Martian Dictator

by Øyvind Harding

  She took off in search of Roger and his calculations, and remembered just in time to take an alternate route to avoid aisle number three.

  20. The Hunt

  “I just got the new numbers from Roger, and they are not encouraging.” Anna pushed her glasses further up on her nose and glanced over at the Billionaire. He was sitting in what had become his customary chair, reports and calculations spread out on the desk in front of him. His private quarters, which had unfortunately survived the impact of landing, had quickly become the de facto Oval Office of Mars.

  “I know. The crops will not be ready in time. If we harvest too soon we will not be able to support a second planting, and we will be facing the same problem again in a couple of months.” He twirled a pen between his fingers and fixed her with a stare. “The serving of the captain was important as a psychological gesture, to prepare the crew for what will eventually have to be done, but it was far from the amount of meat needed to sustain our population for as long as we need to.”

  Anna looked away from the penetrating stare, and she could almost hear his thoughts echoing across the room: You know what we have to do. She knew. They needed more. Drawing a deep breath, she looked him square in the eyes and found her voice. “We need the bodies from the Wayfinder.”

  Nodding his assent, he answered almost thoughtfully. “Yes, yes we do.”

  “How do you propose we do this, then?” She pulled out her pad and prepared to make yet another list of atrocities.

  “So it’s us now, is it?” His smile was cold as he regarded her.

  “Hasn’t it always been?” Anna found that her own smile echoed his, and she felt a surge of pride that she didn’t falter under the scrutiny of the wolf.

  “Perhaps, but you would do well to remember my speech earlier. I will not tolerate dissension; unity is too important right now to be diluted by delusions of oppression. That being said, we need to establish if it is even possible to perform a controlled release from the Wayfinder. It wasn’t exactly smooth sailing when we did it earlier, and at the time we had hands-on control of the procedure and the descent.”

  “I’ll talk to Johanson and see what we can drum up with regard to options. And for the record, you may think that your manipulations are covered in veils of secrecy and layers of secrets, but I know what you did to weaken my position back on Earth. I know that you cost me my job and my reputation, and had I found out earlier I would have sabotaged your expedition so soundly that it never would have left the ground. But I didn’t, and I’m stuck here with you. I will work with you, if not for anything but for our mutual survival, but do not for a second think that you have me under your thumb. I am nobody’s bitch.” With that she turned on her heel and marched from the room, head held high.

  In the hallway, safely out of sight, she leaned back against the wall and a shudder passed through her body. She hadn’t meant to let him know what she suspected, but the look on his face when he realized he had been found out was priceless. At least she had proven that it was possible to bluff the man. Light of heart but heavy of mind, she made her way to find the one man who could make her smile these days.

  ◆◆◆

  I had to admit, I was surprised. I believed my machinations back on Earth to bring her on the team had been well hidden and cleverly executed. Well, they had been, but obviously not cleverly enough, nor as hidden as I had thought. She might have been guessing, but I had been unable to control my reactions during the unexpected exchange, and I was pretty sure she had caught the signs that would confirm her accusations. I would have to be very careful around that woman, even more so than I had originally thought. Eventually something might have to be arranged, but that was not for this day. This day was a day for organization, innovation, and cannibalism. And not necessarily in that order. I hummed along with the radio system, where some comedian had put on “Life on Mars?,” and prepared yet another list of necessary things to be done.

  ◆◆◆

  “Fuckers! Nitwits! I’ll have your innards for breakfast, you evil, incompetent devils from hell!” Only a pair of patchwork jeans poked out from underneath the communication desk as Anna entered the room, the owner of said jeans being buried to his shoulders in the innards of the opened system. She knew those jeans well, and had come to rely pretty heavily on the owner during the past couple of months. The moment was too perfect to pass up. She snuck up, any noise she made covered by the music blasting out of a pair of speakers, kicked the side of the metallic desk and yelled at the top of her lungs, “Have you found any life yet?” The sharp bang and the muffled cry emanating from inside told of her success, and after a little wriggling and a number of threats, Johanson pulled himself free, rubbing his forehead.

