Crimson Sky
by Eric Choi
Eric Choi is a Canadian aerospace engineer, writer and editor. He holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering science and a master’s degree in aerospace engineering, both from the University of Toronto. The first recipient of the Isaac Asimov Award (now the Dell Magazines Award) for his novelette “Dedication”, he is also a two-time winner of the Canadian Prix Aurora Award for “Crimson Sky” and for co-editing The Dragon and the Stars with Derwin Mak. He also co-edited the hard SF anthology Carbide Tipped Pens with Ben Bova. Visit his website www.aerospacewriter.ca or follow him on Twitter @AerospaceWriter.
Press Release
Date: Ls 117.43, 59 A.L.
Source: The Bessie Coleman Foundation
A Voliris 3600 lighter-than-air vehicle took off today from Yeager Base, Arabia Terra, at 07:22 Coordinated Mars Time, launching a bold attempt to set a new Martian record for the longest flight made by an aircraft. Piloted by Carl Gablenz, with funding from the Bessie Coleman Foundation and support from Thomas Mutch University, the blimp is expected to fly over 600 nautical miles in approximately 80 hours. Gablenz is scheduled to land at Laurel Clark Station on the western edge of Isidis Planitia.
Link here for video and images of the departure.
Every med-pilot does their own things before flying.
If anyone were to ask about their routines, Martian med-pilots would swear that whatever they did was based on method and procedure, never superstition. Some of them, usually the grizzled veterans, hung out in the ready room, perhaps drinking coffee or watching videos or playing solitaire. Newbies might be found in the map room studying the latest mission profiles, or going over operational procedures in a simulator.
When she wasn’t strength training in the gym, Maggie McConachie drank coffee and read journals while listening to the irregular beat of heliocentric jazz. Helio had been all the rage when she was growing up. Her dad had loved it, and she too had learned to relish its strange rhythms. She now read her journals to its siren call. Never aviation or medical journals, though—Maggie’s pleasure reading was scientific journals. Dad had still been a grad student when she was a baby, and he would often lull her to sleep by singing papers he had to read, thereby killing two birds with one stone. Maggie might very well be the only person in the solar system to find soothing comfort in the bizarre medley of heliocentric jazz and partial differential equations.
A framed still image of Maggie as a young child, with her father at her side, broke the grey monotony of the otherwise spartan walls of her quarters. Her dad used to travel frequently to scientific conferences and would often bring his young family along. Maggie must have been around two or three Earth years old at the time the picture was taken, in a boarding gate waiting area at the old LaGuardia Airport. They were standing in front of the windows looking out onto the apron, her father kneeling beside her as she pointed a short, podgy finger at a passing airplane.
The call came in at 08:41 MTC. Maggie was next up in the flight rotation.
“Med-Three here.”
The message was terse. She nodded and put down the reader, stealing a quick glance at the picture before dashing out of her quarters, the music fading to silence before the door closed behind her.
Navigating the claustrophobic hallways and ladders of Syrtis Station, she found her way to the operations center in less than a minute. Ops was crowded, as usual, with teams of technicians seated at their workstations. Liu Huang, the Air Search Coordinator, turned to her and nodded as she entered the room. In the middle, surrounded by banks of screens, was Charles Voisin, the chief Search Master for the Mars Search and Rescue Service at Syrtis Station. Maggie approached Charles, carefully squeezing through narrow rows of equipment and workstations.
“Good morning, Maggie. I have an excellent mission for you.” Charles was a slight man of medium height. His angular face was crowned by curly dark hair, with a neatly trimmed moustache and large soulful eyes that always had slight bags under them, as if he never quite got enough sleep. Maggie thought Charles looked a little bit like her dad when he was young. “We have an aircraft down.”
“Where’s the ELT?” Maggie asked.
Liu uploaded a panoramic map to the wall screen. A flashing icon with the registration M4-LGA indicated the approximate signal source from the downed aircraft’s emergency locator transmitter. “Arabia Terra, near the southwest rim of Antoniadi Crater.”
