by M. G. Herron
Before Griv’s funding dried up and the scientists got blocked out.
NASA’s funding had been pulled before his team was able to get halfway through their mission—a bitter disappointment to them all. While the evidence for dried-up waterways and the probable existence of micro-organic life seemed beyond dispute, they had found no fossils or structures or tools or artifacts worth protecting in their detailed search of the planet’s surface. And, as is the human way, once Mars was divided up into holdings owned by profit-seeking interests, the scientists were forced out.
The corporations hurried to deploy computerized tomography scans to pinpoint gold and petroleum deposits deep inside the red planet. They found the first one in year two, and the mining operations began a month later. The scientists went home and moved on with their lives…all except for Griv. He used his NASA training to get a transport pilot’s job so that he could stick around. It didn’t feel like there was any other option at the time. He refused to run the drills with his own hands, but hauling supplies and shipping precious metals back home? That he could stomach.
Barely.
That Griv had always believed that the artifacts of an ancient alien civilization were hidden somewhere in the red soil of Mars kept him going.
Over the years, the bile with which the idea had originally occurred to Griv settled. He resigned himself to his fate. He even learned to enjoy his work.
Maybe that was why he was found himself so disinclined to take Deirdre’s advice. He’d left astrobiology behind years ago. Flying transport ships wasn’t just a ruse anymore. It genuinely was his way of life.
Griv focused on landing his ship carefully in an empty crater. Then he suited up and walked around the outside of his ship with a checklist while he waited for the site manager from a small Mexican-American gold conglomerate called Oro Dawn to send men to retrieve the equipment they had ordered.
A dust cloud billowing over the lip of the crater announced the approach of the Oro Dawn transport trucks. To Griv’s surprise, Raul Merino, the site manager, actually stepped out of one of the trucks. The two of them had been working together for about three years.
“Thank you for making a second trip back so soon,” Raul said as he stepped out of the cab of the transport truck. “You’re a life saver.”
Griv cocked his head at this. He’d thought it was a little unusual for Raul to order twice as many mining bots as he had the previous shipment, and even more so to place the order before Griv finished the last trip back. Griv hadn’t cared why, because it meant a good commission, but he clearly didn’t have the whole story.
“Is something the matter?”
Raul waved his question away with one hand. “Just a fluke. Several of our older machines broke down in the low mines, and we’ve been forced to halt some operations in this area while we retrieve and replace them. The execs are not happy about it.”
“Why did they break down?”
“Ah, who knows,” Raul said dismissively. “The sand here gets in everything, and we work the bots around the clock. They probably just gave up the ghost from being pushed too hard. Some of this equipment is getting old, even if it is still mostly serviceable.”
“How many broke down at once?”
Through his helmet, Griv saw that Raul pursed his lips as he turned to gaze at the mining bots, which his people were rolling them across the sand on chunky wheels to the transport trucks. “Several of them,” Raul finally said.
Griv pursed his lips. “You don’t seem so sure about that.”
“It’s probably nothing. Superstition.”
Griv felt a wry smile creep onto his mouth. This intrigued him. Superstition was like popcorn. It always concealed some kernel of truth, however small. “Oh yeah?”
“Ah, you know how people can be, especially when they spend so much time underground in a hostile environment. They see ghosts, even on Mars where no one has ever died.”
“Did you forget about the Canadian gold mine collapse, two years back?”
Raul clenched his gloved hand into a fist. “Okay, fine, two deaths, but not in my mines. Listen, forget it, Griv. People just talk when they’ve nothing better to do.”
“And the company doesn’t want you to tell anyone what they’re talking about.”
Raul looked away again, and shouted through his comms at one of his men to get back to work. They were both silent for a long minute. Griv wanted to know more, but knew if he pressed the wrong button, Raul would clam up. The man had a family back on Earth. He needed this job.
Griv remembered what else was stored in his cargo bay. The Canadians would pay more for it, but this story might be worth leaving a bit of profit on the table.
“I’ll give you one of the cigars I brought with me if you tell me what they’ve been saying.”
Raul squinted at Griv through the visor of his helmet. “What kind of cigars?”
“Dominican,” Griv said. “Follow me in two minutes.” Without waiting for a response, he walked up the freight ramp into his now-empty cargo hold.
Griv removed two cigars and one bottle of whisky from his secret compartment, and closed it quickly. By the time Raul walked up the cargo ramp, Griv was waiting by the ladder that led up to the cockpit. He held up the stogies, and the bottle of whisky.
Raul grinned.
Once they had settled into the pilots’ chairs and removed their helmets, Griv flipped on the air filters that recirculated air throughout the sealed part of the ship.
He handed a cigar cutter across to Raul, who sat now in the co-pilot’s chair. None of the freighters kept a co-pilot on board any more—with the flight automation, there was really no need for one. As long as the EM drive worked, the ships would guide themselves home safely, even if something bad happened to the pilot.
“This is a treat,” Raul said, slicing the end off the cigar with a quick snap of the cutter. Griv flicked the lighter and held it out. Raul took several shallow puffs as he turned the cigar to get it lit evenly.
