“That dish is headed for the stars, at about three million miles an hour,” Travis said over the radio. “How long before it gets to Alpha Centauri?”

“Is this question going to be on the final exam?” I asked.

“Extra credit.”

“A thousand years,” Kelly said, and when I looked at her, she shrugged. “Just a guess,” she whispered to me.

“Did you give her the answer, Manny?” Travis said with a laugh.

I hadn’t even figured it out myself. But light travels 186,000 miles per second, which would be… eleven million and some miles per minute, 670 million miles per hour, a light-year was 5.8 trillion miles, [329] Alpha Centauri was about four and a half light-years away… the answer I kept getting was 1,004 years. How about that?

“Trick question,” Travis said. “The answer is, never. We’re not aimed at Alpha Centauri.”

Travis moved along the strut quickly. I had another episode of the dry heaves before he got to the most critical area, the welds connecting the strut to the thrust cradle, and from there to the rest of the ship.

It was half an hour before Travis pronounced it good. Another twenty minutes to get inside and up to the cockpit. Five more minutes before he was satisfied we were ready to apply thrust again. And just a bit over an hour after the emergency began, that blessed, blessed thrust settled down on my abused stomach again. I felt like I’d gone ten rounds with the heavyweight champion of the world.

Travis got the ship stabilized on her new thrust vector, and then joined us in the common room.

“Aren’t we going to miss Mars now?” Alicia asked. “I mean, we traveled more than three million miles while you were outside, if I understand right.”

“You understand right. If I stuck to our original flight times we’d go way past Mars and have to come back. But I can compensate by applying just a bit more thrust. I haven’t figured exactly what that thrust should be-that’s one of the nice things about Red Thunder, she’s very forgiving, you basically just have to aim at where you’re going and blast, not calculate complicated orbits. If you go too far, you can just thrust your way back. But it’ll be about one point oh three or maybe one point oh five gees from here to Mars, to bring us stationary a thousand or so miles above the atmosphere. You won’t even feel it. In fact, it’s one point oh five now. Do you feel heavy?”

I did, a little, now that he mentioned it, but it was only a few pounds, and that heavy feel could be just my abused stomach bitching at me.

It wasn’t until then I had time to think about the consequences of what had befallen us with the antenna. We couldn’t transmit or receive signals from the Earth anymore. We were out of contact, and would stay that way.

Suddenly outer space felt pretty lonely.

28

I TAKE BACK everything I said about the lack of a view aboard Red Thunder. When we arrived at Mars, Travis inserted us neatly into a close orbit, and Mars in all his glory filled half the sky.

The Red Planet was not as red as I’d expected. There were infinite shades of rust, then large areas of lighter-colored sand, vast deserts and deep valleys, volcanic mountains that cast a long shadow if they were on the day/night terminator.

If only I felt well enough to truly appreciate it.

We all floated in the cockpit, getting the best view we would have on the entire trip, and my mouth kept filling up with spit. Then I’d try to swallow, and my stomach didn’t like that idea at all. I’d gag, and try to throw up again. I think Kelly, Alicia, and Travis were starting to find Dak and me pretty disgusting. The bastards.

We could have simply eased into the atmosphere without any orbiting at all, Red Thunder was capable of that, but the site Travis wanted to land on was on the other side of Mars when we got there, so we “parked” for an hour.

“Noctus Labyrinthus?” Dak asked. “I thought-”

“Elysium Planitia, what I told everybody during our last news [331] conference,” Travis said, with a grin. “A nice, flat plain where there’s very little of real interest. An excellent choice to make a nice, safe, sane touchdown. But we ain’t going there.”

“Why not?” Kelly asked.

“Because it’s boring, and because that’s what I wanted the Chinese to hear. My children, the two greatest tourist attractions on Mars are Olympus Mons and Valles Marineris. The first is the largest volcano in the entire solar system. Almost seventy thousand feet higher than the surrounding ground. Compare that to Mauna Loa, Earth’s biggest volcano, which is twenty-nine thousand feet above the ocean floor.

“Valles Marineris is the Grand Canyon of Mars, and it would stretch almost from New York to Los Angeles on Earth, four miles deep and four hundred miles across in some places. Either one would be a wonderful place to land.”

“Then why the valley?” Alicia asked.

“Two big reasons. We’re pretty sure we understand the forces behind Olympus Mons. There’s no shifting of the crust on Mars, no continent-sized plates moving along fault lines. Volcanoes form because there’s an upwelling of magma in the mantle. On Earth, the plates move over that hot spot, which is how Hawaii formed, a series of newer volcanoes popping every few million years as the plate slid over the hot spot.

“On Mars, the crust just sits there, and Olympus Mons just grows, and grows, and grows, over billions of years.”

“Sounds great,” I said. “Why don’t we go there?”

“Because Valles Marineris is more likely to contain the answer to the most important question about Mars. Is there any water still there? The valley looks like it could have been formed by running water. But how long ago? Is any still left, frozen in the ground like permafrost in the tundra? The canyon’s an obvious place to look.” Then he smiled a little broader. “Besides, it’s where the Chinese will land.”

He called up a map of Mars on his screen. He jabbed his finger at a point just above the north rim of the Valles.

“Longitude ninety-five degrees, six degrees south latitude. I’ll be able to eyeball the correct landing site, because we’ll be able to see the Chinese pathfinders.”

[332] It was the successful landing of two out of the three “pathfinder” ships on Mars that had finally lit a match under the complacent butts of those in charge of America’s manned space program. One of the ships had failed to respond to commands from Earth and zipped on past Mars and into oblivion. But the other two had landed within half a mile of each other.

“The Chinese have to land there, they’ve got no choice. So I will come down at the landing site they announced to the world. I’ll find the supply ships and put down within a couple miles of them. And then… then, my friends, we’ve got them.

“We’re going to hijack the Chinese mission.”

And he explained his plan to force the Chinese to acknowledge our presence on Mars… and soon we were all grinning with him. It sounded foolproof to me.

Providing, of course, that we didn’t kill ourselves during our landing.

TRAVIS FIRED A long burst to slow us out of Mars orbit, then we were weightless again for what felt like three hours but really wasn’t nearly so long.

Once again the four of us were strapped to our chairs in the windowless control deck. There was a cruciform cursor superposed on our aft-looking cameras, the ones that would be giving Travis his only useful view of where he was going. The cursor was right on the knife edge of the western reaches of the Valles Marineris. Of course we were also using our radar to judge altitude, but radar was one of the weak points of Red Thunder. To keep our costs under one million-okay, in the final accounting we had spent more like $1,150,000 of Travis’s and Kelly’s money-the great majority of the ship was built with parts purchased off the shelf, from the tanks the ship was made out of, right down to our pressurized ball point pens, an item NASA had once spent almost three million dollars to develop. But good civilian radar equipment that would meet our needs was hard to come by. We wanted to be able to bounce signals off Mars and the Earth while still hundreds or thousands [333] of miles away, and would need even more range if we had to find a crippled and lost Ares Seven.