Journey Back to Mars: a sci-fi collection

by Hugo Huesca

  “There, among the stars, it breaks apart the darkness,” whispered his sensei, his delirious sight lost in a point that went beyond the hospital room. “I never stopped believing, Hiroto. Even now…”

  The delicate hand of the old man that Hiroto held between his own, young and strong, was so weak the kid could barely feel it. Like holding a wet cloth, without life. The boy tried to contain his tears, without success.

  The old genius closed his eyes and Hiroto thought, “I’ve lost him.” At the side of the bed, the life-support machines were quiet, there was nothing they could do today. And then, the sensei opened his eyes once again and the strength returned to his grip for a few seconds.

  “My Amaterasu can do it,” he said, with a clarity that had eluded him for months. Hiroto almost believed, for a brief moment, that everything was going to be alright. “It needs you, Hiroto. It will be… your legacy. For all mankind.”

  Hiroto felt how the life escaped from the sensei. He doubled over the sickness-battered body and muffled a cry of sorrow.

  Later, Hiroto left the medical room and let the doctors and the lawyer team –whose company the sensei had absolutely refused in his last days— handle the legal aspect of the passing.

  In the corridor waited the other members of the Amaterasu Project. His friends. In front of him, Junko covered a tearful face. It was Brenda who hugged him tightly.

  “Oh Hiro, I am so sorry…”

  All of them had been the chosen ones of the old scientist; the four young mavericks who carried the future of humanity. But it had been Hiroto who spent the last moments of the old man’s life with him and no one had doubted it. It was natural. And it was natural that Hiroto was who hurt the most.

  “Did he say something, in the end?” asked Abner, the strong kid who would be the ship’s future systems engineer.

  “In the end,” nodded Hiroto, “he spoke of his vision, again. Of his road of fire. He called it…” My legacy. “He called it ‘our legacy.”

  Abner accepted it. They all knew the dream of the sensei. He had shared it with them many times. The solution to the equation that tied men to their mother’s cradle and separated them forever from the stars. The sensei had seen a light-line crossing the vastness of the universe, through impossible distances, vanishing the darkness.

  “Since I can remember, the road of fire has been his dream,” thought Hiroto, “I never believed it would become my mission so soon.”

  Hiroto steeled himself, then. His friends read something in his face, because they did so, too. It was time, after all. Brenda cracked her knuckles and sweet Junko held her tears. Yes, that was the attitude proper of the four prodigies of the Amaterasu Project.

  “Let’s go, then,” said Brenda.

  The four friends snuck through silent corridors, avoiding technicians, soldiers, guards and scientists with whom they had lived most of their lives. A tearful last goodbye wasn’t possible: it would only alert everyone of the kids’ plan.

  Hiroto had seen how the confidence slowly vanished from world leaders and the great multi-national sponsors as the sickness of his sensei worsened. The secret meetings. His friends and he had caught fragments of conversation: the investment in the Project had overreached their budgets. Countries were in recession. Other companies demanded payback for their collaboration. The prototypes in the interior of the ship were so revolutionary, so bleeding-edge, that they would take decades to mass-produce. And everything for the remote shot that Amaterasu offered –and the ship was in kids’ hands…

  The Amaterasu Project happened during an opportunity window, a special moment in Mankind’s history when the grey clouds had given way to a brief ray of sunlight. Today that moment had passed, and the light quickly dimmed.

  So Hiroto, Junko, Brenda and Abner delved into the entrails of the installation that lay in the hollowed interior of a mountain. They reached the great central vault over which everything else was built. As they had secretly practiced for months, the kids disabled the alarms and injected software into the computers so the launch sequences would start ahead of schedule.

  While the rest of the world mourned the dead genius, who had quickened the progress of humanity by several decades, his young chosen ones arrived in front of the ship that had been the man’s dream. Hiroto was sure the sensei would have approved their plan.

