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Chapter 40

"SSTO John Carter ready for launch to Mars surface landing."

"All clear, John Carter. You may launch when ready, Bruce."

"Acknowledged. Stand by." Bruce Irwin looked into the screen showing his passengers. "Everyone ready? All strapped in? It'll be a couple of hours before we land, so get comfy."

"We're all ready, Bruce. Let's get this show on the road!"

"I didn't ask just you, A.J., now shut up. Everyone strapped in and ready?"

The others replied with various affirmatives.

"Right. I'll do my best, but it's a fair dinkum ride and no one's ever done this before. So it's probably going to get a mite bumpy, especially the last few minutes."

He switched back to the transmitter. "This is John Carter, launching in thirty seconds. Locks disengaged. Bay doors open."

Bay doors on the side of Nike's ring allowed John Carter to be launched by the simple expedient of using the ship's own rotation. The SSTO shuttle would slide along tracks until it reached the exit and then fly free. Once clear of Nike, Bruce would initiate a burn to set them in an orbital course for eventual deorbit and landing.

"Wheee!" A.J.'s voice came over the systems as he felt the slow, speeding, curved vibration of the shuttle's track-based launch. "Here we go, guys!"

He knew that Joe shared his excitement. It wasn't that there hadn’t already been about a thousand wonders to appreciate, a million things to learn. But this was the real dream—the dream the accident had stolen from him, and that he'd been haunted with ever since they arrived: to set foot on the Red Planet itself.

"John Carter is now clear of Nike," Bruce stated. "Beginning orbital insertion for Melas Chasma landing site."

The orbital shift for this purpose wasn't huge, but had this been Earth they would have had to take considerably more time for the purpose—and probably used ion engines. However, John Carter could—barely—achieve single stage to orbit on Earth. Here, dealing with a gravity well only thirty-eight percent as powerful, it had deltavee to spare.

The rockets roared for a few seconds, pushing everyone into their seats with a force that felt immense. Glancing with concern at the telltales, A.J. saw to his surprise that it was only about two gravities.

"Damn, I'm out of shape," he heard himself say, his voice slightly strained. "I thought we were doing four or five g's there."

"It does feel out of whack, doesn't it?" Bruce commented. "That's what months of soft living in a third gravity do to you. Don't worry, though. I'm not planning on anything more than three all the way down."

"I practice in the high-g rotor every week." Madeline's voice was serene. "It feels just fine to me."

"Thank you, Ms. Jane Bond. The rest of us have things to do rather than working on our mah-velous looks."

"Her looks don't need any work. And she puts as much time in the med department as anyone else does on their job."

"You, my friend, are prejudiced."

"You really should exercise in the high-g area more, though," Helen said. "You've been slacking off lately, A.J."

He took a deep breath and prevented himself from an instinctively defensive retort by biting his lip. "Yeah, I know. But you guys have been keeping me awful busy, you know."

Conversations drifted rather like John Carter for a while, as the shuttle headed for a particular point in time and space. "Okay, mates, can the chatter," Bruce finally said, as the time approached. "I'm about to take us down, and I don't need any distractions."

A.J. clamped his mouth shut.

"Nike, this is John Carter, we are about to begin deorbit burn."

"This is Nike, John Carter. You are about to begin deorbit burn, we copy."

"Burn starting in five, four, three, two, one—"

Once more the rockets roared, vibrating the shuttle with the power of contained explosions. The great red planet began to swell.

"Return all your trays to the upright position, please. We're about to experience a spot of turbulence."

"Breathe, A.J.," Helen said quietly.

He suddenly realized that he actually had not been breathing, as though he'd hold his breath the entire way down. "Jesus. But, well, Helen, this . . ."

"I know."

A faint vibration tickled at the edges of the senses, then grew. A keening whine began. Suddenly, for the first time since they'd arrived in orbit, Mars seemed to be down instead of up or over there. The pink-red-orange-brown surface was starting to look like a landscape instead of a globe.

John Carter was in the atmosphere now, its meteoric speed being slowed by friction that heated its outer shell, turning it to a glow which those on Nike could easily detect. Ionization cut out all exterior communications as the ship was briefly enveloped in a sheath of blazing fire. John Carter shuddered, Bruce preparing to take full control of the shuttle as they dropped to atmospheric speed.

THUNK.

"What was that?"

"Bloody hell."

"I said, what was that?" Madeline repeated, with more urgency. Sitting in the copilot's seat, she could see the telltales rising on Bruce's suit.

"Left wing extension buggered. And I'm getting poor response in the rest. Joe, no offense, mate, but this is the last bloody reentry I'm doing with you on board." Bruce's voice was light, but an undercurrent of tension made his words serious.

"Shimatta," Dr. Sakai said, calm resignation in the Japanese curse.

"What caused it?"

"Sorry, no way to tell right now. Bad parts, heating got to one of the joints, micrometeor, gremlins, the much-feared Martian Anti-Spacecraft System, take your pick. I gotta get us down in one piece first, then we can bloody well worry about the whys."

"You'll do it," Joe said.

"Mate, I didn't do it last time. We punched out, remember?"

"Well . . ."

"There's no ejection pod in this bird, I remind you," Bruce continued relentlessly, as if he found some peculiar solace in contemplating the worst. "Parachutes are no use in atmosphere this thin. I've got to put her down somehow so she doesn't completely come apart on us."

A.J. finally forced himself to grasp that they were in a genuine crisis. By reflex, he brought up all of the sensors and tied in.

