Chapter 2: Breaching the Veil of Night

Rob spent the entire afternoon in meetings, listening to people talk about money, personnel, public relations and surprisingly, religious intolerance.

There were several groups of very fanatical evangelical fundamentalists out there who saw the planned trip to Mars as a refutation of 'God's word', because of course, whoever wrote the bible two thousand years ago was not a scientist, and failed to mention Mars or spaceships. 'The bible doesn't mention bullhorns either, but that didn't stop them from standing in front of Obsidian's offices around the world and shouting through them at the top of their lungs.' Rob thought.

Speaking of shouting at the top of your lungs. That night he discovered that it was indeed true that Wendy Fellowes was damned fine at a lot of things. He thought he had managed to keep up with her for the most part, but sleep came far too quickly to give it the post-coital analysis that the world class performance deserved.

When Rob came into the lab the next morning, he had good news and bad news waiting for him. The good news was that there was indeed a simple cause of the huge targeting inaccuracies. The sensor array system and the tracking system used off the shelf coupler components from two completely different product lines and the metal oxide coatings on the comb assemblies didn't match the metal oxide on the matching pinhole arrays. They solved the problem by throwing out the manufactured components and building their own.

The bad news was that this only got rid of the seriously wild errors. There were still an entire boatload of small scale inaccuracies being measured and the system guys could find no discernible source at the system level. That brought the sensor team back to either the quantum hashing problems that had hampered so much of this project or something else entirely. At least the elimination of the gross errors would make troubleshooting the fine errors possible, even if it wasn't going to be easy.

Rob thanked Victor and his crew, but the old Russian was dismissive of his teams efforts.

"It was nothing. We have developed an entire series of standard tests to run on components and their connectors. Materials that conduct electricity in any fashion can produce unsuspected traits at the drop of a hat, especially since they sit inside a planet-sized magnetic field that is eternally influencing them."

"We even have to subtract magnetic and gravitic field influences on some of the more delicate nano-scale components before we can be sure we have eliminated all the influences." DeeDee Ponders added.

Rob put Alex on the task of pinning down the source of the remaining errors. In addition to her other qualities, good and bad, the woman had the determination and focus of a mongoose stalking a cobra.

Wendy and Rob probably should not have tried getting a standing ovation from the judges at the mattress Olympics the previous night. Neither of them was in any shape for a rematch that night, but they did fall asleep with Wendy's head nestled in the crook of Rob's arm and her leg draped over his.

Rob's exhaustion may have played a part in his dreams that night, and if so he would probably be insisting on regular repeats in the future. He couldn't get DeeDee Ponders's words out of his head. 'subtract magnetic and gravitic fields' she had said, and in his dreams he had one chasing the other in some form or another for half the night. Of course he was right behind the both of them in a futile chase of his own. Somewhere in the second half of the night he began dreaming of one catching the other, repeated in infinite combinations, until one snarled pairing of fields blended together and seemed to flare brightly, right in front of his face.

Rob jumped back from the flare and found himself sitting up in bed with Wendy on the floor beside the bed.

He apologized like crazy and picked her up and laid her back in bed. Then apologized again and threw on a t-shirt and grabbed his Q-tap and sat down on the couch in the living room with a pad of paper and a pencil. It was three in the morning local time when he flipped the tap on. He was still hard at it four hours later when Wendy came out of the bedroom freshly showered and made coffee. He had most of it then or he probably wouldn't have noticed. Rob took the cup of coffee and the toasted muffin when it was offered by a fully dressed Wendy. He took the goodbye kiss as well.

"I'll tell them to expect you when your synapses stop firing. They'll understand." She said on her way out the door.

By ten he had it fairly well fleshed out. Even most of his side notes made sense. 'I need to get to the office to use the scanner to get some of these hand drawn diagrams into the system.' Rob thought to himself, only then realizing where he was and what time it was. He took a shower but didn't bother shaving. On his way to the office he tripped a link in his Q-tap to Dr. Fylakas, to see if he was available today.

