CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE NIGHT THE SHUTTLE DID NOT ANSWER
High Mars and Camp One, early 1981
Mars Orbit Shuttle Nine disappeared for eleven minutes.
It had departed High Mars carrying four passengers, medical supplies and a cargo pallet of electronics. The passengers were technicians transferring to surface assignments. Two had never been to Mars before. They had spent most of the flight watching the planet grow beneath them.
The pilot had made the journey often enough to find little remarkable about it.
The shuttle was descending through its scheduled approach when the communications link broke.
At first, nobody was concerned.
The flight path included a brief period during which the geometry between the shuttle, the orbital station and the surface relays made direct contact unreliable. The interruption was expected to last less than two minutes.
The flight controller at Camp One marked the time and continued watching the tracking display.
Two minutes passed.
Then three.
“High Mars, Camp One. Do you have Shuttle Nine?”
“Negative. Last contact at scheduled loss of signal.”
“Any secondary tracking?”
“Checking.”
At Arrivals, the status board still read INBOUND.
The flight controller called the shuttle on its primary frequency.
No response.
He tried the backup.
Nothing.
The shuttle's last telemetry showed normal attitude, propulsion and environmental systems. There had been no warning before the signal disappeared.
That was reassuring for about thirty seconds.
Then the controller realised he had no way of knowing what had happened afterwards.
He called Shaw.
She entered the control room at minute five.
“Last telemetry?”
“Nominal.”
“Tracking?”
“Lost with signal.”
“Emergency beacon?”
“Nothing received.”
“Could the ground relay be down?”
“We're checking it. High Mars has lost them too.”
Shaw studied the predicted flight path.
“Where should they be now?”
The controller indicated a point on the display.
“Here. Assuming the descent is proceeding normally.”
“And if it isn't?”
He did not answer immediately.
The shuttle carried enough propellant to correct its approach or return to a safer orbit under certain conditions. But every option depended on the vehicle remaining controllable and the crew recognising the problem in time.
Nobody said crash.
The word occupied the room anyway.
At minute seven, the rescue rovers moved to standby.
Their crews checked medical equipment, emergency pressure suits and the routes to the designated landing area. A rover could reach a disabled shuttle on the surface. It could do nothing for one that had failed high above it.
At minute eight, Haddad opened the medical emergency kit.
She reviewed the passenger manifest and asked for the latest medical information on everyone aboard.
“Do we know whether they have landed?”
“No.”
“Then prepare for both possibilities.”
At minute nine, Han ordered the power grid prepared for search operations.
The new powerhouse had only recently entered service. It gave the settlement enough reserve capacity to support additional tracking equipment, emergency lighting and rescue preparations without shutting down essential operations.
Han asked whether the shuttle's disappearance might be connected to the relay problems reported in the preceding weeks.
The communications supervisor could not rule it out.
The ground stations were functioning, but that did not explain why High Mars had also lost contact.
At minute ten, Valdés stood beside the terminal window looking at an empty sky.
He knew the shuttle's expected approach corridor. He also knew that, from inside Arrivals, he was unlikely to see anything useful.
He stayed there anyway.
Aboard Shuttle Nine, the pilot had been trying to restore communications since the first missed acknowledgement.
The shuttle was flying normally.
Its navigation system showed the expected descent path. Propulsion was responding correctly. Cabin pressure and life support were stable.
The radio was not.
“Camp One, Shuttle Nine. Radio check.”
Static.
The copilot selected the secondary system.
“High Mars, Shuttle Nine. Do you read?”
Nothing.
She checked the antenna selection and transmission power.
The indicators showed that both radios were operating.
“Maybe it's the relay.”
“Both links?”
“Could be.”
The pilot looked at the flight instruments.
“We continue the procedure.”
The passengers had noticed the repeated calls.
One of them leaned forward.
“Is something wrong?”
“We've lost contact with the ground,” the copilot said. “The vehicle is operating normally.”
“For how long?”
“A few minutes.”
“Is that supposed to happen?”
“Not for this long.”
The pilot glanced at her.
She returned to the checklist.
They had rehearsed communications failures. The procedure was clear: maintain the planned flight path while the navigation data remained valid, attempt contact through alternative channels and prepare for an independent landing if necessary.
