Mars, The Bringer Of War

by George P. Saunders

  The shape of the giant robot was insect-like, scorpionic. The metal appeared amorphous, soft, at times, gelatinous -- but Mars could hear the impervious clang of clearly non-living tissue against his boots as he struggled for balance. The head of the robot, again, definitely arthropodic in appearance, bleeped and twittered with mechanical efficiency.

  Some kind of machine, he repeated over and over in his beleaguered, shell-shocked psyche. Some kind of --

  For one crazy moment, Mars felt hope. Machines rarely acted defensively without provocation, and he felt certain this was a machine. Perhaps he and his crew had simply activated its sensors, causing it to be fully operational. A realistic assumption.

  That theory was shot to hell in a hand-basket seconds later as the unrealities mounted. From below, Mars stared in bewilderment, as did his men; one of the gigantic robot legs turned green. An electric lightning bolt streaked out at Travers and Danning. The men screamed as they were enveloped by a gaseous, amorphous light. For a searing second, their bodies did a horrible, incandescent dance of agony. Then they were torn apart. Flesh, bone, blood and graphite-epoxy based fabric exploded in a grizzly, redolent flare of light -- the pointillistic epitaph of living men, thrust into the eternal silence of oblivion.

  Mars watched his men die, and could hear the low, feral growl of empathic pain form in his own throat. Bitterly, his heart dying within him, he knew all this would end very badly. Tears welled in his eyes, but he forced these back instantly. There was no time for grieving, no time even for shock or hesitation.

  Another green death ray from a back leg flashed with lethal intensity. Lindon began to run, but the charge released from the leg tracked him down after one missed shot. Running, screaming, Lindon exploded in like manner as Travers and Danning.

  Terry Anderson howled with fury and began firing his laser at the robot-scorpion.

  Mars yelled from above, “No, Terry. Run, god damn it!!!”

  But Anderson, youngest of Mars' crew, wanted to fight this alien thing that killed. Mars took out his laser and fired at one of the gun legs. The leg collapsed and part of the metal monster he was riding lost its balance. So did Mars, as he tumbled off the robot’s back, bouncing twice on the lunar surface. He rolled by instinct as much as by chance, still clutching both laser pistols. He found himself eyeball to eyeball with the robot.

  The probe stared back enigmatically. An array of lights serving as eyes, Mars assumed, flickered across its complicated visage. The robot’s face was a mechanical slate, devoid of expression, dead. And like all dead things, this creature’s eyes were inscrutable. Mars didn’t hesitate or attempt communication. He fired point blank into the robot skull. Not exactly a gesture that said, We Come In Piece, but fuck it, he thought: We didn’t fire first.

  Metallic glass and shard exploded outward. Part of the shrapnel tore at his suit. To be sure, it was only a small violation of suit integrity but oxygen began to hiss out, and Mars realized if he didn’t make it to a pressurized environment quickly he would die.

  One of the legs glowed green near him. He hit the ground as a light beam sizzled past his head and smashed into the dust, throwing small moonrocks everywhere. He rolled, turned, fired at the offending leg, decimating it. Now, two gun legs were down. But two were still working -- murderous appendages serving a dual function. The giant tail of the scorpion robot now came into play and aimed at Mars.

  He saw it and dove for the ground as a red projectile, perfectly sphere-shaped and glowing like a firefly, hissed passed him and smashed into a rock formation nearby; he saw the projectile pass through -- not explode -- against the outcropping of stone.

  He had no time to ponder the implausibility of a lethal charge simply vaporizing harmlessly against a target. He rolled directly under the belly of the pseudo-scorpion and now looked at Anderson, who was still running, firing and screaming.

  “Get outta there, skipper. I'll cover you!”

  Suddenly, a green lightning bolt hit the young navigator. It lifted Anderson into the air, suspended him for a moment then, as it had done with the rest of Mars' crew before, ripped his body into a million pieces.

