Several minutes passed, and Chloe turned when she heard the rattling of stones behind her. "You have the scanner."
"Of course," Parker said.
Chloe knelt to the ground, rubbing the coarse rock between her fingers. It was as sharp as glass. "Watch your hands in this stuff," she said.
He nodded, then pulled the scanner’s case open and laid it on the surface. He instructed the girls to place the four scanning coils ten paces from each other in a square. In the center, he placed the case containing the central computer system. "Turn on the power supply after you position it and walk outside of the scanning area."
"Do you see anything?"
"Nothing," Parker shouted over the increasing winds. He shivered as the temperature began to drop. "The screen shows standard readings for this area."
"What about those red spots?" Chloe pointed toward the screen. "What does that mean?"
"It indicates a high percentage of iron in the stones. Anything hollow would be in black. This shows nothing but natural basalt and iron-laden rocks."
"I guess I was wrong," she said, slightly embarrassed at having dragged them there for nothing. "Maybe we got lucky the first time. I can feel it still, but it could be residue from a shipment from long ago."
"You are usually right, but look around. Nothing here, only rocks and rubble."
The sky darkened as clouds blew in from the west.
"We should head back," he said. "Those repulse engines are still a little shaky, and I don’t trust them if this storm gets worse."
"But we haven’t looked around enough. Something is here," she said.
"We can come back later," Jan said. "The weather is getting worse."
Chloe nodded. The lack of any evidence was compelling enough for her to remain quiet. She would have to come back alone. Maybe when they got returned, she could sneak away.
Parker began to collect the scanning coils from their positions and stow them back into the case, while Chloe, frustrated that she had led them out in the barren expanses of Mars for no reason, took one last look around the area for something they might have missed. She found nothing.
"Turn the ship around," Chloe said. "Someone is back there."
"No," Parker said. "The rear scanners aren’t picking up anything."
"The dust storms sweeping into the area are obviously blocking them, and even in clear conditions, from over a kilometer away scanners aren’t one hundred percent."
"We have played your games long enough. We’re going back to Aethpis and figuring out a new strategy."
"Someone is out there," she insisted. "Please do a fly by. Loop around. It can’t hurt."
"Our repulse engines are weak enough as it is. Throttling on a loop turn won’t help them at all."
"Then perform a reverse angular turn using the rear thrusters only. I’ll show you how."
"No," Jan replied, trying to act as peacemaker and to temper the growing antagonism between the two. "Let’s get back to Aethpis. The old privacy laws have been obliterated, so we will be able to scan the area with the satellites."
"The person will be hidden within the ground by then," she said. "Turn it around. The longer you wait, the farther we are away."
"Good," Parker replied. "That is the point of flying away."
Chloe crossed her arms and sat back. Her friends’ indifference angered and frustrated her. First, they were reluctant to help her; second, Parker was hostile toward her senses; and last, they were indifferent to helping Mars. The entire point of the mission was to find the meteor cache for the Alliance. The danger, the frustration, and the effort were all part of it. Parker and Jan kept skirting danger, seemingly not wanting to find anything, only to keep her safe.
She wasn’t afraid.
She reached out with her thoughts, feeling Parker’s mind. Suddenly, she was inside of him, watching his vision and his movements. His anxiety about her swirled in the forefront on his mind. He wanted to help her, but his obligation to Seth was at war with his desire to push the situation as far as it should go.
She reached out with her thoughts, trying to touch his innermost loyalty to her. Inwardly, she spoke. Chloe knows someone is back there. She can find the metalor.
Parker twitched, a sideways jerk with his head and his arms. It was subtle, but Chloe could feel his subconscious fighting with his conscious mind. Her suggestion was working.
Chloe knows someone is back there. She can find the metalor.
Promptly, an unexpected thing happened; the skimmer veered to the port side. Jan squawked as it dropped several meters. The repulse engine tried to keep equilibrium with rear thrusters, but in its weakened state, it was sputtering every chance it could, sending the ship even lower. The hull groaned, and not the natural grown Chloe was accustomed to hearing with the added gravitation forces. The twisting hull pulled and pushed until it almost buckled. Several dents pushed in.