“That’s getting awfully close to the bingo fuel radius of the chopper,” Maggie said, referring to the farthest distance she could safely fly before having to either return to base or find an alternate landing site for fuel. The latter were extremely rare on Mars.
“There aren’t any permanent settlements at Antoniadi yet. Who’s out there?” Maggie paused for a moment. “Oh, for the love of... It’s that guy trying to set the record, isn’t it? Carl...Gablenz?”
“Yes.”
“But he’s only been up since...what, yesterday, and he’s in trouble already? As if we’re not busy enough already without having to pull damn stunt pilots out of their self-inflicted messes.” Maggie made a face. “Isn’t he supposed to be rich? Can we send this playboy the bill?”
“We do not go after people for costs just because they have the money to pay for it,” Charles said gently. “Someone gets lost or goes down, we go help them. That’s our job.”
“Who says universal healthcare is dead, huh?”
Charles shrugged.
“All right, then. Liu, get me the METARs and PIREPs,” Maggie said, referring to the meteorological aviation reports and pilot weather reports. “Start with the upper level weather—wind speed, bearing aloft and temperature. I’ll also need the forecasts and updates for the target area as well as current weather on-scene, especially site visibility.”
“Roger that,” said Liu. He called up a display. “We have a low pressure trough approaching the crash site from the northwest.”
As Liu continued with the weather briefing, Maggie pulled out a tablet to prepare her flight plan.
“We have requested Mr. Gablenz’ medical records from Earth,” said Charles. He consulted another display. “The Harmakhis-7 satellite will be passing over that area in about twenty minutes. We will transmit all data to you en route as it becomes available.”
“All right, Charles.” She pronounced his name Anglo style, with a hard “ch” sound.
“Soyez prudent, Maggie.”
She looked at him with a blank expression.
“You have no idea what I just said, do you?” His moustache twitched in amusement. “No matter, although I wish you would at least try to pronounce my name correctly.”
Maggie tapped the tablet to file her completed flight plan. “Just make sure the coffee’s hot when I’m back.” She dashed out of the operations center and went to put on her biosuit. Ten minutes later, she was on the pad.
MarsSAR employed the Bell-Xīnshìjiè BX-719A helicopter. A two-armed dexterous robot nicknamed Chop-Chop performed near-continuous systems diagnostics and routine line maintenance for the BX-719 on ready standby. The ready vehicle was further checked every couple of hours by a human technician who performed a more detailed inspection and then signed-off the helicopter as ready to fly. This minimized the time between a call coming in and when the med-pilot could be dispatched.
“Liu, please confirm the flight status of vehicle,” Maggie radioed.
“The last A-check was completed 38 hours ago,” Liu reported. “No major faults. One minor fault, an intermittent indication on the starboard landing light status, not a MEL issue. Caution memory is clear. Vehicle flight status is green.”
“Thanks, Liu.”
Formal assurances aside, Maggie always made a point of taking a minute to do a quick check herself. After one of her early flights, a technician on the Air Search Coordinator’s team—perhaps insulted by her apparent lack of trust—asked her why she did it. She told her the truth: “Because I want to stay alive.” Chop-Chop took no offence.
Every med-pilot does their own things before flying.
Jumping into the seat, Maggie checked the status of the liquid hydrogen and oxygen tanks, the regenerative fuel cells and the batteries, as well as the on-board medical equipment. Finding everything in order, she hopped out and did a quick circuit around the chopper, starting from the port side and working counter-clockwise. On the ground, the BX-719 sat on four landing legs with articulated foot pads. Maggie looked for leaks in the shock absorbers of the portside pair. She then scanned the port engine pod and its ten-bladed propeller for damage. The BX-719 was equipped with pusher props on each side, which served to increase the chopper’s speed while counteracting the torque of the large main rotor through differential thrust.
