“Hull temperature thirty-three hundred.” Reza’s reporting of the instrument readings was barely intelligible. “Five and a half gees. Angle of attack holding steady. Rate of descent constant. Hang in there. I think we’re through maximum drag.”
It didn’t feel that way to Celine. But then the force pressing her into the hammock became perhaps a tiny bit less. Breathing was agony, but a reduced agony.
“Hull temperature thirty-two hundred. Deceleration under four gees and falling. Rate of descent steady.” Reza tried to shout in triumph, and managed a wheezy croak. “We’re through the worst. We made it, guys. We’ve got lift. We’re home.”
Home? Not quite. But the Clark was no longer skimming like a flung stone across the skies of Earth. Celine could tell that they were flying, descending fast but buoyed upward by aerodynamic lift from the air. She struggled upright and turned in the hammock to face Reza.
“Where are we? Do you have any idea of our position and ground speed?”
“Don’t know yet.” He turned to grin at her. “The micro-positioning circuit says thirty-eight north and eighty-two west, but I don’t know how much we can trust it. Depends if the GPS satellites are alive. I’d like visuals, but it’s nothing but clouds below. We’re forty-one kilometers up, descent rate eighty meters a second, airspeed eleven hundred, heading nearly due east.”
Celine wanted to see for herself. So apparently did Jenny. As the deceleration dropped they started to crawl to the top of the hammock. At the same moment they realized that it was not feasible. They would change the mass balance of the little ship, but worse than that they would crowd Reza’s access to the controls. The overloaded orbiter was too small to permit passenger movement.
Celine strained upward for one moment above the edge of the hammock before she slid back to her old position. She glimpsed white clouds below and ahead, their rolling heads bright in western sunlight.
“I guess we can forget about ground assistance and ground information.” Reza was focused on the cloudscape ahead of the Clark. “The only way we’ll learn conditions below is to look at them.”
He wasn’t asking Celine, he was telling her. Did she want to second-guess him? She peered again over the edge of the hammock.
Reza had increased the angle of descent. The ship was swooping fast toward the cloud tops. “Seven thousand meters. Let’s hope the altimeter works with the changed atmosphere.” As he spoke the ship dropped into the clouds.
Ahead of the orbiter sat unchanging gray vapor. The ride became uncannily smooth. The ship might have been hanging motionless, except for the altimeter. Celine could see it in the diffuse light that permeated the cabin. Its display was flickering rapidly downward: six thousand — five thousand — four thousand.
At thirty-eight hundred meters, when she was beginning to panic, the orbiter vibrated heavily and a moment later was racing across the broken floor of the cloud layer.
Reza could see what lay below, but she could not. His low whistle did nothing to reassure her.
“What is it?”
“Snow. On the ground, everywhere. If it’s deep we’ll have problems landing. The orbiters aren’t designed for that.”
“Snow. I thought we were at latitude thirty-eight degrees?”
“That’s what the instruments say.”
“But that puts us nearly as far south as Richmond, and it’s almost April. There shouldn’t be snow.”
“Hey. I didn’t order it. I’m just telling you what we’ve got down there. And I don’t like the idea of trying to land in it.”
“Do you see cleared areas?”
“There was one patch of blacktop back there, looked like it could be a cleared runway. It’s behind us now. And there’s a big body of water ahead. It could be the James River or part of the Chesapeake Bay. Either way, it doesn’t help — we can’t land on water. We’d better take another look at what I saw, find out if we can land there.”
The Clark banked steeply. Celine didn’t need to be told that they were losing altitude fast. When the engines were off, the orbiters had the glide ratio of a brick. Reza was conserving power for the final approach and landing, assuming he would find a place where that landing was possible. The orbiter circled, losing more height.
“It’s not a commercial airport.” Reza giggled. “Not a military base, either. Not a highway. And not very big. But it’s all we’ve got. Hold tight. I’ll have to use the engines full throttle and bank at the same time to drop us in there.”
Celine slid back down the hammock, to settle between Wilmer and Jenny. You dreamed for a whole year of the triumphant return to Earth. Although you never discussed it or admitted that you ever had such thoughts, you rehearsed mentally the words to be spoken as you emerged from the lander. Those dreams and words did not cover the case where you swooped to a blighted Earth across a snow-covered landscape, in a crippled and jury-rigged orbiter.
“We’re very close,” Reza said happily. “Ten seconds to touchdown. But we’re moving too fast, and the strip we’re landing on is shorter than I thought. Even with maximum retro-thrust we’re going to overshoot the far end. Be prepared for something rough.”
After that warning, the first contact of the orbiter with the ground seemed soft as a kiss. Celine heard the hiss of landing wheels and felt a tremor as they raced along the surface. The retro-thrusters howled, and once more she was pushed deep into the hammock.
“This is it,” Reza said, and the orbiter shuddered and reared up onto its head. Celine felt one crushing moment of force. Then she was lying on her back, staring up at the cabin’s rear wall. Wilmer was lying half on top of her, muttering and wriggling.
“Reza?” she asked.
“I’ll live. I said you could trust me. How is it back there?”
“All right,” Jenny said, and Wilmer added, “Me, too, but the side wall has bent in. I can’t move until Celine does.”
“Don’t try.” From the sounds, Reza was releasing himself from his harness. “Sit tight and I’ll try to open the hatch. It’s going to be tricky. We’re in the middle of a snowdrift.”
Sitting tight was easy. Unable to move, Celine could do nothing but wait and listen to Reza’s gasps and grunts of effort.
“Good thing it slides,” he said after half a minute. “We’d never have opened it outward against packed snow. And the drift is almost to the top of the door. Another half meter and we’d have to tunnel free. But I can get to you now.”
He kicked at the banked snow, enlarging the hole, and used the space he had made to crawl upward and free the hammock clamps on one side. Celine, Jenny, and Wilmer rolled together to finish in a heap near Reza’s feet.
“Anyone have some first words for our return to Earth?” he said. “The ones I’d been working on don’t seem to apply anymore.”
“We made it,” Jenny said shakily. “In that last few minutes, I felt sure we wouldn’t.” She reached out and put her arms around his neck. “I’ve always laughed at you when you told me what a great pilot you were. But you are.”
“You’d better believe it.” Reza went on kicking at the snow, making a hole big enough to crawl through to the ground outside. “Celine, you first. You’re the head of the Mars expedition now.”
His words brought back to Celine the memory of the crew members who were not with them. The sheer exhilaration of being alive faded. She eased her way feet-first into the hole that Reza had made, and the mound of snow crumbled and sank beneath her weight as she slid to the ground.