Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [41]
But as fate would have it, Martian stratospheric weather was stable, and they remained on the Mantra Run— which in actuality turned out to be a roaring, shuddering, breath-robbing eight minutes. No hour Maya could remember had lasted as long. Sensors showed that the main heat shield had risen to 600 degrees Kelvin—
And then the vibration stopped. The roar ended. They had skipped out of the atmosphere, after skidding around a quarter of the planet. They had decelerated by some 20,000 kilometers an hour, and the heat shield’s temperature had risen to 710 degrees Kelvin, very near its limit. But the method had worked. All was still. They floated, weightless again, held down by their chair straps. It felt as if they had stopped moving entirely, as if they were floating in pure silence.
Unsteadily they unstrapped themselves, floated like ghosts around the cool air of the rooms, an airy faint roaring sounding in their ears, emphasizing the silence. They were talking too loudly, shaking each other’s hands. Maya felt dazed, and she couldn’t understand what people were saying to her, not because she couldn’t hear them, but because she wasn’t paying attention.
• • •
Twelve weightless hours later their new course led them to a periapsis 35,000 kilometers from Mars. There they fired the main rockets for a brief thrust, increasing their speed by about a hundred kilometers an hour; after that they were pulled toward Mars again, carving an ellipse that would bring them back to within 500 kilometers of the surface. They were in Martian orbit.
Each elliptical orbit of the planet took around a day. Over the next two months, the computers would control burns that would gradually circularize their course just inside the orbit of Phobos. But the landing parties were going to descend to the surface well before that, while perigee was so close.
They moved the heat shields back to their storage positions, and went inside the bubble dome to have a look.
During perigee Mars filled most of the sky, as if they flew over it in a high jet. The depth of Valles Marineris was perceptible, the height of the four big volcanoes obvious: their broad peaks appeared over the horizon well before the surrounding countryside came into view. There were craters everywhere on the surface. Their round interiors were a vivid sandy orange, a slightly lighter color than the surrounding countryside. Dust, presumably. The short rugged curved mountain ranges were darker than the surrounding countryside, a rust color broken by black shadows. But both the light and dark colors were just a shade away from the omnipresent rusty-orangish-red, which was the color of every peak, crater, canyon, dune, and even the curved slice of the dust-filled atmosphere, visible high above the bright curve of the planet. Red Mars! It was transfixing, mesmerizing. Everyone felt it.
• • •
They spent long hours working, and at last it was real work. The ship had to be partially disassembled. The main body would be eventually parked in orbit near Phobos, and used as an emergency-return vehicle. But twenty tanks from the outer lengths of the hub shaft had only to be disconnected from the Ares and prepped to become planetary landing vehicles, which would take the colonists down in groups of five. The first lander was scheduled to descend as soon as it was decoupled and prepped, so they worked in round-the-clock shifts, spending a lot of time in EVA. They pulled in to the dining halls tired and ravenous, and conversations were loud; the ennui of the voyage seemed forgotten. One night Maya floated in the bathroom getting ready for bed, feeling