Филип Керр - The Second Angel

There was a longish pause as the Descartes Crater grew nearer. Gates was using the lip of the crater as his navigation marker and then aiming the nose of the Mariner a good distance ahead of it. He was flying on instinct now. Instinct and the seat of his pants. Without the flight computer to advise him, he was having to reduce altitude through experienced guesswork.

‘Descartes? This is Mariner. How are we doing?’

‘According to the information you have sent me, one of your oxygen tanks has exploded,’ said the cool voice of the computer. ‘All other failures are a corollary of that first failure. Alteration in levels of oxygen and hydrogen inside your fuel cells has starved your electrical circuits, causing some of your computer systems to shut down. However, since you have backup fuel cells, it’s quite possible your computers may be rebooting themselves even as we speak. Please advise.’

‘Thanks for your information,’ said Gates. ‘But it’s a negative on the reboot, I’m afraid.’ By now he had both hands firmly on the stick. ‘Drop the landing gear,’ he told Dallas.

‘Will it work?’

‘Pull those levers. The thing’s hydraulic.’

Dallas did as he was told and then breathed a short sigh of relief as he saw a green light and felt the undercarriage lowering beneath the RLV. ‘Landing gear operative,’ he said.

‘I appreciate your fault diagnosis, Descartes,’ said Gates, ‘but please be advised I need permission to ATL. It’s that or crash-land in Abulfeda.’ This was the large crater immediately southwest of Descartes.

‘ Mariner , this is Descartes. Confirm you are clear to land. Repeat, confirm you are clear to land. Good luck.’

Gates had already started his final descent. Some of the others on mid-deck had cheered the computer’s permission to land, but he thought it was a little premature for any celebrations. Judging altitude above a moonscape by eye was extremely difficult, and even with the main facility to give him some idea of height, he wished he could have had some landing radar data to rely on. This was not going to be a seat-of-the-pants landing so much as the skin of his ass.

‘Bring it on down,’ he urged himself, through gritted teeth. Although it seemed hardly possible, this landing was proving even more hair-raising than the simulation. It was just as well that Descartes had turned out to be a little more cooperative than they had been expecting.

Mariner missed the northern rim of the crater by less than fifty feet. Gates throttled back quickly and let the RLV drop toward the crater surface, stirring up a small dust storm beneath them. Now that they were inside the crater he had a clear view of the landing site ahead of them, and for a split second, he wondered if the Descartes computer might even have been lying when granting permission to land. What if the mines on the landing area were still active? Why had the Descartes computer been so cooperative?

‘I sure hope this computer isn’t bullshitting us, Dallas,’ he said, and slowed the Mariner to a near hover.

‘Computers don’t lie,’ said Dallas, gripping the armrests of his seat. ‘Although they do have the kind of memory you need to carry it off successfully.’

‘I wish you were a bloody computer,’ said Gates, as he pushed gently at the flight stick. The RLV dipped again, and guessing that there was now less than seventy feet to the ground, he stretched out his hand, ready to hit the engine stop button the moment he saw the green contact light. His guess was off by more than thirty feet. The Mariner hit the landing area earlier and with much greater force than he would have wanted, and such was the strength of the impact that the resulting vibration shook every piece of equipment in the cabin, jolting the still unbuckled Dallas out of his seat, and causing all the computers suddenly to restart themselves. Gates killed the engines, the Mariner rocked on its landing gear for a few seconds, and then all was still.

‘Well, we’re down,’ sighed Gates.

Dallas picked himself up off the floor.

‘What kind of an astroliner pilot were you anyway?’ he asked.

‘Whaddya want? Dinner and a movie?’ Gates nodded. ‘You want to know the definition of a good flight? One you can walk away from. That’s what you’ve got, so don’t complain.’ Adjusting his tone to ask a leading question of the people below him on the mid-deck, he said, ‘Sorry about the rough landing, folks. Is everyone okay?’

‘Negative,’ said Prevezer. ‘We have one injury down here.’

‘Descartes, this is Mariner. We’re on the ground.’

‘We copy you on the ground, Mariner. Please advise if you need medical assistance.’

‘Thank you, Descartes. Please stand by for my report.’ Gates switched off the open communications channel and looked across the flight deck at Dallas. ‘You’ve given this computer a very bad press, Dallas. He’s a more helpful son-of-a-bitch than you led us to believe.’

‘All it’s doing is offering us the medical facilities of the landing site,’ said Dallas. ‘There’s a small emergency station immediately to the east of us, with some repair equipment and first-aid items. No blood, of course.’

Dallas approached the controls at the back of the flight deck to operate the payload-bay doors and the remote manipulator system. He said, ‘One good thing about that landing, though.’

‘Just one? We’re here, aren’t we?’

‘The impact managed to reboot all our computers. I don’t know how we’d have managed without that robot arm to deploy the space fridge.’

When the space fridge was deployed, Dallas followed Gates downstairs onto mid-deck. With the environmental control systems back on-line, the atmosphere throughout the RLV had been restored, and Ronica had already climbed out of her space suit and was lying down on a hammock in preparation for her blood transfusion.

‘I hope you appreciate this, Dallas,’ she said as she connected herself to the trans-infusion machine. ‘The way I’m prepared to shed my blood for you. It’s not everyone I’d do this for, you know.’ The machine made its own tourniquet, swabbed the skin on her arm, and then inserted the needle.

Dallas took hold of her hand and then kissed it, even as the blood started to flow through the cannula. ‘I know.’

‘Simou?’ said Gates. ‘I want to know what caused that oxygen cylinder to explode. And what is the status of our fuel cells?’

‘Some kind of electrical short circuit inside the liquid oxygen tank, I think,’ answered Simou, starting to check through his computerized electrical gauges. ‘A thousand-to-one chance, but it happened. And after that everything else was predictable. The fuel cells mix hydrogen and oxygen to produce water and, as a by-product of their reaction, electricity. So when we lost one of the liquid oxygen cylinders, some of the fuel cells were effectively asphyxiated.’ He ran his eyes over the fuel cell gauges. ‘Looks like we’ve still got ten out of twelve working okay.’

‘Fifteen percent,’ Dallas told Ronica. ‘This machine’s slower than it was in the simulation.’

‘Real life can be a little like that,’ she sighed.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Same as the first time I met you. Light-headed, weak at the knees, butterflies in my chest.’

Dallas held her hand tighter, and scrutinized her transfusion rate.

‘Dallas? That’s my hand,’ she told him gently. ‘Not an orange. Squeezing it won’t make the blood flow out any quicker.’

He slackened his grip. Her blood was collecting in a large plastic bag that was attached to the back of the machine, while the computerized display was providing a host of details about its constitution: the type, the temperature, the red-cell concentrations, the plasma content, the pH, the adenosine triphosphate levels, and even the antibodies that were present in the component.