Andy McKesson's return to the Nauru shipyard was premeditated, but early. Thanks to the incredible inventiveness of the 'kiddy corp' they had brought into the shipyard, the eighteen month schedule that had replaced the original five year project cycle the Joint Study Group had proposed had been condensed to nine. The IME had also finally won concessions from the U.S. Senate, only after Senator Montgomery was threatened with censure. As it was, all they got was an official okay to invite NASA to lend them as many of their people as they could use.

Of course at this point they didn't really need any of them, but Andy had a plan for them that would free up Rob Young to come work for him.

The department and sector heads at the shipyards had been among those invited to attend Andy and Cor's wedding, and so their arrival at the shipyards at long last was not quite the arrival of the outsiders it could have been. They had spent a good bit of time socializing with them during the reception, and in particular they made good use of Janet Dearing and Ryan Ardmore as buffers. The shipyard folks knew them and they knew Andy and Cor. Both had been with and among the shipyard crew from the beginning, documenting in words and pictures their heroic efforts in building and testing the Pai Lung.

They had asked NASA for eight people, and Cor and Andy brought them with them when they finally reported to Nauru. One of them was an NSA spy, but Andy had expected no less from their government. He was going to be free to spy all he wanted while working on the drive tuning crew. He was going to have a dedicated crew of the Awakened watching his every step outside of the power bays though. They're still not sure why the spooks felt it would be easier to sneak a spy in disguised as a fake scientist rather than as a fake pilot, but they had them out-gunned in the spying department anyway, thanks to the Gifts.

The trip out to Nauru was on a modified Obsidian Aurora III. This was the same model the President rode in now as his official Air Force One. This one was laid out in something of a similar fashion, and Andy had his own office towards the back of it. He had a brief sit down meeting with each of the NASA guys one at a time.

The first three NASA guys were all pilots, two were system specialists with no expertise in any of the systems they would be using, but Doctor Owen Gardner's specialty was in Astrodynamics, and him they really wanted.

"Doctor Gardner, Welcome to the IME. We have big plans for you sir."

"Big plans for me? What, I get to be the one standing at the big steering wheel in the publicity shots?"

"No sir, though now that you mention it, you would look good in one of those old cruise ship captain's uniforms. But, a few budding romances aside, this is no love boat. You are going to be busy teaching astrodynamics to our officers and bridge crews. They will be trusting our piloting to computers, but that doesn't mean we wish to remain ignorant of the theory and methods needed. This crew is ninety percent science geek, and those ninety percent are one hundred and fifty percent geek. They want to understand this stuff."

"I'm going to be teaching, in a classroom then, and nothing more?"

"No sir, assuming you can learn the nav and sensor systems well enough, you will become the Pai Lung's Chief of Navigation. You have too much experience and knowledge to put you anywhere else. The key will be how well you can adapt to the new systems. The people you will be teaching Orbital Mechanics to will be the same people teaching you how to use our systems."

"How much time will I have for my lessons?"

"We will give you all the time available. Right now that means at least two hours in the afternoon, every day but Sunday. I want you doing two groups, an overview course open to everyone who wants to attend, and a full immersion brain scrubbing course for the command crew, myself included. When you're done, we know what you know, or as close as you can come in six weeks."

"Why six weeks?" He asked, but I could see he felt he knew the answer that was coming.

"Because in six weeks, the Pai Lung is on its way to Mars."

Rob had a bad case of Owen Gardner on the brain. He was seeing the officious bastard in his sleep. Orbital Mechanics. Stellar fixes. flight path angles, mean anomalies and position vectors dueled in his brain like kids at the carnival, clamoring for his attention, which was always somewhere else, usually riding the roller coaster with velocity, momentum and time. The bastard actually had taken to pinging him via Q-net in the middle of the night and at odd hours during the day to ask him seemingly nonsensical questions, the answers to which always seemed to fire off in his brain just beneath all those other dancing demands clamoring for his attention during his dreams.

