The Ruins of Mars: Waking Titan (The Ruins of Mars Trilogy)

by Dylan James Quarles

  Copyright Information

  The Ruins of Mars: Waking Titan

  Copyright © 2013 by Dylan James Quarles

  Cover art to this edition © 2013 by Cougar George and Dylan James Quarles

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written and signed approval from the publisher (Dylan James Quarles), except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages for the purpose of a review.

  Published 2013 by Dylan James Quarles, Seattle Washington

  The Ruins of Mars: Waking Titan

  By Dylan J. Quarles

  Prologue

  James Floyd was a man with battery acid in his stomach. Though never someone people had thought of as relaxed, he was now so far beyond the word that he hardly knew what it meant anymore. For the last few years, he had been leading the design for a manned mission to Mars and as a result, he had lost weight, hair, and countless hours of sleep.

  Ruins, ancient and long buried by the sands of time, had been discovered by two self-aware twin satellites some four years ago.

  Sent to the red planet to map out its surface with advanced Infrared Micron Cameras, the brothers—as they were called—Remus and Romulus had revealed their discovery to their sister, an Artificial Intelligence named Alexandria.

  From there, word had spread like a computer virus and soon James was put in charge of getting a crew to Mars. Discovery and industry: that was their mission. Build the first human colony. Begin producing water, food, and fuel while at the same time uncovering the mystery of the ruins. Discovery and industry.

  Now, some five months after the launch of mankind’s first interplanetary spaceship, James was in a perpetual state of waiting. Waiting for word from his crew, waiting for news. It had been bumpy ride so far.

  Though Amit Vyas, the ship’s pilot, had planned out a safe course, the team had nearly been blown to bits by a rogue meteor belt. However, Braun, the crew’s AI, had responded with speed and severity, saving their lives. Acting in accordance with his primary programming, the mighty AI had cut the frozen chunks of rock and gas into shreds with the ship’s Laser Defense System. It had been a close call. From there, things had actually gotten a little better and James, for a time, was less ulcerous.

  The landing had gone well enough. Ralph Marshall was a skilled pilot, and the two German engineers, Udo Clunkat and William Konig were on schedule to complete the construction of a permanent base soon. For now, though, the seven members of the ground team would have to make do in their inflatable dome.

  Ship’s Captain Tatyana Vodevski was in almost constant contact with James, and this helped to ease his frazzled nerves. An unprecedented solar flare, deadly to many thousands on Earth and nearly catastrophic to his team on Mars, had helped to form a bond between the captain and himself. Both had watched in helpless horror—he from Earth, she from Mars orbit—as two members of the ground team, Ralph Marshall and the young archaeologist Harrison Raheem Assad, ventured out into the solar storm to restore critical functions to the dome’s life-support system. Though Harrison had briefly died from radiation poisoning during the EVA, it was still a successful mission in James’s book.

  Harrison. Now there was a name fast making itself known to the billions on Earth. That young man, that boy really, had performed above what James ever thought he could when assigning him to the team. Already, he had discovered a vast cave network beneath the buried Martian ruins and, better still, a means to access the tunnels. He was there now—in those catacombs finding God-only-knows what.

  James belched a little and a hot acidic bubble popped in the back of his throat.

  Acid in my stomach, thought the tired NASA Mission Controller. Acid.

  Chapter One

  Voices

  Voices stirred. Beyond forgotten and long dead, they whispered through the bones of a cold world. Alone for so many eons, the ghosts of Mars had grown accustomed to their exile. Now though, they stirred. As silent as snakes in the sand, they rose to the surface and curled around scattered boulders, filling deep chasms with the liquid of their dead consciousness. Spreading like a rising tide, they webbed out across the desert, searching for something. Searching for life.

  Standing in the center of a grand underground chamber, Harrison Raheem Assad peered up into the lifelike faces of two towering statues. Adorned with three eyes in triangular alignment, the statues seemed to stare through him—through everything—at a force that resided in between realities. Behind the implacable figures of the standing statues, subtly cloaked in the digital shadows of his suit’s Augmented Vision, another figure peered back at Harrison with stony eyes. Blind as rock may be, the eyes bore into him with palpable intensity, imploring him, daring him to stare back.

  Though Harrison had been on Mars for less than two months, already so much had happened. He had died and been revived, he had fallen in love with a beautiful and talented Chinese engineer, and he had discovered a network of tunnels and caves beneath the buried Martian ruins. However, under the gaze of those twin statues and their even more mysterious companion, Harrison felt as though he were just now scratching the surface of his true mission.

  Above, through a half-kilometer of solid Martian earth, a giant and complex city complete with streets, buildings, and piazzas stood waiting to be welcomed back into the light of the sun. Luckily for the often impatient Harrison, he did not have to kill time while the automated excavators did their job. Per the results of a deep-soil CT scan, he had found access into the tunnels where he now stood through an open cave, partway down the rim of Mars’s grand canyon.

  Met with design, intelligence, and artisanal excellence on a scale surpassing his wildest dreams, the tunnels were beginning to change the young archaeologist’s perception of who the ancient Martians were.

