Mia remained silent as she frantically tried to think of something she could do to avert this catastrophe. Kane had returned his gaze to the window and the surface of Mars. “This has been a long time in the planning. For years we sought to infiltrate and influence both the council on Mars and the board of MASS. All that work and effort now comes to fruition.” He turned back to Mia. “Not even your pathetic attempts or that witch Malbec can stop it now.”
“What about the courier… the clone that died when his rover blew up?” An idea was forming in Mia’s mind. It was probably futile, but she had to try something, so she kept him talking.
“What? Oh him. Well we needed someone with intimate knowledge of Jezero City to transport and hide the bioweapon. Who better than a clone? You know, they will do anything for the promise of a ticket back to Earth.”
“He was never going back, was he? So you got rid of him?”
“There’s no way we could have him go back to Earth, so yes. Blake Derringer did a nice job on that rover. Nobody would have found out, and I would not have had to reveal myself this early on, if it wasn’t for your meddling.”
While Kane Butros had been rambling on, Mia had booted up her suit. Not that she was planning to EVA, but she wanted the thruster pack activated. It was a desperate idea, because even though a little thrust went a long way in the weightlessness of space, how much she could move in one gravity was questionable. Nonetheless, Mia cranked the power up to max, aimed herself at Kane, and hit the button.
The initial burst lifted her to a standing position, but from then on she lost control and tumbled her way across the room, cartwheeling as she went. She whacked into Kane, sending him flying over the holo-table. The detonator fell out of his hand and rolled along the floor.
Mia cut the power to her suit thruster and flopped face down on the floor. Almost immediately she felt a heavy kick to her side but the suit took most of the sting out of it. She rolled onto her back to see Christian. He had a PEP in his hand ready to fire. “I should have thrown you out the airlock the first time.”
Mia glared at him. “Go screw yourself.” Only then did he realize she was holding the detonator. She hit the button.
She felt a slight tremor ripple through the station. The others in the room felt it too and they all turned to look out the window on the opposite side from the Martian vista. This looked out at the central truss. Mia sat up to get a better view. She could see the antennae array was completely destroyed. Debris was flying in a hundred different directions. The large dish had detached and was tumbling through space—straight at them. There was a brief moment of complete stillness in the control room while its occupants watched in horror as the speeding dish slammed into the window. The station rocked with the force of the impact. Everyone stood stock still, all eyes on the window, all waiting to see if it survived the collision. It didn’t.
A crack appeared and everybody looked around frantically for the exits. Mia looked around for her helmet. It was over where she had first woken up. With everybody distracted by the potential loss of station integrity she scrambled her way back to it. Her glove was still attached by its umbilical so she clipped it on. But as she was about to grab the helmet a boot came down hard on her arm. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” It was Christian. He brought the muzzle of the PEP weapon right up to her face. “Time to die.”
The window shattered.
The entire contents of the control room started being sucked out into the vacuum of space, including Christian. He fired the PEP weapon as he tumbled backward towards the gaping hole in the window. But his aim was random, the plasma blast crackling across the ceiling.
Mia could feel herself being pulled along. She still had the helmet but she struggled to attach it as she bounced and banged her way across the floor. Already she could hear the screams of technicians being sucked outside. She finally clipped the helmet on as the window gave way completely, and she, along with everyone else that was in the control room were vented out into space. Through her helmet visor she could see the body of Kane float past. Mia tried to shift her position to look for Christian, but she had no controls. The thruster pack was empty, having used up all its reserves in her bid to grab the detonator. She was drifting away from the station, out into deep space, with no way to stop, and no way to get back. She had halted the terraforming event and prevented the genocide. But with no control over her own momentum, she knew she was dead, it was simply a matter of time.
Mia lost all sense of motion and felt instead a strange sense of calm. The vast panoply of stars enveloped her and she began to experience a deep existential epiphany. She felt at one with the universe, compiled from the very atoms that had been forged in the celestial cauldron that expanded out all around her into infinity. At that moment Mia felt an inner peace so profound that she was content to die now, in this place, surrounded by the heavens.
She woke some time later to a staccato burst of static emanating from her helmet comms. She had been hearing it for quite some time but it had failed to penetrate her semi-unconscious state. Now though, she thought she heard voices somewhere in the depths of the white noise.
She had been floating out into deep space for quite a while. How long she wasn’t sure. It was hard to gauge as she seemed to be drifting in and out of consciousness, or maybe that was an illusion. Her head was fuzzy and she had difficulty in making sense of her surroundings. More static burst out from her comms.
“Hello?” she ventured. Her voice was shallow, as if she had forgotten how to speak. She tried again. “Hello, anyone hear me?”
Silence, then another quick burst of white noise. This time Mia sensed it was trying to communicate with her.
“Hello? I’m still alive—I think.” She waited for a reply, but as the moments passed and no more static emanated from her comms, she decided she had just been hallucinating.
