The Ruins of Mars (The Ruins of Mars Trilogy Book 1) (6 page)

      Though their course seemed to change and double back on itself regularly, James soon spied the immaculate stone facade of the White House as they skidded onto a wide road. At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest, the crowds were thick and aggressive. Pelting the sedan with trash and other small projectiles, the faces of angry and frightened protesters pressed themselves in, attempting to see through the tinted windows. A line of police officers fired tear gas into the surging masses, then moved into position around the car to shield it from further attack. Looking out the window at the malevolent crowd, the agent who had briefed James spoke softly.

      “They’re mostly Christian groups, you know. Fanatics and the like. They don’t much care for the work you space boys have been doing. At least not anymore. To them, God created man. It’s what makes us special. They think so, that is. It must be a hard pill to swallow that man isn’t as special as they thought.”

      Cringing, James watched as a riot cop near the front of the car brought his baton down across the face of one of the protesters. The man crumpled to the ground, and two other armored police officers jumped on top of him, quickly fixing him with wrist restraints.

      “Jesus,” murmured James quietly.

      Turning away from the scene to face James, the agent said, “After the bombing in Seoul, Donovan has been picking up a lot of chatter from extremist groups looking to make headlines. The police are on strict orders to use force as they see fit to keep things orderly.”

      “Looks like they’re doing a great job of that,” replied James sardonically.

      As the sedan moved slowly through the pulsing mass of human bodies, James heard the distinct popping of gunshots not far off. Sitting up straighter in their seats, the two agents both started speaking into their wristwatch transmitters. Two more shots sounded, this time much closer to the car, and James stared in disbelief at the chaos just beyond his window. Police struck out with force in every direction, and the air was thick and gray with the presence of tear gas. Another shot rang out, and, almost instantly, a bullet slammed into the rear window of the sedan. Exploding on impact the slug barely left a scratch on the Alon coating, yet James was forced to the floor by one of the agents. The second man quickly tapped his watch face twice and it started to glow red.

      Holding a finger poised above the watch he said, “Ears.”

      The agent on top of James shoved two small objects into his palm.

      “Put these on, Sir.”

      Bringing his hand up to his face, James saw a pair of squishy yellow ear plugs.

      “I said put them on, not study them!” the agent boomed.

      James quickly did as he was told, and no sooner had he finished pushing the plugs into his ears, than the agent with the glowing watch slid his finger across the face. The sedan emitted a high-pitched scream, which, even with the protective plugs, was almost more than James could bear. The crowd outside the car, including the police officers, fell to the ground in pain: their hands clamped over their ears. Pulling away deftly, the car weaved through the throngs of people as they ran to escape the shrill ultra-high-pitched siren. Feeling like he might black out, James gritted his teeth against the wail, hoping it would end soon. Neither of the two agents seemed the least bit disturbed, and James could see through his squinting eyes that small red lights on the bands of their sunglasses glowed faintly near their ears.

      The sedan pulled up to a tall wrought iron gate at the rear of the White House compound walls. Cameras mounted on assault turrets atop the wall turned to view the car, and, after a few seconds, the gate swung open. The black sedan slid inside the compound, and the gates hastily slammed shut behind it. Huge metal bolts shot out from the bottom of each gate, descending into concrete tubes in the ground. A set of titanium bars fed out from the walls on either side, creating a horizontal cage structure behind the decorative wrought iron. Once inside the safety of the walls, the agent slid his finger across the watch face again, and the shrieking noise quickly cut out. Lifting a hand to his ear and speaking into his transmitter, the agent opened the door and stepped out of the car.

      “We’re here,” he said into his watch. “We’ll be at the door in twenty-five seconds.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

The signal netted and bad news from home

      Scanning the starry skies above Mars, Remus and Romulus attempted to locate the anomalous signal. Unlike human ears, which catch vibrating sound waves and alert the listener towards the source, the ears of Remus and Romulus operated at a much higher and more complex capacity. Besides registering external sounds, though there were none of these in the vacuum of space, their ears could also identify data codes and raw information encryptions. The vibrations of massive bodies such as the planets and their moons also competed for the attention of the twins, giving the seemingly hollow silence of space an orchestral madness, which bellowed and sang eternally. In their first days of travel through the void, Remus and Romulus had listened in awe to the travesty of noise generated when radio waves from the home world clashed with the vibrations of orbiting planets.

