PS-9 skimmed the surface at a thousand feet. The crew had laughed and cheered as they punched an exit hole in the sandstorm engulfing the barrens. A few centuries earlier on Earth and they could have been in a Viking longboat riding out of a giant wave. Tunnel One was immersed in the storm. They could have landed and waited it out, but Captain Devans had never been great with idle time and opted for T2. So they pierced the Martian night and found themselves on the other side of the planet. The shuttle circled the tunnel twice and set down on the landing zone without so much as a bump.
CapD outdid himself on speed this time, Alicia Hamilton thought, eyeing the outside camera feeds that went from dark to light as the high-powered bulbs popped on at their arrival. The shuttle had kicked up some dust that sparkled now. She stood at a control lectern, flexing and bending inside the formfitting space suit and helmet.
“Captain, landing bay is sealed and ready to depressurize,” she said.
“Go for depressure, Alicia,” came the acknowledgment. “Continue surface prep under self-direction. Keep us posted. Need anything, holler.”
She smiled. Devans, letting her do her job.
She addressed Trent Wagner. “Ready?”
“Like, yesterday.”
She pressed a sequence of buttons on the lectern. She could have gone holo, but she preferred physical touch, even if it was through the sensor-augmented pads of the space gloves.
Compression valves hissed. The sound of them was picked up by her suit’s exo-microphones and channeled through the small speakers at the sides of the helmet. The hissing was familiar, and each time sounded like a warning, as if they’d breached a snake’s den. This time more so than others.
Not surprising, she told herself, given the imminence of Detonation Event.
She pressed a second sequence of buttons.
The hatch receded from the hull three inches and stayed there as if held by an invisible hand. A large oval frame of blue-white appeared, glowing against the dim interior of the landing bay, courtesy of the shuttle’s outer floodlights. The panel of reinforced metal and its small circular window vanished to the side, carried along recessed tracks. Light poured inside now from the shuttle floods and the outside lights on tripods that lined the landing zone and entire mouth of the tunnel. The gateway to the red planet beckoned.
Hamilton stepped forward. Her gloved hand wrapped tighter around the handle of the mobile instrument case. The toes of her boots extended just over the edge of the hull.
“Let’s jet down,” her companion suggested.
“We’ll ramp it,” she countered. “Send the sequence to extend like a good boy?”
“Yeah, yeah. What fun is that? They put the jet packs in these suits for a purpose, you know.”
“This gal could use the exercise.”
“Not that I can tell. Besides, in one third Earth gravity, how much exercise is involved?”
“More than if we let the ion jets do the work.”
Streams of white carbon dioxide spouted from support arms as the ramp pushed slowly outward from the hull, then the relative vacuum of the Martian night whisked them away. She’d noted the dust via the cameras, but it was more interesting up close. The landing pad beneath and around the shuttle had formed a layer of dust since their last mission, just a week prior, and the fine particulate continued to swirl around the shuttle, despite the soft landing.
Martian glitter, she thought, as it sparkled in the lights.
Hamilton had experienced this effect many times during the exploratory and mining operations. It had lent mystery and awe to the situation, but now even more so. Perhaps it was because she knew she wouldn’t be seeing it for a while after Detonation Event.
Appearing beside her, Trent Wagner leaned and swayed in his suit while mouthing a beat rhythm. He’d turned off his mic and appeared to be singing. She tapped her forearm as a gesture for him to switch it on. Not that she was enamored of his musical skills, but microphones should be open out in the field, at least between party members. Instead, Wagner took the impulse reader by lifting it by the strap from her shoulder. She let him have it, but shook her head and put an open hand alongside her helmet at ear level. He opened the lid to his arm computer and hit a switch.
“Better, Leash?” he said.
“Yes.” She eyed the hand atomizer holstered at his side. “We’re not mining today, doofus.”
“Uh, that’s Mr. Doofus, and it’s always fun to carve boulders. Plus, it’s security against alien attacks.”
“Uh-huh. Well, the little green men have done a pretty good job of hiding from us these past two hundred plus years.”
Wagner shrugged and resumed his vocal beats.
Devans’ voice in their helmets: “Landing team.”
“Go for landing team,” Hamilton replied.
“Ham, we know by micro-ID chip, but for the verbal record, who’s your dance partner?”
Alicia smacked the humming youth in the shoulder.
“Huh? Yeah, I’m here too, Cap. Trent Wagner.”
“You’re everywhere. Dubbing you Wagner the Weasel.”
“Love it!” Trent said.
