On Mars Pathfinder (The Mike Lane Stories Book 1) (17 page)

I leaned forward towards the General and lowered my voice, “Give me something to fight them with, if they want to mix it up,” I slowly finished with a creepy smile of my own, “Payback’s a bitch.”

I pushed my chair back from the table, and picked up my coffee cup. Quickly switching to a pleasant and disarming demeanour, I looked at the General and said, “More coffee, ma’am?” She smiled wide; it was a genuine, warm and laughing smile. She stood up, “Yes Mike, but allow me to get it this time.” She took our two cups to the Keurig to make us coffee, leaving Jayden and Hans to get their own.

There was more I could have learned from her, but there was so much she had chosen not to share. I could have gone more fully prepared and with more support, but there were still some secrets that were too secret for her to let out of the bag at this point. It seemed to me at the time that she wanted me to go to Mars. I thought it was simply for the reasons I had stated. I didn’t know that the U.S. Air Force had been on Mars since 1975. I didn’t know about the Hybrid base, or the terms of the formal détente with the Eridani. I didn’t know that she had spent three hours with Jayden and Hans outlining how the U.S. Air Force was going to get the Corporation’s mission to Mars, and foot part of the bill. I didn’t know about her terms and conditions for the assistance. The three of us certainly didn’t know that Lt. Gen. Rosewood had a plan for dealing with the Eridani, and that this plan hinged on me going to Mars. It totally hinged on me going to Mars. She didn’t care if I went or not, just that I played my role obediently, and without too much fuss. I was just a pawn in her game.

The Drone

It had been some time since the little green Drone saw any movement outside the human’s dwelling place. The Drone was concerned about failure of the Master’s orders. Perhaps the human scum was outside, on the other side of the dwelling, and it was doing something important, and the Drone couldn’t see it.

The Drone moved the vessel slowly back and forth across the ice field, trying to get a different angle of view. There were two spots on the opposite side of the human’s dwelling that the Drone could not get a visual of. The Drone moved the vessel in a large circle around the human site. The Drone could not see the human anywhere outside. However, something had been done outside, because the metal pieces the human had taken off the dwelling had all been put back on. The scum must have done that during the night while the Drone’s vessel was on auto-hover, and the Drone took the necessary rest period.

A bolt of hatred and a bolt of horror simultaneously spiked through the Drone at that thought. The Drone had missed recording this activity for the Master.
Failure!
The body wracking sob of rage and frustration at the thought of failure tore through the creature. It was so bad that very, very rare ink black tears came out of the Drone’s eyes. The crushing terror of failing the Master was no longer just an abstract thought for the Drone. The Drone wanted to zoom in with the vessel, and annihilate the human for its impertinence, and for bringing the Drone knowledge of what failure felt like.

The Drone swung the vessel around over the plain between the ice wall and the dwellings. The ice wall’s ragged structure would help with the camouflage system. The seething hatred in the Drone’s mind was causing it to make a high keening sound, as the Drone fought desperately to not give in to the hatred and destroy the human. The Master had given observation orders, not kill orders. To go against the Master like that would be worse than simply being dissolved for the failure of missing the human’s activities through the Drone’s sleep cycle.

Hovering over the plains and glaring at the dwelling on the Drone’s viewing screen, the human suddenly appeared in the window of the dwelling. At last, activity to record. The Drone started the recording equipment, and was able to focus again on the task at hand. The human was looking around, and looked like it was taking in sustenance. After a few minutes, the human disappeared, and then reappeared. It was holding something up to its face.

The Drone wondered what kind of tech the human was using to look out at the surface, and moved the vessel slightly closer. After a few moments, the Drone realized the human was looking directly at the Drone’s vessel. The Drone had been discovered. With a cry of despair at yet
another failure
, the Drone rocketed the ship straight up in the air, not stopping until it was several kilometres above the Martian surface.
DESPISE THE HUMAN; HATE THE HUMAN; KILL THE HUMAN; DESTROY THE HUMAN; ANNIHILATE THE HUMAN
… The Drone was beside itself with fury and the wracking pains of failing the Master. The Drone hastily put the vessel into a low Mars orbit, as it tried to come up with a simple decision matrix that would reveal what steps to take next. The Drone’s bitter hatred of the human was so unbridled and consuming, the Drone could barely breathe. The Drone continued to seethe with white-hot fury, as the Drone imagined what joy would be had; if only the Drone would have the opportunity to see the human’s disgorged entrails, dripping from the walls of the human’s dwelling place. The Lectra weren’t the only ones with claws.

No. 2 Hits The Fan

I was only unconscious for about three minutes. I moaned as I opened my eyes and stared at the white ceiling. My bedroom ceiling? No, it wasn’t as high as my bedroom ceiling was. I wondered where I was.

Then I remembered; I remembered what I had seen. I sat up a little too fast and had to pause. My head was still spinning and I had to let the brief flare of nausea die down. It didn’t feel like I hit anything on the way down, but I felt around my brain pan and kept checking my hand for any signs of blood. None was to be in evidence.

