The Genie and the Engineer 3: Ravages of War

by Glenn Michaels

  They were on their way.

  A long series of portals took them ever closer to the planet. As they drew nearer, they could actually see Mars, first as a small red dot, but with each portal leap, the planet grew larger.

  “We need to start decelerating our speed,” Daneel 1 recommended. “To match speeds with the planet surface.”

  “Roger, wilco,” Daneel 2 said. “I will start our deceleration at 5 gee when we get a little closer. I think that when we get really close, I’ll try Dad’s idea and shunt most of our momentum to the planet.”

  “A great idea,” agreed Daneel 1. “That’ll test out the theory, to see how well it works.”

  On their seventy-fifth portal jump, when Mars was almost 40% the size of a full moon as seen from Earth, Daneel 2 blew a sigh of relief.

  “There! One million miles from the planet. ‘Close enough to smell them!’” he said, quoting Chekov from the Star Trek classic “The Trouble With Tribbles.” “First, a microportal to the Martian surface…ah, excellent! And now, a transference of kinetic energy! Voila!”

  The effect was immediate. The two Daneels spiraled wildly away from one another, tumbling through empty space like dice on a craps table.

  “Banzai!” screamed Daneel 2. “Turbulent jaunt, there!”

  “Awesomity!” shouted Daneel 1 in agreement, as he cast a spell stabilizing himself and scurried back toward the other Scottie. “What a roller coaster ride that was! But let’s not repeat it, okay? Imagine the Sirius Effort doing that!”

  “Too fast a transfer, to be sure!” Daneel 2 concluded. “It seems that it worked, though. We don’t seem to be moving very fast now.”

  “Agreed.” Daneel 1 sighed. “Now that we are here, we need an operational plan. We can’t just go running higgledy-piggledly around the planet looking for monoliths.”

  “You’re quite right. Let me have a copy of the maps, please.”

  “On their way,” Daneel 1 assured him, transmitting the USB files wirelessly.

  “Dad suggested we start with volcanoes,” Daneel 2 reminded his brother. “Hmm. Wow! Mars has a lot of really big ones!”

  “Yep. Let’s start with the biggest one, Olympus Mons. If that has what we need, then our search will be a really brief one.”

  “And Olympus Mars is on the Tharsis plateau, along with…uh, I count eleven other volcanoes. Ooh, howdy, the database says they’re absolutely huge!”

  “Then we are agreed. Olympus Mons first, and if we don’t find what we are looking for there, we’ll search the other volcanoes in the Tharsis region,” Daneel 1 declared. “Shall we get down to the planet now? After all, we have a ship to save.”

  “Tallyho!”

  Ω

  Since they were basically now in range of the planet, they were able to tap enough of the planet’s heat and gravitational energy to portal directly to a point 300 miles above the equator.

  “Uh, oh,” Daneel 1 groaned. “Would you look at that!”

  “A dust storm,” bellyached Daneel 2. “A big dust storm! It must cover half the southern hemisphere!”

  The northern half of the planet’s surface in front of them, at least the part that they could see, was free and clear of any obstruction. There the features and elements of the surface could be seen in extremely high detail.

  But south of the equator, only half the surface was so clearly visible. The rest was a smear of muted browns and greys.

  “I guess we arrived in the dust storm season,” Daneel 1 observed. “Summer time in the southern hemisphere, when Mars is near perihelion.” He breathed a sigh of relief. “Fortunately, the Tharsis plateau is mostly in the northern hemisphere and none of it seems to be affected by the dust storm.”

  “They really aren’t that bad,” Daneel 1 realized. “The dust storms, I mean. The Martian atmosphere is only 1% that of Earth’s. A 100 mile per hour gale here feels like a light breeze by comparison. Nothing like in the movies Mission to Mars or The Martian. And the dust is never so thick that visibility drops to zero. Hollywood dramatic license.”

  “Right. You want to split up to check out Olympus Mons? We could do it faster that way.” Daneel 2 pointed out.

  “Not really, no. With the chutzpah, you can do the scan of the caldera fifty or sixty times faster than I can using McDougall’s talisman.”

