Chapter 8 - The Plan

Author’s Note - In this chapter we have three different versions of hero:

Anna is intrepid, stalwart, and highly competent. She has a moral compass that she follows and she is willing to give everything to follow that compass.

Jack is loyal to his cause to the end, and will to do anything to complete his mission.

Nestor is the unwitting hero, capable of rising to whatever the occasion might be, but hesitant and inexperienced.

Our three heroes do not see each other as such.

They arrived at the spaceport in the predawn dark, two groups in as many rovers, and easily cleared security using Anna’s credentials. Past the gate, they descended to the level below the surface, trying very much to embody the picture of innocence as they headed to the tiny hangar on the outskirts. Anna opened the pedestrian doors to the hangar and walked in to activate the overhead lights. As they came on, they could see that the single-ship building sat empty but for a meter-tall crate pushed against the far wall, next to the massive rolling ship-entry doors.

Nils gestured toward the crate, “That it?” he asked in Chrysean, looking at Linh. Linh seemed not to hear him, but Andres answered for her, “Yes, four hundred kilotons. We delivered it yesterday. With some help from Young Nestor there.”

Linh ignored the conversation, and instead looked at Anna, “I thought he was supposed to be here already. Where is your man?”

“He’s on his way. You don’t always get the de-orbit window you’d like, you know? Once he touches down on the pad and ground control gives him his final taxiing instructions, he’ll let me know on this com,” Anna held up the small square comsbox, showing it to Linh, “and by the way, you already knew that was the plan.” She smiled, but it only seemed to be with her lips, as her eyes and Linh’s were locked in some other unspoken ferocious battle.

Linh sighed with a certain amount of impatience and glared back at Anna. Nils stepped between them, his face all business, “How about you take us through the plan once he does get here, Anna? I think your copilot should hear it, if nothing else.”

Anna flicked her eyes to Nils, and then briefly back to Linh, her face contorting into a frown, “Well, for the record, and for what feels like the hundredth time, I neither need nor want a copilot. No offense, kid. Especially one who doesn’t know how to fly…”

“But I do know how to fly,” Nestor said in his halting Chrysean, trying to summon some outrage into his voice, “I’m just not…”

“You’re just not a pilot yet. You can’t solo a craft, you’re not a pilot. It’s just that simple kid.”

“But I have…”

Linh spoke loudly, her voice cold with authority and her gaze moving from person to person, “Stop it. The recruit goes because I wish for him to go. He has demonstrated his usefulness in other matters, which engenders my trust. And does so in a way that questioning my decisions does not. Perhaps allowing him some further experience will help us know how serious he is about creating a New Mars,” her eyes settled on Nestor, slight movements analyzing him. It felt like they were boring into him. They flicked back to Anna, “Or maybe not. Who knows. It does not matter. Nils has an excellent idea, as usual,” she nodded graciously to Nils, smiling warmly, “We should not waste our time, waiting for your friend, arguing. So let’s review the plan. We have nothing else to do.”

Anna passingly glared at Linh, then seemed to fade into calm professionalism. She addressed Nestor directly in Chrysean, speaking very slowly with eyes that didn’t seem to see him, “The plan, once our shuttle arrives, is to load the item from that crate over there, which is a four-hundred-kiloton nuclear bomb, into that ship. Then yourself,” she still didn’t appear to be seeing Nestor, though she was looking directly at him, “Jack, and I will launch from this spaceport into orbit. We will attain an orbit of one thousand kilometers, on a polar orbital inclination. We will then orbit to the appropriate location, close-to-but-not-directly-over the Great Seed Bank, where we will burn retrograde until our surface velocity drops to zero. At this point, I will align the ship with our new terminal descent. I’m sure, since you’re a pilot, you’ll know that that means ‘straight at the ground’. We will then burn full throttle for one minute. I will then angle the ship opposite our descent. Sorry - ‘straight at the sky’. We will release the bomb from the rear hatch, and I will then burn for ten seconds to clear it. At that point, I will recircularize our orbit, change our inclination to an equatorial orbit, and we’ll come home. The bomb will fall, unguided, at several-kilometers-per-second onto the Seed Banks, triggering only after its full impact. The force of that impact, combined with the subsequent explosion from the bomb itself, will obliterate the entire structure, as well as everything nearby.”

