This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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Published by Kindle Press, Seattle, 2016
A Kindle Scout selection
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Contents
Part One: 2101
Chapter One: Au Revoir Mother of Mars
Chapter Two: Entropy
Chapter Three: Damned If You Do
Chapter Four: Deep Space
Chapter Five: Winging It
Chapter Six: Phoebe
Chapter Seven: The Station
Part Two: The Wild Frontier
Chapter Eight: Outlaws
Chapter Nine: Albiorix
Chapter Ten: The Killers Are Coming
Chapter Eleven: The Killers Have Landed
Chapter Twelve: Slingshot
Chapter Thirteen: Trippin’ the Light Fantastic
Chapter Fourteen: Plan B
Chapter Fifteen: Plan C
Part Three: Birth of a Space Gang
Chapter Sixteen: Harpoons Away
Chapter Seventeen: Vigilance Fail
Chapter Eighteen: Caleb and the Gang
Chapter Nineteen - Scavengers
Chapter Twenty: Pooh in Rabbit’s Hole
Chapter Twenty-One: A Little B&E
Chapter Twenty-Two: The Gentle Way
Part Four: Arrival
Chapter Twenty-Three: Harry’s Bar
Chapter Twenty-Four: The VIP Treatment
Chapter Twenty-Five: Pan
Chapter Twenty-Six: Revenge
Chapter Twenty-Seven: Consciousness
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Nanos Nanos Everywhere
Chapter Twenty-Nine: Self Destruct
Chapter Thirty: To the Future
Acknowledgements
Part One: 2101
Chapter One: Au Revoir Mother of Mars
In April of 2101, if an individual bothered to observe the timeless clockwork of the moon, he would note that the onetime goddess offered little evidence of her heavy burden. An amateur astronomer peering through a cheap home telescope might detect that something didn’t look quite right. Armed with slightly more magnification, the amateur would likely smile with satisfaction at Luna’s craggy old face. A sharper focus, however, would reveal an open graveyard of empty bases, man’s first experiment in extraterrestrial living, scattered with the self-slaughtered corpses of freedom-seeking humans. If the moon’s one operational orbiting satellite cared to behold the carnage below, its lenses, mirrors, and processors would have observed something akin to a decimated anthill: poison gas having driven the insects out, the dead lay in heaps near the exits.
For Earth’s purposes, that satellite, the Long Range Orbiter or LRO, had become scientifically obsolete and was thus abandoned. It had been an observatory, a famous one, one that had at various times made rather spectacular discoveries regarding potentially habitable planets. No less than twenty Earth-like rocky orbs had been discovered by the device. Although it was incapable of observing actual life, it was able to calculate that at least five of those rocky planets were not just well within the goldilocks orbits of their stars, but that the chemical composition that made up their atmospheres indicated a high probability for extraterrestrial life. In time, the celebrated space telescope had been supplanted with other, more powerful space-based devices that had all but confirmed alien life (though the discovery of actual intelligent life remained out of the grasp of all efforts to measure it). Then something happened on Earth that made astronomia seem quaint. Why bother studying the cosmos from a fixed point when a virtual multiverse could be explored in its infinity from any point? Never mind that that virtual multiverse and every other virtual space that occupied minds that had been improved by artificial brain enhancement, or ABE, were but a figment of imagination with no grounding in space-time reality. For those who chose to merge their existence with a digital alternate universe, the question was moot.
In the period between 2091 and 2094, roughly one-third of humanity chose to undergo ABE and join itself inextricably to a synthetic intelligence of its own creation. In a bold counterpoint, trillionaire libertarian Bez Hanson—an anti-ABE Man, or Analog—built the base structure for a city on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan (a floating feat of engineering in the dense upper atmosphere that outshone any wonder on Earth). With Hanson’s financial backing, roughly four million Analogs left Earth to develop a colony on the sixty-two moons of Saturn. Though Mars had long been under development, Saturn’s moon Titan was of particular interest as the only other body in the solar system with a significant atmosphere, which, theoretically, could in time be made to be habitable.