She then climbed to the top of the helicopter and looked at the transmission well and the main rotor for anomalies. The BX-719’s rotor had four low aspect ratio blades made of reinforced Kevlar epoxy skin stretched over a skeleton of graphite epoxy spars and ribs. Resembling giant fan blades, they were twisted along their lengths, and the top and bottom surfaces were equipped with a pair of upper and lower boundary layer trips to produce an optimal lift distribution.
After jumping down, Maggie went to look at the last major component of the helicopter, a large V-shaped horizontal stabilizer at the rear of the aircraft. She scanned the elevator and trim tab, and then manually moved the elevator up and down. Once the portside check was finished, she repeated the procedure on the other side of the helicopter.
With her personal inspection ritual completed, she returned to the cockpit, strapped herself into the pilot’s seat and plugged her biosuit into the helicopter’s power and life support system. With the exception of a large forward windshield, the cockpit was open and unpressurized. She powered up the flight management system and avionics, started the engines and commenced the takeoff procedure.
“Syrtis Station, MarsSAR-3 is ready for departure.”
“MarsSAR-3, you are cleared for departure. Surface winds are from two-seven-zero at eleven knots, gusting to twenty. Good luck, Maggie.”
Maggie confirmed the callout with the meteorological data displayed on the augmented reality projection on the inside of her helmet. “Thanks, Liu.”
She raised the collective with practiced confidence and brought the helicopter to a hover over the pad. After a final check of the instruments and the flight controls, she applied more collective and pushed the cyclic forward, translating the BX-719 to forward motion.
This was already Maggie’s sixth mission since being assigned to Syrtis less than eight Earth months ago. By necessity, they were all solo missions. A lone med-pilot plus the patient (or two, if the latter were light enough) was all the helicopter could lift in the thin Martian atmosphere. If there were more casualties, she could only take back the one or two most critically injured. For the remainder, she would do her best to stabilize them on site, to await either her return or the arrival of a MarsSAR ground team.
Every mission was different, but there were also similarities—most notably, the way she felt during the outbound flight. Like many young pilots, she was always geared up, her adrenaline constantly pumping. She knew exactly what she had to do; her training made that a certainty. Yet, at the back of her mind, there were always questions: How am I going to pull this off? What surprises await me?
Maggie didn’t know much about this Carl Gablenz character, just brief clips of stuff she’d seen on media. He was probably one of those self-made rich people who had racked up a fortune in finance at Clavius. Somebody once tried to climb the four “Mons of Tharsis” in one year but quit after getting stuck somewhere halfway up Pavonis. Maggie thought it might have been Carl. She was pretty sure he was the guy who had tried to do a solo balloon circumnavigation of Titan. That had been a failure, as well. Maggie wondered if he’d ever succeeded in any of his crazy stunts.
If nothing else, she really hoped he was still alive when she found him. The paperwork for processing dead people was horrendous.
Maggie’s thoughts were interrupted by a radio report from Liu.
“I have good news and bad news,” he said. “Which would you like first?”
“Surprise me.”
“Here is the data from Harmakhis-7, hot off the downlink.” As he spoke, an image appeared on Maggie’s augmented reality display showing a grey truncated ellipsoid with stubby fins against a crimson background. “We have pinpointed the crash site, and the coordinates are being entered into your FMS now.”
Maggie confirmed that the helicopter’s flight management system had accepted the navigational data. “I take it that’s the good news. What’s the bad?”
Another image appeared inside her helmet. At first, it appeared to show a featureless Martian plain. But as the contrast was enhanced, a pair of lines cutting across the surface became visible. They resembled shallow trenches, somewhat like those left by fingers scraping across fine sand, but on a much larger scale. According to the display, they were several hundred feet in length.
“Dust devil tracks,” she said grimly.
“Yes. They are probably what brought down our intrepid adventurer Gablenz.” If it had been at low altitude, the slow-moving blimp and its possibly tired pilot would have been easy prey for the strong whirlwinds.
Maggie gritted her teeth. “So which Department bureaucrat should we call to ask about our lidars?” The MarsSAR fleet was supposed to have been equipped with laser detection and ranging units months ago. Remote Syrtis Station was still waiting.