  To his right, Ralph Marshall—astronaut, Lander pilot, and (aside from Liu) Harrison’s closest friend—shifted from foot to foot. Turning his helmeted head to face Harrison, the older man cocked it to the side.

  “Harrison? Did you hear me?”

  His voice caught in a web of dumbfounded mystery, Harrison could not respond.

  “Harrison?” repeated Marshall, frankly. “Which ones are the Martians?”

  Taking a long thin breath, Harrison scanned the faces of the identical three-eyed statues then that of the murky form of the other figure behind them. Though still somewhat unsettled by the fierce and provocative stare of its stone eyes, he could immediately tell that this third installment was clearly different from the first two.

  For starters, it was much smaller than the twins and its face was almost human in design. To Harrison it looked like a kneeling woman, her hands clasped firmly together before her widely spaced eyes.

  She’s praying to the other two, he thought with a shudder. Praying.

  “Harrison?” Marshall nearly shouted. “Hello, can you hear me? Harrison?”

  “I don’t know, Ralph,” Harrison finally answered, snapping his head around to stare at his friend. “I suppose it could be either of the two kinds. Or both. I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  “Well, shit. Don’t get all weepy on me. We’ve got time to figure that out I guess.”

  “Yeah,” echoed William Konig, the third member of their small party. “Don’t worry about that now, but we should probably go. I’m showing very low levels of usable gasses in here and my Survival Pack is over halfway empty.”

  “I agree with Dr. Konig,” sounded the voice of Braun, the team’s Artificial Inte
lligence. “It would be best to return with more comprehensive monitoring equipment.”

  Still shaken, Harrison glanced at the haunting blue light of a flashing X-Ray Beacon as it painted the walls of the camber with invisible waves. Without these baseball-sized devices, the three explorers would be cast into blinding darkness, as the room was too large to register the tight-wave digital pings of their suits’ sonar.

  Everything he saw around him was as a bat might see: not really seen with his eyes, but rather relayed through the eyes of his Tactical Skin Suit and projected on the inside of his helmet’s glass.

  “How long will the Beacons last?” he asked, prudence taking control of his awe.

  “I can deactivate them when we leave,” replied Braun. “Then, upon our return, I can reactivate them, thus conserving their energy.”

  “Good. I’ll bring a geni and some tripoded lights for next time. I want to see this room in living color.”

  “Why not push on?” said Marshall, shrugging. “See what else there is.”

  Tapping at his wrist-mounted Tablet, Harrison brought up the tunnel-network map he had garnished from his deep-soil CT scan. Then, swiping his finger diagonally across the screen, he multiplied the image and relayed it to his fellow explorers.

  “The scan shows that this room is part of a continuing tunnel or passage, but I don’t see any doorways in here. Do you?”

  Marshall allowed his head to swivel from left to right before shrugging again.

  “I guess not...”

  Nodding, Harrison pointed to the CT scan on his wrist Tablet.

  “Exactly. The scan says there is a way through. We just need to find it.”

  “That is a sound deduction, Harrison,” spoke Braun in their helmets. “But I still agree with Dr. Konig. It would be best to turn around for now and return up the lift to the surface. Your Survival Packs cannot produce breathable oxygen until a more abundant source of usable gasses is reached.”

  Casting his eyes about the chamber one last time, Harrison sighed and turned to go.

  I’ll be back soon, he said silently. I’ll bring light.

  As the three men backtracked their way through the digitally illuminated tunnel, Harrison’s mind was heavy with the mystery that faced it. For over three years, his mission had been clear and tangible: learn everything the Martian ruins had to tell about their builders. Uncover a lost truth.

  What have I gotten myself into? he thought. I don’t even know who built this place anymore. Before, it was easy. I didn’t have to ask. But now...now I just don’t know.

  The discovery of a large chamber filled with giant statues had been incredible. The further discovery—that in the three statues, there appeared to be two different species depicted—was a mystery that threatened to reshape the entire expedition.

  “Harrison?” said Braun softly. “May I speak privately with you?”

  Thankful for the distraction, Harrison nodded then remembered that Braun couldn’t always see such things.

  “Yeah,” he said. “What’s on your mind?”

  “Upon our entry into the chamber, I detected a presence.”

  “A presence? What does that mean?”

  There was a short pause wherein Braun seemed to be searching his mind for the right words.

  “The presence was similar to a light-wave disturbance, yet I did not detect it through any of the channels or sensors associated with light waves. Instead, I—”

  Braun trailed off momentarily, a phenomenon whose occurrence was as rare as it was troubling.

  “—Instead, I felt it. Though I could not see it visibly, I knew it was there.”

  “You felt it?”

  “Yes.”

  “How do you mean? What did you feel?”

  Again, Braun was slow to answer. And when he did, his voice was laced with doubt.

  “I have not formulated the words to describe what I mean. I am sorry. What I can say for certain is this: these tunnels are not as they appear on the surface. There are greater elements at play.”

  Liu

  Xao-Xing Liu stood on the rim of the Valles Marineris, staring out across its hypnotic network of canyons and trenches. Bending in at the edges, the Valles stretched on past the curve of the horizon, longer than the contiguous United States and five times deeper than the Grand Canyon. Though its sheer size was humbling, Liu felt only an absentminded passing appreciation for its grandeur.