Griv poured whisky into two plastic cups, then cut and lit his own cigar. Soon the cabin was filled with a haze that drew slowly toward the narrow vent in the ceiling.
“Your men okay?” Griv asked.
“They’ll appreciate the down time.”
“Right then. Proceed,” he said, raising his plastic cup to his mouth. A warm burn coated his tongue and throat as he swallowed the smoky whisky.
Raul tossed his drink back in a single shot, and sighed. “A few weeks ago, a crew was poking around in one of the lowest mines, exploring how we could get around a thick vein of granite to reach a new area where scans indicate a rather large deposit of gold is located, when the bots broke down. They just stopped working, all of a sudden. Of course the men down there are competent mechanics, so they popped open the bots and saw immediately that not only were their processors fried—and you know those things are worth a million a piece—but all the wiring was burnt out, blackened, like it had been in an electrical fire.”
Raul paused, and pointed to the whisky bottle.
“By all means,” Griv said.
Raul poured himself another large shot and tossed it back as quickly as the first, then puffed at his cigar thoughtfully, as if considering something important. Finally, he said, “The gold deposit we were looking for is on the border of the Canadian mining region.”
Griv whistled through his teeth. “You mean…?”
Raul nodded. “A few miles from the Canadian mine collapse.”
“That can’t be a coincidence.”
“Maybe. My men are spooked now. They think there are spirits in the mine, or something. Ghosts in the machines.”
“Have you considered that maybe there’s some truth to their claim?” Griv suggested gently.
“Maybe,” Raul said. “So a few machines malfunctioned? But I could never admit it even if I thought it was true. If that sort of talk made its way back to the CEO, I’d be pulled from this job in an instant.” He looked up, his eyes
suddenly bright. “We’ve worked together long enough for me to know that you’re a man of integrity.”
“Of course, Raul. My lips are sealed.” Now Griv had even more sympathy for the site manager. If his men organized and refused to follow orders to return to the low mines, he could potentially have a full-blown mutiny on his hands.
“Good,” Raul said. “This can’t get out.”
“How many men do you have working for you here?”
“About a hundred and fifty.”
Griv did some quick mental calculation. “Would some more whisky and a few of these cigars put their minds at ease?”
A mischievous look twisted Raul’s lips. “How much?”
“Well, I just need to make the cost back, plus a little for my troubles, you understand. Not much.”
“The company gives me a rather…flexible expense account where matters of morale are concerned.”
Griv grinned. “I know it.”
Raul’s men had a noticeable bounce in their step when they saw what their site manager carried out of Griv’s freighter in his arms. After packing every bottle of whisky—and all the cigars save for a dozen that Griv held back for himself on the return trip—into Raul’s trucks, Griv lifted his freighter off the ground and set a course back to Earth.
In just under an hour, he had cleared the thin atmosphere of Mars. The red planet was but a speck in the rearview camera, and Griv had settled down into his pilot’s chair with another one of those Dominican cigars, when the EM drive cut out.
4
Chaos on the Ship
“YOU HAVE GOT to be kidding me,” Griv said, the cigar halfway to his mouth.
Gold snow glitched across the cockpit windows for the second time, and the array of controls on his dashboard flashed red and blue and green—color sequences without meaning. He pressed the button to reactivate the engine, but nothing happened.
That button was not flashing. That one was dark.
A klaxon cut through the ship and Griv dropped the cigar as he gripped his hands to his ears.
“What the hell!” he shouted, although he could barely hear his own voice over the horrible noise.
That klaxon was only supposed to go off if a breach in the ship put the crew in danger. But with the electronics going haywire, he couldn’t rely on his systems to check.
He had taken his spacesuit off, so Griv slid quickly down the ladder without the cumbersome restraint of the suit. The deafening noise faded and boomed as he moved between compartments of the ship.
In the cargo hold, the four repair drones skittered across the floor frantically, bumping into each other and circling in a mad dance.
So much for checking the hull. He took a deep breath. The air seemed to be fine, so he decided it was safe enough—for now.
Griv sidled along the wall, trying not to step on or kick the drones, and finally ducked into the engine room. The source of the klaxon was located here; he found the manual override and flipped the switch. The noise ceased, and he breathed a sigh of relief.
“Ship, activate engine,” he told the voice command system in the ringing silence.
Nothing happened. The EM drive didn’t make much noise beyond a vibrating hum when it was active, and now it remained ominously quiet.
“Ship, activate engine!” Griv demanded. He broke out in a cold sweat when he heard the panic that had seeped into his own voice.
Apart from abandoning the ship and taking the lifeboat out on its own—which would be a fool’s errand in the vast emptiness between Mars and Earth—there was only one other option.
“Ship, activate external thrusters.”
He felt more than heard the external thrusters activate and push the ship gently in the direction of Earth.
Griv breathed a sigh of relief. That, at least, was good news. “Ship, stop external thrusters.”
The external thrusters were primarily for takeoffs and landings and minute corrections during flight—for instance, they would activate automatically to avoid large asteroids.
But because they were only to be used for minute corrections, there was very little fuel on board.
