“We’ll get you hooked up to some visual feed,” said Mahnmut. “Hell. We’re tumbling again.”
“Let it tumble until right before we enter the atmosphere,” said Orphu. “Save our thruster fuel and energy. And—no—we’re not going to get this vision thing fixed. I did a damage check after you plugged me in here, and it’s not just the eyes and cameras that are missing. I was looking toward the bow when the ship was slagged, and the flash burned out every channel down to the organic level. My internal optic nerves are ash.”
“I’m sorry,” said Mahnmut. He felt sick and it wasn’t just from the tumbling. After a minute, he said, “We’re running fairly low on everything consumable here—water, air, reaction-pack fuel. Are you sure you want to stay inside this debris field?”
“It’s our best chance,” said Orphu. “On radar, we’re just another chunk of the destroyed spaceship.”
“Radar?” said Mahnmut. “Did you see what attacked us? A goddamned chariot. You think a chariot has radar?”
Orphu rumbled a laugh. “Do you think a chariot can launch an energy lance like the one that vaporized a third of the ship, including Koros and Ri Po? And yes, Mahnmut, I saw the chariot—it was the last thing I’ll ever see. But I don’t believe for a second that it was actually a chariot with an oversized human male and female riding in open vacuum. Uh-uh. Too cute . . . too cute by half.”
Mahnmut had nothing to say to that. He wished Orphu had damped all the roll—the sub was also pitching and yawing again—but everything else in the debris field was tumbling, so it made sense that they should be too.
“Want to talk about Shakespeare’s sonnets?” asked Orphu of Io.
“Are you shitting me?” The moravecs loved the ancient human colloquial phrases, the more scatological the better.
“Yes,” said Orphu. “I am most definitely shitting you, my friend.”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” said Mahnmut. “The debris is beginning to glow. So are we. Picking up ionization.” He was pleased that his voice stayed calm. Ahead of them, larger bits of the destroyed spacecraft were glowing a dull red. The bow of The Dark Lady was also beginning to glow. The Dark Lady’s external sensors started reporting hull temperature rising. They were entering Mars’s atmosphere.
“Time to straighten us out,” said Orphu, getting the relayed data down in the submersible’s hull, doing what he could with the partial Koros III control download as he fired the sub’s strap-on thrusters and realigned her gyros. “Roll gone?”
“Not quite.”
“We can’t wait. I’m going to turn this pile of scrap iron around before we burn up.”
“This ‘pile of scrap iron’ is called The Dark Lady and she may save our lives,” Mahnmut said coldly.
“Right, right,” said Orphu. “Tell me when the hash mark on the aft video monitor is centered on the limb of Mars above the pole. I’ll begin flattening the tumble then. God, what I’d give for one of my eyes back. Sorry, last time I’ll say that.”
Mahnmut watched the monitor. Because of the widening debris cloud, the only reliable fixes he’d been able to make for Orphu over the past thirty minutes or so came from Mars itself. Even the two little moons were invisible. Now the thrusters thumped hollowly and the damaged sub pivoted slowly, the bow camera losing its view of Mars and showing glowing plasma, white-hot melted metal, and a million shining shards that had once been their spacecraft and traveling companions.
The orange-red-brown-green bulk of Mars filled the aft camera and the hash mark Orphu had directed Mahnmut to draw in the monitor drifted up, up, crossing the cloud-dappled coastline, showing blue sea, then white . . .
“Polar cap,” reported Mahnmut. “There’s the upper limb.”
“Okay,” said Orphu. All the thrusters hammered. “See the pole now on the aft camera?”
“No.”
“Any recognizable stars?”
“No. Just more hull ionization.”
“Close enough for government work,” said the Ionian. “I’m going to use the ring of thrusters on the stern as braking rockets now.”
“Koros III was going to use the big reaction pack on the bow to slow us for re-entry, then jettison it before we hit the atmosphere,” said Mahnmut. The stern glow was a deeper red now.
“I’m keeping those heavier thrusters on while we enter the atmosphere,” said Orphu.
“Why?”
“You’ll see.”
“Isn’t it possible that if we keep those thrusters attached, they’ll explode when they heat up during reentry?”
