The Martian Conspiracy

by Read, John

  Bowden continued, “For this reason, staffing in the mines is set to decline immediately. One thousand people will not be showing up to work tomorrow, and a month from now, another thousand employees will be off the job.

  Amelia was right, I thought.

  “Red Planet Mining has carefully considered the situation and assures its departing employees that they will receive a living wage until the launch window opens next year. However, due to the extreme cost of spaceflight, the company will allow non-working colonists to remain on Mars. These citizens will be given a small salary in exchange for not returning to Earth.”

  The report ended and I switched off the holovision. For the first time ever, Mars was going to have freelivers.

  The next morning, Kevin and I went back to work while Avro took the day off to spend some quality time with Amelia. Jimmy had taken the night shift and was sleeping in a bunk on the ground floor of the PDC.

  Despite our long hours, Amelia and Avro had grown close in the past weeks. I guess she got tired of our bed fort because she even moved into Avro’s apartment. Their relationship reminded me of a high school romance, but instead of hiding from her father, she was hiding from everyone.

  Kevin stood as he worked the data screens that stretched along the windows. His station was command-and-control for the construction drones. I sat at Jimmy’s station, where he functioned as a dispatcher, helping coordinate the teams on the surface.

  Out the large windows, we could see two of the ten storm coils running outward from the colony and over the horizon.

  “So when does the system go online?" I asked. We hadn’t heard from Watson since the ceremony and since our role in Project Bakersfield was complete. Keeping us in the loop wasn’t a priority.

  "Not sure," Kevin said. "The integration team still has some testing to do. The system is preventative, so it doesn't matter if it's active all the time. The probability of a storm happening on any given day is less than one percent."

  I stared out the window, studying Project Bakersfield’s anti-storm coils. The coils reminded me of oil pipelines running through the desert, embedded into the soil so that vehicles could pass over them. Up until today, the silvery coils were inert. Today, something was different. The coils pulsed with colorful electric distortions that traveled along the coils outward toward the horizon.

  "What was that?" I asked.

  "Oh, that? They’re testing the coils in bursts. Look closer."

  I squinted. Sunlight reflecting off distant solar arrays made it difficult to see. I put my aviators on and saw static electricity like St. Elmo’s fire running in blue flames over the coils.

  "I thought you needed oxygen for St. Elmo's fire," I said. I shuddered a little. Sailors had often regarded St. Elmo's fire as a bad omen.

  "You do," Kevin answered. "There’s oxygen in the soil. When the coil creates an electromagnetic field, the dust surrounding the coil becomes charged and O2 is released."

  THRUMP. The sound came from outside and a layer of dust jumped up into the air. THRUMP. The dust settled back onto the ground.

  "That was weird," I said, standing up and leaning against the window.

  "That was, indeed, weird," Kevin said, looking at the readings on his display. I glanced over to what Kevin was looking at. His primary display showed a map and the location of all our drones. He pulled in a camera feed from a drone’s point of view.

  The dust jumped again. “I have a bad feeling about this,” I said.

  "What’s wrong?" Kevin asked. “That’s probably just the system cycling through the abatement sequence.”

  "That dust lifted off the ground! Don't you see what this means?" I said.

  "No.”

  "If a negative charge prevents a storm, what happens if the coils produce a positive charge?"

  “I don’t want to think about it,” Kevin looked up from his display. “Most likely we are experiencing a real storm somewhere on Mars and this is the system doing its job.”

  "Get Avro on the line, I want another opinion. Where is he anyway?"

  "He's with Amelia," Kevin answered. "I assume they’re up at Make-Out Point."

  "The Look-Off?"

  "Yeah, the Look-Off," Kevin said.

  “You know, someday you’re gonna have to stop talking like you’re fourteen.”

  “But not today,” he said.

  Our phones chimed. Avro was calling us. I unclipped my phone from my wrist and transferred the call to the display window.

