Journey Back to Mars: a sci-fi collection

by Hugo Huesca

  “He lies in everything he says,” thought the kid, “and dad just believes him.”

  “Tell you what, I’ll get these two back to their parents, so you and your son can get some one-on-one time,” Old Sullivan told his dad.

  “No way!” Lizzy exclaimed, but Sullivan was already beside her, grabbing her gently by the arm, like a grandfather who has to reprimand his grandsons. The girl tried to shake him off for a bit, then went pale and just looked at him in fear. Was he speaking to her, threatening just like he had done with Quark?

  The kid walked towards the monster, but his dad grabbed Quark by the arm, and dragged him towards the decompression’s chambers, with strength that was beyond his eleven-year-old chances to resist. “C’mon kiddo, we are going to find your mom, and have a talk with her.”

  “I can’t leave them with him!” exclaimed Quark. His dad gave him a dangerous look, that said: You are in trouble now, keep it up and you’ll be in real trouble. It was like trying to out-push a wall, it was impossible. His dad started to drag him without any effort, and he could only see powerless the silhouette of lanky Old Sullivan at the side of his friend…

  “We’ll be fine, Quark!” Orion yelled behind him, trying to sound brave. Then father and son walked out of the building and got into the connecting passageways. Quark had never felt as alone as he did then.

  “Why won’t you listen to me?” Quark told his dad, while he and Quark’s mom exchanged looks of disapproval.

  “What you did back there was very rude, Quark. I know you are upset about Mr. Danglers, but this is no way of going about it. What is poor Mr. Sullivan going to think of you now?” said his mom.

  “He thinks of everyone as food; he murdered Mr. Danglers!” And he had left his friends with him. He stared flames at his dad. The man didn’t even understand what he had done!

  “That’s it, young man, you are grounded,” Dad exclaimed, and Quark knew there was no point trying to talk to them. They wouldn’t listen. It was parenting-time for them, that they were wrong was unthinkable.

  And the way Old Sullivan played with everyone’s mind… Now that he knew how the trick felt, Quark was certain he had never seen the man before yesterday, ever. He had simply arrived and wandered everywhere, reading people’s minds… And had started feeding! How long until he was hungry again? Years, days?

  “He has my friends”, Quark thought, desperate.

  “No more movies until next month, and no going out either. You will come back home straight from school; I will be right outside waiting for you. And no conference calls, either. Until you say you’re sorry for what you did to poor Old Sullivan!”

  Something nasty brewed inside Quark, and his eyes filled with tears of anger.

  “You’re the ones who are going to be sorry, for leaving my friends alone with that monster.”

  “Quark…” began his mom, she tried to hold him, but he shook her off.

  “No! Whatever happens is on you. I won’t let them alone to get… dehydrated by that thing!” He said, and before his parents could react he had turned around and ran off into the complex.

  “Quark! Stop right there…” they tried to follow him, but he was fast and agile, and they were two scientists in Martian gravity who weren’t all that strict with their muscle-exercises. He avoided repair-bots and made sharp turns into crowded hallways where he could move among technicians and chemists without stopping. He crawled into vents that he and his friends had used to play for years, and where he barely fit anymore, with his space-suit dragging him down.

  He managed to lose them by going around the complex in a circle, running on instinct, and he made it to Danglers’ garden before he even knew it, by taking the long road.

  He didn’t want to stop there, because his dad may come looking, but he needed to catch his breath and didn’t want to stand in plain view for long.

  “I didn’t see him in the Bureau office,” he thought, punching the code to open the door (which the Futurisians had stolen from some technician’s log account, in what seemed like another lifetime). “He could be anywhere by now. Even out of the Colony…”

  How could Quark find him? The plan failed before they even finished putting it in motion, Sullivan had captured two-thirds of the Futurisians and all it took had been to ask an adult to help him.

  “Even with the evidence, they would never have believed us. It’s not only his telepathy; it’s how they,” his parents, “didn’t even try to fight it. They just accepted it as the truth.”

  How was he supposed to oppose something like that?