Well, so much for Mr. Unflappable
. I didn’t dwell on it too much. What I had seen had triggered an age old childhood terror reaction. Next time, I would be ready and wouldn’t spaz out so bad.

I checked the COM system, and then realized that there hadn’t even been enough time for that video feed of me shouting and fainting to get even part way to Earth. The audio-visual signal was direct feed. It wasn’t a file that needed to spool up for burst transmission. If that had been the case, I might have been able to stop it but no, the signal was on its way. It would be another almost 40 minutes before I heard anything about it. I sent a quick text message to Hans to let him know I was okay. I took a big drink of water to get the cotton balls out of my mouth, and then plugged an Ethernet cable from my tablet into the COM controller. It would make things faster.

First, I pulled up the record of the Jalopy-Sat feed. I fast-forwarded from the start of the tracking over the ice field, across the plains, around the colony site; and then stopping on the plains between the site, and the ice fields. Then I played it in real-time, and watched the shimmer and the shadow until suddenly, the shimmer was replaced by a grey object that looked almost perfectly round, almost. It shot straight upward and quickly went off camera. There was a blur on the screen, as the targeting system caught up with the object, showing it achieving an orbital altitude, and then move off south and west from the Chasma Boreale area.

I sat back and thought for a few moments. I reviewed the topside panning camera from the W-Hab, and then the topside camera that was in motion detector mode. Neither camera feed revealed any more than I had seen with my eyes, it was basically the same thing but from slightly different angles. The panning cameras (#W1 and #L1) had both panned off object just before it took off, so only the motion tracker cameras (#W2 and #L2) caught its departure. It showed almost exactly what I had seen with my own eyes. I figured Mar-Sat would have similar, though differently angled feeds of this as well; but frankly, I had seen enough. There wasn’t much else I could learn by watching those videos, at least not at this stage of the game.

I downloaded the video files, encrypted them with the secure video software, put them in the file servers outbox, and then executed the procedure to send the files to Mission Control. The topside cameras were on live feed as well, but at least I felt like I had done something. Carrie had once said something about copies of the local recordings containing much more detail than the live feed stream, so she would probably have asked for them eventually. Having done that, and it having taken almost a full hour to view, download, and prepare the videos; I saw that the messages were starting to pour in from Terra. A few were from Mission Control as the public message box was filling so fast it was almost a blur. There was not only a website dedicated to the mission, there was an email address the general public could write to me on Mars. I was obligated to spend at least an hour a day responding to these, but that obligation did not begin until the AtmoGen was fully hooked up, and the Stage 1 Wind Farm had been completed. Neither had been done yet.

The first Mission Control message was from Carrie, it was a video message. I opened it, decoded it, and then played it. Carrie’s beautiful, concerned face under the ever-present Dutch Pancake braids filled the screen. Arno was hovering over her shoulder. He looked like he was going to burst with excitement. “Mike, we saw the whole thing. It’s all recorded here. Arno and I are going to try and back track it. I hope you’re okay and didn’t hit your head too hard. You’re in my thoughts and prayers Mike.” There were tears forming in her eyes. She ended the recording with a weak, but brave smile, as Arno waved at me with wide eyes and a stupid grin on his face.

The next video was one of the Hab techs. He wanted to see if I had checked the Habitats’ video feeds for any captures of the object. Well … duhhhh.

Next video was Hans. He too wanted to make sure I was okay, and offered his moral support. His face said more than his words. We both knew that things had changed radically in the last few minutes. He said Jayden was on his way down, and he would get back to me as soon as he had confirmation I was okay. He ended his message with a double entendre, “Remember Mike, you can always look up for help.”

Next was an email from that mousey little ESA spook, Ernst. It said simply, “I stand ready to assist.” A chill ran up and down my spine at the ominous words sitting so innocently on the monitor. I wasn’t certain at this point, but I was forming the impression that people were over-reacting. I would need to think on it a bit but right now, I was still thinking about what Ernst’s words meant.

I knew very clearly what he meant. The Jalopy-Sat’s Support Module was so large, it had caused commentary by more than one person involved in the Space game. Our spin was that we were bringing along a significant amount of new technology to be tested and evaluated for future transit missions. In fact, the Support Module was so large on the Jalopy-Sat because as soon as the transit vehicle became Jalopy-Sat, it also became a weapons platform. I’m a pacifist by nature. I hated that a commercial enterprise for humankind’s advancement became a player with weapons. That weapons platform was the price tag of the U.S. Air Force’s help in getting the mission on its way. Conversely, it was also a bit comforting to know there are options when you are all alone, on an
alien planet
, one hundred million or more miles from home. I had, after all, asked Lieutenant General Rosewood to give me some teeth.

The Jalopy-Sat was armed with ten orbit-deliverable Thermobaric warheads (converted), and each had a 44 ton yield. These were an advanced design based on the Russian FOAB (Father of All Bombs). Thermobarics were used because they don’t need high levels of oxygen as part of the explosion. Each of these was attached to a small bodied cruise missile modified for flight in Mar’s atmo. They would be released from the Jalopy-Sat, and moved in an orbital position by OMP rockets (Orbital Manoeuvering Package). From there, the warheads delivery package could put it on the surface of Mars in about 40 seconds. That meant from the Jalopy-Sat to anywhere within a thousand kilometres of the colony, from button press to detonation was under three minutes. Delivery to the other side of the planet: nine minutes. Of course, there was no button to press. It would all be done by voice commands. There was even one, special, terminal voice command, just in case.