  He held his breath. The great silver ship, fruit of the colossal effort of Mankind’s elite as directed by one man’s dream. In its core lay the power to break the chains that relativity imposed over space travel: the light-speed constant which paled when compared to the impossible distances of the universe. The ship held the power to cross the dimensions, of joining points of space and time.

  Hiroto must have barely seen it a couple of times, always in different states of construction. But never finished, in all its glory.

  “Let’s go, Hiro,” Abner told him, “we have to board right now.” They hurried to the launch-platform, were Junko and Brenda waited for them. As they rose on the lift, Hiroto examined with worry the chamber they left behind. The soldiers must be already on their way… Even with the kids’ precautions, alarms had started blaring.

  Amaterasu’s doors opened to greet them. The inside smelled of metal and oil and the air had the clinical touch of the life-support machines which would keep the kids alive during the years of travel that awaited them. The passageway after the decompression chamber extended in every direction, deeper and deeper inside the ship which would become their home. It was bigger than it looked.

  They hurried towards the cabin. Although Hiroto had memorized every single control panel, he had imagined the cabin as one from a science-fiction tale: chromed flight-controls and huge control panels with flashing little lights, filling the walls. Instead, the Amaterasu had a cabin like the interior of the old shuttles he had seen in pictures and videos. It was almost insulting for the first interstellar ship in history. He smiled when he imagined the insulted look in the engineer’s face whom had built it, telling him, “each centimeter in this ship is worth millions, Hiro.”

  The four kids took their places in their flight-seats and Hiroto turned one little key in the corner of the control panels. With a buzz, the ship came alive. Hiroto felt the brief current of the air-recycling machinery when it came online. The cabin had no windows: it was sealed; but a screen in front of them turned on to show them the outside world.

  Soldiers came into the vault just as Junko finished the last steps in her sequence. Above the kids, the metal dome opened slowly while Amaterasu rose in its platform. The soldiers, to Hiroto, looked like angry ants, unable to come too close to the mighty propellers. What would they do when they understood they could not stop the launch anymore?

  Amaterasu rose with a powerful roar. Hiroto fought against the controls during the brutal acceleration, giving the computer the final adjustments required for a perfect launch. The ship left behind dome, and installation, and eventually, Earth itself. Above the kids, the blue sky parted to give way for the stars while the acceleration glued them to their seats. And suddenly, Hiroto felt weightless. Gravity stayed back on Earth. Amaterasu was free.

  “The MC core is ready to jump,” announced Brenda, who at only sixteen years old already had a Ph.D. in physics and understood better than anyone living the complexity of the MC core.

  It was the heart of the Amaterasu. It held the power to reduce the four dimensions to mere points in a Cartesian plane.

  “Waiting for the order, Hiro. Remember, once we jump, there is no going back.”

  The MC core bent space. Thanks to the feed of a motor capable of synthesizing black matter from hydrogen molecules, Amaterasu could cross impossible distances in merely a second. It was an incredible technological advancement. By itself it almost launched humanity into a new golden age. And, nonetheless, the MC had a price: the exit coordinates for a jump appeared on the computer as different from its arrival coordinates for the previous point.

  Simply, for the MC, the physica
l laws that dictated the existence of a straight line, were irrelevant. Like a car which traveled backwards for the same road it had used, and then somehow arrived at a different country than the one he started in.

  Hiroto’s sensei had dedicated whole decades to deciphering the equations that ruled the MC core. He never got close.

  But he never stopped believing, either. And now, Hiroto, Junko, Brenda and Abner would go forward into the cosmos. They would fill the ship’s computer with coordinates after coordinates. Eventually, according to the sensei’s theory, the computer would discover the principle that had eluded him, using just sheer brute processing power.

  “Activate the MC,” said Hiroto. In his flight-console he started the astrophysical operations that would allow them to jump close to planets of certain characteristics: the jump was almost at random, but he could prune the choosing-pool. Gravitational wells, energy emissions, radiation… it all was part of the algorithms that allowed the ship to avoid jumping out into the inside of a star or the middle of an asteroid field. That made Hiroto the ship’s pilot. The life of the ship and all of his friends were in his hands.

