Colony Mars Ultimate Edition

by Gerald M. Kilby

  She found it at a junction. One way led back to the entrance, where they had come in. The other was where they wanted to go. She bent down and started poking and prodding and cursing it. Then she stood up and gave it a good hard kick. Gizmo sped off again, right into the maintenance sector. Mia fell over clutching her foot. Not because she was acting, more because it hurt like hell.

  She managed to hobble down the corridor where Gizmo was now stationary. She whispered to it, “Where to now?”

  “According to my calculations, the only section of this facility with an airlock big enough for a rover is on the other side of that door.”

  Mia walked over to where the little robot was facing. There was a small window in it about head height. She peered in. Right in the center of a small workshop were the remains of the vehicle. It looked like the carcass of some recently excavated dinosaur with wheels. Mia peered around the space. There was no one there.

  “Come on, let’s go.” She cracked the door open and they moved inside.

  “Gizmo, I trust you’re recording all this.”

  “In 3D.”

  Mia looked down at Gizmo. “You can do that?”

  “Only when I am not acting dumb.”

  They spent some time walking around the rover, examining it. The entire back was blown off. Three of its six wheels were also gone. From what Mia could see, a good deal of it had been dismantled. Three long tables held dozens of burnt and charred parts. Each was labeled with some alphanumeric code that she could not make out. She picked up a small component that looked like a plumbing valve, then extracted a clear plastic zip-lock bag, and dropped it in. She turned to Gizmo and held it up. “Exhibit A.” Mia shoved it in her pocket.

  She took one last look around. “Okay, I think we’ve done all we can here. Let’s get out before we’re spotted.”

  They were about to leave when Mia’s attention was drawn to a door on what looked like a sealed room, like a spray booth in a car maintenance shop. She looked in through the window.

  “Gizmo, quick. Over here.”

  She pointed. “The EVA suit. Let’s check it out.” Mia tried to open the door but it was locked. “Gizmo, do you think you could hack this?” She nodded at a keypad beside the door.

  “My pleasure.” The little droid proceeded to disassemble the unit with amazing dexterity. A few seconds later Mia heard a click, and the door swung open. She stepped in.

  The suit looked dirty and battered, a large crack ran across the faceplate. “Looks like the poor guy lost all his air through this crack.”

  “Unlikely,” said Gizmo.

  “Why do you say that? I mean, he did die of asphyxiation.”

  “Correct. But I calculate a breach of this type would take approximately one hour and seventeen minutes to evacuate a fully resourced suit.”

  “Well maybe his power unit failed.”

  “Again, unlikely.”

  Mia asked, “How can you be sure?”

  Gizmo reached up to the side of the suit, tapped some controls, and the suit lit up. Mia jumped back, startled. “Jeez, Gizmo. Warn me before you do that.”

  The robot interrogated the suit’s systems. Mia looked at it for a few moments. “So you’re saying he had little or no air to begin with.”

  Gizmo’s head twitched. “That’s interesting.”

  “What… what’s interesting?”

  “Very unusual.”

  “What, Gizmo?”

  “He had less than seven percent oxygen reserve when he exited the rover. Someone had intentionally depleted it several hours earlier.”

  “How can you know all this, Gizmo?”

  “It is tracked in the EVA suit’s log.”

  Mia’s brain tried to digest the ramifications of this revelation. Two things were clear to her. One was that Dr. Jann Malbec might not be as paranoid as Mia had originally thought. And the second was, they needed to get out of here as soon as possible.

  “Say, what are you doing here? You’re not supposed to be in this sector.” Mia spun around to see the same guy that had met them at the airlock. He must have been monitoring the camera feeds. Maybe he wasn’t as stupid as he looked.

