“Maybe for Xaing Zu, but COM will be a different matter.”
“True, but there’s not much we can do at the moment. We’ll just have to wait and see what transpires. Then seize our opportunity, if one should present itself.”
“And if it doesn’t?” said Anika
Xenon once again rose and spoke. “If such a moment escapes us, then we fail. And if that is the case, then so be it.”
4
Embrace
Jann sat in the dim light of the balcony, looking out across the expanse of the main Colony Two cavern. Here and there she could glimpse the night shift going about the business of maintenance, their presence evidenced only by the sweep of a torchlight. The ceiling illumination was many hours into its nocturnal cycle, painting the cavern roof with the illusion of stars. She felt a cool breeze across her face from the array of large air recyclers overhead. It felt like a summer’s night back on Earth.
“Can’t sleep?” Nills’ voice drifted out from within the darkened room.
Jann turned her head, trying to penetrate the inner gloom to where she and Nills had been sleeping.
“No, my mind is like a racetrack, it won’t let me sleep.”
She heard a rustle of sheets and Nills materialized from the dim interior and sat down opposite her on the balcony. He was naked save for a sheet gathered around his waist.
“Want to talk about it?”
Jann looked back across the cavern. “I wonder if we’re doing the right thing.”
“Letting these guys in?”
“Yeah. Maybe the others are right. We should batten down the hatches and throw boiling oil over them at the gates.”
“And how long would that go on for? We agreed the best way forward is to face it head on.”
“I know… and you’re right, but I just have a bad feeling about it all.”
“Well, there’s nothing we can do. We don’t have what they’re looking for so we’re going to have to convince them of that one way or the other.”
Jann looked over at Nills and studied him for a while. He was silhouetted against the dim light of the cavern, his face obscured save for his bright smile and a faint glint from his eyes.
“Actually, Nills, that’s not entirely true.”
Nills froze for a moment and Jann could sense his mind was coming to terms with the implications of what she just said.
“Go on,” he finally managed.
Jann shifted in her seat, and pulled the sheet around her.
“I went looking for it, in the cave under the medlab in Colony One, the place where I first met you and Gizmo.”
“You mean my Alpha.”
“Yes, sorry… I didn’t mean to…”
“It’s okay, I shouldn’t have said that… go on.”
“Anyway, that was months ago, when we were extending the research facilities.”
“And you found it.”
“Yes. I isolated a test sample and then purged the cave.”
Nills leaned forward. “When were you going to tell me this? Who else knows?”
“Just Gizmo. I was planning to kill it before they got here. I didn’t want to burden you with it.”
Nills sighed. “Do you still have it?”
“Yes. I was about to irradiate it this morning, before the meeting, but…”
“But what?”
Jann took a moment before replying, then sat forward. “If it’s what they want, what they’ve come here for, then we could simply hand it over, be done with it. It could spare the colony a world of grief.”
“And what if they take it back to Earth?”
Jann sighed and sat back again. “Therein lies the dilemma. The irony is if we deny them this then we are doing it for the good of Earth, not Mars, not for us.”
Nills thought about this for some time, scratching his chin in a slow absent-minded manner. “Tell no one else,” he finally said. “Keep it between us. We’ve time yet to decide. Maybe it’s good… you know, to have an ace in the hole.”
They sat in silence for a while before Nills finally spoke.
“Do you ever miss Earth? I mean, it is your home.”
“I’m not sure if I know where home is anymore, Nills.”
“I’d like to think it’s here, Jann. But I know, in my heart, you will want to go back to Earth at some point.”
Jann hesitated. “I don’t know. There’s nothing there for me anymore. My father’s dead now and… well, I don’t have any other family alive.”
“You don’t talk about him much, what was he like?”
“He was like any alcoholic, tormented by his demons. But don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t a bad man. My mother died when I was still a baby. So my father was left to his grief, to the demands of a small farm and to the needs of an infant. It must have been hard.”
“Well, from where I’m sitting, he did a good job.” Nills smiled.
“It came at a cost, Nills. If I were to sum up his legacy, it’s that he instilled in me an almost primal need to run away and hide. And I’ve come to realize it’s probably what defines me. Run and hide, that’s all I ever do.”
“You’re being too hard on yourself, there’s more to you than that.”
“I grew up on a rural farm, no family, few friends, just myself and my father. Every now and then, when things got too much, he would drink himself into a rage. All the anger, the grief, the frustration would come out in a torrent of violence. Not directed at me, thankfully, but at anything that wasn’t nailed down in the house, and some things that were. So, at those times, I would run and hide. Out into the fields to my secret place. I would stay out all night sometimes, staring up at the night sky and wish some alien spacecraft would beam me up and take me on an adventure through the stars. Then, in the morning I would go back. My father would be crashed out on the sofa, or sometimes he would make it to his bed. When he woke up later, he would say nothing, just clean up the mess and be extra nice to me for a few days.”
“That must have been scary, for a kid.”
“In a way, it’s what gave me a love of nature, of biology. My friends were the plants and the animals, and the stars were my dreams.” Jann shrugged. “Ahh… I’m getting soppy. I’m sure you’re not really interested in hearing about my screwed up childhood.”
