Mars, The Bringer Of War

by George P. Saunders

  He was pushing her away. She didn’t know about his dreams, and he felt guilty that he couldn’t share them with her. She would not understand or believe them. And had he expressed his deepest fears about them, she would have tried to persuade him to seek psychiatric counseling. If John Mars had a fatal flaw, it was the inability to let someone else share his pain. He was aware of the character defect, but such awareness didn’t help him lower barriers.

  The dreams involved the killer robot, the Probe from another galaxy. But the dreams also involved something else, something darker. Something that was never revealed, like some omniscient demon remaining in the shadows, waiting to strike … a demon even more frightening and destructive than the alien robot itself.

  Mars knew what the unseen demon was really a host of demons. It was them. The ones who had built the robot. They were out there. And in his heart, John Mars knew they were coming. Coming to get him, for what he had done to their machine on the moon.

  Mars wasn't afraid for himself.

  He was afraid for the world.

  "I'll let you think on this alone," Anna said on her last day in Mexico, nearly two months later. She had stayed with Mars, hoping that his mood and outlook in general would improve. It had not, and in fact had gotten noticeably worse. She had put up with the long days of morose silence, and the longer nights of assiduous bingeing. She could put up with it no longer. She was ready to leave.

  Mars was ready for her to leave. Grateful, even. Still, even at the last moment, Anna cajoled, hoping for a surprise in Mars – something that would give both of them hope.

  "I know you,” she said softly. “You'll start to miss me and one day I'll find you on my doorstep, flowers in one hand, champagne in the other."

  Mars smiled and kissed her on the lips, stroking her hair. "Good bye, Commander. Wave to me now and then from Freedom."

  Anna kissed him back and cried.

  He bought a small condo near the Calinda hotel in Los Cabos, right on the beach. It was isolated and the walk to the center of town took about ten minutes at most (although of late, Mars stumbled more than he walked). Money was not a problem; he’d saved a bit through the years, and his salary had increased proportionately with his experience and fame as a NASA astronaut. And of course, there was still the honorary stipend NASA wired to his account every month for every year of his life until he died.

  No, cash was not a problem. Nor was his capacity for absorbing alcohol. The tequila helped quell the dreams; only in those rare moments when he was actually sober, did the dreams sneak back into his sleep.

  The dreams also killed the mind fairies.

  The little bastards. Drowned by Ceurvo Gold.

  He assiduously avoided sobriety for six months.

  He took up company briefly with a stripper in town, a deliberate choice . . . someone he would never make an emotional connection to ... such a connection was reserved for only Anna. He missed her terribly but he did not miss her enough to return Stateside . . . or quit drinking. The stripper was content to simply hang with Mars, nothing more; he picked up all the bills, and was nice as hell, and God knows, it was tough enough just finding someone like that, male or female, in the world. The strippers holy mantra.

  Months turned into more months. The dreams lessened. Not so the boozing. Around the seventh month, he began thinking of coming home. Not because he had forgiven NASA, or wished to renew the fight for credibility -- the battle to convince the world that aliens lived and breathed in the immediate solar neighborhood.

  No, he wanted to come home. He wasn’t initially sure why.

  “Any ideas about what you would do?” Anna had asked him in a very brief phone conversation.

  Oh, sure, plenty of ideas, he thought; more ideas tumbling out of me than crap out of a cow’s ass. Sure, ask me another.

  He opted for another response to her very reasonable question. “Not yet. Just doing some thinking.”

  It was an answer fairly bloated with optimism as far as Anna was concerned. Perhaps there was hope yet that John Mars would willingly return to the living.

  Mars did indeed give the matter considerable thought. It took another month of steadfast boozing and determined introspection to make a very simple discovery.

  He wanted to work again.

  He wanted to fly.

  Yet another month passed. The stripper went to Tijuana to dance, and was replaced by yet another stripper, just as content to ride his alcoholic wave of equanimity. His tan was brilliant; and despite months of steady alcoholic excess, his health was good. His depression had faded weeks ago and by the time he made the decision to quit drinking altogether, it was all but a distant memory.

