Voyage. Stephen Baxter
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as if Ares was heading for a wall of vapor. On the land she could easily make out cities – a gray, angular patchwork – and the lines of major roads. The orange-brown of deserts was vivid, but the jungles and temperate zones were harder to spot; their color did not penetrate the atmosphere so well, and they showed up as a gray-blue, with the barest hint of green.
She found the lack of green disappointing.
She saw the wake of a ship, feathering out like a brush stroke on the sea’s calm surface.
Gershon, in his center seat, leaned toward her. ‘Quite a view, huh.’
She turned her head – and quickly regretted it; her head felt like a tank of fluid, sloshing when she moved. She held her head steady for a few seconds, and let the sloshing settle down again. Resolutely, she tried not to think about her stomach.
Space adaptation syndrome. She understood what was happening to her. Without gravity, little particles of calcium on sensitive hairs in the inner ear took up random positions, and the body couldn’t work out which way was up. It generally went away after a few days.
But right now it was a huge embarrassment to York.
More carefully, she turned back to the window. They were passing over storm clouds now, thunderheads which piled up on top of each other as if solid, cliffs and ravines of cloud miles deep. She could see lightning, sparking in the clouds like living things, propagating across storm systems thousands of miles across. The clouds, illuminated from within, glowed purple-pink, like neon sculptures. ‘Look at that. It looks as if the thunderheads are reaching up toward us.’
‘Only about a tenth of the way,’ Gershon said mildly.
‘Pressure’s okay,’ Stone said now. He began to take off his gloves and helmet.
York unlatched her gloves and pulled them off, and shoved them into a pocket on her couch. She grasped the sides of her helmet, which came loose with a click; she pushed it up over her head.
She moved too quickly. Suddenly her head was full of sloshing fluid again, and saliva flooded her mouth.
Her helmet, rolling loose, clattered against a bank of switches. Gershon grabbed it easily, laughing. ‘Interception!’ In his pressure suit he looked small, compact, comfortable. He threw the helmet up in the air again with a twist; the helmet revolved, oscillating about two spin axes.
York felt embarrassed, clumsy. And, watching the helmet, suddenly she was retching.
‘Oh, man,’ Stone said in disgust. He handed her a plastic bag, and York fumbled it open, and pushed her face into it.
As she heaved, a greenish sphere, about the size of a tennis ball, came floating up out of the bag. It was shimmering, and complex pulsations crossed its surface.
York watched in awe. Maybe I ought to film this. It was a demonstration of fluid mechanics in the absence of gravity; she wondered if the wave patterns, dominated by surface tension, could be predicted by computer.
Now the glob of vomit split in two. One half headed toward the wall, and the other made straight for Gershon.
‘Ah, shit,’ Gershon said, and he tried to squirm out of the way.
The glob hit him in the chest, with a soft impact; it immediately collapsed and spread out over his suit, as flat as a fried egg. Surface tension again, York thought absently.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ Gershon said. ‘Oh, shit.’
Stone reached for wet wipes, and passed some to Gershon. ‘Come on, man. It might have been any of us. We got to get this place cleaned up.’
So they began chasing around the cabin, hunting down bits of vomit with paper towels and plastic bags.
Now that her stomach awareness had receded a little, York found, oddly, that it wasn’t actually so unpleasant. It was a little like chasing butterflies.
‘NC One phasing burn,’ Stone said. He held down the thrust control, watching his instruments.
The burn felt tight and rattly to York. She was shoved into her couch again; the acceleration was low, but crisp.
Through her window she could see vapor venting from attitude control thruster nozzles; the vents looked like fountains of ice crystals, the particles receding from the walls of the craft in precise straight lines.
The burn was taking place over the night side of Earth. The planet pulled away; it was as if she was rising above a floor of dark, frosted glass. The continents were outlined by chains of brilliant dots, like streetlights seen from the air. But those dots weren’t streetlights; they were towns.
She twisted in her seat and looked ahead, toward the limb of the planet.
She could see the airglow layer, the bright layer of ionized oxygen at the top of the atmosphere, a fine line that was like a false sunrise. And then, as she watched, a sliver of sky turned blue and spread along the horizon. More colors came up, coalescing around a bright patch that was the rising sun, a spectrum that washed around the curve of Earth. The light of the dawn reached her through the layer of atmosphere; for a brief moment she saw the shadows of the clouds streaming across the orange surface of the sea.
Then the sun rose high enough to illuminate the tops of the clouds. The sea turned to crimson, and a wash of pale blue and white spread from the horizon toward her.
On a whim, she dug into a pocket of her pressure garment, and pulled out the handful of grass which Vladimir Viktorenko had given her. She held it in her palm and rubbed it gently; it gave off a sweet aroma, like a herb. It was polin, a kind of wormwood, common all over the Kazakhstan steppe.
Stone finished the burn. His push-button control, released, popped back out of the panel on its spring. ‘Two hundred seven feet per second,’ he said.
‘Right on the wire,’ Gershon murmured. ‘One hundred ninety-five times two hundred zero one.’
Young called up, ‘Copy your burn, Ares. You are two hundred fifty miles from the stack, and closing.’
‘Copy, John. Preparing for NC Two …’
The crew had arrived in orbit with half the Ares cluster: their Apollo Command and Service Modules, the Mars Excursion Module – the MEM – and the Mission Module, their habitat for the journey. The rest of the cluster – the main injection booster and its huge fuel tanks – had already been placed in orbit and assembled, ready for them to dock with it.
The Mission Module was a squat cylinder, with the Apollo a slim, silvery cylinder-cone attached to its front, and the MEM – a fatter, truncated cone – stuck on the back. Fixed to the base of the MEM’s shroud was an Orbital Maneuvering Module, a fat doughnut fitted with a modified Apollo Service Module propulsion system. The OMM would be discarded before they docked with the booster cluster. But first Stone had to use the OMM in a series of four burns, to chase the booster cluster around the sky.
Stone announced: ‘Ready for NCC.’
‘Copy,’ Young said. ‘Ninety miles and closing.’
The corrective burn was crisp and short, a brief hiss.
Stone murmured, ‘Natalie, you ought to be able to see the booster by now. Right out front.’
York pressed her face to the window. The brief burns were placing Ares on segments of successively wider orbits; following the new orbits, Ares would eventually overtake the booster stack.
The craft was noticeably higher than when they had first been injected into orbit; the curvature of the Earth was much more pronounced, and she was able to see complete landmasses, speckled with cloud.
Suddenly it was there: a pencil, gleaming silver, hanging over the dipping horizon.
‘I have it.’
‘That’s a relief,’ said Stone dryly. ‘Okay,