Nills didn’t reply and remained quiet for a time. Finally he shifted in his seat, leaned in closer to Jann and, in a low voice, said. “The family of Nills Langthorp has tried to contact me.”
Jann felt a wave of emotion wash over her and she gathered him up in her arms and held him tight. She had always feared this might happen. In truth, she knew it was only a matter of time.
The colony had, for some time, adopted a policy of open and transparent communications with the public back on Earth. It had been envisaged as a first-line defense strategy—open themselves up to the world, be accessible and get the people on their side. It helped that Rachel and Xenon were masters at picking the right stories to focus on. The message was controlled, managed and massaged to present the colony, and its colonists, as people you could relate to. They no longer referred to the inhabitants as clones or Betas or Hybrids. They were all simply colonists. The stories were about everyday life in the colony: the trials and tribulations, the ups and downs, the hope and fears. In reality, it was a kind of propaganda.
They broadcast as much as they could over X-band so anyone on Earth with a big enough dish could receive it. This resulted in a number of enthusiastic amateurs relaying all this information via the Internet out to the broader world. By now there were thousands of media channels back on Earth dedicated to dissecting and discussing everything that the Colony transmitted.
Recently, they had been putting out more and more stories about their fears for the colony with the arrival of Xaing Zu Industries, COM, and other planned missions. As a strategy, it worked. People started to question the motives of these corporations, and how they would treat the colonists. So the propaganda war that they now waged mattere
d. If communications stopped when COM arrived then at least Earth would know that something was not right. How much all of this effort helped in the fight for the colonists to keep control was debatable. In reality it probably didn’t matter to the likes of COM one way or the other. They were going to do whatever they wanted and the colonists were powerless to stop them.
But this openness also had some unexpected repercussions. Now that they were open for all to communicate with, the families of original colonists, who they assumed were dead, found that clones existed of their loved ones. Identical in every way to the person they had lost. It raised hitherto unknown emotional and ethical issues for both parties. This communication had to be handled very delicately. Some embraced it, some retreated from it, and some on Earth simply reviled it as being the devil’s work, advocating that the entire colony on Mars should be razed to the ground, with everybody in it.
Jann detached herself from Nills and looked at him. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know. To be honest, I’m a little confused. I mean, I’m not who they think I am. I’m not here to satisfy someone’s morbid curiosity.”
“You don’t have to engage if you don’t want to, Nills.”
“I know, but… I have memories of them… I really don’t know who I am.”
Jann moved closer again and held his hand in hers. “For what it’s worth, I know who you are. Someone I’m very glad I found.”
Nills gave a wide grin. “Now, you are getting soppy.” He stood up. “Come on, let’s try and get some sleep. There’s nothing to gain from dwelling on things that have no clear answer. We’re here now, so we may as well get on with it.”
“You go, I’m going to sit here for a while longer.”
He kissed her on the forehead. “Okay, but don’t try and work it all out tonight. There’s much we don’t know yet. Too many uncertainties lie ahead.”
5
Xaing Zu
Over the next few sols, as they counted down to the arrival of the Chinese expedition, messages began to flow back and forth between the colony and the orbiting craft as arrangements were being made for the landing. Much was already known to the colonists about the history and scale of Xaing Zu Industries. They were a global industrial conglomerate, with interests in space exploration, biotech, mining and more. They had a long-standing helium 3 lunar extraction operation, and also controlled over ninety percent of the global stockpile of many rare-earth resources. Their decision to land near Colony One had been made long before they had lifted off from Earth. And all communication, hitherto, had been polite and efficient, if somewhat clandestine. They gave nothing away about their mission, other than on a need to know basis.
Jann, Nills and Xenon, along with a few other colonists that constituted the reception party, were in full EVA suits standing out on the planet’s surface, well back from the proposed landing site. They had assembled there around an hour ago, and were now all craning their necks to try and spot the telltale streak in the sky that would be the Chinese Mars Descent Vehicle. It should be currently ploughing its way through the upper atmosphere, hurtling towards the surface. All going well, it would land in a few minutes.
“There.” Xenon pointed over across the horizon.
They all watched as the speck in the distance grew in size and formed into the recognizable shape of a Mars lander. Finally, its descent slowed as retro-thrusters kicked in, then it was lost in an enormous cloud of dust and sand. They had landed successfully. The first craft to do so since the ill-fated ISA mission. The one that brought Dr. Jann Malbec to this place, many Earth years ago.
“Okay, let’s saddle up and go say hello,” said Nills. They clambered onboard one of the colony rovers and Jann took the controls. She started up the machine, and headed in the direction of the slowly dissipating dust cloud. As she drew closer, Jann could see just how big it was, maybe three times the size of the now destroyed ISA lander.
“That’s a sizable bit of machinery,” she said to no one in particular.
“Well there are eight of them. And fully fueled to lift off again in a hurry,” said Nills.
“They’re not taking any chances, are they?” she said, as she slowed the rover down.
