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

by John Triptych

  “A few people started going crazy,” Jennifer said. “We started running out of food, and Silas would order a few people out of the airlock as a test, you know. He said that if you truly were a Martian, you wouldn’t need a suit to go out there. A dozen people did just like that, and we never heard from them again. Of course, we were able to get some meat a few days later, so that was good. Tsuda was a good cook.”

  “Is that how Joe died?” Darian asked.

  Jennifer looked away. “Joe, I dunno what happened to him in the end. The last few days, there were rumors that the government was coming to get us. To take us back to Earth. We wanted to fight them all, but we didn’t have any guns or nothing, just knives and forks. Joe was upset, he didn’t want to go back. Silas and Joe would talk privately many times. Then one day Silas came into my room. After he used me, he told me that Joe was dead. He said that Joe killed himself because he didn’t want to go back. I started crying and he assured me that Joe was now a true Martian.”

  Darian ran through the reports on her smartglass. Of the original one hundred and twenty members of Mars First, only sixty-six survivors were brought back to Earth. Testimonies from several witnesses stated that Joe had died of asphyxiation, and was buried near the colony site. Silas had been detained by the FBI the moment he had returned, but was eventually released. “So you never saw Joe’s body? Silas never told you how he died?”

  “I searched for Joe, but I couldn’t find him anywhere in the colony base. Tsuda says he killed Joe, but I didn’t believe him, he was always full of crap. Silas told me his body was outside, and we just didn’t have enough suits to wear,” Jennifer said. “I wanted to go out without a suit like the others, but Silas told me not to, for I was chosen to deliver the message back to Earth, so I obeyed him.”

  Darian’s eyes narrowed. “Message? What message?”

  Jennifer looked at her with her one good eye. “We stopped calling him Silas when we were on Mars. He had a secret name that only people like us knew about, and we never told it to the cops either, we kept that bit for ourselves, yeah. But since you know Joe, I’m gonna tell you. Silas’s real name is Ares, the god. That’s what he was called on Mars. He would stand in front of everyone, and we would all bow our heads and pray to him, yeah. He was Ares alright. And his message was only for the people who died on Mars, and it gave us hope.”

  Darian pursed her lips. “So what’s the message then?”

  Jennifer grinned as she remembered her time on Mars. “It’s in the Book of Ares, that was Silas’s personal book, and he left it behind on Mars, I think he hid it, that’s the last thing he told me before they took us all away. He read a few passages on it, yeah. There was one message on it that he always read to us after our morning prayers, and it was everybody’s favorite. It basically said that anyone who died on Mars wasn’t truly dead, that they would return to life in a few years’ time. And once they came back to life, their voices would be heard once again.”

  Darian blinked a few times. This was getting weird. “Could Joe have been alive and maybe … left on Mars accidentally?”

  She pointed a crooked finger at Darian. “I know why you’re here. And I know why you brought up Joe. You heard from him, didn’t you? You heard his voice, yeah.”

  Darian didn’t reply. She simply didn’t know what to say.

  Jennifer’s body started shaking. She stared up at the ceiling and folded her spiderlike hands in a gesture of prayer. “Joe, it’s me! Take me back to Mars, back to the arms of our loving god Ares. Please, I want to be with you forever! I hate it here. Take me now!”

  Darian stood up when she noticed that Jennifer was now convulsing. Julius ran over to them. The orderly tried to calm her down, but Jennifer continued her seizure as her eyes started rolling and she fell forward, right into Julius’s arms. Two more orderlies came running towards them. Darian knew her time was up so she turned around and walked away.

  By the time she got back in her car at the parking lot, her phone started ringing. The sun was beginning to set over the horizon, and the air was still chilly as the spring season had not yet begun. Darian sat on the driver’s seat and put on the earpiece before accepting the call. The smartglasses she wore over her eyes was a universal communications device, able to send messages through the internet and it could also take incoming calls.

  It was from her supervisor at NASA, Martin Ballast. “Darian, what in the hell have you been up to? I just got a call from an ACE Corp lawyer threatening to sue us over harassment. He said that you went and visited Karl Rossum’s wife, causing her go into hysterics. Paramedics were called, and she’s now under observation at the hospital for a nervous breakdown. You were only supposed to do a routine check on her servers to track the worm down.”

