The Piranha Solution: A Hard Science Fiction Technothriller (Ace of Space Book 1)

by John Triptych

  “Three days from now,” Errol said. “Our colonial planners call it the start of the Mars tourist season. We’ll get you on a transporter with the first driveship we’ll send out, that way you’ll beat the crowds.”

  Stilicho leaned forward. “Three days? Are you freaking kidding me?”

  “We normally run a two-month training and orientation program for our tourists, and a six-month program for our colony personnel before they launch,” Errol said. “In your case, we can wing it.”

  Stilicho finally stood up. “This is insane! I won’t go!”

  “Sit down, Stil,” Errol said calmly. “You’ve been by my side ever since I plucked you out of college. I knew then that you were special. You’re not that old, you’re in generally good shape, you’re smart, and you can think on your feet. Those are the qualities I was looking for when I handed you the job of corporate troubleshooter. Think of this as being nothing more than another assignment. I know your talents, and I’m sure you’re more than up for this.”

  Stilicho sat back down. He had a dejected look on his face. “Please don’t do this, Errol. You must have someone more qualified than me for this. I don’t know a damn thing about Mars, or the colonial operations ACE has over there.”

  Errol smiled. “Like I said, we’ll get you up to speed, so quit worrying.”

  “But, three days? You can get me qualified to go up there in three days?”

  “It’s my company, which means that I can circumvent a few things, so don’t worry about the clearances and all that, I’ll take care of it,” Errol said. “You remember Dave Conklin, our training director, right?”

  “Yeah,” Stilicho said softly. “Former NASA astronaut who joined up with ACE … like, a long time ago.”

  “Exactly,” Errol said. “I told him to run you personally through an accelerated program to get you in shape for the launch which goes up in forty-eight hours. You’ll be considered as VIP and you’ll have the transporter mostly to yourself. Our ships are designed to carry two hundred passengers, so you’ll have plenty of room.”

  The thought of being stuck in a confined space while in microgravity for days filled him with dread. Stilicho’s eyes looked down on the floor. He knew he didn’t have a choice. All of his stock options, and his pension fund would be held hostage if he didn’t. “How long will it take to get to Mars?”

  “The delta-v of our driveships is normally sixteen kilometers per second,” Errol said. “With the trans-Mars injection from low Earth orbit, that provides an extra six kilometers per second, for a total of twenty-two. You’ll be in the orbit of Mars at around thirty-two days after launch, give a day or two.”

  Stilicho exhaled slowly. He would be stuck on a spaceship for a little over a month. A part of him was interested, but it was a very tiny part. The rest of him felt like it would be a death march. “Is there any other way to do this?”

  “You’ll be heading to Mars using the fastest way possible,” Errol said. “Once the transporter launches from Earth, you’ll link up with the driveship. The driveship will then get the transporter to Mars orbit, then you’ll detach and go in for a landing right into Eridu Colony. While on the ground, the transporter will undergo ISRU refueling and will wait for you until you solve the problem, then it’s back up to orbit and link with the driveship for the journey back to Earth. The driveships we use have got NERVA propulsion, so they provide the fastest way of going there. In fact, they’re so fast that they normally go way beyond the standard injection velocity, so the ships end up doing a braking maneuver just to slow down before they even get there.”

  Stilicho’s smartglass display was on voice-activated learning mode, and it indicated that NERVA was an acronym for Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application. The concept had been developed and tested successfully by NASA in the 1960’s, but was ultimately canceled a decade later due to budget cuts. Essentially a nuclear reactor injected with propellant for thrust, NERVA engines had very good and prolonged delta-v acceleration, but current treaties restricted their use in planetary atmospheres due to possible radioactive fallout, so only the driveships that traveled in between space were equipped with them. The transporter ships that he would be a passenger in still used the old-fashioned hydrogen and liquid oxygen chemical rockets. These were good enough to get the ship to low Earth orbit, before they needed to be attached to the more economical NERVA driveships to ferry them the rest of the way. ISRU was an acronym for in situ resource utilization, which was the process of manufacturing fuels at the landing site itself, and the transporter would replenish its fuel tanks using locally produced elements while on Mars. Everything seemed so neat, so well thought-out, but the whole thing still bothered him. “Once I get to Mars, then what?” he asked.

  “Edgar Roth is the colony director for Eridu, and I’ve already talked to him,” Errol said. “He will be at your disposal. You’ve met Ed before, right?”

  Stilicho nodded. “Yeah, a few years back. I actually interned for him when I was still wet behind the ears as I started here.”

  “Good, good,” Errol said. “You will have full authority to run the investigation. Just make sure you don’t get in the way of the projects they’re running in Mars, unless it conflicts with the issue that you’re solving. In that case, you could talk to me and we could then work it out with Ed.”

  “So we’ll stay in contact then?”

  “Of course,” Errol said. “Mars isn’t some out of the way place where you have to send a telegram in order to talk to me. Net latency has a twenty minute delay, but other than that whatever you can access here on Earth is accessible on Mars too. I know today’s generation wants instantaneous access to communications and information at their fingertips, so you’ll have to learn to be patient. Twenty minutes isn’t all that long.”

