“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 listening 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 . . .”
“Chariots.”
“. . . several of those flying machines crisscrossing above the sea in the several thousand square kilometers of the debris impact footprint.”
“Looking for us,” said Orphu.
“No register of radar or neutrino search,” said Mahnmut. “No energy search spectra at all . . .”
“Can they find us, Mahnmut?” Orphu’s voice was flat.
Mahnmut hesitated. He didn’t want to lie to his friend. “Possibly,” he said. “Almost certainly if they were using moravec technology, but they don’t seem to be. They’re just . . . looking. Perhaps just with eyes and magnetometers.”
“They found us in orbit easily enough. Targeted us.”
“Yes.” There was no question that the chariot or its occupants had some sort of target acquisition device that had worked well at 8,000 klicks of distance.
“Did you reel in the buoy?”
“Yes,” said Mahnmut. There were several seconds of silence except for the creak of the damaged hull, the hiss of ventilation, and the thump and hum of various pumps working in vain to clear the flooded sections. “We have several things going for us,” Mahnmut said at last. “First, there are tons and tons of metal debris from the spacecraft in this footprint, and it’s a long footprint. The first impacts weren’t that far south of the polar cap.
“Second, we’ve settled in bow first, and the only section of the sub above the silt line, the stern, still has some tatters of loose stealthwrap on it. Third, we’re powered down to the point that we have almost no energy signature at all. Fourth . . .”