by Graham Brown
It had taken a decade to build and launch the array, which was made up of fifty thousand computer controlled reflective panels, each the size of a ten-story building. But the effort had been worth it. This second ‘sun’ added another twenty percent to the incoming heat. Most of it aimed at a band along the equator. The combined efforts of the Solaris Array and the atmospheric modification plants had raised the average temperatures on the planet by forty degrees. But with the atmosphere still so thin it was like the harshest of deserts, broiling in the day and cold to the point of frost at night.
Further north or south the temps dropped dramatically, but if the progress continued, in another ten years or so half the planet would be habitable without environmental suits.
The future was bright, Hannah thought to herself, bright and warm. But there was no guarantee any of them would live to see it.
The Deca-Trac continued to rumble forward, shuddering slightly as the wind buffeted the vehicle’s side. With heat and thicker atmosphere came weather. Wind was becoming a problem, mostly because it whipped up the ultrafine dust blanketing the surface.
Hannah could hear it sand-blasting the side of the truck. The curved Plexiglas windshield was already hazy after less than a month of exposure. In another month it would be opaque and need replacing.
“The forecast didn’t mention these winds,” Davis said, slowing.
“They’ll probably die down after sunset,” she replied.
“And if they don’t and we get caught in a dust storm?”
There was no need to answer. If that happened they would most certainly die.
“Keep going,” she said. “We have a mission to finish.”
Davis stared at her for a minute, and then reluctantly nudged the throttle forward. “We get caught out here, the dust will clog all the filters and kill the engine. We can’t walk in it, we can’t breathe in it, and we sure as hell can’t call for help if we need it.”
He was right about that. Hard to call for help when you were crossing a zone you weren’t supposed to be in in the first place. “Trust me,” she said. “We’ll be okay.”
They continued on, traveling another five miles, closing in on the coordinates she’d been given. After rolling over a small ridge, they came down a sandy hill and passed a rocky out cropping. On the far side they came upon a sight neither of them had expected.
Another Deca-Trac similar to their own lay there, half buried in the sand. Thirty yards away a huge, tracked vehicle called a rock hauler sat buried up to the chassis in the soft sand. Only the cab and the very top of the four tracks it rode on remained visible.
Its mammoth size and derelict appearance brought to mind a shipwreck on a deserted coastline.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Davis said. “Someone has been out here after all.”
“We knew that already,” she replied. “The question is why? What the hell were they doing out here?”
“I’ll circle the rigs,” he said.
She nodded. “Watch out for soft spots. Don’t want to end up stuck like them.”
“Will do,” Davis replied.
It was nearly dark. The sun had gone down an hour ago, and the last portion of the sparkling Solaris Array was dropping below the horizon. The landscape had turned the dark maroon of dried blood, but soon it would be too dark to see.
In response Davis reached for the headlight switch. Hannah stopped him.
“Wait till we’re certain there’s no one else out here.”
They’d circled both vehicles, confirmed that they were empty and scanned the surrounding area.
“Nothing on the horizon,” Davis said.
“Put us next to the hauler,” Hannah said.
As they pulled in front of the rock hauler and parked, Hannah pulled on a helmet. It wasn’t pressurized, but it would seal out the dust and a micro filter would allow her to breathe.
Davis did the same and with Hannah’s blessing flipped on the exterior lights. The ground around the Deca-Trac and the long flank of the rock hauler was instantly bathed in a warm glow, accentuated by the pink and red soil of the planet.
Hannah reached for the door, opened it and stepped through. As she and Davis approached the abandoned rig with flashlights in hand, their boots left two-inch deep boot prints in the sand as if it were red snow.
Hannah stepped up on a rail and pulled open the rock hauler’s main door.
“Give me a hand,” she said.
Davis grabbed the handle and the two of them pulled in unison. The door creaked and then swung open. Reddish sand flowed out. Half the cab had been filled with it. As she looked around, Hannah saw where it had come in. Several holes had been punched in the windshield. They were bullet holes from some large caliber weapon. What looked like dried blood was all over the cab.
“Whoever was driving this didn’t get out alive,” she said.
“We should have brought a few rifles,” Davis announced, his voice tinny and monotone over the helmet speaker.
“No one here to shoot us now,” Hannah replied. “But that doesn’t explain what happened.”
“You hear of any gunshot wounds down at the hospital?”
Keeping up with injuries was part of her official job. And every week brought a litany of new ones as the breakneck pace of construction caused accidents and incidents. She’d definitely have heard if someone had been shot, especially since possession of weapons on Mars was strictly forbidden except for the security teams.
“No,” she replied. “But I doubt these people made it to the hospital. You have any reports of missing persons?”
“No,” he said. “I checked with admin this morning. Everyone is accounted for.”
That was a bad sign. It meant someone was lying. Or worse.
“I’ll check the other rig,” Davis said.
Hannah nodded. As Davis moved off, she stepped out in front of the abandoned rock hauler. Playing her light across the red soil, she spotted other equipment nearby. She crouched beside one piece and began to clear the sand away. It looked like an oxygen generator.