“It’s possible,” grunted the Ionian.
“We’re pretty battered,” said Mahnmut. “Any chance we’ll break up as stuff burns away from the hull?”
“Sure, there’s a chance,” said Orphu. He fired the heavy-ion thrusters.
Mahnmut was pressed into his acceleration couch for thirty seconds and then released as the noise and vibration ceased. He heard the heavy thump as the attitude-control ring was ejected into space.
A fireball flicked past the bow camera, although the bow camera was now showing the view behind them as they entered the atmosphere stern first. “We’re definitely hitting atmosphere,” said Mahmut, noticing that his voice wasn’t quite as calm as before. He’d never been in a real planetary atmosphere before and the idea of all those close-packed molecules added queasiness on top of his nausea. “The jettisoned thruster-pack just turned white-hot and burst into flame. I can see the stern beginning to glow. So is the main reaction pack on the bow, but not as badly. Most of the heat and shock wave seems to be around our stern. Wow—we’re falling behind some of the debris field, but it’s all burning up ahead of us. It’s like we’re in the middle of a huge meteor storm.”
“Good,” said Orphu. “Hang on.”
What had been the moravec spacecraft hit the thickened Martian atmosphere very much as Mahmut had described to Orphu—as a meteor storm with the larger fragments massing several metric tons and stretching tens of meters across. A hundred fireballs arced through the pale-blue Martian sky and a rattle of deep sonic booms shattered the silence of the northern hemisphere. The fireballs crossed the northern polar cap like a flight of fiery birds and continued south across the Tethys Sea, leaving long plasma vapor trails as they passed. It looked eerily as if the fragments were flying rather than falling.
For hundreds of millions of years, Mars had boasted a negligible atmosphere, of some 8 millibars, mostly carbon dioxide, as opposed to Earth’s thick 1,014 millibars of pressure at sea level. In less than a century, through a process that none of the moravecs understood, the world had been terraformed to a very breathable 840 millibars.
The fireballs streaked across the northern kilometer in rough formation, leaving sonic-boom footprints in their wake. Some of the smaller pieces—large enough to survive the fiery atmospheric entry but small enough to be deflected by the thick air—began splashing down some eight hundred kilometers south of the pole. If one were looking from space, it would appear that some deity was firing a string of oversized machine-gun bullets—tracer rounds—into Mars’ northern ocean.
The Dark Lady was one of those tracer rounds. The stealth material around the stern and two-thirds of the hull burned off and joined the plasma trail streaming behind the hurtling submersible. External antennae and sensors burned away. Then the hull began to char and chip and flake.
“Ah . . . “ said Mahnmut from his acceleration couch, “shouldn’t we think about popping the parachutes?” He knew enough of Koros’s landing plan to know that the buckycarbon-fiber ‘chutes were supposed to deploy at around 15,000 meters, lowering them gently to the ocean’s surface. Mahnmut’s last glimpse of the ocean before the stern optics had burned away convinced him that they were lower than 15,000 meters and coming down very fast.
“Not yet,” grunted Orphu. The Ionian had no acceleration couches in the hold and it sounded as if the deceleration gravities were affecting him. “Use your radar to get our altitude.”
“Radar’s gone,” said Mahnmut.
“Will your sonar work?”
“I’ll try.” Amazingly, it did work, showing a return of solid—well, liquid water—surface coming at them at a distance of 8,200 meters—8,000 meters—7,800 meters. Mahmut relayed the information to Orphu and added, “Shall we pop the parachutes now?”
“The rest of the debris isn’t deploying parachutes.”
“So?”
“So do you really want to drift down under a canopy, showing up on all their sensors?”
“Whose sensors?” snapped Mahnmut, but he understood Orphu’s point. Still . . . “Five thousand meters,” he said. “Velocity three thousand two hundred klicks per hour. Do we really want to hit the water at this speed?”
“Not really,” said Orphu. “Even if we survive the impact, we’d be buried under hundreds of meters of silt. Didn’t you say that this northern ocean is only a few hundred meters deep?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to rotate your ship now,” said Orphu.