  Anderson’s death was silent, instantaneous. It gave little comfort to the only survivor remaining. Mars momentarily froze, trying to assimilate the impossible events in the past minutes. His mind went gray. He heard himself scream. Then he turned, firing his weapons into the underside of the alien monster. He again immediately rolled, barely escaping the body of the robot as it collapsed onto its belly. But the robot was far from being rendered finished. Its tail and two legs still functioned as offensive weapons -- and now Mars realized he had only one remaining defensive option left: turn tail and run.

  Bounding toward the Rover, he barely escaped being hit by two green lightning bolts exploding into the ground on either side of him. He dove for Anderson's dropped weapon, rolled, and aimed at another leg. He fired, and the leg exploded at the joint and collapsed. Now the one legged, one tailed robotic scorpion pulled itself out of its mired grave, tail hissing and twitching wildly -- searching for something, something to kill.

  Mars was again up, running for the Rover, which in another second took a direct hit by a green death bolt and blew into a hundred, splintered pieces. John bee-lined, suit still hissing, losing oxygen. He turned on himself and saw that the robot, crippled as it was, maintained a respectable speed and was gaining on him. He tripped and fell. The robot scorpion's tail hissed above him, and drew itself back, as if it was about to strike.

  Within the blinking head of the alien - the actual cyclotronic brain -- a grid imaging picture of John Mars suddenly materialized. Subatomic protons, deuterons and ions propelled by an alternating electromagnetic field assessed and analyzed John’s physical organs, bone structure, DNA composition and arterial system. All were scanned within a few micro-seconds.

  A determination was made by the robot ... a determination that ruled out destruction of the alien man that had crippled it.

  The tail of the robot scorpion aimed and fired a single red fire-bolt at Mars, similar to the one it had initially discharged a few minutes earlier. The shot slammed into Mars' body, dissolving magically into his environmental suit without even a tear. The force of impact threw Mars to the ground. Old instinct kicked in, and even down, he continued to move, crawling for dear life.

  The pain was searing, eviscerating, and he felt death was a certainty.

  Keep moving,goddamnit, he snarled inward. Stay pissed. That was the key. Fury, he thought from somewhere deep within; fury and rage over the death of friends, the ruthless dismissal of human life kept him crawling.

  Aye, but the fairies are peeved, laddie –

  Mars crawled, vaporizing any thought that entered his head other than that of escape. He glanced up through a perspiration-filled helmet. Just ahead, twenty feet to go, was the lunar module.

  The robot scorpion was moving slowly now, mortally wounded by Mars' surprising attack. That slowness allowed him to make it to the airlock and slam the hydraulic doors shut. The inner airlock pressurized in a few seconds; once done, Mars hit the Emergency Takeoff switch.

  The thrusters burned bright. A moment later and the lunar module was airborne.

  The Probe's scanning beacon, in essence, it's "tail" followed the module’s trajectory, then scanned its own damage. It still had the capability of destroying the alien spacecraft, which now harbored a catalogued form of destructive life within. John Mars was now filed away in cyclotronic storage and labeled as "New Contact". But the decision to Track and Destroy was momentarily arrested by a complex series of criteria known only to the Sel Builders.

  The tail of the robot turned and expelled a small yellow sphere, different in shape and texture from the offensive green and red charges. It dropped to the ground and began to blink. Then, the one remaining leg of the robot probe took aim at its own underbelly and fired twice. The probe's entire body was enveloped in green light. The remains of the alien contraption glowed, modulated in form
and brightness, then vaporized into eternity. The sphere that was expelled sank slowly into the lunar soil. And began to transmit its message.

  A May Day message to the stars...

  The lunar module achieved orbit in about 30 seconds. Mars fought the crushing G-forces, sucking in breath, regulating his breathing, hoping, praying that an embolism wouldn’t form in his lungs from the sudden rush upwards.

  He tore off his helmet, gulping in air, eyes dazed, his body bludgeoned. Pain radiated dully out of his back, pulsating in waves up to his extremities. He hit the radio-com.

  “May Day, May Day. This is John Mars from Challenger. My crew is dead. Repeat, my crew is dead. Encounter with an alien entity. Highly destructive. Origin: unknown. Aliens appear to be mechanical in nature. Repeat May Day, May Day.”

