But Ares was about to fall around the back of Mars, into its shadow, and out of radio line of sight of Earth; and it was at that point, with Stone able to rely on nothing but the instruments in Ares, that the burn would be initiated. The crew would be on their own — isolated by time lag and the rocky bulk of Mars — when it most mattered.

According to the ground’s best predictions, they were going to hit the MOI window within plus or minus ten miles of the required height above Mars.

However, who the hell believed predictions?

The MS-II was going to impose a tough acceleration. So all the stack’s remaining modules — the MS-II and MS-IVB booster stages, then the MEM, the Mission Module, and Apollo — were still strung out along the center line of the stack, along the line of the burn. Then, after the burn was completed, and they were safely in Mars orbit — if they got there — the crew would have to go through a complex repositioning exercise to prepare for the landing. It was one hell of a way to run a mission, York thought: to reassemble your spacecraft in Mars orbit…

“One minute to loss of signal,” said Stone.

“One minute,” John Young said, almost simultaneously. He must be timing his transmissions so they arrived to match their local events. “Ares, this is Houston. All your systems are looking good going around the corner.”

“Copy that, John.”

York could hear the tension in Stone’s voice. Gershon sat in the center couch, uncharacteristically silent, pensive.

The ocher light shifted. She looked up.

Ares was dipping low across Mars.

Less than three hundred miles beneath York, a mottled, battered landscape slid by. She could see Arabia, a bright yellow circular area, and to its right an irregular, blue-black patch, the volcanic plateau called the Syrtis Major Planum. Syrtis had been the first Martian feature observed by telescope from Earth. And now I am falling ass-backwards over Syrtis itself; I can see it before me, a lurid patch the size of my hand.

She felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, prickling. She was so close that Syrtis slid across her field of view, falling toward her as Ares slid deeper into Mars’s gravity well, moving past her fast enough for it to change the lighting conditions in her cabin.

The belly of Mars seemed to bulge out at her. Mars was a small world; in contrast to Earth, she could see its curvature prominently, even at such a low altitude.

She tried to be analytical, to separate the panorama into geological units…

But it was a battered, tired landscape. The land was the color of bruises, inflicted by the ancient meteorite impacts: like accumulated porphyrin, which the little world was unable to break down. Bruises on the face of a corpse, left there for all time. It was a surprisingly depressing panorama, obviously lifeless.