  “To boldly go where no one–” quoted Abner, from an old show. Before he finished, Brenda activated the MC core and the space before them compressed as in a reverse explosion, the light of the stars fused into one single white point in front of them. Amaterasu didn’t even shake. When the MC field dispersed and the universe returned to normal, Hiroto couldn’t recognize the stars in front of him.

  That was the first of thousands of jumps. The computer carried the count of the days and during every one, they jumped thousands of times. After three years of traveling, they found alien life. And five years after that, they lost Abner.

  Hiroto scratched with frustration his rough three-days beard, with a hand that had become callous after the constant work in the controls of Amaterasu.

  “I know, Brenda. But we can’t stay any longer. The mission—”

  “Screw the mission,” Brenda spat with bitterness. She had become a strong woman, with steel eyes and a forehead crisscrossed with lines of expression. “I can’t stay another ten years locked away in that ship, Hiro. I can’t. How can you? That’s our tomb you want us to come back to.”

  Hiroto withheld a curse. He needed Brenda, that was the truth. The maintenance she gave to Amaterasu’s systems was so important in Abner’s absence… And she was also his friend.

  “But you first thought of her as your specialist,” a cynical voice inside of him told him. “Always moving forward, no matter the cost, right? For twenty years, you three have been the slaves of Amaterasu.”

  And the ship needed maintenance, always, like a ravenous god demanding sacrifices.

  The first it had claimed was their youth. But that wasn’t enough. The ship consumed even more. Hiroto, at first, thought before every jump, “this is it. This is the one that frees us, at last.” Those thoughts had vanished with the years. Now he had only his mission and his crew.

  “Tell him, Junko,” Brenda said to the other woman, “we can’t spend any more years wasting away in that jail, hoping to find another planet like Host. Once we jump there is no going back. And how many others like Carzarot are waiting for us?”

  Hiroto grimaced. Carzarot was the second planet with life that they had found. The first with ‘intelligent’ life. It was also the planet where Abner died.

  The things they found there… The claws, filled with poison; and the screaming… at the end, trying to get to the safety of Amaterasu, they hadn’t even recovered their friend’s body. It would forever lay in that dusty planet, a testimony of their failure.

  Abner died before losing his faith in the old man’s dream. Before the ten years they spent in the ship, watching dead and dry planets. His last words had been: “Go back to the ship. I’m stronger, I’ll stall them from here.” And that was exactly what he did. In the the cave where they found the inhabitants of Carzarot, Abner bought them, with his life, the few precious meters that separated them from Amaterasu. And Hiroto had paid that sacrifice by ordering lift-off, and leaving behind the barely recognizable corpse of his friend.

  Hiroto dreamed of Carzarot for a long time. Now, thankfully, he barely dreamed at all.

  “Brenda, I can’t,” said Junko, softly, bringing Hiroto back to the present. Some days, it seemed only her voice could achieve that feat. “This is our purpose… and you know he will never abandon it.”

  “I understand,” Brenda said, “you will throw your life away to be at his side. At least you will have that garden in the greenhouse…… Well, maybe finding that damned equation is impossible. Have you thought about it? I have. For twenty years.

  “There is nothing, guys. Only an old man who couldn’t accept there was something he couldn’t solve. And four teenagers that bought him a cheap story about a dream. He lied to us, Junko, goddammit. He lied and Hiroto knows it and not even then will he allow us to leave that monster in the shape of a space ship. Because he is just like him.”

  Neither Hiroto nor Junko said anything. They couldn’t. After almost thirty years traveling together, the three knew each other as well as they knew themselves. Brenda had hit exactly where both of them hurt the most.

  The woman’s anger dissipated: behind the rage there was only a deep sadness, and that hurt Hiroto the most.

