The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN

by Michael Rizzo

Day 157. 8 June, 2115:

  It takes a cooperative effort between MAI, Anton and Rick to get the hatches to open, two days later.

  The inside of the ship is a stark contrast to the smooth black exterior. It’s all bright, sterile whites and chromate greens. Mechanical instrumentation is minimal—Anton surmises everything was run by shifting touch screens or heads-up graphics. There isn’t much in the way of moving parts besides the hatches.

  There are two sets of airlocks—one fore and one aft—dividing the habitable hull roughly into thirds. Each pressurized section is laid out in a single line down the tubular fuselage, like a plane or small submarine, so that personnel must pass through the inner hatches of the locks themselves to get from section to section. Rick surmises having each section so well sealed from the others was designed to keep the air in if one section got holed. Halley wonders if there were other isolation functions in mind, especially after she gets a look in the aft-most section.

  Each airlock has two outer hatches, almost invisibly flush with the hull when sealed, one above and one below. The lower hatches offer retracting ladders to debark under the ship. The upper hatches may have been for linking to other craft in orbit, but Rick’s alternate theory is that the ship may have been designed to be buried, that whoever sent it planned that it might need to be hidden in the sand after arrival. (But from whom?)

  The most forward compartment appears to be a command bridge. Five couches are arranged in a triangle, with featureless instrument panels in easy reach. MAI manages enough of an interface with the main operating system to get a set of “ready screens” to come alive on the otherwise bare walls. Mostly these show optical views 360 degrees around the ship.

  “As far as we can tell,” Anton explains, “whatever memory or mission log the ship had were erased, either when the crew left her or due to some failsafe.”

  “Whatever they were up to, they didn’t want anyone to find out,” Matthew surmises, idly rotating in one of the command couches, his tone unusually calm considering his ongoing suspicions.

  “It seems that way, Colonel,” Anton agrees fairly readily. “The ship also lacks any apparent registry or flight plan. Nothing to say where it came from, who sent it, who built it, or even what course it took. Only a signature on the operating system: ‘Lancer,’ which may or may not be the name of the ship, and a copyright date of 2085, which only tells us when the OS was created.”

  “Is it an AI?” I ask him.

  “If it was, it’s all been wiped or deactivated. I’ve only been able to bring up basic operating and navigation.”

  “Can we fly it?”

  “Not yet,” he admits. “Too many systems are still locked down. This thing has a lot of security on it. Makes me think they anticipated someone trying to use it without authorization.”

  “Weapons?” Matthew wants to know. Rick steps forward and leans over him, fingers tracing on one of the panels. A graphic of the ship comes up on the main screen. Six points are highlighted: one on each side of the nosecone, the other four centerline: top and bottom, fore and aft.

  “We haven’t unlocked them yet, but the ship has five retractable turrets, armed with a kind of Gatling gun. Three forward and two aft, covering both above and below. Small caliber, but armor piercing. They wanted the ammo to be light, but expected to be shooting more than flesh and bone. This unit on the underside of the nose emits a directed EMP, probably designed to disable any incoming technology. We were working on something similar to use against the Discs, but the power demand and recharge times were too great.”

  “Lets us know they were expecting Disc-grade trouble,” I concede. “I take it they solved the power problem?”

  “Highly efficient fusion reactor of some type,” Rick tells me. “Housed mid-aft. Well shielded. There’s evidence of a system that will jettison the whole unit in an emergency, so we could pull the thing for a closer look. Personally, I’m reluctant to start disassembling her.”

  “And no sign of the crew?” I ask again.

  “The ship is sterile—no sign anyone was ever on board, but that doesn’t mean she came empty.”

  “There are food stocks in the form of highly-compressed nutritional supplements,” Halley interjects, coming in through the forward lock from where she’d been working aft. “Looks like enough for five adults for a two-year mission. Nothing fancy, but they’re labeled with different flavorings. Some are recognizable—mostly fruit and vegetable flavors. Others tell me times have changed—algae and sea kelp and something made out of cultivated maggots, manufactured proteins. No meat flavors, mind you.”

  Matthew is wrinkling his nose.

  “There are five tubes in the midsection that look like some kind of new Hiber-Sleep couches,” Halley continues. “Chemical stores show use—somebody tapped a good part of the dosing, probably getting here.”

  “I suspect the ship may have been carried here by some sort of unmanned booster that was left waiting in orbit,” Anton theorizes. “This ship looks like it was built to serve as their shuttle, lander and recon craft.”