  He made a few calls to some friends in the private sector. He needed a job. Work. Something in the air. He wasn’t talking ET anymore . . . so that was a plus. Within a few weeks, an offer was made from Colonial Air International, a new outfit out of Los Angeles, running flights out of LAX to the Asian Pacific. They were looking for experienced pilots to fly their small fleet of 747 and 757 jumbo jets. The pay was decent -- better for John than other pilots because he was still, to some degree, a celebrity. A man who had walked on the moon. A spaceman, for chrissakes ... a man who could fly a jet in his sleep and jerk off in a wet hankie, all at the same time.

  Now that’s somethin’ you don’t see everyday, laddie.

  The mind fairies tried to resurrect themselves briefly, the initial concept of returning stateside giving their moribund existence a brief flicker of hope to haunt. Time (and liquor), but mainly time and mental discipline chased the uglies away before they could nestle in for good.

  The job offer was there.

  He said yes. He kissed the newest stripper good-bye, packed his bags, and drove a rented Ford pick-up a thousand miles back along the coast of Baja. He was feeling better about things. Six months ago had been hell. Today . . . well, today promised a better tomorrow. An optimist by nature, John Mars refused to dwell on the past too long. What the hell was the point?

  He willed himself not to think about the alien encounter. Through will alone, he was able to salvage his sanity.

  He did not call Anna when he returned to Los Angeles. There was no reason. They had never made it official -- but it was over between them. An unspoken closing of doors. Unhappily ever after. And as for the dreams . . . they haunted him no more. Like the mind fairies, they had been exorcised and consigned to some nameless abyss in his brain, courtesy of Tequila or through conscious denial. John did not know. But he was glad they were gone. With each passing day, he began to embrace the notion that perhaps he had been wrong. Wrong about the aliens coming over the proverbial hill to attack the world and destroy it without question, without remorse. He didn’t doubt that these same aliens had built a destructive robot and planted it on the moon, but it was possible that such a civilization had become long since extinct. The fabric and nature of space, coupled with incomprehensible distances, aided and abetted the theory that maybe advanced civilizations had once passed this way, but were now gone forever.

  Hell, isn’t that what Erik Van Daniken had been saying for years? Just passing through, left a killer toy on the moon, no hard feelings and have a good life?

  Possible.

  No, probable.

  Because it had been almost a year, and there were still no aliens. No counterattack, no retribution sought.

  Fine. Moving on.

  His days as an astronaut were over.

  The planets -- the stars -- would belong to other men ... as he had always suspected, though not quite like this.

  For now, he would have to survive as a civilian. Nine to five, an hour for lunch, and then do it again til’ Friday. The thought of such a pedestrian existence did not really scare him nor even fill him with unbearable frustration. That his days would be lived out in the relative normalcy of predictability, perhaps monotony was a welcome reprieve. He had accepted such a fate -- in a way, yearned for it. He had done it all, done more than most men.
Now, he was just a regular guy, about to hit the payment again as a simple working man.

  Harsh terms, perhaps, for a man who had once touched the universe.

  Yet on these harsh terms, John Mars would begin again.

  And hope for the best.

  But the Sels were coming, true to the darkest fear John Mars harbored. Their transport vessel dwarfed every piece of space garbage in the Asteroid Belt. At two thousand miles long and a thousand feet high, the spaceship was nearly half the size of the Earth’s moon. Amazing in and of itself that such bulk could move, but move it did, at speeds well past those of light.

  This flagship had broken off from the main body of the Armada. The Sels were anxious to find John Mars, but they would follow standard operating procedure and exercise due diligence. This was, after all, a new galaxy to be conquered and there were many star systems to explore and catalog. Gradually, more probes had sent similar messages to the one John Mars had encountered: this was a galaxy peopled by a variety of life forms, some benign – others, like the species to which John Mars belonged, clearly were not. Thus the Sels were responding methodically: one reconnaissance vessel would approach Earth, specimens would be collected and brought back to the Home System.