Time passed and again she lost track of how much. There had been no more comms activity and she had resumed her resigned frame of mind. But something was changing—it was getting darker. How is that possible? Am I dreaming? No, she could see the stars in her peripheral vision being blocked out, one by one. She sensed something ominous sneaking up behind her. She shifted her head in her helmet to try to get a better view, but it was pointless. Nonetheless, there was no mistaking it, she was being slowly enveloped in a cone of darkness. It surrounded her, leaving only a small patch of stars ahead of her, and that too was growing smaller and smaller with each passing second. Mia felt as if she was being swallowed by some great spacefaring whale.
As the darkness finally engulfed her, she was bumped by something behind her, pushing her forward until she banged off something hard. She reached out to touch it and in the illumination reflected from her helmet she could see it was metal. What is this? But before Mia could answer her own question the lights came on and she realized she was in the airlock of the MASS transport craft that she and Gizmo used to take off from Mars. She felt it pressurize and saw the green light illuminate. It was with a deep sense of trepidation that she reached up to remove her helmet. Mia wasn’t sure if this was really happening or if it was just an elaborate hallucination. She heard a slight hiss as she unfastened it, then she removed it completely and took a tentative breath.
The inner door opened and Mia twisted her body around, pushing herself into the capsule cockpit. Gizmo was at the controls. The little robot had managed to maneuver itself into a position that allowed it to access the flight controls. A rather awkward arrangement, as the transport craft’s flight control was not designed with a G2 interface. It spun its head around as Mia entered, and waved a metal hand.
“Greetings, Mia.”
“Gizmo, how the hell did you get here?”
“When the space station control room was destroyed, so too were the systems commandeering this craft. I was able to take command. I tracked your unorthodox evacuation from the station and calculated your exit vector and velocity. A quick analysis of the craft�
��s flight capability, using only the very limited maneuvering thrusters, confirmed a 53.4% probability of retrieving you. Of course, I still had no data on the integrity of your EVA suit, so I had no way of ascertaining if you would be dead or alive when we rendezvoused.”
The oxygen rich environment of the capsule was clearing Mia’s head. She floated down into a seat and strapped herself in.
“Well, thank you, Gizmo. I had pretty much accepted that I would die out there.” She took some time to take stock of her change of fortune. “So, where to now? I presume this craft can’t land back down on Mars.”
“Correct. However, we can return to the station and dock.”
“But that’s destroyed.”
“Only partially. The control room is now open to the vacuum of space. But the rest of the facility is still intact.”
“Okay, the station it is then.”
22
Star
Mia sat on the patio of her new accommodation pod in one of the recently completed housing domes. Although it was more of a cylinder than a dome, with three levels of accommodation pods built around an open tropical garden, and capped with a translucent domed roof. It was spacious compared to the one allotted to her on arrival nine months ago. This one could almost be considered an apartment by any standard.
It had been given to her as a perk of the new role she was about to take on, as director of the newly created local police force. This was being set up as a response to the need for better dispute resolution. It would also be an official point of contact for colonists who had been subjected to the normal run of the mill crap that most communities have to deal with when they get bigger. It was the kind of municipal agency that Mia could have engaged with when her ex-boyfriend ran off with her jewelry box. If it had existed back then, perhaps she wouldn’t have had to take the drastic action she did. But then again, it would have been a different story, with a very different outcome.
In many respects Mia had failed in her primary mission. Sure, she saved the citizens of Mars from extermination, but she still had not retrieved her jewelry box. So, the case was still open, and as such, it would be number one on her list when she took up her new role. She sipped her tea as she sat and watched two small birds drink from the fountain in the center of the garden. Mia marveled at how they had adapted to flight in one-third gravity. With just a few flaps of their wings they could fly high into the dome superstructure where they kept their nests. To descend from these heights they seemed to just glide down on outstretched wings, like cormorants riding the thermals along cliff walls.
She still had some time to kill before the ceremony. They would be presenting her with an honor, recognition for her heroism in saving all their asses. Mia was not looking forward to it, in fact she was dreading it. It reminded her too much of times past, attending similar ceremonies back on Earth, where medals were pinned on the heroes or solemn words said for the fallen. But there was no denying she had earned her place among the pantheon of figures that had forged the colony into what it was today. Those who had protected it from both the inhospitable environment and the inhumanity of their fellow species. There was even talk of a statue in her likeness being erected alongside the titans of Martian history, Malbec, Xenon, and the others. But even though Mia was glad to have come through the ordeal with her life intact, deep down she felt as if she had not got full closure. There was a gap there, the mission was still not complete.