  “Ah, an excellent point,” Daneel 2 conceded with a small frown. “Okay, we’ll do it together,” he proclaimed as he opened a portal down to the planet’s surface. “Olympus is so big, even with the chutzpah, it’s going to take at least two hours to vet it anyway.”

  Ω

  Nearly the size of Poland, Olympus Mons was a shield volcano, consisting of the accumulation of layer upon layer of lava flows from volcanic eruptions over the course of roughly 100 million years. The mountain, about 370 miles in diameter, stood 72,000 feet tall, approximately two and a half times taller than Mount Everest on Earth.

  At the summit lay a complex of at least six calderas. These were craters, created by the collapse of the crown at the top of the main vent when the magma chamber underneath emptied. For Olympus Mons, the six calderas formed a composite circular area 50 miles long by 37 miles wide.

  The two Scotties arrived in the center of the largest caldera, floating only a few feet off the ground. They were instantly disappointed with the scenery around them.

  First of all, there was very little variation in the colors. All the rocks and sand were muted colors of brown and dull reds. The sky was lighter in color but not all that different from the ground.

  In the distance, sections of the caldera rim could be seen, reaching toward the sky, in places up to 2 miles above the caldera’s floor.

  Surprisingly, the ground around them was mostly flat, with very few rocks of any size. As Daneel 1 looked around, he saw no hills, mounds or depressions of any kind. Nothing until the far horizon where the ground sloped up to the rim.

  “Let’s get started,” Daneel 2 proposed, snapping his fingers and forming a midair display in front of them. The image thereon was of the structure of the ground beneath them, focused on showing any fault lines and discontinuities in the bedrock below.

  “What a mess!” exclaimed Daneel 1.

  “Yeah,” mumbled Daneel 2.

  What they saw did not make them very happy. There were individually large pieces of rock here, yes. But nothing larger than a small house. Certainly nowhere near the size they were looking for.

  “Let’s go higher, increase the scale of the display and start a spiral search pattern,” Daneel 1 recommended. “And ‘order the Columbus to open its course two degrees on every lap from now on,’” he said, quoting from the Star Trek episode “The Galileo Seven.”

  Startled, Daneel 2 looked back in surprise. “‘But Captain, two degrees means they’ll be overlooking more than a dozen terrestrial miles on each search loop.’”

  Grinning back at him, Daneel 1 quoted Kirk’s next line. “It also means we have a fighting chance to cover the majority of the planet’s surface.’”

  “Dad would be proud of you for that quote,” Daneel 2 noted.

  “Well, it is appropriate. Daneel, I’ve got a bad feeling about this. The ground below us is fractured in a million pieces. Yes, I know, this is just one tiny spot but if all the calderas are like this, it might take us a long time to find what we came to find.”

  “Right. Then let’s go. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover!”

  “Ooh, that was punny, that!” observed Daneel 1.

  “Ha! Touché!”

  Together, they lifted higher into the air and began their intensive but hectic search.

  THREE

  Spacecraft Sirius Effort

  22.4 Million miles from Mars

  Friday 5:52 p.m. EST

  November

  “They’ve been gone for hours now,” Paul complained as he pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut. “Yes, I know that portaling that far takes time. But by my calculations, they probably reached Mar
s a couple of hours ago, at least. They should have something to report by now!”

  “Well, dear, they do tend to take after you,” Capie pointed out. “You know how men love to communicate.”

  Paul grimaced and glanced at his fingernails, resisting the urge to chew on one.

  “I’m going to check on them,” he declared to no one in particular. “So, I will create a magical high gain antenna outside the ship…and link it to my cell phone. There! I set up a phone number with Daneel 1 before we left Earth. Let me send him a text message.” He held the phone up near his mouth, to use the speech-to-text feature and spoke slowly. “Hello, Daneel 1? How’s it going? Your status, please.”

  Paul hit the Send button and nodded thoughtfully. “At our range, it will take a minute and a half for Daneel to get the message, due to light speed limitations. So, about three minutes to get a reply.”

  Capie waited patiently while Paul continued to fidget, neither daring to say a word.

  Finally, the phone chirped, quoting from Captain America, Civil War, “‘You have a metal arm? That is awesome, Dude.’”