The speed of light, C, is measured these days in meters per second and is 1,079,252,848.8 kilometers per hour. We usually use the Light Second, a distance of 299,792,458 meters, as our reference when calculating solar distances. The distance from the Earth to the Moon is just over one light second, at approximately 1.282 light seconds. Why approximately? Because the Moon's orbit is not perfectly circular, sometimes she is a tad closer than average, sometimes a tad further away.

They hadn't tested it yet of course, but The drive crew thought they could get the gravity drive to push the Pai Lung around the solar system at a decent 2 or 3 percent of C. Limitations in the ability of the inertial compensators meant that they wouldn't be able to hit those peaks unless they were pushing something with no crew, or really dragging it out on a long haul, stretching the acceleration and deceleration out at both ends. No Earth to Moon in 30 seconds, not unless you didn't mind scraping the red smears off the inside of the hull afterwards.

As it was, with their projected launch window, and with this being one of the optimal years as far as Earth-Mars distances and orbits went,...

... The buzzer from the alarm was going off again. Dammit! Rob hated waking up with his mind already full of orbital graffiti courtesy of the good Doctor Gardner!

As happened so frequently these days, Rob got pulled away from the lab by a request to attend a meeting. They had learned to adjust for this on the fly, and he had plenty of confidence in either Ike or Alexandra to handle things in his absence. Alexandra had mellowed quite a bit once she had gotten used to things, but Ike was still a bit better at the 'human touch' side of things, so Rob tended to delegate Alexandra to handle the hard charging tasks and Ike got to handle the delicate personnel issues.

He was thinking these thoughts because his meeting turned out to be with Andy McKesson, and the first words out of him when Rob walked into the room had been about that very situation.

"Rob, if I pulled you off your section, who would you propose take your place?"

In the end, he had to pick Ike.

"Ike Dunham, and I'd suggest he make Alexandra Nascimento his second." I answered finally. "Either would do fine internally, but Ike is more personable and has a finer touch when dealing with the other sections."

It took him another moment to wonder where he was being shifted now, but he did finally think to ask.

"I'm moving again am I? Where to this time?"

"You are coming to work for me." Andy said. "Captain Brenneman likes to say my job title is assistant god. If his title is accurate, that makes you at least junior assistant god. I am understudying the Captain's job, and based on what Doctor Gardner has to say, you will at least be understudying his job as chief navigator, but you will also be learning everything I'm learning."

"Why me?" Rob asked, that familiar dazed feeling creeping over him again.

"Because you show the potential. Because I am a firm believer in meritocracy as a concept. Because you have earned a chance to be more than what you are currently asked to be. But there are other reasons. What would you guess they are?"

Rob thought about that. Running back over some thoughts he'd already had.

"You aren't planning on remaining on the Pai Lung after the Mars mission, you're a McKesson and have other fish to fry. You don't need to be here now, other than as a demonstration of McKesson commitment, and I expect you won't stick around after our return from Mars. If you're not going to be here, you want to leave someone behind when you leave that shares your perspective on things but can still get things done and you think I might be that guy."

Sometimes Rob hated it when he was right!

So almost against his will, and surely against someone's better judgment somewhere, Rob Young became an officer and a gentleman, a bridge officer anyway.

Alexandra Nascimento had a few words to say about the gentleman part when Rob told her that Ike was getting the nod as his replacement. The volume and vigor of her vitriol were the very things that won him the argument.

"It is this very attitude that makes me recommend Ike for this position over you Alex." Rob told her. "Ike is willing to take the time to hear explanations. He does not assume that someone else's actions must be intended to be hurtful. He asks for and listens to his co-workers opinions, and does not give them more or less weight because they did something a week ago that upset him."

Then Rob played back for her the sound of her yelling at him. He let her listen to herself call him every name in the book, cast aspersions on his manhood, ancestry and mental fitness. When it was done playing, he pointed out that the recording had been made from the lab two doors down. When the facts sank in finally, she ran off, embarrassed.