“Be careful, Maggie. Syrtis Station out.”
She frowned, contemplating her situation. Martian dust devils were difficult to see, and without a lidar system there was no reliable way to detect one until she literally flew into it. But she remembered reading a journal paper about how the swirling dust often became charged through triboelectric effects, producing low frequency radio emissions. Maggie tuned one of the helicopter’s receivers to pick up in the lower AM band. She wished she had more data, but with luck the radio might give her a few seconds of warning.
Maggie let the autopilot fly most of the course, guided by data from the Harmakhis-7 satellite. She took over manual control as she approached the crash site, flying a circular observation run around the downed aircraft.
“I have a visual of the target,” Maggie reported. “Video and data telemetry on. Attempting to link-in with the aircraft’s flight data recorder.” The link status icon on her augmented reality display remained a red X. “No joy. Liu, where are we?”
“A-OK on your data and video, I’m seeing you fine. No link to the FDR. Please try again.” Liu’s voice crackled over the radio. “We... picking up interference...”
“Copy that,” Maggie replied.
Maggie continued to circle the crash site, transmitting video and data back to Syrtis. The blimp was tilted about thirty degrees to the surface, its cruciform fins pointed in the air and its crumpled nose planted into the ground. Except for the ruptured forward ballonets, which had lost their hydrogen harmlessly to the carbon dioxide Martian atmosphere, the solar cell-covered envelope still largely retained its shape. The left-side ducted-fan thruster pod was damaged, but otherwise the gondola housing the pilot also appeared relatively intact.
“...doesn’t look good,” Liu said.
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Still...no link.” Liu’s voice was dropping out intermittently. “Their communications subsystem...damaged, proceed...caution...”
“Boys and their toys,” Maggie muttered. “Why do we let idiots do these stunts?”
Maggie landed about a hundred feet from the crashed blimp. As the helicopter’s huge fan-like rotors slowed, she released her seat harness and switched life support from the helicopter’s to her biosuit’s internal system before disconnecting the umbilical and climbing out of the cockpit. Maggie went around to the helicopter’s trauma bay and deployed the stretcher, picking up the medical kit and portable life support unit before making her way out to the crashed blimp. It was a physically demanding task, even in three-eighths gravity.
“Syrtis Station to MarsSAR-3.” This time, the radio was clear.
“Go ahead, Liu.”
“We have received Mr. Gablenz’ medical records from Earth.”
“Any allergies or relevant preconditions I should know about?”
“None.”
When Maggie got to the unpressurized gondola, she found Carl Gablenz unconscious, still strapped in his seat. Carl’s biosuit, like Maggie’s, was a sleek, form-fitting garment that applied counter-pressure to the body mechanically rather than barometrically with air like the bulky old spacesuits of the first human Mars landings. Maggie peered into the hard, transparent, bulbous helmet. Carl looked younger than the twenty-five Martian years indicated in his medical records. With his eyes shut, his roundish face looked almost serene, and his black hair had only the slightest streaks of grey. She could not see any obvious signs of an airway obstruction like vomit, and a small patch of condensate on the inside of the helmet showed he was still breathing. Carl was indeed alive—to Maggie’s great relief.
With efficient skill, Maggie unplugged Carl’s biosuit umbilical from the blimp’s dying life support and connected it to her portable unit. She initiating a wireless link with the biosuit computer and transmitted the MarsSAR key to access the embedded medical sensors. Next, she commanded the biosuit’s smartskin to rigidize in order to immobilize its occupant as much as possible. On Earth, or in a pressurized Martian habitat, Maggie would have checked her patient’s blood circulation by pressing their finger or toe nails and observing the capillary refill, but this was not possible through biosuit’s gloves.
“Syrtis Station, this is MarsSAR-3. The patient is unconscious but breathing. Biosuit integrity has not been breached. His mean arterial pressure is sixty-seven.”
“Copy that,” said Liu.
Suddenly, Carl let out a low moan.
