Mars Nation: The Complete Trilogy

by Brandon Q Morris

“Unless you tell me more about Ewa. It’s just the two of us here. Do you really want to stand by your claim that she simply marched off into the sunset with only her spacesuit?”

  The man was trying to bribe him. Him, Lance Leber! “Yes, that seems to be her MO. I’m sure you’ve seen the logs from the Spaceliner from when she broke in there. She showed up in just a spacesuit there, too.”

  “That’s... true,” Summers agreed.

  “See!”

  “Mr. Leber, you have a young son. Do you want him to grow up without his father? Even if we wanted to, we couldn’t take him along, or do you have a spacesuit for a baby? And I have to carry out the arrest warrants. I’m really sorry about that.”

  Lance stuck his hands inside his pockets to keep them from pounding the other man. Was the man actually threatening to leave Michael here all alone? That would be a death sentence.

  “You’re staring at me as if you think I would simply abandon your son here in this station. That isn’t my intention. For humanitarian reasons, I’ve rescinded the arrest warrant for his mother. He will be cared for. What’s his name?”

  “Michael.”

  “Good. Michael will grow up here. At some point, he will be big enough to wear a spacesuit so he can visit you in the Mars City prison.”

  “You...” Lance bit his tongue.

  “Unless you have something to tell me about Ewa that I don’t already know.”

  Lance shook his head. He refused to be a traitor.

  “Understood,” Summers said. “You want it this way. I’ve tried my best.”

  Lance didn’t reply.

  Thirty minutes later, they were saying goodbye. Summers was obviously in a great hurry to return to his settlement. Maybe he’s afraid there’s been an uprising during his absence, Lance thought. He still couldn’t believe what was happening now. This administrator was making him leave his son whom he had only known for three days! He knew that Sarah would take good care of Michael, but now she and Sharon would be the only ones at the base, which would be several days away from all possible help. If anything happened, the two women would be on their own. And he probably wouldn’t hear anything about it since he would be limited to whatever communication channels Summers made available to him.

  “I’ll be in touch as soon as possible,” he said, wrapping his arms around Sarah who was carrying Michael.

  “Have a safe trip, and don’t do anything stupid,” she urged.

  They kissed.

  Lance turned away so that nobody could see the tears in his eyes.

  “Take care of yourself,” Sharon said, suddenly materializing in front of him. She held out her hand. “You’ll be back soon,” she declared.

  “We’ll be back soon,” Mike repeated.

  The young commander hugged Sarah and Sharon, sealed his spacesuit, and stepped toward the airlock. One of the armed guards followed Mike through it, and then it was Lance’s turn. As soon as he fastened his helmet and could no longer see any of his surroundings, he let the tears flow. At the airlock door, he looked back and waved. Michael waved back, or at least he imagined he did. He entered the airlock and shut the door behind him.

  Sol 320, Mars Surface

  Ewa felt guilty. She kept sitting down at the radio and thinking about whether or not she should contact the NASA base. Didn’t Mike and the others have a right to know what had motivated her to flee? Because that was what she had done—flee secretly, in the breaking dawn after spending days loading the rover with the resources that would be the most critical for surviving out here for as long as possible.

  If she pushed the transmit button and explained everything, she might feel better. Or not? Friday had advised her against it. In his opinion, she would just be burdening the NASA crew. If they didn’t know anything about her departure, they also wouldn’t be susceptible to blackmail. Ewa wasn’t sure. She had grown fond of the four of them, and now there was the baby, too, who needed special protection. She had persuaded herself that Michael was the actual reason she had set off into the unknown. The administrator had to be stopped. But he was sitting so solidly in the saddle that this would only be possible through extraordinary measures.

  She hoped that she could find these measures out here, but she hadn’t gotten very far in the past two Mars days. She had only reached the mountain that had unexpectedly grown out of the desert several months ago and then had threatened their very existence. Her crazy plan was to somehow reactivate the mountain and to bring it under her control. What could go wrong with that? she asked herself. On her last visit, she had presumably destroyed the navigational computer, but there might be a backup system. Or perhaps Friday, the AI that someone had installed inside her brain without her permission, could find a way to command the giant machine.

  Friday had tried to convince her otherwise. Unfortunately, he had handled his arguments clumsily and basically ended up confirming every one of her assumptions. Yes, in theory, the monster should be able to be steered externally. And no, something that had endured millions of years under ice and stone surely couldn’t be entirely destroyed by an electrical short. His only real counterargument had been, ‘We can’t access it.’

  The inside of the mountain, where the control system was located, had been buried under meters of rock ever since they had deactivated the machine. The mountain would have to re-emerge through the surface to let them inside, but that wouldn’t happen until they restarted it. And, to do that, they needed access to the inside.

  “Time will tell,” Ewa had declared, pointing to the explosives that she had stolen from the storeroom at the NASA base.

  For some reason, destruction seemed to be in her blood. She didn’t really understand that herself. Was it some kind of Mephistophelian tendency? Was she driven to destroy things in order to create something new? Maybe this was just an excuse for her actual problem—her stupidity. If she were smarter, she probably wouldn’t have to solve every problem with explosions and destruction.

