Martian Dictator

by Øyvind Harding

  Curious, she opened a couple of files originating from the Billionaire. She knew she ought to leave them well alone, but the man was bothering her, and this was probably the only chance she had to get a glimpse of the mind behind their expedition. The next time he accessed the system he would see that his private files had been made public to the other administrators when a member of the crew was listed as dead. He would not hesitate to remedy the situation and fix the access points; he had shown remarkable skill already by hiding his intrusion in the system.

  What she found unnerved her. Crisp, precise notations, detailing each crew member’s weaknesses, strengths, affiliations, political views, and whom they spent their time with on board. And old notes on plans for how to persuade some of the more reluctant participants to join the crew back on earth. Nothing specific, just single words in sequence, probably meant as a mental reminder.

  Her fingers, seemingly moving of their own accord, moved over to the Status display and re-entered herself as dead. Immediately, the system opened the access to her files and notes. She skimmed the medical reports, nothing new there. Rebekka was nothing if not thorough in her examinations, and Anna’s case was special enough that she could probably have written her own case report. Captain Reinholts’s analysis was short and to the point: “Fit for the job as quartermaster despite her mental disorder.”

  The notes from the Billionaire were in the same style as with the other crew, although more extensive. “Anna Stokes,” “OCD,” “No paper/email,” “Move car,” were notations that immediately jumped off of the screen. Along with “Small Eggs” and finally, the name of both the group responsible for suing her funding company and the name of the medical journal in which her work had been called out as fraudulent.

  Thoughtful, she closed the file, returned herself to the living in the system and rose to join the others in hauling the final batch of emergency crates.

  ◆◆◆

  “We have power. We have life support. We have water, air, food, and heat. We have no shielding. We have limited space. We have thirty-two dead friends. We have several sections with serious damage, some that will certainly not be able to detach. Earth is not responding, and our resources will not last us for an immediate return trip.”

  The captain’s voice came through the speakers, disembodied and thin. You could feel the gravity of his words like the pull of Sisyphus’s stone. Anna leaned back against the bulkhead and traced her fingers across a mark on the wall. She was back where she had been when it had all started, having finished loading crates with the others a while ago. Flames had licked the surface here, briefly, before she had put it out with her shirt. She had been useless during the disaster. The crew who had been fighting the flames in this very room had quickly departed after getting it under control, and she had been left alone to replace the damaged circuitry. Rebekka had come through a little while later, on her way to other globes where the crew lay dead or injured. She had tried to get Anna to come with her, but had quickly snorted in disgust at the apathy present in the other woman and left her where she was.

  She could feel the heat leaking out of her along with her resolve. Nadia had been right. The solar flare had hit exactly when she had predicted it would, but Anna had been unable to act on the information. She had been timid, afraid of any inaccuracies in the other woman’s calculations, afraid that her actions might cause a disaster even if they acted on Nadia’s warnings and boosted the shield in time. The captain had dismissed her as overly cautious, and the Billionaire had been stoned out of his mind on morphine. Not that he could have done anything on such short notice, but it rankled her that he had not been sound of mind when they needed him to make a decision. He had been her equal, he had fought her verbally session after session back on Earth, even getting her on the phone on several occasions. He had been relentless in his pursuit, and when the funding for her research had finally run out and her home on the campus was expropriated, she had caved and accepted the role as mission planner.

  She had spotted the errors in the supply calculations he had sent her almost immediately, and even though she was certain the man had planted them there, she was nonetheless impressed at the subtlety. He had been a good boss, the first she had met, and he had let her down when she needed him the most. The files she had accidentally uncovered had rattled her more than she would have thought possible.

  Erasmus, her little stone figure, came floating slowly through the air in front of her.

  “We have no choice but to go on. We have no choice but to land on Mars as planned, albeit with fewer resources, fewer friends and fewer options. But this is what we have been training for, why we went in the first place: to go where no man or woman has gone before. To brave the black and to land on the red planet. To create the first stepping stone in the destiny of humanity, to be remembered as the first who travelled from our home planet into the unknown. Whatever comes, they cannot take the skies from us. We are the first, we are here, and we are still alive!”

  As the captain’s voice built to a crescendo to finish his speech, she grabbed the little stone man and flung it across the room, tears welling up in her eyes making it hard to see. She recognized the Billionaire’s words coming in the voice of her captain, and it infuriated her. He had planted his poison in the mind of Reinholts, and it was spewing forth, infecting the crew. They were not heroes! They were amateurs on a suicide mission. Yes, they would be remembered. They would be remembered as idiots. The idiots who couldn’t even float in a straight line without dying. The morons who allowed their shield to overload and kill them all. The sheep who followed the wolf to the stars. Puppets on a string.

  She was nobody’s puppet!

  A hand shot out from the adjacent room, catching Erasmus before it could shatter against the wall, followed shortly by a disheveled Robbie Johanson, trailing smoke and bad news. “Fuckssake! Careful now, girl, I don’t think you want to kill your only friend in a useless fit of anger.” He gently pushed Erasmus back towards her.

  “My only friend, eh? Would that be yourself or my little friend here?” She snatched Erasmus out of the air and stuffed him in a pocket on her belt.

