I’m drowning, he thought angrily. Drowning in my own damn blood.
The ribs he had broken during his tumble down the plateau were stabbing at him, sharp pain cutting each shallow breath even shorter as his lungs raked across the splintered bones. Worse still, the sun was sinking fast and the wind was picking up. Knowing that the Base was likely to be without lights in the wake of the latest Pulse, Marshall saw a very bleak and frozen future for Harrison and himself.
Last time he had been out after dark, the powerless Dome had practically disappeared against the landscape. Now adding to the predicament, a sandstorm was fast brewing, threatening to blanket them like a plague of locusts. If things continued like this, Ilia Base would be all but invisible
“Ralph,” shouted Harrison, leaning his head in closely to be heard.
“Yeah?” Marshall sputtered back, choking on the words and tasting blood.
“How far away do you think we are?”
Scanning the desert before them, Marshall pointed to a series of small hills ahead. “It should be over those hills a ways.”
“What’s a ways?” Harrison asked.
Unable to answer, Marshall simply shrugged, pinpoints of light dancing in his eyes from the pain the movement caused him.
This is bad, he worried to himself. I felt that through the drugs. This is very bad.
Behind them, the wind gathered clouds of red dust, building the furls up like frothy storm breakers. Racing to meet the tempest, rogue flurries of sand moved like ghosts on the open plains—their whispering voices calling the two men to join them for eternity.
With the sun now fully behind the western peaks, only a faint orange glow remained to guide their way in the starless night.
“Sandstorm,” Harrison yelled. “Reminds me of the old days.”
Marshall nodded. It was all he could do. Talking seemed impossible. Feeling Harrison suddenly take his hand, the pilot looked over at the young man.
“So we don’t get separated this time,” Harrison said.
Bitterly fighting the desire to cry, Marshall gripped his friend’s hand as if for dear life and worked at taking deep breaths.
However, try as he might to abate the growing panic, his breathing was getting shallower by the minute. Soon, with legs that refused to work properly, Marshall staggered then dropped to his knees. Still clutching Harrison’s hand, he sucked helplessly at the air in his helmet as if through a straw.
“What’s wrong?” Harrison called, the glass of his visor touching that of Marshall’s.
“I can’t—” Marshall gasped. “I can’t breathe. I think I have a punctured lung.”
“What?”
Wanting to say more, something in Marshall’s brain wouldn’t allow him to waste what little breath he was able to gather.
“Let me carry you,” Harrison said, dropping to one knee in the sand.
“Your heart,” wheezed the pilot fitfully. “You can’t stress yourself. It could stop beating again.”
Ignoring his friend’s plea, Harrison scooped Marshall up in his arms like a child. Thanks to the feeble gravity Mars exercised on its inhabitants, the muscular man was light enough for Harrison to carry without excessive strain.
Resting his head against his friend’s chest, Ralph Marshall pretended that he could hear the beating of Harrison’s heart through the fabric of his Tac Suit. Using the imagined rhythm, he tried to regulate his labored breathing. Like a goldfish in an inch of water, Marshall continued to survive.
A wild ride indeed
Nearly out of time and totally out of other options, Julian Thomas depressurized the airlock of the Chinese Ark.
Reaching the small chamber had taken longer than he had hoped. Almost getting lost on the way down, he’d become confused in the maze of tunnels and narrow shafts.
Occasionally when he became pressed for time, Julian missed things: little things like where he put his car keys or what time he was supposed to pick his daughter up from school or, most recently, which access hatch bypassed the radiation shield of a Chinese spaceship.
Swinging the airlock door open, diffused red light flooded into the chamber like liquid magma. Across the space that separated the two ships, the white hull of the Lander shone in sparkling hues of ochre and orange, its polished ceramic hull reflecting back the haunting glow of Mars.
Poking his head out, Julian looked up the length of the Ark at the Red Planet, big and bright in the starry sky. Adjusting his perception so that the nose of the ship and Mars were now down, he swung out into space and grasped a rung of the nearby maintenance ladder.
