Mars Wars - Abyss of Elysium

by Abyss Of Elysium (Lit)

  “Go ahead and do it,” she said with a smirk. “But by all means, exhale into the bag!”

  Brinker laughed loudly, as Covenant lit the stogie and Brinker took a long, deep drag and held it for well over a minute in complete silence. Everyone present held their breath as well, savoring every second of the moment with him. Then he exhaled dutifully into the plastic bag and crushed the cigar out on the table-top.

  “Just once before I died; just one more time; that’s all I wanted,” he said with real tears brimming in his eyes. The whole colony roared its approval anew.

  Colony psychologist Julia Friedman walked over to a wildly cheering Peter and touched his arm lightly. “You know, Peter,” she said with all seriousness, “none of this, none of this fits anyone’s previous models of the behavior of social groups in stress. And you know, if we ever do make it and if there ever is an earth to go back to, I seriously don’t believe anyone would ever believe this even if I managed to write it up.”

  As she said this, Markley cleared a table for Gorteau who sat down, opened his tablet computer from his pocket and began collecting bets. Brinker placed the first one.

  46

  omehow, they all managed to pull themselves out of the clutches of total despair for nearly a week. Between Gorteau and Psychologist Friedman, they drew out the long awaited announcement over the carbon dioxide pool for almost seven sols. The colonist who won collected $21,345 in now worthless U.S. dollars and another 246.25 in RSE currency notes.

  Once the routine set in, when the temperature was lowered and the severe rations instituted, BC1 slipped into a kind of muted silence – somewhere between despondency and a soundless, controlled, but altogether neutral, state of quiet survival. There was no meaningful work assigned to keep treks outside to an absolute minimum. And all activity that raised the carbon dioxide output or required caloric intake was strictly forbidden.

  For Peter, the most difficult task of all was the order to stay in bed for 10 hours per sol. For his entire life, his sleep periods rarely lasted longer than six hours. Thus, he typically lay awake in his dark room listening to Ashley’s deep breathing beside him and brooding over their plight. It was during one of these times, just before 0500 that he sat straight up, suddenly, wide awake and his heart pounding.

  “What is it, Peter?” Ashley asked, also now awake.

  “Get Francis on the line. Have him and Jack meet me at the Command Center. You come too,” Peter said quickly as he leapt from his bed and pulled his coveralls up around himself in the cold air. Then he burst out the door, only to return three seconds later.

  “Forgot my drive,” he said, fumbling around his cluttered desk. Then he grasped the portable, thumbail-sized device and headed back out the door again without another word. He paced quickly down the darkened passageways toward the Command Center, his breath condensing in the frigid air, tightly clutching his solid-state mini-drive in his fist. Peter burst into the Command Center, interrupting the watch who was quietly viewing a movie, surrounded by the muted glow of hundreds of console lights, gauges and monitors.

  “Nick, you’re relieved,” Peter said as he entered. “Thanks for letting me have the Command Center for a meeting. I’ve got the rest of your watch.”

  Nick looked back at Peter, silently shrugged, and turned his movie off. He then began to call up the different consoles that routinely displayed information that the oncoming watch commanders required in order to turn over the duty to the next watchman. When executed properly, this turnover duty required about fifteen minutes.

  “Skip it, Nick, I can review it myself,” Peter snapped.

  “Well, goodnight then,” Nick replied without a smile and headed toward his own quarters.

  As he departed, Ashley, Francis and Jack came walking briskly through the door, passing Nick on his way out. Jack was buttoning his shirt as he walked, his shoes untied.

  “What?” Francis asked dryly.

  “Jack, sit here at the console; you need to drive,” Peter ordered briskly. “Call up the main computer access logs for control date 11-12-79-04. Then plug my drive into your console and match the access logs on the monitor here where everyone can see them.”

  Jack sat down without a word and soon his fingers snapped expertly at the keyboard in front of him. In less than a minute, two parallel, very dense rows of numbers and symbols appeared on the screen.

