Aerobraking saved them from the necessity of carrying the enormous amount of fuel it would have taken to slow down, but it was an extremely precise operation, and therefore dangerous. They had a leeway of less than a millisecond of arc, and so several days before MOI the navigation team began to tweak their course with small burns on an almost hourly basis, fine tuning the approach. Then as they got closer they stopped the ship’s rotation. The return to weightlessness, even in those used to it, was a shock; suddenly it came home to Maya that it wasn’t just another simulation. She lofted through the windy air of the hallways, seeing everything from a strange new high perspective; and all of a sudden it felt real.
She slept in snatches, an hour here, three hours there. Every time she stirred, floating in her sleeping bag, she had a moment of disorientation, thinking she was in Novy Mir again. Then she would remember, and adrenalin would knock her awake: almost there. She would pull through the halls of the torus, pushing off the wall panels of brown and gold and bronze. On the bridge she would check with Mary or Raul or Marina, or someone else in navigation; everything still on course. They were approaching Mars so quickly it seemed they could see it expanding on the screens.
They had to miss the planet by thirty kilometers, or about one ten-millionth of the distance they had traveled. No problem, Mary said, with a quick glance at Arkady. So far they were on the Mantra Run, and hopefully none of his mad problems would crop up.
The crew members not involved with navigation worked to batten down, preparing everything for the torque and bumps that two and half g were sure to bring. Some of them got to go out on EVAs, to deploy subsidiary heat shields and the like. There was a lot to do; and yet the days seemed long anyway.
It was going to happen in the middle of the night, and so that evening all the lights stayed on, and no one went to bed. Everyone had a station – some on duty, most of them only waiting it out. Maya sat in her chair on the bridge, watching the screens and the monitors, thinking that they looked just like they would if it were all a simulation in Baikonur. Could they really be going into orbit around Mars?
They could. The Ares hit Mars’s thin high atmosphere at forty thousand kilometers per hour, and instantly the ship was vibrating heavily, Maya’s chair shaking her fast and hard, and there was a faint low roar, as if they flew through a blast furnace – and it looked like that too, because the screens were bursting with an intense pink-orange glow. Compressed air was bouncing off the heat shields and blazing past all the exterior cameras, so that the whole bridge was tinged the color of Mars. Then gravity returned with a vengeance; Maya’s ribs were squeezed so hard that she had trouble breathing, and her vision was blurred. It hurt!
They were plowing through the thin air at a speed and height calculated to put them into what aerodynamicists call transitional flow, a state halfway between free molecular flow and continuum flow. Free molecular flow would have been the preferred mode of travel, with the air that struck the heat shield shoved to the sides, and the resulting vacuum refilled mostly by molecular diffusion; but they were moving too fast for that, and they could only just barely avoid the tremendous heat of continuum flow, in which air would have moved over shield and ship as part of a wave action. The best they could do was to take the highest possible course that would slow them enough; and this put them into transitional flow, which vacillated between free molecular and continuum flow, making for a bumpy ride. And there lay the danger. If they were to hit a high pressure cell in the Martian atmosphere, where heat or vibration or g forces caused some sensitive mechanism to break, then they could be cast into one of Arkady’s nightmares at the very time they were crushed in their chairs, “weighing” four hundred pounds apiece, which was something Arkady had never been able to simulate very well. In the real world, Maya thought grimly, at the moment when they were most vulnerable to danger, they were also most helpless to deal with it.
But as fate would have it, Martian stratospheric weather was stable, and they remained on the Mantra Run, which in actuality turned out to be a roaring, shuddering, breath-robbing eight minutes. No hour Maya could remember had lasted as long. Sensors showed that the main heat shield had risen to 600° Kelvin —
And then the vibration stopped. The roar ended. They had skipped out of the atmosphere, after skidding around a quarter of the planet. They had decelerated by some twenty thousand kilometers an hour, and the heat shield’s temperature had risen to 710° Kelvin, very near its limit. But the method had worked. All was still. They floated, weightless again, held down by their chair straps. It felt as if they had stopped moving entirely, as if they were floating in pure silence.
Unsteadily they unstrapped themselves, floated like ghosts around the cool air of the rooms, an airy faint roar sounding in their ears, emphasizing the silence. They were talking too loudly, shaking each other’s hands. Maya felt dazed, and she couldn’t understand what people were saying to her; not because she couldn’t hear them, but because she wasn’t paying attention.
Twelve weightless hours later their new course led them to a periapsis thirty-five thousand kilometers from Mars. There they fired the main rockets for a brief thrust, increasing their speed by about a hundred kilometers an hour; after that they were pulled toward Mars again, carving an ellipse that would bring them back to within five hundred kilometers of the surface. They were in Martian orbit.
Each elliptical orbit of the planet took around a day. Over the next two months, the computers would control burns that would gradually circularize their course just inside the orbit of Phobos. But the landing parties were going to descend to the surface well before that, while apogee was so close.
They moved the heat shields back to their storage positions, and went inside the bubble dome to have a look.
During apogee Mars filled most of the sky, as if they flew over it in a high jet. The depth of Valles Marineris was perceptible, the height of the four big volcanoes obvious: their broad peaks appeared over the horizon well before the surrounding countryside came into view. There were craters everywhere on the surface: their round interiors were a vivid sandy orange, a slightly lighter color than the surrounding countryside. Dust, presumably. The short rugged curved mountain ranges were darker than the surrounding countryside, a rust color broken by black shadows. But both the light and dark colors were just a shade away from the omnipresent rusty-orangish-red, which was the color of every peak, crater, canyon, dune, and even the curved slice of the dust-filled atmosphere, visible high above the bright curve of the planet. Red Mars! It was transfixing, mesmerizing. Everyone felt it.
They spent long hours working, and at last it was real work. The ship had to be partially disassembled. The main body would be eventually parked in orbit near Phobos, and used as an emergency return vehicle. But twenty tanks from the outer lengths of the hub shaft had only to be disconnected from the Ares and prepped to become planetary landing vehicles, which would take the colonists down in groups of five. The first lander was scheduled to descend as soon as it was decoupled and prepped; so they worked in round-the-clock shifts, spending a lot of time in EVA. They pulled in to the dining halls tired and ravenous, and conversations were loud; the ennui of the voyage seemed forgotten. One night Maya floated in the bathroom getting ready for bed, feeling stiffened muscles that she hadn’t heard from in months. Around her Nadia and Sasha and Yeli Zudov were chattering away, and in the warm wash of voluble Russian it suddenly occurred to her that everyone was happy – they were in the last moment of their anticipation, an anticipation that had lain in their hearts for half a lifetime, or ever since childhood – and now suddenly it had bloomed below them like a child’s crayon drawing of Mars, growing huge then small, huge then small, and as it yo-yoed back and forth it loomed before them in all its immense potential: tabula rasa, blank slate. A blank red slate. Anything was possible, anything could happen – in that sense they were, in just these last few days, perfectly free. Free of the past, free of the future, weightless in their own warm air, floating like spirits about to invest a material world. In the mirror Maya caught sight of the toothbrush-distorted grin on her face, and grabbed a railing to hold her position. It occurred to her that they might never be so happy again. Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real. But this time who could say? This time might be the