by Hylton Smith
The panic intensified when the silo doors opened and people began climbing out of the mayhem. The Section Leader reported to Kim’s subordinate that there must be sabotage, as override controls were locked out. “Sir, we have to assume now that we can’t stop this launch sequence in time and we do not know its destination so... just a moment... our Electronics Chief has determined it is intended for the capital of South Korea. We must warn them. We have been advised our last chance is to break into the hardware complex and destroy the entire interface with the software.”
One of the saboteur’s many inputs that would be ignored by the system would cause interruption of certain implementation sequences but not others. Kim was transfixed. Would Seoul have enough time to scramble intercept missiles, and if they could, where would the problem be exported to? He asked his subordinate, “Do you know which specific functions are still active and unstoppable, and which are not capable of being reset to default?”
“We are currently on that task Sir, as there is a time lag from alarm initiation to acceptance of reset protocol. Because of cascaded system checks, our man has so far found it difficult to break these automatic loops. We are concentrating all manpower not required for guarding personnel to breaking into and disabling the hardware. This is however not without risk, and the Section Leader cannot supervise both activities simultaneously.”
At missile velocity it was a short trip to Seoul as this silo was near the border. Information was trickling in on the functions disabled unintentionally by the maintenance man, and the destruction of the hardware fortress had been delayed by the need to find employees with retina recognition authority clearance. Explosives were out of the question and brute force was painfully slow. Kim’s subordinate was trying to coordinate this frenzy of activity. “Sir, we may have to evacuate the silo, time is our enemy now. I realise this means our saboteur will be presented with a chance to escape, but I will endeavour to.....”
The line went dead after what sounded like static bursts. The warhead had detonated. The coordinates input priority had been unavailable to the saboteur after the bungling of his maintenance man, and he had opted for a time to detonation, unaffected by other sequenced parameters.
Although this was a ‘remote’ area for North Korea, the population density was sufficient to account for deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Even greater numbers were badly injured, and unknown proportion would perish with radiation burns and sickness.
There would be questioning by the people, even those at the most severe receiving end of the dictator’s whims, as to whether this sacrifice could ever be justified for this method of getting rid of him. In contrast, the well-publicised efforts of North Korea’s military to neutralise the warhead, and give advance warning to prevent it effectively destroying their neighbour’s capital, had a profound influence on relations of the two countries. It would become a beacon for the two nations to herald an era of understanding, tolerance and re-construction. The wider global emphasis on such cooperation began to overtake entrenched agendas and religious differences. It would not last forever but it was not to be a wasted lesson.
The relationship between the planets would see more coherent strategy outlined for a while. Although it could be viewed as a cynical piggyback ride on sentiment, it would also allow the MDV campaign by Cheverry to gain approval. This period would not witness a reduction in the migration applications, quite the reverse, the nuclear catastrophe, whoever was to blame, had managed to make people seriously afraid, and caused the existing mistrust in government to enter a new stage of fragility.
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The Korean experience prodded the remaining members of Reuben’s family to enlist for aspirant Martian citizenship. This was good news for Evander as he had only bad recent memories of Earth. He was an accepted member of a stimulating group and there was meaningful work to do instead of trying to merely prove or disprove abstract concepts.
Sabine was also progressing well. She was beginning to be able to converse in Axis ‘click’ and spent much of her time in their libraries. Her human school curriculum was no challenge and she could complete two hours homework in less than twenty minutes. She was beginning to show interest in Evander’s project. The most intriguing aspect of her promise was her rudimentary ability to understand some technobabble via a link to one or other of the Symbiants who were conversing.
The ‘farm’ for the MDVs had been constructed and the first arrivals were eagerly anticipated. The Axis had re-configured some of their own food output production to emulate the Terran diet, which they preferred.
The suggested improvements in QSD gravity A waves were proving elusive and it was decided to concentrate more effort on construction and evaluation of the Epsilon Eridani communication rig concurrent with the Gliese data breakthrough.
The Martian population was now approximately seventy thousand and although the self-generating oxygen level had not reached optimum for humans it was breathable in short spells. It had progressed to highs of eleven percent, as this was commensurate with the recent volcanic activity creating more water from trapped ice. This cyclical treadmill was capable of creating but not sustaining small clouds.
It occurred to Scillacci after looking through the data on gradual change of the Axis reproductive organs, that nobody had really thought of them as male or female. This was partly due to their translated names and abbreviations. Far Vision (Fav) and Always Precise (Al) gave humans no indication and they had never asked. They would have to do this if the project was to proceed to voluntary treatments. It would be helpful just to know the ratio of male to female individuals and the normal number of young per birth, when they were fertile. This could be important because the MDVs, as the chosen species to study, had multiple young per birth. The DNA comparison needed to be made at the outset.