  Squinting his eyes at the screen, Peter said, “Now, isolate the geology files and get rid of all the other activity.” As Jack complied, nearly all the figures and numbers cleared from the command Center side of the screen.

  “What does this tell us, Jack?” Peter asked with understanding edging into his voice.

  “Well, it tells me a certain set of geology files were deleted, or wiped to government standards on that date at just after three thirty in the morning from the BC1 main computers.”

  “Exactly!” Peter replied. “And what else?”

  “Well, it also shows that your daily backup occurred right on schedule on your drive in your quarters just half an hour before, and they’re still intact.”

  “Yes! Yes!” Peter exclaimed.

  “Who deleted the files on the main computer?” Peter asked.

  “The Command Center watch commander,” Jack replied.

  “And who was that?” Peter asked.

  Jack’s fingers keyed the board, and then he replied, “Toon.”

  “Yes!” Peter repeated. “It was on that night that we discovered Lipton’s body. When I was in Lipton’s stateroom, I saw that he had been into my files, collating information. Then I asked you, Francis, to shut it down before it did any damage. When I returned to my own stateroom, I was going to shut it off myself, but it was finished with its job, so I checked my own files for damage, backed them up, pulled the drive out of the computer and went to bed. Toon erased Lipton’s job on the main computer, but I still have it on this disk right here.”

  “Yes,” Francis acknowledged. “I went to shut it down, but it had completed its run and I forgot about it.”

  “What was Lipton doing with the geology files?” Ashley asked.

  “I had no idea. The next sol, I couldn’t find the drive on the clutter of my desk…”

  “Imagine that,” Francis interrupted drolly without a pause.

  “Last night, just before retiring, I noticed the drive sticking out from under the corner of my desk safe. I remembered why it was laying there. So out of curiosity I put it in and reviewed Lipton’s job. It was totally unintelligible to me. But as I began thinking about it, I realized that the coordinates on the job were the same coordinates of our investigation out on the desert on the sol of the redwind, the same sol all the trouble began. And I have a general idea that he was not looking there just for his own entertainment.”

  “So, Lipton was relieved of duty, locked himself into his stateroom and began to run an analysis of our site on the desert?” Ashley mused. “Then Toon decided not just to shut it down, but to erase it. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “No; it didn’t then and it still doesn’t,” Peter replied. “And that’s why I invited all of you here on this fine morning. Help me, if you will, figure out the link between Lassiter Lipton, my geology files and our spy, Mr. See.”

  “Ok, first thing we need to find out is what Lipton’s program was doing,” Francis offered with some enthusiasm. It appeared that after several sols of boredom, any puzzle at all was worth deciphering. “Jack, can you pull up the request?”

  Jack’s fingers hammered the keys anew, and a complex screen of numbers and figures appeared on the display.

  “Well, I’ll be a horse’s patoot!” Francis mused with a half-smile. “A complex matrixed Fourier. I haven’t seen one of those since graduate school.”

  “What does it do?” Peter asked.

  “Well, we used it to analyze three dimensional atmospheric dynamics. It appears that Lipton was using it to analyze the site you discovered on the sol of the redwind.”


  “What could it tell him?” Jack asked, eying the glowing numbers on the screen.

  “And how could Lipton manage to initiate a complex matrixed Fourier analyses?” Ashley mused.

  “It was not his idea,” said a voice from the back of the Command Center.

  All eyes turned to see Fabian Gorteau standing behind them.

  “It was my idea, and I asked Lassiter if he would not mind running the program on my behalf,” the old physicist said, looking tired and worn.

  “What was it? Why?” Peter asked with concern. Gorteau looked as though he was lacking rest and seemed very tired and frail.

