Captain Future xx - The Death of Captain Future (October 1995) by Allen Steele Read Free Book Online

two..."
    “Mr. Furland!” McKinnon snapped. “I didn't give orders for you to...”
    I ignored him. “Skip the numbers, Brain. Just tell me if it's still on course for cislunar rendezvous.”
    A momentary pause, then: "Negative, Mr. Furland. The Fool's Gold has altered its trajectory. According to my calculations, there is a seventy-two-point-one probability that it is now on collision course with the planet Mars."
    Jeri went pale as she sucked in her breath, and even McKinnon managed to shut up. “Show it to me on the tank,” I said as I turned my chair around to face the nav table.
    The tank lit, displaying a holographic diagram of the Fool's Gold's present position in relationship with the Martian sidereal-hour. Mars still lay half an A.U. away, but as The Brain traced a shallow-curving orange line through the belt, we saw that it neatly intercepted the red planet as it advanced on its orbit around the Sun.
    The Brain translated the math it had displayed in a box next to the three-dimensional grid. "Assuming that its present delta-vee remains unchecked, in two hundred and thirty-six hours, twelve minutes, and twenty-four seconds, 2046-Barr will collide with Mars."
    I did some arithmetic in my head. “That's about ten days from now.”
    "Nine-point-eight three Earth standard days, to be exact." The Brain expanded the image of Mars until it filled the tank; a bullseye appeared at a point just above the equator. "Estimated point of impact will be approximately twelve degrees North by sixty-three degrees West, near the edge of the Lunae Planum."
    “Just north of Valles Marineris,” Jeri said. “Oh God, Rohr, that's near ...”
    “I know.” I didn't need a refresher course in planetary geography. The impact point was in the low plains above Mariner Valley, only a few hundred klicks northeast of Arsia Station, not to mention closer to the smaller settlements scattered around the vast canyon system. For all I knew, there could now be a small mining town on the Lunae Planum itself; Mars was being colonized so quickly these days, it was hard to keep track of where a bunch of its one and a half million inhabitants decided to pitch claims and call themselves New Chattanooga or whatever.
    “Sabotage!” McKinnon yelled. He unbuckled his harness and pushed himself closer to the nav table, where he stared at the holo. “Someone has sabotaged the mass-driver so that it'll collide with Mars! Do you realize...?”
    “Shut up, Captain.” I didn't need his histrionics to tell me what would occur if ... when ... 2046-Barr came down in the middle of the Lunae Planum.
    The Martian ecosystem wasn't as fragile as Earth's. Indeed, it was much more volatile, as the attempt in the ‘50s to terraform the planet and make the climate more stable had ultimately proved. However, the Mars colonists who still remained after the boondoggle had come to depend upon its seasonal patterns in order to grow crops, maintain solar farms, continue mining operations and other activities which insured their basic survival.
    It was a very tenuous sort of existence which relied upon conservative prediction of climatic changes. The impact of a three-kilometer asteroid in the equatorial region would throw all that straight into the compost toilet. Localized quakes and duststorms would only be the beginning; two or three hundred people might be killed outright, but the worst would be yet to come. The amount of dust that would be raised into the atmosphere by the collision would blot out the sky for months on end, causing global temperatures to drop from Olympus Mons to the Hellas Plantia. As a result, everything from agriculture and power supplies would be affected, to put it mildly, with starvation in the cold and dark awaiting most of the survivors.
    It wasn't quite doomsday. A few isolated settlements might get by with the aid of emergency relief efforts from Earth. But as the major colony world of humankind, Mars would cease to exist.
    McKinnon was