Killing Time On Mars

by Alec Taylor

  “I don’t even know where the vibration bag is,” said Chris. “I suppose, once we find it, we could just leave the bodies outside to freeze overnight. Then we can use the bag to reclaim the water and distribute the ash outside somewhere. We’ll need a special place, I suppose. But shouldn’t we run DNA on the foetus first? And the science of their bodies is amazing—we’re going to learn so much from them. We really need to send them back to Earth. They should be studied. And besides, they probably have relatives back home.”

  “We will remember Imani,” said Karl, “and we will move on. We need to respect them as human beings, even after death, so they do not need to become laboratory experiments. Also, let us not be overly sentimental, Doctor. We do not need to send them home.”

  I involuntarily shook my head with astonishment—Karl was prepared to sacrifice the truth and valuable knowledge in his rush to return peace and stability to the colony.

  “But…” said Chris. “I’ve only just started writing my report. I was about to run a paternity test. I need more time—”

  “I am sorry, Doctor,” interrupted Karl. “This is not a university hospital. We are carrying out a vital mission. We do not need any more tests. We cannot afford to be sentimental and we certainly cannot afford to send additional cargo back to Earth. No, we must dispose of their bodies. And I am afraid that your report must remain strictly classified for only the most senior company officials to read.”

  There was silence in the infirmary for a few seconds. Chris was visibly shaking, her mouth open but no words coming out.

  Pete said, “Okay, then, it’s done. Time to write our final report and organise the funeral.”

  And both Karl and Pete left the infirmary.

  “What just happened?” Chris asked me in disbelief.

  “We closed the case,” I replied, with a hint of sarcasm.

  “But there’s so much to learn and so many unanswered questions!”

  “Yes, and we haven’t seen enough hard evidence for my liking. I suppose the circumstantial evidence is convincing and, in this colony, it’s their call.”

  June hadn’t mentioned Imani’s pregnancy when I interviewed her, and I was confident she didn’t know about it. If Eli had known Imani was pregnant, it might have made him more upset, particularly if he thought he wasn’t the father. And yet I didn’t think Eli knew either—I guessed he would have mentioned it. I believed that Imani had not told her best friend or the probable father. And, it seemed most likely nobody else in the colony knew she had been pregnant, either. To me, it appeared to be an unhappy coincidence, which I did not like at all—coincidences made me suspicious.

  My mind was reeling as I walked back to Security. The extraordinary events of the last two days were swirling around like a chaotic whirlwind in my mind. Unlike Karl and Pete, I didn’t think it all fit together neatly. I needed to talk to someone safe and trustworthy outside the case, so I placed a call to Tony.

  “Tony’s plumbing,” he said as he picked up my call.

  “Tony, it’s Mike,” I said.

  “Have you blocked the toilet again?” he asked.

  “Yes, and it’s your job to unblock it.”

  “Too busy today. You’re gonna have to do it yourself.”

  “Tony, I need to talk through something with you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Are you free?”

  “Just wiring up the new greenhouse. Can work and talk.”

  I hesitated—the investigation was confidential.

  “I can’t tell you the details.”

  “About Imani and Eli, huh?”

  “I maybe shouldn’t even say that.”

  “Right. I’ll help if I can. Fire away.”

  “The thing is…It looks like we’re going to close the investigation down, but it feels premature. Something is telling me to dig deeper…but I’m fighting against the tide on this one.”

  “You want to know if you should do the easy thing or the right thing?” he asked. I bet his father said that to him in his garage back home a million times.

  “It’s not that simple. It’s actually out of my hands now, and I’m not sure there’s anything for me to do.”

  “You can only do what you can do.”

  “That’s where I’m landing,” I said.

  “Chill. The truth has a way of emerging eventually.”

  “Maybe it has already. Should I raise it again with Pete? He seems as keen as anyone to shut it down.”

  “Do it. He’s a straight shooter. Anyway, what’s the worst that could happen? He’ll reassign you to plumbing and you’ll have to put up with my whistling all day. I guess that is pretty bad.”

  “Listen, you’d better forget we had this conversation,” I said, but I immediately felt uneasy. “No, scrap that, we had this conversation. If anyone asks, you can tell them exactly what we said.”

  “Okay, I will. You propositioned me for sex, and I threatened a harassment lawsuit.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Grow up.”

  I caught up with Pete and Karl.

  “Pete, wait. Can I have a minute?” I asked.

  “I will brief Jan and start preparations,” Karl said as he went into his office.

  “What is it?” asked Pete impatiently. “Oh, yeah, how did the chat with Hu go?”

  “Not well, actually. No new information and frankly she was obstructive and downright confrontational.”

  “Well, those guys rule the planet, I guess,” said Pete, with a knowing half-smile.

  “Listen, Pete. I know it all points toward Eli, and he probably did it, but I just have this sense that something bigger is at work here. It’s elusive, but right now I sense that Eli was just a part of the puzzle. Don’t you think something bigger might be going on?”

  “No, I don’t. We’re all unsettled—two deaths are gonna do that to you. What you saw out there yesterday, it wasn’t right. But that voice you’re hearing right now is you, not the case. You should have some sessions with Chris or someone on her team. It’s time to let it go now. You did well; we have everything we need.”

