The Ruins of Mars (The Ruins of Mars Trilogy Book 1) (18 page)

     
No time for love, she said to herself with steel determination. And yet, she could not ignore the warmth spreading through her body as she looked into the young man’s hazel eyes.

     
We’re here for over a year, came the quietly hopeful voice of her inner child. Maybe you can give yourself this one thing. Just this once.

Departure from Earth orbit—December
2047

     
The day had finally
arrived. The crew, strapped tightly into their high-backed chairs, sat in the open bridge deck of the ship while the blue Earth spun below their feet. Listening to the chatter of the command crew across the room from him, Harrison wished he could turn his head to see Liu, sitting two seats behind him. They had spent the night together, and Harrison was still reeling from the abrupt change in direction their friendship had taken. That morning, Liu had quietly slipped back to her own quarters while he was still asleep, making the following breakfast a little awkward. In all honesty though, Harrison had been relieved that everyone was too preoccupied with the impending launch to notice the furtive glances he exchanged with Liu as they sat across the table from one another.

      With a tone, the ticker projected on the massive oval window rolled over to two minutes and counting. As he sat, squeezed into the plush padding of his chair, Harrison could hear Captain Vodevski barking pre-launch systems-check orders to Amit and Julian. The two men responded mechanically, filling the air with numbers and stats, making Harrison wonder how anyone could possibly comprehend what all of this information actually meant. YiJay called out that Braun was functioning at full launch capacity, adding her own voice to the mixture of technical jargon that Harrison could not understand. James Floyd’s face was also projected on the window, just beneath the quickly reducing numbers.

      “I’ve taken you as far as I can,” he was saying, although it seemed that no one was listening. “Now it’s up to you to do the rest. Godspeed and good luck.”

      Swiveling in her chair to face the screen, Captain Vodevski, who was the only person not fully strapped in, nodded curtly.

      “Thank you, Dr. Floyd. We will not let you down.”

      “Fusion detonators engaging!” shouted Julian as he tapped out commands on the Tablet screen of his workstation. “There’s no going back now!”

      “T minus thirty seconds to launch,” echoed the smooth voice of Braun.

      Bunching his hands up into fists, Harrison felt the floor beneath his feet begin to quiver and rumble. A low, nearly inaudible, growl started to build in the bowels of the massive ship, spreading out to reverberate off the curved walls of the bridge deck as it grew louder. Feeling his body shudder with anticipation and adrenalin, Harrison fixed his eyes on the timer as the numbers ran down with feverish celerity. Somewhere behind him, Viviana began praying in a shaky voice as the movements of the ship grew more jarring.

      “Fifteen seconds,” stated Braun.

      Winching down into her seat, Captain Vodevski called out loudly enough to be heard above the peaking roar of the engine.

      “Lieutenant Vyas,
are you ready?”

      “Ready, Captain!” shouted Amit from his center station.

      “Ten seconds,” said Braun patiently.

      Transfixed by the numbers as they melted away from double digits into singles, Harrison clenched his jaw to keep his teeth from chattering with the jerking vibrations of the ship.

      “Launch in five. Four. Three. Two. One. Detonation—”

      Deep in the belly of the metal Leviathan, tiny atoms combusted as their nuclei split, unleashing a fire that burned as hot as a sunspot in the depressurized vacuum of the engine core. With the force of a half-megaton nuclear explosion, Braun leaped away from Earth orbit at over 35,000 kilometers an hour. Shoved down into his seat, Harrison felt as though he were back in the grip of gravity’s squeezing fists. His boots pressed against the floor, and his arms clung to his body—not floating about like snakes with minds of their own as they had been moments before. The ship rattled loudly, and the stars outside the window seemed to spin and whirl like flakes of snow in a vicious blizzard.