With development of the gas giant’s dense upper atmosphere and its vast system of moons colonized at an exceedingly rapid rate, the Great Saturn Land Rush had begun. The only prerequisite for settlement was acceptance of the precept that the Saturn System would remain ABE free. The price of freedom was exile from the home planet; to stay on Earth was to agree to assimilate, to become part of the Singularity, to be permanently altered into a remodel of mankind. To an Analog, the ABEs were no longer human but a genetic manipulation, with nano robots coursing through every organ and a cyberspace-brain-interface that connected the individual to all aspects of the collective whole. For an ABE, the very act of not choosing to assimilate was anathema, an abomination. How could anyone willfully choose to remain the pitifully dangerous slug that was a human being before the Singularity? Analogs were barbarians. Barbarians ensured chaos. Chaos was only something that should be experienced for short-term pleasure in the virtual realm. Chaos could not and would not be allowed to exist in its natural state of turmoil, disruption, and upheaval.
Forgotten about in all annals but in the digital historical record, the lonely LRO whirled around Earth’s moon, seemingly innocuous, until one of the planet’s last amateur stargazers discovered that the great eye in the sky was no longer looking outward. The device had been hacked, ostensibly by the Analogs, and trained instead to spy on the mother planet. Unfortunately for the hackers, a clever artificial intelligence, enhanced by the seemingly limitless imagination of humanity, made for a powerful adversary, one that the Analog population of the moon had failed to outwit.
On Mars, a repeat of the lunar disaster was brutally unfolding.
Dr. Gabrielle Levy slowly blinked awake and noted that she was still seated in her lab chair, her face aching from laying on her desk. She had been up for nearly seventy hours before her brain and body had finally called it quits. Exhaustion had overwhelmed abject terror and put her out where she sat. She had locked herself in her office, sealed the door and vents with silicon caulk, and watched the security feeds with utter horror as every man, woman, and child inside Mars Base 3 walked out onto the surface without so much as an emergency breathing apparatus. In a period of less than three days, the entire base had committed mass suicide, the majority of them within the first two hours of the first day. By the time Gabrielle and some others had sorted out the problem, there were only twenty or so people left. Now, as far as she could tell, she was alone.
Doc Levy was an explorer, a psychiatrist, and an astronaut by default, but foremost, she was a woman who loved the adventure that was life. She had inhabited Mars for thirty-five years. Hardly the first to arrive, but the longest
to stay. She had been the sole resident who had moved on from the original permanent station (consisting of a small group of interconnected prefab living and experimental pods) to the far more expansive colony known as Mars Base 2, and finally, to the permanent colony built into the deep volcanic rock of the planet, earning herself the sobriquet Mother of Mars.
Engineers with heavy-duty mining gear provided the wherewithal to create a network of underground caverns that ultimately formed the international cluster of towns that were Mars Base 3. The caverns and tunnels that made up the villages were cleverly disguised by tricks of light, paint, holographs, and live plants to create the impression that the new residents were living in any quaint burb located in dozens of nations on Earth. With different “neighborhoods” mimicking the architecture of various parts of the world, no one could deny that it might as well have been the long defunct Disneyworld. This third round of explorers had arrived armed with the technology to excavate the necessary elements to then fabricate, build, and fuel machines that could bring more people out or return them to Earth with surprising ease. In the late twenty-first century, the goings-on at home caused most Earthlings to choose to fly farther out into the solar system—except Gabrielle Levy. Gabrielle loved being a Martian, for that was how she thought of herself. Earthlings were something different now, and the distant communications with those colleagues who had returned home had grown from impending angst to outright alarm. Most of them deeply regretted their choice to return home and were trying every angle they could to get back to Mars—or farther.
