by Read, John
I put my lunch back in the fridge and drove to the spaceport. I pulled up to the curb in front of the terminal and stepped out onto the sidewalk.
“You’re late!” someone yelled. A tall man limped towards me. He had obviously come from space and was getting used to gravity again. The sun reflected off a vehicle behind him, and I couldn’t see his face.
“Yeah, sorry, I was in the three o’clock dome. It’s a long drive.” I paused. I know that voice. I picked up my pace toward the man, fighting back tears.
“Good to see you, too, Johnny!” Avro said.
We hugged, clapping each other on the back.
I grabbed one of Avro’s wheeled suitcases. “I’m speechless. Why didn’t you let me know you were coming?”
“I wanted it to be a surprise.”
“Well, you succeeded,” I said, dropping Avro’s suitcase in the SUV’s front trunk.
We pulled away from the spaceport and Avro filled me in on his last two years. “I was stationed in San Diego. Eventually, the Cartel’s guerrilla war stagnated and there wasn’t any progress on any front, but no one was getting hurt either. To tell you the truth, it was boring.”
“Were there any more survivors?” I asked. “Civilians, I mean.”
“A few,” Avro replied, “Literally, a few, as in three.”
“What’s it like, in California?”
“Bad. It seems like everyone in the occupied territory actually wants to be there. The Cartel is actually trying to secede.”
“So it’s basically Somalia seventy years ago,” I said.
“Basically,” he replied. “So anyway, six months ago I was recruited by Red Planet. They patched into my HV with their sales pitch right as I was preparing to go on leave. I was planning to go east, maybe meet a girl, settle down and raise a family. When I got the call, I thought, ‘okay, I’ve got time for one more adventure.’ But I had one condition.”
“What was that?” I asked.
“I asked to work with you,” Avro said. “You were the best wingman a guy could ask for, and I’d be honored to fly with you again.”
I was flattered, and I admit, the thought of Avro on the team made me very happy.
“The PDC team was only assigned one plane,” I said. There were others, of course, but shipping anything to Mars was so expensive that our backup aircraft was shared between several departments.
Avro smiled. “Not anymore.”
Early the next morning, Kevin and I arrived at the PDC’s observation deck, mildly hungover from the prior evening’s festivities. Avro was already there, coffee in hand. He had stayed home the previous night, using the time to get settled in. I introduced him to Kevin and they shook hands.
Kevin and I stepped closer to the window and looked down onto the PDC’s tarmac at a machine that looked like a bulbous spider.
Avro joined us at the window. “This is the MVA, the Martian Vertical Aircraft. It’s nicknamed the Arachnid. Basically, it’s a helicopter for Mars. That array of thrusters provides the lift.” Avro pointed at eight arches that emanated from the top of the fuselage like the legs of a spider.
“That thing is sweet!” Kevin said. “Can I fly it?”
Avro looked at Kevin, glancing at another of his holographic t-shirts. “Sure, I’ll give you a shot at the left seat. It’s pretty automated, basically flies itself.”
“This is really something,” I said, admiring the craft. The fuselage of the Arachnid resembled a medevac helicopter with large, sliding doors on each side. “I guess the company’s looking to increase our productivity. This’ll sure beat driving out to the array.”
“Exactly,” Avro said. “With this aircraft we can get anywhere in the colony in under five minutes. The Arachnid can haul up to eighteen Martian tons of equipment; that’s enough to carry a construction drone. It can fly pressurized, or unpressurized, making EVAs much—”
“We call them GODs,” Kevin interrupted.
“No, we don’t,” I countered.
“Going Outside Dome,” Kevin clarified. “You know, a GOD.”
“Anyway,” Avro said. “Want to go for a test flight? Just remember, I’ve only trained in the simulator. This will be my first time flying the actual aircraft.”
“God, yes,” I said. Two years flying just the Pelican had me eager to experience a new aircraft.
Kevin looked at me, “Why can you say GOD?” he said, then turned to Avro. “And it’s your first time?”
