Mars Nation 2

by Brandon Q Morris

  But thoughts like this were pointless. She didn’t have anything from which she could build a sled. Ewa stood back up. She had to keep going.

  She reached the valley floor around six o’clock in the evening. She couldn’t complete the ascent before sunset, but she couldn’t afford to break for the night already. Ewa looked up. The ascent was no steeper than the descent. She hadn’t encountered any difficulties on her way down, and her helmet had an electric lamp attached to it. This meant she could keep going even after the sun went down. If she reached the top yet today and marched an extra two hours tomorrow, she would make up for the time she had lost here.

  “Up we go,” she said aloud.

  The mountain was waiting for her. Ewa set off. She quickly felt out of breath. Naturally, going uphill was more strenuous than going downhill, but she would manage it. Her heart beat rapidly, but that wasn’t unusual considering the challenge facing her. She hit a stride that she could maintain for the long term. The pain that was always sitting on her shoulder had vanished. It had probably struck off ahead of her and was waiting at the top. The strain would exact its price, she was sure about that, but that fact couldn’t matter right now. Once the sun set, her pace dropped a little. She had to frequently use her helmet lamp to search for the best path. An overhead floodlight would have been more helpful, but that wasn’t all that important either. She had to overcome the wall in front of her.

  That was the moment her left foot slipped, the one onto which she had just shifted her weight. She tilted to the side, but managed to twist her body such that her backpack broke her fall. However, she wasn’t able to offset the energy produced by the fall. Her body began to roll, and she barreled back toward the bottom of the canyon. Her helmet lamp illuminated a massive, black boulder downhill from her. She was rolling straight toward it, and there was no way for her to change her trajectory. It was a moment like from a nightmare. She had to keep herself from colliding with the boulder, but it was unavoidable. The gravitational pull was dragging her toward it. Then the crash, and everything around her grew silent.

  Ewa opened her eyes. She was still alive. She tested all her limbs—no pain beyond the typical aches. She had been amazingly lucky! Her backpack had been in just the right spot at just the right moment. Something in it might have broken, but it wouldn’t be anything too critical. The oxygen containers were much too solid to break so easily. Some of the crackers might now be crumbs.

  But then her wrist vibrated. ‘Leak,’ the universal device announced. Shit. Her suit was losing oxygen. It had taken at least thirty seconds for the system to notice the problem, which meant that the hole wasn’t too large. She had to remain calm. The repair gel was located in her suit’s tool bag. All she needed to do was find the leak and seal it.

  Ewa sat up and started patting down her spacesuit. She didn’t feel anything. She needed light, so she pulled her flashlight from her bag. She shined the beam all over her suit and found a scratch on her knee. Was that the spot? The material at this spot was gaping. That had to be the leak. She pulled out the repair kit. The tube of self-hardening sealant was only half-full. Someone must have used her suit’s supplies to repair something. This was the last thing she needed! She pressed the tube over the leak. What she squeezed out was just enough. All she could do now was hope that there were no other holes in her suit. The gel needed to harden, so for the moment she couldn’t move her knee.

  Ewa sat completely still for three minutes. It should be sealed now. The system should give her an update on the oxygen loss in about thirty seconds. Ewa mentally counted. When she reached thirty, she felt herself start to sweat. Thirty-nine, forty. Her universal device vibrated again. “Suit sealed,” it reported. Whew! She had done it.

  She had lost about fifty meters. Ewa stood up. She had to reach the upper edge of the canyon. Only then could she consider herself done for the day. She didn’t pack the flashlight now, using it instead to keep better track of the stability of the ground. Step after step, she ascended the canyon wall.

  Ewa never looked back. She had one and only one goal. And she finally reached it, the ravine’s edge. The chasm transformed before her eyes into a harmless plain. She dropped to the ground. She had earned this rest.

  5/26/2042, Spaceliner 1

  “One minute to go,” the FM said. “All stations, please confirm your readiness or report any questions you might have.”

  The decisive seconds. Their spaceship, Spaceliner 1, was about to leave Earth orbit and start its journey to Mars. Rick felt a shiver run down his spine. During the Earth launch, he had been a mere passenger, but now he belonged to the flight team. Along with Terran, he was supervising the propulsion system. As flight manager, Maggie Oh was coordinating all the stations. Although Mission Control had been guiding the flight up to this point, the leadership crew on board was now taking over. The greater the distance between them and Earth, the longer it would take for responses to reach the surface. This was why a Mars spaceship needed to be independent.

  “LO?” Maggie asked.

  “LO,” confirmed a voice that Rick couldn’t place.

  “LM?”

  “LM.” Another stranger.

  “RC?”

  “RC,” replied a woman’s voice.

  Acronyms whirred through the room. Rick couldn’t place them all, but others around the ship knew what they represented. It was their last chance to express any doubts they might have about the functional abilities of the systems that fell under their supervision. If there was even the slightest deviation from the norm values, they had to speak up now. The countdown would be interrupted immediately.

  “LD?”

  “LD.”

  They should be up soon. Terran had agreed that Rick could give the authorization even though they had the same rank. This had been very important to Rick, even though the only thing he would need to say was four letters in length.