  Unfortunately, the clarity time had promised was taking its own sweet time. They had circled the perimeter of the mountain multiple times yesterday, a distance of about ten kilometers. They had initially driven the stretch with the rover, then Ewa had climbed out and gone on foot. It had been a nice hike, but except for awaking memories, the exercise was fruitless.

  The recent past was brought back to life when she came across the remnants of the drill. They had needed most of the material for the reconstruction of the drill, but some pieces were simply lying around, like the hacksaw she had used to cut through the chain on which the drill head had been fastened. She’d briefly considered taking the saw with her, but then she had examined the blade more closely. It was utterly worn out. The saw was trash.

  Now what? She repeated the question out loud in the hope that Friday would speak up. “Now what?”

  He obliged. ‘We’re screwed,’ he said through her mouth.

  Ewa had to admit that she had missed these conversations. She had avoided them at the NASA base. It would’ve looked too odd if she had walked around talking to herself.

  “You’d have to be a mole,” she countered.

  ‘What’s a mole?’

  “You don’t know what a mole is?”

  ‘The way you’re using it I’d classify it as a member of the human race.’

  “No, it’s actually an animal that digs long tunnels. Its tunnel systems can stretch as far as three to five hundred meters long.”

  ‘That would be long enough,’ Friday said with her voice. “We’d only need fifty meters to get inside.’

  “The entry point we crawled through seemed longer.”

  ‘Yes, but that couldn’t have been the only entrance.’

  “Doesn’t matter. We can’t dig a fifty-meter long passage either way,” Ewa said with a shrug.

  ‘At the same time, the shell is made of nothing.’

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  ‘The distance between atoms is huge. Or at least betw
een an atom’s nucleus and its so-called shell. If you could increase a hydrogen atom’s nucleus to the size of a pinhead, a ten-thousandth of a millimeter-sized electron could move up to a distance of fifty meters from your pinhead through empty space.’

  “That’s insane. The whole universe is made up of empty space.”

  Ewa felt like she had come across this comparison somewhere else. Unfortunately, the mountain’s shell didn’t feel as if it were composed of empty nothingness. Quite the contrary.

  “This concept isn’t helping any,” she said. “In our world, what we have is a fairly solid obstacle.”

  ‘Maybe we could change our world,’ Friday suggested.

  “By losing weight, or how else am I supposed to fit through there?”

  ‘No. Maybe we don’t personally have to get inside the machine.’

  “But rather?”

  ‘I could communicate with the mountain’s computer.’

  “How would you do that?”

  ‘We need to insert a very, very thin wire into the interior, into the spot where all the machine’s computer systems are located.’

  “You do remember how far we had to go to reach that spot, right?”

  ‘Yes, Ewa. I even guided your body on our way back out, but that doesn’t matter.’

  “Doesn’t matter?”

  ‘Do you remember the chamber in which we found that strange computer?’

  “Absolutely.”

  ‘What did we see up on the ceiling?’

  “The outer world.” Ewa now realized what Friday was getting at. “You think that, at that spot, we were quite close to the surface.”

  ‘I’m quite sure of that. The machine could make its external skin transparent to electromagnetic radiation. We were able to make radio contact with the NASA people. There are a lot of things I think the machine’s creators were capable of, but there’s no way they could have managed that through fifty meters of dirt and sand.’

  “And if they did?” she asked. Ewa’s mouth was dry. It had been ages since she had talked so much without a break. She took a drink of water from her bottle.

  ‘Then I’m quite mistaken, and we’re back to square one,’ Friday replied.

  “In other words, we need to search for the spot underneath which the chamber is concealed.”

  ‘Exactly.’

  “And how do you want to proceed, Friday?”

  ‘I don’t know yet. I am thinking we should use a very, very thin wire.’

  “How could we produce that?”

  ‘I suggest we solve one problem at a time. Let’s first look for the entrance to the chamber.’

  “Agreed,” Ewa said. “If worse comes to worst, we can always blast a hole in the chamber.” She laughed. No, it was Friday who was laughing. That was something new. The AI had never laughed through her before. It felt odd. Whenever Friday used her voice to speak, what she heard sounded like the words of a stranger. But when he laughed with her laugh, his emotion was... infectious. She had to be careful.

  ‘A hole in the roof,’ Friday said. ‘You would like that.’

  Ewa considered this. Yes, she would like that. It would be fun for her. She was probably not entirely mentally stable. Or was it normal to enjoy blowing things up?

  “And when should we start hunting?” Ewa asked.

  ‘The chamber should be situated close to the summit. We won’t be able to reach it with the rover.’

  “If I recall rightly, that’s a pretty good climb,” she said.

  ‘We should plan everything out so we won’t be returning in the dark. It would be unfortunate for me if you fell,’ Friday said.

  “For me, too.”

  ‘Which is why it would be better for us to set off early tomorrow morning. Then we’ll have the whole day in front of us.’

  “Sure. And now let me have a little time alone with my thoughts,” Ewa said.

  ‘Of course.’

