Killing Time On Mars

by Alec Taylor

  We hovered high above the canyon, looking back toward the outpost on the far side.

  “Do you think rivers will ever run here again?” Tony asked.

  “Not in our lifetime, but one day maybe.”

  We flew back more sedately. Tony seemed preoccupied and I wondered if he wanted to talk about something.

  Eventually I said, “Something on your mind?”

  “Not really,” he replied. “I’m just feeling…I don’t know…uneasy.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m not sure. I love being with Vivian, but it has no future.”

  “Well,” I said. “Isn’t that up to you? I think it could have a future.”

  “Really? You think that?”

  “You might not live that long, and maybe you won’t get everything you want, but you can be together now.”

  After a moment, Tony said, “I’m worried about the colony. If we’re right about Robert, then we’re in a bad place and there’s no way of fixing it.”

  “Ahem,” I replied and tapped the side of my helmet.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “Anyway, I’m probably in this mood because we’re way out here and nobody is pestering me about fixing any goddamn pipes.”

  “You’re getting soft.”

  June wanted to go for a walk in the afternoon, but Vivian wanted to stay in, so June and I went alone. We decided to keep our feet on the ground, and we walked along the ledge to the west of the outpost. It tapered and widened, then eventually disappeared completely. Suspended just beyond the end of the ledge was a rope, looped around a large peg that had been drilled into the cliff.

  “Do you want to head back?” I asked June.

  “Not really. Do you think we could go down safely? And climb back up?”

  I looked down and saw that the cliff sloped out a few degrees—it wasn’t vertical.

  “Yes, I think so. We could always call the hovee if we don’t want to climb back. But would it be silly to go down after what happened to Vivian yesterday?”

  “It seems quite safe to me,” said June.

  We had both obviously caught the exploration bug. The thrill of discovery was pushing us and, though we didn’t want to say it out loud, we both wanted to keep looking for anything unusual, maybe even signs of life.

  I gave the rope a big downward tug and was satisfied that the peg had been bolted securely. I pulled a couple of clips out of my suit pouch and attached my belt to the rope.

  “Here goes,” I said and swung out onto the rock face.

  Blood rushed to my head and my heart pounded. It was a long way down. I pushed my legs out underneath me and held the rope behind my back. I leaned back until my legs were perpendicular to the rock face and started to descend. June attached above me and swung out more confidently.

  “You’ve done this before,” I said.

  We walked down the cliff to the bottom. It was fairly smooth all the way down. I looked back up from the bottom and wondered how much muscle I had lost in my arms.

  We walked along the base of the cliff for a while, until we came across a rockslide and decided to walk down and around it, rather than over it.

  It was nice to walk the planet with June. After a while, we sat down on a large boulder and admired the view. And then, as we stood up to head back, I caught a glimpse of a dark shadow beside the rock we were sitting on.

  “What was that?” I asked, looking over.

  “What was what?” said June.

  I pointed over the boulder and then we both noticed something at the same time—at the far edge, there was a pattern in the rock. We looked at each other and then moved closer.

  It was half a shape, partly obscured by a layer of rock on top. The part that was visible was the size of half a dinner plate and looked like a caterpillar inside a large segmented jellyfish. It had a tubular spine down the centre, with about ten little body sections. Around the outside, it had a fan of rounded jellyfish leaves.

  We leaned forward until our helmets touched.

  “Is it real?” asked June with awe.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “I suppose one of the early colonists could have carved it.”

  I noticed that the shape was embedded in a layer of rock that was only partially exposed on the boulder. I looked around, saw a hard rock nearby, and went over to pick it up.

  “Watch out,” I said and waited until June had moved away.

  Then I took aim at the boulder, at a spot near the jellyfish shape, where the layer of rock on top was thin and exposed. I threw the rock and jumped back. Not a lot happened—the rock bounced off and over the boulder, which didn’t appear to be affected at all.

  “Don’t damage it,” said June.

