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  Still the dream of space travel and eventually becoming a true spacefaring society refused to die. Indeed, it was the spiritual glue that held SpaceCorp together—the belief that one day mankind would reach the outer planets and from there press on to the stars beyond.

  Today, one hundred eighty-five years after Edgar Rice Burroughs’ failed dream of interplanetary travel, the SpaceCorp Interplanetary Spaceship SIS Pascal Lee was about to embark for Mars. Her mission, besides the usual flags and footprints, was to search for life. It was hoped that such a find would provide proof of a second genesis, where the first lifeforms originated not from living parents, but from non-living chemicals. Presumably, the first genesis, at least from an Earth-centric view, was the one that began with primitive microbes 3.8 billion years ago. Meanwhile, a second genesis had been the holy grail of astrobiologists for over a century. The dogma held that a second genesis, no matter how minute nor how primitive, would prove extraterrestrial intelligence could exist… somewhere. SpaceCorp just had to find it.

  * * *

  If the word ‘inelegant’ had a picture in the dictionary, SIS Pascal Lee would have been it. She was a testament to why afterthought has no place in engineering design. Back in the days of Pascal Lee’s initial design, c 2074, her nuclear thermal rockets or NTRs were expected to be the standard closed cycle light bulb design. Nuclear light bulbs consisted of a quartz chamber, or light bulb, housed inside a rocket motor. Uranium hexafluoride or hex was stored in a matrix to prevent fission. At startup, the hex was pumped from the matrix into the light bulb where it underwent fission. Because the hex was never allowed to escape, this type of NTR is closed cycle. Liquid Hydrogen (LH2) propellant was then pumped into the gap between the quartz and the rocket motor wall where it became very hot from the hex, exiting the rocket nozzle at an exhaust gas velocity or Ve of 30 km/sec, far higher than the 4 km/sec maximum of chemical rockets.

  In the initial design, Pascal Lee stored its LH2 in a hub that was a whopping 700 meters long. The 200-meter long habitation spokes were mounted amidships, spinning about the hub’s longitudinal axis at 1.89 rpm for a full gee of artificial gravity.

  Pascal Lee had fore and aft NTRs mounted on either end of the hub—no flip-and-burn maneuvers needed to accelerate and decelerate. Plus, the fully redundant complement of engines on either end made for a nice redundancy for a crew embarking on the first mission to Mars. Total elapsed time of the mission was to be 153 days with 13 days in Mars orbit to put landers on the surface, collect core samples, and return them to the mother ship in hopes of finding proof of life buried within.

  But in 2085 a minor breakthrough happened. The light bulb NTRs were augmented with open cycle gas core NTRs that had a Ve of 50 km/second. They were messy contraptions, spewing radioactive uranium hexafluoride or hex out their nozzles along with the usual complement of gamma radiation. Hub length increased to 800 meters, but the mission duration was reduced to only 93 days.

  Six years later in 2091, a major breakthrough happened. The open cycle gas core NTRs were tweaked to achieve a Ve of 98 km/sec, but by some quirk of the mathematics of Tsiolkovsky’s Rocket Equation, she needed a lot less propellant to get up to speed. Hub length shrank to 150 meters, and the mission duration shrank with it to only 64 days, 12 of them in Mars orbit. The spacecraft form factor now resembled a coffee mug with a pair of thick dowels sticking out the sides. She’d always be the last girl to leave the bar—usually alone—but she was functional. She kept her light bulbs since they were closed cycle and didn’t spew hex all over everything—handy for maneuvering around Mars orbit without contaminating the externally mounted landers. But she still needed robot tugs to maneuver her into launch position at CisLuna’s 2nd LaGrange Point, EML2, 65 thousand km above the Moon’s far-side surface.

  Shorter mission duration meant a lower accrued dose of radiation for the crew. Inside the storm cellar’s 3-meter thick nanocellulose walls, accrued radiation would be 0.7 rems for the duration of the mission, and 7.4 rems inside the rest of the spoke where the walls were only a half-meter thick. The exterior of the ship would get an 11.5 rem accrued dose.

