Mars Wars - Abyss of Elysium

by Abyss Of Elysium (Lit)

  Brinker knew what had to be done. With strength he did not know he had, he pulled himself into the rushing air-stream, jerking Quinton up in front of him, and rode headlong into the wall. Quinton's body stuck, abdomen first, into the gaping hole.

  A single sharp fragment of the jagged edge of the hole penetrated the Lieutenant’s suit and body. Quinton screamed as the air and fluids were ripped from his lungs, but no one heard. The Martian near-vacuum sucked the fluids out of his body from a pencil-sized wound. Its powerful force also evacuated his suit, pulling it around his form until the fabric buckled his body over backward.

  The colonists pulled themselves off the floor, gasping for air. They all saw the horrible image of Brinker falling and crawling away from the vacuum-packed corpse of Quinton hanging off the wall, the officer's upper torso bent completely backward, his upside-down, contorted face clearly visible through his visor. His body successfully stopped the airflow and the emergency air banks quickly restored the pressure. But Quinton's lifeless eyes stared out over them, a thick red foam dripping from his nose and mouth.

  7

  ilitary authority now fell to Brinker. But standing in the dining hall, staring at the body of his former superior officer hanging dead from the wall in the grotesque position into which he had purposefully placed him, did nothing for his own sense of command. Yet there were other lives to consider and none of his troops could handle the job, so he acted. He reached out unaggressively and took a PC2 from one of the colonists. He keyed in Lipton's command channel.

  "Director's office, this is Sergeant Brinker here."

  After a prolonged silence, a voice replied, "Go ahead, Brinker, this is Hernandez."

  "Lieutenant Quinton is dead. Complex 14 dome had been breached but conditions are stable..."

  "Are the prisoners under control, Brinker?"

  "Yes, but not in my control, sir. Under Marine Corps regulations, this operation falls under the domestic dispute classifications, and I must have orders from higher up to continue these kind of military actions against American citizens. The United States Marines are not permitted to perform domestic police duties with regard to our own people."

  There was a prolonged period of silence. Peter waved several individuals over to his side and whispered orders, pointing at Quinton. One immediately grabbed a table cloth and draped it over his body. Several more left to suit up and weld a cofferdam over the outside hole so that Quinton’s body could be safely removed from the wall.

  Finally, the PC2 crackled to life. "Brinker, this is Lassiter Lipton. Are you refusing to obey my direct orders to apprehend the prisoners and bring them back?"

  "I’m just informing you that my commanding officer is dead, Mr. Director, from a civil dispute, and that puts this whole operation into a new category. Until I hear from my command on earth, I’m not allowed by Marine Corps regulations to aggravate this situation."

  "What regulation are you quoting, Marine?" Lipton asked, characteristically.

  “My actions are constrained by the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878,” Brinker replied unhesitantly.

  “And just what part of that act are you constrained by, Marine?” Lipton shot back without pause. “Are you aware of the implications of my authority as a Presidential appointee with special ambassadorial status under Title 10, U.S. Code, Section 331 and exactly how that relates to the Posse Comitatus Act?”

  "I'll have to wait until I can contact my command and get back with you. I’ll need a JAG analysis of that relationship, sir," Brinker replied instantly. He was used to dealing with bureaucratic nit wits. “I’m not permitted to exceed the limitations of my mission without proper authorization, sir.”

  "If you can offer innocent American citizens no more protection than that, you may as well stay in the enemy camp, Brinker," Lipton said in a fit of anger.

  "You heard the man," Brinker replied, tossing the PC2 back to its owner, and directing the comments to Peter. "Looks like I'll be here for a sol or so until we can get this whole mess worked out. But I put you on official notice: I still work for Lipton until directed otherwise."

  "Of course," Peter replied. Then to Toon he asked, "Will you assist the Marines with some coveralls and dinner?"

  Brinker finally smiled, "Best idea I've heard in two sols."

  Jack approached Brinker and slapped his shoulder. "Let me have your suits and I'll patch up those holes."

