Combustion Read online

  Judd focuses on the HUD for a moment then surveys the deep-red surface below. ‘Thousand feet, down fifty.’ Through the low light he can see the landing point clearly for the first time.

  It’s not good. At all.

  His feeling of goodwill vanishes. This mission has been a long time coming, the culmination of a billion man-hours of concerted effort and a trillion dollars of taxpayers’ money, all to have the onboard computer direct the spacecraft to a landing point slap-bang in the middle of a crater the size of Yankee Stadium.

  It’s not a big crater by Martian standards but it’s big enough, with sides so steep a landing is impossible - Orion would simply slide down the incline as soon as it touched down. To ice the cake this crater is both filled with and surrounded by boulders which range in size from medicine ball to Cadillac Eldorado. It would only take a small rock snagging one of Orion’s four spindly landing legs to damage the ship irreparably. Then the crew, unable to leave the planet, would spend the rest of their truncated lives staring up at a distant blue speck, wishing they’d never dreamed of visiting the stars when they were children.

  ‘Not liking the look of this.’ Judd keeps his voice even, doesn’t want the words that reach Mission Control in two minutes to scare the cattle. Not that it matters. In two minutes this will be over and there’s nothing the gang in Houston can do about it. They have no control over this ship. They’re too far away.

  Judd works the hand controller, pivots the ship and takes a look at his surroundings. He needs to find somewhere else to land that’s about the size of two tennis courts side by side. There’s nowhere obvious; boulders dot the landscape. He sets Orion on a course to cross the crater.

  Judd’s more concerned than fearful. He had, for a long time, been fearful, but that passed after he saved the space shuttle Atlantis off the north coast of Australia. Of course, he isn’t flying a shuttle today so that is part of the reason, too. He hadn’t trusted the shuttle but he trusts Orion. It is a brand-new piece of equipment, specifically designed and purpose built for the task of interplanetary travel, without the Nixonian budget cuts and cobbled-together Frankenstein design that compromised the shuttle.

  The alarm trills in Judd’s ear again. Del kills the noise and pre-empts Judd’s question. ‘I’m looking for it.’

  ‘Seven-eighty, down twenty-five.’ Judd searches the landscape as Orion clears Yankee crater. There are boulders everywhere and still no place level enough to put down. He works the hand controller again, slows the rate of descent. ‘How’s fuel?’

  ‘Eleven per cent.’

  He’s used too much gas tooling around, avoiding Yankee crater then looking for a level spot. Judd doesn’t say anything but he wants to swear. Instead of dropping the f-bomb he says: ‘Okay. Four-fifty feet down sixty.’ He scans the scenery again. There must be somewhere he can land this bucket.

  ‘There.’ He sees a spot. It’s not too far away, looks wide enough, without too many rocks, and it’s level. He works the thrusters, angles Orion towards it. ‘Got an answer on that alarm?’

  ‘Still looking into it —’

  The ship shudders and the HUD projection flickers, then disappears from the portal’s glass. ‘I’ve lost Heads Up.’

  Del’s voice is panicked. ‘Guidance computer is down.’

  ‘Guess we got an answer on that alarm. Go with the back-up.’

  Del works the touchscreen in front of him, reads the news, his voice incredulous: ‘They’re both rebooting. It’ll take two minutes.’

  ‘This is over in one.’ Judd breathes out, really wanting to swear now. He knows what he must do. Without height or speed information he’s going to have to seat-of-the-pants it. ‘Going visual.’

  ‘Commander!’ Del’s stunned voice is an octave higher than usual. That one word tells Judd everything the forty-two-year-old is thinking, which is: ‘Dude! No. We abort-to-orbit. You don’t land on Mars without a guidance computer.’

  Abort-to-orbit is a last resort as far as Judd’s concerned. The guidance computers may have failed but Judd trusts this machine. All those dollars and man-hours demand that he parks this sucker safely in the Martian dust and mankind can finally say it has reached the planets. ‘How’s fuel?’

  ‘Descent quantity.’

  ‘Okay.’ It means Judd has ninety seconds to land the spacecraft - minus the twenty per cent he must save in case he needs to twist the red abort-to-orbit handle by his left hand if something unforeseen happens. He has seventy-two seconds and counting.