  “Interesting. That text alert is for Daneel 2. Let’s see…” Paul said, touching a couple of buttons. “He says, ‘Not so good, Dad. We’ve been on the planet for three hours now. The Olympus Mons and Alba Mons volcanoes are a bust. Their calderas are all fractured into relatively small pieces. We’ve just started scanning Arsia Mons and ditto for it so far. Daneel 2 and I’ve decided that if Arsia Mons doesn’t shake out, then we will only do a cursory scan of the other volcanoes in the Tharsis region. If that fails, then we’ll do a quick check of the non-volcano mountains in the area too, like Gonnus Mons and Tanaica Montes. Then we’ll move on to the Elysium volcanoes. So far, the Martian volcanoes are nothing like Devil’s Tower, Dad. We’re thinking that when the calderas collapsed, they did so violently enough to shatter. It’s the only explanation that makes sense. Oh, and Dad, there’s a huge dust storm covering half the southern hemisphere. I hope we don’t have to do any searching there. I wouldn’t care to get all that dust in my electrical connectors.”

  Capie made a face. “Not good about the dust storms.”

  Paul nodded grimly, then held the phone back up. “Understood, Daneel. Good luck in the search.” He slid the phone back in a shirt pocket. “Maybe we should be working on a Plan B. You know, just in case.”

  Ω

  The search of all the likely and some of the unlikely candidates at Tharsis was in vain. Nothing came close to meeting their needs.

  And they were running out of time. At the speed with which Sirius Effort was moving, they only had another 2.5 hours before it crossed the Martian orbit and then maybe another 45 minutes after that before it moved so far out of range that there would not be time to decelerate the ship and bring it back to Mars. They moved on to the Elysium region.

  A little under an hour later, they had sadly confirmed that nothing in that area—none of the volcanic mountains nor any of the non-volcanic mountains of the Tharsis Plateau—were large enough to do the job either. At one point, Daneel 2 even did a scan of a section of the vast stretch of plains in the territory. The result was just as disappointing as the volcanoes.

  “So, bro, what next?” asked Daneel 2, irritated at their lack of success and the little time that was left to them. “There are quite a few volcanoes in other parts of the world.”

  But Daneel 1 was shaking his head on his monitor screen and frowning. “I’m thinking now that we wasted too much valuable time on volcanoes. So far the largest rocks we’ve found were just plain old vanilla mountains.”

  “Like Phlegra Montes and Gonnus Mons.”

  “Exactly! I’ve looked at the database Dad gave us. We’ve already checked the two largest such candidates. Most of the rest are either in the Argyre Planitia region or are scattered around the rim of the Hellas Planitia.”

  “Hmm. Both of those are well south of the equator,” Daneel 2 pointed out looking both very annoyed and edgy.

  “But the dust storms have not reached Argyre, at least not yet. On the other hand, the largest mountains are at Hellas and there are more of them there too.”

  “Let me guess. That’s the center of the dust storms,” Daneel 2 surmised with a pinched expression.

  “Dead bang on, bro. In fact, since Hellas has the lowest elevation on the planet, that’s where all the dust collects at the end of the season and it’s where the dust storms start the next year! Well, most of them anyway.” Daneel 1 paused and sighed before continuing. “On the third hand, both Argyre and Hellas were created by very large asteroid strikes that punched huge holes in the planet’s crust.”

  Daneel 2 snorted and rolled his eyes. “Which means that any large rocks in that area were smashed into tiny pieces hundreds of millions of years ago.”

  “Précisément! So, bro, what think ye?” Daneel 1 asked him, tilting his head to one side. “We simply don’t have time to check out both areas. We must pick one. But which?”

  Daneel 2 rubbed his forehead with one hand. “Here’s what I think. I think Murphy is in full control of this day. He has been, ever since the port engine exploded. So the mountain that we are looking for will be in the last place we expect or want to find it in.”

  “Hellas Planitia it is then. We need a portal, if you please.”

  “Going to be hard to navigate in that dust storm, you know. Visibility must be less than ten percent of normal. What’s the local time there?” Daneel 2 glanced up at the sun. “About 4 p.m. here so it must be around noon at Hellas. At least that is in our favor though I doubt it will help much. I’ll keep a protective bubble around us while we are there,” he volunteered as he popped open the appropriate portal and dived through, with Daneel 1 hot on his heels.

