Geoffrey Landis - Mars Crossing

Ryan closed and sealed the cockpit around them and took the pilot’s seat.

“Ready?” Ryan asked.

“As ready as we’re going to be,” Tana’s muffled voice said.

“Get on with it!” Estrela said.

“Armed,” Ryan said. He pulled out an arming switch on the remote control, and said, “Launch!”

The explosives fired in silence, but Ryan could see the flash behind him, severing the strap that held the stretched superfiber down. Instantly he was pressed back into his seat as the superfiber slingshot, attached to the airplane at the motor mount, grabbed the airplane and shot it forward. Behind him he heard Tana say “Yikes!” and Estrela let out a sudden grunt as the sudden weight pressed into her.

The ground rushed past them with terrifying speed. Ryan concentrated his attention on keeping the wings level; with even a slight brush of a wingtip against the sand the fragile airplane would disintegrate around them. He couldn’t spare any attention for the airspeed indicator, but he could feel the wings beginning to pull against the air. He held forward pressure on the stick to keep the nose down; they needed to reach flying airspeed as quickly as they could. He shot a glance down at the airspeed; not yet, not yet. Now.

He eased back on the stick—not too much, or the wings would be ripped off—and the ground dropped away under them. Now Butterfly was lofted like a kite being towed behind a running boy. The pressure from the slingshot eased off; they were running out of stretch. It had been only a few seconds. He concentrated on keeping his airspeed up while milking the last little bit of altitude out of the quickly relaxing slingshot.

The slingshot slackened and fell away. For a moment Butterfly was soaring. He commanded the valves on the liquid oxygen tanks open, armed the ignition switch, and watched for the green light. After a terrifying pause, it flickered on.

They were ready.

Ryan hit the ignition button, and with a shudder, the ram-rocket chuffed to life.

For the first time in weeks, Ryan felt a surge of hope. Maybe they would make it after all. They were flying. Flying!

Other astronauts who flew up on the shuttle with him felt sick. Ryan felt exhilarated. Every part of it was exciting, the training, the launch, and now the free-fall. This was what he’d always wanted. He tried a slow flip, then a fast one. “This is great,” he said.

But he was here to work, not to play. He had the map of the space station memorized. The others went quickly to find the station physician, or at least to find vomit bags. “They’ll get over it in a day or so,” the station physician said. “How about you? You okay? Need a patch?”

“No. I’m fine.”

The doctor nodded. Ryan was fascinated to see how his body moved infinitesimally in the opposite direction as he did. “Some people aren’t affected. Guess you’re lucky.”

He went to work.

After a while, when he was alone in a module, one of the female astronauts floated over. She casually snagged a handrail next to him, and looked at him, floating upside down.

He looked up.

“Are you gay?” she said.

“Huh? No.” He tried to remember her name. He was supposed to know the names of all the people on the station, but he’d never been good with names. Britta, he recalled, Britta Silverthorne. That was it.

“Nothing wrong if you are,” she said.

“Nope, nothing wrong if I were,” he agreed. “Happens I’m not.”

“Oh. That’s okay; I just wanted to know.”

He waited, saying nothing.

She rotated herself over until she reoriented so that her head pointed the same way he did. “That’s better. Now I can look at you,” she said. “Say, you’re better in microgravity than any other newbie I’ve seen. You must have been upside before?”

“Nope,” he said, “first time.” And then, “I think I like it.”

“I’m impressed. You’re a natural.”

There was a pause.

“You did get the orientation, didn’t you?” Britta asked. “You know about our first-night custom here? The welcome-aboard ritual?”

Ryan considered her. She was cute, in her way. She had a round face, with short dark hair and deep brown eyes; her rather baggy coveralls failed to conceal a body that was compact and fit. He knew about the space station’s rite of jus primae noctis , of course; there was no way to avoid it. The other astronauts—the male ones, anyway—had made sure about that, with a lot of ribald comments and pointed innuendo. But it was not his way of dealing with the people. “Sure.”

She paused, licked her lips nervously, and looked at him sidelong. She was blushing. “You want to?”

He looked at her calmly. “Are you asking?”

She looked away. “I’m not supposed to ask.”

“Are you?”

“Well, damn it, yes. Yes.”

“Well, then,” he said, “sure.”

It was sweet and complicated, almost like an exercise in momentum management. And it was slow, so slow. Whenever he tried to be hasty, he pushed her away from him, and she would say, “Slow, keep it slow and easy.” Afterward, she clung to him, and in a few moments he realized, somewhat to his amazement, that he wanted to do it again.

And sometime after that, she kissed him on the nose. As she drew her coveralls back on, she said, “I’m pleased to be able to say that you are now a member of the microgravity society.” Then she smiled, and said, “Very definitely pleased.”

For the first few weeks Ryan was assigned to momentum management. This meant two things: garbage dump detail, and processing wastewater into fuel for the resistojet thrusters. He used the garbage dump as a chance to experiment with the tether, trying swinging deploys, crack-the-whip deploys, getting a feel for the tether system.

“You actually like garbage detail, don’t you?” one of the astronauts said, incredulous. “You spend more time working on the garbage drop calculations—everybody else just reads out the computer and plops the answer into the drop parameters.”

“One day we’re going to use a tether on the way to Mars,” Ryan said. “I’m getting ready.”

The other astronaut shook his head. “You sure are,” he said. “You sure are.”

Mars looked different from above.

Ryan flew fast and low. He had to stay low, with the Butterfly so overloaded, he had to stay in the densest part of the tenuous atmosphere to fly at all. Still, the view was remarkable. From above, it was clear that they were following the coastline of an ancient sea. To the east, a jumble of mountains and chaos interrupted by ancient riverbeds flowing down to a beach. To the west, a flat and smooth basin, broken by craters.

Tana pressed against the cockpit window, enrapt. She turned forward to point out something to Estrela, to ask about a massif that loomed on the horizon, and with astonishment saw that Estrela had her eyes closed. She was asleep.

Asleep, through this greatest airplane trip ever taken!

As the liquid oxygen burned off, the airplane gradually lightened, and Ryan slowly gained attitude. “No such thing as an airplane that flies itself,” Ryan’s flight instructor had told him, long ago, and on another planet. “You have to be alert every second. The moment you think that the computer is going to do the flying, the moment you think you can relax and stop paying attention, that’s when you’re going to screw up. That’s when pilots die.”

Butterfly came as close to flying itself as any airplane ever did. Once the take-off had been completed, Ryan could have taken his hands off the controls and let the autopilot take over. They were heading due north.