  “What did you do that for? I wasn’t talking about you in there. I was just generalizing about the mental state of certain engineers, who apparently decided that it had to be impossible to fully open the covers on our main communication system. It’s almost as if they believed us to be a bunch of idiots ganging together to die on Mars.” He rubbed his head where it had made contact with the metal and gave her a quick grin. “You did surprise me but good there, though, I’m going to have to come up with something special to make it up to you.” He wiggled his eyebrows suggestively and reached out to get a helping hand getting up.

  “You know exactly why I did that, and you have even more coming. It wasn’t aisle three I was supposed to avoid over in the farm, it was aisle two. I spent nearly fifteen minutes cleaning out my shoes.” She gave him as hard a stare as she was capable of and pulled him to his feet.

  His eyes opened in mock horror and his hand flew to cover his mouth. “Aisle three? No, you were supposed to take aisle three, and avoid aisle two. You see the beauty of it don’t you? Aisle two, number two. You know, a theme!” His voice shook with badly contained laughter, and finally he couldn’t hold it in anymore, doubling up, howling with laughter.

  Anna managed to hold it together, barely, and waited until the tears of his mirth had been wiped away. “You know,” she added innocently, “while you were working in here, I just might have taken a detour by your bunk. Something of yours might have been used in the cleaning of a nice pair of shoes recently.” She cocked her head to the side and blinked her eyes, all innocence and wickedness wrapped in one small package.

  “Oh, no, you did not. You evil woman! Here I am, slaving away for you, doing my best to establish a working relationship with that blasted ship of ours, not to mention between the two of us, and you go and do something like that. Now that’s just low.” He nodded appreciatively at her, acknowledging her victory.

  “Well, you know me, I like to go the extra mile when taking my revenge. Speaking of extra miles, did you manage to make contact with the ship?” She ignored his playful little hint at there being something more than just friendship between them. There was, but she could not afford to let it develop. Not now. Maybe not ever.

  “Yeah, contact is not a problem, I can speak with her all right. The problem lies with the individual globes. Most of them have some kind of mechanical problem that prevents them from sliding on the rails, and some of them have communication problems with the rest of the ship. I’m trying to reconfigure our friend here to communicate with both sides of the ship at the same time at my will, but so far, it’s tough going. Something to do with not risking a catastrophic breakdown in the spin or something.” He scratched at the patch of mangled skin on his scalp that marked where he had been burned during the flare.

  “Do you think you can do it?” If they couldn’t separate the globe they had used as storage for the bodies, then the whole project had to be scrapped.

  “Oh, I can do it, no question about it. After all, the ship’s not spinning anymore, so the fail-safes are rather easy to reprogram. There’s some hardwiring that needs to be done on our end, but I’ll manage. It will take some time, though, and I need somebody to calculate the trajectory for me. That’s not a part of my otherwise amazing array of knowled
ge, and it wouldn’t do to be killed by a bunch of dead bastards dropping from the sky.”

  “Better that than a living one down here,” she muttered, and sat down to do some math.

  ◆◆◆

  Nadia lay on her back, watching the twilight approaching. The sun rapidly dipped beneath the horizon, and the stars slowly appeared, one by one. She squinted inside her helmet and focused on a point between the farm and the parked digger. Soon it would appear, just like any one of the myriad of stars, moving faster than the others but disappearing just as certainly after it had run its course. The way home: the Wayfinder. The ship that could carry her and her unborn child back to the green, back to a life with oxygen, water, food, and warmth. A ship she could never set foot on if she wanted her baby to live. But she could dream, she could hope, and she could pray. Prayers cost her nothing. Hope cost her nothing. Dreams might hold her sanity for ransom, but she was willing to take that risk. She could buy hope for her baby, until he or she was old enough to hope for themselves. She would pay the interest, gladly, and leave her child debt-free.