Chapter 27
Stella and Carvalho had decided not to know the sex of their first child. She was going to ease off the workload at the hospital and spend more time on the MDV project, leading up to the birth. Scillacci had agreed to cover her normal duties at the neurosciences wing and was assisted by a new arrival from Earth – Jonathan Munro, an ambitious young surgeon from the Isle of Skye, off the west coast of Scotland. His reputation was chequered, he was considered as academically brilliant but almost dismissive of moral roadblocks which he considered as derived from human spiritual self-delusion. He would enjoy some interesting discussions with Scillacci.
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The more stringent checks on migrant applications had identified many irregularities from the passport biometric chips. Most were people with a good reason to elude law enforcement officers and a few were so desperate to improve their prospects they had spent their life savings on forged documents. One individual had caused the system to display a match to someone registered by Interpol. Further detail was requested via the menu and there was a link to Kinsey. The individual ‘corresponded’ to a person who had recently died. He was detained, while Kinsey was alerted, and the photo, plus other details were transmitted. The man was more nervous than disappointed. Kinsey’s checks confirmed that one of the henchmen of the Caracas duo who organised Evander’s kidnap had since been officially registered as deceased. The certificate was issued only weeks after his escape from the Brazilian prison, and was stamped with the ‘official’ Caracas registrar’s seal. Kinsey was on the next available plane.
The UN personnel in North Korea were now mainly aid workers. The response from around the globe had been phenomenal. Medical care was under strain despite South Korea and China opening their hospitals to the needy. Many of the dead were only registered as such because they were missing and had been so close to the blast that they must have been vaporised. The injured, and those with radiation sickness, were moved as far from the fallout zone as their condition and logistics would allow. The nation most generous in their contribution towards social recovery was Japan, whose reminders of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki events wer
e hard-wired into their response, even though there were no living witnesses of the actual atrocities. It was a truly bizarre paradox that those who were at the forefront of condemnation of North Korean foreign policy were at the heart of the aid and reconstruction effort.
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The pictures which did get transmitted to Mars were sobering enough for the humans, but the effect on the Symbiants and Axis was one of utter and absolute confusion. Neither species could begin to reconcile this incident with the reported chain of events leading up to it. They wanted to understand more about it, to hopefully fit it into their previous knowledge of humanity. Carvalho couldn’t help. His shame registered more with the Axis and their accidental genocide on Nexus, but Alex 2 could only admit to further decline in interest in helping humans. He quietly stated that the position he had rescinded some time ago about not returning to Earth, should be re-instated. Carvalho agreed with him this time around.
The MDVs had actually conceived during the flight. The females had been treated in order to display more frequent mating scent, and the males had been kept busy. It had been planned but they had become unruly and two males had perished as a result of competing for the pleasure. It was as well they were nearing orbit.
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Kinsey arrived and viewed the detainee through a one way glass partition, but did not recognise the individual. He had brought all relevant Brazilian interview data and photos which were of the alleged deceased. The confiscated passport showed evidence of tampering, and clever forgery, but they had not been able to, or thought they did not need to do anything with the chip. Kinsey had confirmed with the Brazilians that the original owner of the passport had been deleted from their criminal database and this applied to other South American countries including the subject’s own, Venezuela. Because the Brazilians were absolutely sure that the body they saw when it was recovered in Caracas was genuine, Kinsey assumed a hit was the most likely explanation. Having appeared after a jailbreak and then used for extraction of information about the elusive head duo, would have flagged him as a conspicuous liability. The question facing Kinsey was whether this meant the new owner of the passport was working for the Caracas consortium. It would have been necessary to allow the passport to be available to Caracas and Brazilian police for verification of the death, before returning it to his family. He needed to get one of his people to tease this out of his family. First however, he needed to check their bank accounts for any unusual deposits.
While he waited for this he felt it was worth providing the Beijing authorities with questions for a second interrogation, while he continued his voyeuristic assessment. The man had claimed to be joining an old friend on Mars during the first interview. Now he was asked to give details of this friend so that this could be checked with Mars. It was put in such a way as to make him think there may have been a technical glitch in the passport biometric readout. They had to be sure that’s all it was, and the quickest way was to get his friend to vouch for him. If it depended on debugging the passport chip it could take weeks. Anyway this would be done retrospectively by holding on to his passport and it would be forwarded to Mars when the fault was rectified. The man looked relieved and gave the name of his friend.
Kinsey had confirmation of significant deposits spread across the family members’ accounts, so he called off his men without alerting the family to his suspicions. He decided to ask Carvalho’s cooperation in running the entire ring to account rather than take this detainee out of it. It would also help identify further Martian diamond prospectors. They allowed the suspect to migrate. Carvalho saw the sense in this but realised it was the next step to a police or intelligence organisation on Mars. It would also reinforce the unpromising trend of humanity from the increasingly critical eye of the Continuance.
Kinsey had conveyed to the Commander his feeling of connection to the money men behind Evander’s kidnap, and the possibility they were after crystal and diamonds. It would be worth Carvalho’s people keeping a discreet surveillance on the detainee’s nominated friend who had vouched for him.