“Don’t worry, Kevin,” I said. “Avro can fly anything.”
Our watches buzzed, summoning us to the conference room. The test flight would have to wait. We grabbed our coffees and headed in.
I sat down at a desk in the conference room followed by Jimmy, Avro and Kevin. After the morning pleasantries, we turned and faced the floor-to-ceiling display at the front of the room.
The image of a 1960s era rotary phone flashed on the screen, signaling the incoming call. Jimmy leaned forward tapped an icon in the center of the table, accepting the call.
The call came from Environmental Engineering, the newly arrived team tasked with mitigating the storms. They were headquartered in the observation dome to the northeast of the colony, sharing the dome with the Zubrin Research Station and enjoying some of Harmony Colony’s best views.
“Morning, boys, great to see ya,” a man on the screen adjusted the camera. He spoke with a smile and an accent I couldn’t quite place. Irish, perhaps?
“Good morning,” Jimmy said. He leaned back in his seat, putting his feet up on the table. “Welcome to Mars.”
“I’m Jeff Watson, the new senior environmental engineer.”
Watson looked fit. He must have spent five hours a day in the transport’s gym. Unlike the blue jeans and white shirts most of us wore at work, Watson’s clothes appeared tailored. His hair was meticulously styled, which made me wonder if Mars had a new barber.
I introduced the others, Avro last.
“Avro, like the Arrow?” Watson asked, with genuine curiosity in his voice.
“How do you know about that?” Avro asked, a big smile suddenly crossing his face.
“The Avro Arrow was one of the first fighter jets to reach Mach two. Canadians are very proud of that aircraft.” That explained Watson’s accent and his friendliness.
Avro continued the history lesson. “And when the Avro Arrow program was canceled, many of the engineers moved to Los Angeles to work for Lockheed Martin. My grandmother was one of them. It’s where she met my grandfather.”
“So why did you call us?” Jimmy said.
“We have a solution for the storms. And we need your help,” Watson said. “The plan involves electrical power. And lots of it.”
“We’ve got the electricity. How much do you need?” I said.
“Well, let me explain how we’re going to do it and then we’ll discuss our power needs. Can you see the presentation?” The screen faded to a map of the planet. Watson’s picture moved to a small box on the top left. We nodded the affirmative. After eighty years of PowerPoint, there was still the occasional issue.
“Yes? Okay. Good, let’s get started,” Watson said, clearing his throat. “So: static electricity is the problem.”
“Static electricity builds up during periods of increased solar activity, creating storms,” Kevin said in a news anchor voice. “Pretend we’re not idiots and tell us what you need.”
Watson smiled, and I knew he was a politician through and through.
I said, “Don’t mind Kevin. He forgot to pack polite when he left Earth.”
“Not a problem,” Watson said. “Let’s move on.”
On the screen, an animation showed a solar flare billowing through space. When the fiery cloud approached Mars, the video switched to a surface view of Mars, showing a plume of dust lifting off the ground.
“In order to fight the storms, we need to dissipate the static charge.”
“Counteract the Sun’s radiation?” Avro interrupted. “You’re talking about
completely geoengineering the climate. How do you expect to use electricity on a dust storm when our electricity comes from solar?”
Watson smiled again and leaned forward as if he was about to say something profound. “Please, this will all make sense in a moment.” A map of Mars appeared on the screen. “Our team carried with us a series of coils that will produce an opposing charge in the atmosphere. When laid out in the right pattern, the coils will completely remove the planet’s ability to produce storms of any magnitude.”
Watson paused, then announced, “We call it Project Bakersfield.”
The next slide showed a rotating view of Mars from space. Running from north to south, along the lines of longitude, was a series of red bands making Mars look like a crater-covered basketball.
“These red bands represent the anti-storm coils. They circle the entire planet providing a defensive shield against any increase in solar radiation, eliminating the possibility of a static-induced storm.”