  Among those specimens, of course, the Sels would insist upon John Mars being one. Not because there was any sense of vengeance to be wrought – the Sels did not take the destruction of their probe on the moon to be personal. Extracting John Mars would simply be a matter of convenience, since the subatomic tracking beacon in his body would be easy to find. He, along with whatever other humans were nearby, would be transported and studied – as other life forms would also be tagged and studied throughout the Milky Way. Comparatively, John Mars was a kind of intergalactic harbor seal that had been labeled and catalogued; the Sel way was a logical and systematic one. SOP down to the letter.

  As the sun rose above the Moon’s horizon, it was eclipsed by the long, dark expanse of the Sel ship passing over the terminator. It hovered over the daylight exposed part of the moon then passed into night-side. Lights suddenly blinked on, dotting the massive exterior. Then a small, cylindrical sphere was ejected from the immense spacecraft's forward section. It descended to the dark surface and hovered over the pummeled moondust. A long, pipe-sized proboscis descended from the sphere, until it impacted the surface, and drove itself deep into the ground.

  For a moment, nothing happened.

  Then...

  The sphere that was delivered from the ship surfaced -- along with the smaller sphere ejected from the robot scorpion that fought an earth vessel a year earlier. It was the alien equivalent of a hard disk, filled with memory and information...

  The smaller sphere rose away from the delivery sphere, hovering in space for a few seconds. Suddenly, a holographic image appeared: It was the recreation of Colonel John Mars' battle against the robot probe. The depiction was three dimensional in color. One by one, the images relayed to the Sels what the S.O.S. beacon had told them already in transit: that John Mars, whatever kind of creature he was, and whatever race he belonged to, was an extraordinary warrior.

  The holograph concluded with the robot scorpion's final act of aggression against John Mars -- the firing of a small homing projectile into his body -- a bio-neurotransmitter that was separated into a billion molecules on impact with his body; through osmosis, it passed through his flesh, discorporating in his bloodstream, then regenerating itself all within the epochal span of seconds.

  The holograph now focused exclusively on John Mars -- his body, now being scanned, glowed and pulsed. The probe studied the face. Remembering it. Committing it to electromagnetic memory. Finally, the hologram ended with the robot scorpion’s own self-imposed liquidation.

  The potential Earth specimen was a true talent -- a living, breathing tribute to the art of warfare. Arguably, there were dissenting voices within the Sel collective that suggested Mars was simply responding like any trapped animal, lashing out, fighting a desperate fight. But the general consensus agreed that Mars showed skill and initiative against overwhelming odds … and not just blind, feral panic.

  The delivery sphere reattached itself to the smaller recording sphere and raced back to ship, rotating patiently above. The reacquisition of the probes took only moments, and then the Sel ship was underway again.

  Heading for this moon's only primary.

  Earth.

  THREE

  EXTRACTION

  John Mars looked up from the control panel of the 747 he was about to pilot to Japan and shuddered. He felt as if someone, or something, had just passed through him, or more accurately, taken over. The feeling was icy, alien, jarring ... and then it was gone. He glanced at his hands. They were suddenly clammy.

  Then, and he was not sure why, he felt the need to see Anna. He reached into his flight jacket, and pulled out his wallet, flipped open the top flap and stared at the creased picture of his ex-lover.

  It was an old photo, taken a hundred years ago or so when they had been together … when there had been a life -- a life that included plans and children and a future, little things like that which had been torn away from him. At first he thought it was a visceral, emotional response; old feelings, lurking near the surface, always good for a momentary pang of regret, an inescapable sense of tremendous loss. He shuddered again and this time he knew it was a different sensation. It was more like -- a chill. Or was it more.

  A premonition?

  “John.”

