The Attempt (The Martian Manifesto Book 1) (5 page)

Bonnie took two steps to her left to stand in front of her husband, Jeff.

“Wasn’t that part of our trip just fantastic, Honey?” Jeff said, hopping up and down on his seat. “Here we are, speeding away from Earth and you can hardly tell. I told you it would be a glorious adventure, didn’t I? Can’t you just not stand it, waiting to see what happens next?”

Bonnie didn’t quite know what to say, but had to admit that Jeff’s enthusiasm was infectious. If she thought about it, it
really was a glorious adventure that she was on. If only she didn’t have to worry about her children, she would have felt much better.

Brother Jacobs stood up and reached forward, grabbing both of Bonnie’s hands. “My dear, I know this must seem overwhelming
,” he said. “But I am here for you. I am here for all of you. Keep the faith.” He leaned further forward and kissed her on the top of her head. “Go now. Settle in. We have much still to do. There will be a meeting here for all in one half hour, where we will outline our next steps.”

Jeff handed Bonnie a small pamphlet labeled ‘Emergency Procedures.’ He then said, “Make sure to read these. There’ll be a quiz later,” he laughed.

Bonnie looked down at the top page of the sheet she had been handed. The first item on the list said, ‘Know where your spacesuit is located at all times.’
“So much for that,”
she thought.
“Hopefully the rest of the list will be a bit more useful.”

Bonnie turned around, and noticed that her daughters had already taken Lotus to one of the rooms and were headed towards the ladder they had descended. She picked her bags back up and hurried to catch up to them.
She had to detour around a hatch in the floor by the ladder, which she hadn’t noticed before. Jean was lifting Lucky and shoving her through a small hole in the wall at about waist height.

“We have to go through that?” Bonnie questioned.

“Of course, Mom! It’s right on the map,” Jean said. Jean lifted her sister to the hole and then pushed her butt. “C’mon slow poke. You’re in my way. I want to get to our room.”

As her daughters disappeared through the hole, Bonnie ducked and crawled in after them. The passageway was only about five feet long, which only took her a few seconds to traverse. When she came out the other end, she saw her daughters running to the end of a hallway. Along each side of the hall were rooms. The
first door on her left had the word ‘Head’ on it. The one on the right said ‘Showers.’ There were more doors down each side of the hallway.

Her children had already opened the door at the end of the hallway and disappeared. Bonnie walked deliberately forward with her shoulders squared as she passed the other doors on each side. Not knowing what to expect, given
the incomplete nature of the Central module, she took a deep breath and stepped over the threshold into her new residence.

Lunch was over, and Charles climbed back down the ladder to the work section of the habitat. He was excited, as this was the first drilling expedition for the Mars rover. He wondered whether it had uncovered anything. As he alit at the bottom floor of the hab, he glanced over to his left at the exercise wedge section of the circular room. There was the treadmill with the bungee cords to hold the runner down as he ran. Next to it was a rowing machine, which he had specially requested for this trip.

There was a big debate at NASA about whether th
e one-third G of Mars was adequate to hold off bone loss, and so they had mandated as much exercise be done while at Mars as during the weightless journey there. Charles had insisted on a low impact rowing machine as an alternative to that endless jogging that they were required to do. He had rowed on the crew team in college, and had found the rhythm of the ergometer chain as it spun the flywheel quite soothing. But NASA required that he perform specific pieces at incredibly high stroke rates until he was aching and exhausted as part of the arrangement.
“Hand it to NASA to suck the fun out of everything,”
he thought.
“At least those of us here haven’t lost our sense of humor.”
He looked at the exercise bench next to the rower. A metal bar for bench pressing sat on the bench. It had a huge round Martian rock located on each end of the bar. On each rock was stenciled ‘500 lbs.’ in magic marker.
“That photo we took of our geologist Brad while he was standing in his underwear holding the bar with the rocks overhead was shear genius,”
he laughed to himself.

He heard a small thump behind him. “Let’s go, Chuck. I want to see what our
baby has dug up,” Brad said.

Charles walked over to the rover remote control desk. He saw on the monitor that the rover had stopped drilling, and a message light was flashing on the console. Charles typed a few commands to pull up the message.
It read,
“Depth, 2 meters. Ice detected. Recommend changing drill bit. Alternative action: utilize ChemCam laser.”