She looked away from Nestor, shifting her stare to focus upon Linh with unbridled insolence. Andres raised his left hand, fist in the air, “And with the Seed Banks destroyed, we will release Mars from the expectations of terraformation. We can create a new world that will be fully unshackled from the old!” They all raised their left hands with him. Nestor looked around the impromptu circle, his eyes coming to rest on Anna, who was blank-faced as she repeated “For the New World!” with the rest of the group.

Linh seemed to lose interest at this point and walked off at some other task on her handheld tablet. This seemed to be a signal dismissing the rest of the group. Andres and Nils walked off together, chatting about a ball game, and Jack wandered over toward the bomb, as if he were entranced. Nestor moved to take a step towards Anna, but she turned her back to him, looked down at her own handheld, and walked away. Nestor stood for a moment staring at her back, and then turned and followed Jack towards the bomb.

By the time he got there, Jack had already opened a side of the crate, and was kneeling to gaze into the box with an expression of awe. Nestor knelt to investigate with him for a moment, but could make little sense of what was there. Inside the box was a sort of metal tube encompassed in a series of exceptionally thick, slightly rounded plates, with caps on the front and back, the whole thing perhaps a meter in diameter. It sat in a circular external frame fastened to the walls of the box at its vertices. To Nestor, there didn’t appear to be anything else of interest inside the box, but Jack was reaching in to root out wires and trace them back to mysterious sources. Nestor stood back up and listlessly looked around the hangar. Andres had broken off from Nils and was walking over to them, and seeing Nestor staring at him from a couple meters away, he said, “Hell of a lot of work to get that. Especially getting it to this space port. Glad we were able to pull it off.”

Jack looked back over his shoulder at Andres, “Thanks to Nestor, we pulled it off.”

Andres smiled broadly, his whole face lighting up, the first time Nestor could recall seeing such a thing, “Thanks to Young Nestor.”

Jack frowned at the crate and reached out to pry the other sides off, exposing the bomb underneath.

From the center of the room, Anna yelled, “He’s landed on Pad Three and is taxiing right now. Let’s get those doors open. He’ll be here in a minute.” Nils jogged to the panel and hit the big circular button in the center with the palm of his hand, and the doors slid open, their weight in motion causing the ground to tremble. As they came open, several spotlights high in the rafters of the hanger came on to illuminate the threshold in the otherwise dark tunnel. It was only another moment before the ship appeared, being pulled along by a small robotic tractor hitched to the front wheel, a yellow strobe light flashing atop the little bot. The tractor backed the ship into the hangar and left unceremoniously, the small light ceasing its strobing as it pulled away.

Nils closed the doors behind the tractor, and as they clanged shut, the rear hatch of the ship opened with a hum. The shuttle was shaped like a slightly-rounded-at-the-edges brick, with the clamshell hatch at the rear and the cockpit windows at the front serving as the only visual identifiers of fore and aft on the entire thing. The top was clad with curved indigo solar panels, and the bottom with square black ceramic heat-shielding tiles, which all were graying and curled up at the edges. At the exact center of the brick, triangular support struts extended out to either side, holding at their apexes a massive engine apiece. The engines sat on swivels and were presently facing the ground, positioned for takeoffs and landings. A pair of heavy fuel tubes extended from the center of the swivel back to the ship’s sides, disappearing within. The ship rested on wheeled tripod landing gear.

“I still think it was a mistake to get such an antique,” Jack said to Anna, walking over.

She half-smiled in reply to Jack, but before she could further enumerate, a man emerged from the hatch at the back of the ship, saying in her stead, “She’s old, but she’s sturdy. Been serving orbital shuttle duty at the Hellas scrapyards for longer’n any of us has been alive.”

“Antique is good,” Linh said, appearing at Nestor’s side. “Antique might as well be invisible.”

The man from the ship looked at Linh as she spoke and then scanned the rest of the group before coming to rest on Anna. He walked over to her, addressing Linh as he walked, “She’ll be invisible enough, if that’s what you’re looking for. The solar and the heat tiles are both very low albedo, especially after all the hours she’s spent doing orbital runs. Ain’t no shine left on either, heh. Though anyone with a radar’s going to see these engine struts from a million miles away.”

Linh watched him carefully as he spoke. When he finished, she shook her head, looking back down at her handheld, “Yes, good. Anna, please pay your friend so he can be on his way.”