Though he did not really want to know what it said, he checked the timecode on his left wrist. Chewing his upper lip, he stared at the numbers as they flicked past.
Calculations began to run through his head, swirling and mixing with the echoes of promises he made and the faces of those he’d let down time and time again. Slowly turning his attention to the grappling hook that connected the Ark to the Lander, he allowed several more beats to pass.
Finally, with the weight of resolution settling over him, he dug in the duffle sack and produced a small amount of C4. Placing the little charge on the base of the grappling hook he inserted a spare blasting cap, but no Wireless Time-Delay Ignition Switch. Finished, he took one final look at the sleek Lander hanging by a thread above him then turned his back to it and climbed sidelong up the hull of the Chinese ship.
Following the curving path of the ladder as it brought him around the circumference of the hull, he counted each rung in his mind, using their spacing as a sort of measurement to help him keep his bearings. As he neared another ladder running from tail to nose, he pivoted, aligning himself with the direction of the new rungs then began moving down the length of the ship towards the cylindrical launch pods of the Chinese MI.
Fiery and imposing, Mars bore up at him like an angry red eye. Growing nearer, the silhouettes of the launch pods were black against the rusty glow, and though he knew his mind was just playing tricks on him, it seemed to Julian that the long-dormant God of War was stirring with the anticipation of violence.
Having had no time to waste finding a harness or any other safety equipment, Julian climbed, unsecured, down the exterior of the massive Chinese ship, each movement holding the possibility of disaster. Despite the fact that every synapse in his brain was telling him to go slowly and choose his actions with care, a glance at the timecode on his wrist easily trumped his better instincts.
Thankfully, he soon came to the launch pods and began scanning the area for the best place to set his first charge. Everywhere, weld marks cut across the grey hull, their fat beads of steel glaring like scars on the hide of an elephant.
Standing as tall as eighteen-wheelers turned on end, the MI launch pods spawned long shadows that moved like those on a sundial as the Ark continued to roll on its axis.
Shaking his head inside his bulbous helmet, Julian cursed the dormant killbots for their role in sealing his fate then turned his attention back to the hull.
Before him, about a meter to the left, two seams crossed one another in the shape of an X. As he reached into the duffel sack, his memory tingled, scanning its vast reserves for the source of the nautical nostalgia attached to such a symbol.
‘X marks the spot,’ a voice from his childhood recalled. ‘Just like in Treasure Island.’
“Julian, what’s your ETA?” Aguilar said in his ear, scattering the Frenchman’s fond memories.
“I’m just getting ready to place the last two charges,” he responded, taking a shrink-wrapped ball of C4 out of the sack.
“Now? What’s taking you so long? You should be on your way out.”
Sighing, Julian resisted the urge to inform Aguilar that he was, in fact, already out.
“I just ran into a little setback but it’s no problem. How’s the Lander?”
“She’s back up and running! I’ve taken her through all the major checks so she’s ready to jet as soon as you get here.”
Clamping a rung of the ladder between his knees, Julian let go with his hands and began assembling the first explosive charge. “Do me a favor will you?” he said, flicking his eyes to the timecode on his wrist.
“Sure, what do you need?”
“Sync my Tablet to this radio channel then open the file ‘Jean Marie Thomas’ and hit ‘play.’”
“I didn’t know your daughter was a musician.”
“She is. Will you do it?”
There was a pause on the other end. Then, the slow and tremulous melodies of a lone cello filtered in through the earpiece of his headset.
“Thank you,” he murmured.
As if in time to the music, he measured out the correct lengths of wire, formed the plastic explosive, and primed the blasting cap. Adding the final cherry to the deadly sundae of C4, he inserted the Wireless Time-Delay Ignition Switch then pressed the charge firmly against the welded X on the hull. It held solidly.