  The door to the garden opened, startling him. He looked up and gasped when he saw Lizzy standing there. The girl looked pale as a ghost, she shook with fright and was munching a lock of her auburn hair as she did when she was nervous.

  “I thought I might find you here,” she said, in a whisper.

  “Lizzy!”

  He ran to her and hugged her. “Are you okay? What happened? I thought he had caught you,” he said, stepping back. She didn’t seem dehydrated, to him, but he wasn’t a doctor.

  “I’m fine,” she said, taking a deep breath, gathering strength, “Orion saved me. Old Sullivan was dragging us outside; he said it was for a quick planetary walk. I thought he was going to throw us planet-side without helmets… But Orion, he pretended to trip, and Sullivan lost his balance… He could’ve gotten away, but instead nudged me free. He told me to run…”

  Quark thought of his friend standing his ground against a devil and a murderer. He was terrified, and yet, he had managed to fight back.

  “But Sullivan caught him, instead,” he completed Lizzy’s tale. What would the monster do to Orion now that he had opposed him? He shuddered at the idea. “We are getting him back, Lizzy.”

  She nodded and cleaned her tears with the gauntlets of her space-suit. “I know. That’s why I looked for you, he gave me this.”

  Out of the small compartment at the legs of the suits, she took a tablet. Quark knew what that meant immediately.

  “Orion’s tablet!”

  “Yeah,” she said, showing it to him. On the screen, they could see the view of the complex the cameras they had installed gave them. Quark even saw his parents looking for him near Xin’s office, which was not far from here. Old Sullivan and Orion, though, were nowhere in sight.

  “If Sullivan took him planet-side, they could be anywhere,” he said, thinking aloud. Lizzy agreed and pressed a button rendered on a corner of the small screen. It changed into a crude green map of the Colony, with red points at every corner where they had installed a camera.

  “I found it while looking for you,” she explained. “Every camera has a micro-GPS antenna installed on them. As long as they don’t get out of range…”

  She pressed a button and the view of the Colony changed into the Mars’ territory around it. Quark saw a bunch of red dots clustered near them and another bunch that was quickly gaining on the compound.

  “Orion, you are brilliant!” the kid whispered. Then he said to Lizzy: “How long is the range on these?”

  “Not far, I suppose,” she said, “the receiver is on the tablet, so if they get very far, we will lose them.”

  “Then there is no time to lose,” he said. They were moving quickly. He tried to check the view of the cameras on Orion, but they must be still in his pocket. He would refuse to risk revealing them to the vampire until he had no other choice, or they stopped.

  “We should get an adult to find him,” Lizzy said because she was still the conscience of the Futurisians, and a Martian must respect her job description even if it’s unappealing.

  “No way, Lizzy, you know what he can do to adult’s minds,” Quark said. “Somehow we can resist it, but they will simply believe he was right to carry Orion wherever he is taking him. We have to do this on our own.”

  “I figured,” she said, and she turned towards the door. “But they are moving fast, and I’m not good driving a buggy. And stealing one would be worse than steali
ng apples or skipping school…”

  “Oh,” Quark said, with a dangerous smile, “we’re not stealing a buggy.”

  “Well, that’s good to hear, but what—”

  “We’re stealing a Coaster. Come on, my parents are about to get here.”

  Using the cameras they had set-up, avoiding Quark’s parents was piecemeal. Quark and Lizzy ran into the decompression garage where the Coaster and dad’s buggy awaited.

  “There it is, c’mon!”

  He got to the vehicle, and even in the emergency, his eyes tingled with boyish greed. It was a flying bike, with jets instead of wheels and no Life Support. Well, they already had their spacesuits on. Using a Coaster could be extremely dangerous, even lethal. It was also great fun. He was sure his mom liked to be late just for a chance to ride on the Coaster without interruptions. Officially, it was an emergency transport, designed for safe, fast, movement during a sandstorm or for a quick exploration trip into difficult terrain that was too vertical or treacherous for the buggy to withstand.