  Judd pushes Orion towards the only landing area that looks remotely suitable. He estimates his height at three hundred feet. ‘Give me remaining fuel time minus abort.’

  ‘Fifty-seven seconds.’

  Orion drops towards Mars. Judd scans his chosen landing spot and realises it’s nowhere near as good as it looked from a distance. It’s actually terrible and is littered with rocks. They’re not as large as the boulders surrounding Yankee crater but they’re big enough to be a problem if the metre-wide footpad at the end of one of the landing legs was to come down on one at an awkward angle. The legs have two metres of suspension play built into them but that won’t do any good if the footpad is destroyed and the spacecraft tips on its side.

  ‘Come on.’ This planet is really starting to piss him off. It’s the damn low light: it’s playing tricks on him. Because Mars is so far from the sun it’s cloaked in a dull gloom that Judd’s eyes are taking their sweet time getting accustomed to.

  ‘Thirty-eight seconds.’

  Judd drops Orion lower as he watches the LED screen beside the portal, which shows him an image of the ground directly below. The engine’s quiet whisper is the only sound, telling him to hurry up and find a spot now. He searches. Where? Where the hell is it? Where is my spot? There must be a spot.

  There isn’t one. The lower they drop the worse it looks.

  ‘Twenty-six seconds.’ Judd can hear Del’s concern. They’d never been this low on fuel in a simulation.

  ‘There!’

  He sees it. A clear, flat section of dust to the right. There are a few smaller rocks but it’s not too bad. That’s what it’s come down too: not too bad. It’ll have to do. He eases Orion towards the area, keeps his eyes on the LED screen and the landing spot that’s not too bad. He’s thirty feet from the surface.

  A large shape looms from the left. Judd glimpses it. ‘What’s that-?’

  The screen goes red and he loses sight of it as thrust from the engine hits the planet’s surface and kicks up a cloud of dust. It obscures the camera’s view of the ground, then the portal, cuts off Judd’s only reference points.

  He’s flying blind.

  ‘Twelve seconds.’ Del’s voice is thin as a reed.

  Judd plays the hand controller, holds Orion in place as his left hand lightly touches the red abort-to-orbit handle. If he turns it to the right the engine will fire at full power for eighteen seconds - and he’ll have seven months to think about his failure on the way home.

  He needs a moment to think. What was that shape? Was it a boulder he hadn’t noticed or a shadow? He didn’t see it on the way in, but this damn planet is so dark.

  Shadow or boulder?

  ‘Five seconds.’ Del sounds like he’s about to be sick.

  Boulder or shadow?

  Judd makes a decision.

  The spacecraft drops onto the planet.

  ‘Contact.’ Del’s voice wavers as he confirms the probes under the footpads have touched something.

  ‘Shutdown.’ Judd presses the engine stop button. The quiet whisper disappears and Orion settles onto Mars. He can feel the four landing legs compress under thirty tonnes of spacecraft. He awaits the sound of cracking metal, or the sensation of a tilting horizon as a landing leg snags on a boulder he’s not sure is there.

  A long moment passes.

  No one breathes.

  There’s no cracking or tilting - because there’s no boulder. It was a shadow. Orion’s shadow.

  Judd turn
s to Del with a grin. ‘Well, that was seven months of boredom followed by seventy seconds of terror.’

  Del nods, too drained to speak.

  Judd does it for him. ‘Let’s get outside.’

  *

  Orion’s hatch swings open and Judd steps out - onto the wrought-iron catwalk beside the towering High Fidelity Orion Landing Simulator (OLS) in Building Five at Johnson Space Center (JSC). It was built two years ago for NASA by Lockheed-Martin, at a cost of two hundred and sixty million dollars, and replaced both shuttle simulators.

  Until the first flight to Mars lifts off in September 2020, Judd expects to spend thousands of hours training in the OLS. And he’s more than happy to do it, as every time he flies a successful sim it increases his chances of piloting one of the five planned Mars missions. He’s the only one of the training astronauts to have successfully landed the simulator on the Martian surface more than once, including his partner, Rhonda Jacolby, who is tipped to be FOM (First On Mars). He’s sure his success in the sim is annoying the hell out of her but so far she’s done a bang-up job of not letting it show.

