Mars Nation 3

by Brandon Q Morris

  Jean read out their names here.

  “What we do know is that they were caught by an echo from the world we left behind, a program that traveled along on the Chinese spaceship, perhaps a destructive AI. With Ewa Kowalska’s help, we were able to neutralize the danger. At least, I hope so.

  “However, for these eight people, it was too late. I cannot promise you that these were the last deaths that will occur. This planet is dangerous. But I can guarantee you, with a clear conscience, that things will change here. We will improve the quality of our lives, and not just in an economic, but also in a cultural, sense. The people of Mars Nation will be free.

  “I ask that you not waste any applause on my words. We should bid farewell to our friends in silence. However, I will ask for your support. If we want to have a collective future here, we need each and every one of you. Thank you for your support.”

  The people started to move, each of them throwing a shovel of Mars’ dust into the graves.

  Theo took a deep breath. He would depart tomorrow to return the rover to the MfE base. The other enclosed rover would take Mike and Lance back to the NASA base. He would see Rebecca again in a few days. Today, he needed to find someone from whom he could purchase a pair of rings. He would ask Rebecca to join him to gaze at the rainbow they had created together. And then he would ask her to be his wife.

  Sol 376, NASA Base

  Everything had taken longer than they had hoped. In his impatience, Lance had already chewed all his fingernails off, and Mike had asked him numerous times to stop telling him enthusiastic stories about Michael.

  The enclosed rover finally drove onto the NASA site. Lance recognized the turbine that he had once built himself. Sarah had helped him with that. And now their son was already 60 sols old, two whole months! He had been so worried that he would miss out on the most important time of his life that he almost felt grateful to the AI for taking over Mars City. That had been what it took to finally topple the administrator.

  Four people in Spaceliner suits were standing in front of the airlock. Neither Sarah nor Sharon were in sight. These were four men. Who were these guys, what did they want here, and why were they the ones out here as the welcoming committee? Lance felt anxious.

  Mike insisted that they prepare for an orderly exit. “Don’t leave anything inside here. The rover will be heading back to the city,” he said.

  Lance checked all the shelves and compartments one more time. He then picked up his kitbag and closed his helmet. “I’m ready.”

  “Good,” Mike said, opening the hatch. The stuffy air rushed out.

  One of the four men walked toward them. “Hello, I’m Dr. Cline,” he said as an introduction. “These men are Pawlidis, Tanner, and Müller.”

  “Benedetti and Leber,” Mike replied, pointing to himself, then Lance. “What is your business here?”

  “We’re here for the rover,” Dr. Cline said.

  “But how did you get here?”

  “We were ordered to examine the ancient machine that is stuck in the dust behind your camp, but that’s sorted itself out now.”

  “For your sake, I hope you haven’t been bothering our comrades.”

  “Not at all. Who do you think we are?” Dr. Cline spread out his arms. “We spent the entire time over by the machine, and only occasionally fetched supplies from here.”

  “Don’t worry, Mike. They really did leave us alone,” Sharon spoke from down below.

  Lance relaxed his muscles. He would have single-handedly beaten up all four of them if they hadn’t behaved decently. “Is Sarah there, too?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Sarah replied. “We’re waiting for you down here. I didn’t want to take Michael up to the surface since he doesn’t have a suit.”

  Dr. Cline smiled. “She’s quite wise. We should keep our goodbyes brief. We will take the rover off your hands and finally return home. I’ve been missing my wife.” The man held out his hand. Mike shook it, as did Lance.

  “Did you find anything?” Mike asked.

  “It was a pointless endeavor. The outer hull was so hard that we couldn’t get inside. It’s a shame, really. There’s so much we could have learned from it.”

  “Yes,” Mike said.

  Lance reached for his shoulder. Enough small talk. He was anxious to get down to his partner and child.

  “Yes, Lance. We’re going now. Safe travels, folks,” Mike said.

  “I’m sure we’ll see each other again,” the scientist replied.

  Lance was the first one in the airlock. Mike had given him permission to go first. He opened the external door and wiggled his toes impatiently. Today, the increase in pressure was taking an unusually long time. Finally, all the lights switched to green. He opened the interior door and climbed down the ladder.

  There she stood. Sarah was wearing the loveliest smile he had ever seen. She pressed Michael into his arms. He was drooling all over the place, but he was so sweet and cute! Lance knew he needed to remember this moment forever.

  They then hugged each other, and the whole world politely gave them the privacy they deserved.

  Sol 407, Mars City

  “Madame Administrator, please wake up.”

  A young woman was standing next to her bed, plucking at her sleeve. She shook her head groggily. “Please, call me Jean.”

  “I was asked to bring you to the bridge immediately.”

  “I’m coming. Do I have time to shower?”

  “Uh, no. I’m sorry, but they said you need to come right away.”

  Jean got up. She lifted her robe off its hook and pulled it on over her pajamas. “Alright, let’s go. Who has asked for me?”