“My name is Maggie McConachie, from Mars Search and Rescue,” she responded calmly. “You’re going to be fine. We’ll get you out of here very soon.”
She would soon have to move Carl, but there was nothing more she could do to restrain his neck and cervical spine beyond rigidizing the biosuit’s smartskin. Attempting to insert a brace or splint would require taking off his helmet. EVA trauma protocols still left much to be desired. It was medical heresy to not better restrain the neck, but she had no choice but to be careful and keep any necessary motions as gentle as possible.
“Syrtis Station, the patient is semi-conscious,” Maggie reported. “Pulse steady, blood pressure systolic 80, respiratory rate 12, temperature 37.6. Level of consciousness is GCS 5. I’m going to oxygenate him now.” She commanded the portable life support unit to vent the air in Carl’s helmet and replace it with pure oxygen. She could see his eyes start to flutter. He looked like he was trying to say something. Maggie felt Carl’s legs and arms, looking for signs of broken bones and finding none. “I’m going to administer Ringer’s lactate for fluid volume resuscitation.”
“Data...”
Maggie blinked. The voice on the radio was not Liu’s. “Mr. Gablenz?”
“Important, data...”
“Don’t worry, Mr. Gablenz,” Maggie said. “We’ll have you on your way very shortly. Everything’s fine.” She pulled an EVA syringe from her med kit and jabbed it hard into Carl’s left forearm. The Ringer’s solution was delivered in seconds, and Maggie withdrew the syringe. A normally functioning biosuit’s smartskin could self-seal millimeter-sized punctures, but for the sake of time Maggie simply slapped a patch over the pinprick.
“We have a yellow caution on oxygen constraints,” Liu warned. “You’d better start heading back to the chopper soon.”
Maggie pulled the stretcher up beside Carl. She was about to release the harness that held him in the pilot’s seat when she noticed a small still image stuck to the control panel. It was of a young girl, probably about one or two Mars years of age, sitting in the flight deck of some aircraft or spacecraft, pointing at the displays and controls.
Carefully supporting the upper body to minimize neck movements, Maggie slowly slid Carl off the seat and onto the stretcher. She briefly derigidized the biosuit’s waist to lay him down, relocking the smartskin after he was fully reclined and strapped in. With the patient secure, Maggie began to push the stretcher back to the helicopter. She had just pulled up to the trauma bay when suddenly the stretcher began to thrash ever so slightly.
“Get...data...”
“Data?” Maggie repeated. She thought about the blimp’s flight data recorder and her earlier inability to link-in. But there was nothing more she could do now. The recorders would have to be physically recovered whenever the crash investigation team from the Mars Transportation Safety Board showed up.
“Sir, I cannot recover the FDR data at this time,” Maggie explained. “That will have to wait for the MTSB team. There is no time to go back to the wreckage now.”
“Not flight data...science...”
“What?”
“...data chit, my cuff...” Carl lapsed back into unconsciousness.
Maggie looked at Carl’s arms and spotted a small velcro-sealed pocket on the biosuit near his left wrist. Her finger fished inside and produced a data chit. She stared at the small sliver for a moment before putting it into her own biosuit’s pocket. Then she docked the stretcher to the helicopter’s trauma bay, deflating the wheels before pushing it all the way inside and securing it. Finally, she unplugged Carl’s biosuit umbilical from the portable life support unit and connected it to the helicopter’s system.
“Syrtis Station, this is MarsSAR-3,” Maggie said as she strapped herself back into the pilot’s seat. “The patient is secure. I am commencing my return now.”
Maggie raised the collective and the helicopter lifted off from Arabia Terra, kicking up a small amount of ruddy dust in its wake, and headed in a south-easterly direction back towards Syrtis. Maggie watched the altimeter display on her augmented reality visor count up past 1,000 feet above ground level.
She activated the autopilot and settled back in the seat, occasionally glancing at the display in her helmet that was monitoring Carl’s medical parameters such as heart rate, body temperature, respiration, blood pressure and oxygen saturation. Her thoughts turned to Carl’s data chit. She pulled it out of her pocket and plugged it in. Another display popped into her helmet, showing parameters of a different kind: wind speed and direction, temperature, barometric pressure, relative humidity, atmospheric opacity.