  Ω

  They emerged into a gloomy twilight-lit landscape where the visibility was exceptionally poor.

  Here the ground was extremely rocky, from pebbles all the way up to massive boulders. Rolling hills, escarpments, gullies and ravines covered what little could be seen of the area.

  “Wow, I didn’t know that it would be this dark!” exclaimed Daneel 2. “Okay, casting a spell to ramp up the light sensitivity on my webcam. There! That’s somewhat better. But I still can’t see anything more than a quarter mile away!”

  “It’s the dust,” remarked Daneel 1 in a distracted manner as he glanced around. “Really rugged terrain. I bet even mountain goats would have a hard time in country like this!”

  “This just confirms my suspicions,” Daneel 2 said with conviction.

  “Which are?” asked Daneel 1 with a frown.

  “‘If there’s a bright center to the universe, you’re on the planet that it’s farthest from,’” Daneel 2 said with a deadpan look, quoting Luke Skywalker from Star Wars IV, A New Hope.

  “Oh, good one,” Daneel 1 remarked, sighing dejectedly. “Hmm, I don’t see any mountains near us. Maybe we are too far off the ground. Let’s go lower.”

  “10-4.” Daneel 2 paused a moment. “Naw, not helping very much. Still can’t see any mountains but we must be close.”

  “Let’s switch to radar mode,” Daneel 1 advocated, popping up a large midair display in front of them. On it, a bright green line swept around in a circle, several large white pips flashing briefly into existence at widely divergent angles.

  “Quite a few mountains around us,” Daneel 1 remarked. “I bet Anseris Mons is the one closest to us. According to the database, it’s the tallest mountain in these here parts.”

  “But not the largest, bro,” Daneel 2 countered. “There’s one to our southeast that is quite a bit larger and then two really big ones to the east northeast.”

  “I agree that they are larger but that doesn’t mean much and you know it. They might be like other mountains we’ve seen, just layers of sedimentary rock. And we’ve seen a few too that were just a collection of outcroppings the size of city-blocks.”

  “Look, we don’t have time to argue!” Daneel 2 contended, wagging
a finger at him. “Let’s split up. You go check Anseris. I bet that the big one to the southeast is Hellas Montes. I’ll go check it out.”

  “Well, okay. If you insist. But please be careful!”

  Daneel 2 opened a portal and then exited via same. Daneel 1 hurriedly formed a protective bubble around himself and frowned, turning to the northwest. Anseris Mons was so close that he didn’t need a portal. Instead, he raced through the air and started a scan of the rising landscape below him as he flew.

  Ω

  Hellas Montes was indeed quite large, at 93 miles in diameter and rising more than 18,000 above the surrounding plains. Unfortunately, as Daneel 2 soon discovered, it was not a contiguous piece of rock but was instead a mosaic of rocks of all sizes. None of them were truly super-sized. On the other hand, it was encouraging since some of the really large rocks in the mountain were the largest that he had seen so far on the planet. Just not large enough for their purposes.

  “Well, that was a waste of a good twenty minutes!” he muttered to himself vehemently. He thought of calling Daneel 1 but rejected the idea. There wasn’t anything to report.

  He brought up a radar display again and studied it. There was a small mountain to the west-northwest and another larger one to the southeast. Northward, the radar plot disclosed another series of blips and a really big one to the far north. Comparing the position of all the radar returns with the database, he was able to put a name to each and every one of them.

  All except one. There was one mystery blip and it was a big one, to the northeast. Strange, but it didn’t seem to be in his database. Well, no matter. There were plenty of other mountains to check out and precious little time left, a little less than an hour, to do so. Soon, very soon, the Sirius Effort would be crossing the orbit of Mars.

  Ω

  Both Paul and Capie had taken turns with afternoon naps on Deck 4, though neither one had slept well.

  Capie fixed a decent meal on Deck 3 which the two of them pretended to enjoy, though little was actually consumed. Their conversations were short and half-hearted, each avoiding the topic most central to their thoughts. They saw no sign of Ariel-Leira who had apparently grown bored of waiting and was off somewhere doing her own thing.