Mission to Mars by Eric Walters

Author:Eric Walters [Walters, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orca Book Publishers
Published: 2023-01-31T20:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

I took out the last screw and pin and then reached up and took down another of the ship’s support ribs. It was a section about six feet long and six inches wide, made of a magnesium alloy. The alloy was as light as aluminum and as strong as titanium. It had the strongest strength-to-weight ratio of any material known to mankind. This rib would have only weighed about twenty pounds on Earth, and here on Mars it felt more like seven.

“Here you go,” I said as I turned and handed it to Teal.

She brought it over to an open air lock.

“Ashley, clear below?” she called out.

“I’m well away. Go ahead.”

“Copy that,” Teal said.

She threw it out the opening. I pictured it flying through the air and landing in the dust sixty feet below. We weren’t worried about the ribs being damaged in the fall because they were, after all, constructed of the strongest metal ever made.

We’d decided it was a lot better doing it this way than carrying them down the stairs and then hauling ourselves back up. Doing that trip once or twice would have been all right, but we were in the process of moving over six hundred pieces. It had taken us almost three days but we were down to the last few. These ribs had contributed to the structural integrity of the ship. Now they were going to be the support beams of the greenhouse we were constructing.

Ashley, waiting below, took them over to the site of the greenhouse. Once they were all at the site, we’d work as a team to put them together. And while we were all members of the team, Teal was in charge. This was part of what she’d studied on the trip here, taking on what would have been Colonel Kim’s domain.

Basically this was like a gigantic build-a-greenhouse Lego set. I loved Lego, but then, who didn’t? The biggest challenge was that we were doing it while wearing our heavy Mars suits, which included cumbersome gloves. Despite the climate control in the suit, my fingers were getting clumsy and numb with the cold. And it would only get worse as the sun started to go down, and with it, the temperature. In the middle of the night, it would drop down to minus eighty degrees.

We were stripping down just one of the ships for the greenhouse. Each of the six supply ships had been constructed with similar support ribs. The plan had been for the crew to build numerous structures. Ultimately all the ribs on all the supply ships would have been used to construct those structures. Not anymore, though, not with just the three of us. Building all of those structures was just one of many tasks we wouldn’t be able to complete.

So much of what had been planned for our crew had been reduced out of necessity. We didn’t have the time, talent or training to carry out many of the tasks and experiments of the mission. Back at Mission Control they were dividing the tasks into categories.

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