The Ruins of Mars (The Ruins of Mars Trilogy Book 1) (12 page)

      Once the waste was processed, it was combined with the genetically modified agar gelatin, then allowed to solidify into a consistency similar to that of a hard-boiled egg. By checking the jelly regularly with the needled reader tool, one could tell if more water or fertilizer was needed. To add one or the other, an injection directly into the jelly with a standard hypodermic needle did the trick nicely. Once the injection was made, the modified agar gelatin absorbed and distributed the new material via rapid osmosis. Though completely safe, people usually needed to be walked through the entire process so that the idea of eating something grown in their own waste became a little less terrifying.

      Now standing at her lab, Viviana smiled.

      Once we get there, she thought to herself, eating tomatoes grown in shit will be the least of our worries.

      Feeling the icy presence of fear worm its way into her mind, she tried not to visualize the many photos she had seen of the surface of Mars. The eerie likeness of those red deserts to the landscapes of Earth bothered her. Like looking into the future. Like looking at a vision of your own face, shriveled and rotten, long after you were dead. Mars, to her, looked like a wrecked and decayed Earth, its people burned to dust—their spirits hungry and forgotten. The discovery of the ruins only served to strengthen the comparison, and even though she was excited to go, there was a voice in her head that would not allow her the full joy of adventure.

      There is too much that could go wrong, it warned. Too much left in the hands of technology.

      “Copernicus?” Viviana said to the air, trying to silence the insidious voice.

      “Yes, Dr. Calise?” answered the AI.

      Facing her wall screen, she instructed, “Please display the live feed from the HEO Shipyard.”

      “As you wish.”

      The wall screen lit up and quickly produced an awe-inspiring sight. Hurtling through high Earth orbit at over 27,000 kilometers an hour, Braun hung in the scaffolding of the Shipyard like a great white whale inside a cage made of toothpicks. Only fully completed a week before, the ship was a testament to mankind's feverish ambition. As she watched the image, Viviana saw small figures encased in bulky pressure suits crawling over the brilliant, white ceramic surface of the vessel. These courageous men and women worked around the clock to test and troubleshoot the many systems and functions of the mighty Braun. Thankful for the peace of mind that their tireless efforts brought her, Viviana muttered a prayer for them under her breath.

      “Voi tutti santi Angeli e Arcangeli aiutare e difendere noi.
All ye holy Angels and Archangels help and defend us. Amen.”

     
Two months. She thought with shuddering apprehension. Two months and we’ll all be at the mercy of the heavens. Then, stopping herself, she frowned. No, not the heavens. We’ll be at the mercy of Braun, a machine.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The hamster wheel—January
2048

      Beads of hot sweat dripped from the brow of Mission Commander and Ship’s Captain Tatyana Vodevski. Per her daily ritual, she had awakened before the rest of the crew and was now taking her morning jog in the hamster wheel. The centrifugal force generated by the revolutions of the belted floor allowed Tatyana to jog in place while the rest of the ship was at the chaotic whim of zero gravity.

      Bringing the back of her forearm across her brow, she puffed with exertion and called out, 

      “Braun!”

       “Yes, Captain?”

       “What are you spinning at now?”

       “I am spinning at one-half of Earth’s gravity.”

       “Give me a full G!”

      There was a brief pause, then Tatyana felt the floor beneath her feet begin to accelerate against her. Noticing that she was moving backwards slightly, she pumped her legs harder and focused on the rhythmic sound of her feet striking the surface of the floor.

      The gravity simulation exercise facility, or the hamster wheel as the crew called it, was as its nickname might suggest: a large wheel-shaped room, which spun fast enough to simulate gravity through centrifugal force. Three meters tall by one-and-a-half across, with an access hatch at the axis of the wheel, the room was stark white and as well-lighted as an operating room. By directing Braun, the centrifugal force could be increased or decreased to simulate nearly any level of gravity, yet there was a prescribed program that the crew was expected to follow. Mandated by Dr. Kubba, the program instructed that they start the force of the wheel at Earth’s one G, then slowly decrease the force to Mars’s one-third G as they drew nearer to the red planet.

      Even though they had been in transit to Mars for nearly two months, Tatyana disregarded the instructions to decrease the centrifugal force of the hamster wheel. To her, the need to grow accustomed to Mars’s lower gravity was diminished, for she was not slated to stay on the planet for any real length of time. Her duties as Mission Commander were to be carried out primarily from orbit aboard Braun. Granted, there would be cases where she would need to make the trip to the surface, but, to her, the real work was in maintaining the strict schedule put forth by the mission designers.

