Mars Nation: The Complete Trilogy

by Brandon Q Morris

  “Stop it! I’m trying to think,” said Mike.

  Lance left him alone like he asked, picked up his schnapps glass, and stared at the floor. He slowly rotated the glass in his hand and enjoyed the bright colors as it bent the light.

  “Well, if you ask me...,” said Mike, and then he stopped.

  “Yes, I am asking you.”

  “... then I would say, the statement was a hint at something. There never was an actual worm.”

  “I had already gotten that far myself,” said Lance. That wasn’t quite true, but he had at least considered the possibility.

  “A worm is something that disrupts something else,” said Mike.

  “Or something disgusting,” added Lance.

  “Yeah, and it can be found just about anywhere. There’s the proverbial can of worms.”

  “Something that’s gone wrong.”

  “Everything here has gone wrong,” said Mike, “but Sarah doesn’t mean that. We can all see it ourselves.”

  “You don’t usually see the worm before opening the can,” Lance suggested.

  Mike rubbed his chin. “Yeah, something unknown hiding inside it. It must mean something that we don’t see yet, but probably need to.”

  “Was she trying to warn us about an informant?” asked Lance.

  “That might be. But why use this as the code word?”

  “So that no one else will know what it might mean?”

  “No, I think it was more of an encryption. She’s trying to tell us who the worm is.”

  “From the way you say that, have you got a suspicion, Mike?”

  “I’d start with the type of food she mentioned. It isn’t just a can of noodles.”

  “You’re right. A worm inside a can doesn’t make any sense,” said Lance.

  “Exactly. And where do people like to eat noodles? In Italy,” said Mike.

  “So, Gabriella?”

  “I’d guess that’s who she means.”

  “Buddy, do you know what people in Bali or Cameroon or in the Philippines eat? Noodles, too! I was on vacation in Bali and had fried noodles there.”

  “Still, Italy is world-famous for its noodles,” said Mike.

  “Umm, don’t you also have an Italian mother?”

  Mike laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. “Nice play, but I am not spy material.”

  “Of course, that could be exactly your strong point. No one would ever think it was you.”

  “You don’t really believe that do you, Lance?” Mike looked at him, his eyes narrowed.

  “No. It was just a joke, don’t worry. I just think we need to be careful not to make any snap judgements.”

  “And of Gabriella,” said Mike.

  “If she has switched sides, we will need to warn the other women at the MfE base.”

  “Right, Lance. We need to discuss it with the MfE men here.”

  Sol 332, Hellas Basin

  They spent a long time debating whether or not they should cut across the Hellas Basin. Friday was against it for safety reasons. The name of the region conjured up false expectations. It was an impact crater, the second largest in the solar system. Thus the ground was fairly level. The walls of the crater reached nine kilometers at spots. In addition, the impact from approximately 3.7 billion years ago had created a two-meter tall ring of loose material surrounding the crater.

  The alternative, namely driving around the basin, would have cost them too many days. But Ewa had to admit that this wasn’t the main reason to insist on taking the direct route. The drive through the homogenous Mars landscape was incredibly dull, and the prospect of a view from inside the basin seemed to her like a nice change of pace.

  The descent wasn’t all that treacherous. Ewa had informed Friday at the outset about the crater’s dimensions. A depth of nine kilometers sounded challenging, but these were spread out over a more horizontal incline of many kilometers. An uncharted mini crater of ten meters could pose a greater risk to the rover’s computer than the consistent downward movement here.

  In the meantime, they crossed the plain, which couldn’t have been any less accurate of a description. The further south they traveled, the colder it became. That morning, the hills were covered with glittery carbon-dioxide snow caps, which remained intact for the rest of the day. Ewa was intrigued. Closer to the South Pole, there were supposedly areas where meters-thick layers of snow dominated the landscape.

  The rover drove down a dune. Ewa had expected the wheels to sink, but the material was solid. In the distance, she saw a small hill lit orange by the sun. The horizon was flat, and the opposing cliffs were still very far away. Ewa deactivated the autopilot mode.

  ‘Do you really have to do that?’ asked Friday. He already knew the answer, but that still didn’t keep him from asking the question over and over again.

  She sometimes felt like Friday was the husband she had never had, who only wanted the best for her but who had no idea what she thought and felt. In this case, she wanted to floor it and tear down the dune, steering the rover with perfect precision around the sloping curves and holes of the crater which no human had ever touched before.

  Sol 332, Syrtis Major

  He was only two or three hours away from his destination, but Walter decided to set up camp one more time anyway. The necessary steps were so routine that his hands almost moved automatically. He ran his glove over the tent’s thin fabric. Less than one millimeter of manmade material became the dividing line between life and death.

  This was the last time he would use the tent. Since reaching the plain yesterday, he had made much better progress. The dark, basalt surface was almost dust-free. Any obstacles were easily seen from far off, and the rover’s wheels gripped the ground much better. He patted the wheel housing. The vehicle would be making its way back without him. He had considered whether he should continue the last few kilometers to the Japanese probe today, but then decided against it. He wouldn’t be able to carry out the necessary repairs in the dark anyway.

