Mars Nation: The Complete Trilogy

by Brandon Q Morris

  Ewa laughed. It helped to think about something else besides her impending death and her pain. But of course, there wasn’t really a point in doing so. No one would ever again ask her for her opinion regarding the future of the MfE initiative. She was out, once and for all.

  And what if what she had written with her own hand in her journal was true? What if there really was something inside her that was capable of controlling her mind? Ewa was sweating, but this thought sent a cold chill down her spine. She almost hoped that it was all a hallucination, an external force inside her head that could alter her personality at any moment. If she gave this careful thought, this was much scarier than imagining that she had some kind of illness. It would mean she wasn’t really a murderer, but she would be a vastly graver threat to everyone with whom she was associated. She would never be able to be around other humans again. The implant’s knowledge might save her life, but she couldn’t imagine spending the next sixty or seventy years in isolation.

  She had to do something. If there was a foreign object inside of her, she couldn’t let herself grow dependent on it. She had to regain control.

  5/28/2042, Spaceliner 1

  Out of nowhere, his companion slugged him in the stomach. Rick doubled over in pain. What was the man doing? What did he want from him? Had he done something to him? Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the man’s astonishingly large fist come toward him for a second time. It was situated at the end of a three-meter long arm made up of chains. However, before the fist reached Rick, his alarm went off. He opened his eyes and glanced to the side. His clock indicated it was 3:50 AM. It wasn’t what had gone off, though. His watch had awakened him.

  Someone was calling him in the middle of the night.

  Something must have happened.

  Rick searched for his pants, which had slipped under his bed. One side of his wardrobe stood open. He was positive that he had closed it before retiring. Rick glanced over at the clock. A thin layer of dust had gathered on the shelf it was sitting on. The alarm clock must have slipped out of place, which Rick could tell by the trail left behind as it slid through the dust. Had the blow to his stomach been real? Had the ship been hit by something? The clock had moved in the direction of the bow, so the spaceship must have decelerated momentarily. He hadn’t heard a ship-wide alarm go off, so he must have been alerted individually. There had to be a problem with the propulsion system for which he was responsible.

  He counted eleven people on the command bridge. This was more than twice as many as a standard shift. A man in a fashionably tailored suit immediately caught his eye. He was wearing a small name tag with gold letters, which distinguished him as a passenger with special privileges. Rick tried to make out the name. Short first name, longer last name. Well, well. If it isn’t the Senator himself! Rick smiled at the thought of the small item in the man’s cabin. If he only knew!

  At that moment, Terran appeared behind the Senator.

  “Rick! You’re finally here.” he said, floating toward him.

  Rick raised his hands defensively. “I got here as quickly as I could.”

  He noticed the Senator send Terran a look. He looked like a gentleman who had just silently given his dog an order.

  And Terran—tall, strong Terran Carter—responded. “May I introduce Rick Ballantine, one of the main sponsors of this trip.”

  The Senator smiled. To Rick, the smile seemed artificial. He held out his right hand, and Ballantine shook it.

  “You’re one of the propulsion engineers, right? Terran has already told me about you,” he said.

  “Hopefully, nothing negative. I’m a jack-of-all-trades around here.”

  “Ah, I see, ‘A jack of all trades...’” The Senator’s smile struck him as increasingly wolfish.

  “My specialty seems to be bathrooms and toilets for now,” Rick said. “The engines don’t need me all that often.”

  “So, you were the one who repaired my clog? What was the problem?”

  “The ventilator had stopped working. It’s a common problem, especially in the private passengers’ rooms.”

  “I’m afraid I need to cut your chat short,” Terran said. “We have a serious problem.”

  “My apologies,” the Senator replied. “I don’t want to keep you from your work.”

  “Have you been briefed already?” Rick asked. He was annoyed that Terran had apparently been called before himself. They had the same rank, so the flight manager should have notified them at the same time.

  “Seventeen minutes ago, all of our thrusters fired at the same time in the same direction. This is what caused our brief deceleration,” Terran explained.

  “Someone hit the brakes? Or was that not the cause?”

  “The sensors didn’t indicate any obstacles on our course. There wasn’t anything out there at all.”

  “So this was just a little hiccup?” Rick speculated.

  “Fortunately, the pilot on duty reacted quickly and deactivated the thrusters.”

  The pilot had done well. If the thrusters had fired for a more extended period, they might have been pushed off their course to Mars. This would have resulted in a multiple-years odyssey through the solar system. They would have reached Earth again in two and a half years, but such a long time in such a tight space wouldn’t have been any fun.

  “And now we’re supposed to figure out the cause,” Rick declared.

  “You’ve got it.”

  “Then let’s get to work.”

  Rick floated over to his seat which was located off to the side of the consoles used by the pilot and the flight manager, while Terran seated himself at the next console. Rick buckled himself down—you never knew—and pulled up the schematics for the thrusters on his screen. Distributed around the ship, they were intended for making small adjustments. Once they were close to Mars, they would be needed to turn the spaceship so it could be slowed down by the ship’s main engines. They worked on the same chemical basis as the main engines, though with significantly less power.