  "You damn well better. Government property, you know."

  As the Marines walked out of the dining hall, the other colonists began to speak to one another in hushed tones.

  "Brinker, Lipton here," the PC2 echoed. "I want you in my office in ten minutes with a full report. Brinker, acknowledge!"

  "Did you hear anything?" Peter asked Francis. "I didn't hear anything." Then he turned the PC2 off.

  They removed Quinton's body more quickly than anyone expected. A second plate was hastily welded over the hole in the wall from the inside, and the external cofferdam removed. The plate hung there as an ugly reminder of just how desperate things could get.

  Peter asked Gorteau to transmit the details of Quinton's death to Lipton immediately and call off the scheduled teleconference until they could come up with a new strategy.

  It was approaching 11PM in the colonist’s compound, and Peter asked Communications Chief, Jamie Powers, to prepare an update on the worsening crisis in their inability to communicate with the earth. Then he called another meeting of his staff. This one was considerably more subdued. Now the price of resistance was being measured in lives.

  ipton himself had been changed by the affair. He caught himself losing his much regarded self composure in the pressure cooker he now found himself in, and that was unacceptable to his own self image. Yet, as he re-read the report from Gorteau on the death of Quinton, he found his hands shaking. This and the accusations the scientific community were making about his lockers were sure to end his position as Director, regardless of how many others were also ruined in the ensuing political firestorm.

  He was losing his ability to think ahead, plan ahead and extract himself from this expanding morass. Or, was it just late? He wasn't sure as the next problem burst into his office.

  "What's this crap about launching without the earth links, Lipton?" It was the lander Commander, Ian Cartwright, followed by Pilot Sigourney Michner and his deputy, Hernandez.

  "I told you before, it’s against NASA regulations to fly out of here without the earth links."

  "I have the authority to order you to fly tomorrow morning, Commander, and when the window opens, you will fly," Lipton replied, all of the force of his temperament restored. "The count is underway. At T-zero, the lander will lift off."

  "Read my lips Mr. Director: forget it - no way!"

  "Just in case you’ve forgotten, there are two serious considerations here that directly affect you, Commander. One, you have a pilot still in orbit. Two, your upcoming rendezvous with the MTSO (Mars Transfer Solar Orbiting vehicle) is exponentially linked to your departure time. Every sol you delay past next week will cost you six sols in intercept time. If you wait until OT (Occultation Terminus - when the earth reappears from behind the sun) you’ll be stranded here for a hundred or more sols, perhaps double that. No one has ever missed a cycle, Commander. Are you going to be first?”

  "I don't need your lessons on space flight. And, believe me, nobody I know said anything about not leaving, Lipton. In fact, if I thought I could get away with it, I'd be out of this asylum in ten minutes. However, as it is my ship, I’ll decide when NASA regulations will be waived and I take the responsibility for the safe conduct of my passengers and my mission.

  “And while we’re on the subject, I will not take prisoners back on my run without direct authorization from my command. You got that? No revolutionaries on my ship. When I decide to leave this planet, I’ll take what is scheduled on the authorized manifest, and that includes people, diplomatic lockers and cargo; no more, no less."

  "You realize, Command
er, that the communications link is likely to be reestablished momentarily," Lipton said coolly. "And when it is, I will report your refusal to obey a direct order from a superior and your public insolence. Now get out of my office."

  "That don't pass the so-what test, Mr. Director," the Commander replied turning toward the door. "Come on, Siggy."

  "I hope you enjoy your last run, Commander," Lipton said with a sneer.

  "I want the next transmission out of here Lipton," Cartwright replied, pointing his finger at Lipton, and then left the room, slamming the door behind him.

  Hernandez looked at Lipton's face and did not like what he saw. He had never seen Lipton lose his composure on so many occasions. As Lipton sighed deeply and sat back in his chair, Hernandez feared for the Director's stability.

  "Shall I scrub the launch, Dr. Lipton?" Hernandez asked quietly.

  Lipton looked back at him with red, glazed eyes. "No, damn you to hell! The launch will proceed. Now get my staff in here immediately!"