  He remembered one of the artificial nights of Amaterasu, when he had woken after a nightmare worse than the others. It had been a week after Carzarot, when the shock and terror had given way to other feelings. He woke up thinking he was still covered in Abner’s blood and that the wrecked body of his friend tried to drag him into the underside of that desert planet. “Why did you leave me, Hiro? I’m so lonely here…”

  The cosmos was a big, empty space. And they were so alone…

  “Here we could be happy,” Brenda told them in a whisper. Almost begging them. “We will never have another shot like this, I’m sure of it. You know it, right, Hiro?”

  “Yes.”

  This was the first civilized world they had found. The Hosts, as Junko had named them, contacted them when the ship jumped near the orbit of the planet. Later they had told Hiroto and the others that it was the first time something like that interrupted their contemplation of the night-sky.

  Hiroto had almost ordered another immediate jump when Brenda told him the Amaterasu had received an incoming message. But his friend had had a hunch. And Hiroto decided to take the risk: If Carzarot and this other world, the only two with intelligent life they had found, were the same… maybe it was for the best that humanity never followed their trail.

  They had lived more than two years on Host. Their stay had been peaceful, the Hosts were kind, curious people. Since the beginning they had dedicated the efforts of their xeno-psychologists to try and solve the differences between life forms. What advantage Earth had on technology, Hosts had on social progress.

  “How Mankind would change,” Hiroto had thought, one day, “if they discovered that on one corner of the universe we have brothers.” And with the old man’s dream, that was possible. Even if it was a long shot.

  Hiroto knew he would never be free of the grasp of the silver ship. He would never allow himself to be.

  Brenda contemplated the purple and orange sky of the world that had allowed them to heal. For a moment, no one said anything. Then she made a choice:

  “At least one more day, Hiro. Let’s stay one more day. Then we can go back to that ship and finish what we started.”

  Hiroto nodded. One more day. “Thank you,” was all that Brenda said, with a sad smile. The woman was a sister to him. And now, her heart was breaking.

  What would have Abner done?

  The three of them walked together around the pillars surrounded by alien flowers. They lived in a crystal palace where a Hosts crew spent almost every moment of the day studying them, getting to know them. Hosts weren’t mammals, but they had emotions and kept friendships. Hiroto had begun to understand their body
language and when he and his friends told the Hosts about their parting, he recognized sadness, but they didn’t stop them. But Xen made them an offer.

  “I’ll come with you,” said Xen, a little Host biologist who had become a good friend of the Amaterasu’s crew. “I’m smart, I can learn much about your ship. I’ll help maintaining it.”

  “Xen, there is a very real chance you will never see your people again.”

  “I understand that. But meeting you has been the culmination of my many existences. This is my chance that will never come again. Traveling while listening the song of the void is a dream for my people.”

  Near the Host, Junko hid a tear and Brenda’s face was a mask. Hiroto avoided her eyes. Instead, he turned to the planet that he would never see again and tried to etch it forever in his memory. He knew he would need it, later, on the eternal vigils of the Amaterasu.

  That night, Hiroto went to Junko’s room. The woman was already up, and didn’t ask for explanations. They walked together, like a pair of shadows, across the Hosts palace, until they reached Xen’s chambers.

  “We are leaving a bit earlier than we thought,” Hiroto explained to the Host. He repeated his warning, but the biologist was ready, and didn’t ask any questions. Xen took a small suitcase made of a material that didn’t exist back on Earth. He filled it with tools and personal trinkets, along the test-tubes that Junko and him had managed to germinate during trials in the Amaterasu’s greenhouse. Those seeds were compatible with the ones from Earth. They would be sisters.

  The three crossed the palace without making any noise and without finding anyone. Xen knew well the road and guided them outside in few minutes.

  It was as if the entire planet slept. They made it to Amaterasu without being disturbed. The ship waited atop a hill covered in golden grass, and from there a Host city revealed itself, with crystalline buildings that shone merrily in the distance.

  They entered Amaterasu, who welcomed them as if they never had left. Everything was in its place. In a corner of the depressurization chamber Hiroto saw Brenda’s space-suit and his heart ached with sadness.