"Ike, I tore her down, but you're going to have to build her back up if you want her to be your second. Take DeeDee with you if she's free. Take Nat or Wendy with you if she's not."

Ike nodded. He knew as well as Rob did that Alex would try to turn the situation sexual if she thought it would give her an advantage. It was just the way she was wired.

It took three days to calm her down. 'Alex should have been thankful I wasn't working in the lab during those three days!', Rob thought, 'Because I would have ripped her a new one!'.

Ike had a different management style. He was far more laid back, but he did get their Brazilian bombshell back on track, and with her filling in as the sector second, she seemed happy, so Rob certainly wasn't going to pick nits over it.

In addition to everything else Rob would be doing, it was assigned to him to get the eighteen scientists who were coming along as passengers up to speed on the ship's safety systems. Mrs. McKesson, appropriately, would be handling their orientation to the Caldwell suits. Her nose crinkled cutely any time anyone referred to her as Mrs. McKesson.

There were some objections from a few of the scientists when Rob began assigning them ship duties. They had all had to win lotteries held among their professional communities to get their berths on this trip. Perhaps some of them felt like they held positions of privilege. The crew disabused them of that notion very quickly.

The geeks in the lab and the techno-jocks in the construction crew were used to waiting on themselves, but with extra hands aboard, it made no sense to pull someone from the Drive team to serve lunch, or have the people keeping the sensors calibrated from dropping what they were doing to do clean up. They did have a 'service section' of the crew, people whose job it was too cook the meals, wash the laundry and in general deal with the grunt work involved in day-to-day living. The rabble rousing professors settled down pretty quickly when they were shown what the rest of the crew schedules looked like. Besides, they were only assisting here and there. None of them were working more than an hour or two a day.

When Rob wasn't babysitting, he spent the rest of the next five weeks either bouncing brain cells against Doctor Gardner's personal game of Astrodynamic Breakout, or madly following Andy MecKesson up and down every corridor, accessway, hatch, tube and conduit in the Pai Lung. Every step of the way they were deluged in the data, opinion, theory, surmise, suspicion, hope, fear, dream and nightmare of every person responsible for every thing everywhere on and in her. Did you know that every single airtight hatch and every doorway up and down the length of her is numbered? And that the numbers can tell you exactly which section and subsection of the ship you are in, if only you knew the scheme?

Rob knew the scheme now. He'd personally verified that every hatch matched every doorway. He'd done the same thing to every fire extinguisher, emergency air pack, first aid station, radiation detector and 'you are here' sign on the Pai Lung. Every freakin' one!

Today they were examining the emergency overrides for the rewiring routines in the command clusters. There are five of them, the one on the bridge, plus the one in the engineering bay, as well as three emergency reserve 'slap and go' panels in the keels. If their ship was an old Windows PC, those 'slap and go's were the equivalent of a hard reboot. They are supposed to restore basic functionality to all the drive and life support systems no matter what. Big pieces of the ship would have to have been vaporized for them not to work. That was the theory.

Tomorrow afternoon they were going to test those slap and go switches, and they were going to do it while they were orbiting the moon! But before that, they would spend the morning getting a refresher course in using their new space suits, and in weightless maneuvering. Rob suspected breakfast was going to be lightly attended!

Weightlessness was fun, what little of it there was. The transition time for the slap and go switches to do a complete rewire and restart of the control systems was 1.74345 seconds. During the middle .765889 seconds, they were weightless. Everyone had been given plenty of warning and they still wound up with a broken wrist, a twisted knee and a half dozen sprains and bruises. Someone suggested that the default settings for the environmental gravity controls should be 'on' instead of 'off'. They'd have to see. They were repeating the whole series of tests again in a few days.

Ike Dunham and Tyrese Glover got the employee of the week title sewed up between them by the time they were halfway back to the shipyard. Ike came up with the clever idea of tying the slap and go switches through the Q-Net and into the Q-tap key-ID of the command staff. The on duty watch officer would have the ability to do a fast verbal authorization, and the rest of the command staff would be able to do one after giving a confirmation code. Tyrese then had the bright follow up idea of tying the entire command console into the Q-Net.

