“Alright, good,” responded Harrison. “Get back inside. We’ll check the rest tomorrow.”
“You and me?”
“For sure.”
Standing up, Marshall quickly scanned the ever-deepening sky above him. “Do you think the captain and the rest are ok?” he said.
“I hope so.”
“You know, I realized something today.”
“What?”
“I don’t want to die on Mars.”
“You just now realized that?”
Laughing, Marshall walked towards the airlock. “Yeah, I guess.”
“Well,” said Harrison in a knowing voice. “Take it from someone who has died here. It’s not really that bad.”
“I’m going to kick your ass,” Marshall chuckled
“Good,” Harrison shot back. “‘Cause you’ll have to come find me inside to do it.”
As he approached the airlock hatch, Marshall again turned his eyes to the night sky. They won’t be able to see us from orbit if we don’t get these lights back on, he thought.
Suddenly, with the surprising serendipity that only pure coincidence can conjure, the Dome blazed to life. From top to bottom, the lights turned on, illuminating the surrounding landscape like a beacon.
“Put a candle in the window,” Marshall said under his breath.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Operation Columbia—10 days after the Pulse
James Floyd sat behind a new desk in his corner office of Kennedy Space Center’s Wing Building. The brilliant Florida sunset outside the floor-to-ceiling windows was unable to sway his attention from the daunting task of replying to emails. Using the new Tablet he had recently bought, he typed a message to his Mars Team Project Chiefs.
Outlining construction dates, timelines, and future missions’ objectives, the email was really more of an official goodbye than anything else. Pausing for a moment, he made to speak to the empty room then caught himself in the action and frowned, suddenly lost in thought.
“Um, Dr. Floyd, Sir?” came a voice from the new intercom unit on his desk.
“What, Phillip?” James replied to the box.
“You have a visitor: a Mrs. Eve Bear. She’s on her way up now.”
“Phillip, do you really think now is an appropriate time for jokes?”
“It’s no joke, Sir. She had high-level clearance credentials and a Secret Service envoy. She’s on her way up now. I—”
James turned off the intercom and tightened the knot of his tie. A soft knock emanated from the door, and he quickly got to his feet.
“Come in.”
The door opened and Eve Bear, wearing a dark blue knee-length skirt and white blouse,
walked in.
“Wait outside,” she said to the stony-faced Secret Service men behind her.
“Yes ma’am,” one of the men replied and shut the door.
“I didn’t believe the receptionist when he said you were here,” James smiled, moving around to the side of his desk. “Can I offer you anything to drink?”
“It’s too late for coffee, Floyd,” Eve sighed tiredly as she sank into a chair opposite James’s.
“I wasn’t talking about coffee,” he replied, opening a small cabinet beside his desk.
“Whiskey and ice,” she said.
Handing her the drink, James quickly poured himself a Greyhound then dropped into his own chair. For a moment, only the sound of ice clinking against glass rose above the hum of the electric lights.
“Are you here on official business? James spoke, finally breaking the silence.
“Why do you ask?”
“Well, Barnes has me up for review after the Braun incident. I don’t think I’ll be here much longer. I just thought maybe they sent you to deliver the hammer blow.”
“I don’t fire people like you.” Eve said, sipping her drink. “And given what’s happened, I think your employment status is literally the last thing on anyone's mind.”
James nodded and fell silent.
“You have kids, right?” she asked, fixing him that calm-yet-smoldering gaze she was famous for.
“Yes, two daughters. Eight and eleven years old.”
“That’s lucky.”
“I know.”
“My granddaughter was five,” she said over the rim of her glass.
“I’m really sorry to hear that,” James muttered, not sure how else to respond.
Shifting gears, Eve set her drink down on the tabletop and crossed her legs. “You know anyone who didn’t make it? I mean, other than the obvious.”
“My neighbor down the street was eighty-one,” James shrugged, thinking of old Mr. Alberts slumped over his steering wheel on James’s front lawn.
“Yeah,” Eve chuckled. “Three Supreme Court Justices dropped dead. Not a big loss if you ask me.”
“I heard,” said James. “How’s this thing affecting your guy’s shot at a second term?”
“Don’t know yet, too soon to tell. The world is in mourning. We can’t talk about politics right now.”
James finished his Greyhound and stood up, taking Eve’s empty glass in his other hand. As the amber-colored whiskey splashed over the melting cubes in her tumbler, James tossed a quick glance at the Chief of Staff to the President of the United States. Her silver hair hung limply at her shoulders, and she exuded the same tenseness that seemed to plague everyone in the aftermath of recent events.
“What are you doing all the way down here?” James said, handing Eve her second drink. “Florida is quite a drive from D.C., unless you flew, that is. You didn’t fly, did you?”
Moving a cube of ice around with her fingertip, Eve shook her head.
“God no. The Secret Service drove me.”
“That’s good,” smiled James as he took up his chair and leaned back in the soft leather. “So, why are you here?”
“I’m here on unofficial business.”
“Oh?” James said, cocking his head to the side. “And that is?”