Avro and I looked at each other, then back at the screen, which displayed another animation. The scale of what he was describing was massive.
“As you can see, the coils are distributed from these trucks. The distribution method is similar to laying deep sea cable.”
An animation showed a large yellow truck towing a rotating drum. As the truck moved along the surface, it laid the coil behind it.
“We’ve assembled ten of these trucks, each capable of laying coil at ten kilometers per hour. We’ll be laying one hundred thousand kilometers in all. With some simple math, you can see that we’ll lay the entire network in only six weeks.”
“Sounds like a pretty good plan,” I said. “Where do we come in?”
Watson closed the presentation and his image again filled the screen.
“First, you need to connect Project Bakersfield to the grid.”
“Sounds easy enough,” Kevin said. “There’s an extension cord in the garage.”
I looked over at Avro, watching him pinch his temples.
“Moving on, we have permission from H3 to install a relay to the nuclear reactor in the Alamo, so the system can be used at night, although at an extremely reduced level of efficiency. Compared to the new solar array you’re about to build, the nuclear reactor will be a drop in the bucket.”
“So who gets to work with the folks in the Alamo?” I asked. “We’ve never had any interaction with them before.”
“I will be your liaison with the Alamo,” Watson answered.
“You’ve been to the Alamo?” Kevin asked. “Most people we meet from there don’t talk about it.”
“I have, actually. It’s very nice,” Watson said.
“That’s it? It’s nice?” Kevin said.
“Finally,” Watson said, “the question you’ve all been waiting for.” Watson paused. I think he was trying to size us up or just trying to determine if we were competent at all.
“How much power do you need?” I asked.
“Project Bakersfield requires five gigawatts of power.”
“Five gigawatts?” Kevin shook his head.
“Okay, question time. Yes. We’re talking about geoengineering the atmosphere of a planet. But we’re also very good at math. You’ll have capacity by the time the trucks have completed laying the cable.”
“Oh, yeah? And how do you figure that?” I asked.
A grin spread across Watson’s face. “Because we’ve got a warehouse with five gigawatts of panels just waiting to be installed.”
Working on deploying five gigawatts of solar panels in six weeks gave us a weird feeling. Maybe it was the fact that we were asked to do six months work in only six weeks. Something was off about Project Bakersfield and we weren’t sure what.
Every morning we arrived at the PDC before sunrise. I’d spent more time in a spacesuit in the last two weeks than I did in the previous year. Kevin continued to insist that we change the spacewalking abbreviation from EVA to GOD.
The logistics of the operation went like this: A flatbed drone arrived before sunrise stocking our distribution center with panels. At the same time, our machine shop printed parts for making ad hoc repairs to the grid. If nothing went wrong, our construction drones would take the panels from the PDC and install them out on the surface. It was simple if nothing went wrong, but something always went wrong.
Two weeks into the operation we prepared for our busiest day yet. By the time I arrived at work, we had seven stuck drones, three misaligned solar arrays, and a rogue support structure.
I was in the observation deck, going over the colony’s power consumption reports when I noticed a massive spike in the Alamo’s usage. The Alamo had tripled its consumption overnight, dipping into the colony’s reserves.
I patched in a call to their engineering department. “Hey, John Orville here at the PDC. What’s going on over there? Your power consumption is off the charts!”
“Ah, yeah, about that. We’re ah… we’ve just built some additional reserve hydrogen tanks, we’re filling them now. You’re probably seeing the residual spike from the electrolyzers.” Electrolyzers used electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. His story was plausible but I didn’t buy it. He sounded like he was lying.
“Ah okay,” I said. “How much hydrogen are you making?”
“Don’t know sir, but I can find out,” he said.
“You do that. PDC out.”
Avro and Kevin were already getting into their spacesuits for the day’s activities. I joined them and began suiting up, as well. We sealed the connection rings on our spacesuits and stepped into the PDC’s airlock. The airlock opened just in time to watch the sun rise over the distant hills. Unlike Earth, where sunrises shine in pinks and yellows, Martian sunrises radiate blues and grays, making for a very alien looking sky.