  Stilicho was feeling lightheaded. His mind was slowly accepting the fact that he was going, and he needed to know a lot of things in order to get the job done. Since he was already sitting down with his boss, he might as well ask him everything now. “What do you think is the problem out there?”

  Errol shrugged. “It’s hard to say. The outpost had a six man crew, and they were always working in pairs, like having a dive buddy when doing Scuba diving, so no one was ever left alone. A catastrophic failure of the outpost habitat is a possibility, but they would have had some time to put on emergency life support gear, unless they were all somehow unaware or unconscious when it happened. One of the men doubled as a medic, and any sort of emergency would have always been reported and on the net within minutes.”

  Stilicho rubbed his grizzled chin. He needed a shave. “Were there any reported problems before contact was lost?”

  Errol activated his monocle. “It says here that they lost contact with some of their robots that were assigned to mark the transportation corridor to the south. A team of two men was dispatched to find the bots. That was the last entry.”

  “So if there was a failure of the habitat, then only four of the six would have been affected,” Stilicho said. “What happened to the other two?”

  “No contact with them either. The GPS locator of their rover was detected in Ares Vallis, before we had to shut down the node in that area due to the virus attacks,” Errol said. “Ed sent the rescue team over to the last reported location of the rover first was since they were closer, then the colony lost contact with the rescue team as well. This happened two days ago.”

  “So whatever could have affected the outpost might have affected the rover crew as well?”

  Errol sighed. “I have no idea. Once the link with the rescue team was lost, Ed and me agreed to restrict all EVA and vehicle travel to within Hellas Planitia- no expeditions outside of the basin. Most of the staff in the colony isn’t aware of what’s going on, so it’s best you and Ed keep this information to yourselves for the time being. I don’t want a panic to start.”

  Stilicho thought about it for a minute. “Do you think it might be some sort of microorganism that they caught?�
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  Errol smiled a little. This was what he liked about Stilicho, his troubleshooter was always good at thinking outside of the box. A virus was something he had not considered. “That is a damn good guess, Stil. When I talked to Ed the subject never came up, but nevertheless I think we need to initiate new protocols just in case there was some sort of biological contamination. We sure as hell can’t ignore the possibility of that occurring.”

  “Broaching on that subject, wasn’t there a news report about the living things we’ve encountered on Mars?”

  “You know from learning at school that we ultimately did find some life still living on Mars,” Errol said. “But they were just simple bacteria that could survive the radiation and the extreme cold temperatures of the planet. Most of them were found beneath the topsoil or underneath rocks. We’ve never found anything remotely larger than a microbe.”

  “Or maybe it’s a dormant virus that mutated after coming into contact with a human being?” Stilicho said.

  “We’ve deployed crews in the Chryse Planitia region for years and never encountered anything that proved to be dangerous,” Errol said. “All outposts also follow strict procedures to prevent contamination. Any water extracted locally has to go through a heat and filtration system that would kill any bacteria still living in it. If any of the crew used skinsuits for EVA, they would have to go through mandatory quarantine before they were allowed into the main section of the outpost habitat.”

  “Well, if Martian bacteria can survive radiation on its surface coupled with extreme cold, don’t you think they might survive the purification system we’ve set up?”

  “The purification system has been tested time and time again,” Errol said. “Strict use of the health protocols has ensured that nothing like this has happened yet.”

  “Well, maybe there was a breakdown of some sort that enabled an alien virus,” Stilicho said. “Or it could be something else. Perhaps the Chinese did it.”

  Errol snorted. “The Chinese? Why in the hell would they do that? They mostly keep to themselves ever since they set up that colony of theirs in Gale Crater. I see no reason for them to try and kidnap our people, much less intercept a search and rescue team.”

  “Who knows? Maybe they all went nuts or something,” Stilicho said. “Have you heard from them?”

  “Yeah, they send out a constant stream of nationalistic bullcrap and how they are doing so great and all that,” Errol said. “But the latest reports I’ve been getting is that they are operating at a loss, and their taxpayers are grumbling about the money they are pouring into the place.”

  “Well, they are communists and all that so it’s not a surprise is it?”

  “The Chinese are communists in name only,” Errol said. “I would describe their system as closer to fascism, since their government controls many corporations to serve the national interests. They love to point out that Ba-Dian Colony is a privately run enterprise by the Xintian Corporation, but we all know that the government controls that firm and heavily subsidizes it. But still, I think it would be highly unlikely that they would be behind this.”

  “You never know,” Stilicho said. “Maybe some Chinese in their colony went rogue and are now taking hostages.”

  Errol chuckled. “You’ve watched too many movies.”

  “The other possibility is maybe some sort of Martian lifeform that we’ve never encountered before suddenly came out of hiding and is now killing our crews,” Stilicho said.

  Errol rolled his eyes. “As I’ve said, you watched too many movies.”

  “Maybe it’s the Russians,” Stilicho said. “The new colony you’re setting up in Chryse Planitia is awfully close to their old colony isn’t it?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Errol said. “Their old colony in Valles Marineris is almost two thousand kilometers away to the southwest. Anyway, there are no Russians left on Mars except a small academic exchange team in Eridu, and they’re all accounted for.”