  "Hey, guys," came the voice from the screen. "Have you seen this?" Avro pointed at the view. From Avro’s and Amelia's vantage point, a cloud was rising from beyond a hill.

  “Yeah, we’re seeing the same thing,” I said. “Looks like a storm, so why hasn’t the system neutralized it?”

  “I have no idea,” Avro said. “But I’m worried we did a lot of work for nothing.”

  "Kevin, get Central Control on the line," I ordered. "And Avro, don’t go anywhere."

  "On it," Kevin replied and punched in the commands to bring Central Control up on the adjacent screen.

  "Central, this is PDC," I said.

  It was bright in the central control tower and Jackson wore leather blinders on his sunglasses. “Jackson here,” he said.

  “Jackson, what’s going on out there?”

  “We are experiencing a storm,” the director replied without any hint of concern. “As you can see, Project Bakersfield is working to counteract.” He paused as if everything was okay.

  “Are you sure the coils are resonating at the correct polarity? If I had to guess, the coils appear to be emitting the wrong charge."

  “That’s unlikely,” Jackson stated confidently. “The system was designed to emit a negative—”

  “What is it?”

  “You’re right," Jackson said, turning in his chair, and double-checking his displays. “The coils are emitting a positively charged electromagnetic field.”

  "Well, shut it down, dammit!” I yelled.

  "We can’t. Control of Project Bakersfield was transferred to the engineering team inside the Alamo," Jackson admitted.

  "What? Why? Because we connected H3’s nuclear reactor as a backup?"

  "Yup. Apparently, H3 doesn't want anyone else to have access to the nuclear portion of the grid.”

  “So we have no control over the coil," I said. "Can we disconnect it from the grid?"

  “No, we can’t. The power is routed through the main bus, where the solar grid meets the nuclear one. This occurs inside the Alamo."

  Kevin grabbed our camera and centered it on his face, “Are you seeing what we're seeing?" Kevin asked.

  Jackson gave him a dirty look, then reached up and pushed his camera so it showed another part of the control room. Like an air traffic control tower, the control room sat on top of the central dome. The tower’s two other controllers stood along the room’s windows, watching as dust clouds churned in the distance. "Does that answer your question?" he asked.

  Again, the dust outside our window rose several meters into the air before snapping back down onto the ground.

  “Yeah, that about sums it up,” I said, looking at the situation from multiple angles.

  The dust rose once more, except this time, it stayed up. Debris pelted our window as pressure variances formed around the colony. Jackson’s control tower went dark as a red cloud covered central dome. A storm was in full force.

  Jackson reoriented his camera back towards his station. He took off his sunglasses, setting them on his console. “John, I’m signing off. We’ll be back in touch as soon as we figure this out.” He hung up before we could reply.

  “My God,” I swore. It all made sense now. I turned, facing Avro’s picture on the screen, “The system we just built?”

  “What about it?” Avro said.

  “I know why it didn’t prevent the storm.”

  “Why?” Amelia leaned into view, a nervous look on her face.

  “Because Project Bakersfield is c
ausing the storm,” I said.

  “Someone sure screwed this up,” Kevin said.

  “No, Kevin, not a screw up,” I said. “I’m willing to bet that Project Bakersfield was designed to cause storms!”

  An alarm went off on our panel. I looked at a map of the colony. Several more alarms wailed, and I tried to concentrate on which ones were demanding my attention.

  The fuel cells were working overtime, creating electricity from hydrogen and oxygen at an incredible rate. They were tapping into the colony’s reserves!

  “Oh shit shit shit!” I yelled. “Kevin, the hydrogen! Our tanks! They’re already half empty! Shut them down, shut off those fuel cells!”

  Kevin’s fingers flew across the controls.

  “That power’s going to the Alamo!” I yelled.

  I got on the line with the Alamo’s engineering team. ”What the shit,” I yelled into the terminal. “Shut down all power transfers from the circumferential!”

  A video feed of an Alamo engineer’s face appeared on the screen. He looked frantic. “We’re locked out. Can you shut it down on your end?”