  Judd looks at the row of technicians who sit in the glass control room above the simulator. ‘Thanks, guys. Almost got us with that reboot.’

  One of the technicians grins down at him: ‘Yeah, well, you gotta be cruel to be kind.’

  Cruel to be kind. It’s true. There’s nothing to be gained by going easy on a pilot. Not with six lives and a trillion bucks on the line. The techs had to throw everything at them. Judd even added his own pressure as he imagined the four other crew members strapped in behind him on the flight deck, lives that will be in his hands if he makes the landing for real.

  He pulls off his helmet and runs a hand through his crew cut. He feels pretty good for thirty-nine, though recently he has needed to watch his weight, which has been both an annoying and disheartening reminder of impending middle age. He’s tall, so he can get away with a little extra around the mid-section, but still, he must stay away from the damn Krispy Kremes. They are his crack. Unfortunately he only has to look at one of those glazed donuts and he puts on five pounds.

  He clunks down the metal stairs to ground level. Del follows behind, claps him on the back. ‘That was pretty damn cool.’

  ‘Thanks, man.’

  ‘Wouldn’t expect anything else from one of the four.’ Del walks on. ‘See you at the debrief.’

  ‘Will do.’ Almost a year later and the Atlantis 4 are still a big deal. Judd, Rhonda, his Australian mate Corey Purchase and his old friend, launch director Severson Burke - the four people who saved the hijacked shuttle Atlantis and prevented the detonation of a radioactive dirty bomb in Virginia - are regarded as bona fide, genuine heroes, a title Judd feels uncomfortable with. Of course, he hasn’t told anyone he feels ‘uncomfortable’ because then he’d have to explain why, and he has no interest in doing that. Ever.

  He hasn’t even told Rhonda.

  A buzz in his pocket. He fishes out his iPhone. Speak of the Devil. Rhonda Jacolby. His beloved. She’s in Wisconsin at the moment, checking out a prospective contractor for the Orion’s launch system. He picks up. ‘Yaallow.’

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hey yourself.’

  ‘I have like fifteen seconds before I have another meeting - oh God it’s so boring it makes my mouth numb just talking about it. So, how did it go?’

  He knows she’s asking about the sim run he just completed. ‘It came and it went.’

  ‘You nailed it, didn’t you?’

  ‘Booyah!’ He’s happier about it than he realised.

  ‘Baby.’ He can hear that she’s genuinely thrilled for him.

  ‘They threw in a double guidance computer reboot during the descent phase.’

  ‘That’s not a good way to land.’

  ‘It’s not landing, it’s guessing.’

  He can hear her smile. ‘Congrats. You’re the only one to land it three times.’

  ‘Yes indeedy.’ He doesn’t want to make too much of it. He knows how disappointed she is to have made only one successful landing. ‘So, how’s it going up there?’

  ‘Errr.’ The sound is an exhausted breath released through clenched teeth.

  ‘That good?’

  ‘Omigod.’

  ‘It’ll be over soon.’

  ‘I am really looking forward to the Beverly Wilshire.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Okay, gotta jump. The meeting’s about to start.’

  There’s a pregnant pause. He waits for it. A little sugar. Just a taste.

  ‘Okay, I’ll see you in LA, biatch.’

  ‘Don’t be late, mofo.’

  They hang up.

  She didn’t say it. She went with her usual, the jokey ‘biatch’ instead of ‘love you’, and he replied in kind, with the ever reliable ‘mofo’. He thought that because she was on the other side of the country it might be different this time, but no, she didn’t say it. And he didn’t either.

  This last year their relationship has gone from strength to strength, though he would like a little more sugar. And by ‘sugar’ he’s not talking about anything related to their physical relationship, which has always been stridently expansive (words that perfectly describe it yet make no actual sense). When he went ‘lovey-dovey’ (her term), by bringing her flowers or holding her hand or expressing heartfelt sentiment, she’d either shut him down or make fun. He likes a bit of the ‘lovey-dovey’ or ‘sugar’ (his term) occasionally, but, for some reason, it just doesn’t fly with her. She is the least sentimental person he has ever met, man, woman or child, so a month ago he stopped saying ‘love you’ at the end of phone calls, or before they fall sleep, or when they leave for work. It’s not a huge deal in the scheme of the world, but he misses it.