  8

  In Low Martian Orbit

  n ancient Gregorian chant drifted and echoed diffusely throughout the air and joined with the magic of the sunlight's brilliant display out of the spaceship’s clear window. The pure soprano voices of the boys’ choir were linked to the sun's brilliant golds and silvers, while the deep men's basses carried and caressed the vibrant violets and reds as the sun rose over the Martian horizon.

  The Robert H. Goddard rounded Mars in its highly elliptical orbit for more than the hundredth time. As the sun rose over the horizon again, as it had every fifty-second minute, Navy Lieutenant and NASA Payload Specialist, Robert Kerry celebrated the magnificent event with his micro-miniature sound system turned up as loud as it would go. As always, nature's most glorious spectacle merged flawlessly with the most consummate cantos fantasia ever composed. It reverberated off the Goddard's thin walls and fused with the light in Kerry’s soul. He floated in front of the window facing the sun, chills repeatedly crossing his spine and running down through his legs.

  They worried about him alone in space. They were fools.

  Too soon, the glorious spectacle became too bright to watch and Kerry switched off the music. Better to save it for the next sunrise. But with the silence, the worry returned in force.

  The liftoff of the lander and rendezvous were delayed for highly unusual and bizarre reasons. The peculiar happenings on the ground made Kerry as uneasy as he had ever been. BC1 was evidently embroiled in some kind of administrative crisis, they had all lost their earth links, and the normally routine schedule of exchanging people and cargo had been delayed. Such had never happened before in the history of spaceflight.

  Any one of these events would have been cause for great concern, but all occurring together was unprecedented. They were already causing a ripple of effects in the Goddard. The orbiter continuously collected data about the Mars environment and made a data dump directly to earth every nine hours. Since there was no link, the data was being stored. In one hour, Kerry was going to have to delete one whole data set to make room for the next. No one on earth had planned for this particular anomaly. And that is what concerned Kerry the most. If they had not planned for this little glitch, what else had they overlooked?

  Kerry was all too aware of the game of orbital catch-up in store for them. In continuous orbit around the sun was the Wernher Von Braun II, one of three unmanned, freely orbiting space platforms perpetually encircling the sun in orbits that periodically intersected the orbit of the Earth and Mars. The Von Brauns were thus called MTSO ships, or, Mars Transfer Solar Orbiting Vehicles. They were orbiting life support ships whose only purpose was to provide humans with a large living space and all the equipment necessary to provide life support. This saved the fuel required to accelerate and decelerate great mass every time someone needed to travel to and from Mars.

  They had left the Von Braun II ten sols earlier for a rendezvous with Mars. If they departed Mars as scheduled, the planned intercept would require eleven sols. However, as orbital mechanics dictated, for every sol they delayed, the amount of time to catch the solar orbiting Von Braun II changed exponentially. In other words, it would take longer and longer to catch the ship until, eventually, it could not be caught at all.

  The mission of the Goddard was to transfer two canisters to and from Mars orbit: one passenger canister and one cargo canister. The canisters were ferried to and from orbit by a launch and landing vehicle simply dubbed “the lander”. The canisters ferried up and down by the lander vehicle were identical in shape and power, and fit like twin cocoons, clinging to the Goddard’s sides. When the ship had first entered orbit, the empty cargo canister from the last run was blasted into orbit from BC1. As the passenger canister departed to land, Kerry rendezvoused with the empty cargo canister and docked it to the sides of the Goddard.

  The process would be reversed when the earthbound passengers left the Crippen Spaceport. The fully loaded cargo canister would be released for landing and the passenger canister would rendezvous and dock in its place.

  The whole process was essential to the survival of those on the surface. BC1 was unable to provide enough power or find enough water on Mars to continue its existence without regular resupply shipments from earth.