  “What the hell? No! You’re empting our reserves! Can’t you see what we’re seeing?”

  “Affirmative PDC, we’re working on it.”

  I listened to the hustle and bustle in the Alamo’s control center. In the background, I heard people speaking. “I don’t know, I don’t know, Can’t… no, it’s not responding.”

  I looked at Kevin “I don’t think they’re in control either.”

  More voices from the other side. “Got it, auxiliary systems coming online, reset override complete, cutting the power—”

  The line went dead. I looked at my screen. The Colony’s energy reserve stabilized at twenty percent. Ten months of the colony’s energy reserves were gone. Just plain gone. I tried to call the Alamo back. Nothing. Communications had been cut off.

  Kevin faced the window, staring out at our darkening view. Then, in a slow voice, he whispered, “Oh, shit.”

  “What is it?”

  “Look at the wind speeds,” Kevin said, pointing to the meteorological display. “The storm,” he paused. “It’s category five.”

  We could tell the storm was bad from the noise. The sand in the wind beat harmonies against the observation deck’s glass. It was like driving a car through a hailstorm.

  I flipped on the news. Robert Bowden stood in the bio dome, just outside the meteorological center. In the background, a dust-caked dome wall took on a deep, red hue.

  “Well, this is the second storm this month to hit Harmony Colony. According to the meteorological center, we haven’t had two storms this close together since 2063. We’re also having trouble with our deep space transmitters, so don’t expect to be contacting Earth any time soon.”

  He doesn’t know about the power drain, I thought. And how could he? Only the engineering teams would see that data, and we weren’t exactly issuing press releases. I turned the volume down but kept the news on in the background.

  “Kevin, we need to make sure no more reserves get stolen,” I said.

  “There’s a substation near each fuel cell in each dome. Right now, all the fuel cells feed into the grid. If we disconnect each fuel cell from the grid, each dome will be on its own.”

  My watch buzzed. It was Avro. He was on his bike with Amelia on the back.

  “John, we just passed the entrance to the Alamo. It looks like the MDF has set up a checkpoint. According to Amelia, they’re executing their contingencies as planned.”

  “Shit,” I said. “Got any good news?”

  “Well, the Alamo’s residents are still coming and going, which means they won’t seal off the Alamo completely, not unless they have to.”

  “Meet me in the parking lot. Right now I’ll need your help disconnecting the fuel cells to protect our reserves.”

  “What about Amelia?” Avro said.

  “She’ll be fine in the PDC. We’ll tell Jimmy she’s your girlfriend.”

  An hour later, we had finished isolating the power in all thirteen circumferential domes. Kevin recalled one of our construction drones, waking it from weather-induced hibernation. He programmed it to sweep the area around our PDC, cleaning up any drifts before they got too high. We didn’t want to be stuck without our equipment like after the last storm.

  At five p.m. the Meteorological Center held a conference call. We gathered in the observation lounge as the call came in. We decided not the share the military’s cat-five contingency with Central Control. Sharing this knowledge could get us in serious trouble, especially if there was a mole. We all suspected that there were folks outside of the Alamo who were in on the conspiracy.

  Jackson appeared on the screen to our left, with the Meteorological Center on our right. The video feeds displayed on the observation deck’s windows.

  “Status updates everyone,” said a man on the right. I didn’t recognize him.

  Apparently, Avro didn’t either. “Who are you? And where the hell is Watson?”

  “Alan Gordon, chief climatologist on Project Bakersfield. We can’t find Watson. I assume he’s in the Alamo.”

  “Traitor,” Kevin barked, and for the moment I agreed. When the lead person from a rouge project disappears, you tend to get suspicious.

  “What are you talking about?” Gordon said. “Watson just happened to be over there when they cut off communications.”

  “Isn’t it a bit suspicious?” I said. “Project Bakersfield was Watson’s baby. It creates a storm and now Watson is nowhere to be found.”