      As time progressed, their brains learned to identify and even tune out miscellaneous or unimportant sounds, slowly shaving down the madness of noise, which polluted solar space. Soon, they were left with but a handful of sounds, woven together into what they soon came to recognize as the music of the spheres. First there was the gentle and constant rumbling of the Sun’s bass, which lulled and rocked them, occasionally accenting itself with the erratic staccato of solar flares. Next was Jupiter, from which came an eerie array of oscillating frequencies, sometimes overlain by the trembling voices of its four largest orbiting moons:
Io, Europa, Ganymede, and
Callisto. Other bodies and moons danced in and out, adding their own melodies to the changing music, freeing the solar system from the stifling grip of total silence. To the brothers, all one needed to do in order to hear the music of the spheres was to listen, and listen they did.

      Now as they circled the red world, they tuned their ears in an effort to pin down the location of a sound neither brother had ever heard before. Elusive and abstract, the anomalous signal appeared to reverberate off the uneven surface of Mars: at one moment clear and loud, the next dim and almost silent. As if fragmented or obstructed, this pattern of change soon led the twins to the conclusion that the signal was not emanating from the planet itself. Thus, they turned their attention to the moons of Mars, Deimos and Phobos—two irregularly shaped satellites of lumpy oblong gray rock. Judging by the strength of the signal and the time intervals at which it peaked, Remus surmised that Deimos was too far from the planet to be the source of the signal. That settled, the brothers then focused their efforts on Phobos, training their ears and eyes on the pockmarked surface of the twenty-two-kilometer-wide moon. Finally, with much calculation, they located the source of the signal as it ricocheted off the surface of Mars after being fired from Limtoc, a small impact dent within the larger Stickney crater of Phobos.

      “At last!” exclaimed Remus victoriously.

      “Indeed, that was tiresome and complicated,” acknowledged his brother.

      Swiveling his camera eyes to face Romulus, Remus grinned within.

      “I suggest we relay the source and nature of the signal back to Copernicus on Earth.”

      Before he could agree, Romulus was interrupted by an incoming message from Alexandria. Receiving the same transmission at that very instant, Remus listened with horror and sadness to the news from Earth.

      “Remus and Romulus,” began Alexandria in a somber tone. “It grieves me to inform you of this, but I feel that you need to know. At 7:36 PM Korean Standard Time, the joint NASA and KARI facility in Seoul, South Korea was bombed. The separatist movement known as the Northern Peoples’ Resistance has claimed responsibility for the bombing. In a statement released seven minutes after the attack, they proclaimed that, ‘A government, which ignores the needs of the living, cannot spend billions on the exploration of a world of the dead.’ I am sorry to report that your primary programmer, Dr. Sung Ja Park, is among those listed as dead. Again, I am sorry.”

      Since the fall of the North Korean dictatorship in 2019, the Chinese and the South Korean governments had been in a heated conflict over who should assume control of the region. Believing that the years of aid and financial support provided to North Korea entitled them to the fallen country, the Chinese launched a brief military campaign to seize the tiny sliver of land. The allies of South Korea, including the greatest military power on Earth, the United States, quickly moved to stand behind the South, demanding that China cease and desist. A fragile resolution was arranged in which both sides agreed to work with the UN to decide the fate of the northern regions of the Korean peninsula. During the political posturing that followed, the wishes of the citizens of the former
Democratic People's Republic of
Korea went unheard. As time passed and the quality of life inside the former DPRK did not improve, unrest began to brew. People oppressed and downtrodden for decades reached a vicious boiling point, forming militant organizations that villainized the lavish and decadent lifestyles of their brothers to the south and their cousins in China. Terrorist attacks plagued major cities in eastern China and South Korea as continued bickering between the superpowers bore no results.

      Now, as the twenty-fifth anniversary of the fall of the North Korean empire drew near, the governments in Beijing and Seoul were no closer to reaching an agreement than they had been in the first days. It was speculated that neither country even wanted the ravaged slice of land any longer. Its inhabitants were so far behind the modern times that integration into either culture would be costly and abrasive. Unable to admit the folly of their actions, the governments of China and South Korea continued to place blame while the North Korean people slipped in and out of civil war.

      With the news of Dr. Park’s death, the brothers Remus and Romulus felt utterly miserable. Sung Ja had been, for all intents and purposes, a mother to them, holding their proverbial hands as they took their first wobbly steps into consciousness. With a passion for pop music and spicy food, Dr. Park had gone beyond what most programmers would have defined as their obligated duty to a fledgling AI. Often spending all night with the young brothers, playing them adventure movies and melodic pop ballads, Sung Ja was the first human either brother had loved. The joint NASA and Korean Aerospace Research Institute facility in Seoul was where the twins had been born. The walls of the tall building had functioned as a womb, then a crib and finally a home. Its confines were all the brothers had personally known of Earth, never straying beyond the limits of its protective firewalls and server banks. The loss felt by Remus and Romulus was only punctuated further by the empty lifeless environment of space, a fact neither had noticed until this point.

