Mars, The Bringer Of War

by George P. Saunders

  So why was her personal life a wreck? The work, of course. The answer was always the same. The work precluded the possibility of another mate. It was a taskmaster that wanted zero competition. It demanded and prevailed on every level. Those were the rules, and Lisa had played them well, as had her father in his day.

  Still, it was nice when a man like this Simpson openly flirted with her, in fact, expressed a bold interest in her as a woman, rather than a medical practitioner. Forget nice. It was, for all her weariness, downright exciting.

  Wes Simpson continued holding her hand another moment, then released it. His smile was broad, friendly, open. Lisa decided she liked the big man. She turned as some plates rattled in the galley just a few seats behind her, followed by one of the plates shattering on the floor.

  The Business Class galley was situated just behind the flight stairs leading from the lower deck of the 747 to the Business Class Section on the upper level, and the flight deck furthest forward. Brenda ascended the stairs and entered the galley -- there, to find John Mars, who was gulping some water, while also trying to clean up the shards from the plate he had knocked over.

  “Are you okay, Captain?” Brenda asked, stooping down to help with the clean up.

  “Yes. Fine,” he lied, letting her take over the plate recovery. “Just thirsty. Sorry about the mess.”

  “Not a problem,” she smiled, as he continued to gulp water.

  Brenda looked puzzled. “Can I get you something, Captain? I mean, there’s no need to trouble yourself going downstairs --”

  “Just a last minute, uh, walk-around, Brenda,” he said quickly, forcing a smile. “Little ritual I’ve always done, goes back to the NASA days.”

  Fairy dust stuff, lassy … you don’t have a puppy dog tail on yer, do yer?

  Brenda smiled and shrugged, accepting the statement at face value. In fact, Mars just wanted to keep moving, keep walking, do anything, just shake off the aftermath hangover of his psychic (or whatever the hell it was) encounter.

  It was helping.

  A voice chirped at him from the seat ahead.

  “Excuse me, are you the pilot? I mean, are you Colonel John Mars?” Barry asked, awe and admiration twinkling in his eyes as Mars towered above him.

  Mars stopped, and glanced down at the boy. “Yeah. That's me.” King Leprechaun of this fine flyin’ vehicle, son. Having a bad moment with the wee tinkerbells in me head. Showin’ me visions of catastrophe, they are…

  Barry jerked out his hand. Mars took it, fighting an urge to bolt.

  “Wow! John Mars. The greatest astronaut in the world,” Barry whispered. He might as well have been talking to Christ.

  Mars blinked wearily and forced a smile.

  “Not any more, kid.”

  “Naw, it's true. I've studied all your missions. Can I come up and look at the flight deck?”

  The boy’s enthusiasm, infectious at that, made Mars relax momentarily. He was getting his legs back again. The sweat was still digging into the crack of his ass and the miasma of swirling thoughts, most panicked, remained … but the boy proved to be a welcome distraction. He chanced a smile back at Barry.

  “Sure. Once we’re airborne. I’ll give you the grand tour.”

  Barry was standing now, fairly hopping happy.

  “Really? Cool! You know, I’m gonna be an astronaut, too,” he said.

  “That’s nice, kid. I’ll see you later.”

  As he headed up the stairs for the upper level of the jet, he again froze.

  Another vision loomed directly ahead: It fluctuated momentarily. He was back in space for just a second -- then back on the plane. He glanced at the aft lavatory near the galley, and dived into it. Brenda had moved forward, so he did this unseen.

  And just in time.

  Because, now, sitting on the john -- he was again, somehow back in space.

  Space Station Freedom was a sixty billion investment of combined American, European and Russian technology. It maintained a crew of eight comfortably, but could on occasion accommodate up to three more people, if necessary. Operational for more than four months, Freedom was the designated platform for future space missions to either the moon, Mars -- or beyond. It may have been all these things on paper, and in reality, but from where Mars was floating (or observing), it looked like a fragile toy ready to be crushed.

