Mission Mars Alpha: Mortal Reality by Pierre-Etienne Bram

Author:Pierre-Etienne Bram [Bram, Pierre-Etienne]
Format: epub
Published: 2021-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 31.

Lift-Off + 228 Days

04/20/2024

“Mars Alpha here. Three hours before descent. May God protect us.”

“Good luck, Claire. The eyes of France are on you.”

“Thank you, Mr. President.”

Wow! If someone had told me that I would one day have a conversation with the President of the French Republic, I would not have believed it.

Nor would I have believed that one day I would be on the verge of stepping on planet Mars.

And yet, here I am.

Here we are.

After all the years of training, battles, voyeurism, and exposure, it’s time for our final hurdle before we ultimately become the first humans to step on the Red Planet.

At 10:12 p.m. tonight, we will begin the final stage of our journey: entering Mars’ atmosphere.

We know about the vibrations. But it’s nothing—something like the rinse cycle in a washing machine.

Detailed images of Mars are on display before us, hour after hour.

Several moments ago, Dragon 3 turned around as planned, thus introducing its heat shield to the Martian atmosphere. We cleared a critical stage.

Just over three hours to go. I am so excited, yet terribly stressed about things not going according to plans…

“Claire, are you coming? We’re waiting for you for the final briefing before descent.”

“I’m coming, Linn.”

“Not too stressed?” asked Mike.

“Just enough.”

Stressed? Why would I be?

There are three stages, in which everything must go right.

Stage One: Three mega-parachutes must slow us down to between five and ten percent of our initial speed.

Stage Two: The final retro thrust, which should last about twenty seconds and consume the remaining ten percent of our fuel, should stabilize our speed.

If, by chance, the first two stages do not come off as planned, we have to hope that the final stage—in which we eject from our seats and finish our descent in individual parachutes—works without a hitch. In this case, the robots on the ground will retrieve us, since there is a strong likelihood that our bodies will be unconscious after the third or fourth minute out of the seven minutes of descent. And to think we won’t even be awake when the great moment arrives… Maybe it’s for the best, come to think of it.

“Did you re-do your calculations, Mike?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“You don’t want to know.”

I doubt that Earth could have made this type of error, allowing us to dive head first into Mars, knowing full well that we wouldn’t have enough fuel to slow us down. No, surely, he has to be wrong.

At least I hope so; otherwise we are all going to die.

“OK. As a reminder, in just shy of fifteen minutes we will go live for a final message to Earth before landing on Mars. As usual, joy, enthusiasm—and shit, we are going to be the first to walk on Mars. To Mars Alpha: hip, hip, hip…”

“HOORAY!”

Pedro has commanded the group perfectly over these past seven months despite some tense moments with Mike, which Linn and I were able to smooth over and calm in time. Let’s hope that for the Mars landing, his piloting skills are as good as his leadership skills.

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