  There. A firefly on the horizon, moving faster than any of its neighbors. A cold ship, the nuclear reactor at the core barely lighting a few candles in the dark for them to see by, but not much else. A communication desk at the aft end, and one in the fore, both hopefully humming along merrily right now, singing a duet. A song of cooperation, of liberation. A dirge perhaps, for the twenty-seven men and women interred in the second-to-last globe in the Mars-bound side of the ship.

  She could almost paint a picture of the scene in her mind’s eye—the silent ship, the battered globes. Some ravaged by fire, some by explosions. The empty sections with their missing cargos. The full ones, jealously holding on to their precious globes, their tracks too damaged to slide them away or their innards too entangled to escape without tearing and ripping their host. One desk giving the signal to tear, one to cut. A globe damaged beyond repair, but with its tracks intact, given the order to slide. Another, given an order to emergency-vent its remaining atmosphere at a given time. A third, waiting patiently, filled with hopes and dreams and nightmares, waiting to see if the marriage of globes preceding it would give it the bump it so desperately needed to disengage from the umbilical cord of tangled wires holding it back in its womb.

  She raised her hands and orchestrated the entire symphony. The disengagement, the venting, the sliding, and finally the crash. There was a very real chance that the Wayfinder would not hold together after the two globes bumped into one another. There was an even greater risk that the crash would destroy any chance they had of controlling the falling tomb, or even destroying it outright. But it was a risk they had to take. The Wayfinder was, for all purposes, useless to them. They could not reach it, and by the time they could construct a method of doing so, they would be so weakened that it was unlikely that they could return to Earth, anyway. And that was taking for granted that they would survive the trip without shielding, that they could bring enough supplies to last them the trip, and that an organization still existed back on Earth that could bring them down to the surface. Nadia saved her hopes, her dreams, and her prayers for more tangible results. Namely, fresh meat.

  She held up her hands, one raised above the other, building the crescendo, then pulled them sharply down together. The time had come and gone. It was done. One way or the other their fates had just been decided. Her radio crackled.

  “This is an emergency message going out to all crew. We have successfully disengaged globe Three M from the Wayfinder. It is currently circling the planet on the projected curve, and will start entering the atmosphere within the next couple of hours. The globe took some damage in the maneuver, but we are optimistic that we have enough control of the jets to adjust its course as necessary. If all goes according to plan, it will land safely about twenty-five miles from our position. We will need volunteers to go there with our digger and retrieve our fallen crew. Good luck to all, Godspeed to the Wayfinder, and may God forgive us on this day. Anna Stokes out.”

  “Why did you not do the radio message yourself?” Nadia half-turned to the person lying next to her.

  “She believes that by taking control of this situation she cements herself as an alternative to my leadership, as the one who is strong enough to oppose my rule. However, she is carrying out my policy. By her actions, she is supporting what I started. In the mind of the people, it is not her running this operation, it is I. She sees only logic and angles, while I read opportunities and fortunes. No, I was happy to let her have the announcement. If it is a success, it will be mine, and if it fails, she will take the fall.”

  The Billionaire rolled over and stood up, reaching down to help her to her feet. She took his hand and let him pull her up.

  “And if it crashes down on our heads?” She stared long and hard at the star moving across the night sky.

  “Well, at least it was interesting while it lasted.”

  Hand in hand they walked over to the airlock.

  ◆◆◆

  “Why me?” Roger grunted for the fifth time in as many minutes.

  “Because I love you, Roger. I can’t get enough of you and your bodily odors, your happy disposition, and your sharp wit. How could I survive five hours in this thing if it wasn’t for you and your optimism?” Johanson shifted his weight, and Roger cringed as a boot pushed his elbow the wrong way. “And, you know, you’ve done this before.”