  From his discorporated position in space (or wherever he was that allowed him a limitless vantage of the space station), Mars could see the huge ship of the Sels rotate on itself, hovering near Freedom. Suddenly, a small aperture appeared to open on the starboard side of the alien ship.

  A brilliant, revolving sphere whisked free from the spacecraft and streaked directly toward the space station.

  When the alien sphere smashed through the hull, decompression was instantaneous; simultaneous with the impact, the probe fired some kind of particle beam at the torn wall which sealed it up in less than a second, thus preserving on-board gravity and life support.

  Mars suddenly found his birds-eye view within the space station itself. He had, in the epochal span of a wink of an eye, somehow acquired the same view as the invading sphere.

  And then he knew what the sphere was doing here on Freedom.

  It was here to kill.

  Mars found no speech in this strange, ultra-limbo world of alien acuity; he could watch, but that was all. His ability to warn had been neutralized. Watch and wait, that was it.

  Suddenly, he was staring at Anna.

  Anna looked up from her console monitor. She felt a sudden iciness climb up and down her spine like an electric current. As if she were being watched. It was a silly notion; there were no tie-in video links from Control Center to individual crew cabins; that kind of privacy was insured on board Freedom. She glanced toward the one and only entrance to her cubicle; perhaps someone had walked past, and the blur of movement had caught her eye peripherally. Perhaps...

  No, that wasn’t it either. The sensation of “something odd” stayed with her and did not diminish. For no reason at all, she turned and picked up an old portrait of John Mars and herself a hundred years or some. When all seemed right with the world, and there was promise for future happiness. She stared down at the familiar face. And felt immediately comforted.

  They had met, it seemed, a thousand centuries ago. She had come to NASA from the International Oceanographic Research Substation (IORS), situated nearly five thousand feet below the Pacific Ocean in the Duran Trench, near Japan. Two years of hyper-accelerated underwater dive training coupled with two degrees from MIT made Anna Carpenter the resident child prodigy among a diverse and eclectically assembled core group of researchers who had a general aversion to all things landbased. In that two year interval, Anna helped develop an experimental Deep Sea Remote Vehicle (DSRV), capable of remaining at depths of over 30,000 feet indefinitely. This achievement solidified her reputation within the scientific community, and she could have written her own ticket to any position she wanted: R&D, DOD … or NASA. She chose the latter, simply because NASA represented an adjunct to unlimited possibilities.

  She had heard of Colonel John Mars as far back as her post-graduate days at MIT. Mars had once been a gifted electrical engineer, graduating with honors from Stanford, before entering the Marine Corps as a Special Advisor. When they finally did meet in Astronaut Training (AT), back in the early 1990s, both Anna and Mars had been awarded legendary status by their peers and trainers alike.

  Their personalities were not exactly similar. Anna tended to be brash, impatient, borderline reckless, both personally and professionally. Mars, conversely, older and more seasoned, tended to be quieter, guarded … haunted by imagination and dark experience of covert wars fought long ago, at too high a price. Together, they enjoyed an agreeable and passionate relationship that friends and associates alike had sworn early on would last both their lifetimes.

  Would. Should. At last … nothing could weather the private demons John Mars took with him everywhere. Not even,
in the end, Anna Carpenter. She would never stop loving him. Ever. And she knew likewise he would always be hers. Only problem they had was that John Mars couldn’t get over what happened on the moon a year earlier.

  The disturbing premonition (or whatever the momentary paranoia had been) evaporated. She was alone again, completely.

  Space life was like that sometimes. Spooky. It could make one twitchy, even experienced veterans. A viability study on proposed trips to Mars and the outer planets, and eventually to the stars themselves, revealed that the greatest challenges to face space travelers of the future would be mental and emotional, rather than physical. Artificial gravity and simulated conditions to a terrestrial environment could be created; the comfort of existing billions of miles - or light years - from anything could not. Man could conceivably go mad on the way to the stars. Simply because space was so large. So infinite. So forever.