Once they were back on the ground and the excitement had faded it was decided there were too many inherent security problems with having the command consoles tied directly into the Q-Net, but by the time Rob got out of the weekly staffing and resource meeting, they had developed an entire separate Com-Net, that was strictly for command level traffic, including accessing a virtual command console that put you in front of a holographic set of bridge controls.

Now that he was an official bridge officer, Rob had to immediately dive into this whole new setup and learn it, front to back. Did you know there are a complete set of hands-free eye and facial controls for accessing the comm setup in a space suit? Even if you can't issue verbal commands you can still use what is somewhat laughingly referred to as the 'blink and twitch' system for navigating through all the drop down menus in the suit's HUD.

Rob was falling into a pattern that seemed strange but which he was incredibly grateful for. He would absorb all this stuff during the day, and then somehow he would integrate it all in his sleep. He woke up many a morning feeling like Neo in the Matrix, coming out of the training program. Instead of breathlessly declaring that 'I know Kung fu', Rob would mutter "I know emergency access override codes!" or something else equally as boring. Usually Wendy would mutter "That's good baby." without even waking up. When Rob mentioned this to Andy he expressed some concern at his difficulty sleeping and invited the both of them to lunch. They had a very nice time visiting with Andy and Cor, and of course Wendy had scads of questions about their recent wedding. Rob got the impression that they were giving Wendy an evaluation of some kind, maybe just trying to get a feel for what kind of a person she was. She must've passed though, because she was still with him when he woke up the next morning!

Their second trip to the Moon was slightly less traumatic as far as the reset tests went. The new defaults on the environmental gravity systems made the transition into and out of zero G almost seamless. They also tested the Q-tap assisted 'slap and go' setup, and Rob got to take his turn at running a reset through his.

A few brave people who had made it all the way through the training and orientation on the OPEE suit modifications got to do the initial testing on them, and once again Rob was cursed with being ahead of the curve, and was one of the lucky volunteers. OPEE stands for Orbit to Planetary Emergency Evacuation. These shoulder harness modifications to the standard Caldwell suit were considered add on equipment at first, but they were quickly added to the basic configuration for the space suit version. The ground based hazard and climate suits didn't need them.

Testing them consisted of activating them and then stepping into an emergency jettison chute and being spat out into open space.

In some ways it was a peaceful ride. Rob had thirty minutes, hanging in space, nothing but the sound of his own breathing and the vibration of the suits internal systems shifting material and making minor adjustments. The HUD in his suit was keeping him updated on his progress, telling him he was locked into a rescue beacon at a particular set of lunar coordinates and giving him an ETA that was updated every few seconds. He pushed his perceptions of that to the back of his brain after a few minutes and just took in the slowly expanding expanse of Lunar scenery below him, and let myself get lost in thought. He so seldom got time to just think these days, without other demands or distractions, it was almost a guilty pleasure. He chased another one of those energy field tangles that he had seen in his dreams, one that kept coming back. It didn't clamor at him in quite the insistent fashion the one he had used for his targeting solution had, but it did show up pretty often in his dreams.

OPEE began bleeping insistently, wanting to make sure Rob knew he was sixty seconds from the beacon and to warn him that he might have to do some manual overriding. A quick glance around told him he was in fine shape, but those tangles were going to have to wait for another day. A little manual assist to make it seem like he was just out for a casual stroll in the park, and he was happily in the arms of a waiting engineer.

"Hello boys, nice of you all to wait up for me." He said over the Q-comm on the ship's public channel and through it to the standard radio net the rest of the world was using.

"Glad you could drop in." Was the dry reply.

Their rescue beacon on the moon was located at the pre-construction engineering camp at Aristarchus. The area in and around Aristarchus Crater had long been looked at when considering moon base locations, but it had finally been settled on because it was at the lunar equator, and because there was a lot of data on it. In the end, all the time spent looking at it had become a reason on its own to consider it.