“Chuck, use the laser. It will give us a quick chemical analysis and we can determine the water composition at this depth.”

“Spoken like a true geologist, Brad. You don’t care if we zap any poor Martian microbes?”

“Nah. The laser will be faster in determining if there are any chemical precursors of life. If there are, you can try to bring some samples up. Otherwise, we’re probably
just wasting our time. I want to get over to that nearby crater to see if we can snag any meteorite fragments.”

“
Okay, Brad. That makes sense.” Charles issued the command to retract the drill, and moved the arm with the laser over the hole it had created. “Firing the laser now.”

# # #

“Warning, Warning, Threat Detected.”

Probe Spit came to high alert. The hopper had discovered something. The hoppers had limited intelligence, but were good at what was required from them. Spit changed from the hopper audio feed to video surveillance and analyzed the resulting image with its neural processors.

The creature nearby had multiple articulated appendages. Pointed instruments of destruction were located on some of them. It appeared that it also had optics attached at various locations. At the top, there was a dangerous coherent light attack weapon, which was what had set off the hopper alert. Spit switched the hopper video feed to infrared. Sections of the detected creature had very high temperatures compared to the surrounding terrain. ‘Possible heat weapon’ was added to the list of threats it was compiling. As Spit scanned the intruder, it noticed that the foreigner’s legs were composed of wheels and treads.

Spit’s analysis was definitive: ‘Robotic, possibly intelligent. Most dangerous above ground.’

It parsed the list of responses.
“Yes, the electro-biosynths will do perfectly to handle this menace,”
it determined.

The factory had just completed the additional
three hoppers, so these were dispatched to other sections of the crater rim to cover all approaches. The probe then released three more picograms of antimatter to the factory in order to create two of the response synths. There was still enough antimatter remaining to complete its mission and to create additional defenses if needed. The programmers had planned well.

Shackleton Crater, China’s Baojia Moon Base

Chief Scientist
Li Julong stood in front of General Zhou Desheng of the PLA Air Force. “You sent for me, sir?”

“Li Xiansheng,” the general started, using the formal method of addressing the scientist. The general had ensured that this meeting would take place in his office, where he sat behind an impressive
desk on a raised platform. Since there were no other seats in his office, glowering down on the standing scientist would ensure proper respect. “We have been given a new mission from the home world. You will play a crucial role, and no errors will be tolerated.”

“Yes, General Zhou
. Have I not done everything needed so far? We have successfully completed the mass driver, and launched the first test packages into lunar orbit just this week. The incentives you instituted for the North Korean workers have been most persuasive.”

Li Julong was, of course, referring to the carrot and stick approach that had been used on his charges.
China had promised young and desperate North Koreans who had escaped into China full citizenship for themselves, their spouses and children in exchange for a one year work mission to the Moon. Once they reached the Moon, the Koreans were forced to work eighteen hour shifts. Some were tasked with building manufacturing plants to extract water from the Moon’s regolith. The water was used for drinking, and also split into oxygen and hydrogen for breathing and for fuel.  Other Koreans were tasked with mining the regolith and creating ore which was converted into tracks for the mass driver. If anyone complained about the harsh conditions, the general had a tiny isolation chamber in the bowels of the Moon for the dissenter. Standing for hours in a cold dark chamber where the slightest movement under low G would allow the sharp Moon rocks to dig into you had an energizing effect on the Koreans.

Chief S
cientist Li Julong gazed out of the Moon-quartz window of the general’s office, looking down into shadow of the crater. He had lost many of his young Korean workers in accidents while they were building the mass driver at the bottom of Shackleton Crater. But the ends had justified the means. The spotlights outlined the beautiful sweep of the tracks as they ran along the bottom, and then curved up the gentle slope of the small central mound with an elevated ramp at the end. The perpetually shadowed bottom of the crater was the perfect place for a mass driver. Since the temperature never went above 100 degrees Kelvin, they could use massive superconductors to speed the launch packages along the track and up the central crater mound into orbit. And up here on the rim of the crater, solar panels were in perpetual sunlight ensuring power for the base and the mass driver.

The scientist prepared himself for what was to come next. Many of the workers were nearing the end of their contract
ed time and were anxious to return to Earth to reap the benefits of their hard labor. They would not be happy. He turned back towards the general. “We are all ready to further honor China with our efforts. What is our new mission, General Zhou?”