These Thermobaric weapons had the destructive power of a small nuclear weapon against anything on the surface, but they didn’t have the consequence of radiation or radioactive fallout. They wouldn’t do much to penetrate fortified structures though. That’s why there was another five conventional cruise missiles with an OMP, like the Thermobarics had. The conventional cruise missiles would punch a hole, the Thermobarics would obliterate what was inside by releasing the fires of hell upclose and personal like.

This weapons platform idea and the weapons themselves had been arranged by the U.S. Air Force. They couldn’t send it to Mars on its own; they needed to get it there under cover and without notice. That made our mission and the circumstances of our mission so fortuitous for them. They had their own reasons for getting that platform in place, and Lt. General Rosewood refused to comment on the why; just that it was the trade-off for helping us get on the way. I had my own suspicions: that she was hoping I would take on the Eridani problem for them. That way the Eridani backlash would be directed at the colonists on Mars, and not on the U.S. Air Force or on Terra.

As if the Thermobarics were not enough, there were also two, ten
Mega
ton thermonuclear packages in the Support Module. They came with all required periphery and were added last minute. I imagined that Lt. General Gilda Rosewood had something to do with those as well, but Jayden would neither confirm nor deny my speculation. He just suggested that perhaps I should stop speculating, for my own health.

I wasn’t happy about the nuclear packages in the weapons platform. Fat Man, dropped on Nagasaki had a 20
kilo
ton yield. Little Boy, dropped on Hiroshima had a 16
kilo
ton yield. These orbiting Hydrogen bombs were 600 times as powerful as the one dropped on Hiroshima. These multi-megaton thermonuclear bombs orbiting Mars meant a very impressive amount of destruction could be wrought with a few moments notice. It was definitely something to be upset about. For a few minutes, one day in transit, I fantasized about dropping them on the far side of Mars, just to be rid of them. However, the cultural fallout back on Earth from that would have been devastating. The irony that I was the one with the trigger hadn’t escaped me.

The saving grace was, however, that when Jayden relented to the U.S. Air Force demands for assisting with the mission, he insisted that the actual “launch” signal for any of the weapons could only be sent from Mars’ surface. They could monitor, track, assess and recommend as much as they wanted, however: no weapon would be released unless someone on Mars released it. They agreed to this, rather too quickly it seemed.

In my own view, we were going to Mars for colonization, expansion, and the furtherance of humankind’s presence in the star system and inherently, in the galaxy. These were our first steps. I initially thought that bringing the weapons of war was distinctly against what we were trying to achieve. However, my feelings on the conventional weapons softened a little bit after considering the first briefing General Rosewood had given to me. Given the events at today’s lunch time, I started to feel very appreciative of the conventional warheads being up there. I still wasn’t happy about the thermonuclear packages, but so long as they stayed orbiting, they weren’t falling.

On The Internet

The colony audio and video direct feeds were transmitted from the Hab’s COM system to Mar-Sat. From Mar-Sat they were beamed towards Earth. In orbit around Earthwas the satellite Relay-1 which was responsible for collecting the signals and beaming them down to the Corporation’s antenna farm, just outside the complex where Mission Control was located. Once there, they went through a small bit of electronic delay (ten seconds), then were loaded onto a web server and streamed out to the internet. All the cameras at the Habitat, plus the Activity Suit cameras (when activated), had their own streams. Viewers could pick and choose which stream they wanted to play, and if their own bandwidth allowed it, they could play multiple streams, timestamp coordinated, side by side. They could also play back the archived clips as the stream itself auto-archived every one hundred and eighty seconds.

One of the ways the Corporation was paying for the whole colony operation was by collecting revenue from these viewers. It cost a certain amount of money each month for access to the Mars camera and audio feeds. You could also message the Mars colony with an email message system that only worked if you were logged into the site and therefore, a paying viewer. There were paying viewers from every nation on Earth, even Nauru.

When the small grey ship appeared and rocketed away into the sky, there had been a few thousand people viewing feeds and poking around the site. No one at Mission Control had thought to interrupt the feed until the delay time had passed. By then there was nothing to see, nothing to stop people from seeing, except in the archived clips. Now, so many years later, I can look back and say I’m glad that what was seen, was seen by everyone. Within a few days of this event, Jayden informed me that after some discussion, the live feed being broadcast would not be interrupted except in the most egregious of circumstances. That didn’t mean, I later learned, that someone else might not interrupt it.

With the pause, rewind and playback features of the web site, those few seconds got played an unimaginable number of times. With word of mouth, within ten minutes of the word getting out, there were over thirty million people watching the vid feeds. The colocated servers eventually snapped under the strain, and the site went down for several hours. It came back up and was immediately deluged again. However, the propeller heads added so much scalable hardware that it was able to withstand the load.