REENTRY WINDOW

As originally published in the best selling anthology, Synchronic, 2014.

In fondest memory of Ray Bradbury.

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REENTRY WINDOW

by

Eric Tozzi

"I can't believe what I'm about to say—can't believe this is really happening. Something's landed here on Mars. Just a half mile from my current position. I watched it decelerate, so I'm certain it's not a meteor. It looked like a parachute deployed, and a piece of it fell away—maybe a heat shield. I don't know what to make of this. There were no other flights scheduled but ours. No way it's from Earth. No way."

Brett Lockwood angled his gloved hand toward the glass of his helmet to read the touch screen on his wrist. His suit had three hours of life support left. Enough time to investigate the strange object. Enough time to make it back to his lander. But after that? He'd have to engage the Mars Ascent Engine, leave the surface, and rendezvous in orbit with his crew in Epoch 1. Once systems checked out, they could start recalculating a trip back to Earth. They'd have to leave now, ahead of schedule. It was too dangerous out here. But based on the orbits of Earth and Mars, getting back home at this point might be impossible.

It was in that moment that Brett felt it sink in, an injection of resignation bleeding into his stomach, possessing his whole body, staking out a stronghold in his mind. The window's closed, Brett. There's no going home. The thought came loudly. But he muscled past it. No. No, there's still a chance! With a carefully planned gravity assist, they could build enough velocity and make it back to Earth safely.

Brett swept his display to make sure that audio was live, still recording his every word. It was. A tiny waveform at the bottom right of the screen pulsed in time with the sound of his voice.

"Still recording," he said, as if to remind himself to keep talking. He found it to be a comfort—the sound of his voice in that helmet. He'd been waiting for a response from his friend Martin Locke, flight navigator on Epoch 1, or from any of the rest of his crew: Debra Stone, William Chu, Howard Black, Kate Wallace. He could imagine hearing them as clearly as he had on any one of the two hundred days they'd spent together on the flight to Mars, each with their own distinct voice, like instruments in an orchestra. Singing now in his memory. But that's all they were. A memory. They weren't responding to his calls. As if... as if the anomaly had done something to them. Yes, the anomaly—it's why they came here to Mars in the first place.

Fifteen years earlier, the planetary exploration program had been pronounced dead. Prior to that, there had been plans for a robotic sample return mission, and even a manned mission to set up a permanent habitat on the surface of Mars. But over time, economies tanked, political will failed, people lost interest—and space exploration, whether manned or robotic, was buried and forgotten. One by one, deep-space missions were truncated and spacecraft abandoned, left to die in the uncharitable coldness of the solar system.

It was the Mars atmospheric anomaly that resurrected the planetary and deep-space exploration programs from the ashes of oblivion.

Initially described as a peculiar opening, or window, in the top of the Martian atmosphere, the anomaly soon became the primary target of investigation of the MAVEN Orbiting Spacecraft. MAVEN, or Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution, had been sent to Mars for a routine study of the upper atmosphere; scientists were hoping to learn why the red planet had lost most of its atmosphere over the last several billion years. But MAVEN discovered much more. On a routine orbit, it detected a strong inflow of solar particles moving toward a focal point in the atmosphere—a point that was generating a massive quantum gravity field spike. The phenomenon, as a whole, resembled some sort of vortex.