The Ruins of Mars (The Ruins of Mars Trilogy Book 1) (15 page)

      Another meteoroid exploded near the window and drew gasps from the crew as frozen vapors of gas within the rock ignited, then instantly burned out like the sparkling tendrils of a Roman candle. Sweeping with mechanical precision, the lasers trained their beams on the incoming meteoroids and dispatched them as they drew near. Detonating with flashes of blue fire, the once-solid masses of rock and ice were reduced to pinwheels of wreckage, which spiraled out into the abyss. Sparks of electric light streaked across the volumes of blackness as Braun swam through the meteoroid belt like a whale parting a writhing school of herring. After nearly five minutes of lightning-flecked illumination, the laser beams blinked quickly, then went out altogether. Following the abruptly extinguished light show, the sound of impacting debris ceased as well, and the bridge was left in awed silence. After several long moments, a voice crackled through the helmet speakers of the shocked crew.

      “Well,” said Julian Thomas in slightly breathless tone. “It works.”

      “Indeed,” replied Braun gravely.

      At that, a chorus of nervous laughter broke out from the rest of the crew. Perplexed, Braun remained silent as the laughter on the bridge grew more lively and emboldened.

Gene enhancement—January
2045

      James Floyd stood outside the closed door of a small sub-level lab in Kennedy Space Center’s newest facility, The Wing. A three-story V-shaped building, The Wing housed NASA’s newest branch of study: Experimental Space Exploration and EVA Technologies. Behind the seawalls and beneath the unassuming glass-and-steel exterior of the building lay a vast network of hive-like tunnels and chambers dug nearly five stories into the earth. It was in these secret labs that some of the most impressive new technologies and sciences ever conceived were developed and tested.

      The lab, outside of which James waited, was located at the end of a long hallway in the west sector of the facility some three stories underground. The air this deep down smelled canned to James, and he wrinkled his nose at the faint odor.

      Okay, he thought impatiently. Where are those guys? They’re already three minutes late.

      Sighing, he smoothed his thinning hair and leaned against the immaculate white wall. With only the faint hum of electric lights, the cavernous hallway seemed oddly hushed—almost haunted.

      “Excuse me, James,” said Copernicus, interrupting the silence. “Doctors Price and Melmorn are on their way down now. They should be here in the next minute.”

      Checking his watch again, James grunted and drummed his fingers rapidly on his thigh.

      “Tell them to get a move on, will you? They already threw off my day with this little unscheduled meeting. I should be in a crew briefing right now.”

      “Don’t worry, James,” replied Copernicus. “I’m briefing the crew as we speak. Should you like to join us when you are finished here, we are in Conference Room D on the third floor of the above-ground levels.”

      Grinning slightly, James said to the empty hallway, “What would I do without you?”

      A ping emitted from the far end of the hallway, and James turned to see two men stepping out of an elevator. Noticing that he was already waiting for them, the two began to jog towards James, their lab coats billowing out behind them.

      “Dr. Floyd,” breathed the first to reach him, a handsome, young black man of no more than thirty. “Sorry we’re late. I’m Dr. Melmorn and this is Dr. Price.”

      He gestured quickly to the second man, a pudgy pale fellow with a shock of frizzy brown hair. Dr. Price put out his hand, then, noticing that his palm was sweaty, dried it on his lab coat and extended it again. Taking Dr. Price’s hand, James shook it, then accepted Dr. Melmorn’s outstretched hand in turn.

      “That’s alright,” he frowned. “Why don’t you just tell me why I’m here. Your message was a little vague.”

      Exchanging a sideways glance with his partner, Dr. Melmorn stepped up to the keypad by the door and pressed a long finger to it. As the door slid open, he ushered James through after him. Walking into the lab, James noticed that it was rather small and cramped. Workstations filled with chemistry equipment and computer monitors lined the walls, and a large clear tank sat squarely in the center of the room. The water inside the tank was a faint yellow color and seemed to be filled with millions of tiny unmoving bubbles, which hung suspended like jellyfish in a calm sea. Glimpsing a flicker of movement, James looked closer and saw long oily salamanders moving slowly about the bottom of the wide tank.

      Bustling hurriedly over to a bank of computer tablets in the far corner of the room, Dr. Price called over his shoulder, “So how much do you already know about what Dr. Melmorn and myself are doing down here?”

      Bending slightly to peer deeper into the tank, James answered, “I know a little. Copernicus wasn’t able to give me much since your project is classified under a different program heading. Gene therapy right?”

      Behind him, Dr. Melmorn removed several Petri dishes from a small refrigerator and arranged the little disks on the tabletop.

      “No, Dr. Floyd,” he said emphatically. “Gene therapy is for sick people. What we do here is gene
enhancement
.”

      Arching an eyebrow, James straightened and turned away from the tank of suspended bubbles and fat salamanders to face the young black scientist.

      Seeing that he had James’s full attention, Dr. Melmorn continued,

      “You see, our particular line of genetic research pertains to the enhancement of human subjects for space travel. This means stronger, faster smarter astronauts for longer harder missions such as yours, Dr. Floyd.”

      Pausing, Dr. Melmorn swept his arm towards the row of Petri dishes on the countertop beside him.

      “For the last year or so,” he went on. “We’ve been developing, with the help of Copernicus, a method for enhancing the integration of oxygen into the systems of the body. As you know, oxidizing raw materials into pure energy is what fuels the human machine. Our bodies use that energy in the cells of our brains and our muscles and our internal organs. It’s actually an amazing process, something which took millions of years of evolution to reach the point it is at now. But one question still remains, Dr. Floyd. Is the process as efficient as it can get?”

      From the opposite side of the room, Dr. Price chimed in.