  His mom treated it as a cool flying jet-bike, because, well, that’s what it was. Quark had never driven one, no matter how much he begged, and he had been dying to.

  “She will have to understand,” he thought, fidgeting with the controls, “it’s for a good cause.”

  “Are you sure you can drive this thing?” Lizzy asked him, eying the jets suspiciously.

  “Sure, I’ve seen lots of videos,” he replied, with confidence. He took out the polyplastic helmet out of his suits pocket. The polyplastic could be as flexible as a plastic bag while folded, but with a mere sonic signal from his suit, it expanded slowly and became a solid helmet. Quark put it on and Lizzy did the same with hers.

  “They are almost out of range, let’s go,” she urged him, staring at the screen.

  Quark mounted up and Lizzy seated behind him. He gave the all-clear to the chamber’s computer, and the Martian atmosphere filtered in for a moment before the door rolled up into the ceiling, and then Quark pressed the accelerator with all his might.

  The Coaster’s engine roared and streams of blue fire came from its jets, and they were in the air chasing after the monster that had kidnapped Orion.

  When Frank and Catherine Campbell realized that their son was away from the complex and had taken with him the Coaster into Mars planet-side, they panicked.

  “What is he thinking?” Catherine exclaimed.

  “I don’t know; this is nothing like him. I thought it was some game that got out of hand, or—” He didn’t finish the sentence.

  They arrived at the Bureau’s building and then into Bob Cunningham’s office. The man was working on a bunch of reports and looked like he hadn’t slept in a while.

  “Frank, Catherine?” He said, and then he saw the looks on their faces: “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s Quark,” said Catherine, “he has stolen my Coaster, we think he is chasing Old Sullivan. He thinks the poor man is a monster or some-such. I’ve never seen him act like this before, I don’t know what came to him…”

  “Well, they must be somewhere near the complex,” Cunningham reasoned, trying to appease the scientist, “Let’s ask Mr. Porter, he has GPS tracking on all the vehicles in the Colony. I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding, Catherine.”

  So he opened a channel to Security’s office, which was in a nearby building, connected to the Administration. Porter answered the call on the third ring and his face appeared floating atop Cunningham’s desk.

  “Hello, James,” said Cunningham, “we need your help for a situation here. Young Quark is missing, he has taken a Coaster and is searching for Old Sullivan around the complex, I think it’s a kid’s game. Mind looking for the Coaster assigned to Campbell family?”

  “Quark did that?” James Porter’s head mumbled, confused, and then angry, “that kid is getting reckless by the day, Campbell, I swear he is a bad influence on Orion. If you won’t reign him in, I’ll have to get my kid away from yours.”

  Frank looked indignant. He wanted to argue, but his wife put a warning hand on his arm and looked at Porter. “Please, James, hurry. The hydrogen tank is almost empty; I was going to refuel today.”

  With a sour glance, the security chief did as asked and fidgeted out of sight with his equipment back at his base. When he was back on view again, everyone could see he was pale. “He is not in the Colony anymore… I double-checked the signal, and it’s now almost fifty kilometers away. He may be heading for the mountains.”

  The Colony was built on a plain that extended several kilometers in every direction. ‘The mountains’ were giants of rock that extended length-wise for hundreds of kilometers and reached as high as twenty kilometers. They were giants in both Earth and Mars and it was a dangerous place that was only reachable by Coaster, and even then they had always performed remote experiments over there, using bots.

  What was Quark’s business in there?

  “The kid must’ve gone insane!” Porter was saying, while the Campbells imagined their only son alone in the top of a mountain, risking his life for some strange game. Except they didn’t think it was a game anymore.

  “Everyone, calm down, calm down,” Cunningham said, raising his hands, “I’m sure the kid isn’t in any danger, he is with Old Sullivan, right? The man has never given us any trouble in all these years, why start now? I think what happened was, he took him for a planet-side excursion a bit farther away than they expected, and simply forgot to report it. They will be back soon.”

  It’s not like they could ask Quark or Sullivan. They were too far away for the short-distance communication capabilities of the Colony, and no one had taken a radio.

