• • •
You could force patience on yourself and everyone else, but no one said you had to like it.
Celine watched Jenny working for a few minutes, with Wilmer sitting by to assist if and when needed. Then she left the control cabin and wandered away to the Schiaparelli’s observation chamber. She had another mystery to ponder.
Zoe had been the leader of the Mars expedition. Ludwig Holter had been second in command. No backup to those two had ever been mentioned. Oversight, or deliberate act by the selection committee?
Now Zoe and Ludwig were dead. And Celine, without making any conscious decision, seemed to have taken over the direction of the surviving group. Did she want to do that? Or, inverting the question, did she have any choice?
Celine stared out at Earth, its surface again shrouded in night. The radio silence continued, broken only by weak and sporadic signals that addressed purely local problems of food, water, and power supply. The old Earth had been a celestial beacon, a roar of radio and television signals easily picked up when the Schiaparelli was orbiting Mars. That had gone. The firefly glow of light from the big cities was no longer visible. In its place she saw the ruddy sparks of bush fires across much of sub-Saharan Africa.
The planet to which she so much wanted to return was nothing like the world that they had left. If they survived to land on it, they would find a tougher, wilder place.
First, though, they had to live through the descent. Who would make the crucial decisions in the hours ahead? Put like that, the question of leadership became clear. She did not trust Wilmer or Jenny to direct the group. She wasn’t sure she trusted Reza to do much at all, he was showing increasing signs of strangeness. And there was no one else.
Celine left the observation chamber and headed for the control room where the others were working. True, she did not wholly trust herself. But maybe Zoe Nash, for all her apparent confidence and certainty, had felt the same way.
Uneasy lies the head.
The important question wasn’t whether or not you thought you were the right one to lead. It was whether others believed you were.
What am I? What is my function?
Celine, squeezed into the improvised hammock between Wilmer and Jenny and facing away from the front of the orbiter, felt a new wave of uncertainty rising within her. Reza sat behind them at the controls. Celine didn’t like that, but she had no choice. He was by far the best pilot. She could see his distorted image in the shiny rear panel, singing to himself. Unless she told him to abort in the next sixty seconds, the Clark would leave the safe haven of ISS-2 and begin reentry.
She had performed none of the data analysis and modeling that proved Wilmer’s assertion was correct. That work had been done by Jenny and by Wilmer himself. It showed that the crew of the Lewis had died not because of pilot ineptitude or software transfer error, but because the equations embedded in the control programs no longer modeled correctly the atmosphere of today’s Earth.
She had not changed the software, to incorporate the parameters of the new atmosphere determined by the data analysis. That had been Jenny’s work.
Nor would she fly the Clark back home. That responsibility lay with Reza, now well into manic mood.
What, then, did she do?
She worried, when apparently no one else did. The others were completely confident that the problem that killed Zoe and the rest of the Lewis crew had been solved. As Reza cheerfully said, “Everything else was on the button, exactly the way it should have been. We’ve cleared up the only problem.” Yet it was his partner,
Jenny, who in another context had assured the group that test a program as you liked, it always had one bug left. And she and Reza apparently didn’t realize that “program” was a general term, applying just as well to a return from orbit as to a computer subroutine.
Celine wondered how much longer she would have delayed the attempt to return to Earth, without Reza’s remark the previous day: “The log shows this orbiter’s past due for maintenance. There’s a steady deterioration in condition, even when it’s not being used.”
Reza’s reflection was staring at her. Apparently the sixty-second grace period had expired. It was now, or abort to a later time. Celine nodded. “Do it.”
The thrust of the engines in front of her was silent and easy, apparently too gentle to affect their situation. It was surprising to watch the Schiaparelli and ISS-2 sail away ahead, continuing in their shared orbit. The or-biter had taken the first step, braking its motion enough to allow the trajectory of Clark to intersect the upper atmosphere.
Now it was simply waiting. But not for long. In less than fifteen minutes they would know if the drag calculation had been the only problem affecting the Lewis.
No one was wearing a suit. Celine had wanted that as a precaution against the failure of cabin integrity and loss of air. Two minutes of direct experiment ruled it out. Even without suits they could barely squeeze into the Clark’s limited cabin space. With suits, forget it. The pilot might fly home, but no one else would fit in with him.
“Everything is nominal,” Reza announced. “The control routines are doing exactly what we hoped. We are losing altitude as planned and are already experiencing some atmospheric drag.”
He seemed without a care in the world, but his words made Celine think of Zoe. She had said almost exactly the same thing, shortly before the Lewis disintegrated to its individual atoms.
“Do the drag forces seem to be following the new model?” Celine was being pushed back into the hammock, harder and sooner than she expected. She had to ask if things were all right, even though there was nothing she could do if she didn’t like Reza’s answer.
“The new model works fine,” Reza replied. His attitude didn’t tell her anything. He sounded ready to fly a ship through the gates of hell. “We’re coming down by the book. Trust crazy Reza. I think I could squeeze us a degree or two farther north if you want. It may be clearer there.”
“What’s the cloud situation?”
It was another problem, predictable but irritating. Normally the weather reports for a returning orbiter were provided by ground control, with access to metsat and to ground radar data. The Clark was forced to fly without any such aids. Reza was the only person on board who could see anything outside the ship.
“Continuous cloud cover below, cumulonimbus by the look of them. But we’re a long way from touchdown. Drag is higher, skin temperature going up fast. Sit tight.”
There was no choice. Celine didn’t need to be told about the drag forces, she was pressing harder and harder into the hammock. Wilmer, to her right, was rolling in on her a little. The hammock support was not quite centered — her own fault, that had been her job. But he was quite a load, especially under what already felt like two gees and more.
“Hull temperature close to three thousand. We’re pushing three gees and projecting more than five.” Reza forced the words from compressed vocal cords. The ship’s deceleration was still increasing. “If there’s going to be unpleasantness, it will be right about here.”
Unpleasantness. A pilot’s gift for understatement. Their bodies had spent most of the past year in free fall, and the year before that in a Mars gravity only forty percent of Earth’s. Five gees was intolerable. Celine had trouble breathing, and she could hear beside her Jenny Kopal’s painful grunts. Wilmer was a silent lump at her side. How much more? And how much longer? Only the thermal skin of the orbiter’s cabin wall protected them from the white-hot inferno beyond.