Anna handed a bag to the man. “Thanks Timothy. As far as I’m concerned, we’re even now,” she said with a warm smile.

Timothy smiled back at her as he took the bag. He looked at it for a moment, holding it closed before him, and then he looked back up to Anna and said, “I’m going to trust that it’s all here, Anna,” his eyes flicked dubiously over the rest of the group, “You all have a good one.” He turned, shouldering the bag, and left quickly through the side door.

The group watched him leave in silence, but as soon as the door closed, Anna and Linh shared a pointed look, and Jack said, “Ok, c’mon Andres, Nils, let’s go get this thing loaded.”

They walked over to the bomb, Jack grabbing the handle for the dolly, and Andres and Nils grabbing a back sweep of the external frame apiece. As they wheeled the bomb over, Anna looked at Nestor, “Come along, copilot,” she said this last word witheringly, “let’s get a request sent over to the control tower for refueling and departure.”

She walked up the ramp into the back of the ship with Nestor at her heels. The interior of the ship was low, so short that Anna, who was at least ten centimeters shorter than he was, needed to stoop. Nestor felt less like he was stooping and more like he was crawling as they passed through the tiny cargo area. The cockpit was small as well, with only enough room between the two seats for one person at a time. Nestor waited while Anna took the left seat and then slid into the seat on the right. The ship had been powered down and Anna began methodically flipping switches, turning systems on, screens and lights and unidentified hums all coming to life as she worked.

“You do know how to submit a tower request, don’t you?” she said, looking at Nestor expectantly.

“Yes, of course I know how to do that,” he lied, reaching out to the touchscreen in the center of the cockpit. He started randomly pushing buttons, hoping to luck onto the prompt for ground requests. Anna watched him for several button presses, then sighed and smacked his hand away, pushing the button on the lower left rapidly three times. GROUND REQUESTS appeared on the screen, with a series of different options displayed below. She glared at Nestor for a moment, shook her head, and then turned back to her preflight tasks. He selected the FUEL & TAXI option, and the screen switched over to show ‘REQUEST RECEIVED. FUEL TUG INBOUND–97s’. The number at the end began counting down the remaining seconds.

The dolly with the crate on it rattled up the ramp behind them, coming to a stop in the cargo area. Nestor leaned out and looked back at the men strapping the crate down, “Hey…uh…we have a fuel tractor on the way. Can one of you open the doors again?”

Nestor glanced at Anna after he spoke, and she glared back at him. Nils volunteered and jogged lightly back down the ramp and over to push the hanger door button. Seconds later, the fuel tractor backed through the open hangar doors, the hitch bar pivoting down as it backed, and locked onto the front wheel with a thump. It was larger than the former tractor, with two fueling arms held aloft on either side, attached to tubes that ran back to a substantial circular tank on top. The whole thing was capped with another flashing yellow light. Nestor couldn’t help but see it as a fat man with wheels for legs, lengthy arms, and a diminutive flashing head.

“Well,” Anna said, glaring at him again. He stared at her blankly and she sighed in response, “Look, are you going to attach the fuel arm, or what? The bot doesn’t know where our fuel slot is…”

“Right, yes. Sorry, just a lot happening,” he said, standing up from his seat and squeezing past her. He could feel her eyes on the back of his head as he squeezed past Jack as well, who was finishing up strapping down the crate. Nestor walked down the ramp and around to the bot and grabbed one arm and pulled it toward the ship, turning and looking for a likely place to insert it. A panel had popped open on top of the nose, and he assumed that had to be it and pulled the arm out, servos wheezing as he did so, and slid the nozzle into the ship. It locked into place with a click and the tractor beeped two short beeps and the strobe light on top began flashing faster as it dispensed the fuel. He looked up at the cockpit windows to see Anna beckoning him back inside. As he walked up the ramp, he heard it hum, lifting to close behind him.

Jack was sitting in a jump seat beside the door between cockpit and cargo area, leaning forward to tug on his restraints as Nestor squeezed by again. By the time he was back in his seat and fully restrained, the tractor was pulling the ship out, and then they were clear of the hanger and trundling along the taxiway towards the elevator airlocks to the surface launchpads.

A few silent minutes later, they came to rest in the launch area for Pad Four. The fueling tractor was still connected, and they’d been sitting quietly on the pad just long enough to cause Jack to start squirming. He yelled in Chrysean from his perch behind them, “What are we doing? It seems like we’re just sitting here?”