  “Tetsu Annan.”

  “The physicist? He’s never had the night shift on the bridge.”

  “He was called to the bridge before you were, Madame, uh, Jean.”

  “Understood. Then whatever it is can’t be all that bad.”

  “Tetsu says otherwise. It’s something huge.”

  That still didn’t sound like a catastrophe to her, so Jean felt a little calmer. Nonetheless, her heart was pounding faster than usual.

  The door to the bridge slid open automatically.

  Tetsu noticed, looked up, and waved Jean over. “You need to see this. You are the only one who can respond,” he said.

  “To what?”

  “Read it yourself.”

  He pointed at the screen in front of him. Jean recognized several graphs showing frequency patterns that had probably been analyzed using various techniques. One of the orbiting satellites had picked them up and identified their source as Earth. The computer had also created a representation of their most likely content. The computation was conclusive. The risk that the computer’s interpretation was wrong was less than one-tenth of a percentage point.

  The text read as follows:

  We are calling for help. Over a year ago, our entire technological system failed. Earth lies in rubble, but many people are still alive. We have exhausted most of our resources. What we need the most in order to rebuild Earth is the data that we have completely lost in its digital form. We hope that it still exists somewhere.

  “Is there more to this?” Jean asked. “The text seems to have broken off in the middle.”

  “I’m sorry, but that’s all there is,” Tetsu replied.

  “But you agree that it seems incomplete?”

  “Yes. I assume that this was sent out from a stationary antenna with a very narrow cone. The Mars satellite must have quickly brushed through the transmission cone. The senders were probably only able to make a rough estimate of the direction to send the transmission.”

  “That would fit with the claim that they are now missing critical information on Earth.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s hard to believe. All the technological systems have failed there?”

  “You know, Jean, the control over everything was fairly centralized.”

  “But what about the different countries?�
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  “Everything was interconnected with everything else. A power outage in one place would cause the power to fail somewhere else. No country was immune to that.”

  “Not even North Korea?”

  “Even they had been reliant on Chinese networks for many years.”

  “So, Tetsu. We now need to consider how we can best help them.”

  “That will be difficult,” the physicist declared.

  “What if we send our entire information bank over the satellites?”

  “If all they have is a primitive antenna, they will only receive a small fraction of what we send.”

  “Then we will have to get closer to them,” Jean said. “For example, with one of the Spaceliners.”

  “The Spaceliners won’t be able to land on Earth because of the thick atmosphere. But we could bring one of the ships into a geostationary orbit over the antenna whose signal we have received. And then we could transfer to them all the information that we brought to Mars with us.”

  “But how would the ship get back? There wouldn’t be enough fuel for a crew to make the round trip.”

  “Exactly, Jean. So, we would need to send the other Spaceliner along as a tanker. We’d have to sacrifice it, but right now it’s only functioning as a good storage space anyway. We could extract all the things we’ll need from it, and then there’d be enough room for the fuel.

  “Sounds like a plan. I’ll speak with the council about this.”

  Sol 449, Terra Cimmeria Highlands

  “Stop immediately!” Ewa called.

  The rover came to a rapid stop.

  “Did you see something?” Rick asked.

  “I think so.” Ewa pressed her forehead against the porthole. The glass was warm. It wasn’t actually a real window, it was a screen that provided the illusion of a porthole. In the ice layer right in front of the rover, a pattern resembling a spiderweb stretched out across the ground.

  “I think we found it,” she said. They had been searching for it long enough. Friday was already considering how to convince her that it didn’t really exist.

  “Close your helmet. I’m getting out,” she said.

  Rick moved to obey, without protest. “Helmet shut,” he said a moment later.

  There was nothing left in Summers’ behavior to indicate that he had once played the dictator. Ewa wished she knew what was really going on inside his head, but he was the only one who knew that, and he wasn’t telling anyone. That was why everyone had been relieved when she offered to take this human problem off their hands and along with her to the South Pole. This was after an attempt was made to put Rick on trial. They could have proven him guilty of—and jailed him for—abduction, but in order to placate his supporters, they had put him on probation, on the condition that he participated in Ewa’s expedition.

  “I’m opening the hatch.” Ewa climbed out. The air was pleasantly clear today. The Mars surface was covered with ice. At first glance, she couldn’t tell that she was still on the Red Planet. If she could just bide her time until sunset under a blue sky, her short mental vacation on Earth would be perfect.

  But it was only noon now. That was exactly the right time, since what she was looking for would only reveal itself if the sun was at its zenith. Unobstructed, the sunlight was penetrating the uppermost layer of dry ice, warming the layers below it. Down there, the ice was evaporating and attempting to work its way up to the surface. As soon as it found an access point, it rushed out, dragging sand and ice particles with it. What it eventually formed was something like a network of geysers across the Mars landscape. The spiderweb-type surface pattern that Ewa had discovered was an indication of this phenomenon. However, no human had ever seen these geysers in person.

