Soon they’d gotten under way, seeking to put as much distance between themselves and Heinlein Station as they could. Garroway was certain that the UN guards must have some sort of call-in routine, and that call-in was long overdue by now.
The first rays of a golden sunrise were just beginning to touch the floor of Tithonium Chasma as the Mars cat started to climb up a sandy ridge, snaking its way higher and higher up the eastern escarpment of the chasma. During the night, Kaminski had attached his flag to the cat’s whip antenna, and it made a brave sight as it fluttered in the thin wind above the vehicle’s cab. Progress was slow, however, and at times the Marines riding outside had to dismount and carry the sled over rough spots, while the Mars cat ground forward with painful deliberation along the steepening, narrowing path.
By 0900, Mars time, they’d crested a saddle between the two cliff walls. The path cut sharply left and on up to the top of the cliff, where it emerged on flat and open terrain. That, Garroway knew, was the regular crawler route; radar beacons had been set along the path to mark it, and he could see the tracks the cat had left when it’d come this way a few days before. Directly ahead, though, the terrain turned ominous, plunging into a broken and tortured landscape of cliffs, craters, and boulders. According to the maps on board, that was the continuation of the Tithonium Chasma, a narrow and rough-bottomed canyon that ran arrow straight toward Candor.
Garroway tapped the shoulder of the crawler driver—it was Sergeant Caswell this watch—and pointed ahead. She nodded inside her helmet and, without hesitation, gunned the vehicle’s electric motors with the foot pedal and sent them lurching forward.
Bergerac would expect them to take the fast and easy route to Mars Prime, the one over smooth terrain that would get them there in a day or two. By staying in the chaotic badlands of the canyon, Garroway was taking a fearful risk of breakdown or outright catastrophe if the cat slid off a cliff or got mired in soft sand. But the canyon also gave them their best chance of evading the patrols—both on land and in the air—that Bergerac was certain to employ. Marines always avoided the regular paths and trails when they could.
Garroway thought it worth the risk, especially since his comments to Kettering and Vandemeer about staying on the main track might well reach Bergerac’s ears.
He just hoped he’d guessed right, because they were less than a full sol into the march, and it was already beginning to take on some of the overtones of hell.
SATURDAY, 2 JUNE
International Space Station
344 kilometers over the North Pacific Ocean 0915 hours GMT
It was called the International Space Station, and the fiction of global cooperation had been maintained over the years, despite the realities of world politics. The design once planned as Space Station Freedom, and later as the International Friendship Station, had eventually become Earth’s lone orbital spaceport, a spindly, Tinkertoy collection of struts, modules, solar panels, and trusses circling the globe in low Earth orbit.
When construction had begun during the last couple of years of the previous century, the facility had been planned with a twenty-year life expectancy. By 2041, the station was definitely showing its age; it had always been easiest and cheapest simply to add new components to one end of the aging structure, rather than starting fresh with something new. The original station main module, called the Alfa Complex—leaking now through a dozen badly deteriorated pressure seals and valves—was relegated to storage of non-vacuum-sensitive supplies, while the docking facility was located at the far end, eighty meters distant. To either side, four sets of solar panels stretched like vast and glisteningly black damselfly wings spread from the slim and segmented white body.
Despite its age, the ISS remained the premier human facility in orbit, and a true spaceport. When the joint US-UN Return to the Moon mission was launched in 2012, the landers had departed from the ISS. Mars One was assembled there in sections by NASA workers berthed in a temporary hab adjoining the station, and Columbus, the first cycler, was also assembled and launched from the ISS.
There were other stations in LEO as well, Japan and the ESA both had small, independent facilities in the same orbit, some fifty kilometers ahead of the ISS, while the United States maintained a half dozen free-flying stations either in LEO or in higher, polar orbits. The International Space Station, however, was by far the largest, eighty meters long, with solar panels spanning over two hundred meters, with a permanent crew of fifteen to twenty people, and room for as many as fifteen short-term visitors.
In keeping with its designation as a spaceport, its facilities included twelve Shuttle II fuel tanks now filled with water and cryogenic oxygen and hydrogen, fuel for the cyclers, the UN moonships, and the small fleet of tugs that serviced the other space stations in the vicinity and even made weekly treks out to the L-5 facilities. Most of the other LEO stations, in fact, were positioned within a few tens of kilometers of the spaceport, partly for convenience, partly for safety. The fleet of Mark IV space tugs stationed at the ISS were valuable both for routine repair and maintenance of all the orbital structures and for evacuations, if such became necessary.
What no one seemed to have considered so far, though, was what would happen if something went wrong with the ISS.
Colonel Paul Gresham was not particularly worried about structure failure at the moment…though the ISS carried an uncomfortably long list of things on its maintenance log that needed to be checked, replaced, or repaired. He was concerned, however, about the human components under his command. The political situation was getting damned dicey.
Gresham carried the rank of colonel in the US Aerospace Force, but he was currently assigned to NASA, had been, in fact, ever since he’d been accepted for the astronaut program eight years before. He was the commander of the ISS, a position that, by international agreement, was rotated among the senior members of the current station staff on a monthly basis. It was a cumbersome system, and one that never worked entirely to perfection. Last month, the CO had been LeClerc, with the ESA contingent. Next month, the position was due to rotate to Zhang Shu, of Manchuria…unless the scuttlebutt he’d heard was accurate and Zhang got recalled early. If that happened, chances were that his Russian counterpart, Kulagin, would get the job.
It was annoying having necessary work, tight schedules, convenience, and even safety all twisted out of shape by politics, but that seemed to be the price for running a truly international space station in the uncertain political situation of the day. The irony was that most of the people on ISS duty couldn’t care less about politics. There was something about being able to float over to a nearby port and see the entire expanse of the glorious, blue-white Earth that tended to bring the people inside this little string of pressurized tin cans closer together, in a way that just wasn’t possible on the ground.
Sometimes, he thought, it would be nice to just sever all ties with Earth. “Come talk to us when you have your problems worked out….”
“ISS, I did not copy that.”
Gresham blinked. Damn, he’d been up too long—almost three months now on this tour. He was starting to talk to himself and not even realize it.
“Ah…Hermes One-zero-one, you are clear for final approach and docking, over.”
He was floating in the ISS command center, a somewhat larger than normal tin can mounted behind the station’s primary docking module. With his feet slipped into the deck restraints, his head was positioned behind the two main windows that looked out across the DM and beyond, to the Hermes shuttle silhouetted against the spectacular, cloud-brushed turquoise glory of Earth.
Hermes was a European design, a smaller version of the old US shuttle orbiter. Launched from any of several spaceports, from Guiana to Zanzibar to the South Pacific on an Energiya-III booster—the Russians still made the biggest, most powerful, and most reliable heavy-lift boosters anywhere—the Hermes was the workhorse of the European space program, shuttling personnel and cargo to and from LEO with near clockwork regularity.
“Copy, ISS,” the voice in his headset told him. “On final approach.