      Glancing sideways, Harrison saw Amit, face calm, with his fingers sliding across a black screen of his workstation like a man trying to tune the knobs of an invisible radio. Hearing a series of clanks and motorized hums, Harrison realized that Amit was stabilizing the ship with bursts of fuel from side-mounted rocket engines. Looking to the window again, he was struck by a dizzying bout of disorientation. Now the stars were arcing slowly and with less intensity. Suddenly, he was hanging upside-down, fighting wildly to keep his stomach from lurching into his throat. With a whine, something inside the hull above them kicked on, and Harrison’s equilibrium was instantly returned. Distracted by the confusion of the moment, he did not notice that his arms were floating again until his own hand bumped the side of his face. Everything fell silent, and the ship was totally calm.

      “Stabilization complete,” announced Braun. “Desired trajectory achieved. Current speed: 33,796 kilometers per hour.”

      With the sound of twelve men and women exhaling a breath held for too long, the straps loosened on their seats, and the crew of Braun drifted into the air. With an almost-drunken smile plastered to his face, Harrison moved to gather with the rest of the party as they swarmed to the window, trying to glimpse the Moon as they sped past it into the murky black of space.

      Julian, barely able to suppress an enormous grin, looked, to Harrison, like a man who had just heard his child speak its first words. The Germans took turns shaking his hand while the Frenchman tried in vain not to look smug. Captain Vodevski, with an arm around YiJay, beamed and nodded as Amit animatedly described his actions in stabilizing the ship after its explosive launch. Viviana and Elizabeth hugged and laughed while the two pilots Aguilar and Marshall patted each other on the back. In the crowd of happy faces, Harrison spotted Liu looking up at him. As he floated over to her, she held out a slender hand for him to take. Suddenly, miles away from the rowdy crew of interplanetary explorers around them, the two held hands and spoke without speaking. All of the doubt and ambiguity, which had plagued the memory of the night before, retreated from their subtle embrace.

      We are together now, they said with their eyes. Mars is where our new life begins. Forget everything we’ve left behind.

      As the light in the sky created from the massive explosion shined like a second Sun, James Floyd looked up into the hot ball of fusion fire through his protective sun glasses. Camera crews and NASA technicians bustled excitedly about the Launch Observation Deck, but James stayed rooted to the spot, staring into the sky.

      Thank God the damn thing didn’t break up, he thought with relief. Point-five megatons is a lot of juice: enough to level Hiroshima twenty-five times if I’m not mistaken. Now they just have to get there in one piece and start building a whole new world while the rest of us sit on our hands and wait.

      His mind wandered to the ruins, and a shadow fell over his face.

      A new world alright, he said inwardly. Built right on the remains of a dead one. If that’s not bad mojo, then I don’t know what is.

Bootprints—April
2048

     
With a loud clank, the howl of the afterburners cut out, and Lander 1 touched down on the brittle sunbaked dirt of Mars. Swaying slightly, the long, hydraulic landing gears of the windowless white craft adjusted their length to settle the ship evenly on the rough and rocky ground. Thin fingers of steam rose up from the surface as the heat from the ceramic-plated underbelly of the Lander thawed flakes of permafrost hidden among the red stones. Inside the craft, the six men and women of the ground team relaxed as the Lander softly lowered itself towards the ground.

     
For the Lander crew, the flight to the surface had been a rough and abrasive experience, made all the worse by their lengthy, silent even-serene trek through space. With a concussion louder than a cannon shot, the little craft had breached the thin atmosphere of Mars like a comet, racing insanely towards the rock-strewn desert below. Fire had licked at the super-hard ceramic shell of the hull like a demon’s tongue, attempting to find entry and violate the safety of the pressurized cabin. Vibrations, so forceful that they seemed to shake the very bones in their bodies, assaulted the explorers as Marshall clutched at his controls, pulling back and grunting with effort. When the afterburners had kicked on, the Lander seemed to buck and skip, momentarily delving the crew back into a state of weightlessness.

