Martian Valkyrie

one problem.

But once back in Mars orbit, we would have face the fact that we had, essentially, two and a half UN crews and two UN ships, one stuck out in an unuseful orbit almost out of maneuvering fuel. While Dr. Karinsdatter was seeing to my crew, I spoke to Per.

“My plan had been to take the lander back to the Zhang-Diaz and transship propellant from our supply depot. But that lander will not fly again. Can the Amundsen ferry fuel?”

“Nei. To go out to Deimos, circularize, then go back towing a large mass so we cannot aerobrake, and then burn back to Earth? We do not have enough fuel for that. The Zhang-Diaz has its nuclear engine; why not use that?”

“The design is for only two more restarts, maybe three in a crunch. It’s a thermal cycling limit—after six or seven cycles the inner frit starts to crack. It was a trade that let them make the engines lighter and more powerful— they only needed four burns. So a main orbit transfer maneuver would need two more restarts which would likely lead to an engine failure during the Earth arrival maneuver.”

“Ja.” Per smiled at me, this man whose only passion seemed to be this kind of technical problem, and that passion a mild one. “But you still have the reactor on the Leonov, powerful enough, I think, to get you all back. And you have the fuel and crew modules on the Zhang-Diaz. So, how do we now put all these pieces together?”

We spent the day with computers, drawing screens, and styli, and came up with a plan to send to Halvorsen. We left it with the Norwegian’s computer to send, then turned in.

Halvorsen then called me in the middle of the Martian night on one of the spare comm units the Norwegians had given me. The man could do a clinic on revenge, I think. I got some minor satisfaction by getting Per up to hear it, too.

“OK,” he began once I was coherent. “Your Zhang-Diaz uses its main engines to push itself and the Leonov to almost rendezvous with the supply cache, then separates the reactor module. Then you complete the docking with chemical rockets. You fuel both ships, then you depart using the Leonov’s nuclear engine. Over.”

Per joined me, as blurry-eyed as I. The inside of the dome was warm with bodies, overloading the Norwegian’s small recycler—I smelled not only my own body but everyone else’s.

We were all down to shorts.

“Si.” I told Halvorsen. “Its engine can get both spacecraft to Earth if it can use the fuel left in the Zhang-Diaz as well as its own.” This much Per and I had discussed.

“But, Dr. Halvorsen, to make this work, the fuel remaining in the Zhang-Diaz has to be pumped into the Leonov and we can’t pump under zero gravity. We must use the reaction control thrusters, or the weak gravity of Deimos to settle the propellant first. Once under thrust, the pumps work. But now we don’t have enough reaction control fuel to sustain that much pumping time. Over.” Minutes passed as I regretted using up my extra margin in the vain effort to get to Mars first.

Finally, Halvorsen’s answer arrived: Ja. Your technicians said that was the only way to pump fuel. But then they said it can’t be done under main engine thrust because of where the thrust vector would have to be with the ships tied together. You have to gimbal the Leonov’s engine hard right, to put the thrust line through the center of mass, but the pump will shut down if the gimbal is more than five degrees, no? A safety measure.”

I remember those cold blue eyes staring at me from the screen.

“Uflaks. So you have to think harder. I think you know now well enough to look beyond what things were designed to do to see what they can do. And I think you know now well enough to learn from others, without it hurting your manhood. We are all tied together now, nei? It would be most helpful for you to solve this problem yourself for your self-respect and that of your crew Their morale is tied to yours. So now you think and you think hard. Tomorrow, you tell me what you think. Halvorsen out.”

“Uf. I think better morning,” Per said, “good nights.”

Learn from others, Halvorsen said. Tied together. Think hard. I inflated my mattress, removed everything but my shorts, and crawled into my bag without remembering that I had done so.

I thought. The Norwegians used tethers to give themselves gravity during the mission coast phase. Fuel transfer required acceleration—which was not necessarily thrust. Our ships were not built for rotating around each other on tethers. Where would one attach them? Impossible.

I did what I have done since a child to clear my mind. I prayed. Lord deliver me. Some call it a retreat to a fantasy world, a land of childhood Faith in tooth fairies and Easter bunnies. If so, why is it still so strong in me, as other illusions have dropped away? That I do not know. But I do know the absence from here and now settles my mind.

An image came to my mind almost unbidden. I remembered watching the ships being hoisted up to their stations on top of the heavy lift vehicle. There were hard points in the noses where one could attach cables. Tethers. Just a little rotation would do for the fuel transfer, and, I thought, the system might be strong enough to give my crew some artificial gravity on the way back. I rolled out of the sack and headed for the terminals on the other side of the dome.

I found Ingrid still working, under red night-vision lighting, packing samples for the morning’s departure at a flimsy looking bench opposite their tent. She wore shorts and a thin, dusty T-shirt. Not really understanding what was happening to me, I explained my idea with a breathlessness that had little to do with the mental effort.

“Not so difficult.” She smiled. “We have spare tethers and hosing which we no longer need here.”

The smile did it. She was lean, smooth, intense, glowing with health. She put a hand lightly on my arm. “Are you all right? You have been under much strain, I think.”

God help me, I just put my arms around her, my head on her shoulder, and moaned. If I had done that at NASA, I would have been reported. But she made no objection. After a minute, she gave a slight low laugh, returned my hug, and rocked me back and forth like a child. Urgency overcame me. My hands found their way down her back and beneath the elastic of her shorts.

“Are you trying to seduce me?” She asked, in a voice that neither invited nor condemned, but seemed more in the tone of curiosity.

My men were wrapped in emergency blankets sleeping on the other side of the dome. Per was asleep in the tent. She could have yelled and destroyed me, humiliating me even beyond anything that had happened so far, I was that far out of line—and I could not help myself, not even for a moment.

But instead of acting offended, she stroked me gently, “I do not mind.” she murmured. “Per is sometimes too polite.” She knelt to the floor and I followed. Her kisses were light and motherly at first, then more and more passionate. And so we two responsible adults made love, then and there, as if we were teenagers in the back seat of a car.

All through it, she smiled at me as if I were a child she was indulging with a minor treat. And when it was over, I turned my head so that she would not see my tears. But she pressed my head to herself and held me again, as a mother would a child.

“This is nothing wrong,” she murmured as my sobs turned into deep breaths. “We both needed it, so do not hate yourself for it. But now we must work on getting people back to Earth, yes?”

Six sleepless hours of calls to Mission Control later, our engineers had conceded that the remaining crews could have some gravity on the way back—with the Leonov and the Zbang- Diaz tethered nose to nose. Fortunately, the UN ships were launched as fuel tanks with their interiors fitted afterwards—they could be rearranged for spin gravity from inside and that would give their crews something to do. The thermal control people griped, the communications people griped, the propulsion people smiled.

And the numbers worked out, just. We would have to put everyone on the Leonov before the final Earth orbit capture burn, and discard the Zhang- Diaz, but my ship would have served its purpose as lifeboat and fuel tank by that time.

But the Amundsen and Fram were designed to go directly to Earth, on a faster trajectory. The easiest thing to do was to not try for a rendezvous, but rather for those