  Walter groaned as he peeled his LCVG off his chafed body. It wasn’t worth it to treat his wounds anymore, and he had already gotten used to the unpleasant smell after only three days. Today, he was going to treat himself to a feast. He had brought along a can of sour cherries from their food stocks, which he now opened cautiously with his pocket knife. He sniffed the open can. The contents were still good even though the cherries had been harvested over two years ago.

  As he had read the words on the label, he simply couldn’t resist taking them. His grandmother used to have a cherry tree in their garden behind the barn, a Morello cherry tree. His sister had spent practically her entire summer vacation up in the cherry tree next to the asparagus beds, but he never had any interest in it. Just the name alone! Morello… it had such a mysterious ring to it. And its fruit, which none of his friends ever wanted to eat raw, were all destined for him alone.

  He drank some of the juice from the can, the acidity burning his throat, and then he fished out a cherry. The fruits were pitted and not as fresh as straight off the tree, but the taste was the same. Walter closed his eyes and returned to the shade of the barn, 40 years ago. Despite the noise from his suit’s life support system, he could imagine the crickets chirping and the sparrows chattering as they tried to steal the cherries from the tree he heroically defended. They were the best cherries he had ever eaten, and they would also be his last.

  All of a sudden, the small wooden door in the back wall of the barn opened, and his grandmother stepped out. She was wearing wooden shoes and a brightly colored apron. With one hand, she motioned him over to her. He stood next to her and leaned his head against her apron bow. He was a little boy. His grandmother stroked his head, and Walter wept.

  Sol 332, MfE Base

  Theo wrote her a message.

  Don’t worry. They are taking good care of us here. There is so much to do that I hardly have any time to think. The city is growing by leaps and bounds! But sometimes, before I go to bed in the even
ings, I think about our time together. Then I look at our pictures, like the one I have attached for you. It was in one of the subfolders on my universal device, and I am so happy I found it.

  Rebecca opened the attached file on the screen. It was a group photo of the MfE crew. She was on the far left-hand of the picture. Theo was missing. He must have been the one who’d taken the picture. Marilou had a paper crown on her head. Rebecca remembered now. The photo must have been from her birthday party. They had at some point decided to convert their Earth birthdays to sols.

  She examined her own face. From close up, she thought it almost looked like she was cross-eyed. And there was a sparkle in the corner of her right eye—a tear. Rebecca remembered more details. She had been thinking of all the birthday parties on Earth.

  She moved on to the person standing next to her. It was Ellen, looking cool as always, with one arm around Rebecca’s shoulders and the other one slung around Andy’s. Andy was gazing at Ellen, not at the camera, as though he was in love with her. Except that they all knew that Ellen was seeing Mike, NASA Mike, the one who was with Theo, her Theo, forced to live in Mars City. Rebecca wiped a real tear from the corner of her eye. She didn’t want to get sentimental right now.

  Who else was in the picture? In the front row, she recognized Germaine, Marge, and Sophie, the French woman. Ketut, Guillermo, and Walter made up the row behind them. Shashwat stood alone in the third row. He looked distracted, and his eyes were focused past Ketut and Guillermo, beyond the camera’s location. Why was he standing alone, way in the back? He was relatively tall, but would have fit in with the other three men in front of him. And where was Gabriella? She was also rather tall. Perhaps she had been standing next to Shashwat and had left the room briefly? But then why wouldn’t Theo have waited with the photo? That was strange!

  Rebecca looked through her own photo files. She had arranged everything chronologically. When was that party? She flipped back, sol before sol. From one day to the next, all the men had disappeared from her photos. There, it was Marilou’s birthday. The paper crown on her head was proof. She had a number of pictures from the party. Gabriella also appeared in some, which meant that she hadn’t been sick or anything.

  Rebecca tried to see if she could find a picture taken from a similar perspective. She found a two-person portrait of Marge and Sophie where they were standing in front of the same wall. Marge’s smile was a little forced. Sophie was holding her hand as though they were a couple. Why had she only just now noticed that? Maybe they really were a couple. Rebecca shook her head. If they wanted to keep it to themselves, that was their business.

  The wall in front of which Sophie and Marge were standing was completely bare. Rebecca only recognized it from the boxes that were stacked there. She compared it to Theo’s photo. Just then she realized that in the space between Guillermo’s head on the left and Walter’s on the right was a picture. It was a framed portrait of the administrator. That was impossible. The party took place long before the raid. Even today, no photo of the administrator hung there.

  Theo must have implanted the portrait into the picture. But why? What was he trying to convey by doing that? It must have something to do with the person missing—Gabriella. Rebecca wiped the sweat from her forehead. Was Theo trying to tell her that Gabriella was secretly working with the administrator? What had Summers promised the doctor for that? At what price was she selling out her friends?

  She had to calm down. Perhaps there was another interpretation for this photo montage. It was evident that a hidden message was embedded. She needed to talk with Ellen about it. Or was it better not to? Only a few days ago, she had questioned Ellen’s loyalty for apparently possessing some background knowledge. What if Ellen really was a spy? It could be that Theo really was warning her about Gabriella, but that didn’t automatically mean that Ellen was also trustworthy. The administrator could very well have two spies in place. He was more than capable of that. It would enable him to more efficiently keep track of what his spies were doing. All he would have needed to do was tell them that there was another spy among the ranks.