The new settlers who began arriving by the dozens and then the hundreds weren’t so much pioneers as immigrants, people eager to escape what was happening at home, opting for Mars as an alternative to the latest upgrade. Indeed, as refuseniks, they had been strongly encouraged to leave lest they contaminate the new model - the New Way, as it had become colloquially known amongst ABE adherants. It was the equivalent of early twentieth-century Russians who, though they deeply loved their country, had decided to accept exile rather than participate in the deeply corrupt and coercive experiment that had become the Soviet Union.
Four days before Gabrielle had passed out from exhaustion, the final ship to leave Earth had landed on Mars with a last batch of exiles, many of them children who had been sent by their desperate parents as a group with a single female adult guardian. No more could be taken in. The base had been maxed out, and the much more expensive option to go to the Saturn System had not been available for some time.
Mars Bases 4 and 5 had been in the planning stages, but the call of Saturn had superseded the funding for such an effort. Mars was deemed by millions to be uncomfortably close to Earth. Saturn was its own planetary system of a sort. With sixty-two moons and lesser satellites, there was room to spread out, to make a claim, to get away from other people if need be. And unlike Mars, the gas giant had the added benefit of a magnetic field similar to that of Earth, which acted as a protective cloak, deflecting the bulk of the Sun’s deadly radiation.
The Great Saturn Land Rush had been happening for a decade, but the last of those big ships had departed a year prior. Those were smart ones, thought Levy in despair, the ones who had clearly seen the writing on the wall. But were they really safe? A billion extra kilometers or so wasn’t really a distance that mattered, not when the enemy had all the time in the universe.
Precious time had been lost while Dr. Levy and her collegues had traced out the methodology for their own destruction. Slipping a amphetamine between her lips and feeling it melt beneath her tongue; she watched for a second time the video record that they had assembled: Before boarding the final ship to Mars, Danny Montoya, all of five years old, had stood bravely in line with the other children while watching his parents across the glass partition wipe away tears and put on brave faces. He clutched a small teddy bear. A woman volunteer dressed as a Catholic nun had handed it to him as a distraction while he was gently pulled away from in between his parent’s rigid legs. Danny’s small sleeves were soaked from rubbing away so many of his own tears. The teddy bear that he absently clutched featured a grin on its face, sewn on rather crookedly. With great big dark brown eyes, it gave the impression of deep innocence. Danny held the bear throughout the long journey to Mars. It became his constant companion, a surrogate that held his parents’ voices for him even as they began to fade from his short memory. One-hundred and forty-nine days later, he stepped off the ship into his new home. The morning after his arrival, Danny Montoya was the first person to step back out of the base via the North Airlock. He did so with all of the other children who had arrived with him, his hand firmly gripping that of his terrified guardian. It was clear in the video that the boy knew he was going to die, didn’t want to go. It was also obvious that the guardian and the other children desperately didn’t want to go, either. But they did, and hundreds would soon follow.
As Doc Levy felt her heart begin to race and her senses become crisp, she listened to the silence of the base and found it deafening. Flicking from security feed to security feed confirmed her solitude. She didn’t have much time. She knew that. Even men wearing exosuits had succumbed. They had pulled off their helmets and breathed in the poison that was the Martian atmosphere. She decided to include a recording of herself along with the video. She would send it to her friend Dr. Carl Libeling in Hanson City on Titan. The folks out there needed to know this was happening. She got as far as describing the pathogen. No, pathogen wasn’t the right word—vehicle. She gave her best guess about the nature of the vehicle, when the invisible stuff finally wormed its way through the still wet silicon she had hastily applied along the threshold of her door. She heard a high pitched ringing in her ears, a brief moment of tinnitus that she yawned away, then the intense smell of cinnamon, which caused spontaneous memories of her mother in Provence and fresh steaming chaussons aux pommes. She hadn’t smelled cinnamon, real cinnamon since leaving Earth. The scent faded. She shook it off and continued to dictate for a few seconds more when she just stopped, unable to speak, barely able to swallow, unable to even remember how to communicate. Naked fear shot through her body, making the hair on her arms stand straight up. In her mind, she could scream the emotional equivalent of “no,” but the word itself was lost to her. She knew exactly what she was going to do, but had no power to stop herself. From an observer’s perspective: one moment the Mother of Mars had been dictating, and the next she was standing up, yanking open the door, and taking the long walk up to the surface. As she passed the grocery, the scientist in her noted that her senses still worked fine. She was aware of the smell of fresh baked bread, a piped-in effect that belied the reality that all food came from 3-D printers and was cooked without the release of any gases or compounds into the surrounding air. The faux sounds of summer insects chirped in the trees on Main Street, USA, and the genuine echo of water trickling gently from a fountain filled her ears. It should have been a soothing sound, but it only served to compound her horror.