"Parker!" Jan screamed.
Chloe knows someone is back there. She can find the metalor.
Chloe smiled. Slowly, cautiously, she searched Parker’s mind for any doubts, but only a meandering collection of thoughts fought her attempts. Not even Jan’s scream caused any resistance to her suggestion.
Calmly, without the slightest sense of anxiety, Parker piloted the skimmer back toward Ganges Chasma.
In her first attempt to control someone’s actions, Chloe had Parker’s mind completely under her control. She had them entirely turned around, and he showed no signs of trouble. She was almost there.
They reached the chasma and circled the valley below them. She released his mind from hers and searched the ground below. Nothing could be seen but the haze of the dust kicking up in the approaching storm.
"Where are we?" Parker said with a slur in his words, as if he had awakened from a long sleep.
"What do you mean?" Jan said. "You’re the one who brought us back here."
"I did?" he said.
The confusion on his face was amusing to Chloe. This was what Seth warned her about, probing and controlling someone’s mind, the first step toward her alienation from society. Still, she didn’t care. She needed to accomplish her mission; fear leashing her and apprehension hindering her steps would stifle her dreams and stop them from becoming reality. Her mind’s ability was her birthright, and no one could control or take that away from her.
"Regardless of how we got here," she said, "we are here, and we should be looking toward the south of the valley. Near where we landed."
Jan cocked her eye toward Parker. "I thought we were heading back to Aethpis?"
He replied. "I guess we should look around. Chloe might be right."
The skimmer swung in an elongated loop, staying a fair distance from the surface to give them a greater area to view. Chloe reached with her mind out to the valley below. Nothing jumped out. The mind she clearly saw only moments before wasn’t replying to her probes. Perhaps, occupying Parker’s mind had interrupted the connection.
After a long turn and a short straight burst from the engines, the skimmer was over their landing site. Jan peeked out of the port side of the ship, still seeing nothing but barren terrain and small dust cyclones, swirling up from the ground, clouding much of the terrain.
"I can’t see anything," she said. "The weather moved in too fast. It is hopeless."
"Another minute or two," Chloe said. "I know someone is out there. The metalor will be found."
"Our power cell is almost empty. We barely have enough to get back to Aethpis," Parker said. "We can’t risk being out here any longer."
Chloe knows someone is back there. She can find the metalor.
"Jinx," Parker replied as she let go of the stabbing attempt to enter his mind.
"What?" Jan said, scanning the controls for any signs of a malfunction or alert.
"Nothing," he said. "Felt like a needle jabbed into my head."
Chloe remained silent, still concentrating outside of the ship, trying to ignore the conversation inside the
cabin. She didn’t care, nonetheless. The terrain was hard enough to concentrate on anyway. The swirling dust and the same monotonous red hues made it difficult to focus.
She raked her eyes over the surface: rock, dust, rock, rock, dust, more rocks, rocks clouded by dust. Nothing.
Then she saw her. It was definitely a female, an older one, judging by the sag in her posture, arms dropping along her sides, and her shoulders hunched forward.
"I found her," Chloe said. "Port side, negative one hundred degrees from the nose, stumbling between the twin rock formations."
"I don’t see…her back is to us," Jan replied, her former dreary tone turned optimistic for the moment. "We need to signal her somehow."
"She can’t hear us with the wind howling around those rocks," Parker said. "I’m going to land about two hundred meters in front of her. She’ll definitely see us then."
"Ahead in the direction she is walking," she said, leaning over the front seat and pointing out of the canopy toward the chasma ahead. "I bet several tunnels start inside of the Ganges Chasma and run under the valley floor."
"Looks that way," he replied as he swept over the woman’s head and thrust toward the clearest patch of land he could see along the surface.