Anna glared back over her shoulder and replied, “I’m charging the capacitors, which uses the ship’s fuel cells. The normal batteries can’t discharge quickly enough to power up the engines, so we have to use the capacitors instead. We need to burn fuel to make enough electricity to charge them, and the fuel bot has to stay connected to backfill what we burn.”

Jack yelled back, “Well, can’t you make them charge quicker? I’m getting nervous just sitting here on the launchpad.”

“No, I can’t make anything happen any faster than it is,” Anna said back over her shoulder with exasperation. Nestor had been staring at the center touchscreen, and noticed CAPACITORS at the top of the screen, with three full bars displayed underneath. The system beeped once, drawing Anna’s attention, and she nodded to herself before saying, loud enough to be heard by Jack, “There. The capacitors are charged, and now we just need to top off our fuel…”

She punched a button, and with a hum, the fuel gauge rose all the way to full, “Ok. Nestor, disengage the fuel tractor, please.” She turned to flipping switches and adjusting screens, doing her final preparations for takeoff.

Nestor undid his restraints and moved to get up and go out to undock the fuel arm. Anna stopped what she was doing and glared at him. He froze in place; it was clear he was doing something wrong.

“What?” he said, shrugging slightly.

“Where are you going?”

“Out to disconnect the fuel tractor.”

“You don’t need to go out there to disconnect the bot,” Anna sighed and reached forward, cycling through screens on the center console until she got to the GROUND REQUESTS screen. A button that said DISCONNECT? appeared on the center of the screen, flashing. She hit it, and out front, the arm disconnected from the ship, retracting back to the tractor as the hitch came unhooked, and then the little tractor began moving briskly down the ramp away from the pad.

As Nestor moved to get back into his seat, Anna grabbed his wrist tightly and pulled him down to her level and glared hotly at him, her face maybe two centimeters from his, and whispered, “I don’t know what lies you told everyone else. I don’t care. It’s not going to matter, anyway. But just so you understand, I know you’re no pilot, and I know you’re not a student, either. It’s obvious that you’ve never even been in a cockpit before.”

Nestor opened his mouth to object, but she gripped down on his wrist even harder, her nails digging in. “Shut up. No more lies,” she hissed, her face bright red and her eyes flashing. “You’re not going to fool me. As far as I’m concerned, in that seat, you’re a liability. But I can’t kick you off this ship, and I doubt he,” she gestured with her chin toward the cargo bay, “would allow me to force you to sit back with him. Which is where you belong. So, you’re going to sit down in that seat, you’re going to buckle yourself in, and you’re not going to touch anything. Understand? Copilot?”

Her lips formed into a sneer as she let him go. He dropped back into his seat and buckled himself up and Anna returned to her preflight tasks calmly, as if he was unworthy of further attention. She began speaking with the control tower, securing approval to takeoff and a vector for departure.

Nestor’s mind was racing. He looked out the cockpit windows, trying to decide what to do next. All he wanted to do was run, to take off the restraints and open the cargo bay door and flee from there. On all sides of the launch pad, what had been ramps for accessing the pad were now pivoting vertically, becoming blast shields surrounding the craft. He wasn’t getting through those shields. They looked like they were each at least a half a meter thick, made of concrete and metal, five meters tall when fully vertical. He snuck another glance at Anna, who was staring at the controls before her as the very picture of stillness, her left hand on the control stick between her knees and right hand on the linked throttle levers for both engines.

“Brace for liftoff.”

She reached forward and flipped two switches marked ENGINE 1 and ENGINE 2 simultaneously. Nestor heard the engines ignite and could see the glow from the right engine out of the window on his periphery and could feel their rumble deep inside his core. Anna eased the throttle forward, and the ship trembled, becoming lighter on the pad but still not yet airborne. She looked around at the instruments, taking a final survey, and then pushed the throttles forward a bit more to bring them even with a small hashmark at the base of the throttle housing. The ship trembled a bit more and then laboriously floated up into the air into a minor hover. The nose of the ship began wandering slightly and Anna moved the control stick a tiny amount to keep it pointed in the correct direction. Satisfied it would drift no further, she pushed the throttle further forward, and the ship began accelerating up and as they cleared the blast shields, Anna reached forward and flicked a toggle switch up. The ship’s engines pivoted to face backwards and the ship’s motion lurched forward to match their orientation, but Anna eased the stick back, lifting the nose of the craft to match the engine pivot and their motion corrected back to upward as she found the balance point and Nestor’s stomach knew this without his mind being able to make sense of the instruments before him. As the nose settled on a satisfactory upward trajectory, she reached down and pushed the throttles all the way forward in a smooth motion that belied the ship’s actual response, which was less smooth and more drastic lurch forward, and the acceleration smashed Nestor violently back into his seat.