  Then I tried the wedge technique from the previous day. I picked up a hard wedge and a hammer rock, pressed the wedge against the lip of rock above the jellyfish shape, and gave it a few big taps. The top layer of rock dislodged and shifted back a few millimetres. I dropped the rocks in my hands and picked up the dislodged piece.

  Underneath was the rest of the fossil. It was embedded in the rock. It was real.

  It was an alien animal.

  “Oh my God!” exclaimed June.

  I was breathing hard, staring at the shape in the rock. I caught a glimpse of a small dark shadow out of the corner of my eye again. There was nothing there, of course, but I suddenly remembered that we were being watched.

  “Oh, no,” I said and tapped the side of my helmet.

  “Don’t worry,” she replied. “We’ll figure it out.”

  “I just saw…” My voice trailed off.

  “What? What is it? Oh, no—was it your brother again?”

  “No, it’s okay. Don’t worry. We should get Tony and Vivian out here to see this.”

  June called Tony and Vivian and asked them to fly out to us. A few minutes later, they arrived and were amazed by the caterpillar-jellyfish. Vivian asked if it could be a fake, and we told her about uncovering half of it.

  Tony suddenly said, “Mike!” as he remembered we were being monitored.

  “Safety in numbers,” I said, “and we can keep a secret.”

  I scanned the horizon, half expecting to see a vision of my dead brother.

  *

  That evening was surreal. After flying back to the outpost, we all left our outersuits in the bedrooms, sat down in the lounge, and stared at each other.

  “Now what?” asked Tony.

  “Do you mean now what do we do, or now what does this mean?” asked Vivian.

  “Both.”

  “We can safely assume,” said June, “that our hypothesis about Robert was right: he discovered something, too, and was hushed up. So now we need to be very, very careful.”

  “Yes,” said Tony. “I don’t think we should call it in. We know what happens if you do that. Hopefully, they won’t even see it on our suit cams.”

  “But what if they do?” asked Vivian with a note of panic in her voice.

  “We prepare our story,” said Tony, “and we stick to it. If they confront us, then there’s no point in denying it. We say we saw it and we’re not going to tell anyone. They destroy it and wipe our recordings. Nobody would believe us, and we’re not going to try to convince anyone anyway.”

  “Self-preservation is sensible,” I said, nodding.

  “Exactly,” said Tony. “We can worry about what we do with this information later. Right now, we just need to avoid having an accident like Wyndham.”

  We all thought about that for a moment.

  “Are you guys really okay with them destroying it?” asked June.

  “We know they’re out here now,” I said. “There will be others.”

  “Okay, so saying we’ll keep it secret might save us,” said June. “But then what? We’re living in a colony that’s being deceived; all of humanity is being deceived. And what’s more, there’s a conspiracy here and maybe even a crime.”

  “Mike,” said Vivian, “you’re in Security. Isn’t the
re something you can do about it?”

  I hesitated.

  “I need to tell you all something,” I said gravely. “I’ve had a sense, for a long time now, that something is very wrong with the colony. We’re in a bizarre situation—it’s as if we’re in limbo or maybe even a prison. We all volunteered, but I don’t think anyone quite appreciated how much freedom we were sacrificing. I think we all thought we were just coming to work in another place, like another city or suburb, but we’ve lost the ability to make any decisions for ourselves. We don’t even have the protection provided by the law…There is no law here. There’s no jurisdiction. There isn’t even a right and wrong. There’s just JOSEV. And whatever JOSEV decides.

  “You know, I think I’ve realised why they chose me to come to Security here. I do as I’m told. I’m loyal and want to serve. The problem is, I’m in a different world now, and I want to do right by this place, by the people here.”

  “You have a plan, don’t you!” said Tony, suddenly smiling.

  “Actually, it was Imani’s plan,” I said, looking at June.

  “You’re kidding,” said June. “Local government?”

  “It’s the only peaceful, long-term solution,” I said. “We need to gradually grow as an independent nation. We need to become self-sufficient, and we need to do it without making JOSEV think they need to squash us all like ants. It’s the only way.”