  “What should I do if I’m not sure? Maybe I could go back over the timeline, see if I can find another angle…”

  “I mean it Mike, let it go. That’s an order.” He made the last statement with a smile, but he was being serious.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll try to forget about it.”

  I had a sudden, fleeting sense that the colony was a prison and we were all in exile. Almost as soon as it came, the thought was gone, leaving me with only an unsettled feeling.

  *

  Karl gave a vaguely inappropriate speech at Imani’s service. He emphasised the need for loyalty to each other and JOSEV, and he squarely blamed Eli for Imani’s death. There was no mention of her pregnancy and it was never officially acknowledged or reported.

  June’s eulogy, on the other hand, broke our hearts. She stood at the front of the dining room with hundreds of colonists sitting on the floor in front of her or watching her on the live video feed. Her loss was palpable. It was immediate and raw. It was like a weight on my chest and gave me the same terrible sense of familiarity that I had experienced when I first looked down at Eli’s dead face.

  “Imani was my best friend,” she started and then hung her head for a moment. “She was the closest friend I have ever had. We trained together. We made the journey in the first fleet together. We arrived here together. We shared the joy of landing and of stepping out onto the surface. We shared the freezing temporary accommodation and the move into this colony when it was unbearably dark and cold. We shared the trials of years of working and living in this inhospitable place. We shared them together. And now she’s gone.

  “I will miss her, in a way that words can’t describe. I’ll miss her smile. Even when she was tired beyond belief and nearly broken by this terrible place…even then, she still blessed us with her beautiful, sincere, happy smile.

  “I’ll miss her positive attitude. And I re
ally don’t know how I’m going to cope without it.” She paused and wiped tears from her eyes. “It didn’t matter what went wrong, or how bad she was feeling—she was always positive, trying to do the right thing and support the people around her. Even though she was sometimes just as sad, or hurt, or frustrated as anyone else.

  “I’ll really miss her courage. After every setback, every failure, every hardship, she had the courage to pick herself up, to speak up and try again. She was the most resilient person I have ever known.

  “But mostly, I’ll miss her love. She had such great capacity for love. She was selfless…forgiving…and generous. She listened, she cared about people, she loved them, she loved me…and I will always love her.”

  And so it was over. Or at least that was what most people in the colony thought. I wasn’t satisfied that we had discovered the truth, but I was forced to accept that conclusion. In the back of my mind, I still had a niggling sense that we had missed something. Something big.

  Nobody had any idea that there would be more violent deaths in that horrific year.

  ACT 2

  12. WEATHERING

  Ancient celestial forces have weathered Mars for millions of years. Its surface is rough and pockmarked and reminds me of the statues from Easter Island. Long ago, in what seems like another lifetime, I stood in a museum in London staring up at one of those statues. It had a giant squarish head, with an angry brow and a broad chin and nose. The lines of its head, shoulders, and belly were strangely proportioned, giving it an eerie, otherworldly appearance. Its surface was rough and strangely organic—it had been weathered for hundreds of years, by rain and wind and salt spray.

  Most days on Mars are calm and clear, with a few light clouds of ice crystals passing across the sky. The weather varies around the planet with the seasons and topography, though the variation is usually measured by how far the temperature is below freezing.

  The main difference to Earth weather is the dust. The substance that brought us here also tries to suffocate us on a regular basis. Dust devils are normal, as they are in many deserts on Earth, and can usually be ignored or avoided. The dust storms are also common and like Earth’s dust storms. However, every now and then a combination of the thin atmosphere and the sun beating down on a large dust bowl during a long summer will create a storm that encases the whole planet in a great swirling blanket of dust for days. The dust absorbs heat quickly in the thin atmosphere. Large temperature and pressure differentials can generate massive thunderstorms.

  In the six Earth-years of the colony before I arrived, there was only one truly global storm. It was a relatively weak, planet-encircling storm that shrouded Mars in darkness for several days and reduced visibility for a month. It significantly reduced harvest production, which greatly displeased JOSEV and the investor nations.

  Autumn came and went in Mars’ northern hemisphere after Imani’s funeral. We entered the shorter and more intense winter and corresponding southern summer—the season with the highest chance of a global storm.

  13. THE STORM

  Life in the colony gradually returned to normal after we closed the case on Imani. Unfortunately, a splinter of doubt remained lodged in my mind. I could never quite let go of the thought that we had never proved that Eli killed Imani and I still had a sense that there was something deeper going on. My dreams were haunted by a dark shadow standing on a clifftop.

  I met June quite often, particularly in the dining room. She was naturally friendly and we often said hello and sometimes ate together. I maintained my distance—blaming my role and telling myself that she was vulnerable while she grieved for Imani. She had also been appointed the General Manager of Colony Development after Eli’s death and was busy with her new responsibilities.

  My work in Security returned to normal after Imani’s funeral and, frankly, it was depressingly boring. The brief and intense investigation profoundly contrasted with my subsequent mundane role in the colony. The Security Office had returned to policing domestic disputes with ever-increasing frequency, assessing and mitigating risks of new structures or harvest missions, watching the weather and ignoring the flourishing mushroom market.

