“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 Mahnmut, 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 Mahnmut 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. Mahnmut 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!”