  “That remains to be seen, won’t it? I do hope I rate higher than a piece of rock in the hierarchy of friendship, but you never can tell with crazy women. I once dated a girl who threw me out because I snubbed my toe on her carpet. That I spilled my drink on her dog and tore down her TV as I fell was obviously an accident and shouldn’t count. As with the resulting alcohol-induced fire. You know, burning dog does not smell nice.”

  He pulled himself over and handed her a soot-stained towel. She alternately laughed and sniffed, accepted the towel and tried unsuccessfully to towel away the sweat, soot, and tears.

  “Thanks Robin. It’s been while since I felt like laughing.”

  “Hey, any time, I excel at making people laugh. It’s in my job description, right underneath the part that says I’m the only guy qualified to fix anything. I have a saying I made up for occasions such as this: ‘I, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, am doing the impossible for the ungrateful. I have done so much, for so long, with so little, I am now qualified to do anything with nothing.’”

  “Konstantin Jireček said that. You thief.” She smiled, and for the first time since they left Earth she felt the weight of the crew lift off her shoulders. Robbie’s shoulders were large enough to carry some of her worries, and he seemed strong enough to do so too.

  “Yeah, well, thievery is one of my more endearing attributes. And call me Robbie, nobody calls me Robin but my lovers or my auntie Rosie, and she counts as both. Now come on, the big guys are holding a powwow to decide how to best crash us down unto the surface of paradise.”

  She took his proffered hand and they pushed off together towards the airlock.

  ◆◆◆

  “We have several options available to us, and they all constitute a certain degree of risk. Risks higher than originally anticipated, risks that you do not in nor
mal circumstances want to stake your life on. There is a very real possibility that we will all end up dead when this is all said and done. However, what are our options? Return to Earth? We have had no transmissions from Earth since the flare hit. Chances are that society as we know it was hit hard by the flare, and that they are incapable of assisting us in any way. The reactor is down to thirty percent after we got it online again, and even at full capacity it would have had serious issues with reversing our course without the assist of a planet as a gravity sling. The remaining food, water, and air is not enough to sustain us on a return trip. We really have no other options, we have to land on Mars.”

  The Billionaire cradled his injured hand and did his best to uphold the illusion of control. At his best he was a master, a man capable of manipulating an opponent into believing he had left with the longer straw, when in fact all he held in his hand was the stumpy remains of a stalk. He was not at his best right now, with a morphine hangover and a serious injury. Anna prepared herself to rip the stalk out of the clenched hand of control.

  “So, your plan is to land on Mars with less than half of our original supplies, a large portion of the crew dead and the ship damaged beyond our capability to repair it? That’s not just foolhardy, that’s borderline insane.” She stood with her arms crossed, facing the Billionaire down with most of the remaining crew at her back. The scene was eerily similar to the one back before they had left Earth: the Billionaire addressing the crowd, the captain next in line to speak, Rebekka, Roger, Robbie, Nadia and all the rest listening intently.

  “So what? If we are to survive we must abandon some of our sanity. We must embrace Lady Luck and trust to her fickle whims.” He smiled, and the twinkle in his eyes scared her. Lunacy lurked in those depths, as surely as it did in her own. But while her lunacy was the wiggle-your-eyebrows-and-count-to-an-arbitrary-large-number kind, his was the hide-in-a-cellar-with-an-arbitrary-large-knife kind.

  “Failure is not an option. If something breaks we die, so we work under the assumption that nothing breaks and that everything we do will succeed. Every action we take will have the desired result, all variables will work to our advantage and every repair will hold. In short, we continue as planned. If you plan for failure, your plans will always live up to your expectations. We will not plan for failure, we will plan for success!”

  The crew seemed to liven up a bit at his words, and she had to admit it—they affected her as well. But she had to stop this. Proceeding with the landing now wasn’t just risky, it was downright ridiculous. They had to return to Earth.

  “How do you propose to land, then? We have no idea if the balloons suffered any damage during the flare, and the computers seem incapable of doing a proper diagnostic run on even the simplest of matters.”

  “We will inspect each and every balloon by hand. It takes more than fifteen percent loss of buffering before the integrity of a globe is threatened during the descent and landing, and it shouldn’t be hard to establish the condition of the individual balloons.”

  “What about radiation? There’s not much point getting to the surface if we all die of cancer within the year.” She almost kicked herself when she finished her objection. This was her very own field of specialty, one of the reasons why she had been selected to go in the first place. He pounced on her mistake like the predator he was.

  “I’m glad you brought that up, Anna, you and your team will have your work cut out for you in the coming weeks. We were all exposed to a high degree of radiation both during the flare and in the hours afterwards. You need to set up your lab and start testing everybody for residual effects as well as begin treatment to counteract any potential medical issues. Cancer is just as dangerous as any faulty balloon, and it will kill you in a much more personal way. Nobody wants to survive the worst disaster in space in recorded history just to gasp their final breaths consumed by tumors in their lungs.”