The engineers at ALB-1, as they called it, were technically speaking, U.N. Representatives, but mostly they were McKesson Technologies engineers working on contract to the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.

The idea for this base had been spawned by the same Joint Study Group that had spawned their Mars mission. Instead of spinning off into an independent operation, the Moon base had instead been handed back to the U.N. Two years later and they were still stuck handing in reports on soil samples and seismic studies.

They were good people though, and not just the McKesson guys either. Unlike their predecessors in the Apollo era, these guys went home for the weekends and spent it with their families on Earth.

Once the 'ahead of the curve' guys had their introduction to OPEE, it was time to let everyone else have a go. Rob got to babysit a dozen crew and staff through the same ride he had just experienced. The UN guys left them alone and went back to work, once they were confident the ship's personnel weren't going to mess up their equipment.

For every drill the crew was subjected to, those who had been shanghaied into the bridge crew did two more. They did every drill the crew did before they did it, then they did it when the rest of the crew did it, and if necessary they did it again afterwards to clean up and correct anything they didn't like.

Added to that were bridge drills. Emergency stops, emergency maneuvers, command disaster recovery, and scenario after scenario after scenario. They called the scenario work 'Murphy Drills'. If anything that could go wrong would go wrong, then there had to be a procedure covering it, and that meant they had to drill themselves in that procedure. Personally, Rob thought Victor Emanoff was using them to work through some personal demons left over from his years in the Russian submarine service. They called him Captain Murphy to his face during drill debriefings and he enjoyed it!

Finally the day came. There were some small ceremonies, mostly shipyard and naval rituals designed to ward off bad luck and encourage a safe return. Sailors are a superstitious bunch, and apparently the vacuum-based versions are no different. There were huge parties back in the U.S, Russia, China and everywhere else they could scrape up a legitimate excuse.

They were used to the lift off procedure by now, and left Nauru shipyard with hardly a tremor. Wendy had been one of the people who had procurement and supply assigned as an extra duty, and she had been busy the past three days making sure the ships stores were aboard and in their proper locations. They docked at the IOH for a brief ceremony, but that was just a PR opportunity, friendly as it was.

The Pai Lung broke orbit two hours later. Rob was on the bridge and got to sign the log, along with all the other official bridge crew. They then stood together for a picture, holding the log book. From there he went back to his quarters and hit the sack. As a very junior bridge officer, he got stuck serving the late watch.

Thirty days to Mars should be as exciting as it sounds, but its not. Rob had three rotations through the watch schedule during that time, and one rotation off. The time spent on watch was shared with two other officers during the off watches, and there were five of us on the main watch. Main watch was shifted slightly during the thirty days so they could do live Q-net feeds back to Earth. The Pai Lung was one big mobile Q-Node, but one of their very first tasks when they made Mars orbit would be to deploy a series of permanent orbital Martian Q-Nodes.

'I should probably stop and spend some time one of these days, with my copious amounts of free time, and think about what an impact our FTL communications breakthrough was going to mean', Rob thought. They had adjusted to their new Q-tap system, and the Q-net pretty easily, but they were still not really aware of the impact of it outside of their own uses. They were more pleased by the immense increases in bandwidth that had come along with the new system.

Once they had the new Q-Nodes in orbit around Mars they were going to be ushering in a new era in communications. Earth - Mars voice, data and video in real time. They were already doing it in transit, but there were some quality and reliability issues having to do with gravitic perturbations and solar flares. What Mickey Brooks called 'Fluctuations in the Aether'.

Rob discovered within the first few days of travel that the junior officer is the morale officer. He got to settle disputes, calm the angry, cheer up the depressed, comfort the lovelorn and chasten the mischievous. Andy and Cor actually took pity on him after a week and informed the captain that since they were not a truly military vessel they would not follow every tradition. The two of them took over all the counseling and comforting. Rob was still in charge of the ship's entertainment though, and at first he approached that with some serious trepidation. An offhand comment by Morrie Scheufelt, one of the Gravity Drive guys, and a member of the 'Gravy Geeks' from MIT was what saved him. He commented about having to miss the Boston Symphony's annual Concert in the Commons. With all the bandwidth available, and with all this instantaneous interplanetary communicating going on, he realized they had access to an entire planet full of entertainment.