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The MDVs were transferred to their domain. The Axis had done a great job in preparing the habitat. It had been decorated with familiar items such as plants, and a water feature. Colour displays of the Axis variety were dotted about and subtle background sounds played at random intervals. These sounds varied from simulated insects and birds to passages of Axis clicking. There was an outdoor pen which would be available for short periods in the thin but breathable atmosphere.
The female which had become pregnant was about to deliver and when she had fully recovered she would be sedated for the ‘bits’ of genetic code insertion. Pascal 2 would perform the procedure, and she would hopefully become the most intelligent MDV in history, and have offspring to compare with the ones she had just delivered.
Stella was nearing that time herself and Carvalho was becoming more nervous by the day. He wondered what his parents would have made of this grandchild being born on another planet. He reflected on whether he would have been here at all if his father had not been the victim of an air disaster prior to his ambition of walking on another world. He rewound his memory even further and recalled his grandfather repeatedly saying, ‘We have no control over our allotted time; we can only decide what to do with it’. What would he think now that humans were teetering on the brink of immortality, at the same time as the Axis race was contemplating the reverse journey?
Chapter 28
Two years had passed since Daniel Carvalho’s son was born, and Stella was pregnant again. Little Fernando had been given his grandfather’s name. Daniel had never been so content despite the massive changes these two years had brought.
He was no longer ‘Commander’. The import of some of the window-dressings of democracy had fostered elections. His first election had been accompanied by the title of Guardian. There was an elected structure reporting to him and the populous, with no other career function.
The population had almost doubled and now stood at one hundred and thirty-two thousand. The immigration system had become porous to ‘undesirables’ and the predicted Police Department had emerged. Diamond prospecting was voted as legal.
The planetary conditions had also moved on. The oxygen level gain was tapering now but had reached 14.7%. This gaseous environment had its own vote on how things would change direction. Humans only needed to carry emergency breathing masks as their respiratory systems had begun to accommodate lower levels than Earth. Some Axis individuals however, were beginning to sporadically lose balance because of the enrichment of the vital gas. Ecological shifts had seen mean temperature increases, and although daytime often achieved ten degrees Celsius peaks, night never got above zero. Clouds produced the odd drizzle patch of a couple of minutes and water was beginning to settle in lower ground in small quantities. These were the forerunners of streams and maybe rivers.
The trend, particularly the temperature rise caused the Symbiants to offer a warning. The red crystal shell on the outside of the domes would soon begin to ‘dust’, as the threshold of amorphous transformation approached. As the dust storms were lower in intensity if not frequency, and the Axis technology had gifted them superior construction facility, it would be prudent to take down the domes and move the crystal to cold, secure storage. This was a sad but sensible suggestion. The Symbiants were once more astonished at the human clinging, sentimental nature in the face of logical alternatives. For those humans who had planted the first colonisation seeds this was emotionally traumatic. These domes saved equipment and lives during those early dust storms. If there had not been the danger of accidental replication and a new market for the stuff, they would have been voted to be protected structures.
Other areas of change included the construction and operation of the Epsilon Eridani communication system and the fantastic data handling package from Gliese. This meant that frequent updates were possible and none more important than the progr
ess on Axis reproduction related studies on Mars. The ring of gigantic telescopes was feeding data which would help chart the space between the four locations in much greater detail. Four because Nexus had not only survived but amongst the ‘noise’ emanating from that direction were faint signatures of radio waves. Because of this the other Axis outposts were hungry for information on the QSD progress.
It was not disappointing news they were sent. Evander had managed to convince the doubters that the amplification aspect of the gravity A waves was optimised and it was frequency modulation which caused Dan’s concern about long periods of operational stability. The proposed changes had placed unprecedented demands on Axis abilities, but they all knew by the lack of critical comment from the Symbiants that it would work, long before they confirmed it by several round trips to Europa. Each trip brought technology enhancing cargo to Mars. The landscape – visual, ecological and political had moved in ‘tectonic’ proportion.
On Earth the change was just as important. The Korean disaster was in a moderately advanced stage of infrastructure repair. This particular holocaust had changed the shape of world politics, religious tolerance and had also rejuvenated desires to reel in consumerism. It was said that these idealistic distillates from such wake-up calls had historically only produced temporary solidarity. This macro pledge to finally legislate for such cultural responsibility was in stark contrast to the other end of the social scale. Criminal activity saw endless mutation to new ways of disenfranchising vulnerable people. It was a close second to the other war; the one in which the viral and bacterial onslaught was strategically out-gunning human defence. Although there was acceptance that at the point of a singularity the laws of ‘our’ physics broke down, there was also irony in a Darwinian law’s indisputable corroboration; the top species remaining on the planet was losing its grip on the interpretation of those laws. Mars was the acknowledged fountainhead. Natural selection and its constant demand for adaptability had become something which no longer applied to humans.