Looking up from the bomb, he shivered at the sight before him. Mars was a Leviathan in space, pulling the Chinese Ark towards its waiting jaws with the invisible tentacles of gravity.
A light, red and startling, flashed across the inside of his helmet’s visor. Chinese symbols spelled themselves out in block letters behind it, partially obscuring his vision. Not needing to decipher what the message meant, Julian gazed down through the translucent symbols at his wrist Tablet. He was out of time.
On cue, Aguilar cut through the calming melodies of his daughter’s genius.
“Where are you man? What’s going on?”
“I’m almost done.”
“Then why is the airlock door open? Where are you?”
Peering down at the unfinished charge in his hand, Julian slowly began to assemble it. “I’m outside on the hull.”
“What?! Why?”
“There was a locked door. I couldn’t get in. It doesn’t really matter, Joey. What matters now is that you have to go.”
“Go?” shouted the pilot. “Go? What does that mean: go?”
“It means, leave me here,” Julian sighed, working the parts of the charge together in a kind of trance.
“I’m not leaving you!”
With Chinese characters still flashing across his visor, Julian knew it would only be a matter of minutes until Amit’s doctored Flight Path took the ship into an entry trajectory and the MI pods initiated an emergency launch.
“Joey, you have to go now. I need to stay and finish my work.”
“Fuck that,” the young pilot swore. “I’m coming to get you. Where are you?”
“Don’t be stupid. The crew needs you alive. Who knows what’s happened on the ground? You might be the only Lander pilot left. You have to leave.”
“But—”
“But nothing, my friend. The Ark will be in atmo soon. You must go.”
“No,” Aguilar said with finality. “I’m not leaving you. We’ll figure a way out. Fuck the last charge. Just come back to the Lander now. We don’t need it.”
“I can’t. The last charge has to go near the MI launch pods, and I’m not leaving the work unfinished. This ship needs to be utterly destroyed or else our friends aren’t safe.”
“Julian,” Aguilar implored. “Think about what you’re saying, man.”
“I have,” the Frenchman replied, pulling out the detonator. “Keep the music playing all the way until the end, alright?”
Selecting a charge from the digital readout of those he’d primed, he blew the grappling hook off the hull, releasing the cable that connecting the Ark to the Lander.
“You son of a bitch,” Aguilar breathed, no doubt seeing the flash from the Lander’s open hatch. “You cut the cable. Why?”
“Call it intuition,” Julian said, turning his attention back to rigging the last charge. “I kind of figured there wouldn’t be enough time and I didn’t want you getting yourself killed too. Imagine how angry the captain would be if I didn’t return you in one piece. I did promise her, after all.”
Only silence replied from the other end of the line.
“When you get back to the ship,” he continued. “Don’t let all of this overshadow how you feel about her. She likely didn’t have a choice in the matter. Kiss her, my friend. Love her.”
Finished with the charge, Julian quickly scanned his eyes over the scars on the hull, looking for a spot somewhere near the cluster of launch-pod cylinders.
Noticing an area just over five meters from where he crouched, he sighed and wished his arms were longer. Centered in the middle of the gun-barrel-like fixtures, the target was well out of reach.
“Julian,” came Aguilar’s voice, subdued and defeated. “What should I tell everyone?”
Exhausting the last of his Chinese comprehension, Julian found the electromagnetic function for his boots and engaged it by swiping his finger across the wrist Tablet.
Carefully getting into a standing position, he shuffled away from the safety of the ladder towards the launch pods and the stippled scars that marked the location of his final charge.
“Tell them whatever you like, but just remember what I said about you and the captain. Life is too short. Believe me.”
Placing the charge on the hull, he pressed down until he was satisfied that the plastic explosive had stuck. Then straightening up, he gazed out at Mars, now grown to fill almost his entire field of vision.
Distantly at first, the ship began to rumble.
“Time to go, Joey,” he said. “Remember to play my daughter’s music for me.”
“Goodbye, Julian,” sniffed Aguilar, and then the line went dead.
