Charles Sheffield - Aftermath

Reza’s reflection was staring at her. Apparently the sixty-second grace period had expired. It was now, or abort to a later time. Celine nodded. “Do it.”

The thrust of the engines in front of her was silent and easy, apparently too gentle to affect their situation. It was surprising to watch the Schiaparelli and ISS-2 sail away ahead, continuing in their shared orbit. The or-biter had taken the first step, braking its motion enough to allow the trajectory of Clark to intersect the upper atmosphere.

Now it was simply waiting. But not for long. In less than fifteen minutes they would know if the drag calculation had been the only problem affecting the Lewis.

No one was wearing a suit. Celine had wanted that as a precaution against the failure of cabin integrity and loss of air. Two minutes of direct experiment ruled it out. Even without suits they could barely squeeze into the Clark’s limited cabin space. With suits, forget it. The pilot might fly home, but no one else would fit in with him.

“Everything is nominal,” Reza announced. “The control routines are doing exactly what we hoped. We are losing altitude as planned and are already experiencing some atmospheric drag.”

He seemed without a care in the world, but his words made Celine think of Zoe. She had said almost exactly the same thing, shortly before the Lewis disintegrated to its individual atoms.

“Do the drag forces seem to be following the new model?” Celine was being pushed back into the hammock, harder and sooner than she expected. She had to ask if things were all right, even though there was nothing she could do if she didn’t like Reza’s answer.

“The new model works fine,” Reza replied. His attitude didn’t tell her anything. He sounded ready to fly a ship through the gates of hell. “We’re coming down by the book. Trust crazy Reza. I think I could squeeze us a degree or two farther north if you want. It may be clearer there.”

“What’s the cloud situation?”

It was another problem, predictable but irritating. Normally the weather reports for a returning orbiter were provided by ground control, with access to metsat and to ground radar data. The Clark was forced to fly without any such aids. Reza was the only person on board who could see anything outside the ship.

“Continuous cloud cover below, cumulonimbus by the look of them. But we’re a long way from touchdown. Drag is higher, skin temperature going up fast. Sit tight.”

There was no choice. Celine didn’t need to be told about the drag forces, she was pressing harder and harder into the hammock. Wilmer, to her right, was rolling in on her a little. The hammock support was not quite centered — her own fault, that had been her job. But he was quite a load, especially under what already felt like two gees and more.

“Hull temperature close to three thousand. We’re pushing three gees and projecting more than five.” Reza forced the words from compressed vocal cords. The ship’s deceleration was still increasing. “If there’s going to be unpleasantness, it will be right about here.”

Unpleasantness. A pilot’s gift for understatement. Their bodies had spent most of the past year in free fall, and the year before that in a Mars gravity only forty percent of Earth’s. Five gees was intolerable. Celine had trouble breathing, and she could hear beside her Jenny Kopal’s painful grunts. Wilmer was a silent lump at her side. How much more? And how much longer? Only the thermal skin of the orbiter’s cabin wall protected them from the white-hot inferno beyond.

“Hull temperature thirty-three hundred.” Reza’s reporting of the instrument readings was barely intelligible. “Five and a half gees. Angle of attack holding steady. Rate of descent constant. Hang in there. I think we’re through maximum drag.”

It didn’t feel that way to Celine. But then the force pressing her into the hammock became perhaps a tiny bit less. Breathing was agony, but a reduced agony.

“Hull temperature thirty-two hundred. Deceleration under four gees and falling. Rate of descent steady.” Reza tried to shout in triumph, and managed a wheezy croak. “We’re through the worst. We made it, guys. We’ve got lift. We’re home.”

Home? Not quite. But the Clark was no longer skimming like a flung stone across the skies of Earth. Celine could tell that they were flying, descending fast but buoyed upward by aerodynamic lift from the air. She struggled upright and turned in the hammock to face Reza.

“Where are we? Do you have any idea of our position and ground speed?”

“Don’t know yet.” He turned to grin at her. “The micro-positioning circuit says thirty-eight north and eighty-two west, but I don’t know how much we can trust it. Depends if the GPS satellites are alive. I’d like visuals, but it’s nothing but clouds below. We’re forty-one kilometers up, descent rate eighty meters a second, airspeed eleven hundred, heading nearly due east.”

Celine wanted to see for herself. So apparently did Jenny. As the deceleration dropped they started to crawl to the top of the hammock. At the same moment they realized that it was not feasible. They would change the mass balance of the little ship, but worse than that they would crowd Reza’s access to the controls. The overloaded orbiter was too small to permit passenger movement.

Celine strained upward for one moment above the edge of the hammock before she slid back to her old position. She glimpsed white clouds below and ahead, their rolling heads bright in western sunlight.

“I guess we can forget about ground assistance and ground information.” Reza was focused on the cloudscape ahead of the Clark. “ The only way we’ll learn conditions below is to look at them.”

He wasn’t asking Celine, he was telling her. Did she want to second-guess him? She peered again over the edge of the hammock.

Reza had increased the angle of descent. The ship was swooping fast toward the cloud tops. “Seven thousand meters. Let’s hope the altimeter works with the changed atmosphere.” As he spoke the ship dropped into the clouds.

Ahead of the orbiter sat unchanging gray vapor. The ride became uncannily smooth. The ship might have been hanging motionless, except for the altimeter. Celine could see it in the diffuse light that permeated the cabin. Its display was flickering rapidly downward: six thousand — five thousand — four thousand.

At thirty-eight hundred meters, when she was beginning to panic, the orbiter vibrated heavily and a moment later was racing across the broken floor of the cloud layer.

Reza could see what lay below, but she could not. His low whistle did nothing to reassure her.

“What is it?”

“Snow. On the ground, everywhere. If it’s deep we’ll have problems landing. The orbiters aren’t designed for that.”

“ Snow. I thought we were at latitude thirty-eight degrees?”

“That’s what the instruments say.”

“But that puts us nearly as far south as Richmond, and it’s almost April. There shouldn’t be snow.”

“Hey. I didn’t order it. I’m just telling you what we’ve got down there. And I don’t like the idea of trying to land in it.”

“Do you see cleared areas?”

“There was one patch of blacktop back there, looked like it could be a cleared runway. It’s behind us now. And there’s a big body of water ahead. It could be the James River or part of the Chesapeake Bay. Either way, it doesn’t help — we can’t land on water. We’d better take another look at what I saw, find out if we can land there.”

The Clark banked steeply. Celine didn’t need to be told that they were losing altitude fast. When the engines were off, the orbiters had the glide ratio of a brick. Reza was conserving power for the final approach and landing, assuming he would find a place where that landing was possible. The orbiter circled, losing more height.