They had a certain amount of name recognition, and the world was indeed watching with interest, so he had no trouble making arrangements with various movie studios, television networks and production companies to begin beaming us almost anything they wanted. Morrie got his Summer concert in the park.

They got to see Rocky 17 at the same time everyone else in the United States did.

Okay, not really.

But they did get their pick of first run movies, and television broadcasts. Most of the TV Viewing was watching baseball and other live events. They didn't have too many soap opera addicts, or TV addicts in general. They got offers from opera, ballet and symphony companies across the globe, and they accepted every offer. Something was playing somewhere on the ship all the time.

Standing a watch was an interesting experience. Rob wasn't sure that he enjoyed it, but it was educational, and provided a certain perspective on Captain Brenneman and Commander Emanoff.

What time Rob had left over after doing what remained of his duties as morale officer, his continuing Astrodynamics lessons with Doctor Gardner and lending a hand to Alexandra and the rest of the Sensor team whenever some minor oddity showed up, he spent with Wendy, or he spent it 'thinking'.

Rob Young was the Pai Lung's only practicing quantum physicist. Everyone else had their areas of expertise, whether it be gravitics, fusion, nanotics, metallurgy, you name it, the staff were a varied bunch, and every one of them were the cream of the new crop of post grads. They had multiples in most of the disciplines, especially in gravitics and physics. They even had two medical doctors, the only two aboard who didn't put PhD after their names. But Rob was the only quantum physicist, and in his spare time he was letting those visions of the tangled gravitic fields drive him nuts! He shouldn't be dreaming in gravitics dammit!!

Wendy, lovely as she was, and sweet and all, was still arguably the world's foremost authority on nano-scale metallurgy. She was one of the people who couldn't wait to get to Mars and unpack her tools. Rob on the other hand was happy right now, and along with Alexandra Nascimento and Tyrese Glover, was up to his neck in data. They were comparing readouts from the direct instrumentation packages on the Pai Lung's hull to the inputs they got from the remote sensors.

When they spoke of the Sensor Array in general terms it was always easiest to speak of the visible light components that allowed them to see things remotely, but in reality, the Sensor system got the Array tag added because it was passing the full electromagnetic spectrum as well as gravitic signatures and particle density and composition. The longer they collected data over a wider and wider set of conditions, the more accurately they could tune the array.

The sensors were pretty much at 100% accuracy with the visible light components, just because they had a longer history of observations to make comparisons to. They were in the 95-98% range with infrared and radio waves, with the rest of the spectrum dropping behind them. they still felt they were at least at 85%, even with the least studied ones. The more data they collected, and the more accurately they got the array tuned, the easier it was for us to boost the sensitivity. There were the occasional 'stray' signal or 'random fluctuation' in a signal that they had no source for, or understanding of. As far as the main sensors went, they just programmed the processors to drop them out. As far as their research sensors went, they were tracking and recording everything. Just because they didn't know what it meant now didn't mean they might not understand it later.

They took up orbit around Mars on day 29. Captain Brenneman suggested that they must've gone through the 'Interplanetary Date Line and moved ahead a day, or else they 'caught a tailwind' or something, but Rob smelled a Public Relations rat and kept his mouth shut when he broadcast that back to Earth. Later they learned that it is possible for computers to make rounding errors, especially when trying to do calculations based on the sure knowledge that there is no such thing as a partial day.

Rob also got to watch Andy and Cor have a 'heartwarming chat' via the Q-Net with both sets of parents as well as Andy's little brother Mikey, who was at that cute pre-school/kindergarten age. There were a few ceremonies and a lot of speeches, but Rob fortunately got to miss most of it, as he was involved in deploying the three Q-Node satellites into Mars orbit. Doctor Gardner was quite annoying with his constant reminders of how in the old days artificial satellites required spot on calculations and pure orbital mechanics to keep them were they belonged in space. These days they had the luxury of being able to simply program the grav systems to maintain a precise altitude and location.

