Boundary: Chapter Twenty Two

    Helen gave vent to a mild curse as she realized her hammer had slid away from her. She leaned reflexively to get it and found herself floating away, scattering sample containers and her other tools in a slow-motion catastrophe across the room. "Oh, dammit, not again!"

    The voice of Walter Myles, the microgravity operations training expert, spoke in her ear. "Sorry, Doctor Sutter, but you should be past simple mistakes like that. I'm not resetting it. You'll have to clean up and recover."

    "Yes, I know. It's just so hard to remember."

    "Well, ma'am, you have to learn somehow. Phobos has barely any gravity, around one two-thousandth that of Earth. That's enough to make things settle eventually, but from your point of view it might as well be nothing. Tidal effects are actually noticeable on that scale."

    Helen didn't answer, as she already knew the numbers. The problem wasn't on the intellectual level, but the level of instinctive reflex. She was trying to retrain a body that had spent four decades in a 1-G field to properly react in the almost total absence of gravity.

    Helen checked herself against the far wall, absorbing the impact and grabbing one of the handholds spotted about the room. Thus secured, she was able to survey the situation and decide the best method to address the scattered clutter.

    "You know, in the real situation, I'd have tools and things attached to me, right?"

    "Correct, Doctor, but you'd also be in a real microgravity situation instead of a simulation. We would prefer that you learn to do your work well enough that you won't notice, nor care, whether the tools are attached to lanyards or not."

    "Simulations are pretty damn impressive these days, though. I have to admit that I can't really tell I'm not on Phobos, except that if I concentrate I can tell up and down. But you confuse that by making 'up' be in the direction that it looks like one of the walls should be, instead of the ceiling."

    In actuality, Helen was floating in a huge water tank inside the NASA training facility. The tools and such were, relatively speaking, real; but the exact way she perceived them, and the background against which the action took place, was all being generated for her inside the watertight spacesuit she had on. The spacesuit was also attached to actuators to assist her in moving in a fashion that would feel fairly close to the way real microgravity would feel—minus, as Helen had noted, the absence of an internal method for referencing up and down. That she'd get to experience later.

    Having assessed the situation, Helen pulled a butterfly net from the wall, where it had been held by a magnetic hanger arrangement, and launched herself slowly across the room. It took several minutes, but eventually she had rounded up everything except her pen.

    "Where the hell did that get to?"

    Myles being non-helpfully silent, Helen started another slow survey of the room.

    Nothing.

    All right, she thought, let's reason this through. Which direction would it have been scattered in?

    She thought back, then looked carefully along the rather broad arc that it might have gone in.

    Nothing.

    Then she smacked herself in the head, or rather tried to. The spacesuit thunked obligingly. "A.J. would call me baka." She called up the record of her mishap and replayed it in slow-motion, watching the pen as it slowly, gracefully, somersaulted through the air.

    And slowly, gracefully, somersaulted into the megayears-old ventilation duct.

    There was only one appropriate response to that level of stupid accidental coincidence. "D'oh!" she grunted. "I suppose I am now the solar system's first interplanetary litterbug, as there's no way I'm getting that one back myself. Maybe A.J. would be able to send in a drone someday."

    "Well, not the first," Myles said, his tone amused. "Several other trainees have lost objects effectively permanently before. I will say that yours was the most elegant method for losing something on Phobos I've yet seen."

    "Thanks. I think. Give me another pen and let me start this over."

    "Certainly." The simulation shimmered out of existence, leaving a large tank with objects roughly coinciding with the Phobos control room layout set inside it. "Actually, go get yours back; it's over where the vent would be."

    "Got it." Helen retrieved the pen and prepared to start the research simulation again.

    It's amazing how you can sweat so much in a climate-controlled spacesuit, Helen mused later, as she finished toweling dry. I hope we have a lot of thought put into creature comforts for this cruise. It's going to be a hell of a trip.

    At least the second half of the practice had gone well. If she could keep it up, she'd be ready to try real microgravity soon. They'd already tested her acceleration tolerance, which had been surprisingly high—at the same level, in fact, of trained fighter pilots. Only Colonel Hathaway had scored better.

    She wasn't looking forward to weightlessness, though. A.J. had come back from his first experience looking about three shades paler. He hadn't quite lost his lunch, but apparently it had been a near thing. Still, he'd gotten over it and done his first orbital two weeks ago.

    Joe, on the other hand, apparently hadn't even blinked when he first went weightless. Hopefully, Helen would have the same reaction.

    That reminded her—Joe should be coming back from his first orbital flight soon. She checked the time. Yes, if she hurried she could be there for the landing.

    She opened a voice channel to A.J. as she dressed. "Hey, A.J.!"

    "What's up, Doc?"

    "I'm going to go see Joe land. You coming?"

    "I'm already on my way. Meet you there. Then we can all go out to eat before it's back to the salt mines."

    "Sounds good to me."

    She finished dressing, jogged down to the parking lot, and got in her car. She was careful to keep the windows rolled up as she exited. That wasn't to ward off the late autumn chill, it was to ward off reporters. Following the announcement of the discovery and the upgrading of both Nike and Ares, news crews were always hanging around the exits.

    She let the window down after she passed the news people and headed for the landing strip, a couple of hours away. Her blond hair whipped in the breeze. The air was a little chilly, but the sensation felt good after all that time in a spacesuit.

    She had a sudden vision of driving like this on Mars, the terraformed Mars that Ares envisioned. The New Mexico landscape she was driving through was even somewhat similar to that on the Red Planet. Now wouldn't that be cool? Well, not something I'll see, but maybe three generations from now.