Kevin attached a utility rover to the underside of the Arachnid’s abdomen. I made sure we had the right tools on board while Avro completed the preflight activities, including fueling the Arachnid and topping off oxygen.
With the pre-work complete, Avro strapped himself into the pilot’s seat, I took the copilot’s chair, and Kevin sat in the jump seat.
“MATC, comm check, over,” Avro said while buckling his harness over his bulky spacesuit.
“MVA, this is MATC, we read you five by five,” Mars Air Traffic Control replied. “What’s your destination, over?”
“MATC, we’re headed to the eastern ridge to work on some panel repairs.”
“Be advised, there will be MDF training activities on the eastern plains.”
“Copy, we’ll try to stay out of their way.”
Avro activated the Arachnid. Pyramid-shaped blue flames licked from the eight thrusters like pilot lights on a stove. Avro grasped the collective throttle control, lifting the craft into the morning sky.
The Arachnid kicked up a plume of dust and the colony sank beneath us. We headed east, into the sunrise. Avro and I pulled down the sunshades on our suits, adding more hues to the already colorful sky.
Avro landed five kilometers from the colony on the shoulder of a service highway that ran below the ridge. We hopped out of the Arachnid and went to work.
Nearby, a defective construction drone twitched. Kevin went over to it, attempting a reboot. He was the planet’s lead expert in human-drone interface. After about thirty seconds, the drone sprang to life and rolled away.
Avro slid open the aircraft’s door and undid the tie-downs holding our equipment in place. I disconnected the rover from the aircraft and booted up a tablet displaying the location of the misaligned panels.
With the supplies placed onto the rover, Kevin drove the vehicle up the hill while Avro and I trudged after him.
Despite the low gravity, the climb was exhausting. By the time we reached the lower array, Avro and I were both breathing heavily. This wasn’t a problem, since we knew we could tap into the O2 tank on the side of the Arachnid.
With no spaces between the solar panels, the upper ridge looked like one
giant sheet of glass. The panels were fifteen feet up, accessible using a ladder. We walked through the supports as if they were trees, the array covering us like a forest canopy.
Kevin took a moment to admire the view from the edge of our synthetic forest.
“Gotta love the pink sky,” I said, tapping commands into the tablet and looking up at the solar panels.
“Pink sky in the morning, Martians take warning. Pink sky at night, Martians delight.” Kevin rhymed, pulling a ladder from the rover.
“This is Mars, boss,” Avro said, “The sky is always pink. You can’t take warning and simultaneously take delight.”
“Sure you can,” Kevin said, leaning the ladder against a support beam and stepping on the first rung. “Hey guys, check it out!”
In the valley, several grey trucks rolled into view and a few dozen MDF troops piled out. You would have thought their dark blue spacesuits would contrast with Mars’s red soil, but they didn’t. The dark coloring helped them blend into the shadows created by large boulders on the plain. That gave me a bit of a chill: someone had given this a lot of thought, and if they were really training for some kind of Earth action, why would they have bothered?
In the distance, scores of airborne targeting drones buzzed over the horizon and towards the troops.
“Looks like a live fire exercise,” Avro said.
“And we’ve got the best view in the house!” Kevin said. The drones circled and kicked up dust as the soldiers dove for cover behind large rocks and launched smoke grenades to confuse the drones.
“What’s the range on their ammo?” I asked, worried not only for our safely, but for the grid.
“They’re using self-destructing shells,” Avro replied. “The bullets have a range, usually a half a mile, and break apart once they reach that distance.”
“This is quite something,” I said as we stopped our work to watch the show. The soldiers were over a mile away and at least several hundred feet below us. They fired at the drones, which fell from the sky in fiery plumes. When the soldiers had taken out that wave of drones, we watched as they carried one of their comrades on a stretcher, loading the fallen solider into a medevac drone. The medevac lifted into the sky, and zipped back towards the colony.