  “I can vouch for Watson,” Director Jackson said from the left screen. “Watson led a carbon capture project after the Fresno impact, cleaning up the air around California. He even testified before Congress to get the funds.”

  It was strange looking into the Central Control tower and having it completely dark. Jackson’s sunglasses rested on the console beside him and there were dents in his nose where the glasses usually sat.

  “I know Watson too. He’s always acted in good faith,” Gordon added.

  “How could someone acting in good faith allow this to happen?” I inquired.

  Gordon cleared his throat. “Theoretically, if you can prevent a storm, you can create one. In 2045, there were plans to deploy a hurricane prevention system in the Atlantic. The concept was simple. We’d pump warm water from the surface into deeper water. Since warm water is fuel for hurricanes, pumping it down would prevent the storms.”

  “Why haven’t I heard of this?” Avro asked.

  “Because if warm water was purposefully cycled back to the surface, it could mix with warm water from incoming currents. This would double the available fuel and create a super storm. For this reason, the Atlantic Storm Prevention System was canceled.”

  What Gordon said made sense, forcing me to wonder what it would take to deceive a man like Watson. Watson seemed highly intelligent, intelligent enough to oversee a large-scale endeavor like Project Bakersfield anyway. Could he have been bribed or extorted?

  “You asked for updates from us, but what have you got?” I asked Gordon.

  “We can confirm that the storm was generated using Project Bakersfield. But there’s more. It looks like this storm is being sustained by a weak, but consistent, positive charge in the anti-storm grid.

  “Sustained,” Kevin said. “From where? They already used most of our power reserves to create the storm. Project Bakersfield isn’t getting its power from anywhere but the Alamo.”

  “From H3’s reactor,” I said.

  “Sounds like it,” Avro said.

  I did some simple math in my head; Project Bakersfield’s massive solar grid was over twenty times more powerful than the nuclear reactor. I guessed that after the storm was up and running, it didn’t take much to sustain it.

  “Are you sure we can’t cut the power?” Jackson asked.

  Avro brought up a map of the colony’s power grid and shared it with the people on the call. A series of green li
nes appeared on the map. “These green lines are underground power cables running from the solar arrays to the colony.”

  Avro keyed in a command and replaced the green lines with red ones. “These red lines represent Project Bakersfield’s power supply. As you can see, the Alamo is the only point where project Bakersfield connects to the colony. To cut the power, we need to get inside the Alamo and physically disconnect the nuclear reactor from the grid.”

  “What about severing the anti-storm cabling?” Jackson inquired, this time directing the question at Gordon, whose team had laid the coils.

  “You mean outside, on a GOD?” Kevin interrupted.

  “He means an EVA,” I clarified.

  “We can’t,” Gordon said. “The cables are protected by carbon nanotube mesh. That mesh will stop any cutting tool. You can’t even blow up the cable with high explosives. The mesh is imbedded with a protective layer of energy-dispersing resin.”

  “Jackson,” I said, “can you give us an update on the MDF’s activities?”

  “Sure,” Jackson replied. “They’ve beefed up security around the entrance to the Alamo. But besides riding the army trucks through the channels, back and forth across the bridge, they don’t seem to be doing much else. I’ve talked to the police about this. They’re pretty pissed about it. If it were up to me, I’d lock them in their base.”

  “Have you communicated with them?” Avro asked.

  Jackson sighed. “We’ve tried, but since the storm began, they haven’t been answering our calls. Anyway, let’s agree on a power quota. We need to begin rationing immediately. I recommend starting the quota at five kilowatt hours per colonist.”

  “Five is fine by me,” I said. That was the most aggressive quota we’d ever had, but with most of our reserves gone, Jackson was wise to be aggressive. We’d need to save as much energy as we could to keep the colonists alive.

  “One more thing,” Jackson said. “No talking to the media. We don’t need a panic. If anyone has any more ideas on how to solve this mess, you let me know.”

  “You got it,” I said, disconnecting the call, relieved that we could now go on to other things.