  Gorteau sighed and sat down. “When Lipton was forced out of his position, I realized that I was partially to blame for the general chaos in the community that led directly to his undoing. So I suggested that perhaps he could analyze the latest data from the probes you placed out on the desert and then propose that there might be some permafrost out there. On the remote chance that it was a success, it would have temporarily made him look like a hero and I would have been able to use the victory to pull the science and administrative teams back together. It was to be a win-win situation where everybody could have come out looking good, even you Peter. You would have been the discoverer and Lipton would have been the catalyst to make it all happen. With the whole team working as one, I hoped we could pull it all back together. I thought that even though the investigation might have shown it to be an illusion, at least the disposition of the colony would have been altered significantly to make up for my own stubbornness. Then, alas, Lassiter was found dead and the colony spiraled into war. And even there I used my God given talents for more destruction. I am afraid this has all been a rather profound disappointment, to end my life in this way.”

  Peter felt a surge of pity for Gorteau that he had felt for few other living humans. “Fabian, you’re just wrong about all this,” he said immediately. “I applaud your attempt to make things happen that way. It was a brilliant plan and it most certainly would have worked. However, you did nothing to set up the disorder here. I’m afraid that was all my own doing.”

  “Now wait just a minute here, boys,” Ashley intoned. “I’m just as happy as I can be to hear all this macho blame-taking, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with reality.”

  “You are wrong, my dear,” Gorteau interrupted. “As the senior scientist here, it was my personal responsibility to lead and to unify. I failed.”

  “Whoa, wait, hold on…” Francis stammered, eyes glued to the screen. “I think I see why Toon took such care to delete these files on the main computer. Look – this analysis clearly defines a layer of density deviations. Jack, can you model this?”

  Jack skewed his lips and looked at the screen sideways. “I think so,” he replied, fingers hammering the keys. As he did so, Ashley walked over to the senior scientist and embraced him tightly as the old man’s eyes brimmed with tears. Minutes later, a layer of reds, browns, blacks and blues appeared on the screen in three dimensions under an image of the desert floor.

  “Jack, define your layers,” Peter stammered with electrifying excitement in his voice.

  “Well, unless I made an error,” he said pointing at the screen with his finger, “these layers here represent your typical desert profile. But this balloon here, in green and blue, represents a rather peculiar density profile different than the surrounding strata.”

  “Jack, can you give me the numbers, the density references, on the screen?” Peter asked breathlessly.

  “Sure. The dark ones right here: 2.7 to 3.5, which is what we normally see. But here, in the green: 1.8. And here in the blue: 1.6 right on down to 1.5!”

  Peter literally fell to his knees and put his hands down on the floor. “Thank you God! Thank you God!” he said in a near sob.

  Ashley fell to her knees beside him. “Peter? Peter, is it… is it permafrost?” she asked.

  “Yes, I think so. Yes, it has to be!” he shouted, embracing her.

  Gorteau’s eyes were now streaming tears. “Oh my dear God in heaven, can this be?”

  “Well, if it is, then we just bought ourselves another 300 sols, at least!” Francis said, slamming Jack on the back repeatedly with his palm.

  ord quickly got out and filtered throughout the colony in under an hour as Peter and Ashley prepared a MAT for their fateful run into the desert. Every colonist stood in rapt, reverential silence and even the irreligious among them managed to eek out a tiny prayer.

  As the MAT began its slow first movements out of the airlock, the colonists gathered around every available window and cheered them on. In the Command Center, Francis sat in the commander’s chair. “Alright, my friends, by the book this time,” he instructed them through the communications circuit. “No more shenanigans like your last infamous outing into the wilderness.”

  “Yes, sir,” Peter replied, madly flipping switches while keeping his eyes carefully on the road ahead of them. “Can you kindly close up your student deportment manual and assist me with a few vectors?”

  “Whatever. It’s not like your school-boy record here is exactly free from incidents, pal,” Francis replied with his consistent, cocky, black humor, while every colonist heard each word broadcast throughout the colony.

  Francis and Jack monitored every meter of the long trek back out into the desert. Winter had come to Elysium and in the early morning light of the Martian sunrise, the carbon dioxide snow, or precipitation frost, had settled everywhere. The thin veneer of white stood out on the landscape like a brilliant blanket, interrupted everywhere by the reddish edges of rocks and dune layers. The white contrasted with the red and exaggerated it so that the desert appeared to be a fantastically designed quilt with alternating layers of brilliant white with deep red patches.

