Chris reached the top of the ladder bolted to the side of the fuel module. The four, curved nosecone panels were fixed in place by removable bolts. It was just a matter of finding the release catches. It would have been much easier without the H.E.P.O. gloves on but the air around him was still icy and all the metalwork was even colder. Numb fingers were the last thing he needed at the top of a twenty-four-metre ladder.
He did not feel confident moving both hands off the top rung of the ladder at the same time, but to get enough leverage to twist the hand-loop attached to the top of each bolt, he needed both. Wedging his boots as firmly as he could into the ladder, he pulled the loop to his right and set about rotating it the twelve turns it needed before clicking and coming loose. He yanked it out and let it drop down the side of the module then set to work on the second one.
Once both were out, the entire panel, a curved wedge-shape making up one-quarter of the nosecone, could be lifted with two recessed handholds and swung over to his left on the hinge running the full length of that edge. This gave him limited access to the cavity within which was mostly packed with two folded buggies, but there was just about enough space to walk along the outer edge to reach the bolts for the next panel.
It felt somewhat precarious, climbing off the top rung of the ladder and onto the flat floor beneath the buggies. There was enough space for his feet and he could hold onto the frame of the nearest buggy for stability, but he was still acutely aware of the deadly drop beside him. The lower gravity of Proxima C would not be enough to save him if he fell.
Each buggy was collapsed to fit in one half the nosecone and mounted on aluminium rails that sloped from about a metre and a half high in the centre to about twenty centimetres above the floor at the outside edge. After he had removed the transit bolts on the next panel, he swung that the opposite way leaving the buggy on this side of the nosecone completely exposed.
There were four heavy-duty release catches to pull and then a three-button panel on an angled post beside the buggy lit its green button.
"Stand clear below!" Chris shouted down to the others, then he made sure he was clear of the buggy himself and hit the green button.
There was an immediate hum from one of the two winches in the middle of the floor between the buggies. That was followed by a deeper buzz and some metallic squeals as the buggy jerked down the rails suddenly. Thankfully, it stabilised rapidly and maintained a slow slide down the rails. As the buggy dropped gently off the end of them, both pivoted from the lower end and swung smoothly forwards over the edge, taking the buggy with them. A pulley on the link between them allowed the whole construction to act as a very simple crane, holding the buggy about half a metre from the module's hull and allowing the buggy to winch slowly down to the ground without hindrance.
Fletcher caught hold of the frame as it neared the gravel and pulled it into a better position.
"Down and safe, Commander," he shouted as the winch cable went slack.
While the rest of the team set about unfolding the buggy, a two-seater with a concave cargo area making up the back half, Chris worked on opening the other two panels of the nosecone. The other buggy was almost identical to the first except instead of the large cargo area, it had a back row of seats and a cargo tray about a third of the length.
The lowering mechanism for the second buggy worked just as well as the first and, less than forty minutes later, they had both buggies in their operational configuration. Fletcher was seated in the four-seater buggy's driving position and checking through the readouts on the small tablet computer attached to the centre of the dashboard.
"The batteries have survived the trip well, Commander. Forty-eight percent showing on this one. Seems they've hardly lost anything. Should only take fifteen to twenty minutes to recharge it from the reserves in the module."
"Good, get them plugged in immediately," Chris replied, barely halfway back down the ladder.
"You know we don't have enough seats?" Lucy asked. "There's eight of us and only six seats."
"I know it's not ideal, but two people will have to sit in the cargo tray of the two-seater buggy. Fletcher, how much of the module's reserve would be used to fully charge both buggies?"
"Hard to be accurate, sir. I'd say around fifty to sixty percent. The half charge they've got now should give then around 250 kilometres range but is that enough?"
Chris stared at the fuel module and thought for a few seconds. "I don't want to deplete the module's batteries too much. We might need it later. On the other hand, I don't want to run out of juice before we get back to the Command Module and we don't know exactly what we're facing before then. Okay, charge them up to three-quarters and then we go."
"Aye, Commander."
"That should get us home with enough power left to safely get here again should we need to. How long will they take to get that much charge onboard?"