“Hannah!”
She turned. Davis was waving her over.
“Come here. Look at this.”
She dropped the oxygen generator and ran over to where he was. Even in the bulky outfit the light gravity of Mars made it easy to move quickly.
“What is it?” she asked, stopping next to him.
“Look.”
He pointed the flashlight into the space between the hauler’s front and rear tracks. The wind was tunneling underneath the machine, peeling back the fine sand in layers. The scouring effect had exposed something sinister: human bodies half buried in the sand.
At least a dozen were clearly visible. They seemed emaciated, but they weren’t skeletons. With the bacterial loads on Mars so low and the insect populations limited to those the settlers had brought and genetically engineered to help with pollination, the bodies hadn’t decayed, they’d just desiccated in the arid air, drying out until they looked like mummies from an ancient time.
“Get the shovels,” she ordered.
An hour of digging would reveal other bodies. She couldn’t even guess how many remained buried underneath or who they were. None of them had identification or even proper uniforms. Some carried bullet wounds; others showed signs of plasma burns.
“We’re looking at a crime scene,” she said. “Someone covered this up and hoped the wasteland would finish the job of hiding it.”
“Should we bring the bodies in?” Davis asked. “As evidence?”
“Against who?”
He turned her way and offered a sarcastic look. “I think we can both guess the answer to that.”
“No,” she said. “We’re not here to guess or to tip our hand at the first sign of trouble. Leave them for now. They’re not going anywhere. We need to head back and get this information off to Earth.”
CHAPTER 3
New York City, 2137
The Fortress was the colloquial name
given to the most imposing of the mega-structures that sprouted from various spots on Manhattan Island. One hundred and ninety stories tall, its base spread out across mid-town Manhattan: a giant footprint in the world’s most powerful city. It tapered as it rose, like a narrow pyramid, with protruding sky ports and landing pads sticking out from the sides at the seventy-first floor and the one hundred twentieth. The defensive missile systems and countermeasures bristled from nodes on all sides every ten stories or so.
Ninety thousand people lived in the Fortress. During the day another forty thousand came to work there. Most of them worked on the lower levels, where the government offices were staffed with the most basic civil servants. They came and went from a terminal on the fourth floor using busses and mag-lev trains like the office workers had in the big city’s heyday.
The more important players never touched the ground, using the sky-ports to jet in and out, traveling back and forth to their enclaves and other areas reserved and protected for the wealthy.
But even among the wealthy there were few who ever made it to the top floors where the upper crust of the world’s government lived and worked, enjoying huge arboretums pumped full of artificial sunlight, pools and spas and other touches that allowed them to soak up the illusion of a world like it once was.
Strangely enough, the most important voice among all those who lived at the top of the pyramid, shunned such indulgences. President Jackson Collins, leader of the United World Government and Commander in Chief of the World Military Forces preferred the gritty reality of the world as it was. Otherwise, he thought, it would be too easy not to work for the change that was needed.
Standing on the rooftop amid a spitting rain, he watched an angular shaped hover-jet with glowing engines and quadruple tails thunder across the dark sky towards the fortress. Crimson flares trailed out behind it, launched at precise intervals to ward off missile attacks, should the Black Death or any other group of insurgents try to take the hover jet down.
Collins watched as they fell slowly, tiny points of burning light dropping beneath the ever-present clouds and toward a darker swath of the city below.
From this height much of the city looked like a wasteland. Most of the buildings were dark and filthy, coated with carbon and scarred by the acid rain. Many of them were no longer electrified, though they were inhabited and indeed overpopulated. On the streets below, fires were always burning. No one bothered to put them out; the surface dwellers would just light them up again.
Much like the flares from the hover jet, the fires were there to ward something off. Hopelessness and utter darkness, Collins thought to himself. Something he sought to avoid as well.
“Mr. President,” a man said reverently from behind him.
President Collins turned. Arthur Inyo was coming toward him from the rooftop shelter a few yards back. With one hand he gripped a file, with the other he held his suit jacket closed as if it might blow open and drag into the air like a kite.
Arthur Inyo was thin, well into his mid-fifties and almost completely bald. He’d been Jackson’s friend and confidant for twenty years, all through the Fall of the Nation States and the War of Unification. He was the bureaucrat who made things mesh together; Jackson was the warrior who forced the issue when they didn’t. In the complicated government structure, Inyo held the title of Prime Minister.
“I wish you wouldn’t stand out here in the rain like this,” Inyo said. “You know what this stuff does to your skin? You look old enough already.”
Collins glanced over at Inyo. The heat in the city was ever-present now, even in winter it rarely got below eighty degrees, but half a mile up in the misty rain it was quite cool.
“Your concern for my physical appearance is duly noted,” Collins said with a grin.
The hover jet had finally swung onto an approach course, escorted by two smaller, more lethal looking military craft.
Inyo glanced at his watch; the hover jet was late. Thirty minutes overdue. “It’s wrong for them to make you wait like this,” he said. “You’re only the leader of the damned world.”