  “That was different! We weren’t driving, for one, we had a tent to sleep in, and the company was hands down much better than this time around.” Roger shuddered as he caught himself just in time before the image of the captain gasping for breath had time to take hold.

  They were lying head-to-feet in the shovel of their automatic digger, all of their field equipment stacked underneath them, and a small, electric aggregate beside them providing heat, air, and some meagre light. Shovels, drills, cutters, rope, and the emergency shelter accompanied them in the shovel. The plan was for them not to exit their suits while away, but it was good to have the option.

  “Fast in, fast out. Just like you’re used to, Roger. Your ex-wife confirmed it to me a couple of days before takeoff.”

  “Ha. Ha. Ha. If bad comedy could be used as rocket fuel, we’d be off this rock by the end of the week, courtesy of your dull tongue.”

  “Hey, not bad! Not bad at all. I might turn you into a comedian yet. Right after I’ve turned all of those lovely potatoes of yours into hard liquor.”

  Roger sputtered and he could feel the heat rising to his cheeks. “Don’t you dare! Don’t you dare touch my potatoes. I know you got something planned, but if you so much as look at them sideways I will kick you out of the airlock without a suit so fast that you’ll be halfway to Phobos before you realize your ears have popped!”

  Johanson’s only reply was a soft chuckle that faded into humming. Roger recognized “Whisky in the Jar,” and he tried in vain to block out the image of Robbie tearing up his entire crop with a manic grin on his face, a cauldron bubbling in the background.

  Another shift, another poke. Roger was starting to wonder if his companion in the shovel was doing it on purpose. They had started out rather comfortably, laying side by side on a comfortable bundle of tent fabric and various ropes. But after about forty minutes on their way to the rendezvous with globe Three M, the digger had lost traction on one side and the frozen sand had collapsed underneath the tracks. Nothing serious had happened, the system on the digger managed to compensate almost immediately. However, the cargo had shifted slightly, pressing them both closer to each other and dropping the middle of their makeshift mattress. The end result was an uncomfortable four-hour ride to the landing site, elbows and knees constantly brushing and bruising.

  “Landing site coming up boys, five minutes and counting.” Anna’s voice came through crystal clear on the radio. “Time to shake it up and get ready, hope you’re not too comfortable on that sweet bed of yours.” The laughter in her voice was unmistakable.


  “Jealous now, are you? Sure, the Plant Man is soft and pudgy in all the right places, but you know who I’d rather have with me on a mattress, don’t you?” Johanson pulled his feet up to his chest and rolled over, jamming his elbow into Rogers chest three times in the process. He was slightly disappointed; he had been aiming for four.

  “Let’s keep it professional from here on out, Robbie. You ought to be able to see the bounce-tracks in about a minute.” Anna switched to her serious doctor voice, and immediately Johanson straightened up and his entire body seemed to shift from lazy lounging to alertness. Roger took a bit longer, but eventually he worked his way to a sitting position and scanned the landscape.

  Red sand. Black sky. Light blue in the horizon from where the sun would rise in another forty minutes or so. They had timed it so that they would arrive a bit before sunrise, hoping the job wouldn’t take them longer than a day to complete.

  There. A gouge in the soft sand. About a hundred yards long, half a yard or so deep in the middle, tapering to a point on either end. The mark of a perfect hit.

  “We got it, Anna. Looks like a perfect hit. Must have bounced at least another mile or so after this one, so we’ve got a few minutes before we come up to the next hit.”

  “Excellent! Still nothing on the radio, so hopefully it’s just hiding in a ditch or something. If it broke up after that first hit you would have seen wreckage spread out over the whole area.”

  “Yeah, nothing so far, I think we’re good.” Johanson stood in the shovel, staring hard at the landscape, trying to make out anything out of the ordinary on the ground. After a tense thirty seconds, his eyes snapped to the side and he slammed his fist into the side of the shovel. “Fuck! That! Shit! That’s a piece of the balloon. Fuck!”