Chapter 25 #2
So yeah, it’ll be annoying, but all it costs me is time. And I’m actually doing well on that front. I have forty-three more sols before Hermes flies by. And looking at the procedure NASA has in mind for the modifications, I can take advantage of the MAV itself as a workspace.
The lunatics at NASA have me doing all kinds of rape to the MAV, but I don’t have to open the hull till the end. So the first thing I’ll do is clear out a bunch of clutter, like chairs and control panels and the like. Once they’re out, I’ll have a lot of room in there to work.
But I didn’t do anything to the soon-to-be-mutilated MAV today.
Today was all about system checks. Now that I’m back in contact with NASA, I have to go back to being all “safety first.” Strangely, NASA doesn’t have total faith in my kludged-together rover or my method of piling everything into the trailer.
They had me do a full systems check on every single component.
Everything’s still working fine, though it’s wearing down.
The regulator and the oxygenator are at less-than-peak efficiency (to say the least), and the trailer leaks some air every day.
Not enough to cause problems, but it’s not a perfect seal.
NASA’s pretty uncomfortable with it, but we don’t have any other options.
Then, they had me run a full diagnostic on the MAV. That’s in much better shape. Everything’s sleek and pristine and perfectly functional. I’d almost forgotten what new hardware even looks like.
Pity I’m going to tear it apart.
■■■
“You killed Watney,” Lewis said.
“Yeah,” Martinez said, scowling at his monitor. The words “Collision with Terrain” blinked accusingly.
“I pulled a nasty trick on him,” Johanssen said. “I gave him a malfunctioning altitude readout and made Engine Three cut out too early. It’s a deadly combination.”
“Shouldn’t have been a mission failure,” Martinez said. “I should have noticed the readout was wrong. It was way off.”
“Don’t sweat it,” Lewis said. “That’s why we drill.”
“Aye, Commander,” Martinez said. He furrowed his brow and frowned at the screen.
Lewis waited for him to snap out of it. When he didn’t, she put a hand on his shoulder.
“Don’t beat yourself up,” she said. “They only gave you two days of remote launch training. It was only supposed to happen if we aborted before landing; a cut-our-losses scenario where we’d launch the MAV to act as a satellite.
It wasn’t mission-critical so they didn’t drill you too hard on it.
Now that Mark’s life depends on it, you’ve got three weeks to get it right, and I have no doubt you can do it. ”
“Aye, Commander,” Martinez said, softening his scowl.
“Resetting the sim,” Johanssen said. “Anything specific you want to try?”
“Surprise me,” Martinez said.
Lewis left the control room and made her way to the reactor. As she climbed “up” the ladder to the center of the ship, the centripetal force on her diminished to zero. Vogel looked up from a computer console. “Commander?”
“How are the engines?” she asked, grabbing a wall-mounted handle to stay attached to the slowly turning room.
“All working within tolerance,” Vogel said. “I am now doing a diagnostic on the reactor. I am thinking that Johanssen is busy with the launching training. So perhaps I do this diagnostic for her.”
“Good idea,” Lewis said. “And how’s our course?”
“All is well,” Vogel said. “No adjustments necessary. We are still on track to planned trajectory within four meters.”
“Keep me posted if anything changes.”
“ Ja , Commander.”
Floating to the other side of the core, Lewis took the other ladder out, again gaining gravity as she went “down.” She made her way to the Airlock 2 ready room.
Beck held a coil of metal wire in one hand and a pair of work gloves in the other. “Heya, Commander. What’s up?”
“I’d like to know your plan for recovering Mark.”
“Easy enough if the intercept is good,” Beck said.
“I just finished attaching all the tethers we have into one long line. It’s two hundred and fourteen meters long.
I’ll have the MMU pack on, so moving around will be easy.
I can get going up to around ten meters per second safely.
Any more, and I risk breaking the tether if I can’t stop in time. ”
“Once you get to Mark, how fast a relative velocity can you handle?”
“I can grab the MAV easily at five meters per second. Ten meters per second is kind of like jumping onto a moving train. Anything more than that and I might miss.”
“So, including the MMU safe speed, we need to get the ship within twenty meters per second of his velocity.”
“And the intercept has to be within two hundred and fourteen meters,” Beck said. “Pretty narrow margin of error.”
“We’ve got a lot of leeway,” Lewis said.
“The launch will be fifty-two minutes before the intercept, and it takes twelve minutes. As soon as Mark’s S2 engine cuts out, we’ll know our intercept point and velocity.