Certainly not enough fuel to take him back to Earth safely. Probably not even enough to get him back to Mars. Were he to use the thrusters to go back to Mars, he would waste half his fuel reversing his current velocity and turning around.
And there were still the electrical problems. Would he even be able to land safely on Mars? Or would he crash into the red planet’s surface and obliterate himself and his freighter in the process?
Griv stepped back into the cargo hold. The repair drones continued to dance and turn, which was weird. They shouldn’t have been directly affected by an electrical issue in the ship’s computers. Griv went to the nearest computer, and initiated a force reboot of the ship’s electronics. The cargo hold went dark, the repair drones stopped, and then the lights kicked back on.
Still no power to the engine, however.
Griv sent a drone out the airlock, and found the seam in the hull—it looked just as it had before, no problems there.
He brought the drone back inside the ship, and climbed back up to the cockpit.
The electronics seemed to operate normally now, except for the engine controls. He initiated a software diagnostic scan for the second time on this trip, and sat back to wait while it completed. He picked up the cigar from the floor where he’d dropped it. Instead of lighting it, he put it away. His tongue tasted so bitter he didn’t think he could handle a cigar.
Griv found himself wishing that he hadn’t sold all the whisky to Raul. He waited, his body tense, for the software diagnostic to finish as his broken freighter hurtled, engine-less, through the void.
5
Burnt and Blackened
WHEN THE SOFTWARE diagnostic came up with nothing, Griv slammed his hand down against the arm of his seat so hard a twinge of pain shot up to his elbow.
And at that precise moment, the control panel went haywire again. Gold snow flashed before his eyes.
This time Griv was not distracted by the control panel. He focused on the glitchy screen, and noticed how the gold specks coagulated into a swirling sine patterns, dissipating and reforming in measured intervals.
It was nothing he understood or recognized, but some part of his mind realized that this unusual glitch was, perhaps, more than it seemed.
With a wild suspicion creeping up in the back of his mind, Griv slid back down the ladder to the cargo hold. As expected, the repair drones were circling madly again.
Instead of avoiding them, this time he stepped in their direction. The drones swerved out away from his feet, and stopped around him at the four cardinal points, like a compass.
He took a shot at his suspicion. “Can you hear me?” he asked tentatively.
The drones began to spin again, dancing in a circle around him.
“Who are you? What are you?” he said.
On a nearby monitor, the gold snow flashed in a wavy pattern. One of the drones slipped forward, and spun rapidly until smoke began to curl up out of it.
It popped. A fountain of sparks washed over the floor. Griv threw up his arm to shield his eyes from the sudden light.
When he lowered his arm again, the drone was smoking. The others were still arranged at the edges of the empty cargo hold, but they had ceased moving about.
Griv donned a pair of gloves he kept in the cargo hold, and carefully picked up the repair drone. Whatever this thing was in his ship, it wasn’t a computer virus—the diagnostic proved that. Plus, a virus wouldn’t have responded to his movements the way the drones had, let alone his questions. He could feel the heat of the little machine through his gloves. He pried open the burnt panel protecting the drone’s innards, and saw that all the electrical equipment was burnt and blackened inside.
Like it had been in an electrical fire.
Griv drew in a sharp breath. Could it be?
He set down the burnt-out drone and began to rethink his
earlier assumptions.
For starters, during his days searching Mars for signs of alien life, his team had only searched the surface of the planet. If the stories that Raul’s men had told him were to be believed, whatever now inhabited his ship’s electrical systems had only appeared after the mining companies had reached a certain depth where gold and granite could be found.
Moreover, his focus had been on finding fossils, artifacts, and structures left behind by ancient life on Mars. But—and he forced himself to follow this line of thought carefully—whatever could fry the mining bots and inhabit the electrical system in his ship would, conceivably, leave nothing of the sort behind. No bodies meant no fossils and no artifacts.
An intelligent being that could fry robots with its presence and inhabit the electrical systems of a ship must, by definition, be a non-corporeal being. A being made of energy.
And if these beings did manage to build structures, they would have been located deep underground, not on the surface where there was no atmosphere.
That made a certain sort of sense, actually. The atmosphere on the surface of Mars was so thin as to be uninhabitable, and had been that way for millions of years. So if life survived on Mars, it would have had to retreat below the surface of the dying planet and evolved to live in an environment with little or no atmosphere.
Griv’s heart began to race. If this were true, then it meant that while some of his assumptions had been wrong, his theory that intelligent life existed on Mars was right!
And it also meant that the mining companies were freshly poised to destroy even more of it than they already had.
He needed to get back to Mars—and fast. His first thought was to use the thrusters and what little fuel he had on the ship to reverse his trajectory, and take the risk of landing on Mars with no EM drive and no thrusters.
But that would end badly. And even if he did land safely, who would believe him? Raul was already convinced of the “superstition” that there were ghosts deep in the mines. If Griv came back insisting that his men’s superstition was actually a highly evolved, intelligent non-corporeal being, Raul would probably think the retired astrobiologist-turned-pilot had gone fully senile.
