Red Planet Run by Dana Stabenow Page A

eventually Titan, long after any of us would be in any shape to appreciate it.
    Not that I was worried about it.
    “Sixty seconds to beacon detach,” Crip said.
    That meant we were right on top of Phobos. I counted the seconds down with him.
    “—three, two, one, beacon away.”
    There was the distant thud of explosive bolts. The craft shuddered once. I waited, tense. Landing the beacon in exactly the right place on Phobos was critical. It would be the Kayak ’s only means of communication, however delayed, as well as the primary means of data relay. If it missed its mark, at our present velocity Crip had about ten minutes to change the Pushmepullyou-Kayak ’s mind about landing us on Mars, and maybe half an hour after that to get us re-oriented for a return to Outpost. There would be no second chance at the Red Planet. This, I told Helen mentally, is what comes of planning a Mars mission in such an all-fired, jet-propelled hurry.
    I knew why she’d done it, of course: I was on board. If the mission had been delayed one day more, I wouldn’t have been, and she knew it.
    The minutes inched by like snails. “Bulls-eye!” Crip shouted. “Beacon on target!”
    “Is it transmitting?”
    “Stand by one.”
    I glanced at the digital readout on my communit. I wasn’t sure we had a minute, but they continued to crawl by, with or without my permission.
    And then Crip’s voice came back over the headset. “Phobos Lander 1, transmitting, loud and clear, five by five.”
    I felt as relieved as he sounded. “Hooray.”
    “First thing that’s gone right since we dropkicked out of the Belt.”
    I said nothing. Pilots swear, avow, and attest that they want each and every flight to go by the book and by the numbers, but around the bar all they talk about is how they brought that baby home to Mama with the IMU out, half a stabilizer missing, the rest of the crew incapacitated, and the ship running on empty. Pilots are weaned on the difficult and raised on the impossible, and they sulk when everything goes right, because afterwards there is no reason to brag about how smart and capable and talented and superhuman they are. Crip would drink for free on the past thirty days for the next three hundred and sixty-five.
    The ship shuddered again. “Okay,” Crip said. “We just dipped into the top layer of Martian atmosphere. All secure?”
    “Okay here,” I said.
    “Five by five,” Paddy said glumly over my headset, and Sean echoed her, equally glum. “Five by.”
    All the graphplex ports were shielded with an ablative bumper, but I knew from countless briefings what was going on outside. The Kayak was bottom down, its circular hull broadside to the Martian atmosphere. The Pushmepullyou crouched like a hairless, metal tarantula over the toroid’s doughnut hole, connected to the Kayak by eight spidery legs that would detach by explosive bolts when the insertion maneuver was complete. Our large flat surface optimized atmospheric drag, which would enable air friction (such as it was on Mars) to slow us down. Crip, controlling the process with small, repeated firings of the Pushmepullyou ’s verniers, would dip us repeatedly into the atmosphere, skipping across its upper fringes like a flat rock skipping across water, our velocity decreasing with every skip. Finally, and may I add, theoretically, our speed would slow from an arrival velocity of over 33,000 kph to a little less than 20,000 kph, in preparation for orbit, insertion, and descent.
    Landing on Terra took a spaceplane. Landing on Luna, all you needed were retro rockets. To land on Mars, we were using the Martian atmosphere to ease on down the road with parachutes, three of them. If they popped too soon, they would burn up in the atmosphere. In that case controlling the speed of our entry would become academic, as would our rate of ablation, as would the length of our survival. The timing was precise, as the Pushmepullyou had to separate soon enough to escape Martian