After Gizmo had navigated their way back to the damaged MASS space station and docked, they found that the main crew had regained control and were busy dealing with the aftermath of both the coup and the destruction that Mia had inflicted on the facility. Nonetheless, their craft was quickly refueled and Mia decided it would be best to hightail it out of there and back to Mars asap. She never got a chance to root through Christian’s belongings to find her jewelry box. But in the weeks and months that followed, when the full facts of the planned genocide were revealed to the citizens, they became so incensed that repercussions were inevitable. MASS were evicted from Mars and herded onto an Earth bound transport. All their facilities, including the space station were commandeered by the council as reparations, much to the howls of protest that were now emanating from the UN back on Earth. Even the Mars council were not spared the wrath of the wronged. Those that had sided with MASS or even argued that MASS was also a victim were dealt with harshly. Justice would not only be done, but it would be seen to be done. And so a purge of sorts had begun and things could have gotten ugly if not for the fact that cooler heads had prevailed and established an equilibrium of sorts.
During this period Mia had kept her head down, even though she was the subject of much praise, bordering on adulation. She smiled, and nodded, and kept her mouth shut. She was acutely aware what it was like to be on the other side of the coin, when the world has turned against you. She knew it would all settle down after a time, and people would go back to worrying about the more mundane things in life, with MASS and their apologists ceasing to be headline news.
Something must have startled the two birds at the fountain as they flew off in unison, up to the safety of the superstructure. Mia followed their path upwards with her eyes, and then heard a familiar whirring sound. She looked around to see Dr. Jann Malbec walking towards her. The whirring sound was Gizmo following beside her. Mia stood up and waved as they approached.
“Is it time?” she said.
“Shortly. We still have a few minutes. I came a little early because I have something for you.” Jann took a seat, Mia sat down opposite her, Gizmo whirred in beside them.
“Good to see you, Gizmo. It looks like you’ve had a few upgrades.” Mia admired the new appendages the little droid sported.
“Thank you. It is good to see you too, Mia. And yes, I have had my full complement of weaponry restored.” A compartment opened on one of the robot’s shoulders and a plasma weapon extended outward. It swiveled around, pointing in different directions before retracting again.
“That looks very intimidating.” Mia laughed.
“My thoughts exactly,” said Gizmo.
“I have something for you, Mia.” Jann reached in the folds of her robe and extracted a small wooden box, no bigger than a pack of cigarettes. It was old and battered and looked as if it had lived a long life. She handed it to Mia.
“I believe this is yours.”
Mia hesitated for a second, not believing what she was seeing. Then she reached out and tentatively took the box, clasped it in both hands, and looked at Jann.
“Where did you get this?”
“We finally did a search of Christian Smithson’s personal effects. This was in one of his bags, along with a number of other missing items.”
“I don’t believe it.” Mia looked at her jewelry box, the one she had spent so much time and energy trying to get back. “I was beginning to think I would never see it again.” She set it down on the table and opened the hinged lid all the way. Inside were some small items, earrings, a few bracelets, rings. At the bottom of the box was a piece of folded paper, which Mia extracted. She opened out the folds and a small, cheap pendant fell out onto her hand. She held it up for Jann to see. It was a small six sided star, cheaply made from thin pressed metal. At its center was a small red plastic gemstone. It looked like something a child might wear.
“This is what I risked my life to get back.” She handed it to Jann, who took it and examined it.
“It must mean a lot to you.”
Mia was reading the worn and tattered note that the pendant had been wrapped in. A tear came to her eye as she read it. She wiped it away, sat back and looked at Jann.
“You know, I never really believed you, that first time we met. I’ll be honest, Jann. I thought you were just some crazy paranoid weirdo.”
Jann laughed. “Well, you’re not the only one. I think that may have been the general consensus at the time.”
“You know, the only reason I took the job was to get back this note and that p
endant you’re holding. Your job offer was a way for me to go after Christian. I knew he must have taken it. I never, for one minute, considered you might have been right about the murder of that courier at Nili Fossae.”
Jann didn’t say anything for a moment. She was looking back and forth between Mia and the pendant.
“I know what you’re thinking. I must be bonkers, it’s just a cheap kids toy. The type of thing you’d find in a Christmas cracker. And yes, on face value that’s exactly what it is. But it’s also what saved my life and brought me back from the brink.”
Mia leaned forward. “Let me tell you a story, something I’ve never told anyone else before now. You know what happened to me, back on Earth, killing that kid and all the crap that got dumped on my head. It was all in that report you read. But what’s not in the report is, about a year after, I was in a bad place, drinking, popping pills. I was a mess and my life was going down the toilet fast. Anyway, one morning after an all night binge I discovered to my horror I had drunk all my stash. So there was nothing for it except to leave my shithole apartment and score some more. I was so drunk it took me a while to stumble to the store. That’s when things got really messy. I don’t really know what happened exactly. But the owner called the cops and I was hauled off, kicking and screaming, at least that’s what they said.
Colony Mars Ultimate Edition Page 67
