Girl on Mars (Girl on the Moon Book 2)

by Jack McDonald Burnett

  Ryan came to Palo Alto to have dinner with Conn one autumn Saturday night—congratulations on his new job. They met at an Indian place called Cafe Bombay that Conn loved. Ryan liked it, too. Conn had a cosmo, Ryan stuck to beer. Conn invited Ryan to her place for an after-dinner drink.

  Conn told Ryan about Yongpo’s company, and how excited she was. She called it Interstellar Aerospace. She felt funny calling it Conn Air talking to Ryan. Whatever it was called, Ryan was thrilled for her. They made a congratulatory toast for Conn’s good fortune, too.

  “How’s all this been compared to when you got back from the moon?”

  “Coming home from the moon was worse,” she said. As she said it, she wondered if it was true, or she just thought so because Peo died the day she got back from the moon, and she was mourning her during the post-mission media blitz. But she cited being more experienced with interviewers, being more experienced selecting interviewers, and the general lay of the land: the first mission to Mars, as exciting and historic as it was, wasn’t first contact with an alien race on the moon. And nobody was trying to get to know her anymore—they pretty much knew everything.

  “I don't know how you do it. You're in the media twice as often as I am and it's already overwhelming for me, and repetitive,” he said.

  “Baby, I’m a star,” Conn told him.

  “Might not know it now?” Ryan said. “Baby but I R?”

  Conn was delighted that somebody else got a fifty-year-old Prince reference.

  “If you like the Feelstronauts, we might be destined to be together,” she said.

  Ryan said he liked the Feelstronauts.

  Conn shrugged and said it was destiny.

  Ryan stood, and Conn stood too. They kissed, and before it was over Conn was already grabbing the back of Ryan’s head and making his mouth stay right where it was. Conn touched him as they made out, his hips, his biceps. She wanted his shirt off, so he took it off. Conn followed suit with her shirt and bra. They made out again, for long minutes before Conn invited him to bed.

  Ryan was reverent in bed—there was no other word for it. Conn loved it. He worshiped her, acutely tuned to what would make her feel good. She tried to get him to be a little naughty, and he took to it like he’d been doing it all his life. Which he assured her he had not. And he had stamina. Conn idly wondered if her physical fitness training had anything to do with that.

  # # #

  The next day, Conn cleaned and dusted and did laundry, her Sunday chores, with a spring in her step. She called and told Izzy. “Happiest day of his life, I bet,” Izzy said. Izzy had seen that he was attracted to Conn; Conn hadn't thought he was serious, which was no surprise to either woman. She called a couple of friends from school to find out what they were doing and whether they were interested in a startup, calls she had been putting off because she didn’t have the confidence necessary to cold call. She had plenty of confidence that day.

  As the afternoon waned, she took a walk. The air was clean and smelled like freshly cut grass. On her walk, her usual doubts crept up on her. He hadn’t had as good a time as she did. He had been trying to sleep with her and now with that accomplished he wouldn’t be interested anymore. And the big one: she would screw things up somehow. She arrived back home more level than she’d been when she left.

  Contrary to many of her doubts, Ryan seemed happy as could be to be seeing Conn. They dated for weeks, the sex turning more mundane but remaining good, and fun. They ate in more often—Ryan wasn’t breaking the bank at his new job, and didn’t want Conn always paying.

  But after weeks had passed, she noticed that Ryan remained enthusiastic about them while Conn had downshifted to more comfortable than excited. She tried to convince herself that if you’re comfortable, keep doing it. “Comfortable” was a plausible synonym for “happy.” And there was no rule that both parties in a relationship had to have the same investment in it.

  # # #

  Conn had business with Ryan’s father, on the company’s behalf. Yongpo was looking for investors. Theirs was the kind of startup Marcus Stoll routinely nurtured into successful low bidders on government contracts.

