by Jon Lymon
“It seems the popularity of nuclear energy is enjoying a renaissance the world over,” said the black guy.
Haalange fidgeted, sitting sideways on a poolside lounger somewhere extremely hot. “No, I think you are all taking this matter far too lightly. You do not realise how vital it is that we dissuade people from attempting to travel to Mars. We don’t want them there.”
“You don’t want them there,” the blond guy whispered.
“What was that?” Haalange leaned into the screen, which gave the occupants of the boardroom a chance to get a closer look at his face. Although his eyes were hidden behind designer wraparounds, they could see he was over-tanned to the point that the skin on his nose and cheekbones was smooth and red.
The blond guy spoke up. “I said I don’t think it matters whether people know this happened or not.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because even if they do get to Mars, what are they going to do? There won’t be anywhere for them to refuel.”
“Exactly. So they will be stuck there, nosing around. Getting in our way. I don’t like clutter.”
“Haygue’s got it under control,” said the younger woman.
Haalange pulled away from the screen. “Haygue is a loose cannon. Too ready to do his own thing. He is not a team player.”
“We trust him to bring it on home,” said the younger woman.
Not everyone around the table nodded in agreement.
“I’m sure you do, I’m sure you do. I, however, have my reservations. I don’t trust him. And I have been thinking very hard about this. Very hard. And I have come to a conclusion…”
At this point Haalange was distracted by someone approaching him.
“One second,” he said to the boardroom, “I shall have to put you on hold.”
The screen turned bright blue and the words ‘On Hold’ in white bounced around the screen. The message was accompanied by a piece of inoffensive repetitive music that soon became highly offensive because of its repetitiveness.
“That guy spends too long in the sun,” said the blond guy. “It’s frying his brains.”
“I don’t think we should be speaking about our chief benefactor in such terms.” It was the elder woman’s first contribution to the meeting. “Without him, there would be no Martian colony. And we certainly would not have got our hands on the asteroid.”
The blond guy slammed his fist on the table. “Bullshit. We’d have got there. Sure, it may have taken us a bit longer, but we’d have made it there first. No question. Who else would beat us to it?”
“Fact is people, this guy has us by the balls,” said the black guy. “Not just us, the whole fucking administration. His people have infiltrated our people.”
“Ah, Jack, don’t be so melodramatic,” said the young woman. “He’s just a guy with too much money, and too much of a vested interest in getting his hands on that diamond. If I were him, I’d be doing the same thing. Making sure that if that stuff comes to Earth, it comes straight to me.”
The music cut and Haalange reappeared, still sitting on his lounger.
“Yes, where was I, change of plan, that’s right. Um, I want you to destroy the SEC facility.” He said it with coldness, aloofness and casualness, like he was asking them to make a fresh pot of coffee.
“What the fuck are you on, man?” said the blond guy.
“Who was that? Who said that?”
“It doesn’t matter who said that,” said Jack. “We are not going to sanction the destruction of the Martian facility. Some of our best scientists are up there.”
“Get them out, then destroy it.”
“What about the asteroid?”
“The asteroid is to be destroyed.”
“Why?”
“I just need someone in the room to give the order.”
“I’ll do it.” The elder woman at the far end of the table stood, staring straight at the screen, refusing to look anyone else in the eye.
“And I’ll second that.” It was the bald guy.
The blond guy shook his head. “Let me get this straight, we go to all the effort to establish a presence on Mars, then we luck out because we find there’s an asteroid worth zillions a few million miles away. We capture the zillion dollar asteroid then all of a sudden we say, nah, fuck this, let’s blow it all up? It doesn’t make sense.”
Jack had his shaking head in his hands. “My, my, what have we done?” He looked at the blond guy and the younger woman.
Haalange grinned. “Monika? Gert? You know what to do next.” The older woman and bald guy nodded. Haalange addressed the other three in the room. “I would like to thank you lady, and gentlemen, for your cooperation in this matter, however unwittingly you gave it.”
The blond guy was still searching for answers. “Will someone mind telling me what the fuck is going on? What have we done, Jack?”
Jack sat still shaking his head in his now trembling hands.
39
Aurora wanted to be left alone with her grief, so Remnant made her as comfortable as he could on the bottom bunk in the cabin and joined the rest of the crew in trying to decide how best to extricate themselves from this situation.
“As far as we know, there’s no fuel anywhere on the planet,” said DT. “That’s the worse case scenario,” he added.
“I’ll walk as far as it takes to find some,” said Remnant.
“But how will you bring it back?” Bettis asked. We’ll need a whole tanker-full to get us home.”
“I’ll carry back enough to get us to a tanker then, won’t I?”
Bettis swivelled back to face the windscreen.
“I’m not going to sit here and wait to die,” said Remnant.
Bettis wasn’t listening. Instead he was peering at something through the window. He pointed it out to DT.
“See that thing? Over there.”
The word ‘thing’ immediately got Remnant thinking about aliens. He hadn’t studied much in his time, but he’d seen documentaries about Mars and about how it was the most likely planet in the solar system to harbour alien life forms. What if they were responsible for the explosions?