The ground fell behind them as they leapt towards the black sky above, but this was unperceivable to Nestor as the edges of his vision darkened and he peered out at the world before him through tunnels bored through his skull by the incredible pressure. He felt it hard to concentrate, hard to tell what was happening on the instruments in front of him, and resigned himself to simply staring straight ahead at the darkening sky through the forward cockpit windows. The ship shook so hard he worried it might rattle to pieces on ascent and the shaking and the acceleration pressure seemed to go on forever, and just as it felt like it might never end, he noticed Anna’s hand reach forward, grasp the throttles, pause a moment, and then pull them all the way back to closed. The roar from the engines ceased and was replaced by a low hum and the pressure ended and his vision swam at the edges for a moment as his eyes readjusted.

“Hey? It sounds like you cut the throttle. We can’t be anywhere near space yet,” Jack piped up over the ship’s coms from his spot in the rear.

Anna was sitting with her head resting back against the seat’s headrest and eyes closed, and without opening them she said calmly back over the coms, “We don’t need to use the engines all the way to space; we’ve established a trajectory whose uppermost altitude is one thousand kilometers. We’ll coast from here to there, then burn to circularize at one thousand.”

This was something Nestor knew, thinking back to innumerable conversations with Oscar, and he confirmed so over the coms while leaning out to look back at Jack, “She’s right, that’s how you establish orbit.”

“Thanks for the backup, copilot,” Anna replied, the awkwardness of her sarcasm silencing further questions.

The rest of the ascent passed in relative silence, but for the groaning and ticking of the ship’s hull as it cooled from their initial burn through the lower atmosphere. Gradually the nose of the craft came over, showing first the golden glow of Mars’s upper atmosphere, then the grand curve of the planet with a horizon split in two half black and half ochre by the dawn happening below, the light racing across the land to scour out the dark. Nestor took this as a portent of things to come.

Anna missed all of this and rode up with her eyes closed and a sad look on her face and hands loosely on her armrests. As they approached one thousand kilometers on the altimeter, a small blob of a tear floated away from her face, and then Anna opened her eyes to reach forward and flick the two engine switches to the ‘off’ position, the tiny movement of her fingers contrasting with the loud thunk confirming that she’d shut the engines down.

“What was that noise?” Jack asked over the coms, “And shouldn’t we be circulariz-aring or whatever sometime soon?”

“She shut off the engines!” Nestor screamed in panicked response.

Jack was suddenly floating in the null gravity right behind them, fury and terror vying for primacy in his voice. “What does he mean, you shut off the engines?”

Tears began streaming from Anna’s eyes, the malformed blobs moving at angles oblique and unpredictable as she looked up at Jack. She unbuckled her restraints so she could turn to face him more fully.

“I’ve turned them off. He’s right. I can’t let you bomb the Seed Bank. The Terraformation is too important, and I’m not going to allow any group of terrorists to destroy the hope…the future…of everyone on this planet. I needed to make sure this mission failed, and now it will. Engines off, we’ll just glide back down, and crash in the wilderness south of the Valley.”

“YOU’VE KILLED US?” Jack screamed, producing a pistol from somewhere at the small of his back and pointing it at her. His voice lowered to express a tranquility he could not have been experiencing. “No…no, you’re not going to do this. You’re going to fly this ship. You’re going to complete this mission.”

“You can’t shoot me into doing any of that,” Anna said with a dead, sad look, “And you don’t know how to turn the engines back on. Or how to fly this ship. Neither does he.” She gestured at Nestor with her chin.

Jack glanced at Nestor, paralyzed in his seat and holding his hands up, for some reason. “That true? You don’t know how to turn the engines back on? How can that be?”

“I’ll tell you,” Anna said, a smile appearing on her lips, baleful eyes locking onto Nestor, “My copilot there is not a pilot at all. He doesn’t know shit. He’s been lying to all of you.”