  The world around Mars began to swim, twist and turn. His vision turned into a kaleidoscope of bright lights, all invasive, all moving too quickly, all assaulting senses that were over sensitized from the recent encounter with madness. He dragged himself over to the nearest viewport and stared down at the lunar surface. The module was speeding ahead with electronic anxiousness, only minutes to go before recoupling with Challenger Two.

  The thing that had killed his men, within seconds, was a hundred miles away.

  Mars fell back against the hull and closed his eyes. His mind reeled, rendered incapable of any thoughts but that of the greatest wonder. The scientist in him was mocked, confounded; the man in him was brutally stunned.

  He had failed. Two minutes of exchange had left his crew dead, blown apart, blotted out of existence like some cold statistic. He had let them die; despite his best efforts, and his survival training, he had let his men down.

  The pain of this fact drilled into him with a fury that the alien red bolt in his back could never match. Even now, that pain was oddly diminished, supplanted with a chilling doubt of his own sanity. His own imagination, his own instincts and senses, boggled before the import of what he had seen … what he now knew for an unalterable fact. The world as he had known it was a lunatic asylum – a mathematical equation of madness and nonsense.

  Was he even shot at all, he wondered? There was no blood anywhere on the deck, nothing to indicate that he had been injured or assaulted by some alien firearm. Had the entire encounter been some bizarre, oxygen-deprived hallucination?

  But he knew better. He was here, now, alive. And his men were dead. Killed by something that defied imagination, defied immediate explanation.

  The moon for John Mars would never again be a thing of beauty, an object for quiet, wistful reflection of dreams savored, and dreams yet to come.

  The moon was a murderer. A killer that harbored killers.

  The G-Forces had taken their toll and a moment later, the world of John Mars turned black.

  The message leapt across the eternal vastness of space and touched the minds and sensing devices of the Sel Builders They were already en route, a hundred giant flagships whisking through the hyper-void of interstellar space.

  Somewhere, Contact had been established.

  Of some surprise, the contact had been violent ... and ultimately destructive.

  The Sel Builders were curious. Opposition to the rule of the Sels was all but unknown. Then again, this was a new galaxy, with new ways. Out of a thousand probes in the new galaxy, one had been destroyed. How? By whom?

  Then, the images of John Mars began to materialize.

  The Sel Builders watched.

  And they watched not with rancor – but with admiration.

  TWO

  AFTERMATH

  He remained unconscious for the duration of the journey back to Earth. Ground control, along with three orbiting satellites, the Morelos-1, Arabsat 1-Band the Telstar 3-D of AT&T -- all deployed near fifteen years earlier by another shuttle, Discovery, picked up his S.O.S. Challenger Two’s onboard computer was taken over by the SL-1 system mainframe at NORAD in Colorado; emergency booster rockets were ignited automatically, thus expediting the shuttle’s return.

  The orbiter hit the tarmac without incident at Edwards Air Force Base, guided by the on-board computer’s pre-designated landing programming. John Mars was whisked away to the air base infirmary, stripped, and examined from tip to toe. He was revived almost immediately after disembarking his spacecraft, though his speech did not come easily and his temperature hovered around the one hundred and four degree mark. He remained in isolation and quarantine for three days, in and out of consciousness. Yet during that time, John Mars talked – and what he said made no sense whatsoever.

  On the fourth day, his fever broke. His doctors had no explanation for his stupor. Physically, he was unharmed. In fact, his cholesterol was ten points lower than when he had left and his visual acuity had improved by four percent. Anomalies to be sure, but hardly conclusive in terms of proof for a close encounter with an alien entity.

  As for his allegation that he had been shot by some kind of alien weapon, well, that, too,

  was inconclusive. There was no scar tissue from such a wound. No blood. No subcutaneous, invasive shell casing, bullet or charge of any kind. Nothing.On the fifth day, he was proclaimed one hundred percent. Physically, anyway.

  When he began to tell of what happened on the moon, there was general agreement that NASA’s finest astronaut was suffering from severe mental exhaustion. And that was a generous summation; for there was still the issue of what really happened up there.

  Aliens. Colonel John Mars, an American Hero, was spouting nonsense about aliens.