  “Maybe they landed back there without us knowing about it,” Stilicho said. “After all, they did lay claim to that whole region and some others. Even though they don’t have a colony now, they are still telling everyone that you need to ask them for permission before you go to that area, right?”

  “The Russians can make claims all they want, but the fact is that they have no official presence on Mars anymore,” Errol said. “They can’t stop our people or the Chinese from going over their old colony base and stripping it clean. Then again it’s been years, so I doubt that any of their facilities would still be operational. They pretty much took everything that wasn’t bolted down back with them when they evacuated, or they just wrecked it, like what they did with their rovers. I still have the inventory manifest from that operation on my desk around here somewhere.”

  “Okay, so the possibilities as to what happened are either man-made or some sort of environmental factor that we haven’t been aware of,” Stilicho said. “Since members of the outpost team were in two separate locations and so was the rescue team, then it’s gotta be people or a monster, there is no other logical explanation. I’m betting it’s the Chinese, they’re the only other colonists on Mars.”

  “Ed and I came to that conclusion as well,” Errol said. “We’ve made some high level inquiries with the Chinese, but they are denying that they have any personnel in the Chryse Planitia region- nor did they encounter any of our crew, so unless you find proof of something, I can’t exactly accuse them out in public now can I?”

  Stilicho rubbed his palms together. All he could do was speculate. He would need to go out to the region in question to get more information. “Were any of the outpost personnel or the rescue team equipped with any weapons, or anything like it?”

  “Outpost crew have no weapons, but they could improvise with the tools at their disposal,” Errol said. “The rescue team had two security officers with them, and they would be equipped with handguns for emergency use.”

  “If it were humans that did this, then I would need to carry a gun for self protection,” Stilicho said. “How equipped is the colony we have for military weapons and personnel?”

  “The UN has pretty much implemented the Antarctic treaty for Mars and everybody signed it,” Errol said. “Just like Antarctica, military activity is prohibited on Mars, but it’s kind of vague when it comes to weapons other than a clear ban on nukes except for fuel. There’s a security team in Eridu that liaisons with the NASA representative that’s permanently stationed there. We’ve got handguns and a few rifles, but nothing major. Our security personnel are not allowed to carry guns unless there’s a clear emergency, so they just walk around with stun guns and tear gas. If the Chinese have got military hardware on the planet, there’s been no official word on it other than the conspiracy websites that claim that there’s a nuclear arsenal out there.”

  “Okay, well uh, I think I would like to pack some heat when I go over there, if you know what I mean,” Stilicho said.

  “I’ll see that the cargo manifest gets a small shipment of weapons, but we need to clear it with NASA first, so if they say no, then it won’t happen,” Errol said.

  “Can you get clearance for it in two days?”

  “It’ll be tough, and I will have to let them know about our problem if I do,” Errol said.

  Stilicho winked at him. “Can’t you just sort of like, sneak them in along with the boxes of steaks you’ll be storing in the transporter’s cargo hold?”

  Errol shook his head. “No can do. If NASA finds out about this after the fact, and they almost usually do, then they have the power to revoke our franchise for the colony, and there’s no chance in hell I would allow them to do that. We’re the only real functioning colony left on Mars, and I’ll be damned before I have to be forced to evacuate my people.”

  “Well I’m going to need a gun, I don’t want to be caught with nothing out there when the crap hits the fan,” Stilicho said.

  Errol looked away and was deep in thought for a bit.
Then he swiveled his chair and looked into Stilicho’s eyes. “I’ve got an idea. I’ll ring up a manifest for weapons along with a new team rotation for the security staff that will be heading for the colony. I doubt that NASA would find a routine personnel transfer as suspicious. I’ll include your name as a security officer so you’ll be allowed to carry firearms.”

  Stilicho grinned. Some good news for once. “Woohoo! This makes me feel a whole lot safer now. I’ll need some heavy duty firepower just in case. I think an assault rifle with a laser pointer and a grenade launcher ought to do it.”

  Errol leaned forward so that Stilicho could see that his boss was serious. “Look, Stil. Tourist season is upon us with the synodic transfer period- and this happens only once every two years. All those visitors bring in much needed cash to mitigate the expenses that the colony is gobbling up. This is why the Russians and Mars First failed- because they tried to make a go of it by themselves. They couldn’t see the commercial potential for tourism and the money it brings in to pay for the tremendous expenses. The Chinese are being subsidized by their taxpayers, so we are the only commercial colony that’s over there. ACE Corp is in the red right now with all our other ventures, so I need you to solve this problem as quickly as possible before the tourists get down there. Because if you don’t, then this could be the end of our Mars venture, and it’ll probably be the end of the company too. You got it?”

  “I won’t let you down,” Stilicho said softly.

  “You better not, or I’ll make sure you never get back to Earth.”

  “Hey!”

  Chapter 5

  Emma Rossum gestured at the large room while standing by the doorway. Upstate New York was slowly waking up from the previous winter, and a bit of green could already be seen from the backyard. “That’s his workshop. Feel free to look around.”