  He will see her tomorrow when the Atlantis 4 all meet in Los Angeles to announce the Atlantis 4 movie. Yes, Twentieth Century Fox has bought the Atlantis 4’s life rights and is fast-tracking the film to be a ‘tentpole’ next summer. It starts shooting in a week so Fox wants them in town for a round of press engagements and has comped them an all-expenses-paid weekend at the Beverly Wilshire, hence her excitement at the prospect of a luxurious stay at one of the world’s great hotels.

  Judd is looking forward to seeing Corey in LA. He’s talked to the Aussie on the phone while he’s been on his eight-month ‘hitch around America’ tour, but it isn’t quite the same. Judd missed him more than he’d imagined, guesses it had something to do with having shared an experience no one else could understand.

  Judd pushes through a side door, steps into the warm afternoon and pauses as he takes in the vivid Texas sky. It’s so blue it hurts his eyes, a thin white contrail from a passenger jet its only blemish. Since the Atlantis hijacking he’s really tried to stop and smell the roses. His life is so hectic that it’s easy to miss the little things, like this perfect sky. Looking at it makes his heart sing, makes him appreciate that he’s part of a larger universe with endless possibilities just waiting to be explored.

  He glances at his Omega Ploprof. He must get cracking. The debrief starts in ten minutes, then he needs to head home, pack for the weekend, finish his report on Orion’s landing software, attempt to read the Atlantis 4 screenplay then get a good night’s sleep before arriving at the airport bright and early tomorrow morning. He must remember to reserve row 56, seat A online tonight, and pack his baseball cap, his headphones and mirror-lensed sunglasses. He’ll definitely need them for the flight west.

  *

  3

  ‘Seen but not heard. This is very important so let me be perfectly clear. Seen. But. Not. Heard. Okay?’ Corey Purchase sits behind the wheel of a convertible BMW M3 and stares at the passenger in the seat beside him. ‘Don’t give me that face. I can’t have you screwing this up. Seen but not heard. Are we clear?’

  The recipient of the lecture is not a recalcitrant child or a sulky teen, but a strikingly ugly canine named Spike. He’s a white blue heeler who looks like he’s been use
d as a canvas by a naughty toddler with a tin of navy blue paint.

  He barks.

  ‘Okay. Good.’ With a nod the lanky, thirty-one-year-old Australian turns and studies the house on the opposite side of the street. It’s bigger than he expected. Much bigger.

  Spike barks.

  ‘Yeah, only one person lives here.’

  Another bark.

  ‘I guess you could call it a McMansion.’

  And another bark.

  ‘Yes, it would have been more impressive to turn up in a chopper than a borrowed car, but unless you have a stash of money squirreled away that I’m unware of, then we don’t have the dosh to be renting aircraft for the evening, okay?’

  Money’s only half the story, though. The truth is that since the destruction of his Huey Loach helicopter (may it rest in pieces at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean), Corey has been, for the first time in his life, a bit gun-shy about flying, which he’s kept quiet from everyone, including the mutt.

  Maybe it was the sheer number of life and death situations he’d been through in Central Australia with Judd in that Loach, but Corey is more than happy not to be airborne at the moment. It’s one of the reasons he spent the better part of the last year hitchhiking around America. The trip had been excellent and they’d seen a lot of the States - and he hadn’t needed to fly once.

  The journey had been a success in a different, unexpected way too. At one point or another it had been covered by every major media outlet and blogger, his trip plastered all over the Tweeter and the Facebooks or whatever they were called. That a bona fide hero, a member of the Atlantis 4 no less, a man who had helped save tens of thousands of lives, had taken the time to see the real America in such a low-key way greatly endeared him to the general public. He’d stumbled upon a phenomenon that occurred to a select number of Australian men who had ventured stateside over the years. Whether it was Errol Flynn, Paul Hogan, Steve Irwin, Hugh Jackman or Keith Urban, Americans occasionally liked to add a laconic, rough-and-tumble, hail-fellow-well-met Aussie bloke to their cultural mix - and now Corey Purchase is one of them.