  Stoll welcomed Conn at his Newport Beach home, and they sat in one of the family rooms and talked. Stoll was grateful that no one had told anyone about his portal. “By now we’ve repeated the story of our getting dropped off here so often that it would make us look bad to spill the beans,” Conn told him. She wasn’t sure if it was true, but she had learned how to talk to potential recruits and investors.

  Conn made her pitch. Stoll listened.

  Then he said, “I want to go back.”

  “To Mars?” Conn asked, brightly.

  “To Mars. I want to rent one of the Pelorian spacecraft Dyna-Tech is afraid to use and go to Mars in days. Land. That’ll take some work, but we can do it. Fix or replace the portal. Put more up. Finish what we started.”

  Conn couldn’t help herself: “But you got out of the first Mars mission. You weren’t involved, at the end. Why the renewed interest?”

  “Oh, Conn, come on,” Stoll said. “I still had Ryan to make overtures; that was the point. That and making him the first man on Mars.”

  “Which he was,” Conn pointed out.

  “Technically,” Stoll said sourly. “In any event, I got out of the Mars mission at precisely the time I knew you would take over paying for it. You probably know to the penny how much I saved.” Conn narrowed her eyes at him. “And my mission was still completed. The Sidereals aren’t ready to trade yet, but they’ll deal with me when they are.”

  Conn didn’t know what to say. She could feel herself reddening. She chose, “well done, then. You saved a lot of money, believe me. Enough to afford an investment in Interstellar.” She recovered nicely, if she did say so herself. Stoll agreed to a second meeting involving Yongpo as well.

  Conn got what she had wanted when she walked into the house.

  What she wanted when she walked out of the house was for Marcus Stoll to be aboard his Pelorian spacecraft when it exploded.

  TWENTY-NINE

  They're Here

  November - December, 2039

  The first week of November, Conn took a business trip to Chicago. She had some ex-classmates and professors, and one potential investor, she wanted to talk to about Interstellar Aerospace. But she also enjoyed each opportunity she had to visit the city. Seeing her family was nice, and she’d promised herself she would do more of it. She also felt at home in Chicago like nowhere else. She missed it.

  By mid-November, Conn’s recruitment efforts had landed six new employees, and one for their management team: Jake Dander, who’d flown her to the moon twice. Jake was forty-eight and would have still gone into space if anybody hired him, but no one had in a couple of years. Conn made him the Chief Astronautics Officer, responsible for astronaut recruitment and training.

  In light of the astronauts’ rescue from Mars, President Lanihan proposed a bill to Congressional leadership ending the war against the Pelorians. It got a floor vote, but was defeated in the House, 225-213. Persisting’s selflessness didn’t quite make up for the lives of the Sirius astronauts.

  November twenty-second, there was a minor earthquake on Mars near the Sidereals’ network of tunnels and hollows. Conn hoped there was no damage and no injuries. That Saturday, curious about whether the dead portal was still standing, Yongpo told the system to boot up. Twenty minutes later came the message from Mars that it had been successful. In fact, the portal indicated it was ready. It had never done that before.

  Meridith Williams was a sometime Dyna-Tech astronaut at the space station doing some work on behalf of NASA. When she heard about the portal turning on, she radioed that she was willing to try to go to Mars. Yongpo hesitated. What if it worked well enough to get Williams there, but not to get her back? Couldn’t she be stranded on Mars?

  By then, Dyna-Tech management knew about the miracle on Mars, and forbade anybody from going through the portal until they could
send an appropriately trained astronaut who had, not incidentally, signed Dyna-Tech’s standard waiver of liability.

  Williams was undaunted, and Yongpo took Dyna-Tech’s refusal as an opportunity to quit his job at Dyna-Tech to devote himself full time to Conn Air. Yongpo hired Williams on the spot. He beamed her a schedule of when the portals would be lined up.

  Williams had a six hour wait until the space station and Phobos portals were lined up. At the appointed time, she passed through the portal and disappeared, materializing on Phobos an instant later, they hoped. She had seventy-six minutes to wait until the second Phobos portal was lined up with the portal on the surface of Mars. At the appointed time Yongpo held his breath, imagining Williams teleporting to Mars.

