Dead on Mars

“Run! Run! Mai Dong, run—!”

Tomcat yelled at the top of its voice.

The girl was taken aback.

Three seconds later, there was a deafening boom. The intense tremors passed through the module’s wall and air, as all the tiny objects floating in the module seemed to freeze at that moment. The air seemed compressed.

Time paused for a moment.

Immediately after that, all the objects violently flew up as the panel and screens on the module’s walls shattered.

The space station’s structure let out the sharp groan of twisting metal as warnings about the loss of cabin pressure sounded.

Mai Dong felt a strong force slam into her chest. Her first feeling was that she was in a car accident and had been rear-ended.

Her body flew out uncontrollably as she tumbled around in midair. Right on the heels of that, she was held back by the earpiece wire which was coiled around her arm. Mai Dong’s body jerked back like a pendulum and slammed heavily into the control panel.

The space station had lost its attitude and she felt dizzy as everything before her eyes was spinning.

Blaring by her ears were the undulating alerts. The entire core module looked red from the warning lights.

Mai Dong had lost all control of her body as she slammed into the window once more.

Before she fell unconscious, all she saw was the red lights and thick smoke.

…

There was still the striking warning window on the computer screen. As Tomcat pressed down on the earpiece, it stood in front of the work desk, its mechanical heart feeling cold.

It’s over.

It’s really over.

At the final moment, the Eagle’s crappy computer had bugged out.

In a normal docking procedure, the Eagle would begin to decelerate when it reached a distance of ten kilometers from the space station. It would reduce its relative speed to below 100 m/s at five kilometers, and drop to 3 m/s once it entered the hundred-meter mark.

But due to the problems involving the propellant and hurricane, normal docking procedures were no longer suitable.

Therefore, Tomcat had used a one-time orbit insertion strategy—using high acceleration and deceleration speeds without stopping when entering anchoring points to save fuel.

However, this resulted in the lander having higher than normal speeds when docking.

According to Tomcat’s plan, the Eagle and the space station would have a relative speed of 1–2 m/s during the docking process. It was like a trailer, weighing more than ten tonnes, immediately entering its parking lot, after doing an accelerated drift into a different lane, while reducing its speed to zero.

The first step had been smooth-sailing, and the relative speed between the Eagle and space station had dropped to 10 m/s.

Based on the development of this trend, the lander would perfectly dock with the space station.

Following that, the Eagle’s sensors had made a mess.

On the approach during the even nearer broadside docking stage, the target and tracker were too close, and due to the delay of the surface’s remote controls, the docking control was done autonomously by the spacecraft.

The Eagle didn’t have any occupants on board, so the control privileges were left to the computer.

And once again, a bug appeared. Tomcat didn’t know the source of the malfunction. It might have been a programming mistake or a result of the sandstorm. The computer had misjudged its speed, switching off the reverse engines ahead of time.

The Eagle immediately lost its deceleration and continued moving with its original inertia at 6 m/s before slamming into the space station.

At that moment, the two bodies were less than forty meters apart. The lander only needed about six seconds to cross this distance, so no one was able to react in time.

The moment Kunlun Station noticed the Eagle’s malfunction, it sent an alert.

But it was already too late.

The lander and the space station’s docking mechanism could only withstand a 5 m/s collision, and that was the limit. Any higher resulted in damage to the mechanism and air-seal… To be honest, the engineers who had originally designed this never expected anyone to slam over at 5 m/s. Under normal conditions, the docking speed would be at less than a meter per second, even slower than a person’s walking speed.

They felt that a redundancy of 5 m/s was more than sufficient.

For this 5 m/s redundancy, they had designed the docking mechanism to be as sturdy as a ship anchor, wasting plenty of their weight quota.

Tomcat sat down in silence as it looked at the two blips collide into one another.

Following that, a series of windows popped up. The first was a warning window with numbers rapidly jumping over it. The Eagle and the space station’s numbers went from green to red as they exceeded normal thresholds.

Imagine a trailer weighing more than ten tonnes slamming over at a speed of 6 m/s. Nothing could withstand such an impact. Even a cement wall would crumple like paper mâché.

Tomcat stared at the screen with a blank look.

It didn’t dare to imagine what had happened on the track, four hundred kilometers above it. It didn’t even want to know if Mai Dong was still alive or not… After the collision, the Eagle deviated from its trajectory, and the docking mechanism was completely unable to lock onto a speed of 6 m/s.

The metal at the APAS and the clamps had all been damaged. The Eagle had completely destroyed the APAS before being thrown into an out-of-control tumble.

It was tumbling through space, breaking ranks from the space station as it vanished into pitch-black space.

The United Space Station also began losing control after suffering the impact. It began spinning about its central axis.

The Eagle’s rear-ending had destroyed a APAS and also flattened the Dawn experiment module.

When Tomcat received the warning about the United Space Station’s loss of pressure, it meant that the exterior had been punctured by the impact. Air inside the module was leaking as the pressure rapidly decreased.

The smoke warnings were sounding as well. The space station’s sensors had detected smoke, which also meant the latent problem of fire.

The space station was filled with pure oxygen, so a tiny spark was enough to cause a flaming disaster.

“Miss Mai Dong! Mai Dong! Mai Dong—! Answer if you copy! Answer if you copy!” Tomcat roared. The signal hadn’t been cut, but there was no response.

Clearly, something had happened to Mai Dong.

Tomcat’s head nearly blew up.

The launch had been done too hastily… I didn’t do a complete inspection. It’s not surprising that a bug appeared in the Eagle’s computer and sensors. With such harsh conditions, and spacecraft being objects with high failure rates, whose spacecraft or space station isn’t without problems?

However, 99% of the problems others had were trivial ones. A tiny fix made sure that they wouldn’t affect any functionality.

As for the Eagle, to have two problems appearing, each lethal… This was a first for Tomcat.

Tomcat couldn’t sweat, but if it could, it would definitely be perspiring like a waterfall.

It forced itself to calm down.

Calm down.

Calm down!

Don’t panic… You mustn’t panic! All the problems need to be solved one by one! Start with the most urgent one!

Tomcat no longer had the time to deal with the Eagle. It could die for all it cared. After causing such a huge mess, it was better off dead.

Tomcat first needed to rescue the space station from the boundary of complete destruction… Mai Dong’s situation was unknown, and it might be possible that she had lost all mobility.

At that moment, the only one capable of rescuing her was Tomcat.

The space station was losing pressure. The air pressure and temperatures were dropping, and would soon drop below the safety threshold. If Tomcat didn’t take the required measures, Mai Dong would die from suffocation… However, Tomcat didn’t know which module was damaged. All it could do was obtain control of the space station and immediately shut all module hatches, to stop the airflow between modules.

What could be done had been done. Tomcat only wished that the damage wasn’t to the core module.

Next up was the smoke warning.

After that, it was the warning of the attitude instability.

Tomcat’s two paws moved swiftly as it resolved each and every warning.

The United Space Station was like a sinking ship filled with water. Tomcat was frantically plugging the holes, pulling the ship from the edge of sinking. It yearned to have another two more paws.

“Tomcat… How’s the situation?” Tang Yue asked. “Which stage are we at?”

“Tang Yue, I’ll have to trouble you to hold on a little longer.” Tomcat gritted its teeth as it said in a deep voice. “We crashed.”