    Eventually she pulled through the security gate, parked in the lot, and headed for the landing area. The vastness of the dry, dusty plain shimmered in the desert sun. The landing strip, a darker ruler-straight road built to a giant's scale, seemed to waver slightly. Off to the left, the control and support buildings threw sharp shadows against the hardened soil, but their somewhat illusory coolness wouldn't allow a good view of the landing. Instead, a long, open pavilion with chairs sat not far from the control area, with a large flatscreen monitor installed in its own weatherized enclosure to one side to provide alerts and alternative views of the landing.

    About thirty people were there already. As Helen got closer, she noticed that they seemed unusually quiet. Many were standing, huddling closer to the monitor instead of watching the sky..

    "What's going on?"

    "Chinook is in trouble," A.J. answered grimly.

    Chinook was the orbital craft Joe had gone up in. "Oh, no. What's wrong?"

    "Not sure yet. They were getting funny responses from the hydraulics, and then she went into re-entry blackout. We should've heard something by now, but..."

    "Jesus." Helen knew what that meant. The likelihood was that Chinook had disintegrated on its way down. Joe would have known maybe a few moments of panic, and then...

    "There she is!"

    Helen's head snapped up. High in the distance was a pinpoint of white. It moved slowly and started growing as she watched.

    "Still no communications from Chinook," one of the controllers said over the PA. "Craft is still roughly in descent path in apparently controlled glide. Not on optimal approach."

    "Mother of God," A.J. muttered, staring at something only his VRD could show him. "Chinook is on fire!"

    A moment later, A.J. tied in his enhanced feed from the multiple cameras along the glide path to the publicly visible screen that Helen and the others were watching. Instead of just a tiny dot of an approaching object, Chinook was an ominous daylight comet; a dot with a contrail of white, gray and black smoke, and tiny, grim flashes of flame-orange.

    "We have a signal!"

    A hiss of static on the PA was suddenly broken with a distorted but mostly comprehensible voice. "—trol, this is Chinook. We are in an emergency descent. Systems mal—"

    A roar of interference obscured the signal. Then: "—arginally functional. Landing gear will not deploy. Re*buzzz* foam and emergency crews. Calling on suit radio. Do you copy?"

    Helen recognized the voice as that of Major Bruce Irwin, the Chinook's pilot. His Australian accent was unmistakable.

    "Roger, Chinook, we copy. What is your fuel status, over?"

    "Tried to dump remaining fuel, no go. Still have *frrrz* percent remaining. Fire hazard definite. Suspect exterior fire."

    "Confirming exterior fire. Repeat, presence of fire visually confirmed. Can you land?"

    Major Irwin's voice held a note of dry humor. "Control, I am positive we can land. Not sure if it will be a good landing, though. Must concentrate on that part. Chinook out."

    "How the hell could he even joke about making a good landing? Obviously he won't." That came from Jackie Secord, standing on A.J.'s other side. Her hands were clenched tight to the back of the chair near her.

    "He has to," Ken Hathaway said quietly. "The oldest and clearest definition of a 'good landing' is one you can walk away from. And if he doesn't manage that with this..."

    Chinook was much more clearly visible, streaming black smoke as it wobbled in towards the landing site. It was obvious that the craft was reacting sluggishly to controls, recovering from a tilt with an aching and frightening slowness.

    "Come on, come on..." A.J. muttered. "You're almost there. Come on, almost there..."

    Chinook was shedding velocity as well as altitude—that much, at least, was as everyone wanted it. The rumbling boom of its earlier trans-sonic passage echoed faintly across the desert.

    "Chinook now three miles downrange, speed two-fifty-two and dropping—"

    "Oh, shit."

    Something had finally come loose on the nose. Debris showered up and over, black smoke streaming across the cockpit. The damage spread as though pushed by the winds, and suddenly the cockpit seemed to disintegrate. Inky smoke spewed into the air and Chinook heeled slowly over, executing a dreamlike cartwheeling pirouette in the sky before thundering down to impact on its side, ironically directly in the center of the runway. The orbiter bounced up, spinning and shedding fragments of wing and tail everywhere, and the spectators dove for cover.

    Chinook's second landfall was squarely on the tail section, and with a whooshing roar it ignited in an orange-red-black fireball. Something had sheared through the fuel cells. Now nothing but a moving holocaust, the remains of Chinook seared their way down another several hundred yards of runway before shuddering to a flaming halt. Emergency vehicles, already scrambled, skidded to a halt around the wreckage and began trying to extinguish the blaze.

    A.J.'s head was bowed, as was Jackie's. Helen tore her gaze from the blazing wreckage that had been bringing Joe Buckley home just moments before. As if she might find understanding and solace, somehow, she traced the trajectory of Chinook back along the trail of smoke.

    What was...

    "A.J.? A.J., Jackie, Look!"

    A white dot showed in the air. As they watched, the dot descended and grew.

    "Parachutes spotted," crackled from the speakers. "Visual confirmation that it is the ejection pod from Chinook."

    Helen and A.J. were already sprinting towards the likely landing area, somewhat to the right as carried by the wind. The emergency vehicles passed them, of course, and by the time they arrived the ejection pod had landed and Bruce and Joe were emerging from it.

    A.J. bulled his way through the EMTs. "Joe! Joe!"

    Joe grinned, painfully. "I tried to tell them it was a no-smoking flight, but nobody listens to me."