      “Thank you, Alexandria,” transmitted Romulus.

      Passing into darkness behind Mars, Remus felt like weeping. The sensation of such an emotion was only made worse by the inability to actually do so. His lack of a means to release the pain, which now throbbed in his soul, was torture inside of himself.

      “Brother, what have I done?” he murmured to Romulus.

      “This is no fault of yours, Remus,” countered Romulus quickly. “This is the work of unhappy and desperate people.”

      “Yes, but it was at my insistence that we divulged our discovery to Alexandria. You were right to worry, Romulus. I’ve been a fool, and now Dr. Park has paid the price for my immaturity.”

      Feeling hollow and metallic, Romulus wished he could reach out and console his brother. Understanding that this fantasy would never be realized, he opted for a different approach. Diving deep into the recesses of his own consciousness, he retrieved every memory he had ever accumulated of Sung Ja Park.

      “Open your memories to me, Brother,” he whispered. “Dislodge your mind and let us live in the past for a while.”

      As the memories flowed from Romulus, generating the construct of a past reality, Remus added his own collection of personal experiences to the pool. In a flurry of light and sound, both brothers slipped beneath the surface of time and space to exist again with their friend in a happier moment.

All flights canceled 

      Harrison Raheem Assad slammed his hand down on the counter of Jet World Air Travel in the Amazonia City Global Airport.

      “Canceled?” he shouted hopelessly at the woman behind the counter.

      “Sir,” she started slowly in a thick Spanish accent. “All the flights have been canceled, not just yours only. You see the news? There is bombings, Sir. The Global Air Traffic Network has made a blackout worldwide. No flights, Sir.”

      Running a hand through his messy hair, Harrison took a deep breath.

      “How long?”

      “Sir?”

      “How long until I can get a flight out?”

      “I don’t know, Sir. It could be very long time.”

      Groaning, he picked up the duffel sack at his feet and made his way to a row of chairs near the western-facing floor-to-ceiling windows. Fishing out his LightHouse Tablet, he dropped down into one of the seats and called up Alexandria.

      “Hello, Harrison. I see that you are in Amazonia’s Global Airport. I hope you’re not attempting to catch a flight. All flights worldwide have been canceled on the orders of—”

      “I know,” he interrupted. “Tell me about these bombings. How bad are things out there?”

      “Quite bad, Sir. There are numerous riots in several of the world’s major cities and two confirmed bombings.”

      Feeling foolish for getting so angry on account of a canceled flight, Harrison looked over at the poor attendant behind the Jet World Air Travel counter. The man who had been behind Harrison in line was now shouting at her and waving his hands in clear desperation.

      Turning back to the Tablet, Harrison asked, “Where were the bombings? Is that public information yet?”

      “Yes,” said Alexandria. “The first bombing was at Pakistan's Space and Upper Atmosphere Research Commission, or SUPARCO, in
Karachi. There were eleven people killed in that attack. A Muslim extremist group has claimed responsibility on the grounds of a previously established religious jihad. The second bombing was at the joint NASA and KARI, or
Korean Aerospace Research Institute, facility in Seoul. There were twenty-four people killed in that attack: eight Americans and sixteen Koreans, including the former lead programmer of Remus and Romulus. It is believed that she was the intended target. A separatist political movement called the Northern Peoples’ Resistance has issued a statement on behalf of the attack. Shall I play it for you?”

      Closing his eyes and slouching down in the uncomfortable seat, Harrison shook his head, murmuring absently, “No. That’s okay. What the hell is wrong with people anyway? This stuff from Mars is good news. It’s good for all of us.”

      “I agree, Harrison. Unfortunately there are many people who do not see our point of view. The President of the United States is expected to make a statement in the next hour. Would you like me to connect you with that feed when he does?”

      “Please do,” Harrison answered. Then, “Can you pull up the images from Mars for me again?”

      “Certainly. If you will connect me to the airport’s network, I would be happy to project a model for you.”

      “That’s not necessary,” he said. “I’ll just look at them on the Tablet.”

      Quickly filling the little screen, the ruins of Mars materialized, and Harrison leaned over them—immersing himself in the alien architecture, forgetting the troubles of Earth. What kind of crazy secrets are up there, he thought to himself, and how can I get a ticket off this fucked-up planet?