      As per her duties, she was the only person on the crew who fully understood the requirements and separate tasks of every other member of her staff. Much of her training had been spent not preparing for the hardships of space travel, for she was already a professional cosmonaut, but rather deep in study. To her, the mission was like a traditional Swiss watch: all of the individual moving parts interlocking, driving one another and working together in order to achieve singular perfection. It was for this reason that she did not lament being ship-bound for the majority of the mission. She was a woman of duty. For her, making personal sacrifices came as easily as breathing.

      Born in Russia in 2007, Tatyana Vodevski was used to swallowing her feelings. In the year of her birth, instances of electoral fraud within Russia’s Kremlin started the country on a brief, but costly, backwards slide into isolationism and corruption. By the time she was twelve, Russia was in the grip of the worst famine the country had experienced since the reign of Joseph Stalin. Her father, a high-ranking military official, had been able to secure his family with enough to eat, but young Tatyana had watched as the rest of her countrymen suffered the freezing Moscow winters with little or no food. The cause of the famine was linked mostly to a decade of poor geopolitical maneuvers made by Russia’s corrupted Kremlin. These unpopular and often hostile interactions had served to ostracize Russia from the global community for nearly eight years. Many of Russia’s own crops were destroyed annually by drought, which fueled the frequent occurrence of summer wildfires, a phenomenon attributed to global warming.

      Even the notoriously harsh Russian winters became more aggressive under the rapid acceleration of climate change. Where once there were four seasons—spring, summer, fall and winter—now the people of Russia knew only two: extreme drought or extreme cold. By the end of the Eight Year Exile, as it was known in Russia, regular citizens had suffered huge losses to disease and starvation. Watching this as a child, Tatyana had vowed to keep her own feelings of desire and longing hidden away. She had been lucky and would spend the rest of her life ensuring that the people around her benefited from her presence. In that way, she could justify her own survival through the Eight Year Exile. If she was useful to the world, then she deserved the life her father’s political power had purchased.

      Now forty-one years old, Tatyana remained physically strong and mentally fit. As she pushed hard against the moving belt of the hamster wheel, her short red hair swayed from side to side in its ponytail. Only 160 centimeters tall, Tatyana was thin and delicate-looking with pale skin and gray eyes. Though she appeared small, her body was wrapped entirely in finely tuned muscles, which reacted with lightning-quick reflexes.

      As the fire in her thighs began to grown unbearable, she let her pace slacken.

      “Alright, Braun. That’s enough,” she breathed heavily.

      “Excellent workout, Captain,” said the AI.

      Almost at once, the room stopped moving, and Tatyana began to drift upwards with the familiar feeling of weightlessness.

      “What time is it?” she asked.

      “7:43 AM Standard Time.”

      “How long have I been in here?” she questioned between breaths.

      “Two hours and eleven minutes.”

      “What was my average speed?”

      “Twelve miles per hour, Captain,” replied Braun. Then, “You are improving. The gene enhancement must be working well.”

      Feeling her heart rate slow quickly, she took a few more deep breaths, then reached for a handrail near the hatch. Pulling herself up to the axis of the room, Tatyana pressed the pad mounted to the door. With the clank of retracting bolts, the hatch swung out, and she pushed herself through into the narrow hallway. Closing the hatch behind her, she drifted down the passage towards the rear entrance to the galley. Checking the hatches to the storage rooms on either side of the corridor, she was satisfied to see them securely closed and latched. As she moved through the air, she admired the method that the technicians at NASA had devised to keep the crew oriented in the hallways. Fading from the floor, up the walls and to the ceiling, the color of the paint changed from deep midnight blue at the base to a nearly sunlit turquoise at the peak. This subtle touch in design was just the sort of thing that appealed to her subconscious mind, always allowing her to know which way was up.

      Like swimming in the ocean, she thought with melancholy.

      Entering the kitchen, Tatyana was surprised to see the two mission engineers, William Konig and Udo Clunkat, sitting at the table. The blueprints for the yet-unnamed Mars base were suspended in the air above them, and the two Germans talked quickly while making animated gestures towards the model. Udo, the elder of the two at thirty-five, was pointing to the blueprints with a thick finger while William nodded and stroked his weak chin, looking a little like a lizard.

      “
Guten tag!” she called.

     
Tilting his head to one side, Udo waved nimbly and replied, “And dobraye utro to you, Captain.”

     
William began to pull himself free of the electromagnets that held him to his chair.

      “
Can I get you a coffee?” he asked.