The smile disappeared. “You don’t have a choice here. We’re all dying, on this ship, in about,” she glanced over her shoulder at the display, “eight minutes.”

“No,” Jack said, who then grabbed the pilot seat to pull himself to float closer to her, pushing the gun against her forehead with his free hand.

“No. The only one who might die here is you. Unless you fly this ship. You say we’re all dead, anyway? I can make the next eight minutes worse than anything you’ve imagined.”

Anna glared up at him for a moment, and then threw herself forward, her shoulder slamming into Jack’s stomach, both floating backward towards the cargo bay. Jack lost the gun with the impact and it floated back to rest against the rear cockpit wall, but he did not see it there for Anna had wrapped her legs around his waist and was swinging closed fists down upon his head as he held up his hands to protect himself. Nestor felt a spark of courageousness overcome him and leapt forward at Anna, but she saw him coming and tossed up a singular elbow which connected hard with his nose and pain bloomed red before his eyes. The force of her elbow impacting his prow reversed the direction of his glide and he spun back against the seat. As his vision returned, he saw Jack get both feet up and kick Anna back, but Anna and Nestor’s shared impact had started them spinning, and Jack’s kick pushed her onto the floor, near the rear of the cockpit wall, to which the gun seemed pinned.

The kick pushed Jack too, and he thrashed as he floated, trying in vain to reverse his motion, to get himself moving back towards Anna. Then he abruptly stopped thrashing, his face frozen. Nestor had been watching Jack and turned to see that Anna had the gun now and was pointing it at Jack. Jack got his hands on the cockpit seats and finally arrested his motion and was watching her carefully as she bobbed back against the wall, both hands on the gun. Jack seemed ready to toss himself at her, his body tension complete and his voice still much too calm, “Anna, listen, just give me the gun, hand it over real slow and then fly this ship. You don’t want to die.”

Anna’s eyes flashed as she seemed to realize that having the gun presented her little advantage and there was nothing, nothing in the universe, to stop this man from coming for her. Nestor could see this realization dawn on her face, and he understood as she did what her only option was, and he began pleading with her, blobs of his blood floating freely out from his smashed nose, “Nononononono, Anna, nonononono”.

Jack, the only person in attendance who was confused about what was happening silently before him, looked at Nestor as the boy pleaded, and in this moment he missed Anna raising the gun to her temple. Upon turning back to face her, Anna smiled a morose little smile at him and pulled the trigger. The side of her head opposite the gun exploded in gore, bits of bone and brain and blood flowing out and floating up in a sort of horrible free-falling bloom, her hand snapped out with the gun and letting it go and then rising limply to the side of her head. Nestor stared with horror vibrating through his spine and his belly and his nightmares for whatever life he himself may have left, likely only minutes of it, and in this terror he watched as her lifeless body floated upward.

Jack’s face was suddenly nearly touching his. “Nestor. NESTOR.”

He turned to face Jack, who spoke to him in Tharsian, “It’s up to you. Pilot or no, you got to get those engines back on. NOW. Pilot or no, you had to’ve seen what she did before takeoff. Do that again.”

He looked at Jack and nodded. It was up to him if he wanted to live. He pulled himself down into his seat, staring out the windows now filled with umber and he felt a pang of panic when he realized what that implied and he faced forward and strapped himself in and stared blindly at the controls, trying to remember what Anna had been doing just a few minutes prior.

He knew he must turn on the engines, for that was what Jack was chanting loudly in his ear, and so he reached forward and flicked both thusly labeled engine switches up and then pushed the throttles full ahead. Nothing happened. There had been some other step he was forgetting. He could feel it, back somewhere in his memory, but he couldn’t think clearly, especially with Jack alarming loudly as he was.

As his eyes traced the edges of the central display, Nestor recalled the engines couldn’t power up without the capacitors. He needed to charge them and use them to start the engines. He pushed the button on the bottom left of the display, cycling through menus, and found the one that said CAPACITORS and began their charge. The bars began filling, almost imperceptibly slow.

The altimeter had dropped below fifty kilometers by the time the capacitors finally reached full charge, and with a sense of relief, Nestor reached forward to flick the two switches up. He heard them begin humming, a soft hum produced by the now-online magnetic fields and coolant system, and confirmed they were both now active by peering out the window at their blue-white glow. He shifted his hand down, shoved the throttles forward as dramatically as he could, and once again the acceleration slammed him back into his seat. Jack was tossed unceremoniously back into the cargo bay.