  “Which means nobody is waiting for them in orbit,” Rick takes it, “nobody to go looking for them when they came up missing. The food packs are also dated 2085. Assuming they packed fresh stores, whatever happened to them happened almost thirty years ago.”

  “Maybe another ship picked them up,” Lisa tries.

  “Seems unlikely they’d just leave a perfectly working ship,” Matthew counters.

  “Unless something went wrong,” I agree with the likely assumption.

  “But my biggest find is back here…” Halley drags us back to topic. She jerks her head aft for us to follow. We go back through to forward lock, and past what she points out are where the crew slept through the trip from Earth, then back one more section. Everything is tight and efficient, uncluttered; small, but not too claustrophobic—it feels like being inside an executive-sized jet.

  When we get through to the aft section, a touch on the smooth green walls opens a series of panels, and what look like work stations fold out. Set in the hull walls are a number of transparent tubes, sealed at both ends, but apparently empty.

  “I’ve been playing with these,” she tells us. “They look like containment units. Besides being physically sealed, they’re lined with a kind of EM field.”

  “Designed to contain nano-technology,” Rick concludes.

  “They’re clean,” she assures us (and she hasn’t made us go back to wearing masks and gloves against potential contaminants). “I doubt they’ve even been used.”

  “I guess they didn’t get what they came for,” Anton decides darkly.

  I turn to look at Matthew, who is hanging back in the hatchway, leaning on it for support. His eyes have narrowed, and I can hear him breathing hard and slow.

  “Armed stealth ship, possibly designed to be hidden on arrival, sent sometime in the last thirty years, by someone who wants to remain anonymous, and who apparently anticipated the possibility of the ship falling into someone else’s hands before it got back to them,” I summarize what I’m sure he’s thinking. “With gear onboard to acquire potentially dangerous nano samples.”

  Matthew nods in tense agreement.

  “Marvelous…”

  Instead of climbing back up to the operations levels, I decide to take a long detour through the other underground aircraft bays—the deep bunkered hangars we built to keep our precious ships safe from hit-and-run Disc attacks. (We’re still keeping the “Lancer” safely separated from the other working bays: A misstep while trying to figure out the operating systems, hitting the wrong control, setting off some as yet undiscovered booby trap—all better to happen with heavy blast walls between our visitor and anything else we wouldn’t want to lose, though I think Matthew would be more comfortable if we just left her topside rather than bring her down into our belly.)

  I walk the open hangar decks between our few remaining ASVs, all in various stages of salvage or repair. Compared to the Lance
r, they’re clunky, battered things: Big delta-wing shapes dominated by their four powerful rotating engines, abdomens bulging with their interchangeable freight modules (one that sits without a module looks gutted), down-turned angular cockpits looking like the sharp beaks and cold eyes of birds of prey. Their Mars-red camo paint is chipped and scarred. They look like rust-colored bird carcasses.

  I hear Morales shouting, her curses echoing in the big bays. There’s a clang of metal as something is dropped or thrown. I see at least two of her crew standing, looking helpless, as her legs come sliding out from beneath ASV-4, which is sitting low on its gear with its rear nozzles both pulled, looking no more promising after weeks of sweat and frustration.

  “Officer on deck!” one of her crew snaps to, I think at least partly to derail their sergeant’s latest tantrum. Morales takes her time extricating herself from the belly of the wreck, wipes her brow with the backs of both gloved hands, then roughly scratches her scalp through her chopped black hair. I smell sweat, grease, metal, fuel…

  “Colonel,” she acknowledges, but does not get up. “Any idea how much fun it is to try to machine new parts by hand and hope they fit?”

  “Not something I’d like to try, Sergeant,” I allow her. She jerks her head toward Pad Bay 3, where we’ve got the Lancer secured.

  “Having fun with our new toy?”

  “You don’t seem to be,” I counter.

  “No time to play,” she complains, but there’s an edge that suggests why she hasn’t been hot to poke around the works of the Lancer since she gave it a cursory once-over: she’s suddenly fifty years behind the technology curve, a master at working on antiques, and can’t even have the satisfaction of making those fly again.

  “No, you don’t,” I agree with her. “Despite all the excitement, the more we look that thing over, the scarier things are getting. Keep doing what you’re doing, Sergeant. Just get something airborne. We may need to get mobile sooner rather than later.”

