they stenciled on the hull as long as the ship was ready to go. And for the first time in her experience with government projects, everything seemed set with time to spare.
The Lowell consisted of a long central stem, with flight deck and crew areas forward and the nuclear engine at the rear. Crew areas, but not the flight deck, could be rotated to simulate .07 g. It wasn’t enough to make the trip comfortable, but it approached the effect generated on the station itself, and was almost half lunar gravity. A lander was tucked under the belly of the craft. Sensor dishes, telescopes, feeder ports, and antennas projected from the hull.
The engines were powered by a Variable Specific Impulse Plasma drive. The system, electrodeless, electrothermal, radio-frequency heated, and magnetically vectored, had been designed during the late 1990s, but not actively developed until President Culpepper took the decision to push for a Mars mission as the natural second step after the establishment of Moonbase.
Years ago Rachel had flown a prototype moonbus on powdered aluminum and liquid oxygen. Now she sat atop a nuclear monster that would take her across the interplanetary void.
It was a nice feeling.
The hatch to the flight deck opened and Lee poked his head in. “Hello, Rache. What are you doing here?”
She was seated in the pilot’s chair. The day’s simulations were over and she felt almost guilty, as if she’d been caught playing solitaire with the computer. “Smelling the roses,” she said. It seemed now that her entire life had been directed toward this moment, had been intended to get her into this seat. And she was making it a point to savor the success. She’d wanted it when she was ten years old, peeking through Grandpop’s telescope. It had been in the back of her mind when she went to flight school, when she was flying patrols over Zagreb, and when she’d begun piloting the buses between the lunar installations and L1. When Culpepper announced nine years ago that the nation would go to Mars, Rachel Quinn had fired off an application before the speech ended. “Where should I be?” she asked Lee.
“It’s Monday. Director’s breakfast.”
She’d forgotten. Yesterday she had lunch with the vice president, who’d been passing through to do the honors at the Moonbase ribbon-cutting ceremony this afternoon. Today it was to have been bacon and eggs with the station director. Tomorrow it would be another lunch, this time with a Chinese delegation of diplomats and industrialists. It seemed as if the most time-consuming part of her job was rubbing shoulders with every VIP who arrived on L1. And with the Mars flight imminent, and Moonbase officially opening today, there’d been a horde of heavyweights.
Lee frowned. “Another faux pas for the NASA team.”
Rachel shrugged, trying to suggest she had more important things to do. But in fact they were well ahead of schedule.
Most of the Lowell jutted outside the station. Only the forward sphere, which contained the flight deck, was enclosed within a pressurized bay. She looked down at a single technician switching umbilicals. “I’m ready to go, Lee,” she said.
So was the ship. It was now only a matter of briefings and politics.
Lee sat down in the copilot’s seat. An image of Mars, wide and bleak and rust-colored, floated in the overhead display. “It’ll come soon enough,” he said. “Meantime, I think you ought to get yourself over to the breakfast. You’re the star of the show these days, and it wouldn’t look real good if you ignored the director.”
Rachel frowned. “I hate the politics involved with these things.” Actually, she didn’t. Not all of it, anyhow. She’d enjoyed meeting the vice president yesterday. But it was part of the astronaut code that all groundhuggers, even vice presidents, were comparative unfortunates. Members of an inferior species.
“What the hell, Rache, grow up.” He grinned. Major Lee Cochran was tall and easygoing, with animated good looks and hair that consistently fell into his eyes. “Half the job is politics and public relations. Who do you think pays for this toy?” He was the media darling of the crew. Still in his thirties, he’d shown up last month on somebody-or-other’s list of ten most eligible bachelors. Unlike Rachel and the others, he had a talent for delivering quotable lines. He was a twin kill, two for the price of one, an astronaut flight engineer who was also a world-class geologist. Cochran would eventually use the lasers and sample collectors to get at the heart of