She twisted around. The woman was now running, waving her hands toward the skimmer. Chloe waved back, expecting no reply, but she was happily mistaken; the woman jumped and ran even faster toward them.
"She sees us," Chloe said. "And she is ecstatic beyond words. I’ve never seen an old woman jump that high."
Jan flipped the cabin’s display screen to view the rear of the ship. "She wanted to find us."
"She knows where the metalor is," Chloe said. "I’ve no doubt about that now."
Parker replied: "Neither do I."
Jan protested. "We don’t know anything about this woman, and you guys are already giving her credit for knowing the biggest secret on Mars."
"It’s simple logic," Parker said. "She’s walking around a barren valley on a sector of the planet where there are no humans. Either she is a hermit, which isn’t probable considering the logistics of maintaining all the necessities to live on Mars, or a secret base is hidden beneath this valley. Think about it. To build a large ship, you need a large cave."
"How would they get it out?" Jan said. "A spaceyard is a far better choice."
He shook his head. "Not if you want to hide it. The chasma and the cave are a natural way for them to create a big enough hangar to build the ship in. A retractable doorway with rock fronting would be a perfect camouflage for hiding it. Scanners and sensor arrays would be useless."
"If it is so easy," Jan said. "Why aren’t there hundreds of them across Mars?"
"There probably are," he said as he shifted the skimmer to a hovering position and throttled the lateral engines to lower it to the ground. "In the last fifty to seventy-five years, the government has been the only entity exploring Mars. With the main colonies established, people have no reason to leave the comfortable surroundings they provide. It isn’t a coincidence that ninety-nine percent of the Martian population lives on one percent of the total land area. We created a series of terrestrial oases on Mars: the colonies."
"What about the nonaligned colonies? You have to count them."
"By last count, only thirty colonies remained of the over three hundred that started. And their viable land radius is one percent of one percent of Mars’s total area. That is nothing."
"It doesn’t make sense though," Jan replied. "Terraforming will allow for more individual sprawl across the planet. People should be spreading out with the greater amount of oxygen."
"Oxygen levels won’t be livable for hundreds of years. Now, the government’s secret projects can exist because we’re centralizing."
"I guess Seth was right," Chloe said quietly from the back.
"How so?" Parker replied.
"He always said the two-government system wouldn’t work because Mars couldn’t be trusted. I realize he meant people of Mars can’t be trusted. The checks and balances of the two governments failed because they didn’t trust one another. Mistrust drove them to form secret societies, research facilities, and who knows what else. The Aethpisians are as guilty as the Zephyrians of deception; it was only a matter of time before the Zephyrian-led MSA acted first and were vilified in our eyes."
"I don’t see how the Aethpisians are at fault," Jan said. "The MSA or the Zephyrians for the sake of this argument acted upon their mistrust. The Aethpisians haven’t attacked anyone."
"If a megacruiser starship exists, the Aethpisians also acted against the Zephyrians but in a passive way. They hid a megacruiser starship; doesn’t that tell you something about their trust of the Zephyrians? On that same thinking, even if they didn’t build the megacruiser, they are still guilty of misappropriating the metalor cache from the rest of Mars and from the account files on public record."
"The Aethpisians did nothing wrong," Jan said with a coldness in her tone. "I can’t believe you can parallel the MSA attacking, invading, and occupying Mars and Lunara to the Aethpisian government hiding a cache of metalor with the intent of building a starship designed for peace."
"The Aethpisians’ passive aggression is just as wrong as the MSA’s physical aggression. The former minister lied to the people who trusted him. The ends do not justify—"
The skimmer jolted to the ground with a loud bang, cutting off Chloe’s words.
Abruptly, they went silent. Outside, the wind howled, hitting the hull, sweeping dust across the skimmer and swaying the cabin with each gust.
Chloe braced herself for the cold as Parker released the canopy. Even with her face tightened and her toes curled, the cold wind, washing across her body, still drained her energy. She shivered.