The ship’s nose had drifted into an aggressive downward angle, and all he could see through the forward windows was post-dawn desert blowing beautifully golden below, but he could not appreciate this beauty through his haze of terror. He pulled back on the control stick, jerking it all the way to the stops. The nose of the craft began to rise, bit by bit, to come level with the horizon, and did not tarry there, but continued rising. Nestor looked to the altimeter, and it passed below forty kilometers as the last snatch of horizon became obscured beneath the craft’s nose, and it was then that it bucked up aggressively, catching and being buffeted by the thin Martian atmosphere. Even with the nose rising and the engines at full throttle, the craft was still losing altitude. It seemed paradoxical to Nestor that their descent had sped up with the addition of engine power, and in panic he kept the stick all the way back against the stops, failing to notice the warning from his inner ears that said he was tipping backward.

What happened next would not have been a surprise to an actual pilot, or even a dedicated student pilot who had a bit of time in a simulator, but it was a surprise to Nestor when the craft’s bricklike nose finally caught enough Martian air to start it into an uncontrolled head-over-heels tumble through the atmosphere, the engines’ thrust combining with the overwhelming drag of the unaerodynamic shape of the shuttle at this relative angle to accentuate the craft’s spin. Disoriented and not knowing what else to do, Nestor slammed the stick all the way forward, trying to correct the spin, but rather than fix any of his problems this added a new one by introducing a rightward motion to the craft’s tumble, and its trajectory through the sky became complete chaos, the spin pressing him hard into the seat. It was all he could do to hold on to the stick, no longer able to keep it all the way forward, no matter how hard he pushed. As his vision narrowed once again to tunnels, it came to him to cut the engines, and he reached down with all the strength left in his arm, feeling for throttle levers he could no longer see. His hand grasped the levers right as he felt the deep pool of unconsciousness rising to meet him, and he pulled back on both, the feel of the levers hitting their zero stops his last conscious memory.

Nestor came-to overwhelmed by nausea. He opened his eyes for only a moment, just long enough to see the alternating view of ground-sky-ground-sky, and realize that they were still tumbling. Another wave of nausea swelled over him, starting as a buzz in the back of his head, then creeping down his spine to wrap an iron hand around his stomach and squeeze hard, his stomach muscles gripping down, vomit welling up and out of his mouth, and almost in slow motion flying out to curve down into a magnificent multifaceted arc before splashing on the control panel at his knees. He saw none of this, however, for his eyes were squeezed tightly shut, as if he could close them tight enough that it might change his circumstances.

He opened his eyes again. Every thought, every emotion, every instinct advising against this course of action for it felt truly insane. He read the altimeter and saw they’d fallen below ten kilometers, and he stared at it for several seconds to determine if it was falling any slower than before. He thought perhaps it might be. He was pretty sure he could still recover at this altitude, and he looked for his velocity, and he watched it fall just below three hundred meters per second. He knew this must mean that drag through the atmosphere was slowing him down, but he also knew he still needed to use the engines to stop the craft from slamming into the ground at too high a velocity, for drag alone would not arrest his descent.

He recalled there was a setting that pivoted the engines to fire forward, and from his experience watching shuttles come in to land at the Poynting spaceport, he believed this to be the typical approach to braking. He looked around at the controls, trying to find the toggle switch Anna had used right after takeoff, but his head was swimming and he felt so sick he could make no sense of the things he was seeing on the panel before him. He had stopped looking, his unfocused eyes staring at a random section of the control panel, his mind trying to fight the nausea and disorientation, when the image in front of him resolved into focus. It was a small, unassuming button labeled THRUSTERS.

Nestor stared at the word and recalled that the maneuvering thrusters were tiny jets positioned all around the shuttle, used for small motions in space, primarily when docking. If you needed to change your approach to another vessel in space, or slow down a bit, or match their rotation, or adjust your approach angle, you’d fire your thrusters in the appropriate manner.