  “Oh… thank God you found us.” Mia clutched at her chest. “I thought we’d have to stay the night here.” She turned to Gizmo. “I don’t know what’s happened. My droid has gone bonkers. It must have blown a fuse or maybe it’s having an existential crisis.” She looked at the guy to see how all this was going down with him. He looked confused, but Mia could sense the same whatever attitude was beginning to get the upper hand. So she kicked Gizmo.

  “Dumb robot lost its internal map! We’ve been wandering around trying to find our way out.”

  He moved over to take a closer look at Gizmo. “Yeah, some of the newer ones can be a bit sketchy. I haven’t seen one like this before,” he bent down to examine the droid.

  Gizmo took off at high speed, out the door. Mia and the guy chased after it. “See, I told you,” panted Mia. “Totally nuts.”

  By the time they caught up with it, Gizmo was back at the entrance airlock of their rover. The guy stopped and had to lean against the wall to catch his breath.

  “Well, would you look at that. It found it’s way back after all.” Mia turned around to see what he was doing. He was still getting it together.

  “Sorry to put you to all this bother. I think I can manage from here.” She backed towards the now open airlock. Gizmo was already inside.

  “Hey… wait a minute.” The guy had regained the use of his body and he was approaching her.

  “Yes?” she said with a big smile.

  “A bit of advice. Don’t let them stick you with that droid, even if they fix it. It will be nothing but trouble. Make sure you get a different one.”

  “Sure… I’ll remember that. Thanks.” She turned back to Gizmo in the airlock, and gave it another kick. “Come on you dumb droid, let’s get going.”

  12

  Smoking Gun

  The lift door of Dr. Jann Malbec’s living quarters opened with a ping and in stepped Nills Langthorp, to an immediate embrace. It took a few minutes for the pair to disentangle themselves.

  “Miss me?” he said with a smile.

  They embraced for a few more minutes.

  “I’ll take that as a yes.”

  “What took you so long? I was expecting you at the council meeting.”

  “Oh… the usual technical issues. It’s not an easy job keeping the wheels of the Industrial Sector running like a Swiss watch.”

  They migrated to the large panoramic window. Nills sat down and looked out at the Jezero City skyline.

  “I am really envious of the view you have here, Jann.”

  She sat down and poured two glasses of the best colony wine. She handed one to Nills.

  “You can always move over here.” She raised her glass.

  Nills smiled. “Yeah, but who would keep the machines running over at Industrial?”

  Jann looked wistful. “Sometimes I think you love your machines more than you do me.”

  Nills’s face reconfigured into a dismayed expression. “That’s absolutely not true. I love you both equally.”

  Jann threw a cushion at him, nearly spilling his wine. They laughed together.

  “Speaking of machines, where’s Gizmo?” Nills looked around.

  “On a mission.”

  “What? You let him out on his own?”

  “He’s perfectly capable of looking after himself.”

  “But, Jann, we talked about this. It’s not about Gizmo, it’s about letting a semi-sentient robot, armed with plasma weapons, go wandering around. You know they’re just waiting for an excuse to lobotomize him.” He pointed in the direction of the council chamber.

  “Relax, he’s in disguise.”

  Nills sat back and took a long slow look at Jann. “Okay, what are you up to?”

  Jann returned the look. “I found someone, unencumbered by any affiliation, to do some snooping around
.”

  Nills remained silent and sipped his wine.

  “She was an investigator back on Earth, so we set her up as a courier and gave her Gizmo disguised as a G2 unit. And don’t worry, we got rid of the weapons.”

  Nills said nothing as he digested this information. Finally he said, “How did Gizmo react to that?”

  “Not very well. I will not enjoy this.” Jann put on her best Gizmo voice.

  “Ha… it’s nearly worth it to hear his reaction.” Nills almost spat out his wine he was laughing so much. “So, you still think that rover accident was… not an accident?”

  “Don’t you?”

  Nills put his glass down, sat back and looked out the window. “To be honest, I don’t know what the heck is going on anymore. There was a time when you and I, and the others, knew every little detail of colony life. But now, we’re no longer needed, or wanted. We’re the past. The future of the colony is with the new blood.”