DT struggled to see what Bettis was pointing at.
“Can you see it?” Bettis asked.
DT was about to say no when he caught a glimpse of something moving amid the ashes. “I see it… it’s…”
“Is it coming to get us?” Remnant asked in a voice that betrayed his fear.
“It’s someone. A woman. I think it’s a woman.”
As she drew closer, they saw she was holding flowers that she was periodically casting onto the ground, crossing herself after doing so.
A few minutes later, DT and Bettis were surprised to see Remnant in an oxygen mask on the Martian surface, ushering the woman towards their ship. She was hesitant at first, but Remnant put an arm around her and pointed towards the cockpit.
“Gentlemen, this is Dot,” Remnant said, as he led the woman into the cockpit.
They both nodded at her as she sat, head bowed, almost ashamed to show her face, which was thickly lined and pinched, her lips smoked away, her eyes sad, her hair grey and unkempt.
“That’s DT and Mitch Bettis, my fellow crew members,” Remnant told her.
“Pleased to meet y’all,” she said quietly, her accent clearly Texan.
DT walked towards her and sat on his haunches at her feet, holding each of her cold, liver spotted hands. “I presume you lost someone in the explosion?”
She looked at him. “It’s all my fault,” she said.
DT looked up at Remnant. “I am sure that is not the case. You cannot blame yourself for such an atrocity.”
“You don’t understand,” she yelled.
As Remnant doubted whether his decision to invite this strange woman on board was a good one, a yawning Aurora entered the cockpit, having been woken by the shout. She looked down at the old woman and gasped in shock. “What’s she doing here? Get her out of here.”
Aurora lunged at Dot, but Remnant grabbed her arm before she made contact. “She needs our help,” he shouted at Aurora. “We found her wandering around outside.”
“She’s responsible for this,” Aurora raged.
DT looked at Remnant then Aurora. “That’s exactly what she just said.”
“You don’t know who this is?” Aurora asked.
The men shook their heads.
“She’s the one who let this planet go to ruin. She’s the one who’s letting SEC and big business do what they like here. She’s the Governor of Mars.”
“The woman on that poster?” Remnant asked.
“Dorothea Clarke?” DT asked.
Aurora nodded.
The men could see very few similarities between the glamorous smiling face they’d seen beaming back at them from the digital poster, and the snivelling wreck who was now cowering before them.
“Sorry,” was all Dorothea could say.
“Sorry? I lost my three sons, my sister, my business. Everything.”
“If I could turn back time, really, I would.”
“What happened here?” DT asked her.
“We got bombed, eight days ago. Two massive nukes.”
“Who? Why?”
“I still don’t know for sure, but I have my suspicions.”
“It was SEC,” said Aurora. Tell them it was SEC. You know it was.”
Dorothea looked at each of them in turn. “I think it was SEC,” she said quietly.
“You’ve met Haygue?” Aurora asked.
She shook her head. “I’ve heard he’s here, though. He’s been here a while.”
Aurora’s eyes widened. “Haygue’s here on Mars?” She looked over to Remnant.
“There’s something going down a hundred miles or so from here that SEC don’t want people knowing about. They certainly don’t want diamond hunters from Earth sniffing around.”
“That’s why they bombed Gasoline Alley?”
Dorothea nodded.
“Have you checked out the SEC facility?” Aurora asked.
“I saw the blueprints. I approved the plans. They wanted to build an exact copy of the Pentagon. What for, I don’t know.”
“Can you get us there?” Remnant asked.
“To the facility? Security will be tight. We won’t get in.”
“But you’re the Martian governor. You run this place.”
“It’s not the kind of job title that washes with SEC.”
“You never questioned what they planned to do at the facility?” DT asked.
“What was the point? They’d tell me one thing then go straight ahead and do whatever they wanted.”
“We need to go and check it out now,” Remnant insisted.
“What’s the rush?” Dorothea asked.
“He thinks that’s where the diamond asteroid is,” said Bettis, condescendingly.
Dorothea raised her eyebrows. “That’s an interesting theory. But I have to say it’s unlikely. I mean, how would you get a whole asteroid back here?”
“I’m not letting this one go,” said Remnant. “We’ve already turned our backs on something that could have been the asteroid. I need to check this out for myself. I need to go to that facility. Can you get me there?”
“I don’t know… I think I...”
“Come on,” Remnant shouted, “you run this place, you must have some trucks or jeeps or tanks. Anything.”
“Sorry, Dorothea, he gets carried away sometimes,” said DT trying to calm down Remnant.
“Hey, there’s nothing wrong with a bit of enthusiasm,” she said. “Listen, guys, I got a transporter you can borrow. What the hell are you doing out here anyway?”
“We’re on our way back from the belt.”
“You went all the way out there?”
Remnant nodded.
“And found nothing, right?”
The silence that followed said more than any words.
“Man, that sucks.”
“I think that Haygue stole it,” said Remnant. “Don’t ask me why, but the man’s a crook, and I know how the crooked mind works. He’s bloody stolen it and brought it back here to chop it up and fence it.”