“The People’s Liberation Army needs a new show of force,” the general stated. “The Americans have started another
set of war games with South Korea and Japan near the South China Sea. We need to remind Thailand that they are in our suasion. Our sources also have discovered that the Americans have reinstated their plans for a space defense shield. We need to demonstrate to the world that China’s power and technology is supreme. Now that the mass driver is completed, you are to launch packages filled with rocket fuel into Earth orbit. These will be used for missions to refuel our satellites, but we will also hint to the world that the packages could just as easily be ‘smart rocks’ that could bombard cities.”

Li Julong breathed a sigh of relief. Launching packages was what he
had been commissioned to do, and would not require any dangerous work other than the handling of the fuel. He was not surprised that the PLA wanted a launch mission towards Earth. They had been hinting for over twenty years that their future Moon base would have the capability to attack Earth from the high ground of space. Julong bowed to the general. “It would be my pleasure to demonstrate our new capabilities, General.”

“But that is not all,
Li Xiansheng. As you know, the Americans have a small base on Mars. It is regrettable that they were there first, but that matters not. What matters is that they have now launched a group of colonists. We cannot allow them to also have the first colony on Mars. Our honor is at stake. You are to select ten of your finest Korean workers to start a Martian colony. You must select five men and five women.”

“But if the Americans have already launched their colony, won’t we be too late?”
Li Julong asked.

“Your fellow scientists on Earth have come up with an ingenious use for our new mass driver. The Americans are on a typical coasting trajectory, which will take six months to arrive at Mars. However, if we could send a ship under constant rocket power, the trip would only take one month, allowing us to arrive before the Americans.
You will use the mass driver to launch packages of fuel which can be used to refuel the ship at multiple points along its path to Mars. The first package must be launched immediately, which will go into Mars orbit and be used for the landing on Mars. The rest can be launched later. The Korean colonists will depart in approximately four months. The full instructions for the launch packages and trip preparations have been sent to you electronically this morning. Later today we will be receiving from Earth electronics and steering rockets for the fuel packages, which you will need to assemble.”

“But
how will the colonists get to Mars? We can’t launch people with the mass driver. They would be squashed by the huge acceleration.”

“We will be launching the ship from Earth, and refueling it in Earth orbit with one of
your Moon fuel packages that you send. The ship will land here, board the passengers and be refueled for the trip to Mars.”

The chief scientist mulled this over. It did s
eem possible, especially since the short trip time would reduce the amount of food and water that would be needed on board the ship. “And where will the colonists stay once on Mars?” he asked.

“Unbeknownst to the world, a number of years ago we
secretly purchased the Mars One assets,” the general said. He was referring to the attempt by a non-profit organization to create a reality show style one-way mission to Mars by 2025 with four colonists. Eight months after its announcement, by December of 2013, over 200,000 people had applied for the mission, which was to be funded by media rights and merchandising. When the unmanned habitat that was to be their home on Mars had malfunctioned, thus delaying the mission, the organization had run out of funds. “We determined that the habitat they landed on Mars can be repaired, and that will be the job of the Koreans we send. Once it is fully functional, we will launch a mission with proper Chinese colonists,” the general stated.

“Most of my workers’ contracts are expiring,” Li Julong said. “Why would they sign up for this?”

“Oh, I think you will have no shortage of volunteers. We have a most generous offer for them,” General Zhou chuckled. “Given our alliance with North Korea, and that Kim Jong-un is having difficulties in Laos and is looking to make a grandiose statement, volunteers can have up to ten relatives and their families released from the North Korean prison camps. These relatives will be given full citizenship in China, and guaranteed mates, housing and jobs. They will also have no restrictions on the number of children they procreate for the next two generations. Oh, I think most definitely they will be fighting for a spot on the spaceship!”

The chief scientist could see how this
might work, preying on the weaknesses of his workers and their families. At least the experience that the workers received here on the Moon for the last year would provide them a fighting chance to survive. “I see that much thought and planning has gone into this audacious plan.” Li Julong bowed. “I, of course, am honored to make this new mission a success for China.”

“Good,” the general said, waving his hand dismissively. “Go read the mission documents that were sent, and
start gathering the people and resources for the trip.” General Zhou then leaned forward on his desk. “And don’t forget, Li Xiansheng. No mistakes. I and the world are watching.”

The chief scientist bowed again as he backed towards the door. “Yes, of course, General.”