If we don’t like it, we’ll have forty minutes to correct.
Our engine’s two millimeters per second may not seem like much, but in forty minutes it can move us up to 5. 7 kilometers.”
“Good,” Beck said. “And two hundred and fourteen meters isn’t a hard limit, per se.”
“Yes it is,” Lewis said.
“Nah,” Beck said. “I know I’m not supposed to go untethered, but without my leash I could get way out there—”
“Not an option,” Lewis said.
“But we could double or even triple our safe intercept range—”
“We’re done talking about this,” Lewis said sharply.
“Aye, Commander.”
LOG ENTRY: SOL 526
There aren’t many people who can say they’ve vandalized a three-billion-dollar spacecraft, but I’m one of them.
I’ve been pulling critical hardware out of the MAV left and right. It’s nice to know that my launch to orbit won’t have any pesky backup systems weighing me down.
First thing I did was remove the small stuff. Then came the things I could disassemble, like the crew seats, several of the backup systems, and the control panels.
I’m not improvising anything. I’m followinga script sent by NASA, which was set up to make things as easy as possible.
Sometimes I miss the days when I made all the decisions myself.
Then I shake it off and remember I’m infinitely better off with a bunch of geniuses deciding what I do than I am making shit up as I go along.
Periodically, I suit up, crawl into the airlock with as much junk as I can fit, and dump it outside. The area around the MAV looks like the set of Sanford and Son .
I learned about Sanford and Son from Lewis’s collection. Seriously, that woman needs to see someone about her seventies problem.
LOG ENTRY: SOL 529
I’m turning water into rocket fuel.
It’s easier than you’d think.
Separating hydrogen and oxygen only requires a couple of electrodes and some current.
The problem is collecting the hydrogen. I don’t have any equipment for pulling hydrogen out of the air.
The atmospheric regulator doesn’t even know how.
The last time I had to get hydrogen out of the air (back when I turned the Hab into a bomb) I burned it to turn it into water.
Obviously that would be counterproductive.
But NASA thought everything through and gave me a process.
First, I disconnected the rover and trailer from each other.
Then, while wearing my EVA suit, I depressurized the trailer and back-filled it with pure oxygen at one-fourth of an atmosphere.
Then I opened a plastic box full of water and put a couple of electrodes in.
That’s why I needed the atmosphere. Without it, the water would just boil immediately and I’d be hanging around in a steamy atmosphere.
The electrolysis separated the hydrogen and oxygen from each other. Now the trailer was full of even more oxygen and also hydrogen. Pretty dangerous, actually.
Then I fired up the atmospheric regulator.
I know I just said it doesn’t recognize hydrogen, but it does know how to yank oxygen out of the air.
I broke all the safeties and set it to pull 100 percent of the oxygen out.
After it was done, all that was left in the trailer was hydrogen.
That’s why I started out with an atmosphere of pure oxygen, so the regulator could separate it later.
Then I cycled the rover’s airlock with the inner door open. The airlock thought it was evacuating itself, but it was actually evacuating the whole trailer. The air was stored in the airlock’s holding tank. And there you have it, a tank of pure hydrogen.
I carried the airlock’s holding tank to the MAV and transferred the contents to the MAV’s hydrogen tanks. I’ve said this many times before, but: Hurray for standardized valve systems!
Finally, I fired up the fuel plant, and it got to work making the additional fuel I’d need.
I’ll need to go through this process several more times as the launch date approaches. I’m even going to electrolyze my urine. That’ll make for a pleasant smell in the trailer.
If I survive this, I’ll tell people I was pissing rocket fuel.
■■■
[19:22] JOHANSSEN: Hello, Mark.
[19:23] MAV: Johanssen!? Holy crap! They finally letting you talk to me directly?
[19:24] JOHANSSEN: Yes, NASA gave the OK for direct communication an hour ago. We’re only 35 light-seconds apart, so we can talk in near-real time. I just set up the system and I’m testing it out.
[19:24] MAV: What took them so long to let us talk?
[19:25] JOHANSSEN: The psych team was worried about personality conflicts.
[19:25] MAV: What? Just ’cause you guys abandoned me on a godforsaken planet with no chance of survival?
[19:26] JOHANSSEN: Funny. Don’t make that kind of joke with Lewis.
[19:27] MAV: Roger. So uh…thanks for coming back to get me.
[19:27] JOHANSSEN: It’s the least we could do. How is the MAV retrofit going?