“Well, if you’re right, that’s a misuse of Martian real estate,” she said, pulling a phone from her inside pocket. “And that would give me grounds to conduct a search of the facility.”
She called her security services and ordered a transporter to pick them up. It arrived within half an hour. The driver boarded the Baton Uric, saluted Dorothea and handed out oxygen masks. DT paused before taking his, but Bettis shook his head.
“I’m exercising my contractual right not to leave this ship,” he said.
“You can’t stay here on your own,” said DT.
“Why not?”
“Look, if he wants to leave the hard work to us, let him,” said Remnant. “I’m pretty sure he’d be useless if things get violent anyway.”
Bettis jumped out of his seat and charged at Remnant who was ready for the attack and took up a defensive position.
“You’re the scum of the Earth, do you know that?” raged Bettis. “Useless, working class scum, who’s bitter at the rest of the world because you failed in your life. You’re a waster.”
“A waster I may be,” Remnant calmly countered, “but at least I’m facing up to it. You, you’re in denial, mate. You know your skills ain’t needed no more. A computer can do your job better than you can. You know that and you need to get over that. Move on. Us working class have had machines taking our jobs for centuries. Now it’s your turn to feel the pain. Machines are the way forward, so that leaves people like me and like you more time to do what we do best, fucking things up. And right now, more than anything, I want to fuck up this Haygue bloke.”
“We should go,” said Dorothea, pulling gently on Remnant’s forearm.
“I ain’t got no quarrel with you, Bettis,” Remnant continued. “I mean, you’re a dick, but Haygue’s in a completely different league. You coming, DT?”
DT took a deep breath and nodded as Bettis slowly walked back to his seat.
Once they were all aboard the transporter, Dorothea directed the driver to head for the SEC facility.
“Are you sure?” he asked her.
“My visit there is long overdue,” she said sternly.
40
Despite being close on one hundred miles away from their epicentre, the blasts were big enough to rock the SEC facility, shake the drills that were breaking up the diamond and rattle the confidence of the scientists and engineers on the site.
Haygue’s initial suspicions were that a couple of big ships had crash-landed back at the airstrip adjacent to Gasoline Alley, but M Krugler told him no man-made vessel could make that sort of impact.
“Maybe it’s terrorists,” Stock suggested. “Maybe a rogue cell launched a missile from Earth, designed to destroy the Martian colony.” Despite his disdain for the man, who was continuing to look younger by the day, Haygue had to concede the theory was feasible. Plenty of other theories did the rounds around the six-sided Martian Pentagon, but the only thing Haygue was certain of was that he couldn’t afford to hang around there much longer.
“I feel like a sitting duck,” he confided in Stock and M Krugler as they sat in the Pentagon bar, drinking while not particularly enjoying each other’s company. “A big target waiting to be taken out.”
“I just want some action,” M Krugler moaned. “I came on this mission to see the belt and dodge a few asteroids.”
“You’ll be compensated for your inactivity,” Haygue told him.
The drilling of the diamond was painfully slow, and a week after the double explosion, still only small shards were detaching from the main body. Shards worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but small fry compared to the value of the rest of the rock.
Haygue was anxious to get as much loaded onto the Prospector III as possible, as soon as possible, and made sure M Krugler was ready to depart at a moment’
s notice.
“I’m ready to go when you are, mate,” M Krugler told him in a tone that was a little overly familiar for Haygue’s liking.
Stock watched the diamond mining operation with fascination, describing the vision before him as best he could for his followers back on Earth, in the absence of any photographs, an issue he raised with his host one night in the bar. “I want my camera back, Haygue. You’re contravening my human rights by denying me access to the tool of my trade.”
“And you’re contravening my human rights by constantly moaning. Now, I’ve brought you to Mars for free and I’ve shown you the most valuable rock man has ever seen for free. You could at least do me the service of shutting the fuck up.”
Haygue watched the mining operation closely too, but not through fascination at the beauty of the process. He wanted to make sure that those he’d cleared to do the hands-on work were not pocketing valuable chunks of the rock. He had hand-picked and briefed all the SEC staff stationed on Mars, but couldn’t trust any of them. No man had ever seen a diamond this big. It would only be natural to think that if even a little bit of the gem slid into a pocket, a boot or down a throat it would not be missed. But as far as Haygue was concerned, the diamond was government property the moment the Prospector laid a camera lens on it. Without the government, there would have been no discovery, and no hardware with which to drag the asteroid back to Mars.
A sense of duty and responsibility for the safe delivery of the diamond into the President’s hands hadn’t left him since he departed Earth. ‘He was an honourable man,’ that’s what the President would say just before pinning his medal to his lapel. ‘An honourable servant who helped pull his country’s economy out of the mire. And an honest man who made sure every first and last shard of diamond made it home to where it belongs.’
Haygue paced his room in the Martian Pentagon. He was still literally and actually millions of miles away from receiving his invite to the White House and seeing the pride on Bette’s face as he got the reward she (and he) felt he richly deserved.
A knock at his door disturbed his train of thought. “Not now, Stock, not now.”
“It’s not Stock, sir. We have an important call from Houston for you.”