      “By observing other—more narrowly evolved—species, we determined that the human method of oxygen distribution is rather archaic and wasteful. With every breath we take, protein molecules in the blood called hemoglobin take the oxygen all over the body where it’s broken down into raw energy by cytochrome oxidase, another kind of protein. The thing is, Sir, each hemoglobin is only capable of transporting four molecules of oxygen at a time. Therein lies the problem: for we are throwing away a surprising amount of usable oxygen with each breath. Our blood is simply not efficient enough to transport a full lungs-worth of air molecules to the cytochrome in our muscles and organs. However, through gene enhancement, Dr. Melmorn and I have perfected a method for correcting this by increasing the amount of oxygen each hemoglobin can carry. At first this was just an idea, a theory. But recently we made a breakthrough so significant, so profound, that Director Barnes himself instructed us to contact you immediately.”

      Suddenly understanding how these two junior scientists shut away in the bowels of The Wing had obtained a direct line to his office, James nodded.

      “Okay, show me what you have.”

      An hour later, as James left the small lab, his head swam with radical ideas so fundamentally obtuse that he could hardly believe them to be true. Through processes far beyond his own comprehension, these two junior scientists had pinpointed and isolated a minute and elusive chain of genetic coding from the RNA of a common salamander. Using this, they had synthesized a genetic code that, when combined with controlled exposure to gamma radiation, would mutate the structure of human hemoglobin. After the gene enhancement, each mutated hemoglobin protein would be able to carry over ten times as many oxygen molecules as before. From there, a simple blood transfusion was all that was needed to introduce the mutated hemoglobin into the body at large. James saw the shape of his mission to Mars changing as he realized that the crew could embark on longer EVAs with smaller oxygen reserves. The enhancement also meant that the effects of physical exertion and exhaustion would be dramatically lessened by the influx of oxygen to the muscles. The brain too would benefit, as mental cognition was projected to grow by five percent at least.

      I’m going to have a crew of supermen on my hands, James said to himself as he walked down the long hallway in a daze. Good thing they’ve all signed medical release forms, because we’re about to screw with their Goddamned genes.

Xao-Xing Liu—July
2046

     
Donovan drifted like a ghost through the darkened Beijing apartment. Flicking from room to room in the spacious penthouse, he covered his tracks with encrypted coding that continued to blind the Chinese watchdog AI, Tainwang, to his presence in the home. Tainwang was China’s premiere government counterintelligence AI, named after the four heavenly gods of Buddhism who oversaw the cardinal directions of the world. While vast and powerful, the Chinese AI was no match for Donovan, who simply mimicked Tainwang’s own intelligence signature and integrated himself, unnoticed, into the AI’s digital construct. In this way, Donovan became like a part of Tainwang: indiscernible from the rest.

     
As he moved into the bedroom, Donovan lingered to watch over the two figures lying in the large bed. Peering through the darkness from his vantage point behind the screen of a wall-mounted computer, he positively identified Xao-Xing Liu—the Chinese astronaut and payload specialist. From the rise and fall of her small breasts, he determined that she must be asleep, but deciding that it was better to be safe than sorry, he hid in the dim room like a living shadow.

     
Liu lay with her eyes closed, but she was not asleep. Listening to the hum of the air conditioner as it battled the sweltering heat outside the building, she fought hard to keep from tossing and turning with boredom. Ever since she had undergone the gene enhancement nearly a year ago, she found that two hours of sleep a night was all she really needed to feel fully rested. Whether it was tradition or just the desire to appear normal, she still tried to sleep the whole night through like she used to, but it was useless.

      The man next to her in bed snorted softly in his sleep and mumbled incoherently in Mandarin Chinese. Breathing deeply in the chill of the heavily conditioned air, Liu silently squirmed with unabated excitement and relief. In two days time, she, along with the rest of the Mars crew, would disembark for the Moon to complete the remainder of their training at Bessel Base. Though the prospect of spending nearly twenty-four months on the barren surface of the Moon was less than appetizing, Liu was still excited—almost giddy—to leave. Like the rest of the crew, she had been flown home the night before to spend her final days on Earth with family and friends. However, with her parents long dead, she had no family with which to visit, and since the members of Project Braun were her only real friends, she felt that this time in China was less of a vacation and more of a chore. As she thought of the crew, her mind drifted to the young Egyptian American archaeologist, Harrison Raheem Assad.

     
Unable to deny that the two did have chemistry between them, Liu had at first tried to pawn Harrison off on the shy, yet clearly desiring, YiJay Lee. When it became clear that he had no interest in the sad-faced young Korean, Liu had instead opted to silence her feelings, burying them deep within herself like a dirty secret.

     
Stealing a quick look at the man beside her in bed, she shivered a little.

     
I am a married woman, she screamed inside her head, trying to outshout the voice of the dirty secret as it yelled up from the depths of her soul.

     
Glancing over again, she saw that in the soft neon-pink light of the flashing signs outside their window, her sleeping husband’s skin looked sallow and unhealthy. Shutting her eyes tightly, she was instantly met with the ever-grinning face of the handsome young Harrison. Remembering the first time she had met him, Liu pressed her palms to the naked skin of her stomach and tried to quell the butterflies that darted about inside her.

     
She had been sitting alone in a NASA conference room, unable to enter the restricted facility until her security clearance had been thoroughly checked. NASA’s AI, Copernicus, kept her company at first, but eventually even he had drifted away to attend to other matters. As men in black suits with accusing faces repeatedly entered the room to ask her the same questions over and over, Liu had begun to wonder if accepting a seat on board Braun was a good idea or not. While the Americans claimed they were happy to be working with her government, the dark-suited G men treated her with paranoid disdain. After two hours of waiting, one of the government men had stridden into the room with a Tablet grasped in one hand.

     
Approaching her, he had said in a commanding tone, “Stand up please. I need to take your picture.”