  “I feel something isn’t right,” said Catherine, “this is not like him, Bob. Please, send someone to find him, before… something happens to him.”

  “I won’t panic over some misunderstanding, Catherine. How would it look if the Bureau’s leadership started sending rescue excursions to interrupt important work of the Colony? How would it look on our reports to Earth?”

  “Earth hasn’t answered our reports in a while, Bob,” Frank chided him. But Cunningham’s mind was made. He thanked James Porter for the help, asked him to keep everyone informed of any development and cut the line before Porter could get a word in.

  “I’ll see you guys later,” he added, then, and relaxed in his chair, “I suggest you enjoy the rest day, just like your son is doing so far.”

  “You don’t even know Old Sullivan!” Frank thought. He felt dizzy. He imagined going to the metal desk and banging Bob’s head against it. But his wife was already out of the room, so he gave the little portly man a dangerous glare and followed her.

  “What are you planning?” he told her. Catherine wasn’t one to give up without a fight.

  “Something is wrong with this,” she told him. Her hands were trembling, “I don’t think we are thinking straight. I know I remember Old Sullivan but I can’t imagine why. And Quark has never lied to us about stuff like this…”

  “Monsters don’t exist, Catherine—” started Frank, but she interrupted him:

  “And other things don’t? We are scientists, Frank, we have seen very strange things even before getting recruited for the Colony Project. Remember the telescope, back on Earth? The ruins we saw on the other side of Mars?”

  “Those were natural formations,” he said.

  “That’s what the government said. They also ordered us to choose this spot, far away from those formations, or ruins, or whatever you want to call them. I don’t know, Frank, but I know that our child is in danger and he knows something we don’t.”

  On that, he agreed with her.

  “So, what now? Cunningham won’t listen. He has shut his brain off.” Some part of him wanted him to do just the same, but the danger his son was in was keeping him aware much better than a dose of adrenaline could ever hope to.

  “We don’t need him. Let’s get Quark ourselves. That fat bureaucrat doesn’t get to decide t
his time.”

  In that moment, someone came running towards them on the passageway. It was James Porter, his overall covered in sweat. He had run all the way to them from Security.

  “My son is never far away from yours!” He explained, “I don’t know what’s the deal with that Sullivan fellow but I don’t see him appearing in any security footage before yesterday. You know, the day Mr. Danglers just fell over and died of dehydration…”

  “Oh, god, I hadn’t thought about that!” Frank exclaimed, and then, going visibly pale, added, “James, I’m so sorry! I wasn’t thinking straight, either. That Sullivan said he was bringing Orion to you and Lizzy to her mother’s—”

  “That’s why Quark is chasing after him!” Catherine realized, with horror. “He hasn’t enough fuel to come back!”

  “I’ll go get the buggy,” said Porter, “the three of them won’t fit inside just one Coaster with me, and perhaps they’ll need medical assistance. But meanwhile—”

  “I’ll get there on a Coaster,” Frank said, understanding the other man’s plan. “Catherine, go get Doctor Xin, tell her we are coming.”

  For one moment, Catherine seemed like she wanted to argue. She was the better pilot, after all, but Frank had a dangerous glint in his eyes: “There may be a fight when I reach that man Sullivan. I only know I don’t want him anywhere near the children.”

  “Just get to them,” his wife whispered. And turned to James, “I’m coming with you, then.”

  James nodded and then sent Frank the program that tracked Quark’s Coaster. “You’ll need this. I’ll meet you there as soon as I can.” He left towards the airlocks, to grab his buggy.

  “We have no other Coaster, Frank,” his wife told him. She looked as scared as he felt. He kissed her once, briefly and then said:

  “Yes, but Cunningham has one, in the Bureau’s private hangar.”

  He was going to get his kid back.

  “Stop, you are about to get us killed!” Lizzy demanded, behind Quark. The mountaintop seemed so close that it was as if they could touch it. In reality, it was still hundreds of kilometers away from them, but it was high, and they were flying just as high and at full speed.