  “In the really long term,” said June, “we should be thinking about terra-forming. Now we know it’s possible; this planet has sustained life before. We’re engineering plants that can survive in the environment—they just need a minimum level of oxygen, and that’s already here, too, locked in frozen carbon dioxide and water. We’d need a bigger population, and to focus more of our energy on greenhouses and plant production and medicine, but we’ve got all the means of production here already. We just need a foothold and then the new atmosphere will warm the planet, and life will take off. We could eventually…not us, or our kids or even their kids, but hundreds of years from now people could live here, on this planet, out in the open.”

  “Okay,” said Vivian. “That sounds amazing, but what about right now?”

  “Mike,” said Tony, “they could do anything now. We could all have nasty accidents and Karl will say nice things about JOSEV at our funerals.”

  Vivian shuddered.

  “That’s true,” I replied slowly, thinking. “We have a couple of choices: we can either go public or go quiet. If we go public and show everyone the evidence of life that we’ve found, we risk another invasive response from JOSEV—and maybe a much more violent response this time. Perhaps they’ll send troops from Earth. Showing our hand now would be very risky and confrontational. If we stay quiet and bide our time, then we can gradually and peacefully change the colony from within.

  “So I think we should stick to your plan, Tony. We don’t call it in. If they come here, we say we have no interest in sharing what we’ve found and they can destroy the evidence. If they don’t come, we assume we’re being watched and we don’t say anything to anyone about what we’ve seen. We bide our time. But we also prepare, because the time might come when we need to take action. Our only hope is in numbers, and even then only if JOSEV doesn’t send troops.”

  “What do you mean, take action?” asked Tony.

  “There may come a time when we’ll need to band together, and when it does, we’ll need to get the word out very quickly about what we saw and how it was covered up. We’ll have to gather our friends together to secure the colony.”

  “My God, Mike,” said June. “You’re talking about a coup d’état!”

  “It might sound that way,” I replied, “but I’m not saying that. I don’t know why, but my instinct is telling me that this might all boil over and we’ll need to band together to survive. We need to think about our future. We should prepare and, if we need to, when the time is right, we’ll work together to secure our freedom.”

  “Okay!” said Tony, beaming.

  “Yes,” said June, her eyes wide and full of life.

  “Okay,” said Vivian, more quietly, with gravity.

  We all looked at each other, from face to face, and were bound together in that moment.

  “But listen,” I said. “We don’t need to do anything yet. Just think about who you could trust in a jam. If one of us gets into trouble, the others need to help, and we might need to enlist others as well. I think we can trust Liu, for example. In the interim, we’ll be extra careful. We’ll try to stay with people we trust. Don’t go out alone; don’t do anything risky, even after a few months have passed, because that’s what they would do. They’d wait until some time has passed, then quietly take us out.”

  “I’m still not sure I believe that, but okay,” said Vivian.

  Suddenly Imani’s memo popped into my mind. I nearly said something about her request for independence a few months before she was murdered, but I was not certain about the connection, and I didn’t want to scare anyone.

  “So we’re careful, we prepare, and we wait,” said June, and I nodded.

  “Yeah, okay,” said Tony.

  “Okay,” said Vivian.

  In the end, we did need to band together, though not how we had imagined.

  29. DREAMS

  That night, I had a vivid dream. I was riding a bicycle on a winding road through a lush forest. Birds were quietly singing, the air was filled with the sweet scent of flowers and the undergrowth, and there was a cool, gentle breeze on my face. The air was moist and cooling my body. The trees slowly floated by as I pushed the pedals. The road wound along the side of a hill and passed a little waterfall. The sound of rushing water filled my ears and cool, clean mist sprayed my face.

  Then, suddenly, lightning flashed and thunder rolled through my whole body. I was no longer riding, I was falling, and the trees became rocks that flashed past. In the darkness, I saw faces illuminated by the lightning. I saw my brother Robbie, Glen, Petr, Meiying, and John, then Eli, and then finally I saw Imani. Then it was only Imani, again and again. Suddenly her dead eyes moved and looked directly at me, and I woke up.

