Survival - a short story

Survival
by Hanamura Yuki (Grey Wolves)

An annoyingly loud klaxon is immediately followed by the familiar voice of Ares, the onboard flight computer. “Warning,” it says, “booster coolant levels at sixteen per cent below nominal.” A flip of three switches in sequence silences the alarm. “Compensating,” Ares replies.

I expected this. No problem. I watch the myriad status displays scattered about the control module. The autopilot computer, the only functioning computer, is performing various system diagnostics. They all seem to be going smoothly. No major problems have been reported yet, anyway. Fuel state is twenty-one per cent, and that’s more than enough to get me to the Mars Shuttle Vehicle. Radiation shield is undamaged. Hull integrity is at maximum.

A subtle beep diverts my attention to the countdown clock. Ten minutes to launch. Good, I think, a break. Until the computer finishes the diagnostics, there isn’t a lot I can do. I take a deep breath and silently thank my lucky stars that this launch is, so far, uneventful. I can’t say the same about the nature of our arrival a year ago today. As soon as we left the MSV, the whole mission started to fall apart at the seams.

* * * * *

“Yee haw!” cried Captain Miller from the landing vehicle’s copilot seat. “I love this part!” His thick, Texan accent still made me smile, despite the nearly three decades I’d known him. The landing vehicle lurched downward and away from the Mars Shuttle Vehicle which would hang in its geostationary orbit above our surface base on the red planet.

I chuckled to myself. Ryan Miller and I had flown dozens of missions together over the past twenty years with the UN Space Agency. We’d had almost identical training and been through the same simulations. We would be the first humans to ever set foot on Mars. He was experiencing his “favourite part” for the first time, just as I was. Sure, in hindsight, the simulator did a pretty good job at replicating the forces I now felt for real, and the cockpit controls were identical. But those were just simulations. The mere thought that I was now falling toward the surface of an alien world, instead of the bottom of a training tank, seemed to make the experience more intense, the starscape before me more vivid. To Ryan’s defence, I felt the same amount of exhilaration and familiarity toward this moment.

“Hull temperature... 100 Kelvins,” I reported as I monitored the sensors. “Atmospheric pressure... zero.” I looked to Ryan as he checked the status of the autopilot. “So far, so good, eh.” I received a friendly punch to the arm in response.

“Yah, eh,” he mocked, laughing as I smiled and shook my head. A Texan and a Canadian probably made us the most unlikely pair to be selected for the Ares III mission to Mars. “Don’t you worry, partner,” he drawled. “Ah’ll have this filly on the ground in time fer yer afternoon tea.” He raised a pinkie finger and pretended to sip hot liquid from a dainty cup. “And ah won’t scratch any of yer china, neither.”

I snorted, checking another sensor display. “That’s English... partner.”

“Whatever.”

The first visible portions of a shockwave began to form ahead of the vehicle’s nose, indicating we had entered the upper atmosphere of Mars. “Outside pressure... 100 pascals,” I reported as thin tendrils of superheated plasma twisted their way from the wave and over our windshield. “Time to land... twenty-three minutes, five seconds.”

“Man, that’s just beautiful,” Ryan remarked as our forward view became dominated by the martian horizon, its orange-red atmosphere in stark contrast to the infinite blackness of space just above it. His eyes grew wide as he heard the snort that I had tried to hide. “Don’t you go tellin’ anyone ah said that!”

I put my hands up in mock surrender. “Hey, I didn’t hear anything!” My act lasted all of two seconds before I succumbed to a fit of laughter.

“Alright, alright!” he conceded in between his own bouts of jollity. “Tell ya what. If you don’t tell anyone ‘bout my comment, then I won’t tell anyone ‘bout the blow-up doll you brought with you.”

It was my turn to display shock, but mine was genuine. “Blow-up doll? What blow-up doll?”