  “Marty, I didn’t put her in hysterics, she did that herself when she heard her supposedly dead son’s voice over an audio recording that her husband had been keeping from her,” Darian said.

  “And I just got another message,” Martin said. “It says here that the doctors at a Maine care facility are treating a patient for a seizure, right while you were talking to her? This latest stunt of yours wasn’t authorized, Darian. What are you up to?”

  “I was talking to the former girlfriend of Karl Rossum’s son, she was on Mars with him,” Darian said. “It seems that Joseph Rossum’s body was never identified when the authorities evacuated the Mars First Colony all those years ago.”

  Martin made a slight pause. It was clear from his voice that he was holding back his anger. “What does Mars First have to do with all this crap you’re giving me, Darian? You were just supposed to follow up on the malware trail and that’s it.”

  “Listen, Marty- remember that hostage situation that happened a few days ago? It’s all tied in with the worm that came from the Mars network,” Darian said. “I was in negotiations with a former cultist of Mars First who said that Silas Balsamic had spoken to him, and he demanded to be taken back to the Red Planet. Then today we traced the malware worm to Karl Rossum’s house, and it wipes out his files except for one that has the voice of his supposedly dead son on it, telling him to go to Mars and find him. I had the technicians trace the audio file and it was definitely from the Red Planet, and it didn’t come from ACE Crop’s colony, nor did it originate from the Chinese netlink. Now it’s clear that no one ever saw Joseph Rossum’s body or knows how he died, so maybe he’s not dead?”

  Martin sighed. “Stop. Hold it right there. Mars First was evacuated more than fifteen years ago. Both ACE Corp and NASA supervised the repatriation. They searched the base from top to bottom. No one was left behind.”

  “I understand that,” Darian said. “But what if he wanted to make it look like he was dead, but instead hid, perhaps inside a rover or just wore a suit and waited outside until everybody left. From the reports I read, all we did was do a headcount after the search and assumed that anyone who wasn’t present was dead, we never bothered to look at the gravesites located just outside.”

  “That’s an insane theory,” Martin said. “You’re telling me that Karl Rossum’s son faked his death so that he could stay behind? The Mars First Colony was gutted. There was no food in there. Their air recycling system was on the blink. Their greenhouse was dead. No way could anyone survive alone in there for fifteen years without resupply.”

  “I know it sounds wild Marty, but someone sent a message to Karl Rossum from Mars, and it motivated him to sell his shares over to ACE Corp and to disappear,” Darian said. “He was reported missing by his daughter, and we would be remiss if we didn’t take this theory into consideration. Even if Joseph is dead, we do have an obligation to find his father. Also, there is the malware attack coming from an unknown source on the Red Planet, and the net was just hit by rumors of people disappearing from the colony. Everything points over there.”

  Her boss let out a deep breath. “So what do you want to do?”

  “I need to get to Mars,” Darian said softly. “When’s the next launch dat
e?”

  Chapter 6

  Stilicho rolled up his shirtsleeve. The office he was sitting in had pearly white walls, just like in hospitals. He always hated going to the doctor ever since he was a kid, only this time he was indeed in a medical facility, for he happened to be at ACE Corp’s astronaut training center. There was a small bandage over his elbow since he had just given up some of his blood.

  Dr. Catherine Niven was sitting on the chair opposite to him. She wore thick glasses, and her red hair was neatly clasped in a pony tail. Stilicho figured she had nice breasts, if only they weren’t covered up by the white lab smock she wore. “Okay,” she said. “It looks like your blood sugar, cholesterol and uric acid levels are all normal. You passed.”

  Stilicho winked at her. “I really don’t wanna go. Is there a way you could fail me, Cat? I’ll do anything for you.”

  Dr. Niven giggled as she pressed a button on her console. “Oh, you.”

  The door behind them opened, and in stepped David Conklin, ACE Corp’s spaceflight director. He was nearly two-meters tall, and his lanky frame tended to sway at times when he walked, giving him an awkward gait. David had thinning hair and a grizzled chin, while his smartglasses were thicker than normal, owing to his short-sightedness. “Howdy, Stil,” he said as he whipped out a very big right hand. “It’s been awhile since I saw you in person, buddy.”