The haunting and serine notes of Julian’s daughter’s first sonata filled his helmet. She had been twelve when she’d written it and he had been there. It was one of the few times in her life that he had.
Feeling a violent shudder, Julian struggled to keep his upright position as the nose of the Ark dipped beneath the surface of the Martian upper atmosphere. Green lights flicked on at the base of each MI launch pod.
With a trembling finger, Julian Thomas glared at the metal tubes then pressed the master detonation command for all of the explosive charges.
One by one, they blew: fire erupting into space with blossoms of blinding light that evaporated in the beat of a heart. Moving in a succession of planned randomness, the blasts tore the hull of the Chinese Ark apart, huge chunks of steel flung out into the atmosphere like giant bats fleeing the fires of hell.
From where he stood, Julian was in the front row of a spectacle like no other, yet he hardly noticed. As the charge at his feet finally detonated, he was already very far away. In the span of nanoseconds, the music of his beloved daughter bore him on a sea of tranquility that protected his soul from the shredding burning chaos which consumed his body.
Tears streaming down his face, Joseph Aguilar watched from a safe distance as the Chinese Ark spiraled in a hurricane of fire and wreckage. Through the cockpit window of the Lander, he saw the massive ship as it cut a wide swath of flaming destruction across the curve of Mars’s skyline. With one final explosion, the mangled Ark burst into thousands of pieces like some demented firework, streaking across the heavens in a celebration of carnage. The God of War was satiated at last.
In the darkness of the frozen desert, Harrison Raheem Assad looked up at the night sky as small streaks of light rained down behind the wall of mountains, casting an unnatural glow. Like a second sunset, the odd illumination seemed to come from well-past the horizon. Yet, in the contrast of its presence, he saw the glint of metal ahead of him in the desert.
“Ralph,” he spoke, looking down at his friend in his arms. “Ralph, look. It’s the Dome.”
Through the heavy ice of delirium, Ralph Marshall raised his head enough to catch the reflection of that mysterious and quickly dying light as it shimmered off the Alon plating of Ilia Base a kilometer away.
“Home,” he managed to say.
“Yeah,” Harrison nodded. “Home.”
As Ca
ptain Tatyana Vodevski held tightly to the handrail that spanned the Bridge Deck window, she felt a huge wash of relief envelop her like diving into a tropical sea.
Though only a tiny prick of light compared to the massive fireball that was the Chinese Ark, she spotted the Lander—Joey’s Lander—speeding towards them.
By her side, Amit Vyes let out a low whistle as the Ark continued to break apart into smaller and smaller pieces, the glow of its fiery demise casting shadows on the back wall of the Bridge Deck.
In the confusion of debris, neither noticed the hard-shelled pod that fell among the other wreckage, its afterburners cutting on like a comet tail as it sped for the gnarled peeks of the mountains far below.
Though lights had been restored to some portions of Braun after the Pulse, the Bridge Deck was still mostly cloaked in darkness. Only the digital glow of random Tablet screens shone in the large room, reporting on the various functions and systems of the mighty interplanetary starship as they came back online. However, at the Pilot's Console in the center of the Bridge Deck, one screen flashed a series of words having nothing to do with the slowly rebooting spaceship.
Anomalous radio signal netted, it said in bright green letters. Location determined: Phobos, Stickney Crater, Limtoc Basin.
End of Book Two
Epilogue
In a smoldering crater past the horizon to the east of Ilia Base, the blast door of a fire-scorched MI pod shuddered under the force of an unseen blow.
Striking with measured, rapid concussions, the thing inside began to warp the door critically until it finally came free from its hinges. Jettisoned into the night sky, the mangled metal disk landed five meters away with a dull thud and stood erect in the sand.
From inside the shadows of the lone surviving MI pod, something unfolded: six metal legs bracing themselves on all sides of the opening where the blast door had been.
The Ruins of Mars: Waking Titan (The Ruins of Mars Trilogy) Page 25