      Then, with a drop, the feeling of gravity had quickly returned as the ship’s plummet resumed—only this time with less ferocity. Uttering shrill whines, the engines had pushed hard to slow the little craft as it fell through the thin air, nearing the ground with diminishing speed. Nimble landing gears had sprung from the undersides of the ship like the legs of a white spider as it descended an invisible web. In an instant it was over, and all that was left was the quiet tick-tick-ticking of the heated hull as it contracted in the frigid air of the Martian morning.

      “
Ladies and gentlemen,” came the jovial voice of Ralph Marshall in Harrison’s helmet speakers. “This is your captain speaking. Welcome to Mars.”

     
Letting out a whoop despite being shut up inside his suit, Harrison ached to get out of the Lander and see what was on the other side of the hull. Straining in the seat harness, he tilted his head from side to side, cracking his neck with loud pops. Swiveling to look about the cabin, he drummed his fingers on his knees, waiting for Marshall to give the all-clear so he could stand up.

     
About as long as a school bus, the interior of the Lander shared basically the same dimensions. A narrow aisle separated two rows of seats where five of the six members of the landing party sat in high, wing-backed crash chairs. At the nose of the vessel was Marshall’s pilot’s station, positioned in the center of a sprawling array of computer screens and tablets, which surrounded him in a near-full circle. The Lander had no airlock, so the entire cabin had to be decompressed before the crew could exit through the hatch in the front-right side. There was limited storage space inside the Lander, so most of the equipment compartments were accessed through small hatches on the exterior of the ceramic-shelled hull. The largest of these areas was located in the rear of the vessel and housed, among other things, the skin and bones of their temporary living space.

      “
Everyone still buttoned up tight?” asked Marshall as he checked the readouts from his landing. “I’m going to depressurize the cabin and open the hatch.”

      “
I’m good,” replied Viviana.

      “
Us too,” said William, nodding towards Udo.

      “
Snug as a bug,” joked Harrison.

      “
Me as well,” piped Liu across the aisle from him.

     
Tapping out a series of commands on the largest of his console’s tablets, Marshall warned, “Okay, here we go.”

     
With a low hum, pumps within the core of the Lander began to cycle the air out of the cabin. Flexing his fingers inside the tight gloves of his suit, Harrison looked across the aisle at Liu and tried hard to make out her face behind the blue sheen of her visor. As if reading his mind, she slid a finger across the curved tablet inlaid in the fabric of her left forearm, and her helmet shield went clear. Smiling, she leaned her head out into the aisle, and Harrison did the same. They touched the glass of their face shields together, and Harrison could hear her muted voice as she said something to him in Mandarin,

      “
Wo ai ni.”

      “
What?” he said into his helmet mic.

      “
What?” barked Marshall from the cockpit as he craned his neck to look back at them. “Did you say something?”

     
Liu, pulled her helmet away from Harrison’s and sat back in her chair, tinting her visor.

      “
No,” stammered Harrison, putting his hands up defensively.

     
Marshall shook his head and turned back to face the flickering screens of his pilot’s station. With a shudder, the pumps in the belly of the Lander shut down, and a friendly tone chimed from the front of the cabin. A green light above the exit hatch suddenly illuminated, and the ever-calm voice of Braun sounded in their helmets.

      “
Decompression complete. The mission itinerary states that Mrs. Xao-Xing Liu will be the first to exit the Lander. Congratulations to you all on this historic day.”

      “
Alright,” exhaled Marshall. “Miss Liu goes first. Then it’s us. Let’s just play nice and not get pushy. There’s plenty of virgin ground out there for all of our bootprints.”

     
Because the Chinese had donated nearly thirty percent of the mission’s funding and all of the robotic equipment, they required that the first human to set foot on Mars must be Liu, a Chinese national. Personally, she hated the idea and felt that it only served to reinforce the same nationalistic ideals that Project Braun was trying to eradicate. Despite her protests, the clause had been added to the mission contract, and Liu was officially slated to be the first human to plant her feet in the Martian dirt.