Ryan turned his gaze out the windshield, a mischievous grin on his face. “The one I hid in your gear while we transferred to the landing vehicle.” It was obviously taking all his willpower to refrain from returning to a fit of laughter.

“You son of a bitch...” I groused, rolling my eyes and attempting to prevent him from seeing the mischievous grin of my own. Just wait until you find what I hid in your gear...

“Hey,” he started again, checking his instruments and monitoring the flight control status, “at least it ain’t as bad as th’ time ya-” BAM! His sentence was cut short in the middle by a loud metallic bang from behind the cockpit. Ryan’s eyes widened again, this time in shock as his emergency training kicked in. “What th’ hell was that?!”

My eyes immediately went to the instruments before me. “Atmospheric pressure increasing steadily from 200 pascals. Hull temperature at 500 Kelvins and rising. Structural integrity holding, fuel pressure 21.5 bars... Everything’s green on my end.”

Ryan punched several buttons on the control panels, reading the statuses of the various computerized control systems aboard. “Yeah... Yeah. Ah don’t see anything wrong. O2 pressure stable, autopilot, navigation, propulsion... all are go.”

“Eighteen minutes to touchdown,” I called. The ambient noise in the cockpit was rising slightly, but I wrote it off as being due to the increased atmospheric friction against the hull.

BAM! The noise was louder this time, and it was accompanied by a noticeable downward acceleration. My stomach briefly lurched into my throat as I experienced negative g-forces for the first time in nearly six months. I was able to abort the launch of my lunch just in-time to be pushed into my seat by several positive g-forces. I looked to Ryan. “What’s going on?”

Ryan was desperately punching the buttons to perform an emergency shutdown of the navigation computer. “NAVCOM’s gone loco! It’s tellin’ PROPCOM that we’re on the ground!” The noise in the cockpit had risen to almost painful levels. The ship’s nubs of wings groaned under the stress even in the relatively thin air. “I’m shuttin’ her down!” he yelled over the din. “We’ll have to fly her manually the rest o’ the way in!”

“Roger!” I responded, my former joviality now furthest from my mind. More pressing issues were at hand. For one, saving our lives. “You take stick! I’ll handle thrusters and throttle!”

“What about the ILS?” yelled Ryan, gripping the yoke tightly. He struggled to wrest control from the computer.

“Forget the ILS; it’s tied into NAVCOM! We’ll have to do this visually!”

Ryan glanced sidelong at me for a moment, nervousness etched clearly on his face. “Aye!” He began punching commands into the control panels with one hand, the other still fighting for control of the stick. “Configuring for visual approach!”

“Altitude 11000 metres!” I shouted.

“Shit!” He continued after a few seconds of my confused silence. “We’re descending too fast!” he explained. Beads of sweat started to form on his brow under the strain of controlling the thousands of tonnes of metal containing us, our return ship, and all the supplies we needed to set up the base station.

“Auto-throttle is engaged and green!” I yelled. “Can you disconnect the autopilot?”

“Already have! Shut down the auto-throttle and give ‘er full power!”

It was difficult to steady my hand enough to switch off the autopilot computer. The cabin was shaking so violently, it seemed the ship would tear itself apart. “Done!” I cried over the cacophony, reaching next for the throttle control. Grasping it with as tight a grip as I could manage, I pushed the lever forward to its maximum setting. The engines roared with a renewed fervour behind us. “Full power!”

Ryan could no longer speak, responding to the sluggish controls with a short series of guttural growls. All his strength and concentration was being poured into bringing the ship out of its steep descent. It was clear that his strength would not be enough to put the massive craft on the ground safely.

I watched the altimetre carefully, and with a growing sense of nervousness. “7000 metres!” The nose of the ship pointed downward at a perilous angle, nearly filling the attitude indicator with a dirty brown. “5000 metres!”

“Help me pull ‘er nose up!” Ryan screamed, the roar of the cockpit close to drowning out all other sound.