The shuttle was not dependent on instructions from the ground to complete its descent.
That was fortunate, because the ground was not answering.
The copilot switched frequencies again.
“Camp One, Shuttle Nine. Communications check.”
She waited.
Then the receiver produced a brief burst of noise.
A voice came through, broken but recognisable.
“—Nine, Camp One. Do you copy?”
She pressed the transmit switch.
“Camp One, Shuttle Nine. We read you.”
No acknowledgement.
She tried again.
“Camp One, Shuttle Nine. Primary and secondary communications failure. Vehicle nominal. Continuing approach.”
This time the reply came back clearly.
“Shuttle Nine, Camp One. Confirm your status.”
The pilot took the microphone.
“Camp One, Shuttle Nine. We have communications failure on primary and secondary relay. Vehicle nominal. Continuing approach.”
In the control room, the flight controller stared at his headset.
“Say again, Shuttle Nine.”
The pilot repeated the message.
For the first time in eleven minutes, the tracking display showed a valid return.
The controller checked the shuttle's position.
It was almost exactly where the flight plan said it should be.
Shaw took the microphone.
“Shuttle Nine, confirm all souls aboard.”
“Four passengers, two crew. All fine.”
“Any damage?”
“None indicated.”
“Can you complete the landing?”
“Affirmative.”
“Land.”
“Yes, ma'am.”
The shuttle touched down fourteen minutes later.
At Arrivals, the status board changed from INBOUND to LANDED.
Nobody cheered.
The controller remained at his station until the vehicle was secured and the passengers had been transferred to the terminal.
Haddad examined the arriving crew and passengers. Nobody required medical treatment, although one of the technicians admitted to feeling sick during the final approach.
“First time?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Then you have had enough excitement for one day.”
The pilot reported directly to Shaw.
“We never lost navigation or control. Only communications.”
“Both systems?”
“Both.”
“Same time?”
“As far as we could tell.”
Shaw looked towards Nakamura.
“I want to know why.”
“So do I,” he said.
The investigation began before the shuttle had finished unloading.
The two radios had separate control units and separate power feeds. On paper, either could operate if the other failed.
But both transmitted through a shared interface assembly connected to the external antenna system.
The assembly had developed an intermittent fault. During the descent, the fault had interrupted the signal path used by both radios.
The equipment had reported that the transmitters were functioning because, technically, they were.
Their signals had simply failed to reach the antennas.
Nakamura examined the drawings.
“Who approved this?”
The communications supervisor checked the installation record.
“It was part of the original shuttle configuration.”
“Then we should have found it earlier.”
The failure was especially troubling because the colony had recently been dealing with similar problems in its surface communications network: equipment that appeared operational while its signals went nowhere.
The shuttle fault was not caused by the eastern relay failure. But both incidents exposed the same weakness in the way the equipment was monitored.
The crew had been told that a system was working when only part of it had been tested.
Nakamura spent the following week reviewing the shuttle's communications architecture with the orbital engineers.
He required an independent emergency signal path, separate antenna connections where practical and a test that verified actual transmission rather than merely confirming that a radio had power.
Some of the modifications could be made with equipment already available.
Others would have to wait for parts from Earth.
The communications supervisor added them to the supply request.
Nakamura presented the findings to the engineering board.
“Two systems are not redundant,” he said, “if they can fail in the same place.”
Nobody disagreed.
The sentence was added to the colony's engineering procedures.
The incident also changed the Arrivals hall.
During the emergency, Shaw had noticed people gathering beside the terminal window. Friends of the arriving technicians had stood there alongside off-duty personnel, watching for a shuttle they could not possibly see until the final stages of its approach.
The window gave them something to look at.
It gave them no information.
She had a row of seats moved to a position where the status board could be seen clearly. A communications terminal was added nearby so waiting personnel could receive authorised updates without crowding the flight controllers.
Evelyn and Sadie had already arrived together, but households like theirs were still exceptional.
Soon the settlement would have more civilians, more personal attachments and more people waiting for someone to come home.
Shaw looked at the new seating arrangement.
It was a small change.
The next time a shuttle failed to answer, there would be somewhere for people to wait.