  Rick went through the status of each of the individual components. The data revealed what he already knew—twenty minutes ago the thrusters had been activated with power parameters that were clearly beyond the normal limits. Someone not only hit the brakes, but jammed the pedal so hard that it almost reached the floorboard. The pilot was clearly not the culprit. He couldn’t have activated the thrusters, even inadvertently, beyond their foreseen power limits.

  With his finger, Rick zoomed in on the separate structural areas. He searched for errors that could have begun a chain of unfortunate events that led to the known result. Their instructor had always enjoyed talking about the thrust-reversal actions in aircraft propulsion systems, pointing out that their inadvertent firing sometimes led to accidents. It was impossible to safeguard against all eventualities during the construction of an engine. Rick didn’t really think that this had anything to do with the problem because it had influenced all the thrusters simultaneously. But he had to completely eliminate this as a possibility.

  Rick couldn’t find glaring errors in the data. “There aren’t any organic causes,” he said to Terran.

  “I’m not finding anything either,” his colleague replied. “But theoretically, the error could be hiding somewhere in the hardware. Not every component is furnished with error sensors.”

  “Those that are likely to break are,” Rick noted.

  “That’s true. We should check everything anyway.”

  “You want to dismantle twenty-four engines.”

  Terran didn’t answer right away. It had to be just as evident to him as it was to Rick that this would be an unpleasant, tedious job. He would prefer cleaning out ten clogged toilets to crawling around for hours in the narrow, hot, stuffy shafts inside the spaceship’s hull. First and foremost because it would be completely pointless.

  “Let’s be honest, Terran. The components without error sensors don’t have any because they only fail once a century or so. And this rare occ
urrence supposedly affected all twenty-four thrusters at the exact same time? To experience such a result, you would have to wait longer than the universe has even existed!”

  “You’re right, but it’s protocol. We’ll have to check if we can’t locate any other cause.”

  “Then we’ll find another cause!”

  Rick was already considering the possibility of simulating an apparent cause. He could fabricate an error, one that would be easy to fix. But the danger that he would be found out was too high. Besides, he wasn’t really comfortable doing this. The strange hiccup could have sent them off course, potentially even into an eternal orbit, if the pilot hadn’t been paying such close attention.

  “Do you have any other suggestions?” Terran asked.

  “Let’s go through the entire sequence of orders for each of the separate engines. They all reacted synchronously, so there had to be some kind of system-wide control order sent.”

  “All right. You take numbers one to twelve, and I’ll start with thirteen.”

  The two of them were working hard a few minutes later. The command storage unit functioned like an airplane’s black box. Its contents were encrypted in such a way that any manipulation would be noticeable. Rick had to sort out the data and then verify the function of all the decoded orders.

  Rick was anxious to finish ahead of his colleague, and he managed to do that. “I found something,” he said, deliberately keeping his voice calm.

  “Give me a minute,” Terran replied.

  Ha! I got there faster.

  “Okay, I have something interesting, too,” Terran said shortly.

  “Shoot.”

  “At almost exactly 3:48, all the engines received a change direction order.”

  “I can confirm that,” Rick said.

  “The order came from the ship’s comp, which is why it could authorize something beyond the normal limits.”

  “True. The comp is authorized, in emergencies, to push the power limits to their max,” Rick added.

  “Exactly. So, we have to figure out why the system thought it was in a state of emergency,” Terran said.

  “In order to do that, we will need the pilot’s authorization. Who’s on shift right now?”

  “My friend Maggie,” Terran said. “She’s just given me access. I’m sending you the data via your console.”

  Rick clenched his jaws. Terran seemed to be quite well-connected. Rick made himself a mental note to make more friends on board. “Thanks,” he said.

  They went through the records side by side. The four-eyed principle was a relic from NASA policy. Rick would have done away with it a long time ago if he could have. The technical risks were much lower today than they had been eighty years ago during the Apollo era.

  But then he noticed something. Shortly before 3:48, the moon suddenly appeared in the sensor data. It must have briefly popped up right in front of the ship. The comp had trusted those data and immediately initiated evasive maneuvers. It had then noticed its error and corrected it. The pilot’s manual countermand had come a few tenths of a second later. However, from a human perspective, it looked as if the pilot had saved them.

  “Do you see that, too?” Terran asked.

  They exchanged glances. It was obvious that Terran would like to allow his friend to keep the honor of having rescued the ship. Rick didn’t have a problem with that. He saved the data to his private files. It was always good to file things away for rainy days.

  “I see that the comp mistakenly believed there was an obstacle in our path,” he said. “The pilot rightly rescinded its order.”

  Terran smiled gratefully. Technically speaking, Maggie hadn’t done anything wrong, even if her reaction hadn’t actually been necessary by that point.