  Stilicho stood up and shook his hand. The grip was like cold iron. “How are you, Dave? Yeah, the last time we talked was last year’s Christmas party. Everything good?”

  “I’m busier than ever due to the tourist season coming up. We’ll be sending a whole fleet to Mars, and it’s shaping up to be a good one, though not as good as the early days, of course,” David said, before turning his attention to Dr. Niven. “So how are his tests, Cat? Did he pass or do I give the bad news to Errol?”

  Dr. Niven leaned back on her chair and smiled. “Stilicho is good to go. His blood tests are fine, his cardio is adequate. He has a fatty liver though, but the spaceflight should help since he won’t be imbibing any alcohol during the trip.”

  Stilicho’s eyebrows shot up. “No drinks? Oh, come on!”

  David chuckled as he took Stilicho by his elbow. “Let’s go, time to give you the rundown on what’s happening. See you, Cat.”

  “Take care, boys,” Dr. Niven said just before they left her office.

  They both started walking along a wide corridor, making their way towards the orientation area. Along the walls stood a number of displays, including scale models of the rockets they were using, as well as life-sized exhibits of the numerous spacesuits that were once used during the early years of spaceflight. The hall was meant to serve as both the museum and an interactive learning display for school kids during their fieldtrips. Wall-mounted monitors would regularly show old newsreels, documentaries and movies detailing man’s early years in space.

  “Okay, so you want to go out into space,” David said as they continued on. “This is a good place to start. First of all, you need to realize that it’s quite simply the most dangerous environment known to man. But even then, there’s a number of misconceptions that’s been caused by too many science fiction movies which didn’t get the science part right.”

  Stilicho shrugged. “Honestly Dave, it wasn’t my intention to go to Mars. Errol is sort of like … forcing me to go.”

  David chuckled again. “I hear ya, buddy. I was kind of shocked when I got an email from him telling me to prep you up for our first launch of the season, which will be in two day’s time. I guess I’m just going to have to give you the accelerated version of our training course.”

  Stilicho rolled his eyes. “Great, so where do we start?”

  “Right here,” David said as he stopped by a display. It showed a pair of adult diapers. The stitching seemed more robust than what was normally seen in box illustrations along the grocery aisles.

  Stilicho pointed at the display. He couldn’t believe it. “Is that what I think it is?”

  David grinned. “Your eyes aren’t deceiving you, buddy. Beneath the clothes you’ll be wearing is a diaper. Let me give you a history lesson as to why. Back in the early days of spaceflight over a hundred years ago, an old NASA astronaut named Alan Shepard was sitting in his space capsule, waiting to be the first American to be launched into space, right after Russia’s Yuri Gagarin. Now, there were numerous delays and the launch was postponed for a couple of hours. Poor Shepard needed to go to the bathroom but the hatch was already bolted down, and it would have been delayed even further if they allowed him to leave the capsule. So in the end, he pissed in his spacesuit and became the second man in space … and the first with dried urine at the rear of his flight suit, all the way back to Earth. From then it was practical that all astronauts wear a diaper.”

  “I guess they never talk about this on TV,” Stilicho said.

  “They don’t,” David said. “It’s one of the less glamorous things about spaceflight, and by no means the only one. So you’ll be wearing a diaper just before liftoff. There is a tube you need to attach to your cock, in the early days they just used condoms. The lining material is made from sodium polyacrylate, and can absorb up to three hundred times its weight in water. Each diaper can hold up to two liters in urine and feces before you need a new one. There are vacuum toilets on the transporter too, but it’s prudent that you sleep with the diaper on anyway, just in case of emergencies.”

  Stilicho gave him a blank look. “Nocturnal emissions?”

  “Maybe, but if there’s a sudden decompression or any other emergency, then it’s best you stay suited up and ready to go, just in case,” David said, before he walked over to another display. In front of them was what looked like a padded wetsuit and an accompanying helmet. “Which brings us to another issue, the vacuum of space. In the event of a hull breach and loss of internal atmosphere, you have some time to put on your emergency gear, like the suit we have here,” he said, pointing to the outfit being displayed. “This is the Andark Block-Two skinsuit, which I’m sure you’ve already heard about since they’ve been featured on TV a lot. The suit itself is skin-tight, made from a combination of advanced composite spandex, Nomex and Kevlar, and each suit measurement is tailored directly for its wearer, because there can be no gaps at all in any part of the body.”