  “NLM?”

  “NLM.”

  As she posed the questions, Maggie was reading down a checklist of the separate stations, each of which she had to confirm on her monitor as she went through them. Rick could still recall from his training days that until about ten years ago, all of this had been done on paper.

  “AFLD?”

  “AFLD.”

  AFLD—this was the department that always came before theirs on the list. He had memorized their order. Rick stared fixedly at his screen. All the gauges were on green. The graph indicating the temperature in the combustion chamber trembled a little. The searing heat that would soon exist in there hadn’t spiked yet. Minimal fluctuations before that point were completely normal. The sensors weren’t calibrated to measure sub-zero temperatures, but rather measurements of over 3,000 degrees. He could confirm their status with a clear conscious. Or would it be better for him to run another check?

  “Prop?”

  Propulsion. Now he was up. He had to make a snap decision. At this moment, the temperature graph was again showing a tiny deviation. Minus 230 degrees instead of minus 231. That was such a small difference. It wasn’t significant, was it?

  Terran tapped him on the arm. Rick knew that it was his turn, of course. He gazed at his colleague who was sitting in his seat, calm and composed. How could he be so relaxed? But that indicated that there was no reason for Rick to be concerned.

  “Prop?” Maggie asked again.

  This was so embarrassing. He was the only one that the FM had needed to ask twice. His face flushed. Fortunately, nobody could see him. But wasn’t the launch being broadcast around the world on TV? What if a camera was aimed at his face right now? By hesitating, he had just given them a reason to focus on him.

  Rick forced himself to smile. He cleared his throat and replied with the four letters, “Prop.”

  “OD?”

  “OD.”

  That had been awkward. How could he act so stupidly when faced with such a simple question? Rick scratched his forearm. Although... didn’t the fact that he hadn’t answered instantl
y, but had carefully checked everything, reflect his exceptional caution? Yes, that was what it did. He recalled the numerous launches he had watched live. Whenever someone had interrupted the countdown to check on a cable somewhere, that decision had always earned praise as evidence of laudatory caution. He shouldn’t put himself through the wringer because of this.

  A deep hum rattled his spine. These were tiny vibrations. If he had a glass of water in his hand, he probably wouldn’t notice anything, but they were shaking straight through him. Only now did Maggie’s voice pierce his mental fog.

  “Two... one... ignition,” she said, but that had to have been a second ago already. His brain reacted strangely sometimes, almost as if he were momentarily disconnected from reality.

  The ship accelerated. Rick followed the engine gauges. High-capacity pumps were conveying ice-cold, liquid methane and equally chilled oxygen to the combustion chamber, where they were being combusted into carbon dioxide and water under pressure that was thirty times greater than Earth’s atmospheric pressure. At a heat of 3,500 degrees, the hot gas was shooting at high speed out of the jets. The Newtonian counterforce propelled the ship forward, as his body’s inertia pressed Rick into his comfortable seat.

  “We are en route to Mars,” Maggie said.

  He recognized the pride in her voice. In a few months they would be establishing Mars City on the planet’s surface, their new home. They would be the original settlers of Mars, the ones that people would still remember a thousand years from now.

  Sol 67, Mars surface

  Today it was especially hard for her to get up. Her muscles kept insisting that there was no way that she would cover more than fifty steps in this condition. The abrasions on her skin had grown new scabs overnight, but as soon as she climbed back into her suit, they would reopen. She was out of the lotion now, but that didn’t really matter, because it couldn’t help her wounds anymore.

  Ewa had to trust her immune system, had to hope that among the many millions of germs on her skin, the benevolent ones would gain the upper hand. Was it worth internalizing the pain, over and beyond her natural limits, to surrender herself to it as she had never done before? Her former friends would hate her forever, no question about that. Even if she did find the supplies, as her other self had promised her...

  The mere act of considering that concept indicated how crazy she had to be. She hadn’t known about any provisions, so neither could her subconscious have known about them. It was a nice fairytale that the second Ewa had invented to motivate the first one to survive. She could imagine it easily enough. Doesn’t every person have a side that urges them to survive and another that recognizes the pointlessness of existence? Or was it merely her survival instinct that had dished up this particular fairytale?

  Ewa had never known so little about who she actually was. Was she the coldblooded murderer who had killed five people and carried out attacks against Andy and Theo? Or was she the woman the others had elected to be their leader? Or, what if she was someone else entirely, but wouldn’t have a chance to discover who that person was? How long would she need to do that? One lifetime? Two? Too many to count? And how much time did she still have?

  Ewa turned on her stomach. She propped her weight on her arms and eased herself into a kneeling position before advancing to a squat. A flash of pain shot through her with each move she took. She had it under control. The best thing for her to do would be to prepare her suit. She was halfway to that goal line. If everything went well from here on out—Ewa laughed aloud—then she would reach her destination the day after tomorrow. Three more days of seventy-kilometer goals, another night in the suit, and one more night in the tent. Ewa imagined herself reaching her destination. She would know immediately when she had reached it. But the location would be just as empty as all the other ones here.