"Look, we have—damn. Yeah, you're losing controls, Bruce. I can feed you some more data, though. Nike, this is John Carter, we have an emergency situation here. Clear everyone out of the satellite feeds, we need all the info we can get now."

"An emergen— Got you. Attention all personnel, this is the captain speaking. John Carter is having trouble. We need the entire satellite network cleared for the shuttle's use."

The remote communications started to synchronize. "Okay,"

A.J. said, "we're losing altitude faster, at least some. Best calculations . . . Bruce, you're going to have to make it a full powered landing. No way around it. We won't be able to make orbit again without refueling, but we can burn that bridge when we get to it."

"How much control will I have by then? Something's making this bird progressively harder to fly. Maybe a leak, or a slow fire, or something."

A.J. ran a couple of simulations as the numbers from the embedded sensors poured through the systems. "About half, I'd say. You'll have to land us with really sluggish controls. Think ahead of time. I'll give you a running calculation that'll cue you as to when to act to get things done."

"Right."

John Carter was now screaming down the center of Valles Marineris. The pink-orange sky set off the towering, darker cliffs to either side as the ground below swept past. The terrain was red, black-splotched, streaked with white—every color, really, now that they were close enough—all of it rough and smooth and mysteriously textured. It was an alien landscape that A.J. had modeled a thousand times. But this time it was real, flowing past a window instead of across a screen. Vibrating, blurry at times, but real, real, real. They were about to land on Mars!

No, he corrected himself, they were about to crash-land on Mars.

"Okay, Bruce, see the display?"

"Yes, I see her. When I reach the first border, there is my burn?"

"You got it. Bring some of our speed down and make sure you get a feel for the controls before we really have to do it."

"Roger that." Bruce turned his head for a moment, and the transparent, wide-view sections of the helmet allowed them to see that his expression was calm. "Hold on, everyone. I'm afraid I can't quite keep my promise. We probably will go over three gees on this one, when I do the final burn. And it might get very shaky."

The rockets responded sluggishly, lagging their control directives by noticeable fractions of a second. "Blast. This is going to be a bloody lot of fun, trying to land her like I'm doing remote control from the blasted moon!"

"Remote . . . Hey, hold on!"

A.J. searched the archives . . . assembly . . . slave . . . predictive . . . tie in . . .

Got it! "Bruce, go opaque in your helmet."

"What? Mate, I need to see to guess some of this!"

"Trust me! I'm going to adjust the displays and your feedback through the suit just like we did for the ground engineers assembling Nike. Combining the predictions on the landing and the degradation of the controls. . . Well, it might not be absolutely perfect, but . . . "

"But a fair dinkum sight better than my trying to learn to play the game with my timing off. Right!"

Bruce's helmet went silvery. Immediately, A.J. knew, it would appear to him to go transparent again, showing him the controls, John Carter, even the others in the cabin. But this was a projection that was going to be off by just the right amount into the future to make things seem to react correctly.

"Mate, I hope you're leaving the computers enough power for me."

"I'm using the ones in the rover, brought them up by remote."

"Right. Okay, this is it."

John Carter was constantly trying to heel over to one side, like a car with a flat tire. That wasn't the real problem, though. Bruce could handle that. But they couldn't land flat like an aircraft. They were coming down considerably to the west of their original site, to make things worse. They were well over a hundred kilometers, maybe two or three, from Target 37. A flat landing would almost certainly run them into something they hadn't modeled well in the last couple of days.

A quick glance at the terrain below confirmed it. Bruce would have to blast back along their current vector; then, as their speed dropped, bring the John Carter vertical and land it on its tail. That was the way it was supposed to launch, of course—but that position was one they'd normally achieve after the regular landing was safely over. But with the controls degrading, his simulation had to keep updating how it did the model . . .

Bruce swore, as he saw his vision glitch. "Listen, mate, if it does that at the wrong time—!"

"I know, I know! But I can't help it, the model has to update if things change."

"Right. Okay, hold on. Nike, this is John Carter, we are about to make a landing. Please stand by. And if we don't make it. . . Goodbye, all, and it's been a hell of a ride. Give my love to Tammy back home."

They were all gripping the arms of their seats now, all except Bruce who wrestled with controls that were sluggish and less responsive than they'd been a few minutes before. The rockets thundered in the Martian atmosphere as they fought to slow John Carter's headlong rush towards destruction.

A.J.'s eyes flicked around, taking in the instrument readings he could see. Airspeed 350, altitude 1500 and dropping—holy SHIT that's a big rock, good thing we're past it—300kph, altitude 1000 meters . . . Dropping . . . oh, man, Bruce is good . . . altitude now 200 meters, speed dropping below 200kph . . . 100 meters . . . he's starting to bring us up . . . lateral speed 70, 60, 50—

One of the rockets stopped responding entirely. John Carter, still inclined at a slight angle and moving over the ground sideways at a speed of about forty kilometers per hour, dipped downward. A.J.'s simulation had almost predicted the loss, but was off by a critical bit as there was no real data yet on just how the failures were progressing. Bruce fought for control, but A.J., living in the real world, watched helplessly as the momentary, uncontrolled drop brought the lander's tail assembly into contact with a boulder jutting from the soil of Mars.

The world spun as John Carter cartwheeled, bouncing impossibly in one-third gravity. Bruce tried to shut her down, but one rocket thrust for another critical half-second, spinning the ship along another axis.

The John Carter shrieked, groaned, and bellowed at its occupants as it tumbled. And then a tremendous impact brought silence and darkness to all within.

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