  But that couldn’t be the whole story. Rick continued to evaluate the relevant data. What else had happened during the fractions of seconds just before 3:48? His eyes fell on the data for the antenna. At that exact moment, it had received a signal. Rick checked its direction. The impulse had come from Earth, but the data content was no longer available. It had probably been some kind of instruction that had ended in self-deletion.

  “Maggie,” he called across the command bridge, “could you ask Mission Control if they sent us a message at 3:48?”

  “Just a moment,” Maggie replied. They weren’t all that far from Earth yet, so the response should only take a few seconds. “No. Mission Control definitely did not contact us at that time.”

  Sol 69, Mars surface

  Onward, onward, onward. Ewa was only capable of taking baby steps now. Her inner thighs felt like raw meat. She had no desire to take a look at them, even if she did happen to step out of her spacesuit again. Today she would reach zero hour.

  Before setting off this morning, her finger had written a request in the sand. She should make an adjustment to her position localization at precisely twelve o’clock noon if at all possible.

  “Why?” she had asked aloud.

  ‘So you can reach your destination,’ had been the answer.

  “How will I recognize it?”

  ‘You’ll see a transport ship. It is tall enough that you’ll be able to see it from far away.’

  This explanation didn’t mean anything. It could still be a fiction generated by her subconscious. Everyone knew that the company that wanted to colonize Mars had sent provisions ahead of its mission. The colonists were supposed to get to work as quickly as possible, but the corporation hadn’t exactly stuck a big sign on its exact landing spot. Mars didn’t belong to anyone. Anybody could settle here wherever they happened to find a place. And there was definitely enough space—the surface of Mars was more extensive than Earth’s landmass.

  Ewa glanced at her watch. It was almost noon. She had already been walking for seven hours and had covered only twenty-five kilometers, ten fewer than she had planned. She wasn't making progress as quickly thanks to her baby steps. A glance at the sky confirmed that she was in luck. It wasn’t just relatively clear. The sun and both moons just happened to be visible right now. She entered their approximate positions in the sky into her universal device and calculated her location from that.

  Her leg suddenly jerked. Ewa suspected that her subconscious was about to make itself felt. She sat down on a rock and waited for what was coming. This time she wasn’t startled when her finger sank into the sand. However, this time it didn’t write anything, but drew a long arrow instead. The direction in which the arrow was pointing was a little off from her current route.

  Apparently she had to make one final adjustment. She wouldn’t argue against it. Ewa stood up and silently followed the line of the arrow.

  The sun stood right above the horizon. Ewa could no longer say she was trudging, she was doggedly dragging herself along. This torture had to end soon, and it would end soon, one way or the other. Her skull was pounding—an intense headache. She wished she could take her head in her hands and squeeze it like a baked potato until she found release. At least her bewildered mind promised that result. Fortunately, her helmet kept her from doing that.

  Ewa’s eyes were fixed on the red sand. It looked almost black now, shortly before sunset. Even the smallest of stones cast long shadows. Would it possibly help if she gave herself more oxygen? She increased the concentration through her universal device and increased the speed of her ventilator by a third. A cool wind blew across her face. Magnificent! Even the ever-present stench of blood and sweat grew weaker. She checked her supply gauge. If she continued at this rate, she had five hours of oxygen left. That was enough, and if it wasn’t enough, that was all right with her.

  The sun was about to go down. Ewa looked westward. This might be the last sunset of her lifetime. They said you should make a wish whenever the sun slipped behind the horizon. But she didn’t reach that point, because only a few degrees away from the sun an oddly shaped hill rose up from the plain. The only reason she caught sight of it was because of the few sunbeams that were being reflected in her dire
ction.

  Ewa knew instantly what it was. The shape of the hill was unnatural. She had just found the transport dream ship that her subconscious had promised her. No, it had to be that alien object inside her head. Ewa was tempted to start running. This was her salvation. She would find supplies—oxygen, water, nourishment, perhaps even a vehicle over there.

  But it was too early. She had one last thing to take care of before then. It was impossible for her to imagine a future in which she didn’t control her own life. Ewa searched for a large rock and sat down. She set her backpack down next to her and pulled out her journal and pen.

  “You were right. It really is a transport dream ship,” she said.

  She then opened the journal. Come on, she thought. Nothing happened. Her right hand eventually picked up the pen and began to write. ‘You’ve done it. The supplies are waiting there, just for you.’

  “No,” she said. “I will sit here and die.”

  ‘Don’t you want to live?’ the pen asked on the paper.

  “I want to live, but not like this,” she replied out loud.

  ‘What does that mean?’ her hand wrote.

  “I want to control my own mind,” Ewa said.

  ‘I will only intervene if I have no choice.’

  “That’s not enough. I want to be completely in control again.”

  ‘That isn’t technically possible. You would have to have another brain surgery, and you don’t have the technology needed for that up here.’