  Liu seemed to self-medicate with the mushrooms. I followed through on my decision to build a constructive relationship with him and found that he was usually in the lounge in the evenings, eating mushroom cookies. We mostly chatted about the weather monitoring system that he had designed and we used in Security. Whenever he offered me a cookie, I politely refused. They were illegal back in Australia and fell into the category of substances that were inappropriate for security personnel to consume.

  Unfortunately, mushroom-related violence was increasing. One Monday, after a particularly busy Saturday night, I raised the issue of the mushrooms with Pete.

  “What kind of impact do you think the mushrooms are having on the colony?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he replied. “About the same as alcohol back on Earth, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” I said, thinking that was not a favourable comparison. “I’m wondering if we should study the impact here, to see if the increase in incidents is somehow related.”

  “People just need to relax and the mushrooms are a relatively safe way,” said Pete. “It’s the number of people in the colony that’s the problem. That and the cold.”

  I could see his perspective, but I didn’t like how little we knew about the mushroom trade in the colony. It could be dangerous if left completely unchecked.

  “Shouldn’t we at least understand what we’re ignoring?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry about it, Mike. Nobody is overdosing, it’s just normal stuff for a small town. Karl doesn’t want to worry JOSEV, so just let it slide.”

  The days and weeks passed, and then, in the darkest and coldest part of our winter in the northern hemisphere, a small storm in the south gathered speed and grew. The Security Office tracked it with our weather satellites, and when it became a Category five storm, we increased the threat level for the colony and issued a warning to everyone on the planet. Our warning had almost no impact—it was just another boring message from Security. In fact, at lunchtime I overheard some of the harvest workers grumbling about Security’s ‘paranoid warnings’. Three days later, the storm became regional—it covered an area the size of Australia.

  I was first into the office, as usual. The weather app was flashing at me as I logged on to my screen: the storm had a very high probability of going global. That was bad news, because the app was rarely wrong. The AI algorithms had been continuously running since before the first colonists arrived.

  When Pete finally arrived in the office, I told him before he even had a chance to log on. He had a brief look at the warnings and said, “Ah, crap.”

  “Pete, we need to lock down the colony,” I said.

  “I know that,” he snapped. “Do you know how much we lose every day the harvest stops?”

  “Yes, I know,” I said calmly. “But it’s going to hit us hard. You know lightning loves the greenhouses and the harvesters. It’ll screw up all the comms, the navigation…”

  “Yeah, yeah,” he interrupted. “But we’re gonna catch hell from JOSEV. Shit. I don’t like doing this.”

  “It’s the weather.” I frowned, perplexed. “We can’t help the weather. Surely they understand that.”

  “You would think so,” said Pete. “The thing is, they’ll tighten the screws the minute we can get the harvesters going again. We’ll have to run everything over speed to catch up. Double shifts for the Ops guys. And it’s all because Security didn’t like the look of a storm. The weather models better not be wrong.”

  I had no reply to that.

  “All right, fuck it,” said Pete. “Announce the lockdown. Just give me five minutes to have my balls fried by Karl.”

  He left Security and went next door to the Executive Office. I couldn’t hear any voices and had trouble even imagining Karl losing his temper. A few minutes later, we issued the announcem
ent and initiated the lockdown procedure.

  We had seven to ten days to batten down the colony and started rolling through our standard lockdown checklist. All machinery was moved at top speed to the nearest hangar. All personnel were given three days to return to the inner colony. Finally people started taking the threat seriously. However, the mood was not anxious. People were smiling and laughing in the passageways—any change in the monotonous work cycle was welcome.

  The outposts were systematically secured and checked for integrity. Pete, Glen and I flew thousands of kilometres, helping to lock them down. Two days before the dust reached the colony, we checked that all colonists were inside—and made a worrying discovery. Over 50 suits weren’t transmitting. We compiled a list, divided it into three, and Glen, Pete, and I individually called each missing colonist to confirm that they were inside and ask them to fix their transmitters as soon as possible. Bizarrely, I noticed that Glen was on the list.

  “Why are so many suits down?” I asked Pete and Glen between calls.

  “People didn’t like the way we used the transmitters during the Imani investigation,” said Glen. “They like their privacy.”

  “Is that why your transmitter is off?” I asked. He scowled and didn’t answer.

  “Don’t you think we should model responsible behaviour for the rest of the colony?” I asked, but then softened my tone. “I guess I can understand it on one level, but you know the transmitters are there for our safety, not to invade our privacy. And we should really set a good example in Security.”

  He shrugged and frowned. At that moment, I received a call from Tony.

  “Tony,” I said. “This isn’t a great time. I’m kinda busy.”

  “I know, I know, it’s just that I’m here outside the main hangar and they’ve closed the doors. Can you come and let me in?”

  “Schmuck!” I replied and hung up.

  He was obviously joking, but I was feeling some general anxiety by that point and couldn’t help looking up his location. His transmitter was working—he was in the lounge. It made me smile and I relaxed just a little.