  Of course, this assumed the absence of Coronal Mass Ejections or CMEs from the Sun, but even then, calculations showed anyone inside the storm shelter would be safe. This would not be the case for anyone trying to wait out a CME on the surface of Mars, but the plan was that CisLuna would provide enough advance warning to retrieve those crews before the CME hit… if they hustled. An average CME could travel past Earth to Mars in about two days, a fast one in less than a day. Without shielding, CMEs could carry an acute dose of over 200 rems in two days. 200 to 350 rems (2-3.5 Sieverts) would result in a lethality rate of 5-50% depending on the quality and immediacy of medical treatment. During the 11-year solar cycle, CMEs erupted from the Sun about 3 per day during Solar Max, and about once per five days during Solar Min. 2102 had been selected for the mission because it coincided with the Solar Min. Nevertheless, the Mars lander crews on this mission were facing a considerable risk and they knew it.

  As the countdown progressed and the tugs released their grip, there was no flurry of activity for the crew to buckle themselves into special chairs for hard gee acceleration. At a scant 1% gee of acceleration, lighting the NTRs was pretty much a non-event. Everyone crowded around monitors hoping to see the Moon shrink in the distance. After about twenty minutes most of them gave up and went back to work. It would be a four-and-a-half-day burn getting up to 40 km/sec cruise speed. She’d hold that velocity for about 18 days, then light the forward NTRs for a 3-day deceleration burn prior to Mars Orbit Insertion or MOI. She would burn 24 million kg of LH2 for the acceleration, but being lighter, she would only need 17 million kg of LH2 for the deceleration and MOI.

  The Pascal Lee’s four landers were mounted to the trailing edges of the habitation spokes. They were called Mars Descent/Ascent Vehicles or MDAVs. Two of them were manned and the other two fully autonomous. They were named after prominent scientists in the past who had pioneered instrumentation for the robotic search for life on Mars.

  MDAV-1 was named for Victor Parro García, inventor of the first immunoassay instrument suitable for space and capable of identifying the giant organic molecules common to DNA-based life. This is no mean task given they are likely to be found in a sample containing thousands of different molecules. MDAV-1 would be crewed by Robin Whittaker and Amanda Blake and land at the Noctis landing site about 200 km north and slightly west of Oudemans Crater at the end of Valles Marineris.

  MDAV-2, crewed by AIs, was named for Brian Glass, inspiration and lead technologist for the robotic drill used to search beneath the martian regolith for microbial life. An upgraded version of his original design is used on each of the four landers to drill the 30 meters of core sample for return to SIS Pascal Lee. MDAV-2 would land in the Northern Polar Region near the old Phoenix site where vast amounts of water ice were discovered under the regolith in 2008.

  MDAV-3 was named for Alfonso Davila, a leading theorist in the Second Genesis concept. MDAV-3 would be crewed by Lisa Weinberg and Shelley Rodriguez and land at Dao Vallis in the bottom of Hellas Crater.

  MDAV-4, also crewed by AIs, was named after Carol Stoker, a leading scientist on the Phoenix lander mission that discovered copious amounts of water beneath the regolith in the Mars Northern Polar Region. It was the presence of this water that led many to believe that life might still exist on Mars. MDAV-4 would be fully autonomous and land at the base of Olympus Mons.

  The reason two of the landers were fully autonomous was that exoplanetary missions beyond Mars might not be feasible for manned landings. Hence, autonomous robotic landers would make the descent, scout around for life, and if found, attempt to characterize it. Hopefully, this life would be DNA-based, making it amenable to sequencing. A sequenced genome could be sent back to the mother ship as pure computer data where it could be reconstructed one physical gene at a time—along with its protein—in a proper hazmat lab. This would be safer for humans o
n the mother ship as well as preserving planetary protection.

  Fully autonomous lander technology was considered an essential strategic technology for SpaceCorp. Truth be told, the human landers were there mainly for flags and footprints. If they made it to the surface and returned in one piece, their mission would be a success. Still, they dragged along a drill rig and some basic instruments on their landers just in case a human presence really was necessary to cope with the challenges Mars might present in guarding its biological secrets.

