expected.”
“Time to intercept?” Lewis asked.
“32 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 great red planet’s horizon stretched out seemingly forever as the wispy atmosphere gave it a fuzzy edge. Only 18 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.”
“42 meters per second.”
“Well shit.”
“Hey, at least he’s ok 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 25 meters per second. Even if I could get to 42, I’d need
“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 42 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.
“Standby,” 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 in to space-”
“Not the whole idea, but part of it,” she said. “Using atmosphere as thrust. Martinez, get Vogel’s station up and running.”
“Ok,” Martinez said, typing at his keyboard. The screen changed to Vogel’s workstation. He 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 in to 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 to go.”
“Ok I have the numbers,” Martinez said. “A breach at the VAL, with the bridge and reactor room sealed off, would accelerate us 29 meters per second.”
“We’d have a relative velocity of 13 meters per second afterward,” Johanssen supplied.
“Beck,” Lewis radioed, “Have you been hearing all this?”
“Affirmative, Commander,” Beck said. “
“Can you do 13 meters per second?”
“It’ll be risky,” Beck replied, “13 to match the MAV then another 13 to match Hermes. But it’s a hell of a lot better than 42.”
“Johanssen,” Lewis said. “time to intercept?”
“18 minutes, Commander.”
“What kind of jolt will we feel with that breach?” Lewis asked to Martinez.
“The air will take 4 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!?” He yelled.
“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
“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?”