  Peter looked to Ashley as her eyes scanned the scene. Her face was lit by the brightest light he had ever seen on the surface of Mars. Indeed, because of the layer of snow, it was so bright on this morning that the sunlight almost seemed to achieve the intensity of the sun on earth.

  “Tell them what you see, sweetheart,” Peter urged her. “Tell them about their planet.”

  Ashley smiled and began to describe the beautiful snows of the Martian desert as it unfolded before them. She began simply, and then started to describe its nuances with carefully chosen words. She called out its colors, its contrasts, its infinite varieties of detail, and especially its brilliance as they drove out into the Elysium desert.

  Every colonist stood in complete silence as they heard her words describe the scene. Somehow, she was connecting them to the landscape as a place of fragility, of vast and infinite beauty and as a living form, not as an immeasurable, deeply frozen and God-forsaken burial ground.

  Soon they arrived at the same spot where they had been struck and blinded by the redwind just before the beginning of the incidents that had changed all their lives. Peter stopped the MAT just two meters from the last probe he had attempted to drive into the ground. As he looked out the MAT’s window, he noted it had been driven only half-way in and also saw that its top had been misshapen by his repeated blows.

  “Are you ready to depressurize?” he asked Ashley quickly.

  “Yes, let’s do it,” she responded with a slight wink.

  “Not so fast, children,” Francis broke into their transmission. “Let’s do it by the book.”

  Peter’s hand held the decompression handle tightly. Then he relaxed his grip. “Yes, sir. Following the checklist now,” he responded as Ashley gave him a thumb’s up.

  Minutes later, the MAT’s door swung open and Peter dropped a booted foot onto the desert sand. Ashley followed and set up a camera so that everyone back at BC1 could watch their every move. Peter walked over to his probe and, with a hammer, attempted to drive it deeper. It would not budge. “Look’s like the base of the probe is into a rock; over,” Peter replied, not even daring to suggest anything else.

  “Concur, Peter,” Francis replied, his voice calm but betraying his
inner anticipation. “Suggest you core it; over.”

  “Roger that, Base. Coring commencing immediately.”

  Ashley handed Peter a rather massive drill motor with two large extruding handles. On the end of the drill was a half meter long hollow coring bit. Peter stood up, pulled the probe out and inserted the coring bit into the probe’s hole. He then depressed the trigger and began to drill down into the desert. Seconds later, he withdrew the bit and looked into its end.

  Ashley could see the disappointment on his face through the bulbous visor of his helmet. He looked to her and shook his head imperceptibly. “Base, the probe was in a rock. I repeat, the probe was biting into a rock beneath the surface.” Then he paused and added, “Not into permafrost.”

  There was a long, protracted silence from the Command Center. Then Francis said, “We suggest you move over one meter north-northeast and try again.”

  “Roger that,” Peter acknowledged, shaking his head slowly. He moved to the location, inserted his bit and drilled again. This time the bit hesitated, then drilled to its full measure. Peter then reversed the motor and withdrew the bit.

  “Too easy,” he mouthed silently to Ashley, indicating the bit had merely sunk into a sand pocket. Peter upended the bit and looked inside the core. It appeared just like every other core he had ever taken on Mars, but it did have a slightly darker appearance.

  “Investigating core,” he said evenly, withdrawing a miniature acetylene – oxygen torch from his pocket. He pulled on its trigger and when its flame had evened out, aimed it at the open core which he held horizontal to the ground. To his astonishment, the end of the core sample disappeared behind a flash of steam. Some then melted like mud and dripped out of the end of the core onto the ground where it instantly refroze into a misshapen lump.

  Ashley spoke first, “Oh my God! Oh, I cannot believe this. It’s permafrost, base. It’s permafrost! We’ve got water here, base; water!”