The emptiness of the place was familiar. She had experienced it once, in the old surface pods when the first settlers had gone away. That isolation had been tempered by the knowledge that more human companionship was on the way. This time there was no happy change to anticipate, just the pure understanding that it was over. Her life was over. That part she understood perfectly.
The the bulk of the humanoid robot assistants simply ignored her as she passed. She had no ability to instruct them to give her aid, and though she was clearly following the deadly footsteps of every other resident, none was offered. All robot’s, humanoid and otherwise, had a primary function to assist humans in peril. This programming seemed to be off. It was clear that everyone on the base had been in imminent danger, yet not a single synthetic finger had been raised to help. She couldn’t remember if this primary function was negated by the act of suicide. She decided that that could be the only logical explanation; that the higher order not to interfere with individual human pursuits overcame the standing order to
protect.
One of the humanoid ones, albino in appearance to differentiate itself from actual people, did acknowledge her as she passed. It very casually said, “Au revoir, la Mere de Mars.”
The surface level itself had been decompressed so Dr. Levy never actually made it outside. She was nevertheless surprised by how far she got in the subfreezing Martian air. As she ferosciously fought for self-control, her lungs burned with evaporation and her vision tunneled. With hot tears boiling off her cheeks, the final image her failing optic nerves transmitted to her asphyxiating brain was of a stuffed bear discarded on the hallway floor. It lay no more than thirty meters from the wide-open North Airlock where dozens of bodies were piled on top of one another. Its big brown eyes stared up at Gabrielle Levy as she stepped over it. What a curious smile for a stuffed bear.
On the moons of Saturn, a vast array of Earthward-looking sensors kept track of the hostile home planet. Nothing in that arsenal compared to the clear view of home provided by the highjacked LRO orbiting the moon. So it was with deep frustration and unspoken fear that the Hanson Chamber of Commerce on Titan accepted the news: in the blink of a laser shot from a cannon on Mauna Kea, the LRO was no more. The fact that the observatory had remained undiscovered for years had given false hope to the masters of Saturn. Their last close-up eye in the sky was gone. With the bases on the moon and Mars suddenly wiped out, vigilance was paramount.
Chapter Two: Entropy
In his dream, Caleb smelled freshly cut grass. A light breeze slipped through a partially opened window, and morning sunlight traced a warm line across his cheek. Curiously, the breeze didn’t carry with it the restless chirps of morning birds. The absence brought his consciousness into the dream with the annoying comment, “This is a dream,” which caused his subconscious to scowl at the interruption. Consciousness in turn, cursed its own role and willed itself to leave the scene. His subconscious vainly attempted to incorporate birdsong into the fading dream. Then Caleb opened one eye, feeling the dream flit away as genuine sunlight nearly blinded him. Sunlight? There wasn’t enough out here to blind a man. A quick shift of his head shook the dull ache he was feeling, causing it to burst into full anger. He rubbed a cottony tongue over fuzzy teeth and regretted for the thousandth time his tendency to binge drink.
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