“What?” But then Mahnmut heard the heavy thruster pack firing—just some of its jets—and the gyros whirred, although the noise was more a grinding than a whirring.
The Dark Lady began a painful tumble, bringing its bow around from the back. Wind and friction tore at the hull, ripping away the last of the mid-ship sensors and breaching a dozen compartments. Mahnmut switched off screaming alarms.
Bow forward now, one of the last working video pickups showed splashes in the ocean—if one can call steam and plasma impact plumes 2,000 meters high “spashes”—and Mahnmut guessed it would be their turn in seconds. He described the impacts to Orphu and said, “Parachutes? Please?”
“No,” said Orphu and fired the main thrusters that should have been jettisoned in orbit.
The deceleration forces threw Mahnmut forward in his straps and made him wish for the acceleration gel they’d used in the Io Flux Tube slingshot maneuver. More columns of steam rose around the hurtling submersible like Corinthian columns flicking past and the ocean filled the viewscreen. The thrusters roared and swiveled, slowing their velocity. Mahnmut saw the pack ring jettison and fly off behind them the instant the firing stopped. They were only a thousand meters above the ocean and the surface looked as hard as Europan surface ice to Mahnmut’s eye.
“Para . . .” began Mahnmut, pleading now and not ashamed of it.
The two huge parachutes deployed. Mahnmut’s vision went red, then black.
They hit the Tethys Sea.
“Orphu? Orphu?” Mahnmut was in darkness and silence, trying to get his data feeds back on line. His enviro-niche was intact, O2 still flowing. That was amazing. His internal clocks said that three minutes had passed since impact. Their velocity was zero. “Orphu?”
“Arugghh,” came a noise over the hardline. “Every time I get to sleep, you wake me.”
“How are you?”
“Where am I might be the better question,” rumbled Orphu. “I ripped free of the niche. I’m not even sure if I’m still in The Dark Lady. If I am, the hull is breached here—I’m in water. Salt water. Wait, maybe I just pissed myself.”
“You’re still attached by hardline,” said Mahnmut, ignoring the Ionian’s last comment. “You’re probably still in the hold. I’m getting some sonar data. We’re in bottom silt, but just under a few meters of the stuff, about eighty meters beneath the surface.”
“I wonder how many pieces I’m in,” mused Orphu.
“Stay there,” said Mahnmut. “I’m going to unclip from the hardline and come below to get you. Don’t move.”
Orphu rumbled his laugh. “How can I move, old friend? All my manipulators and flagella have gone to that big moravec heaven in the sky. I’m a crab without claws. And I’m not too sure about my shell. Mahnmut . . . wait!”
“What?” Mahnmut had unstrapped himself and was removing umbilicals and virtual-control cables.
“If . . . somehow . . . you could get to me, assuming the internal corridor isn’t smashed flat and the hull doors aren’t completely buckled or welded shut by the entry heat . . . what are you going to do with me?”
“See if you’re all right,” said Mahnmut, pulling the optical leads free. It was all darkness on the monitors anyway.
“Think, old friend,” said Orphu. “You drag me out of here—if I don’t come apart in your hands—what next? I won’t fit in your internal access corridors. Even if you hauled me around the outside of the sub, I can’t fit into your enviro-niche and I sure as hell can’t cling to the hull. Do you walk across the ocean bottom for a thousand klicks or so, carrying me as you go?”
Mahnmut hesitated.
“I’m still functioning,” continued Orphu. “Or at least still communicating. I even have O2 flowing through the umbilical and some electrical energy coming in. I must be in the hold, even if it’s flooded. Why don’t you get The Dark Lady working and drive us somewhere more comfortable before we try to get together again?”
Mahnmut went on external air and took several deep breaths. “You’re right,” he said at last. “Let’s see what’s what.”
The Dark Lady was dying.
Mahnmut had worked in this submersible, through its various iterations and evolutions, for more than an Earth century, and he knew it was tough. Properly prepared, it could take many metric tons per square centimeter of pressure and the stresses of the 3,000-g flux-tube acceleration in stride, but the tough little sub was only as strong as its weakest part, and the energy stresses of the attack in Mars orbit had exceeded those weakest-part tolerances.