Collins nodded and offered a sad smile at Inyo’s unfortunate choice of words. The damned world indeed.
“That they come at all surprises me, Arthur. In truth it’s a bad sign. It means they no longer fear us. They no longer feel the need to hide.”
“Are we really going to blame them for what’s happening on Mars?”
“Among other things,” Collins replied.
Inyo shook his head. It was a clash a long time coming. A clash he’d warned Collins about years before. “You shouldn’t have brought them into this,” he said. “Partnering with them in the first place was like making a deal with the devil.”
Collins had done terrible things in the name of peace and stability. Ordering massacres and assassinations. Sending his armies to lay waste to regions that harbored the enemies of unity. It had been his goal to make war so terrible that those who wanted it would finally have their voices drowned out by those who wanted it to end. Partnering with Lucien Rex and the twelve oligarchs of the Cartel had secured that peace, but at a terrible cost.
“I had no choice,” Collins replied. “Look around you, Arthur. God doesn’t live here anymore.”
Inyo nodded sadly and both men watched as the hover jet eased across the threshold of the building, deployed its landing gear and dropped slowly toward the pad. Over the whine of the engines he shouted to Inyo, “Have them checked for weapons, and then send them inside.”
Twenty minutes later, in the shelter of the building, Jackson Collins waited at his desk for Lucien Rex and whomever he’d brought with him to enter. When the door was finally opened, Collins was surprised to see Lucien enter on his own with only a bodyguard behind him.
“You wanted to see me,” Lucien said with obvious disdain.
“Where are the others?” Collins asked. “The rest of your Cartel.”
“We speak with one voice now,” Lucien said. “Mine.”
Collins nodded. He was not surprised. “If you speak for them, then you’ll answer for their crimes as well.”
“Is there such a thing anymore?” Lucien said, taking a seat across from Collins.
Collins ignored the statement, though it might have been the crux of the difference between the two men.
“You’re being paid to send men and equipment to Mars, to speed up the Terra-forming and the cultivation efforts. My people have been waiting for months on your heavy machinery. Now I find out, you’re not sending equipment at all. You’re sending slaves by the thousands.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Lucien replied.
Collins stood. “We’ve found bodies out in the wastes. Hundreds of them. Buried where you or your people thought no one would ever look. And from what I understand that’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
For the first time in the president’s memory, Lucien Rex looked surprised. He said nothing. He just sat and seethed.
Collins smiled. “That’s right Lucien. Someone leaked your little secret. It seems that some of your people have a conscience.”
Still Lucien remained silent, and for a moment, Collins thought he’d knocked Lucien back on his heels. But whatever sense of contrition Lucien Rex had, it vanished quickly.
“Laborers,” he spat. “That’s all they are. Laborers sent to do the job you wanted done.”
“Slaves,” Collins shot back.
“If you want to call them that.”
“Why, Lucien? What’s the point?”
“To save the machines,” Lucien replied.
Collins was stunned. “What are you talking about?”
“Mars and its fine red dust,” Lucien said. “Ten times finer than anything found here on Earth. It gets in everything, the gearing, the engines, all the systems. It wears them to pieces. A rig that might last thirty years on Earth won’t make it six months on Mars. Less, if it gets caught in one of the sand storms. But those laborers—these slaves as you
called them – they can last for years. And when they succumb you can use them for fertilizer.”
Collins’s fury burned, he slammed his fist on the table. “Money? This is about money? I’m talking about fundamental human rights here! There haven’t been slaves on Earth for almost three hundred years.”
Lucien’s ire rose in response to the president’s. “Are you sure about that, Mr. President? Who do you think built these cities? The canals and tunnels that that bring the fresh water in and the walls that keep the sea out?”
“Engineers and workers.”
“Who were paid almost nothing.”
“There is a difference, Lucien. They were free to leave at any time.”
“And go where?”
“Anywhere they thought might be better,” Collins snapped. “The people you’ve been abducting and shipping to Mars have no hope of survival. In fact from what I’ve been shown, those who’ve tried to leave have been killed to keep your secret hidden.”
“I have no information about that,” Lucien said. “What I do know is that trillions have been wasted both here and on Mars. Between the wars, the reclamation of useless, dead land and the Terra-forming effort, our resources are strained to the breaking point. Money, equipment and time, all these things are in short supply. The only thing that isn’t, is the mass of humanity beneath our feet. And unlike you, I’m not afraid to use them.”
“Human lives are not a resource,” Collins said bluntly.
“Oh yes, Mr. President, they most certainly are. You above all others should know that. You’ve spilt more blood than the rest of us combined.”
The two men glared at each other coldly, titans who could no longer exist in the same space. The time for cooperation was over. One must rise and one must fall.
“Where did they come from?” Collins demanded.
“Does it matter?”
“I’ve been hearing of mass abductions in certain cities, including this one. If I find out you’ve been rounding up people and sending them to Mars…”
“You’ll do what?” Lucien snapped. “Are we really going to fight a war over the worthless lives of the untouchables?”