"Ten, maybe twelve minutes, Commander," Fletcher replied, already pulling the charging lead from a panel in the floor of the passenger footwell.
"I think we should have breakfast and get our stuff ready."
* * *
Twenty minutes later, everything was loaded and everyone onboard. Chris was in the driving seat of the four-seater buggy with Melissa seated to his left. The tablet attached to the dashboard showed that the current battery level was seventy-eight percent. He tapped the icon to put the tablet into navigation mode. It took a few seconds to detect the satellites in orbit above them and then showed a plain green map with blue dots for each of the beacons within twenty kilometres.
"How do I get this to display the fuel module beacons, and the local terrain too?" he asked.
"Don't worry about that," Melissa replied, reaching out with her navicom and tapping it against the dash-mounted one. "It's easier to pass the locations from my navicom."
Moments later the buggy's tablet added the surface scan data to its display and showed the distance and direction to Fuel Module 3.
"Everyone ready to go?" Chris called out.
"Already here!" Lucy replied from the driving seat of the other buggy.
"Let's go!"
With only a faint hum from their motors, both buggies surged forward, the crunching of their tyres on the grey gravel drowning out any other sound. They struggled for grip for the first few metres, but the traction-control systems worked well and soon they were moving at speed across the plain.
Initially, it felt exhilarating to be travelling at thirty to forty kilometres per hour instead of just a slow walking plod. The landscape rolling past many times faster was a mood boost too. It was also a pleasure to no longer need to carry a rucksack even if the buggy's suspension was struggling to absorb the bumps and jolts.
They had only been driving for a couple of minutes when Melissa pointed at the dash tablet. As he looked, she scrolled the view downwards to reveal the rest of a near perfectly circular feature in the terrain ahead of them.
"Chris, that's almost three kilometres across."
"Is that a crater?"
"Either that or the caldera of a volcano," she replied.
"How deep is it? Can we drive directly across it?"
"I wouldn't recommend it, Commander," said Fletcher, leaning forwards from the seat diagonally opposite Chris. "What we're driving on now is probably millions of years old. It's stable, but what's inside the crater will have been churned by the impact. We have no way of knowing what we'd be getting into, sir."
"This crater could be millions of years old too," Chris replied.
"On the map," said Melissa. "There's a slope into the crater. The topography shows a drop of anything up to six metres near the centre. Driving down the slope should be okay, but driving up the other side could be a problem. How much grip does this buggy have on gravel?"
Chris remembered how the buggy's tyres had struggled to find grip when they pulled away. "Okay, so we go around. How much is that going to add to our trip?"
"It's hard to be precise. If we go around it clockwise, I reckon around one and a third kilometres extra but it depends on how close you drive to the crater's edge.
"It's not ideal, but an extra kilometre or two on our route has got to be safer than risking getting stuck in the crater. Radio the other buggy. Let them know what we're doing."
* * *
It took the buggies little more than quarter of an hour to reach the outer rim of the crater where they could see a jagged ridge that formed the perimeter, a violent wave of rocks and gravel, frozen in time. As they approached, Chris slowly turned the buggy to the left to avoid the worst of the rocky debris scattered outside the edge. The buggies were nimble and surprisingly powerful but there was no way either of them could make it over the ridge and into the crater.
Chris would have liked to put his foot down and get to Fuel Module 3 at maximum speed so they would have the possibility of collecting the other two buggies and heading back to the Command Module before nightfall but the terrain near the crater was not going to allow that. The mostly gravel surface was irregular with streaks of new material and a scattering of furrows from the crater together with occasional boulders and varying-sized rocky fragments.
The buggies were designed to be robust but a collision with a rock could break the steering, tear off a wheel or worse. If they put a buggy out of action, his plan would be scuppered. They could not all realistically travel on a single buggy for any meaningful distance.
It took the best part of an hour to circumnavigate the crater and it was another ten minutes of heading almost directly away from the crater before the gravel evened out and was once more free of loose rocks. Chris looked around at the other buggy, now driving virtually alongside, and waved to Lucy to let her know he was going to drive faster.
He pulled the throttle and the four electric motors responded instantly. At their new speed, it should only take another half-an-hour to reach the next fuel module.