“We—the President and I—would like to know everything you know about what happened on the morning of July 16th. Not the stuff that’s in the reports. We saw all of that. I want to know what you know.”
Shifting in his seat, James blew out a long breath.
“Sorry to say that I know pretty much what you know.”
“Humor me.”
“Alright, fine. We know that whatever happened was like an electromagnetic pulse, only that it didn’t fry every electronic device, just the ones in close proximity to humans at the time the event took place.”
“What else?”
“Judging by the reports that I’m sure you’ve already seen, the event lasted for less than ten seconds.”
“Ten fucking seconds,” Eve echoed. “That’s all it takes to kill nearly a billion people? Ten seconds?”
“Apparently yes,” whispered James.
Tipping her head down so that silver locks of hair fell in front of her eyes, Eve spoke softly.
“Have you ever heard of the Chinese extremist group called The Tenth Sun?”
“Yeah,” said James, unsure where this was going.
“They’re really fired up about this,” Eve went on. “In fact they’re taking it as a sign, a telling of things to come.”
She paused to take a long pull from her drink.
“You know what they’re calling it?” she asked, spitting ice back into her glass.
“No. What?”
“The Purge,” she said flatly. “They’re calling it, ‘The Purge.’”
James was silent for several beats as he tried to comprehend—really truly comprehend— just how terrified and wounded the world was at that moment. Never before had the future been so uncertain. Never before had the total annihilation of the human race seemed so plausible.
“What else do you know?” said Eve, sitting up straighter in her chair as if doing so would better mask her fear.
“Well,” began James slowly.
“In most cases, people over the age of eighty or under the age of seven died instantly. We don’t know why some lived and others didn’t.”
Watching Eve’s face carefully, James thought he saw a flicker of pain behind her eyes but it was gone so fast he wasn’t sure if it had really been there.
“What else?” she said, picking her drink up then quickly setting it back down.
“We’ve created a timeline of events after the, um, Pulse, and discovered that the first failures of electrical equipment happened on Bessel Base, then the High Earth Orbit Shipyard, then the Low Earth Orbit International Space Station, and then, finally, on Earth itself.”
“What does that mean?”
“We think it means that we, us—the humans—acted as some kind of lightning rod. None of our solar monitoring equipment picked up anything, yet many of the survivors, including myself, reported seeing the aurora just before passing out. It’s like this Pulse raced across open space, doing no harm to anyone until it came into contact with us.”
“Not just us,” corrected Eve.
“Yes, that’s true. Not just us.”
“So they’re all dead?” she asked, her green eyes fixed on James’s.
“Yes. All of them. And before you ask, we don’t know why.”
“July 16th,” Eve said in a heavy tone. “The day the Artificial Intelligence went extinct.”
“We’ll grow more,” James offered hopefully, though in his heart he felt the deaths of Copernicus and Alexandria with a deep emptiness that threatened to stretch on to infinity.
AI were not like humans, and their lives had been placed on a different scale because of it. Though their race had existed for fewer than thirty years, each second had been like a week to them. Each minute a year. Each day a lifetime. And now they were all dead. Mankind owed a hefty debt to the AI, for without their perspectives and suggestions, many of the technologies that James’s crews depended on would never have existed. For civilization, measuring the impact of the AI would be like measuring the importance of fire or the internet.
“Will it happen again?” asked Eve, bringing James back from his sad reverence.
“The Pulse?” he shrugged. “We have no idea,”
“Comforting. You guys are doing a great job here. Remind me, what’s your annual budget?”
Chuckling, James nodded towards Eve’s empty glass. “You want another?”
“Why not,” she said with a defeated smile. “For all I know, it might be my last.”
“If you’re trying to tell me that you’re seventy-nine, then I need to get the name of whatever juice cleanse you’re on.”
Face turned to the sunset, Eve snorted and held out her glass.
Taking it, James refilled their drinks, feeling the liquor melt the edges off his anxiety like the corners of the ice in their glasses.
“Thanks,” Eve smiled, taking her fresh drink from James. “How’s your crew?”
“Are you asking officially or unofficially?”
“I have the official reports,” she said softly. “I want to know how they’re doing.”
Taking a long sip of his Greyhound, James relished the bitter sweetness of the drink.
“They’re okay,” he sighed, crushing a piece of ice with his molars. “They were able to restore their base-to-ship Com link pretty quickly. I think just being able to talk to each other has been a big boost for them.”
“Anything new out at the ruins? Future missions maybe?”
“Well, seeing as how the moratorium on non-essential EVA is still technically imposed, that would be a big no. Also, they’re nervous about going outside in case there’s another Pulse. My safety team is working some things out for them now. You know, survival tips and what not.”
“Were the Landers damaged?”
“No, because nobody was touching them when the Pulse hit. Both Lieutenant Aguilar and Lieutenant Marshall have reported back with full maintenance checklists. Landers 1 and 2 are fine.”
“Did the Pulse affect their suits?”
“Not sure. No one was wearing one during the event. But my safety team says it would likely fry the CPU and probably also cook the automated functions in their Survival Packs.”
“Is that bad?”
