One night, lying in bed thinking about it (thinking of wandering over to John’s room) she wondered if that was why they had gotten together: not from love, she still did not love him, she felt no more than friendship for him, charged by lust that was strong but impersonal – but because it was, in fact, a very useful match. Useful to her – but she swerved from that thought, concentrated on the match’s usefulness to the expedition as a whole. Yes, it was politic. Like feudal politics, or the ancient comedies of spring and regeneration. And it felt that way, she had to admit; as if she were acting in response to imperatives stronger than her own desires, acting out the desires of some larger force. Of, perhaps, Mars itself. It was not an unpleasant feeling.
As for the idea that she might have gained leverage over Arkady; or Frank; or Hiroko … well, she successfully avoided thinking about that. It was one of Maya’s talents.
Blooms of yellow and red and orange spread across the walls. Mars was now the size of the moon in Earth’s sky. It was time to harvest all their effort; only a week more, and they would be there.
There was still tension over the unsolved problems of landfall assignments. And now Maya found it less easy than ever to work with Frank: it was nothing obvious, but it occurred to her that he did not dislike their inability to control the situation, because the disruptions were being caused more by Arkady than anyone else, and so it looked like it was more her fault than his. More than once she left a meeting with Frank and went to John, hoping to get some kind of help. But John stayed out of the debates, and threw his support behind everything that Frank proposed. His advice to Maya in private was fairly acute, but the trouble was he liked Arkady and disliked Phyllis; so often he recommended to her that she support Arkady, apparently unaware of the way this tended to undercut her authority among the other Russians. She never pointed this out to him, however. Lovers or not, there were still areas she didn’t wish to discuss with him, or with anyone else.
But one night in his room her nerves were jangling, and lying there, unable to sleep, worrying about first this and then that, she said, “Do you think it would be possible to hide a stowaway on the ship?”
“Well, I don’t know,” he said, surprised. “Why do you ask?”
Swallowing hard, she told him about the face through the algae bottle.
He sat up in bed, staring at her. “You’re sure it wasn’t …”
“It wasn’t any of us.”
He rubbed his jaw. “Well … I suppose if he were getting help from someone in the crew …”
“Hiroko,” Maya suggested. “I mean, not just because she’s Hiroko, but because of the farm and all that. It would solve his food problem, and there’s a lot of places to hide there. And he could have taken shelter with the animals during the radiation storm.”
“They got a lot of rems!”
“But he could have gotten behind their water supply. A little one-man shelter wouldn’t be too hard to set up.”
John still hadn’t gotten over the idea of it. “A whole year in hiding!”
“It’s a big ship. It could be done, right?”
“Well, I suppose so. Yeah, it could, I guess. But why?”
Maya shrugged. “I have no idea. Someone who wanted on, who didn’t make the selection. Someone who had a friend, or friends …”
“Still! I mean, a lot of us had friends who wanted to come. That doesn’t mean that …”
“I know, I know.”
They talked about it for most of an hour, discussing the possible reasons, the methods that could have been used to slip a passenger on board, to hide him, and so on. And then Maya suddenly noticed that she felt much better; that she was, in fact, in a wonderful mood. John believed her! He didn’t think she had gone crazy! She felt a wash of relief and happiness, and threw her arms around him. “It’s so good to be able to talk to you about this!”
He smiled. “We’re friends, Maya. You should have brought it up before.”
“Yes.”
The bubble dome would have been a wonderful place to view their final approach to Mars, but they were going to be aerobraking to reduce speed, and the dome would be behind the heat shield that they now deployed. There would be no view.
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 the to ruses, 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