  “That doesn’t mean we should sit back and ignore the potential threat to our world.”

  “No, no,” he agreed. “You’re right, it doesn’t. But my point is still the same. I really don’t know what’s going on anymore.”

  Jann activated the tabletop screen. “Well here, maybe this will help you.” She tapped an icon and a series of images slid open and arrayed themselves across the screen. Nills bent over to get a closer look. He touched an image, rotated and expanded it. He cocked an eyebrow at Jann.

  “Where did you get these?”

  “Mia and Gizmo. Our intrepid undercover team. She talked her way in to the MASS maintenance area.”

  “She’s good, I’ll give you that.” Nills went back to studying the images.

  “So what do you think?”

  Nills scratched his chin as he examined an image of the rover carcass. “Massive explosion, probably the fuel tank. It opened up the rover like a can of beans in a microwave.”

  He flicked across a few more images. “I’ll need to take a close look at these. Maybe get some clues as to why it blew up. But don’t expect anything conclusive, it will just be speculation. It’s a pity they won’t allow us physical access to it so we could do our own investigation.”

  “Would this help?”

  Nills looked over to see Jann holding up a clear plastic bag containing the charred remains of some component. He reached over and took it gently from her.

  “You think you could do some forensics on it?”

  “Looks like an oxygen regulator valve.” He turned it over in his hand. “I suppose we could run a few tests on it, check for trace chemicals, that sort of thing. Not sure if it will tell us much, though.”

  “There’s something else.” Jann leaned in.

  “Gizmo managed to access the EVA suit diagnostics. It turns out that when he escaped from the rover his suit was damaged, but not enough to prevent him making it to the way station. It seems that he had little or no air in the suit. It was hacked to make it look like it had a full tank.

  Nills put the part down on the table. “Holy crap. Well that’s a smoking gun if ever there was one.”

  “So you see, someone did try to kill him.”

  Nills shook his head in dismay and looked at Jann.

  “So where is… Mia now?”

  “Over at Central Logistics, talking to couriers, trying to get some clues as to the last movements of Jay Eriksen. It’s the only way to get some idea of what he was up to, since we don’t have access to the MASS database.”

  Nills flicked through some more photos. “You know, there is a way to find out what he was doing before the explosion.”

  “How?”

  “The MASS database is restricted, so we can’t get access to it. But Gizmo can. He can hack pretty much anything. But it would mean getting back into MASS HQ and finding a terminal. You think Mia could engineer that?”

  “I’ll run it by her.”

  “Just tell her to be real careful with Gizmo. If the council were to find out it’s roaming around it will just give them an excuse to have it dismantled. They hate that robot.”

  “Don’t worry, it will be fine.”

  13

  MASS

  Three hundred kilometers above the planet’s surface, the MASS space station orbits the planet every one hundred and twelve minutes, passing directly over Jezero Crater and then tracking across both poles in turn. It is the central command for the survey mission, communicating once every orbital period with all assets on the ground.

  The backbone of the station consists of a long skeletal truss section, terminating at one end with a plutonium-239 nuclear cryogenic propulsion system. This provides both the five thousand degree heat required to propel vaporized hydrogen out through the engines, and also electrical power for the entire station. Forward of this power plant is rigged a large diameter disk. At first glance this might look to be an effort to shield the rest of the station from the reactor core, and to some extent it performs this function. However, its main purpose is to house the secondary EMDrive system. A bizarre device, whose function is firmly rooted in the weirdness of quantum physics. Where the cryogenic propulsion system could trace its lineage back to the middle of the twentieth century, the EMDrive is very much a twenty-first century creation. Yet, compared to its older chemical cousin, it produces a feeble amount of thrust. Nonetheless, being electric it can run non-stop, and so can accelerate the spacecraft way beyond anything that a conventional rocket engine could hope to achieve. It is the engine of choice for all solar system craft, and the main reason that the colony on Mars, as well as the mining of the asteroid belt, could be accomplished.