“Would you? To be fair, they don’t know what to expect on the ground. We could turn out to be a ravenous horde of cannibals,” said Nills.
Jann pulled up around twenty meters from the base of the craft. A thin cloud of dust still shrouded the enormous lander, giving it a ghostly aura. On her left she could see the second colony rover, driven by Anika, pull up close by. On Jann’s right another enormous plume of dust kicked up from the planet’s surface as Xenon brought the flying bed in to land. They were all in position. Nothing to do now but wait.
“They’re taking their time. No sign of any activity.” Nills began to fiddle with the comms unit on the rover. “Gizmo, are you sure this is the correct frequency for two-way with the lander?”
“Are you seriously asking me that question?” The robot had made its own way out from Colony One to meet up with the reception party, at Jann’s request. She felt safer having it around.
“Wait… look.”
On the side of the gleaming white craft a hatch cracked open. It was low and wide, and pushed out from the main structure as it gently rose upward revealing a low, wide gap. From this, a platform extended slowly, giving the impression of a balcony on the side of the craft. From within the shadows of the ship six taikonauts stepped out. They wore gleaming white EVA suits, all identical. The platform slowly started to descend.
“I have to admit that’s pretty slick. I feel like we’re being visited by a technologically superior race,” said Nills. “Okay, well it’s time to get our game faces on, let’s go”
They clambered out on to the surface and stood for a while watching the taikonauts slowly descend. One waved at them. They all waved back. Jann wondered what they must look like to these clean sleek spacefarers. A band of rag-tag colonists, with their battered and dirty EVA suits, and strange space-trash transport. Like a Mad Max on Mars, probably.
Gizmo moved up beside Jann. “If I am not mistaken, and let us face it, I never am—they have brought a robot with them.”
“Where? I just see six crew and some equipment on the platform.”
Before Gizmo had time to answer, the elevator came to a rest on the surface, a small plume of dust kicking up from its base. The taikonauts stepped off and waited, while what looked like a stack of equipment unfolded itself and perambulated out on the dusty Martian soil. It was a quadruped, about waist high, with a small head that seemed to be scanning all around it.
“I see it,” Jann said as she watched the machine advance.
“It is scanning us, multiple spectrum analysis. Hmmm… that is interesting.”
“What is?”
“It just said hello to me. Its name is Yutu, which means jade rabbit in Mandarin.”
“I don’t know which is the most surprising, the fact that they have a robot with them or the fact that you know Mandarin.”
“I have been studying many of the Chinese dialects, of which there are hundreds, in anticipation of this very event.”
“I’m switching to broadcast, Gizmo.” Jann tapped her wrist pad to change comms frequencies. In preparing for this they had agreed a common VHF channel to use for communications. It was old school but worked just as well on Mars as it did on Earth. Jann looked over at Nills and nodded. The three of them then walked forward to greet the new arrivals. Gizmo followed behind.
“Welcome to Mars,” said Jann.
One of the taikonauts waved. “It is an honor to be here. I am Jing Tzu, commander of the Xaing Zu Industries Mars Exploration Mission, and on behalf of our crew we are humbled to be among you on this momentous day.”
Nills stepped forward and extended a hand. “I am Nills Langthorp, pleased to meet you.” They shook hands. “And this is Dr. Jann Malbec.”
“Ah… Dr. Malbec, we have heard so much about
you.”
Jann simply shook his hand and nodded. The other taikonauts all hung back and said nothing. Jann noticed that they were distracted by the Martian vista, preferring instead to look all around them rather than focus on the colonists. Yet she felt they had a distinctly military air about them.
The robot, Yutu, sat down on its hind legs, like a big cat, beside the commander. Gizmo was studying it intently, its head twitching as it probed. Yutu looked to be doing the same thing. It reminded Jann of two dogs meeting for the first time. She half expected them to start sniffing each others’ butts.
“We can assist carrying your equipment and supplies on to the transport,” Nills waved an arm behind him at the two colony rovers and the bed.
“Thank you for your kindness and consideration but we can manage it on our own.”
“No, I insist, it’s no problem.” Nills nodded to the other colonists and they moved forward to help carry the boxes that were now being emptied onto the surface by the crew. This provoked an immediate reaction from the Chinese. They stood together, blocking the way, one held his hand out signaling for them to stop. The broadcast channel broke into a chorus of excited Mandarin chatter. The colonists halted, and looked over at Nills. Jing Tzu turned back to his crew and jabbered in a sharp authoritative manner. This seemed to calm them all down a bit. He returned to face Nills and the colonists with his hands in the air. “Please accept my apologies, we are all a bit anxious from our journey.”
Nills nodded. “That’s okay, we’ll leave you to carry your own equipment, then.”
Jing Tzu bowed. “You are most gracious.” He returned to his crew and started gesticulating wildly.
Jann flipped her comms to private. “They’re a bit jumpy.”
“Understandable,” said Nills.
“I wonder what’s in the boxes that’s so important?”
“Who knows? Maybe it’s a year’s supply of fine whiskey.”
Colony Mars Ultimate Edition Page 35