Their three satellites were also serving as Mars' first Global Positioning System, and almost the first thing they had to do when they got people on the surface was to calibrate their mapping units and tracker/transponders to the new system. These systems were built into the Caldwell suit's core comm module.

They had no intention of landing the entire Pai Lung on Mars. This decision was based on the familiar engineering axiom that warned against putting all your eggs in one basket. Especially when the eggs were representing human lives. Instead, they had three SAHMs. One of their few examples of succumbing to acronym-itis, SAHM stood for Surface-Assembled Habitat Module. Additionally they had the Zephyr and the Sirocco. These two birds were their orbital transports, and were actually heavily modified Obsidian Hurricane Class transports, the same ones currently used to transport people and supplies to the IOH back in Earth orbit.

Their transports were based on a product engineered to a mind-numbingly long list of government-mandated design minimums, so they were incredibly over-engineered and over-powered for their size, but in a pinch the entire ship's complement of crew and passengers could make the transit back to Earth in them, crammed to the gills and living on emergency rations and reconstituted water, but they would make it back. They were also engineered with what Arne Walker described as 'a slightly excessive number' of external hard points. If they wound up needing something to be a tractor, plow, crane, bus, buoy or barbecue, they would be able to add it to the outside of one of their two birds and make it happen.

There had been a lot of arguing amongst the crew, from the top on down, about who was going to be the first to step on Martian soil. The crew collectively considered it a tossup between Captain Brenneman and Andy McKesson. Neither of them wanted it. Too predictable they said. So a week out of orbit, they held a lottery. The winner was one of the systems staff, Howard Dexter. Yes, yet another asterisk would have to be entered into the histories being written back on Earth.

Howard did his duty, and as his foot touched Martian soil, even managed to utter a few words that had at least the patina of inspiration.

"From Earth to Mars. This first step is just a symbol for many more first steps to come." He said. Back on Earth, billions of people cheered and the name Howard Dexter once again was at the forefront of the Earth's collective consciousness.

Rob lost his girlfriend for the next ten days. As a junior officer, he had to oversee the unloading and landing of the SAHMs. They had built in grav drives and shields, so it was a mindless chore. The assembly was left to those who would be living in them for the next few weeks, and he was back in orbit within a few hours. Wendy's drilling rig, which she shared with a team of mineralogists and geologists was one of three that had been brought. The second was under the control of the xenobiologists and the other life science types. The third was still packed safely away in its container and was officially a spare. If everything went well with the two in use, the third would eventually be used for sampling Deimos and Phobos, Mars' two moons. Wendy was already gone with her drill rig by the time Rob got back from his delivery

Rob was one of several people designated to ferry a couple of the NASA guys over to check on the historical stuff. They were going to bring back one of the two Martian rovers and they would take pictures of everything else. Alexei Baranov was also going to be taking a crew to check on some of the old soviet era Mars landers and the one British attempt, the Beagle, which was one of the many 'failed' landing attempts on Mars. Everybody who tried had failures getting a lander safely on Mars. The two rovers that had touched down in 2004 were the biggest successes, and one of them was going to come home and take its place alongside the Mercury capsule and other pieces of space history in the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian.

While Rob didn't get involved in the 'construction' phase of hooking the three SAHMs together, he did get to supervise tapping into the new orbiting Q-Node system. They had a primary and a backup comm unit in the habitat, and they also set up a local net for everyone. He flipped the switch that activated the tie in and sent out over the new node and through the ship node as well.

"Mars Base reporting. Mars Net now online." He got a ragged round of cheers back on the Sensor staff's public comm channel. It was cut short when Captain Brenneman came on shortly thereafter.

"Earth, this is Mars reporting. Mars Base is online."