Chapter 26 #2
“The launch missed badly,” Venkat said, looking past Mitch to the screens beyond. “The intercept distance was going to be way too big. So they’re using the attitude adjusters to close the gap.”
“What do attitude adjusters usually do?”
“They rotate the ship. They’re not made for thrusting it. Hermes doesn’t have quick-reaction engines. Just the slow, steady ion engines.”
“So…problem solved?” Annie said hopefully.
“No,” Venkat said. “They’ll get to him, but they’ll be going forty-two meters per second when they get there.”
“How fast is that?” Annie asked.
“About ninety miles per hour,” Venkat said. “There’s no hope of Beck grabbing Watney at that speed.”
“Can they use the attitude adjusters to slow down?”
“They needed a lot of velocity to close the gap in time. They used all the fuel they could spare to get going fast enough. But now they don’t have enough fuel to slow down.” Venkat frowned.
“So what can they do?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “And even if I did, I couldn’t tell them in time.”
“Well fuck,” Annie said.
“Yeah,” Venkat agreed.
■■■
“Watney,” Lewis said “Do you read?…Watney?” she repeated.
“Commander,” Beck radioed. “He’s wearing a surface EVA suit, right?”
“Yeah.”
“It should have a bio-monitor,” Beck said. “And it’ll be broadcasting. It’s not a strong signal; it’s only designed to go a couple hundred meters to the rover or Hab. But maybe we can pick it up.”
“Johanssen,” Lewis said.
“On it,” Johanssen said. “I have to look up the frequencies in the tech specs. Gimme a second.”
“Martinez,” Lewis continued. “Any idea how to slow down?”
He shook his head. “I got nothin’, Commander. We’re just going too damn fast.”
“Vogel?”
“The ion drive is simply not strong enough,” Vogel replied.
“There’s got to be something,” Lewis said. “Something we can do. Anything.”
“Got his bio-monitor data,” Johanssen said. “Pulse fifty-eight, blood pressure ninety-eight over sixty-one.”
“That’s not bad,” Beck said. “Lower than I’d like, but he’s been in Mars gravity for eighteen months, so it’s expected.”
“Time to intercept?” Lewis asked.
“Thirty-two minutes,” Johanssen replied.
■■■
Blissful unconsciousness became foggy awareness which transitioned into painful reality. Watney opened his eyes, then winced at the pain in his chest.
Little remained of the canvas. Tatters floated along the edge of the hole it once covered.
This granted Watney an unobstructed view of Mars from orbit.
The red planet’s crater-pocked surface stretched out seemingly forever, its thin atmosphere a slight blur along the edge.
Only eighteen people in history had personally seen this view.
“Fuck you,” he said to the planet below.
Reaching toward the controls on his arm, he winced. Trying again, more slowly this time, he activated his radio. “MAV to Hermes .”
“Watney!?” came the reply.
“Affirmative. That you, Commander?” Watney said.
“Affirmative. What’s your status?”
“I’m on a ship with no control panel,” he said. “That’s as much as I can tell you.”
“How do you feel?”
“My chest hurts. I think I broke a rib. How are you?”
“We’re working on getting you,” Lewis said. “There was a complication in the launch.”
“Yeah,” Watney said, looking out the hole in the ship. “The canvas didn’t hold. I think it ripped early in the ascent.”
“That’s consistent with what we saw during the launch.”
“How bad is it, Commander?” he asked.
“We were able to correct the intercept range with Hermes ’s attitude thrusters. But there’s a problem with the intercept velocity.”
“How big a problem.”
“Forty-two meters per second.”
“Well shit.”
■■■
“Hey, at least he’s okay for the moment,” Martinez said.
“Beck,” Lewis said, “I’m coming around to your way of thinking. How fast can you get going if you’re untethered?”
“Sorry, Commander,” Beck said. “I already ran the numbers. At best I could get twenty-five meters per second. Even if I could get to forty-two, I’d need another forty-two to match Hermes when I came back.”
“Copy,” Lewis said.
“Hey,” Watney said over the radio, “I’ve got an idea.”
“Of course you do,” Lewis said. “What do you got?”
“I could find something sharp in here and poke a hole in the glove of my EVA suit. I could use the escaping air as a thruster and fly my way to you. The source of thrust would be on my arm, so I’d be able to direct it pretty easily.”
“How does he come up with this shit?” Martinez interjected.
“Hmm,” Lewis said. “Could you get forty-two meters per second that way?”
“No idea,” Watney said.
“I can’t see you having any control if you did that,” Lewis said. “You’d be eyeballing the intercept and using a thrust vector you can barely control.”
“I admit it’s fatally dangerous,” Watney said. “But consider this: I’d get to fly around like Iron Man.”
“We’ll keep working on ideas,” Lewis said.
“Iron Man, Commander. Iron Man. ”
“Stand by,” Lewis said.
She furrowed her brow. “Hmm…Maybe it’s not such a bad idea….”