  She would only stay for minutes. Yongpo imagined her teleporting back to Phobos. The first Phobos portal was still lined up with the space station, but it would take Williams some time to travel from one to the other. Half an hour passed. Forty minutes. After forty-eight minutes, Williams reappeared in the space station, exhilarated and wanting the record to reflect she was the fifth person on Mars. Yongpo raised his fists over his head, and the skeleton crew that had stuck with him until late on a holiday-weekend Saturday night to see if the portals would work applauded and hooted.

  Shortly after all this, Dyna-Tech installed two more portals, each linked to the space station—one in Sunnyvale, one in Houston. Astronauts working on the space station could sleep in their beds at night and go back to work the next day.

  After Thanksgiving, Conn felt like her relationship with Ryan was over. There was a problem when one person had more invested in a relationship than the other. It led to unmet expectations and moderate-to-severe annoyance. Conn considered him clingy; Ryan considered her cold. They fought, they didn’t speak to one another for days, and the sex wasn’t any good anymore. They had gone off in different directions far enough to snap the frayed string that was holding them together.

  If Conn were honest, her main problem with Ryan was that he reminded her of Grant. At this stage, a relationship with someone who made her think of Grant was not going to be guilt-free. Maybe she should have told Ryan that, but she had a hard enough time admitting it to herself.

  Conn and Ryan agreed to a “break” on December tenth.

  December eleventh, the world changed.

  # # #

  There was an enormous spacecraft orbiting the moon, bigger than anything they had seen the Pelorians use. There had been rumors in the aerospace community, Conn had heard them, but now it was on NewsAmerica. Conn remembered that the Pelorians had supposedly come to the moon in arks that no one had detected. They would have been detected now, with so many US and Russian satellites circling the moon. Maybe that’s all it was, a Pelorian ark.

  December twelfth, it was confirmed that the spacecraft’s orbit, about forty kilometers from the surface, took it directly over the Pelorian fortress. The first unclassified images of the spacecraft were circulated to the media. It was difficult to judge scale from the still images, but the world took NASA’s word for the fact that it was the size of the Loop in downtown Chicago—2.5 square kilometers. The usual suspects assumed the spacecraft was a new, terrible Pelorian war machine.

  December thirteenth, NewsAmerica reported that the enormous spacecraft was dropping several projectiles into the Pelorian force field, two or three per pass over the fortress. They weren’t exploding, as far as anyone could tell, but they appeared to be passing through the force field, and the satellite watching couldn’t see what happened after that.

  Conn had a bad feeling about the spacecraft. It wasn’t Pelorian, now she was sure of it. It made her sick to think that it might be Aphelial. The Aphelials had been hounding the Pelorians from place to place for Conn didn’t know how long. And they were bad news.

  December fourteenth, three more spacecraft the size of downtown Chicago appeared in orbit around the moon.

  Ryan called Conn wanting to talk about the new alien spacecraft. Conn told him that she hoped they could be friends again someday, but she didn’t want to be buddy-buddy with him four days after they broke up.

  “You said it was a break,” Ryan said.

  “And you think the break is over now?”

  “No, but you’re talking about being friends someday. I just wish you would be honest with me.”

  Conn felt like she’d been nothing but honest. “You want more out of a relationship than I do. How much more honest do you want me to be? Because I’m thinking you don’t.”

  That seemed to hurt, as it was intended to, and Conn felt bad about it, but it ended the conversation. And Ryan needed to be talked to that way. Nothing else was working.

  December fifteenth, Thursday, Izzy flew to northern California to see Conn. It was business: now that Conn Air was truly ramping up, Izzy wanted to talk about making the move. The women had little opportunity to focus on business, because that day the four great spacecraft dropped down to roughly three kilometers above the surface of the moon, and stopped. Three over the spread of the force field, one above the peak of the mountain at its center. At its highest point, the Pelorian force field was about a kilometer off the ground.