  NASA found itself in an embarrassing situation; the Defense Department in an untenable one. Four men were missing (presumed dead) and their commander’s return in a half-comatose, delirious condition, lacked a satisfactory explanation. Answers were needed, yet answers were not forthcoming.

  The hearing on the case came to issue and to NASA’s managing coalition exactly one week after John Mars returned to Earth. In the interim marked by his return and the hearing date, a second shuttle mission had been authorized -- a rescue mission which was more a second reconnaissance mission than anything else. There was still the issue of the acoustical beacon which had ceased suspiciously just around the time that Mars' crew was, by all accounts, intercepting and identifying it at its source. No one expected to find Mars' crew alive, though publicly and to the average taxpayer, that’s exactly why Columbia Three was deployed five hours after Challenger Two had returned to Earth.

  Columbia’s three man crew found only the decimated ruins of the Rover ... and nothing more. No body parts. No alien artifacts. No corpses. Zip.

  When Mars was informed of the mission’s findings, he was unsurprised. After all, he had been privy to the weaponry employed by the alien probe, had in fact seen his men, one by one, disintegrated by some kind of pulse de-atomizing laser beam. Of course, the lack of habeaus corpus was to be expected. He was surprised that NASA was incredulous of his report.

  He had flown to Houston and the Johnson Space Center this morning, smoking like a chimney, feeling restless, jumpy, pissed off.

  What the hell was being done about what he found up there? Good Christ, an alien machine had murdered his men -- inside of four minutes! Wasn’t anyone worried? Even mildly concerned?

  He had tried making contact with some friends at the Defense Department. All communications had been steadfastly deterred; no one was taking his calls. Furthermore, as far as Mars could tell, no contingency plans were being employed to deal with what was clearly a threat, not only to National Security, but Global Security, too.

  In short, no one was doing jack shit about anything. The idea enraged Mars.

  His fury was further compounded by the fact that he had only seen Anna for half an hour yesterday, back in California. She was on her way to Johnson, to be part of his debriefing (as they were calling it) -- though he felt he was on trial, plain and simple. There was only time for a hurried lunch, a hand squeeze, a worried kiss, then good-bye. It was the only contact he and Anna had enjo
yed, up to and including Mars' hospital stay in the past week. She had been part of a biolab experiment in southern Arizona; orders and the mission parameter had prohibited her release from the assignment until yesterday. When Mars and Anna finally connected, their time was miserably brief.

  They deliberately skirted the issue of his alien encounter.

  Protocol.

  Now he was here. In Houston, before his peers. Officially relating what had happened seven days earlier.

  John Mars stood at attention, stone faced, and when he spoke, he was careful to use a professional monotone -- something that could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be construed as being stress-filled, irregular, wigged-out. The Board of Inquiry and Investigation for the National Space Center had convened ten minutes ago, and Mars already felt a subtle sense of incredulity and disappointment. As if he had personally let the space program down; not for returning without a crew -- but for returning with an impossible explanation as to their disappearance.

  The Board was comprised of five key members of the Administration -- men and women who would decide the fate of John Mars’ career. Based on available information and testimony of what had happened a week ago on the moon that resulted in the death and/or disappearance of his men and the adjusted loss of over ten million dollars of vital NASA hardware, these five would be judge and jury.

  Chairman Giles Wilson, Chief Operating Officer for Scientific Exploration leaned forward, as did Vice Chairman DeRenault to hear Mars speak. They both glanced furtively at Anna, who was also on the Board; she was currently the Head of Astronaut Training -- a respected officer on any other occasion, but today, an uncomfortable reminder that the NASA family was less than perfect. Her intimacy with John Mars was well known throughout the administration, and therefore, her privilege to sit on this particular Board had briefly been an issue. The one objection raised surprisingly by the only other female member on the Board, Rena Freilich, Programming Administrator, was quashed after Anna reminded the Board in toto that she was also the Alternate Co-Chairman of the Board for the remaining six months of the fiscal quarter. Her incumbency, in fact, her responsibility to sit in on the hearing, notwithstanding her personal relationship with Mars, was clear and not subject to exception. She now listened to Mars with an impassive expression -- one which matched his for sheer, cool professionalism.