“If the suit’s CPU goes out, then they would lose cursory function like Augmented Vision and communications. If the Survival Packs go too, then they would lose their air supply and the liquid chemical heating elements in the suit would stop circulating.”
“So it’s bad.”
“Yeah, but as long as they have spare Survival Packs on hand, they should be able to make it long enough to get back inside a pressurized environment. Why do you ask?”
“The Chinese ship.”
Nodding slowly, James now saw why Eve was here on unofficial business. It amazed him that even during a time of so much upset and personal loss, she was able to steer him right into a conversation he had been trying to avoid since first learning of the Chinese Ark. Like some calculating predator, she appeared to have no problem compartmentalizing and ignoring all of the horrible things happening around her, focusing on the duties of her office as if they were prey.
“It’s time for Operation Columbia to move forward,” Eve spoke, her eyes showing no sign of emotion.
Setting his drink down, James sighed loudly.
“Do you have any idea how insensitive it is to call it that?”
“I’m not concerned with the name, Floyd. Long-range detectors have finally picked up the Chinese ship. It’s about a week out from Braun now. Has Captain Vodevski briefed Lt. Aguilar and Dr. Thomas about their mission?”
“I would imagine she’s been a little preoccupied.”
Eve drained the last of her drink then got to her feet. “Tell her the time has come. Operation Columbia is now her highest priority. We need to do this as cleanly as possible. Do you understand? When it’s all finished, China will need a way to back down without losing face, so we have to make this look like an accident. Lift the moratorium on EVA so if they see the launch it won’t be suspicious, and call me as soon as Lander 2 makes contact with the Chinese ship.”
Stopping at the door, Eve turned and tried to smile.
“Don’t worry about your job, James,” she said, using his first name for a change. “The President and I think you’re doing good work.”
“Yeah, well, sabotage was never part of the job description. Neither was murder.”
“It’s not murder unless you pull the trigger yourself,” recited Eve with practiced impassivity.
“Plausible deniability is not a moral code,” James called after her, but the door was already swinging shut.
Outlining the operation—Sol 104
Onboard Braun, the four members of the ship-bound crew sat around the center table in the galley. Though power had been restored days before, some things were still not operating correctly. Behind the glass walls of its enclosure at the rear of the galley, the bamboo garden had lost much of its green luster and was now mostly brown and yellow. The three days it had suffered with no moving air and no sunlamps had badly damaged the vitality of the genetically engineered plants. Though it was not a critical function, the impact of the nearly dead bamboo was felt by all onboard the ship. With each thin leaf that fell from the spear-like stalks, the crew uttered a collective-yet-silent scream at the tangible loss of life. So far removed from the holocaust on Earth, the dying bamboo had become a kind of symbol of the Pulse’s lasting effects. As a whole, the plant would likely survive, yet none would soon forget the cause of its mutilation. Mankind, like the bamboo, was forever changed by the event.
Magnetically secured to their temper-foam-lined chairs, the group were silent as they waited for Captain Tatyana Vodevski to speak.
“I have called this meeting,” she began and then stopped.
Frowning deeply, she seemed to be looking for the right words.
“As you know,” she started again. “The Chinese Government has launched a ship
to Mars. Though they claim it is simply a resupply and re-staffing mission, no such agreement was made between any of our governments. Furthermore, they only started calling it a resupply mission once the United States caught on to what they were doing. What you don’t know is that intel gathered by the late Donovan shows the Chinese ship filled not with supplies, but with soldiers and weapons. It appears that they intend to invade and assume control of Ilia Base.”
“Soldiers and invasions? Why didn’t you reveal any of this until now?” Amit said, his face set in an expression of worry.
“I was issued strict orders not to divulge the extent of my knowledge except to those involved in Operation Columbia.”
“So we are involved then?” Amit sighed sourly. “Why is this happening?”
“The Chinese are the oldest empire in the world,” Julian muttered. “They have the biggest population, the largest army, and a space program comparable to Russia’s or the U.S.’s. I should know. I did contract work for a jet propulsion lab in Hong Kong years ago. They want their moment to rule the world. It’s their turn anyway. We Westerners do it with economics. They have opted for a more direct approach.”
“I choose not to speculate,” Tatyana said coldly. “But I have been ordered to act.”
Producing a new Tablet, for her old one had burnt up in the Pulse, she plugged it into a port on the side of the table.
Slightly pixilated and with a shuddering quality that was a little disconcerting, the image of a ship came into view above the table. Resembling the phallic shape of the Ark, which had carried the supplies needed by the ground crew to build Ilia Base, this Chinese ship was stripped down and somehow more menacing.
“As you can see,” Tatyana pointed. “The Chinese have used the design for the Ark and made certain modifications. Here and here is where they have installed Lander docks. Unlike our Ark, this one is not designed to break apart into smaller pieces.”
“Damn,” sniffed Julian. “It’s almost like they want to keep on living or something.”
“Shut up,” said Tatyana.
Spinning the model of the ship, she slid a finger across her Tablet then cut the projection into a cross-section.
The Ruins of Mars: Waking Titan (The Ruins of Mars Trilogy) Page 18