“Meteorology.” At last, she understood. “Carl was collecting science data.”
“Maggie,” Liu called in, “when you have a moment could you please transmit—”
“Hey, Liu? I didn’t copy your last—”
The AM radio crackled to life.
“Tabarnak!” Maggie immediately disengaged the autopilot, pushing the cyclic forward and pulling hard on the collective. The helicopter began to accelerate, and the altimeter reading crept past 2,000 feet.
A few seconds later, it hit.
Maggie was pressed into her seat as the helicopter abruptly lofted upward. A moment later, she felt the seat drop out from under her, and she was slammed hard against the harness. She struggled to compensate as the helicopter yawed violently to starboard, but the controls were sluggish. On her augmented reality display, every icon that had anything to do with the helicopter’s electrical system was lit up. She lost the flight management system and the avionics, and the fuel cells went offline.
With painful slowness, the controls began to respond. Maggie managed to stop the yaw and leveled out the helicopter. The buffeting subsided, and she felt the BX-719 climbing again. With the flight management system out, she could only guess at how much altitude she had lost, but one look down told her it had been very close. She could see individual rocks on the surface.
“—respond please, Maggie. Are you all right?”
“Liu! Yeah I, uh—I think I’m still alive. Gimme a second here.” She switched to the backup flight management system and power cycled the avionics. Live data began to reappear on her augmented reality display.
Another voice came on the radio. “Maggie, this is Charles. I am happy to learn that you do speak a sort of French after all, but I would advise you not to say such things in polite company. What happened?”
“I just made the acquaintance of the devil.” Maggie blinked, trying to clear the sweat that had run into her eyes. “Nearly ran me into the ground, and the electrostatic discharge fried a bunch of stuff. I’m running on the backup FMS and the batteries. Wait a minute—”
A status icon changed.
“Okay, the fuel cells have reset and are back online.” She checked the medical telemetry. “And our guest is okay. Slept through the whole thing, so to speak.”
“Do you need assistance?”
“Yes, I need assistance...make sure the coffee’s hot when I get back!”
“Copy that, Maggie,” said Charles. “You have certainly earned it.”
She leveled out the helicopter at an altitude of 5,000 feet above datum for the flight back to Syrtis. The late morning sun cast a diffuse light over the endless bloody plains below her, a landscape wounded by craters and smothered by a crimson sky.
Maggie’s thoughts turned to Carl Gablenz.
On the Earth of the past, it was the pilots who had blazed the trails into the frontiers of the day. Over continents and oceans and across the globe, there was always someone who had to do it first so that others could follow. Flying started as adventure for the few, and through their daring eventually became a safe and indispensable means of travel for all. As it was on the blue planet, so it is again on the red one.
Carl Gablenz was not a stuntman. He was a pioneer, and somewhere another small future explorer was waiting for his safe return. Perhaps the two of them really weren’t so different after all. They might even do the same things before flying.
“Coffee.” Maggie McConachie smiled. An atmospheric physics journal and some heliocentric jazz, she decided, would go very nicely with that.
Press Release
Date: Ls 118.74, 59 A.L.
Source: The Bessie Coleman Foundation
Carl Gablenz has been rescued by the Mars Search and Rescue Service and is currently recovering at the Syrtis Station medical facilities. Mr. Gablenz expressed his deep gratitude to the courageous personnel of MarsSAR, and thanked all those who have sent well-wishes from across the solar system. Although his record-setting flight attempt was cut short, valuable scientific data was collected that will help researchers at Thomas Mutch University improve their models of the Martian atmosphere, which promises to make future air travel safer. Mr. Gablenz also vowed to make another attempt at the Martian flight duration record as soon as possible.
“It’s all part of the process of exploration and discovery,” said Mr. Gablenz. “It’s all part of taking a chance and expanding our horizons. The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.”