  “Yes, sir,” she gives me, followed by a little twist of a grin. Then she tosses a part at one of her techs, tells him it needs to be redone, that the tolerances are all wrong. Then she offers him a break first. He declines, and heads back to the shops at a jog. She sends the others off to work on another ship while they wait. They move with purpose.

  “Friggin’ Wright Brothers,” she mumbles after them, but she’s smiling again.

  I give her a nod and leave her to her work.

  Tru is waiting for me just outside the hatch to my quarters, leaning against the gray reinforced bulkhead. Her hard body language lets me know she hasn’t come to pursue her personal proposition.

  “Does this mean you’re just another all-talk bureaucrat?” she begins, arms crossed in front of her chest.

  “Does this mean you’ve held your election?” I volley back.

  “Doesn’t matter,” she pushes back. “You’ve got some kind of future spaceship in your fighter bays and not a word of update down to us in two days. My people haven’t even been allowed to get an eyeball on it since it landed, you’ve kept us back so far.”

  “I think you’ll find I’ve kept everybody back except the team actively trying to crack it.”

  “And you keep selecting your teams from your own playmates,” she gets closer to the point. “Do you just assume all refugees are only suitable for sweeping and shoveling?”

  “We’ve pulled all your files,” I try to assure her. “We know where your skill sets are. None of you would have gotten here without valuable talent. The more we get on, the more we’ll be pulling from your ranks to get things done. But right now, sweeping and shoveling are still the biggest jobs. But then, I hear Doc Ryder has already jumped a few dozen of you into her greenhouse project.”

  “And what about the communication loop?” she stays focused.

  “Get me a leadership chain. Let me know who to talk to.”

  She shakes her head. “We’re not your soldiers, Colonel. We’re just people. And we live and work here, too. Or have you forgotten how to talk to people?”

  I key open the hatch. “I haven’t forgotten. I was just never any good at it. I think this is where I’m supposed to invite you in.”

  We spend an hour sitting on my bunk, sipping filtered water, while I fill her in about the transmitter failure, the atmosphere net, the Lancer, and all that those things may imply. She’s s patient listener, not challenging—maybe her way of rewarding me for being forthcoming. Then we sit in silence for awhile as she digests. I can see it in her eyes: she’s considering a dozen different things, trying to juggle priorities.

  “I know, it’s a lot,” I allow her.

  “Could you ration it out as it comes instead of piling it all on at once next time?”

  “I’ll send myself a memo.”

  She smiles. Her eyes are lost in her plastic cup of plastic-tasting water.

  “You really do suck at the whole people-thing,” she jokes gently. “When you invite a girl into your bunk, you don’t open by dropping all this scary freak-world stuff on her. It sort of kills any mood.”

  “I’m hoping it isn’t all scary,” I try.

  “The unknown is always scary, Colonel. That’s the way it is with us humans. I can see why you haven’t been eager to be forthcoming.”

  “I’d have thought you’d be happier. The atmosphere net says the ETE crews are still here somewhere. Odds are there may be other colony survivors. The Lancer’s existence says Earth is still there, and someone has at least come looking around since we’ve been asleep. It’s my job to worry about the scary side.”

  She goes silent again, eyes down, idly swirling the water left in her cup.

  “Communication goes both ways, Colonel,” she finally says. “I’ve got my own issues I’m afraid to talk about.”

  “The Eco War is fifty years gone,” I remind her. “I’m not about to restart it here. For all we know, the children and grandchildren of your movement are running things right now. I know there’s still bad blood—that’s the way it is with us humans. But right now, we’re all we’ve got.”

  She forces a smile, but still doesn’t look up. Then the smile goes away.

  “That’s the least of my scaries. I’ve got sixty-two kids ranging from three to fourteen years old—at least that’s how old they were before you add fifty years in a Hiber couch. So far, it looks like the adults all made it through okay, barring any new surprises to come. But Doctor Halley blows it off every time their parents ask about what happens if you chemically stall development that long. These kids stopped growing. Then they started wasting during sleep like the rest of us. They’ve all rehabbed faster than their elders, so they’ve still got that child’s resilience going. But it’s been six months since we woke up, Colonel. None of them have shown any sign of further physical development. On top of that, I’ve got two pregnant mothers who are afraid of what’s going to happen. Halley insists the babies look and sound healthy, but one of them should have delivered almost a month ago.”

  I see a teardrop fall onto her hand. I take the cup from her, and then take her hands in mine. She fights the tears back down, shakes her head until they go away. Then she gives my hands a squeeze.

  “Maybe you don’t suck so bad at this talking to people thing…”