  Her mouth belonged to her once more. Ewa took another sip of water before standing up and starting to pace the cab. She really wanted to know how things were going for her friends at the NASA base. Should she risk calling them? But if the wrong people were listening in on the radio channel, she might give away her location. However, the radio range was limited. She now needed a little peace and quiet to figure out how to make the ancient device inside the mountain work.

  Something banged against the cab window. Ewa glanced up and recognized a drone. It must have come from the NASA base. Maybe it had brought her a message. She pulled on her spacesuit. The rover didn’t have an airlock, so Ewa released the breathable air and climbed outside through the hatch.

  The drone was sitting beside one of the tires. It looked sad, like a bird that had broken one of its wings. She picked it up and carried it inside.

  Sol 321, MfE Base

  The base had grown quiet. Before the attack, life within the Mars for Everyone spaces had often seemed demanding to Rebecca. Six men and eight women sandwiched into about 120 square meters of living space, not including the storerooms and offices. Conflict had often been on the menu.

  Now she missed that turmoil, because of how much she missed Theo. She had convinced herself that such daily altercations would have helped to keep her thoughts from constantly turning to him.

  There were still nine of them here, eight women and one man.

  The man, Walter Richardson, had been left behind at the last second by the administrator’s henchmen. They had probably learned from his personnel files—they had seized everyone’s—that Walter was suffering from a very slowly advancing form of cancer—and they didn’t want to have sick people in Mars City. The 53-year-old American was a quiet man. He had previously worked in the oil industry and seemed to enjoy doing odd jobs. Rebecca couldn’t recall exchanging a single personal word with him. Walter was just there when you needed him. She figured he had bought his passage on board Spaceliner with his considerable savings.

  The new situation came with one advantage. Each of the remaining crew members had more work to do, a reality that helped to distract Rebecca from her worries about Theo. She knew that he was strong, but that didn’t help her. Instead, she was afraid that he would undertake something against the administrator and end up in trouble. Summers seemed to have no scruples whatsoever when it came to taking out his enemies. Theo, on the other hand... No, it was better if she focused on her work. Rebecca set aside the pickax before picking up the electric hammer drill again. She stepped across the thick power-supply line and pushed the point of the drill into the hard Mars surface. Then she flipped the start switch with her right thumb while keeping a firm grip on the handle, and the drill rattled alive.

  The sound carried minimally, thanks to the thin atmosphere, but the vibrations grew unpleasant over time. Eventually she was unable to keep her teeth from chattering. That was her signal to set the drill aside and use the shovel and pickaxe to clear away the debris she’d created. She was digging a garden bed. Rebecca looked up. About 50 meters away, Marilou was standing over another drill. The new field would be about 100 meters long, 20 meters wide, and 1 meter deep. Once they had dug the beds, a transparent roof would be constructed over them, and ventilation and irrigation systems would be installed after that.

  A different group was currently preparing the necessary topsoil. The administrator had ordered them to double their agricultural productivity within the next four weeks. If they hit that quota, they would be allowed to keep one-quarter of their production. What a swell deal! she thought with disgust. But they would hardly be in a position to fend off the harvest collectors when they drove up in their rover.

  “Rebecca?”

  “Yes, Marilou?” she asked over her helmet radio.

  “I think it’s time for lunch.”

  Rebecca glanced at the universal device on her left arm. It had just reached 11:30. She looked around. She had already done five meters, which meant she was making excellent progress. The ditch stretching behind her seemed unremarkable. On Ea
rth, it would have only taken an hour of work with an ordinary shovel to get this far. However, the Mars surface was composed of compacted permafrost underneath a thin layer of dust. The hammer drill was the only way for them to make progress.

  “Good idea,” Rebecca said. “Let’s take a break.” She lowered the pickaxe and ambled over to the airlock.

  Marilou caught up with her and placed a hand on her shoulder. They were passing a large, black spot that measured at least twenty meters in diameter. This was where the Endeavour had stood, the NASA ship that Ewa had stolen. Why hadn’t they put a stop to her actions earlier? They should have collaborated with the NASA people from the very beginning. At least that would have made things more difficult for Summers.

  Marilou held the heavy exterior airlock hatch open. Rebecca climbed in first. They filled the airlock with air, and Rebecca removed her helmet as soon as it was breathable. After the light switched to green, they opened the interior door and entered the base.

  “Have you heard anything from the men?” Rebecca asked at lunch.

  They were having cooked rice with beans from a can. Nancy had fixed the meal, which was heavily seasoned and tasted pretty good. Nonetheless, Rebecca wasn’t hungry. They’d had rice and beans way too often. Hopefully, their field would soon deliver fresh food for them.

  “Officially, there’s been no contact,” Ellen said.

  “And unofficially?” Nancy asked. She was probably missing Guillermo with whom she had recently started spending more time.

  “I’m sorry,” Ellen replied, “I shouldn’t have said, ‘officially.’ There haven’t been any messages. They aren’t responding to our requests. I suspect they haven’t reached Mars City yet.”

  “If we aren’t receiving any official information, then we have to find another way to communicate,” Rebecca said, around her mouthful of food.

  “I agree,” Ellen said. “Any suggestions?”

  Rebecca shook her head.

  “Then come up with one!” Ellen urged.