  Live with that thought every day for a few years in a tin can, Anna thought, shaking off the weirdness of seconds earlier.

  She glanced back at John’s picture and wondered vaguely if he was okay. At the very least, if he was happy. He was probably still in Mexico; drinking too damned much, if the truth be told. The drinking had separated them, inexorably. While she could not deal with John’s demons, she was savvy enough to realize that she would never stop loving him. Their lives were over together -- but that bond they had, would never be broken. That, like space, was eternal.

  She looked up again. Still nothing. Yet, there was something wrong, she knew it.

  She forced herself back to work, studying geo-synchronous orbit ratios for the past week. Gripping stuff, to be sure. But as commander in chief of Space Station Freedom, Anna was in a position to familiarize herself with every aspect of operation.

  The intercom blinked once on the wall, and the voice of her Chief Engineer echoed in her room.

  “Anna.” Paul Reynolds’ voice was deceptively soft. Anna had come to know each one of her crewmembers well, right down to their emotional feel from day to day. She prided herself on isolating and identifying troubling (or pleasant) shifts in vocal patterns among her flock. Even before she responded to Paul, she could identify the distinct tone of distress in the engineer’s voice.

  Something was wrong. It had to be to fluster Paul. The guy was a piece of iron, unflappable, and thank god, too.

  “Yes, Paul?” Anna said.

  “For a moment, I thought we had a hull breach. The systems went nutty for two seconds, then returned to normal. But --”

  He paused, and Anna sensed it wasn’t for effect.

  “But what?”

  When his voice returned, it quavered: “I think you better look outside, Anna.”

  Anna turned to her right, and leaned over to the porthole. Her mouth suddenly went dry. “Oh, no.”

  The Sel spacecraft engulfed nearly all of the porthole circumference. In every direction she looked, Anna could not find a single star. The ship loomed like some huge black hole in space. Yet it was alive, loosely speaking, red, purple and yellow lights flickering intermittently across the massive hull.

  Them, her mind said automatically, a child’s voice poking at something dark and scary, that should die if you poked at it hard enough with a blunt stick. Them … the monsters … they’re here … and … and

  … John was right …

  “It’s doesn’t even scan on radar or spectroscopy,” Paul droned mechanically “Technically, it doesn’t even refract light.”

  Paul,” Anna whispered, awed to her core. “Call Mission Control. Now.”

  The Sel spacecraft suddenly began to move. Right toward Freedom. Anna bolted from her chair and exited her cubicle. She ran directly for Central Control. Paul was already on the horn to Houston.

  “Mission Control, this is Freedom. Be advised, we have, as they say, an Unidentified Flying Object --”

  The radio suddenly hissed. Paul Reynolds tore his head set off in pain, standing and holding his ears a second later. He looked up at Anna as she ran through the control room entrance, and shook his head.

  “Communications are jammed.”

  Lieutenant Ivan Trotsky, Anna’s navigator and sole Russian crewman entered a second later and gazed at a large video screen above the communications network. The dimension of the Sel ship could now be determined.

  “Over two thousand meters in length, one thousand high. It’s the size of a small planet,” Trotsky said, amazement registering in his voice. “Not one of ours.”

  You think? Anna mused without a trace of humor.

  “It has some weird gravitational field that’s shoving us out of our orbit,” Paul said. “I don’t --”

  Paul stopped speaking. He stared beyond Anna and Trotsky. Both senior officers turned around.

  There, at the entrance of the Control Room, was a twinkling sphere, the size of a basketball. It remained stationary, moving neither up, down, backward or forward, though it rotated on some kind of internal axis.

  “Don’t move,” Anna hissed.

  “What is it?” Paul asked.

  “My guess, the eyes and ears of that thing out there.”

  She was wrong. So very wrong.

  The sphere was a murderer with an agenda.