They hopped out onto the surface and waited as the woman came running toward them. Still the silence lingered; no comment about the older woman was spoken aloud. She was about sixty, by Chloe’s estimate; her hair streaked with gray highlights suggested her age. The heavy boots, denim pants, and utility shirt reminded Chloe of algae farmers in the planitias.
As the woman came up toward them, she bent over in obvious exhaustion. "I came to offer the Alliance the solution to end the war. Take me into the chasma."
Then she collapsed in Parker’s arms.
Uncertainty crossed their faces. They didn’t know what to do with her.
Chloe and Jan sat in the cockpit of the skimmer. In the back seat, with her legs extended and her head resting on a balled-up thermal coat, the woman began to stir out of unconsciousness. Her eyes opened, blinked a few times, and then focused on Chloe.
"I’m Chloe Smith. What is your name?"Chloe said, softly, trying to ease the woman out of her sleep.
"Yes," she said. "Where is Parker McCloud? I must speak to him."
"Parker is doing repairs. What is your name?"
"Vivian Mathilde," the woman replied. "I’ve come for Parker McCloud…to tell him something important."
"We know why you’ve come," she said. "The megacruiser has been built."
"Yes," Vivian said, reluctantly. "We’ve been working on it for the past ten years. The technology contained within it will provide an advantage to the Alliance."
"Why did you hide from us?"
"The minister was the only person outside of the complex who even knew we existed. His son was to take over the project, but they all died. We were left without any connections to the outside, so we remained hidden, waiting for the opportunity to share it with you."
Chloe turned toward Jan. "I told you the Aethpisians were guilty of hiding the megacruiser."
Jan shook her head. "She said they want to share it. They can’t hand the MSA the technology, or they’ll become stronger."
"That is why Conway is afraid," Vivian said, and slumped in her seat.
Parker returned a few minutes later. He exchanged pleasantries with Vivian and she explained how Jarvis and Conway objected to her leaving, her insistence tha
t the megacruiser would help the Alliance, and her attempt to signal them from the ground.
"Mr. McCloud, I want you to come into the cave and see how much we have accomplished," Vivian said.
"From what you have told me," Parker said. "I don’t know how welcome we’ll be. Conway and Jarvis seem to think the MSA will take the megacruiser, and I’m tempted to agree with them."
For a long moment, Vivian stared at Parker, looking as if she was trying to convince herself of something. "At least come to the hangar’s entrance and talk. They’ll listen to you. It’s easier for them to sit in their comfortable hangar and sit out the war. The suffering the MSA have brought to the planet hasn’t affected them yet."
He gave her an odd gaze. "And you have?"
"My father fought in the revolutionary war. Being from an outer colony, we saw the carnage war creates. I imagine it is the same."
"It is."
"It can’t hurt to talk with them," Chloe said. "Vivian has risked her life to bring us this information. At least we can follow up on it."
"Granted, but an argument exists for keeping the megacruiser secret from the rest of Mars," Parker said. "You think I don’t want to find it, but that isn’t true. More variables are at work than you figure."
Chloe threw her hands up. "Come on—"
"However, since we know about the megacruiser and its location, I don’t see any further harm in talking with your head engineer and finding the exact scope of how it can help us or hurt us."
Vivian leaned over the seat. "Get us into Ganges Chasma, and I’ll tell you where."
"Hold your position here," Vivian said. "Mr. McCloud, would you key into frequency 45.9 and send a friendly signal with the numerals MVI. They should reply."
Parker reached for his communications unit. He keyed in the frequency and sent a standard greeting along with numerals she instructed. "How long?"
"Might be a few minutes. Conway will be adamant that they remain silent, but Jarvis will talk him out of it," she said.
"Should I worry about them shooting us down?"
"No, they aren’t violent," she replied. "At least I don’t think they are."
Her nervousness made him wonder if it was a mistake to trust this woman so quickly. The console beside him chirped and tweeted. The screen alerted him to an incoming message. He keyed it in.
Lunara: The Original Trilogy Page 60