“You kidding, Commander?” Martinez said. “It’s a terrible idea. He’d shoot off into space—”
“Not the whole idea, but part of it,” she said. “Using atmosphere as thrust. Martinez, get Vogel’s station up and running.”
“Okay,” Martinez said, typing at his keyboard. The screen changed to Vogel’s workstation. Martinez quickly changed the language from German to English. “It’s up. What do you need?”
“Vogel’s got software for calculating course offsets caused by hull breaches, right?”
“Yeah,” Martinez said. “It estimates course corrections needed in the event of—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Lewis said. “Fire it up. I want to know what happens if we blow the VAL.”
Johanssen and Martinez looked at each other.
“Um. Yes, Commander,” Martinez said.
“The vehicular airlock?” Johanssen said. “You want to…open it?”
“Plenty of air in the ship,” Lewis said. “It’d give us a good kick.”
“Ye-es…,” Martinez said as he brought up the software. “And it might blow the nose of the ship off in the process.”
“Also, all the air would leave,” Johanssen felt compelled to add.
“We’ll seal the bridge and reactor room. We can let everywhere else go vacuo, but we don’t want explosive decompression in here or near the reactor.”
Martinez entered the scenario into the software. “I think we’ll just have the same problem as Watney, but on a larger scale. We can’t direct that thrust.”
“We don’t have to,” Lewis said. “The VAL is in the nose. Escaping air would make a thrust vector through our center of mass. We just need to point the ship directly away from where we want togo.”
“Okay, I have the numbers,” Martinez said. “A breach at the VAL, with the bridge and reactor room sealed off, would accelerate us twenty-nine meters per second.”
“We’d have a relative velocity of thirteen meters per second afterward,” Johanssen supplied.
“Beck,” Lewis radioed. “Have you been hearing all this?”
“Affirmative, Commander,” Beck said.
“Can you do thirteen meters per second?”
“It’ll be risky,” Beck replied. “Thirteen to match the MAV, then another thirteen to match Hermes . But it’s a hell of a lot better than forty-two.”
“Johanssen,” Lewis said. “Time to intercept?”
“Eighteen minutes, Commander.”
“What kind of jolt will we feel with that breach?” Lewis asked Martinez.
“The air will take four seconds to evacuate,” he said. “We’ll feel a little less than one g.”
“Watney,” she said to her headset, “we have a plan.”
“Yay! A plan!” Watney replied.
■■■
“Houston,” Lewis’s voice rang through Mission Control. “Be advised we are going to deliberately breach the VAL to produce thrust.”
“What?” Mitch said. “What!?”
“Oh…my god,” Venkat said in the observation room.
“Fuck me raw,” Annie said, getting up. “I better get to the press room. Any parting knowledge before I go?”
“They’re going to breach the ship,” Venkat said, still dumbfounded. “They’re going to deliberately breach the ship. Oh my god…”
“Got it,” Annie said, jogging to the door.
■■■
“How will we open the airlock doors?” Martinez asked. “There’s no way to open them remotely, and if anyone’s nearby when it blows—”
“Right,” Lewis said. “We can open one door with the other shut, but how do we open the other?”
She thought for a moment. “Vogel,” she radioed. “I need you to come back in and make a bomb.”
“Um. Again, please, Commander?” Vogel replied.
“A bomb,” Lewis confirmed. “You’re a chemist. Can you make a bomb out of stuff on board?”
“ Ja, ” Vogel said. “We have flammables and pure oxygen.”
“Sounds good,” Lewis said.
“It is of course dangerous to set off an explosive device on a spacecraft,” Vogel pointed out.
“So make it small,” Lewis said. “It just needs to poke a hole in the inner airlock door. Any hole will do. If it blows the door off, that’s fine. If it doesn’t, the air will get out slower, but for longer. The momentum change is the same, and we’ll get the acceleration we need.”
“Pressurizing Airlock 2,” Vogel reported. “How will we activate this bomb?”
“Johanssen?” Lewis said.
“Uh…,” Johanssen said. She picked up her headset and quickly put it on. “Vogel, can you run wires into it?”
“ Ja, ” Vogel said. “I will use threaded stopper with a small hole for the wires. It will have little effect on the seal.”
“We could run the wire to Lighting Panel 41,” Johanssen said. “It’s next to the airlock, and I can turn it on and off from here.”
“There’s our remote trigger,” Lewis said. “Johanssen, go set up the lighting panel. Vogel, get in here and make the bomb. Martinez, go close and seal the doors to the reactor room.”
“Yes, Commander,” Johanssen said, kicking off her seat toward the hallway.
“Commander,” Martinez said, pausing at the exit, “you want me to bring back some space suits?”
“No point,” Lewis said. “If the seal on the bridge doesn’t hold, we’ll get sucked out at close to the speed of sound. We’ll be jelly with or without suits on.”
“Hey, Martinez,” said Beck over the radio. “Can you move my lab mice somewhere safe? They’re in the bio lab. It’s just one cage.”
“Copy, Beck,” said Martinez. “I’ll move them to the reactor room.”