  John Mars was still physically within the confines of his airplane, but his telepathic, suspended and immediate vision, was on board the space station Freedom. His point of view clearly emanated from the scanning probe now outside of the station’s operating command center. In essence, he was the probe, or at least, an extension of it. How he was here, why he was here -- there was simply no answer. What he could sense about the probe was that it was not merely just an exploratory piece of equipment. It was more.

  What he sensed above all, was that the probe was dangerous.

  Yet there was no way to warn the three Freedomnauts directly ahead. He was afforded visions -- but not communication. He was a bystander, an invited guest to the scenario unfolding. Nothing more.

  In fact, what allowed this unique vision of living, breathing hell to transpire in space for Mars’ viewing pleasure could be explained in the ten million microscopic bits of alien sensing particles in his body. The red probe shot into him by the robot scorpion probe one year earlier had commenced transmission to the Sels almost immediately. Though discorporated, in fact, married to Mars’ very subatomic and cellular composite, the probe entities continued to function right up to the present. Now, in close proximity to the great Flag Ship – home to its creators – the probe subparts had taken Mars to the next level of shared vision and perception. A deliberate choice made by the Sel leadership; Mars, it was felt, should have some inkling of events about to develop around him. It was part of the Plan, of which Mars would, to his great detriment and sorrow, learn about much later, a million light years from Earth.

  He could hear Anna speaking again.

  “I’d like to know how the hell it got on board.”

  “Probably had something to do with that energy jump I told you about,” Paul said.

  The scanning probe continued to fluctuate in intensity and brightness. Thus far, it seemed content to remain stationary at the control room entrance.

  “So, now what?” Lt. Trotsky said, glancing at Anna.

  “Tell Dane and Rebecca to stay in the shuttle bay,” she said, nodding at Paul, not taking her eyes from the probe.

  Paul took three steps across the room to the command board.

  The sphere swiveled on itself and a green light flashed in its center. Suddenly, a beam of green fire rifled across the room. Paul Reynolds was enveloped in the flare of the flash and exploded into a million points of translucent mist.

  Lieutenant Trotsky’s reflexes were instantaneous. He reached for his sidearm.

  “No, Ivan!” Anna screamed.

  But it was too late. The probe had fixed its target on Trotsky and a second later, he, too, was blasted out of existence. Anna turned on herself, and dived into a connecting hall, rolled, and slammed the emergency exit
hatch. The probe was imprisoned in the control central. Anna did not believe it would stay there indefinitely, nor that she could effectively contain the alien device; she therefore ran, hitting an intercom as she turned a corner.

  “All hands, head for the shuttle. Emergency launch!”

  She did not wait for a response. She turned and continued running, but not before hearing the control room hall hatch blast outward from the probing sphere’s escape.

  And then he was back. The images of the attack on Freedom evaporated as quickly as they had started. Shaking, sitting on the lavatory stool, John fought for breath. He was hyperventilating and he knew it. He forced himself to relax and think.

  How much time had passed? He glanced at his watch. Roughly eight minutes had elapsed since he had entered the restroom facility. He heard his name being called overhead.

  “Captain Mars to the flight deck,” Jennifer’s voice sounded out officially.

  He splashed water in his face, dried himself, then exited the lavatory. He hoped no one in business class would recognize the agitated expression in his face, least of all Ravers.

  He entered the 747 cockpit and struggled into his chair.

  Jennifer turned to him. “Are we going to Japan or not?”

  What the hell can I do? Who would believe me? If I told anyone now, they’d laugh me off the plane...

  Mars decided in a split second that the only course of action was to get the damn plane in the air, then speak to Ravers. He could get hold of Mission Control within minutes. He would either confirm Mars' testimony of what was currently happening on Freedom .. or merely prove to him that he was well on his way toward a nervous breakdown. In fact, Mars feared the latter as being a very real possibility. Feared it -- yet in a way, hoped for it. For if indeed he was merely cracking up, then Freedom was safe, and there was no alien spacecraft presently engaging in hostile activities against an Earth spacecraft, and thus Earth itself.