Expedition to a Dead Planet

Chapter One

A Glowing Orange

Thirteen months after departing Earth ten cookie cutter spaceships arrived at the planet Mars. The Fleet, a name normally applied to ships by sea going men, consisted of second hand or surplus equipment converted into interplanetary spaceships. There was no state of the art equipment aboard any of the ships. In truth, any average middle class consumer had probably seen, used or owned everything aboard other than space specific equipment. They had probably discarded much of it already. Why, even the ion engines were only upgraded versions of those used in the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this case the ships were not much more than spider webs of support structures, holding no more than thirty-five human beings between them. With the exception of two of them they were in reality not much more than engines and life support wrapped around non-living material. Built of can shaped units once designed for the first space station each was a tiny world all its own, near robotic supply ships that carried only two crew each. Aboard one of the larger ships a small oriental woman looked out towards the planet far below.

Mars glowed before her like an over-ripe orange through the tiny porthole. It appeared much like an old orange she thought. Wrinkled, pitted, apparently lifeless. There was life though, on the bacterial level at least. Dr. Etsuko Saski stood silently in the ships low-g environment as she studied her new home-to-be. During their long flight, and now final burn into a stable orbit the ships ion engines had been giving her small frame just enough false gravity to make life comfortable. It was an illusion of course, nothing more than simple acceleration and inertia. Then too, Mars apparent near lifelessness may well be an illusion as well. Certainly Pathfinder and its following brothers had proven beyond doubt water still roamed Mars just below surface. Acidic, heavily mineralized it was still water. With hard work and time it might form lakes again, in a few thousand years or so.

A speaker across from her chirped, its sound taken from an old, once wildly popular science fiction series. "Captain to crew. Stable orbit and engine shutdown in ten minutes. Run your checklists and insure that all objects are secure. Out."

She sighed, privately certain that her own assigned area was already secure. Still it never hurt to check yet again. Once they made orbit there wouldn't even be an illusion of gravity and things would float, get in the way, cause problems. Built to ferry the expedition to Mars and back these ships could never land. Not only would their ion engines prove woefully inadequate to such needs, major ship frames would quickly deform under Mars gravitational pull even if they did manage to survive a landing attempt. No, to that job were assigned the landers, both robotic and manned. Turning her attention away from the exterior view Etsuko unclipped her checklist, ignoring several lines of ticks placed there during her previous checks. She'd start from scratch, acting as if this were the first time.