  Ewa laughed bitterly. She would simply go to pieces and die. But for today, she would keep going. Wasn’t that insane? She simply wanted to prove that her other self was wrong.

  She reached for her backpack and stowed away what she had unpacked the night before. She picked up her journal, flipping it open.

  ‘I know what it is,’ was written on the otherwise empty page.

  Ewa remembered how her hand had written that the evening before last. Without the responses she had spoken aloud, the monologue looked bizarre.

  ‘Do you remember the operation you had during your training?’ was the next line.

  The conversation hadn’t been very fruitful. Ewa flipped the next page, expecting to find it empty. But what she saw were words and sentences that were obviously in her own handwriting. She had no recollection of when she had written these down. She had been so tired last night that sleep had descended on her like a leaden blanket.

  ‘I’m using this opportunity,’ was written there, ‘this time when you can’t argue with me. You’re sleeping right now. I’m the only one still awake. I’m always awake because I don’t need to sleep. The BCI implant they gave you doesn’t just control your epileptic episodes. It also allows me to connect with you. I’m a software agent, a small, intelligent program that can access your body via the BCI. I can control your limbs, as you can see. Your hand is moving the pen while your conscious mind is fast asleep. You can’t turn me off. To do that, you’d need a robodoc, like the one that implanted me. I am inseparably connected to you. This is the reason why I want you to survive. I’ll be upfront with you and spare you the lie that you should trust me. I have other plans for you, as you must have already guessed, and I intend to implement these plans as much now as I did in the past. But this is the one point on which our interests intersect. If you follow my suggestions, you will survive.’

  Ewa hurled the book to the ground in horror. These sentences—ones she had actually written herself—claimed that something else was controlling her. It was a terrifying thought, even worse than being assaulted. But could she trust herself? Couldn’t it be that her subconscious was searching for the most effective possible excuse so that she would continue partitioning off her murderous side? Wasn’t one particular symptom of her illness her avoidance of perceiving herself as sick, whatever the cost? She might even be willing to imagine that her brain held some strange machine that influenced all her decisions! Either she was actually sick—or she was innocent. How could she figure out what the truth was?

  There was only one way to do that. She had to finish this journey. If she found supplies at her destination, then her body and her soul would both be saved. But what if this new part of her conscious mind wanted to continue killing?

  5/27/2042, Spaceliner 1

  Wouldn’t you know it? Where did the first clogged toilet occur? In the cabin of one of the paying guests. Obviously, no one had explained to them how a space toilet works. Or it had been explained, but they didn’t care. And who had to clear out the shit? He, Rick Summers, a degreed engineer with highest honors.

  He dried the sweat on his forehead with his sleeve. The life support system didn’t seem to have the temperature settings under control yet. He hoped the mess wasn’t too significant. The FM, who was practically the shift leader for Spaceliner 1, had handed him this repair job just five minutes ago. It wasn’t news to him that, although he was a propulsion system engineer, he was also a repairman, since for most of the flight the engines weren’t in use. A Mars spaceship really didn’t have any use for the non-crew passengers who spent most of the time sitting around. This was why they had paid for their tickets. Even their pilot spent most of his time working as the crew doctor.

  Rick reached into his pocket, fingering the coin-sized mini-spy device inside it. The job order at least gave him an opportunity to place one of his bugs. The FM had given him the cabin number, not the passenger’s name, but he should be able to figure that out easily enough. Rick had asked to be left alone to take care of the mess, presumably because of the potential bad odor.

  He could take a space toilet apart in his sleep. He had practiced this enough times back on Ea
rth. For a spaceship, they had an unusually large number of toilets on board, so that every paying passenger could have a personal bathroom. They couldn’t be expected to share these intimate spaces with each other. On the other hand, the regular crew, which was composed of twenty men and twenty women, had to share four toilets and the same number of showers. Besides that, the use of the showers was limited to once every three days, unless someone had just completed an EVA.

  Rick floated down the row of cabins. Presumably in the interest of privacy, the doors along here were only marked with numbers, although they didn’t seem to follow any particular system. Maybe the passengers had been allowed to pick out their own numbers in exchange for an additional surcharge. The company had been quite adept at selling upgrades like this, the ones that didn’t cost anything to implement. There it was: #313. What did the numbers mean? Divorced three times, one child, three lovers? he wondered. Rick still couldn’t imagine that someone would pay a few million dollars to go on a trip like this. He had grown up in a family from the American Rust Belt. They had worked like dogs for everything they ever achieved. They had never taken real vacations, just visited family for the holidays so their food and lodging had been free.

  He knocked on the door. No response. That was good. The guest cabins had locking doors. He had to use his crew ID number to open the keypad lock. The FM had supposedly given him access to this door for today. It worked, and the lock vibrated. Who was living on the other side of the door? Rick had always enjoyed taking nighttime walks and gazing through the windows of lighted homes. He knew he had a voyeuristic side.

  The cabin was obviously occupied by a man. It was only a little larger than his own. A neatly ironed suit coat was hanging over the bed. An abstract print in a creatively contoured frame was attached to the wall beside the bed. The bed itself was neatly made. Nothing was out of place here. The cabin didn’t look as if the man had picked up especially on Rick’s account.