Before the Chinese began their terraforming operation, the thin carbon dioxide atmosphere came in at one percent the thickness of Earth’s. These days it was closer to three percent—it would take another five hundred years before the Chinese brought it to levels on par with her homeworld.
And while three percent might still seem insubstantial compared to Earth, reentry friction still posed a significant problem. Rhea remembered asking Targon about it.
“Is a shuttle going to pick us up and bring us to the surface?” she inquired.
“Nope, me girl,” Targon said. “I’ve had the underside of me Molly Dook sprayed with PICA just for this trip.”
She frowned. “PICA?”
“Phenolic-Impregnated Carbon Ablator,” he replied. “It’s a heat shield. Had it done in Earth orbit.”
“And how thick is this spray-on coating?” she asked.
“Oh, a few millimeters,” he replied.
“That doesn’t sound very reassuring,” she told him.
He shrugged inside his suit. “It’s all we’ll be needing. Now if we were landing on Earth, of course, that’s a different story. No coating would save me ship from a descent into her hellishly thick atmosphere.”
Rhea still wasn’t entirely convinced. “Well, if you’re sure…”
“Trust me, I wouldn’t take me ship into the Martian atmosphere if I didn’t think it was safe,” he said. “I’ve used the coating a thousand times. Saves me the trouble of finding a shuttle. PICA in combination with a little strategic deceleration is all we’ll need to survive reentry. The shield will be burned away, of course, thanks to ablation… I’ll have to acquire a new coating when I return to pick you up. I consider it the cost of doing business with the red planet.”
Targon angled the nose of the vessel upward, and the Molly Dook began reentry. The camera feed became tinted orange, courtesy of the super-heated plasma that formed around the vessel.
She felt the slightest shift in G forces and knew Targon was activating reverse thrust to slow down. The inertial dampers would prevent her from feeling anything worse. In fact, while the dampers were operational, she rarely felt any forces at all.
On the camera feed, she saw bright sparks appearing in the orange plasma. They traveled upward, quickly vanishing from view.
“What are those sparks?” she asked over the comm.
“Sparks?” Targon asked.
“In the plasma,” she clarified.
“Oh, those… pieces of the heat shield burning away,” he explained cheerily.
She and the others all wore their suit rentals, mostly out of a concern for safety rather than to satisfy any protocol: she was scared to death of a hull breach during reentry. Her recent flashback of a doomed Ganymedean vessel plunging into the Earth’s atmosphere didn’t help matters…
And then the orange tint receded and the Molly Dook was through. She was relieved that the transport hadn’t burned up along with its heat shield.
Soon the geodesic dome of Hongton became visible on the surface ahead, and she adjusted the zoom level of the camera to get a better view. The panes were translucent, like the old Ganymede domes, because the magnetic dipole filtered most of the harmful radiation. The specialized glass, a patented composite of polycarbonate and BNNTS, deflected the remaining radiation, including cosmic rays. The Chinese had supposedly invented that glass, but she suspected they had stolen it from the Ganymedeans.
She could see skyscrapers inside and was reminded of a typical Earth city. Drones roved to and fro like a cloud of insects in the air above them.
But then the camera feed shut off.
“All right, it’s time for ye to get into your hidey-holes,” Targon transmitted.
According to the merchant, from time to time ships were chosen for a random search. If that happened to their vessel, they didn’t want to be caught lounging about the cargo hold.
Rhea and the others left the cargo bay and once more hid inside the deck alcoves in the hallway beyond. They remained inside their suits.
Targon replaced the floor panels, plunging each of them into darkness. “Comm nodes off.”
Rhea disabled her comm node. She had folded her knees against her chest, and now she hugged her arms around them as she waited for the landing. Gravity had returned a while ago, and she was firmly glued to the bottom of the alcove. The suit didn’t feel too heavy.
Before securing the gloves, she’d retrieved the Ban’Shar from the storage compartments in her thighs; they sat firmly around her knuckles, ready to be deployed if the situation warranted. The feel of the metal bands pressing against her palms was comforting.
In a few minutes she felt a deep vibration: the ship had touched down in a hangar bay inside the dome. That hangar would be pressurizing at this very moment.
She waited, and after several minutes she heard the clangs as Targon walked past overhead—clangs that were retransmitted by the internal speakers in her helmet. Another vibration came—no doubt the hatch opening, and the ramp deploying. More muted clangs reached her ears but receded as Targon evidently left the ship.
She felt a final vibration. That could only be the cargo bay doors opening. The freight would be removed by large, robotic arms. She heard muted thuds for the next ten minutes as that cargo was unloaded, and then nothing.
The team members had agreed to reactivate their comm nodes five minutes after it sounded like the cargo had been completely unloaded.
She waited the prerequisite five minutes, and then turned on her comm node. “Targon, is the coast clear?”
The merchant didn’t answer.
“He’s long gone,” Will said.
“He left without saying goodbye?” Rhea asked. “That’s odd. I expected he’d want to give us a proper send-off, you know, gloating about how good he is at Robot Wars and all.”
“I suspect he had good reason to leave,” Horatio said. “Likely lingering in the hangar bay would have aroused suspicion.”
“You’re probably right. But who’s going to get us out of these—” She shoved against the panel above her and