  In all honesty, she had more pressing matters on her mind. For the better part of an hour, she had received no transmissions from the team exploring the caves nearly half-a-kilometer below. Wrapping herself in an embrace, she shivered despite the comfortable seventy-two degrees to which her suit was heated.

  There must be too much rock between me and them, she worried. In the future, we’ll need to set up a Relay Dish to help transmission ranges. I don’t like being out of contact for this long. At least they have Braun if anything goes really wrong.

  Frowning at this, Liu reminded herself that Braun had locked her pressure suit away during the recent solar storm. Though he had done it in order to keep her from venturing out into the blistering radiation to save Harrison, she never truly forgave the AI for his actions. Moreover, she now had little trust in his personality, fearing that he was too inhuman and rigid.

  Perhaps having Braun along is less of an advantage than it seems, she said internally. Perhaps I’m just kidding myself.

  As the minutes ticked by, Liu was beginning to grow truly concerned when a sudden crackling burst of radio static fizzled in her ears.

  “Liu?” came Harrison’s boyish voice.

  Puffing out her cheeks, Liu exhaled a long overdue breath and smiled.

  “Go ahead, Harrison.”

  “We’re at the lift. I just wanted to tell you we’re on our way up.”

  Hands on her hips, Liu walked over to the skeletal mass of scaffolding that served as the lift’s rim-side port.

  Glinting in the afternoon sun, the port stuck out over the canyon's rim like a metal ribcage. Power lines and thick taut cables dangled from the thing, disappearing from sight down the wall of the canyon to the opening of the cave network far below.

  “Alright, go ahead and proceed up,” she said, confident in her assembly of the rickety-looking contraption.

  “See you soon, babe,” radioed Harrison. “I have so much to tell you.”

  Chapter two

  Reunion—Sol 40

  Two weeks had passed since Harrison, Marshall, and William had ascended out of the darkened caves with stories and pictures of giant statues. After their initial discovery, the team had made three more trips to set up a Radio Relay Dish, generators and tripoded lighting for the Statue Chamber. However, William was soon needed to help complete the final stages of the Base’s construction, so the caves were put on the back burner.

  As the life-support systems were tested and the giant Alon Dome came online like some beacon of human defiance, the ground crew heaved a collective sigh of relief. No longer would they spend their nights inside an inflatable dome with gossamer-thin walls. Now it was truly the time for them to get down to the business of establishing the first permanent human colony on Mars. Now it was time for a reunion.

  On the morning of Sol 40, Lander 2 touched down on the frost-spackled surface of the red planet to deliver its payload. Among the pressure-suited astronauts within were the newest installations to the ground team: Dr. Elizabeth Kubba and AI specialist YiJay Lee. One after the other, the six members of the ship-bound crew leaped down from the white beetle-shaped craft and into the open arms of their estranged fellow explorers. Some, like Dr. Kubba and Lander 2 pilot Joseph Aguilar, had already made the trip to the surface once before, during the aftermath of the near-deadly solar storm. The others, however, were experiencing their first feelings of real gravity in the five months since leaving Earth.

  Breaking from her embrace with Liu, Ship’s Captain Tatyana Vodevski turned on unsteady legs to survey the brand new Alon Dome a
s it reflected the rays of the early morning light.

  Over two stories tall, with upper, lower, and basement levels, it was a picture of technology and engineering. Covered in solar-celled transparent aluminum windows and reinforced with thick sloping beams, the Dome looked as if it could withstand a direct meteor impact.

  “It’s beautiful,” she breathed.

  “Can you see it from orbit?” asked William excitedly as he threw his arm over the shoulder of his fellow German engineer, Udo Clunkat.

  “Yes, every morning since you plated the windows, we’ve been catching a reflection off the rising sun.”

  “Oui, it’s true,” said Ship’s Engineer and Designer, Julian Thomas, “I think Amit and I have blind spots from staring down at it for so long. I never thought I would be happy to leave my baby. But hey, I’m sick of fucking space. You know?”

  “Well then, shall we go inside?” said William, gesturing with his gloved hand towards the airlock.

  “Yes,” smiled Tatyana. “We shall.”

  Moving in a small cluster of white pressure-suited bodies, the twelve men and women kicked up clouds of red dust as they marched for the shining Dome. Once everyone was through the airlock hatch, Braun sealed the door then pressurized the little room, pumping out the thin Martian atmosphere and replacing it with thick breathable O2. Echoing a pleasant chime, the lights in the airlock turned from red to green and the inner door swung open on electric hinges.

  “Welcome to Ilia Base,” said Braun as the bleary-eyed explorers removed their helmets and filed out of the airlock into the new Dome.

  Named for the mythical human lover of the god Ares, or Mars, Ilia was an apt identity for the Base, adding an air of timeless destiny to the mission at large. Though the boys in the NASA Public Relations Department swore it was a coincidence, Ilia, in antiquity, was also rumored to be the mother of Remus and Romulus.