  Further along the station’s central truss sits a constellation of tanks, wrapped around it like a bracelet. After these, the truss becomes sparse and skeletal, with nothing other than a few dish antennae to break up its visual continuity, until it finally terminates at a large spherical structure, comprised of several docking ports for transport craft. Currently two of these were occupied with small craft that made periodic commuter trips up and down to the planet’s surface.

  As impressive as all this engineering is, by far the most spectacular aspect of the station is the one hundred meter wide rotating torus, anchored just aft of the docking sphere. Its outer rim rotates at approximately three times a minute, giving its occupants a very comfortable Earthlike gravity. Along this rim are housed all manner of labs, maintenance bays, conference rooms, recreation facilities and accommodations.

  It was within one of the better appointed accommodation pods that Kane Butros, Second Director of the Mars Alliance Scientific Survey, was currently viewing a video recording of a very disgruntled colony courier giving a G2 unit a good kicking.

  “Who else knows about this?” said Kane.

  “I thought it would be better to keep it to ourselves, for the moment,” said Blake Derringer, his security advisor.

  “Good, keep it that way. I cannot stress enough how delicate the current situation is. A good deal of the MASS board are already spooked by this rover accident. We can’t risk any further cause for suspicion.” He looked back at the image of the courier on screen.

  “So what the hell is going on here?”

  “Apparently her G2 unit blew a fuse and they got lost while delivering a package to HQ.”

  “Well maybe they did?”

  “I don’t think so, have a look at this.” Blake moved the video forward. Now on screen they could see both the courier and the robot inside the enclosure for the EVA suit. The robot seemed to be accessing the suit’s diagnostics. The courier was talking.

  “Any sound, can we hear what she’s saying?”

  “No, no sound, just video.”

  Kane scratched his chin and looked at his comrade. “Not good.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” said Blake.

  “Who is she?” He looked up. “And I mean who is she really, and who’s put her up to this, and since when can a G2 unit run diagnostics on a EVA suit?”

  “I already know
who she is, and you’re not going to like this. She’s an ex-cop, came up here on sponsorship six months ago.”

  “A cop?”

  “Ex-cop.” Blake corrected.

  “So who put her up to this? Someone has to be behind it.”

  “It’s unclear. But let’s face it, we both know who’s been agitating for an investigation.”

  “Malbec?”

  “Exactly. She’s like a dog with a bone, won’t let go.”

  “So she recruits some ex-cop colonist and all of a sudden we’ve got a problem.” Kane was looking back at the frozen images on screen.

  “The question is, how much can she find out between now and the event?”

  “Even if Malbec does suspect something, the council are against her, she’s powerless to influence anything.” Kane waved a dismissive hand at his security advisor.

  “Don’t be so sure. From what I’ve heard of her reputation she’s capable of anything. Underestimating Dr. Jann Malbec has been the downfall of many better than us.”

  “So what are you suggesting then, Blake?”

  “Well, let’s not be too hasty, we’re so close now. We need to tread carefully.”

  “Well, I say we get rid of this cop… and that droid.”

  “I don’t like it, too risky. We’ve already managed to load all the blame for the last accident onto AsterX, any further unexplained deaths would just raise more suspicion. Remember, Kane, I advised against the first operation.”

  “He had to go, you know that. There’s no way we could let a clone go back to Earth. You knew that when we set him up.”

  “Still.”

  “Still nothing.” Kane’s tone became more measured, his stance aggressive. “Now is not the time to grow a conscience. You know what’s at stake here, this needs to be dealt with, and soon.”

  His tone lightened and he moved to wrap an avuncular arm around the shoulder of his colleague. “You know, Blake, sometimes to get out of a problem, one needs to get into it more. Just remember, she’s going to die anyway—they all are.”