  Stilicho nodded. “So that’s why you guys were taking my body measurements earlier this morning.”

  “Yup,” David said. “Our 3D printers are working overtime to get three pairs of your own personal skinsuits ready for fitting tomorrow. Some areas of the suit will have fluid-filled bladders like the armpits, the crotch, the knees and elbows. This is to prevent pressure gaps, because the suit and your body will act as a mechanical counterpressure in case of being exposed in a vacuum. The skinsuit has certain advantages over the hard shelled, full-pressure suits in that it’s very light and flexible. It means you can wear it all the time, like a uniform. All you need to survive in a vacuum is to put on the bubble helmet and the life support pack so that you can breathe, just don’t forget your gloves and boots too. If there is a puncture on the hard suits, then your entire body will depressurize. With the skinsuit, any punctures are localized, and you can just slap on a patch in the affected area and go on with what you need to do. Your skin might get bruised from the exposure to vacuum, but at least you won’t have to worry about the rest of your body.”

  “So tell me,” Stilicho said. “Why are they nicknamed fart suits?”

  David started laughing. “Are you a diver?”

  “Yeah,” Stilicho said. “Advanced open water certified.”

  “Good, then you know about Boyle’s law,” David said. “At the event of a sudden decompression and exposure to vacuum, you’ll experience a syndrome called high-altitude flatus expulsion. Since the skinsuit is low pressure, there will be a spontaneous passage of rectal gasses the moment you enter a vacuum. When that happens, forget tact and just let it all out, or you’ll damage your intestines.”


  Stilicho scratched the back of his head. “If this skinsuit is so great, why don’t we just pressurize it so we don’t have to deal with the farting?”

  “Putting a soft, flexible suit under high pressure is impractical,” David said. “Because it’ll blow up like a puffer fish and you’ll be unable to move. Only rigid, hard-shelled suits can be fully pressurized. And this brings us to another matter. Since the skinsuits are low pressure, this means you will be breathing pure oxygen. If you remember your diver training, you need to decompress before you switch from high pressure to low pressure. We call it pre-breathing.”

  “How long do I have to pre-breath before using the skinsuit?”

  “Ninety minutes, with light exercise,” David said. “Knee and arm bends while you breathe in pure oxygen. Also, you are not to wear anything on your head that’s combustible, because pure oxygen is an extreme fire hazard. The last thing you want is your face on fire and you can’t take the helmet off because you’re in a vacuum.”

  Stilicho shook his head. “Wonderful. What if it’s an emergency and I don’t have time to pre-breathe?”

  “You could get decompression sickness,” David said. “I would suggest you swallow a mouthful of aspirin before you don the helmet, because your joints will be in pain. Oh, and be sure to slap on an anti-nausea patch on your thigh or arm before you do any EVA, the last thing you want is to get sick and puke while you’re wearing a space suit, because you could drown in your own vomit. Packets of pills and the patch are normally attached to the hip pockets of your suit.”

  “This just keeps getting better and better,” Stilicho muttered.

  “A few more things,” David said. “If there’s a puncture in the hull, the entire room won’t depressurize immediately, air still has to exit from the hole. The pressure drop will depend entirely on the size of the breach and the room that you’re in. To give you an extreme example, let’s say the entire side of the room you’re in gives way, and you get exposed to hard vacuum in only a few seconds. Now, contrary to what you see in the movies, you won’t get sucked off into space- not unless you’re right by the hole, or you were hanging onto the part that gives way. Even then, you’ve got about fifteen to thirty seconds tops before you lose consciousness. As with sudden pressure changes, do not hold your breath while in a vacuum, exhale slowly so that your lungs aren't damaged- it’s like when you ascend during an underwater dive. Your first priority would be to get to a cabinet that contains a helmet to go with your skinsuit. Pop the cabinet open and take the helmet, then put it on. Don’t worry, all the helmets have universal fit. Each helmet by itself has an internal oxygen cartridge which will give you five minutes of air. So turn it on once you got the helmet sealed over your skinsuit’s neck ring. You with me so far?”