I looked to the control stick in front of my seat. It shook violently, and I wondered if I could successfully grab it without causing my copilot to lose what little control he had. “3000 metres!” I thrust out my hands, hoping to gain purchase on the yoke as it shot in random directions. My knuckles screamed in pain as the hard plastic smacked my hands hard. Even the thick gloves of my environment suit wouldn’t lesson the bruises from that. “1500 metres!”

The stubby wings were beginning to effect some sort of lift in the thin, lower Martian atmosphere. Our attitude began to lessen, the laws of physics apparently taking a small amount of pity on our situation. Ryan had stopped grunting against the controls, leaving a frightening absence of his input. “We got us a problem!”

My heart dropped into my gut. “Well?”

“The wings won’t extend!” He looked at me for a moment, just long enough for both of us to realize what this meant. Without the wings extended, there would be no chance of levelling our flight path enough to land in the designated valley.

My mind raced to determine what systems we had which might save us from being dashed against the rocky soil little more than a kilometre beneath us. “Alright...” I thought aloud. “That means no flaps, either.”

Ryan simply nodded.

“Slats 15!” I yelled, pulling the appropriate control lever. Nothing happened. “Shit!”

Ryan glanced at me nervously. “No wings, no slats, no flaps...”

There had to be a way to get this bucket on the ground without killing ourselves in the process. “Let’s use the ship itself. Nose to alpha max!” I ordered. Even with both of us pouring all our combined strength into the control columns, our angle of attack still wouldn’t rise above the horizon. My heart sank again as I looked to our altimetre. “500 metres! Forty-five seconds to impact!”

“Gear!” Ryan yelled, noticing the three red indicators on the instrument panel that I hadn’t until now.

“I got it!” I released the control stick from my left hand to lower the landing gear, only to have the yoke fly from my right hand’s grasp almost immediately. “You have control!” I yelled, warning my friend that I was no longer helping him steer. The appropriate buttons pressed, I waited for the telltale humming and vibration of the gear being deployed. Nothing happened. I sighed. “No gear!”

Ryan again glanced at me nervously. “You’re kidding me.”

I shook my head, returning my attention to the stick in front of me. Catching it and earning another set of bruises on my hands, I resumed my assistance in guiding the ship to the ground manually.

The reddish valley loomed before us through the windshield, the ground approaching us sickeningly fast. We’d trained for this event. Well, we’d trained for the possibility that one of the flight systems would fail. The probability of a multiple systems failure was infinitesimal. This failure of all the flight systems was just... impossible! The first manned Mars mission, and it begins with a 15000 tonne, aluminum and titanium missile sliding across the rocky surface on its belly at over 800 metres per second? The very idea would have been laughed out of a briefing room. Yet, here we were, living the ridiculous notion. The only thing we could do now was bring the nose up as high as possible to slow our descent and speed. Our greatest ally at this point was hope.

“200 metres!” The ship’s descent had slowed enough to spare us immediate death upon touchdown, but we weren’t out of the woods yet. Not by a long shot. “100 metres!”

“Here we go, partner!” Ryan looked as if he were back in Houston after riding a particularly mean rodeo bull.

“50... 30... 10...!” I braced for the impact, unsure of whether either of us would be able to walk away from it.

The windshield shattered as soon as we contacted the ground. The afterburners sheared off shortly thereafter in a deafening shriek of rending metal. Hoping to spare myself the brute force of the wind entering the cockpit, I ducked behind the instrument panel in front of me. The sound was incredible. Had it not been for the communications earplugs I was wearing, my eardrums probably would have burst.

It felt like every bone in my body was being hammered by entire corps of percussionists, and my internal organs like they were being pureed into a bloody soup. The ship was sliding across the landscape on its belly at break-neck pace, carving a miles-long ditch in its wake. I don’t know if it was a boulder or just the structural integrity finally failing, but an instant later, Ryan’s side of the cockpit was gone... and everything went black.