He realized that could use the thrusters to stop this spin, and he pushed the small button and the control screen changed to two images of the shuttle, one from above and one in profile, both images surrounded by arrows with numbers filling in above each arrow to show the craft’s motion in each relative direction. Content that the thrusters were now activated, Nestor looked for a way to control them. There must be a pad of some sort. Inset partway back on his left armrest, he located a small pad with four directional arrows and two buttons labeled FOR and REV. He pushed the arrow pointing back, looking at the control screen for confirmation, and seeing there on the screen two small straight arrows under both nose and tail become highlighted with their accompanying thrust numbers, confirming he was firing the thrusters on the bottom of the craft, pushing it relatively ‘up’. This did not help to resolve his tumble, however, and so he pushed the other arrows to see if they would correct his spin, but none of the other arrows seemed to fire the correct combination of thrusters to do so.

Nestor began looking all around for a second button pad for rotational thrusters and found no such pad anywhere he looked. He grabbed the control stick and bent over to see if there were buttons he’d missed on the shaft of the stick itself. As the stick moved, he heard thrusters hiss, and he paused and tested it in a different direction and heard thrusters hiss again. He experimented further, watching different thrust combinations pop up on the display, until he could feel in his stomach that the spin was, in fact, slowing.

Only a moment more haggling with the control stick, and he had the shuttle tumbling lazily through the Martian troposphere. Nestor still could not watch the world spin around him through the cockpit windows, and so he stared at the instruments instead while he arrested the craft’s remaining rotation. He knew he was still headed straight towards the ground, and he knew the engines were pointed towards the back of the ship, for he could not suss out how to pivot them any other direction, and he knew he needed to fire those engines to slow down, and he concluded this meant he’d need to face the ship towards the sky, which sat well with him as he did not wish to watch the ground flying up towards him.

Nestor negotiated the ship into a backwards orientation with great effort, for the craft kept wanting to resume its chaotic tumble, and he had just passed four kilometers of altitude when he pushed the throttles all the way forward, slamming back against the seat yet another time. He looked at their velocity and it was falling quickly. He exalted his plan was working, feeling skilled, invincible, and he still felt this way as their altitude passed eight hundred meters and velocity bottomed out, falling to single digits and then finally to zero. Then the numbers began creeping up again and began accelerating towards one hundred meters per second. Nestor glanced at the altimeter to see they were now climbing, but Nestor did not wish to climb, and so he eased the throttle back until the ascent began slowing, and as velocity approached zero, he eased the throttles forward, bringing the craft into a momentary hover, and checked their altitude, seeing it just above one thousand meters. He looked back to the velocity, and saw with exasperation that it was rising again, and so Nestor pulled the throttle back more to slow down, but saw no change. Velocity was still continuing to increase, and so he tried pushing the throttle forward, and it increased more. Through the windows he could see only sky, and his altitude was unchanged, which he guessed to mean that he must be moving laterally, not down.

He tried to adjust by using the control stick, but could not arrest the ship’s motion, as every correction seemed to require its own attendant set of corrections, and with consternation he noticed that his velocity was still climbing and his altitude was now decreasing. He had no better idea of what to do and so he cut the throttle, but this caused the nose to dip aggressively to the right, the direction he’d been drifting. He tried to correct by pushing the left thruster arrow, but this only caused the craft to begin a gentle roll. He tilted the stick to correct out of the roll, which did indeed arrest the spin of the craft, and then looked out the window to see red desert rocks racing by barely two hundred meters below. His eyes scanned the control panel, desperate for something that would help him.

It was then that Nestor found the engine position toggle, unchanged in location from where it had been waiting all this time, and he flipped the switch down into “landing” mode, and was much satisfied to hear the hum of the engines changing position. The display beeped once, LANDING MODE appearing at the top to replace the thruster display as the ship’s computer turned the thrusters off.

Nestor eased the throttles back up, and the ship’s descent slowed, but not quick enough, and right as Nestor recalled the hashmark on the throttle body denoting the ideal hovering thrust, the craft belly-flopped down hard onto the Martian soil.

A deafening scraping sound filled the cockpit, and the nose slammed down with force for just a moment before the craft passed at speed over a ridge and twisted to the right, which caused the still-burning engine on that side to crash into the ground. It resisted the rocky Martian soil for one frightening moment before the struts holding it to the craft buckled. The thrust from the now-unmoored engine was enough to cause it to spin up and over, still perfunctorily attached to the ship via its fuel lines and slung around the hull by them. The craft continued rolling while the right engine rose to meet the left, and then both crashed together in an explosion of parts.

The spacecraft tumbled down the slope, away from the bloom of parts above, rolling once, twice, almost three times, before coming to rest midway down.