  Additional power capacity was provided in the form of new solar panels on each resupply run as the colony grew. A few small nuclear generators were provided with each shipment, but these were political liabilities to the administrative officials and bureaucrats on earth, so not nearly enough were flown. At least one third of each shipment's mass was water. In earth orbit, the cargo canister was spun and the water exposed to the deep cold of space, so that it froze and was delivered as a solid to Mars. Heating elements were built into the canister, so that the ice could be melted on the surface as the water was needed.

  Winter was creeping up on BC1. With the additional personnel added, the colony would desperately need the water provided by the cargo canister. Without it, they would have to severely ration their water until the next lander arrived. If, for some reason, the next lander did not arrive, the humans at BC1 would inevitably die.

  Of course, items that could not be manufactured, grown or otherwise engineered on Mars were also delivered in both the passenger and cargo runs to the surface.

  Winter on Mars did not arrive with a New England vengeance. There were no snows, no blizzards or even brisk winds. Martian winters came on slowly, almost insidiously. The temperature at BC1 dropped from the summer highs of minus 17.2 degrees C (+1 degree F) on a clear sol to winter lows of negative 107 degrees C (-178 degrees F); cold enough so that a morning frost of carbon dioxide ice froze on exposed outside regolith, equipment and shelters.

  The use of water and power also slowly increased with the onset of winter. On Mars, water and power defined life.

  Kerry looked through his hand-held Questar telescope at the slowly unfolding Marsscape below. He had aligned his ship so that Shturmovoi, the base built by the Reunified Soviet Empire, also known as the “Little Kremlin”, would appear in a few minutes in front of his down-pointed scope. As the planet slowly rotated beneath him, the feature he was looking for rotated before Kerry. It was known as Solis Planum; Latin for “Sun Plain”. Corrected for historical accuracy, the feature was called “Lake of the Sun” by the colonists, gaining its original name from a classical Mars map drawn by Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1879. Finally, it rotated into view across the planet below. He checked his chart, then the landmarks in his scope.

  "Okay, baby, come on now," Kerry prodded, as the planet unrolled before his vision. "Bingo!" he said triumphantly as the first of the obviously human made structures crossed into his vision. The Little Kremlin resembled BC1 in that its structures were interconnected with tunnels, but it had a poorly defined regularity to it. The RSE engineers were forced to add and eliminate design plans at the various whims of political ideologies until Shturmovoi ended up looking like a ramshackle interplanetary mining town with no order and little
notice of aesthetic or architectural design.

  The Soviets had come to Mars not so much with science on their mind as undisguised planetary conquest. The Russian Commonwealth of Independent States collapsed early in the 21st century following prosecution of the interminable planetary Terrorist Wars in which the chimerical peace dividends of the old Soviet Union’s collapse proved to be only wishful thinking. When the 21st century’s planetary economic crisis morphed together as an unfortunate constituent of the seemingly endless Terrorist Wars, a new Union of Soviet Socialists Republic emerged from the ashes of the old. It called itself the Reunified Soviet Empire, and it was in historic fact even more of a stiff, totalitarian, ideological juggernaut than the old ever was. In the end, the cold war between east and west that many had declared dead and gone, raged furiously anew.

  Yet, more to Kerry’s immediate interest, and the single item that made the Little Kremlin unique, was their nuclear power station. Located over a crater wall, distant from the main base was, to Kerry's vision, an asymmetrical, flat black dot which defined the main power kernel.

  The power kernel contained the solar system's largest Radioisotope Fueled Thermoelectric Power Generator or RTG. The Soviet built RTG was designed to provide Shturmovoi with constant power while incorporating the least amount of shielding possible. This was accomplished through an ingenious and remarkable engineering technique.

  The Soviets first erected the outside of the power kernel, consisting of thin ceramic walls-within-walls to prevent heat loss. Then they installed a layer of thermoelectric generating devices, leaving the center of the core open. Meanwhile, on earth, they launched six, several thousand kilogram unshielded plutonium plugs into earth orbit. It took them 60 days to accomplish this, while the western world nearly self-destructed with protests. The Soviets denied it all, while in orbit, they were attaching long cables to their plugs. Finally, they literally towed them into Mars orbit.