  Each of the landers had the same fundamental mission: land safely, collect 30 meters of core sample, return to Pascal Lee. Scientific theory holds that after Mars lost its magnetic field, its atmosphere dissipated in the solar wind and its oceans evaporated with it. If there was life on Mars at that time, it would probably have been microbial, and would have had to take up a new habitat under the regolith away from the damaging UV and cosmic radiation that bathes Mars today.

  Most of the time that microbial life would be in a frozen state unable to repair radiation damage that managed to seep through the protective regolith. But Mars experiences regular orbital perturbations that bring warm periods that would thaw out those microbial colonies allowing them to repair their damaged genes and replenish their populations. For these reasons, it is believed that there may yet be microbial life on Mars. If so, and if it is DNA-based, harvesting those genomes could yield genetic riches for the pharmaceutical industry and others. Such a find would make a valuable addition to SpaceCorp’s waning satellite services product market.

  The Primate House

  Roxanne Carvalho hadn’t thought of them as animals for over ten years now. They were a new species of hominid, Pan astra, or stellar chimps. Stellar chimps were genetically engineered from Pan troglodyte, the common chimpanzee, and like their forebears, only slightly different from her own species, Homo sapiens. She spoke English to them and they signed back to her in American Sign Language. They would never speak to her as other humans did—a deficiency in the Broca’s region of the chimp brain. A talking chimp! That would have been a trip.

  But they wore clothes, used the bathroom, ate with utensils. They could even get into their space suits by themselves and knew the hazards of venturing out into space without a suit. They knew how to open unlocked hatchways and often did so to wander about the lab when she was working there. They loved cartoons, especially the Roadrunner, and would howl with laughter when the coyote realized he had run off a cliff.

  They liked ISAAK, the ship’s main computer avatar, with whom they could communicate using ASL. They regarded his image as another cartoon and always expected him to do or say something humorous. ISAAK usually did not disappoint, but neither she nor ISAAK could figure out what the chimps saw in him that was so endlessly funny. She had suggested that he change his appearance to a more realistic, less cartoonish image. ISAAK declined, “They might not recognize me as the old ISAAK.”

  Roxanne observed the sleeping forms of the six chimps whom she was accompanying on the voyage. Something about their stirrings during slumber aroused her maternal instincts. The primate viewing room was outside the storm shelter that the crew would live in for the duration of the trip. Hence, it was exposed to the same annual dose rate that the chimps would experience. Her visits to the primate house were kept short for this reason. As her mother, Monica Carvalho, had admonished her back at CisLuna, “The chimps are the experiment, not you.”

  The chimps were the product of fifteen years of intensive genetic engineering to make them bulletproof to the 25-rem per year gamma radiation levels of interplanetary space. In the process, a few other mods had been done. Although their gametes started their genetic journey as true chimps, Pan troglodytes, they were now non-violent thanks to some genetic mods from their cousins the bonobos, Pan paniscus. Violence would not do on a voyage to the stars. For that matter, Homo sapiens would need similar modification in that regard before he would be considered space-ready. Their form factors had also taken on some other features of the bonobos. They were of slighter build. Males were fifteen kg lighter on average than their forebears. They exhibited no obvious sexual dimorphism—males and females were the same size and strength—another improvement believed essential to good order and discipline on a long stellar voyage. Facial features still resembled chimps rather than bonobos, a testament to their baseline genome. Lastly, they were infertile, lacking some essential hormones necessary to procreation. The way these chimps spent all their free time copulating, a starship would have been awash in crew within a few years. Meanwhile, the missing hormones could be injected to allow pregnancy should the need arise.

  Modifying them for radiation resistance had been challenging. All DNA is equally susceptible to radiation damage. It’s just that some organisms were better than others at repairing said damage. Deinococcus radiodurans and Thermococcus gammatolerans were able to make radiation damage repairs within 12 to 24 hours after acute doses as high as 500,000 rems of radiation with no loss of viability. 500 rems are enough to kill a human in a couple of weeks.