  Not long after that, the bombing started. Now the projectiles were exploding on the force field, with great flashes of light that momentarily blinded the satellites. It was difficult to get a cohesive picture even from four satellites. Three of the four enormous spacecraft were bombing. The one over the mountain wasn’t, yet.

  Just hours after the bombing started, after Earth had had a good look at it, the feeds from the satellites winked out.

  “We’ve got to do something,” Conn said.

  “What can we do?” Izzy asked her.

  “I mean me. I’ve got to do something.”

  THIRTY

  Do Something

  December 15, 2039

  Conn had an Interstellar Aerospace company American Express card. She chartered a jet with it. There was no time to worry about whose money it was, or how to pay for it when the bill came due. She felt sure Yongpo would have told her to go ahead and do it, if she hadn’t been too frazzled to call him.

  Izzy accompanied her. They flew from San Jose to John Wayne Airport in Orange County. There they hired a car to take them to Marcus Stoll’s place.

  Stoll was home, and harried as he answered the door. “You’re here about the portal,” he said. “I’ve had to shut it down. Pelorians were coming through it. At one point I had twenty Pelorians in my family room.” Then put some of them in another one, Conn thought. “The nitrogen. They can’t tolerate the nitrogen in our air. They started to get sick after twenty minutes, half an hour. They had to go back.”

  “They lived in Russia—didn’t they?” Izzy said.

  “Right,” Conn said. “They had breathers that filtered out the nitrogen when they lived on Wrangel Island. They’ll be back, with breathers.”

  “I can’t accommodate hundreds of refugees,” Stoll said. “Thousands. I don’t have any way of helping them.”

  “You help them by giving them a place to be where they’re not going to get bombed to death,” Conn said. “Besides, hardly anybody knows about the portal.” Persisting had said so. “You won’t get that many Pelorians.”

  Stoll seemed to consider this. “No,” he finally said. “I can’t. It’s not my problem. Besides, how shall I say they all got here?”

  “You’re worried about getting in trouble with the law, at a time like this?”

  “I’m worried about getting charged with treason, Conn, yes. They have the death penalty for treason.”

  Conn couldn’t force him to allow dozens of Pelorians in his home—or she could have, but then she would probably be the one getting arrested. “Fine,” she said. “Turn it on for me. I’m going to the moon.”

  Izzy, who had been told that was the point of the trip, was nonetheless skeptical. “What are you going to do?” she asked. “Stop the Aphelials from bombing?”

  “I can
’t save them all,” Conn said. “But I can save one of them.”

  # # #

  Conn had brought her breathing bubble and her personal T-field. She donned these as Stoll continued to insist he was unwilling to activate the portal. She didn’t want to risk the settlement being damaged enough to be depressurized.

  “Let me go through,” Conn said, not asked. “In exactly one hour, turn it back on and I’ll come back with my friend.”

  “They might not have an hour,” Izzy said. “They might be totally destroyed already.”

  “If they’re totally destroyed already, then I waste an hour on the moon. It’s not that big a deal.”

  “Unless the Aphelials are occupying the place,” Stoll grumbled. Conn hadn’t thought of that.

  “But Conn,” Izzy said—Conn rolled her eyes; then she realized she was being unfair: Izzy wasn’t being an astronaut, she was being a friend—“How are you supposed to find somebody in an hour in a settlement of eight hundred thousand?”

  “I have a plan,” was all Conn would say on the matter. Despite her frustration with Izzy, Conn would have liked to have her with her on the moon. But Izzy didn’t have a bubble or a T-field.

  “Exactly one hour?” Stoll said.

  “Exactly one hour,” Conn said.

  “You won’t have a line of sixty-five other Pelorian refugees waiting behind you?”

  “I can’t make you accept refugees,” Conn said. “So I give you my word. Me and my friend. Of course, he has several avatars.” Stoll narrowed his eyes at her.