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Chapter 34

"All rotation stopped. Habitats secured and locked. All personnel report ready for acceleration."

"Understood." Captain Hathaway surveyed Nike's bridge to make sure everyone was properly seated and strapped in. While they wouldn't be taking extreme acceleration, "up" and "down" would no longer be in their accustomed directions. And there would be varying levels of acceleration; enough to be anything from inconvenient to dangerous for the unwary.

He hit the PA button. "Attention all hands."

That sounded sort of pompous, but he couldn't resist. It also sounded proper.

"We are about to begin deceleration in our approach to orbit. After the main burn, there will likely be two or three minor burns to match us with Phobos and then bring us to rest with respect to it. Following that, work crews will begin preparations for landing. We expect to land the first people on Phobos sometime tomorrow or the day after. Unless there's an emergency, please do not move around until the main burn is completed. We don't want any accidents. We're all healthy and ready to get to work, and we don't need anything getting in the way of that."

The presence of a number of humans in the bridge area was more a security blanket and backup than anything else. The precise burn durations and vectors had been calculated and recalculated dozens of times, and were updated daily to account for any departure from the original assumptions. Nike knew exactly when to turn, exactly when to fire her mighty engines and for precisely how long. Unless something went wrong, neither Hathaway nor anyone else on board would have to lift a finger during the entire process.

The only expected partially-manual work when it came to flying Nike was going to be closing the distance with Phobos. The automatic orbit-matching was deliberately designed to leave a considerable distance between the ship and the little moon, just in case something did go wrong. Like the tiny Faeries before her, Nike would use ion drives to close the distance after matching the basic orbit.

Unlike the Faeries and Pirate, however, Nike had the fuel and power to match orbits through its own efforts, rather than requiring atmospheric braking. That was necessary, because the design challenges involved in making a spacecraft the size, shape, and complexity of Nike able to survive atmospheric braking were something to give even modern computers major, major headaches. Dr. Gupta didn't think it could be done at all, in the absence of science-fictional deflector shields or unobtainium hulls.

A faint vibration ran through the ship, and suddenly a deep-throated roar thundered through Nike. The nuclear engines had awakened for the first time in months. Six columns of nuclear-powered fire now blazed astern, pitting themselves against the miles-per-second momentum of the huge ship.

In space there was no sound. But vibration at that level transmitted itself through the main hull and reverberated in the atmosphere of the bridge. There was certainly sound in Nike herself. Ken was pressed back into the cushions of his seat at nearly half Earth-normal acceleration—which felt much greater to a body used to Martian levels of gravity after many weeks in space.

Displays showed the decrease in velocity, the approach of the vessel toward its intended orbit, Phobos approaching in simulation. Another showed the approach of Nike as seen from Phobos itself, a blaze of light from what had been something barely more than another star a moment before. A.J. had two of the Faeries positioned to record the entire approach and eventual landings for posterity.

The live view from a rear-facing boom camera, projected on the main window's active display, showed Phobos swelling. Starting at the size of a misshapen Luna from Earth, by now the moonlet was nearly twice that size.

The sharp gray-black shadowed surface suddenly looked menacing to Ken. Twenty kilometers was miniscule on the astronomical scale, but when compared to Nike it was immense. From that perspective, Phobos was a mass of rock nearly fifty times Nike's length. It was a flying mountain the size of ten Everests mashed together, where an alien race had built a base—and had then died from an unknown catastrophe sixty-five million years before.

Perhaps Phobos had devoured them. The moonlet made Ken think of a gigantic sea beast, rising from the black depths.

He dismissed the grotesque notion. There were enough genuine hazards without inventing fantastical ones. "Engine status?"

"All engines showing green," Jackie answered. "Not that you needed to ask, really. If anything goes wrong, about a dozen alarms will scream their heads off."

"Will you at least let me pretend to be a real captain?"

"Aye aye, sir." Jackie got a false-solemn look on her face. "We're approaching the alien base, Captain. Should we raise shields?"

"Very funny. How are we tracking?"

"Well within tolerances. About four hundred seconds of burn left to go. Relative velocity has dropped below two point five kilometers per second."

The freight-train roar continued, the nuclear engines hurling more than three tons of fuel into space every second at an exhaust velocity of nearly twenty thousand miles per hour. Phobos was enormous and still swelling, now a hulking presence more than ten times wider than the Moon as seen from Earth. Even more than before, the satellite reminded Ken of a monster—with the five-mile-wide crater of Stickney being its single, glaring, off-center eye.

"How big is that going to get before we stop?" Ken wondered idly, trying not to sound at all nervous.

The problem with Phobos was that it was on a scale that the human mind could—just barely—grasp, as opposed to the Earth or the Moon. Something like that approaching touched a very primal chord.

"About seven point one six degrees—more than fourteen times wider than the Moon looks," A.J. answered, from his own console. "Being a hundred miles away is pretty far, sure, but that thing is twenty kilometers wide. It looks a hell of a lot bigger than it did in the photos back home, I can tell you that."

He turned his head and flashed Ken a wicked grin. "Lives up to its name Fear, doesn't it? Especially with that crater staring at us! Reminds me of some sort of gigantic Cyclops."

"Shut up, will you?" Hathaway growled. "I was trying not to think the same thing."

The blaze of Nike now covered measurable width on Rane's image; six separate tiny jets were visible.

"Sixty seconds left . . . thirty . . . ten . . . five, four, three, two, one, ze—"

The rockets cut off as Jackie was in mid word. Ken felt a momentary disorientation as free fall returned. Phobos loomed before them, but no longer did the barren miniature moon swell like a slowly inflating balloon.

"Relative speed with respect to Phobos?"

"Waiting on verification . . ." A.J. answered. "Okay, near zero. Very near zero. Let's just say that if we were staking Nike out in the yard like a dog, it'd be a week before she reached the end of her chain. Not bad for a shot across a hundred million miles. Starting closing calculations now."

Ken hit the intercom. "Ladies and gentlemen, we have stopped relative to Phobos. We have successfully completed the first interplanetary voyage in the history of mankind. Congratulations!"

He didn't need the intercom to hear the cheers.

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Framed