Free IGMS Issue 11 by IGMS

of the NASA programmers produced a protocol for a modified landing telemetry that would take the shuttle in for an approach on the floor of the Cydonian Valley in the northern hemisphere of Mars. The navigation would key off of a beacon from a surveying probe that was close to the chosen landing location. The area was over 50 miles away from the sight chosen by the Russian and Chinese missions, but it offered a wide expanse of what appeared to be relatively level hardpan.
    In the final day before the impact of ISBH-147, the space station crew was guilty of a minor fraud. Both the plan to fling the station into the void and the return of some of the crew members to Earth was concealed. Instead, it was reported that the entire crew was traveling to Mars on the shuttle. The crew went so far as to release video of them all cramming into the shuttle and Trevor confidently predicting the success of the mission.
    The shuttle's bold endeavor may or may not have given hope to the mass of humanity on the planet beneath it, but the way that humans behaved in the final day before impact was a credit to the occasionally troubled history of mankind. The Earth was quiet. No looting, no rioting, no violence; and though many sought comfort from their gods, religious hysteria was missing from the mass candlelight ceremonies that grew spontaneously in the hearts of cities worldwide. Mostly people stayed with their families, taking euphoric pleasure in the simple comforts of life. Most unexpected was the sense of relief felt by so many. Every nonsensical aspect of human existence was rendered irrelevant. Jobs, difficult relationships, the daily stress of life. Suddenly, none of it mattered and much of the population found this heartening. Perhaps this is why the final days of Earth were remembered -- in the minds of very few -- as being strangely abundant in warmth and good cheer.

    With a hiss of compressed air escaping from a relief valve, the shuttle separated from Space Station Alpha. The shuttle then fired a tiny double-burst from its maneuvering rockets and began to inch slowly away from the station. It was followed next by a less cautious burst and the shuttle began to accelerate, appearing to those who remained on the station as if it were falling away beneath them.
    Hector wasted little time. A brilliant blast of orange light exploded from behind the shuttle, creating an oval of fire that fanned away from its engines. Never before had a shuttle fired so much thrust in the vacuum of space. For Trevor, Gretchen and Nikolai, it was a spectacular show, though one that was eerily silent. With their faces pressed to glass, they watched the shuttle grow tiny as it sped off into the darkness.
    Knowing they had very little time, they pulled themselves from the windows and went quickly to work inside of the control module. They were already wearing their pressure suits, minus the gloves and helmets. Gretchen sat herself in front of the monitor for the station's on-board telescope. By tracking the disappearance of stars as they were blotted out by the edges of the black hole's event horizon, she could constantly calibrate and re-calibrate the object's position and trajectory. After every new measurement she shouted out a string of numbers that Nikolai punched into his laptop. The spreadsheet that Nikolai had created took these numbers, along with an estimation of ISBH-147's mass calculated by astronomers back on Earth, and combined them with the station's natural orbit. The result was a target altitude which Nikolai relayed immediately to Trevor who was operating the station's control rockets.
    The hardest part of the whole operation was gauging the orbit of the station itself. As ISBH-147 approached, the space station was revolving continuously around the Earth. The black hole's tremendous speed made exact impact estimates tricky and Gretchen was constantly revising her figures. This was critical because the station's exact distance from the black