  Rebecca closed all the image files and folders, and stood up. She first needed to think about all this. It was hard enough to accept that one of them had switched sides. She never would have guessed that any of them would’ve done that. They had such a long history together, so full of perils and challenges. That should have made their bond unbreakable. Rebecca would have trusted any of them with her life without a second thought. And that was something crucially important, since life on Mars was certainly no walk in the park. She had to be in a position where she could trust her friends.

  She simply couldn’t take Theo’s message at face value. She needed to find out what it was behind it.

  Sol 333, Syrtis Major

  Sol 333. Sounds like a good day to die, Walter thought. At the same time, he also noticed something foreign in the plateau’s crater-pocked landscape, something illuminated by the red sky. It must have been Nozomi 2. The chances that a second probe would have landed right around here were very low. Walter accelerated the rover. The entire trip was based on the fundamentally crazy idea that the last of the four autonomous robots remained tangled on the landing module, but was still fully functional.

  The strange object gradually took shape. The landing module resembled a metal spider. It stood on six legs, and some sort of spike had been drilled into the ground beneath it. In fact, this had been an experiment to analyze the composition of the upper layers of the surface. Walter remembered this detail because JAXA had made history with it. Never before, and never since, had anyone penetrated any farther than 15 meters into the Mars surface.

  As he got closer, the spider illusion faded away. Walter parked the rover a few steps away from it. From this perspective, the four-leaf-clover-like solar collectors were more noticeable and looked like insect wings on the clunky frame. He slipped up to the probe as quietly as he could so that he didn’t scare it, feeling as if it might fly away. However, the probe didn’t react. Not even when he touched one of its solar panels. Still, Walter stayed alert, so the exotic animal wouldn’t fly off at any second.

  He walked around the probe. On the back of it was an IDA, an Instrument Deployment Arm. Attached to its two front joints was an IDC, an Instrument Deployment Camera. It had taken the very famous photo which showed the last of the four robots, the one that had gotten hooked on one of the spider legs. And Walter saw his sacrificial journey had not been in vain. He put his hand to his heart. The robot was still at the same spot. He only needed to free it and set it into motion.

  Walter took a deep breath. It was his last mission. There was nothing else for him to do, not in this world, nor in the one to come. He ran to the rover and pulled out the toolbox and diagnostic equipment before carrying them back to his patient. He still couldn’t recall the robot’s name.

  He inspected its structure. The robot looked like someone had stuck several bicycle rims together concentrically but at all different angles. The result was a sphere without any defined sides. The spokes throughout the inside gave it stability. The outer material of the rims was springy—if the orb fell down a cliff, it would bounce. But because the shell of the sphere was partially open, it allowed the robot to also roll over uneven ground.

  At its core was a motor with two axles, not especially robust, but durable. It was purely electrically powered. Highly efficient photoelectric cells on the exterior of the rims collected solar energy. The robot could roll through the nights and recharge itself during the days.

  Walter immediately realized what the problem was with this one, which he christened ‘Silver Rabbit.’ One of the probe’s six feet had a feeler on its front, some sort of measuring device, which had jammed itself inside the robot, preventing it from moving back and forth. The foot had blocked the robot from maneuvering itself out sideways.

  If the probe could have simply retracted its foot, there wouldn’t have been any problems. It had five other legs to su
pport it and wouldn’t have tipped over. But the engineers hadn’t foreseen this problem, and the extender mechanism only functioned in one direction. This and other similar issues were the final straws that tipped the scales toward sending humans to Mars.

  For Walter, it was a win-win. He only needed to lift up Nozomi 2, and the robot would be able to free itself. But first, he would need to give it a good brain-scrubbing. If left to itself, Silver Rabbit would probably still follow its original research program instructions and explore Mars on its own. But that wasn’t what Walter wanted it to do.

  He set down his tool bag and searched for the programming and data bus. In wise foresight, the space agencies of the 2020s had begun establishing international interface standards. He found the port in the motor housing, pulled the connection cable from his diagnostic device, and attached it to the robot. Now, all he needed was a little patience. The robot’s internal batteries were completely drained after such a long time—of course. The diagnostic device was providing some initial energy. That would enable Silver Rabbit’s operational controls to boot up.

  Walter counted to 60 in his head. Then he started over again from zero. He reached 40 when the one definitive light on the diagnostic device started to blink yellow.

  Yes! It’s working! thought Walter.

  The robot’s electrical circuits were still alive! Another two minutes, and the color of the LED switched from yellow to green. The robot’s internal software’s initial boot-up messages appeared on the display.

  It turned out that its program memory was empty. The robot was as intelligent as a newborn baby, albeit one that could already walk, since its rolling action was stored in a nonerasable data unit. Very good, thought Walter. And, in an unimaginably lucky break for him, the robot had also forgotten that it was supposed to ask him for an access password. Obviously, no one could have foreseen that the robot would ever find itself in such a situation on Mars.