  It was no mean task to insert the necessary genes from a microbe into a complex, warm-blooded animal like a chimp and get them to express properly. Nevertheless, this is what her mother, Monica Carvalho, and her genetics team had accomplished. The chimps were on board Pascal Lee as a final proof that the engineering had been effective. A positive conclusion to this experiment would provide the go-ahead for human genetic engineering to begin. In fifty years, SpaceCorp would have a population of space-adapted humans, Homo galacticus, ready to travel to and live out their lives among the stars.

  The Bridge

  “Well, that was exciting,” First Officer Hamilton Briggs said, forcing his voice to sound laconic.

  “You were expecting your jowls to be jiggling as you white-knuckled the steering yoke?” Captain Roger Thornton asked.

  Ham chuckled, “I grew up watching the old Apollo and Shuttle launch films. I mean, hell, even our own shuttles give you more of a kick when they light their nukes!”

  “Goes with climbing out of Earth’s gravity well while surrounded by atmo.”

  “Yeah, I know. But did it have to be so anticlimactic? We’re on our way to Mars fer chrissakes! I’ll bet half the crew slept through it.”

  “Cheer up, Ham. Maybe we’ll run into a Near Earth Object and you can roust everyone out of the sack to do emergency evac procedures.”

  Ham’s eyebrows raised in anticipation, “Gee, could we? Nice little Apollo… maybe an Amor? Huh?”

  “You tell me, Ham. Why don’t you check the trajectory plots of all the known Triple-A’s now that we have a precise time of departure.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain! There’s only about eight thousand of them, shouldn’t take but a second or two to throw a plot up on the holo-screen. I do love this new computer!”

  “Nav, you want to plot a trajectory up there for reference?”

  “Coming up, Mr. Briggs.”

  “Okay, Captain,” Ham said, “we’re twenty-two days to Mars intercept. Nearest misses along the trajectory are shown in red for Amors, blue for Apollos, and green for Atens. Looks like the worst case is an Amor, our old friend 433 Eros, minimum clearance 0.15 AUs.”

  “Sorry, Ham,” the Captain said, “unless we discover a new Triple-A, you’re in for a boring transit.”

  “Hmm…”

  “What, no comeback?”

  “No, Captain, I was just thinking that if Eros, being five times the mass of the Chicxulub impactor, ever became an Earth crosser, that could be an apocalyptic extinction event—way worse than just wiping out a bunch of dinosaurs.”

  “Good reason to set up a colony on Mars.”

  “Want to see another uranium hexafluoride contrail plot, Skipper?”

  “Uh, yeah, go ahead.”

  “Aye, sir, hex plot coming on line. Radiation particles in a nice clearance trajectory away from CisLuna LaGrange Point 1. Looks like the tugs did a good job positioning us for light-up.”

>   “Excellent! Tell you what, why don’t you drive for a bit while I go stretch my legs?”

  “Cool! Can I honk the horn too?” As the captain walked toward the exit hatch to the Bridge, he signaled the first officer to follow.

  “Ham, I know we’ve done this drill at least a hundred times in the last two years, but now that we’re really under way, can you try to pretend like it’s a little more serious? You know, good for the kiddies if mom and dad act like adults?”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “That’s a good First Officer. Now you may go sit in my chair.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “And don’t slouch.”

  “Aye, sir.” As the captain departed the Bridge, the First Officer called out, “Captain off the Bridge!”

  * * *

  The Captain’s stateroom was sandwiched in between the Bridge and the Bridge’s escape pod prep room. As Captain, he rated a suite—part bedroom with attached head and part office that had a combination desk and meeting table that could seat most of the senior staff. Behind the desk was a full set of monitors that kept him connected with everything important on the ship. The office opened directly onto the Bridge, while the bedroom had a seldom used door that opened into the corridor.

  He was known for leadership-by-walking-around and could pop in unexpectedly almost anywhere—the mess area, the engine control room, long range sensors, local area sensors. Sometimes he would even suit up and cross over to the automated spoke where the entire ‘staff’ consisted of AIs. Ship SOP mandated that all transits between the two spokes required a full space suit.

  This walk-about he walked slowly down a corridor that led him by the wing where the landing crew staterooms were. After checking behind him, he opened the hatch and ducked inside pulling up short beside her room.