Fifty meters, forty, thirty . . . At an altitude of two meters, the rockets cut off, and the lander settled gently to the ground.
Tension vanished into elation as A.J. once more nearly leaped from his seat. "Yes! Distance from Thoat is now . . . eighty-seven point two meters."
Bruce was practically chortling. "That's great! We can hook the winch cable right to Pirate and draw ourselves alongside."
"And," Madeline added, just as gleefully, "Joe and I have figured out a working coupler for our two hose systems. The fuel will be flowing in minutes, after we get these two together."
"Then let's not waste any more time," Helen said, getting up. "I'm going out to get that winch cable strung."
"Coming with you!" A.J. was up now, also.
"Most of us are coming," Madeline said. "If you remember the pain it was stringing the cable the last time . . ."
"Oh, yeah. I guess we leave Joe and Bruce."
"Living in the lap of luxury as we are, mates. See you whenever you slaves are done."
With four of them working to drag the cable and fasten it to Pirate, the job didn't take very long. The winch, despite some worries, did not fail on the way, and Madeline and Joe's coupling scheme worked.
So, a few hours after Pirate had made its extremely short flight, Bruce leaned back and grinned at Joe sitting next to him. "Thoat's right happy now. Fuel's coming in and it ain't gonna stop until she's full up."
The engineer didn't answer, as he was busy with further designs and computations.
"What's up, Joe?"
"Figuring out how we can separate one of the fuel tanks from Pirate and store it on or in Thoat somehow. It'd be silly to try to refuel by driving back out here, and I don't know whether Pirate will survive a longer hop. So if we can drag some extra fuel along somehow . . ."
"Makes sense. Certainly worth looking into while we wait."
By the time the Thoat was refueled, Joe was satisfied. "Okay, it's going to be uncomfortable on the ride over to Target 37, but if we clear most of the equipment out of the cargo bay we can put one of the fuel tanks in there. We'll have to live with a lot of clutter for the next couple of days, I'm afraid."
"That's way better than leaving fuel a hundred kilometers behind us," Helen stated. "We'll do it. Good work, everyone."
She leaned back in her seat, feeling the tension draining out of her. "Well, whaddaya know? It looks like we might actually survive long enough to—"
"Don't say it, Helen! Don't say it!"
Chapter 45
Gupta shook his head. "Too risky, Jackie, too risky by far. We have no opportunity for second attempts in this." He continued to study the design, but he was clearly more worried now than he had been when they first confronted the challenge. A workable solution was proving more difficult to find than he'd expected.
Jackie was just as discouraged. The problem wasn't getting something to deorbit. Gupta's original idea was sound enough, in that respect. They could unship one of the ion drives on the habitat ring and use its small but steady thrust to drop just about anything out of orbit in a few days.
The problem was the actual reentry—more precisely, surviving the impact with the ground. Parachutes were just not all that useful. They'd provide some deceleration, of course, but not nearly enough. The thickness of the Martian atmosphere was less than two percent that of Earth's.
True, most of what they intended to drop wasn't particularly sensitive to shock. But there was still a difference between an impact at twenty kilometers per hour and one at four hundred KPH. A critical difference, generally known as "crash and burn."
"What about reentry itself? How's the design there?"
Gupta's dark eyes brightened. "There we are in excellent shape. The simulations show that we have sufficient materials to make some quite large aeroshells, especially if we sacrifice some of the aerogel insulation to this important project."
"That's no problem," Jackie said, nodding. "Take it from the right places and we'll hardly notice. When you say 'quite large,' are you sure . . ."
"Very sure."
"Okay, just checking. I mean, we're not dropping a little rover onto the surface. We need to send them stuff measured in tons."
"I am aware that I am old and perhaps appear decrepit in your eyes, Ms. Secord, but I do not forget such simple points." Gupta's words were grave, but there was a spark of humor in his eyes.
Jackie smiled. "You're not all that old, Satya. And don't forget that young little me with the still-perfect neurons is the one who forgot the difference between white pipes and yellow pipes."