     
Shaking her head, Tatyana made for the exit to the crew quarters.

      “
No, I’m heading to the shower now. Will you both still be here in twenty minutes? I would like to go over some of the construction timelines with you.”

     
In unison, the two nodded their heads.

      “
Good. I’ll be back shortly,” she smiled.

     
Udo and William again returned their gazes to the holographic blueprint and began to prattle in energetic German.

     
If I didn’t know any better, I would think those two are brothers, Tatyana said to herself. They even sort of look alike with those silly mustaches.

     
Stopping at the exit hatch, she called over her shoulder, “
Ihr brüder spielen schön, okay.
You brothers play nice, alright.”

     
Craning their necks to fix Tatyana with friendly glares, the two Germans shouted, “Ja, Mutter. Yes, Mother.”

The HEO Shipyard—the 29
th
of December,
2044

     
The faint whirring sound of his pressure suit’s fan motor was the only noise Julian Thomas could hear in the silence of high Earth orbit. Holding his breath, he pulled himself clumsily through a narrow opening in the skeletal hull of the massive and incomplete Braun. With a crackle, a voice dripping with the drawling accent of the American South cut in through his helmet speakers.

      “
Alright, Julian, now you’re going to want to take a left and head down about eight meters or so. You should pass five bulkheads before you get to the relay room. The first four separate the forward deck coolant systems from the climate control computer network. After you pass the fifth bulkhead, you’ll be in relay room A9. The panel will be on the far right wall. Got that?”

     
Taking care to mind his surroundings, Julian grunted slightly as he reached up and grasped a guide line anchored to the ceiling.

      “
Okay, Carl. I’m going now,” he said into his helmet mic.

      
“Watch out for any sharp edges. That suit’s a biggon’,” came the twangy response.

     
Julian began to pull himself down the guide line hand-over-hand with his back to the floor. As he moved forwards through the narrow passage, he counted the bulkheads as they passed in front of his helmet. Turning his head inside the pressure suit, he looked at the rooms as he glided through them. The first contained complex arrangements of thick ducting, which grew like upside-down metal root networks, disappearing into the ceiling. Passing the third and fourth bulkheads, he moved through two rooms dominated from end to end by large metal boxes—the door to each empty container standing ajar yet not swaying in the stillness of space. Eventually, when the ship was finished, these boxes would house part of the climate-control computers for the crew decks nearly two stories above. When he reached the fifth bulkhead, he pushed off of the ceiling and turned around to face the small room. The space was two meters long by two-and-a-half meters across with a panel box on the right-hand wall. Out of the top of the box sprouted a large conduit from which other, smaller metal tubes branched out and disappeared into the walls and ceiling. A shaft of brilliant light illuminated the room, and, turning to his left, Julian saw that a small section of hull siding had yet to be installed. Through the opening as if through a window, he saw the massive blue profile of planet Earth. Letting go of the guide line, he drifted to the opening and drank in the glorious vision. White clouds streaked across glowing blue seas while virtually every shade of green smeared and mixed with browns, ochers and tans, adding texture to the massive continents so far below.

      “
Belle,” he whispered. “Beautiful.”

     
Again, the voice of Carl Perrit, chief technician in the Shipyard’s command deck, cut in.

      “
Indeed she is, Julian, but you need to get going on that wiring.”

      “
Merde, mec!” swore Julian. “Shit, man! I can see here that I have plenty of air for another four hours at least.”

     
Carl did not respond for several seconds, but when he did, there was a hint of urgency to his voice.

      “
Listen, Brother. It’s not that. Cape Canaveral just called. It looks like the storm has passed. They’re launching the shuttle tomorrow morning, so you need to finish up with that wiring and get packed to head home.”

     
Julian had been expecting this, though part of him hoped that the typhoon would last for at least another few days. The sensational news from Mars just ten days before had resulted in a flurry of communications from the ground crew at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. A departure date had been set for Project Braun, and a series of shuttle launches were slated to begin ferrying up more workers to the Shipyard in an attempt to accelerate the construction of Julian’s interplanetary spaceship.

      The former Mission Commander of Project Mars Map, Dr. James Floyd, had been assigned to helm the newly revitalized Project Braun, and his aggressive plan for the ship’s completion involved a heavily augmented budget and the cooperation of several space agencies from around the globe. By previously accepting a seat on the Project Braun crew, Julian had forfeited his position in the Shipyard, and Dr. Floyd was now pushing hard to have him on board one of the Earthbound return shuttles as quickly as possible.