Prologue
We could hear the rumble of high-powered
rocket engines warming up at idle from the other side of the airfield as we
climbed aboard the transport. That rumble grew steadily louder as we were
carried across the airfield toward the hangar, until I could feel the
vibrations of it in my chest. As we climbed down from the Hummer and approached
the external crew access door, the engines shut down one by one so that when we
entered and walked down the corridor to the main hangar, our footsteps and
their echoes off the walls were the only sounds that filled an eerie silence.
As we entered the main hangar, we all stopped in our tracks and gazed up at the
spaceship resting on her launch ramp above us.
With the brilliance of the overhead hangar
arc lights reflecting off her white paint and her nose canted up thirty
degrees, she looked as if she was flying to the stars without us. She was
breathtakingly beautiful. She was to be our home for roughly two years—one
hundred and eighty days of flight time to Mars, three hundred and seventy days
of living and working there, and one hundred and eighty days for the return
journey, or thereabouts. She was named Albatross
after the fabled bird, a legendary symbol of hope and good luck to ancient (and
not-so-ancient) mariners.
She would have had a classic flying saucer
shape if it weren’t for the array of three huge thrusters poking out of her
stern. There was one port thruster and one starboard thruster, and nestled
between them but slightly higher on the stern was the main thruster. There were
also twin Titan rocket boosters mounted to her underbelly, which gave the
impression that she was carrying two very large torpedoes. They were there to
save us fuel and to help blast us up to exit speed into the stratosphere, where
they would be released to parachute back to Earth to be recovered, serviced,
and refueled ready for the next launch. The spell was broken by the approach of
Colonel Holman McCallum. He looked over his shoulder and upward, saying,
“She certainly is a beautiful ship to
behold. I have no doubt that you two clowns are dying to launch her into space
and send her blazing through the solar system toward Mars.”
“Yes, sir!” Nick and I replied immediately.
He shook our hands and then the hands of the rest of the crew, wishing us all
the best of luck. Then he escorted us to the elevator that would lift us to the
entry hatch into the ship.
The other four crew members stepped onto the
elevator, and it started to rise. Holly, as the colonel was known, grabbed our
arms and led us into a room nearby. After closing the door, he turned and
walked to his briefcase, opened it, and pulled out two astronaut canteens,
which he held out to us. Although they looked like normal canteens, they were
designed to be used in zero gravity, so they had a one way valve stem to draw
out the liquid. More like a Sippy cup than a canteen, really.
“We’ve already got one each, sir,” I said.
“Not like these, you haven’t. They’re filled
with rum.” We took them eagerly and thanked him.
“Think of it as a going away gift, and I
stress going away,” he said with a
smile. “I figure you won’t come across many corner liquor stores out there,
although I suppose you could order it on the Internet, but you’d have Buckley’s
chance of getting it delivered to you! Drink it slowly; it’s got to last you
twenty-four months or more.”
We thanked him again as we stepped onto the
elevator, and it started to rise. Holly once again shook our hands and wished
us good luck on the gantry outside the entry hatch. He couldn’t follow us into
the ship, because he wasn’t wearing magnetic boots, which were required to keep
from sliding down the thirty-degree slope of the metal deck and crashing into
the aft bulkhead. After we were fully suited up and strapped into our launch
chairs, there wasn’t really anything for us to do while the techies did the
final checks and preparations to launch, so I let my mind wander back to the
time when I had first met Nicholas Watson.