Her hull had stress fractures and unmendable flash burns. At the moment, they were buried bow-down with most of the sub in more than three meters of silt and harder seabed with only a few meters of the stern free of the mud, the hull and frame were warped, the hold-bay doors were warped shut and unreachable, and ten of the eighteen ballast tanks had been breached. The internal gangway between Mahnmut’s control room and the hold was flooded and partially collapsed. Outside, two-thirds of the stealth material had burned away, carrying all of the external sensors with it. Three of the four sonar arrays were out of action and the fourth could only ping forward. Only one of the four primary propulsion jets was operable and the maneuvering pulsers were a scrambled mess.
Of greater concern to Mahnmut was the damage to the ship’s energy systems: the primary reactor had been damaged by energy surge during the attack and was operating at 8 percent efficiency; the storage cells were on reserve power. This was enough to keep a minimum of life support running, but the nutrient converter was gone for good and they had only a few days’ worth of fresh water.
Finally, the O2 converter was offline. Fuel cells weren’t producing air. Long before they ran out of water or food, Mahnmut and Orphu would be out of oxygen. Mahnmut had internal air supplies, but only enough for an e-day or two without replenishing. All Mahnmut could hope was that since Orphu worked in space for months at a time, a little thing like no oxygen wouldn’t harm him now. He decided to ask the Ionian about it later.
More damage reports came in over the sub’s surviving AI systems. Given an e-month or more in a Conamara Chaos ice dock with a score of service moravecs working on her, The Dark Lady could be saved. Otherwise, her days—whether measured in Martian sols, Earth days, or Europan weeks—were numbered.
Keeping in touch with the mostly silent Orphu on the hardline—afraid his friend would cease to exist without warning—Mahnmut gave the most positive report he could and launched a periscope buoy. The buoy was deployed from the section of the stern still above the silt line and it still worked.
The buoy itself was smaller than Mahnmut’s hand, but it packed a wide array of imaging and data sensors. Information started flowing in.
“Good news,” said Mahnmut.
“The Five Moons Consortium launched a rescue mission,” rumbled Orphu.
“Not quite that good.” Rather than download the nonvisual data, Mahnmut summarized it to keep his friend list
ening and talking. “The buoy works. Better than that, the communication and positioning sats Koros III and Ri Po seeded in orbit are still up there. I wonder why the . . . persons who attacked us . . . didn’t sweep them out of space.”
“We were attacked by an Old Testament God and his girlfriend,” said Orphu. “They might not deign to notice comsats.”
“I think they looked more Greek than Old Testament,” said Mahnmut. “Do you want to hear the data I’m getting?”
“Sure.”
“The MPS puts us in the southern reaches of the Chryse Planitia region of the northern ocean, only about three hundred and forty kilometers from the Xanthe Terra coast. We’re lucky. This part of the Acidalia and Chryse sea is like a huge bay. If our trajectory had been a few hundred klicks to the west, we would have impacted on the Tempe Terra hills. Same distance to the east, Arabia Terra. A few more seconds of flight time south over Xanthe Terra highlands . . .”
“We’d be particles in the upper atmosphere,” said Orphu.
“Right,” said Mahnmut. “But if we get The Dark Lady unstuck, we can sail her right into the Valles Marineris delta if we have to.”
“You and Koros were supposed to land in the other hemisphere,” said Orphu. “North of Olympus Mons. Your mission was to do recon and deliver this device in the hold to Olympos. Don’t tell me the sub is in good enough shape to carry us up and around the Tempe Terra peninsula . . .”
“No,” admitted Mahnmut. In truth, it would be an amazing stroke of luck if The Dark Lady held together and kept functioning long enough to get them to the nearest land, but he wasn’t going to tell the Ionian that.
“Any other good news?” asked Orphu.
“Well, it’s a pretty day on the surface. All liquid water as far as the buoy could see. Moderate swells of less than a meter. Blue sky. Temperature in the high twenties . . .”
“Are they looking for us?”
“Pardon me?” said Mahnmut.
“Are the . . . people . . . that slagged us looking for us?”
“Yes,” said Mahnmut. “Passive radar showed several of those flying machines . . .”