  June was lying beside me; we had joined our sleeping bags together. I felt her warm arm across my chest and was instantly soothed.

  “What is it?” she asked. “Are you okay?”

  “It was just a dream,” I said.

  “Robbie?” asked June sleepily.

  “Um.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay. Go back to sleep.”

  But I realised that it hadn’t been just a dream; it had also been a memory. Something wasn’t right with Imani’s case. Maybe Eli had killed her, or maybe he was just the weapon. More likely, someone else killed her. It was unfinished business. June’s breathing became heavy as she fell asleep again. I realised that she also deserved to know the truth about Imani.

  However, I knew I wasn’t going to discover the truth on my own. I had tried that—working on my own I had barely scratched the surface and been summarily dismissed by my superiors. This time, I needed to change my approach, transcend the textbook, lean on my friends, and take some risks.

  Nobody from the colony came to retrieve us. We slept through the night and packed up in the morning. We went through the airlock, and Tony and I waved at June and Vivian as they lifted off and headed toward the colony.

  Tony and I climbed into the buggy and carefully drove out of the canyon. He made jokes on the way back, but there was no jumping or any dangerous risk-taking. He was quietly determined. I realised that he was still thinking about our conversation of the night before.

  June called me from the colony when she and Vivian arrived, and she said that there was nobody waiting to ‘greet’ them. They had just gone back to their rooms as if nothing had happened.

  Toward the end of the day, Tony and I drove into the main hangar and parked the buggy. We walked through the passages, wondering if we were going to be confronted, but nothing happened, and we just wen
t back to our room.

  I showered and went to the Security Office. Pete looked up as I entered. He was alone.

  “How was your trip?” he asked cheerfully. If he was acting, it was impressive.

  “Great, thanks,” I replied. “Were you busy back here?”

  “No, it’s been just as quiet. We haven’t had a lot to do. There’s a small storm in the south, but it’s not going to go global.”

  “Great,” I said and logged on to the system. On a whim, I decided to look at the footage on my suit of our discovery in the canyon.

  It had been erased. In fact, the whole day was gone; it was as if we had never left the outpost that day. I shivered. Part of my life had been erased. It obviously meant that someone had been monitoring us, they knew about our discovery, and they wanted it covered up. What I didn’t know was what that meant for me and the others. Would we be silenced, or covered up as well? I took a deep breath and put my hands on my thighs. I was just closing my eyes when Pete spoke behind me. I nearly jumped.

  “What’re you doin’?” asked Pete.

  “Just catching up,” I said, switching the screen to the Security event logs.

  “Not a lot to catch up on here. Jan’s having a few days off, too.”

  “Good for him,” I replied. “How about you?”

  “I will after this month,” he replied. “If you’re catching up, you should read all the news from Earth. The shit-fight continues. China’s deploying their navy.”

  “Great,” I said and started to read the gloomy news.

  *

  That night, I had the dream again. It started with the same wonderful feeling of riding through the forest, followed by the thunderstorm, and ended with Imani’s staring eyes. I woke up sweating and looked over to see Tony sleeping peacefully in his bunk.

  As I lay there, staring at the ceiling, I started to consider how I could reopen Imani’s case.

  I remembered the timeline—Imani’s movements from her room to the greenhouse, and then off the grid as her transmitter was disabled. The video that showed someone leave a few minutes later. Someone wearing a suit that already had the transmitter disabled before they arrived. The search for missing transmitters and the discovery of nine missing suits, including Eli’s. The call to June the day after we found Imani, connecting Imani and Eli, and then the call about the missing buggy. The search for Eli, the denial in his voice, and his horrific dive into the canyon. The pool of blood in the dust. The discovery that Jan shared a room with Eli, that he knew Eli was a suspect and had possibly tipped him off the night before—and maybe triggered his suicide. The conversation with June, Imani’s letter to the executive committee. Hu and her death-wish flying.