  Cancer. The magic word. The word that opened wallets, hearts, and laboratories all over the world. She could feel the eyes of the entire crew looking at her nervously. She would have her work cut out for her indeed. Testing the entire crew would take weeks, if not months of hard work. It could be done, and in all fairness, it ought to be, but she resented it nonetheless. The work would consume her every waking hour, she would barely have time to eat and sleep, much less pay attention to the workings of the ship and the crew. With just a few sentences he had disarmed her objections and at the same time relegated her to the sidelines. Even at his worst he was deadly.

  Captain Reinholts, sensing that Anna’s time as the voice of opposition was essentially over, deftly caught the relay baton and took the opportunity to make a stand as well. He had delivered the speech proffered to him earlier with little or no reluctance, mostly because he at first had agreed with the words. But now they troubled him. Landing on Mars and not knowing if they would be able to take off again? Brave the cold and the dark with their only reward being that they would die down there rather than up in space? The conditions on Earth would be bad, but would they be that bad? Surely they could expect some measure of help once the ground crew knew of their predicament.

  “The question is not whether or not what you are proposing is feasible. The question is why you are proposing it at all. Who gave you the authority to speak on our behalf? If I remember correctly you are just along for the ride, myself being in charge of the ship, Ms. Loams in charge of the crew and Dr. Stokes being in charge of supplies and distribution. Beneath us are several specialized crewmembers, who are all better suited to analyzing the situation than you. I would suggest that you sit your ass down and shut the hell up while the grownups decide what to do.” Captain Reinholts folded his arms and stood his ground, right in front of the Billionaire.

  He smiled that insufferable smile of his, tilted his head and looked at the captain. “We will run out of food in less than four months. We will reach Mars in less than two, and the return trip would take in excess of nine months. How do you expect us to make it all the way back? Eat our dead? No, we have to land and take our chances.”

  The captain did not reply, thoughts churning and working their way through calculations, arguments, answers and options, finally settling on the one that troubled him the most; the Billionaire was right. They had to land on Mars.

  Captain Reinholts finally broke his gaze, looked down and away and took a step back.

  14. The Launch

  Packed like sardines, drugged so hard that they could not panic, puke, or pray, the crew of the Wayfinder sat strapped into their respective cushioned seats, waiting for the final countdown of their lives. They were leaving their homes, leaving earth. Leaving behind all their previous lives, loved ones, dreams, and desires, but in the process replacing them with a whole new set of dreams, the dreams of humanity. Throughout history, whole cultures and even nations had set forth into the unknown in search of a better future, in search of greener pastures. The criminals went, or were sent. The disheveled, the diseased, the cast outs and the poor, the beggars, murderers and rapists. But also the noble. The visionaries. The seekers of fortune, the lawmakers and the brave. They all went. And they all had one thing in common: they were not coming back.

  Robbie Johanson had been many things in his life. He had been a criminal. He had been disheveled and diseased, and he had been a cast out wherever he went. He had been a beggar and a murderer, a father and a soldier, but never a rapist. He did not consider himself noble, nor a visionary. A fortune seeker? Sure. Brave? Maybe. If he had ever stopped to consider leaving being brave. He had been leaving all his life. From his very childhood, when leaving was all he knew as he went from institution to institution, fighting, kicking, screaming, wanting something but never knowing what. Trying, but always failing. Failing, but always pushing. Never stopping, not even when his desire for revenge brought him to a smoking gun and a man dead by his hands. For Robbie, the past was gone, and the future did not exist. The now was his domain. A soft, slow counting from nearby soothed his
troubled mind, and he allowed himself to sink into the monotony of the voice.

  Robbie was leaving, and not coming back.

  Anna Stokes was counting the holes in the ventilation shaft in front of her and listening to the preflight checklist. Had she been asked, she would have admitted to being a visionary, but none of the rest. She was leaving, but not because she had to. She was leaving because there was nothing left for her back on Earth. Her mind responded to challenges, and this was the greatest challenge she had ever faced. If pressed, she might have admitted that she had decided to go to Mars halfway through the five minutes the Billionaire had used to present his plea to her. The ten-second countdown to launch interrupted her counting. Irritated, she was about to start counting holes again, but caught herself and closed her eyes instead.

  Anna was leaving, and not coming back.

  Roger Wells was stoned out of his mind. He had snuck off for a little preflight smoke from his special stash, and he forgot to take into account the drugs they would be administered before takeoff. The combined effect nearly knocked him off his feet straightaway, but a lifetime of recreational abuse saved him. Barely. He got some funny looks from the personnel as he was boarding, but he managed to keep it together long enough to collapse into his seat. The only one who seemed to notice was that bastard Johanson, and Roger had ignored the conspiratorial wink the other man threw him. He had nothing in common with a thug like Johanson. He had nothing in common with any of them, nothing in common with anyone or anything back on Earth. His wife was gone, his kids were strangers and his work had been focused on this one goal for as long as he could remember. He glanced to his side and met the gaze of the beautiful Russian girl across from him, and he felt a surge he had not felt in years. He smiled, and even though she turned away from him almost immediately, a warm feeling was spreading through his body. It could be the drugs. It could be love. It could be the future. He smiled and closed his eyes.