  Mars snapped his head up to look at his co-pilot, Jennifer Mays. She was around thirty, with dark, intelligent eyes -- Japanese eyes, maybe, or even Taiwanese. Mars had never asked about her genealogy. “Did you hear me, John?”

  John stared at her for a long second.

  “Say what?”

  “I said I’m ready for cross-check,” Jennifer said.

  He nodded, then looked back down at Anna, as Jennifer glanced at the picture, too.

  “That’s a pretty shot of her,” she said softly. “Shit happens, huh?”

  “No shit" Mars responded, replacing the picture in his wallet." Let’s cross-check.”

  He was not feeling good. Sweat beaded his brow, and he felt his stomach do a shake n’ bake, as though he'd just eaten some bad Chinese.

  Aw, come on, this is some kind of flu? he wondered in irritation. The flight to Osaka, Japan was nine hours; if he was feeling this creepy now, it might be wise to scrub the job, call the front office and find another pilot.

  He took a breath and glanced back at Bob Peoples, the Flight Engineer. “Is that air conditioning working, Bob?”

  Peoples, a small, dapper man with a goatee and a tattoo on his forearm that read “America Proud”, tapped a gauge on his panel. “A comfortable sixty nine degrees Fahrenheit.”

  “You’re sweating, John. Are you sick?” Jennifer asked.

  Mars took a breath, and began to hit switches, shrugging it off. “I always feel this warm sitting this close to you, Jen. You know that.”

  “Yes, that must be it,” she grinned.

  They had been lovers once, a few months back, a drunken, giggly lay-over (no pun intended) in Osaka that included an unscheduled typhoon that grounded all outbound flights. Two lonely people, they had found and enjoyed one another for one singular night; mutually, they decided in unspoken acquiescence not to let the affair continue. Too much baggage for both of them, and they knew it, though the obvious was never voiced.

  Jennifer watched Mars as he leaned forward in his chair. She smiled again, at the memory of past lust and spontaneity. That night so long ago had saved her from a nervous breakdown, only two months out of a down and dirty, soul-wrenching divorce. John Mars had been an oasis in a terrible desert of teeth-gnashing separation; nothing meant to last, but a sweet drop of relief that she would remember for the rest of her life.

  Mars activated the onboard video surveillance cameras -- state of the art security additions to all aircraft since one year ago, with the cluster bombing and des
truction of four commercial jet planes taking off out of Miami. The investigation had determined that the terrorists had actually altered their blood chemistry to create explosive delivery systems, with yet another chemical found generally in Coca-cola to literally serve as a trigger for immolation. It was a heinous act, killing over a thousand people inside of two minutes; all four airplanes were well over 10,000 feet into their climb after takeoff when the four terrorists, one on each plane, had activated their biochemical charges simultaneously in the name of Allah and against the Imperialistic Satans of America. September 11 all over again. From box-cutters, to shoe-bombs, to mascara and hair gel – then finally, hemoglobin. That people bombs were now possible – the end-product to coalescing human fluids and demonic intent – it was mind-boggling to even the most hardened forensic analyst. It simply shouldn’t have happened. It was as crazy as … as …

  … as aliens invading Earth.

  Since that tragedy, the on-board high resolution cameras were installed in all American aircraft, and shortly thereafter, on virtually every other carrier across the world. They were not a failsafe deterrent against further terrorist assaults on airliners, but they allowed the flight crew nearly unlimited observation of the passengers and their varied activities. The cameras, to political consternation and varied objections, had also been installed in airplane lavatories. The mandate literally gave new meaning to ‘ya couldn’t take a piss without someone knowing something.’ A probability study had been churned out that promised a drop of terrorist success rate in the execution of their missions, once the cameras were installed. In theory, the cameras would save lives. In theory.

  Four cameras were located on the upper instrument panel just above the pilot’s head. John glanced at all four screens; he could see that final boarding was in process, and that he had a full airplane tonight. He blinked and felt another shudder pass through his body.

  Damn, he thought. Shake it off.