  Ewa took a deep breath. Out here, she felt good. She couldn’t destroy anything, and even if she did, very few people would weep over the former administrator. Nobody would mourn her much, either. She had never explained to the others what had happened when Friday opened the hatch and deactivated the security system. Friday had told her about his mother, and they both agreed that this information would simply frighten the other humans.

  As for himself—and she believed him—Friday had no ambitions of taking control of Mars Nation. This might have been the fundamental error in his matrix. Whereas his AI mother had been equipped with ambition, either intentionally or unintentionally, by the people who had programmed her, she had failed to include this component when creating him. She might have been completely unaware of this element in her own makeup, and that could explain how she’d missed it in him—which might have been why she had considered him incomplete.

  “Watch out, Ewa! Something’s coming.” Rick warned her at just the right moment, because a dark gush of gas now shot out of the spiderweb pattern. It looked like a suddenly blooming desert flower.

  “Did you catch that on the radar?” Ewa asked.

  “Maximum velocity of a hundred and forty kilometers per hour,” Rick said.

  The gas was fast. It carried dark dust up into the sky with it. It was no longer a flower, but rather a gigantic palm tree. There must have been a westward blowing current up there, because the geyser’s crown was sloping in that direction. And then the tree shrank again. The gas reserve underneath the ice was probably empty now.

  The dust particles that had been caught up in the eruption now created a new pattern on the ice. They would drive around it to the East in order to leave nature’s handiwork undisturbed. This time Ewa would make sure that the substrate remained stable under them. Maybe they would be able to reach the place she was actually looking for, where the entire legacy of the earlier Mars inhabitants was waiting on her.

  Sol 499, Mars Nation

  Maggie was leaning against the bar and stirring her cocktail. It was the evening before their 500th day on Mars, and almost every resident had made his or her way into the city.

  “Do you remember our conversation during our trip back to Mars City?”

  “Yes,” Theo said, studying the ring on his finger. “We discussed the meaning of our survival.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I’ve thought about our conversation a couple of times since then,” Theo said. “But I never could quite believe what you said. Sorry. It was too esoteric for me.”

  “And now?”

  “Well, if we hadn’t survived, then we couldn’t have sent the two spaceships back to Earth to help humanity rebuild its existence there.”

  “See, I knew it.”

  “You couldn’t have known that, Maggie.”

  “No, but I believed it.”

  “That’s something different.”

  “Not for me, Theo.”

  “But it is for me.”

  Author's Note

  Even a trilogy has to reach its conclusion. You kept up with me, and I’m very grateful for that. The Mars Nation now has to live on its own. But humanity’s future should be safe. At least in this universe that’s a bit different from ours.

  Out of all my books, the Mars Nation trilogy probably is the series that will be the first to be proven wrong—or right—by reality. In the 2030s, the first humans could land on Mars.

  Will you see the protagonists of the book again? It could very well happen. They need to see how their fellow humans on Earth are recovering. I don’t have any detailed plans for a second trilogy yet, though so I’d love to send you many billion years into the future now. In The Death of the Universe, humanity is in its final days. It’s a different setting, by all accounts, but I promise an exciting one. And still, the science will be hard, so no beaming, no FTL travel. You can preorder the book here:

  hard-sf.com/links/835415

  Did you like Mars Nation 3? It would be great if you could write a short review. Reviews are the most important thing to help me reach new readers. Please click here to review:

  hard-sf.com/links/818194

  Yours,

  Brandon Q. Morris

  PS: At the end of each novel, you normally f
ind a popular science bonus. This time, you already know everything there is to know about Mars. So I will send you a collection of beautiful Mars pictures in PDF format if you send me your e-mail at hard-sf.com/subscribe/

  Also by Brandon Q. Morris

  The Death of the Universe

  For many billions of years, humans—having conquered the curse of aging—spread throughout the entire Milky Way. They are able to live all their dreams, but to their great disappointment, no other intelligent species has ever been encountered. Now, humanity itself is on the brink of extinction because the universe is dying a protracted yet inevitable death.

  They have only one hope: The ‘Rescue Project’ was designed to feed the black hole in the center of the galaxy until it becomes a quasar, delivering much-needed energy to humankind during its last breaths. But then something happens that no one ever expected—and humanity is forced to look at itself and its existence in an entirely new way.

  3.99 $ – hard-sf.com/links/835415

  The Enceladus Mission (Ice Moon 1)

  In the year 2031, a robot probe detects traces of biological activity on Enceladus, one of Saturn’s moons. This sensational discovery shows that there is indeed evidence of extraterrestrial life. Fifteen years later, a hurriedly built spacecraft sets out on the long journey to the ringed planet and its moon.

  The international crew is not just facing a difficult twenty-seven months: if the spacecraft manages to make it to Enceladus without incident it must use a drillship to penetrate the kilometer-thick sheet of ice that entombs the moon. If life does indeed exist on Enceladus, it could only be at the bottom of the salty, ice covered ocean, which formed billions of years ago.