Devans laughed, his voice only slightly modulated via circuitry. “Mission log entry by Ry Devans, captain of Planetary Shuttle Nine. Time is oh-seven hundred EST Earth, twelve hundred MOS-1 synch with Mars Olympus Mons. We have landed at the site of Tunnel Two in canyon Valles Marineris for final checks of tunnel relays and bomb receptor before Detonation Event. Two of the crew, Alicia Hamilton and Trent ‘Weasel’ Wagner, comprise the landing party. Log out.”
“Oh, that’s a terrible name!” Navigator Shannon Burroughs interjected over the comm link.
“Relax. I’m sure the weasel has more coffee bribes on his calendar,” Devans said. “Besides, I made air quotes for that part of his name.”
Burroughs feigned a snort of contempt.
“Don’t worry, ShanBurr,” Wagner added. “I’m connected.”
“Sure you’d like to be,” Alicia Hamilton murmured, followed by a pretend cough.
Trent winked down at her.
Hamilton grimaced as she looked outside. “Lots of glitter kicked up with the landing, CapD. How about a blast or two to thin it out?”
“Clearing for visibility,” Devans said.
More CO2 blasts from the ship’s hull shot the dust farther away. The majority of the glitter swirled outward and faded into the darkness. Just within the perimeter of the shuttle illumination, a signal relay winked and beckoned from the shore of a lake of darkness.
Alicia worked the buttons at the hull panel beside the hatch. “Ramp descent sequence activated.”
Sudden movement made her start.
Trent Wagner broke from her side. In three bounds he was at the end of the ramp. Legs in a wide half-stance, Wagner “surfed” in slow motion down to the surface of Mars.
Hamilton let this go without commenting on the what-ifs. A sudden mechanical failure of the ramp or a spasm from the ship’s engine could have sent him tumbling. The suits and helmets were tough, but why tempt the devil? The antifreeze arteries and network capillaries could be compromised. Or the ion jets could be compromised.
As both engineer and security lead, she was keenly aware of the risks. Space was a paradox for the human psyche: beautiful and mind-bending with its enormity, and a perpetual hazard to navigate. Space exploration was forever limited by time and resources. The global space stations, two of them around the planet and now leaving orbit as a preventive measure against potential blast-out, were the size of small moons, but they were merely tiny bubbles within a vast and deadly universe. Constant vigilance was necessary to keep the bubbles from bursting.
But for sanity, a certain amount of entertainment was necessary.
That’s why SCONA invested in enviro-parks, sporting events, games, shows, and movies. It was also why Alicia had requested Wagner, a junior astrophysicist, for this final check before the Martian big bangs. The more senior physicists were dull and comfortable at their workstations back on the orbiters or Lunar One, awaiting the data influx.
A hundred missions to the surface and Trent Wagner still showed enthusiasm for a variety of tasks, whereas most of the others had become lethargic. He knew how to mine sample rock with the atomizers, perform molecular bonding for tunnel wall patchwork, and extract and interpret the data from the relays and the bombs themselves. The latter was pure redundancy, since they were in a constant transmission and monitor state, but SCONA encouraged duplication. Wagner referred to it as “taking their temperatures.” A trained engineer might have been more optimal for checking the spiraling relay units, but as an astrophysicist Wagner had more than enough mental capacity to handle it. He yawned in jest while she showed him once again how to do the readings and redundancy checks with the mobile impulse reader. Besides, after a year and a half in Martian orbit, Hamilton herself had grown a bit heavy in the neurons. As a “dualie,” with both security and engineering duties, she was certainly busy, but also anxious for the next phase. She supposed everyone was.
“Curling your hair?” Trent said, then leaped twelve feet toward the tunnel mouth. He looked over his shoulder at her.
“You like?” she returned, running a gloved hand over the helmet and her shaved head within.
“Oh, yeah.” Wagner laughed.
An access pathway from the landing zone to the mouth of the abyss had been cleared by the atomizers and mini-dozers. Beyond the perimeter of the landing zone and tunnel mouth the surface rocks were scattered far and wide, dangerous going if one was in a hurry.
Particularly at night, as it was now.
Hamilton started down the ramp. Wagner took a couple strides off the path and knelt on the surface. The strap of the impulse meter went slack against the enviro-suit, but he balanced the unit on his thigh. He scooped up some Martian soil in a gloved hand and tossed it beneath the lights. It was not obvious whether he did it to gauge the wind, which was negligible, or for his own amusement.
He removed a slender round case from one of his pockets, turned the lid, and shook it.
“You keep kidding yourself with those seeds, you know,” Hamilton said, walking toward him.
“You never know.”
She sighed. “Except we do know. We’re centuries away. And that’s if we can get the core hot enough to hold on to a real atmosphere. Even genetically modified seeds need more than Mars can give right now.”
“Science doesn’t always get predictions right. Especially in new circumstances.”
“Maybe they’re only a couple centuries off. Even then you’d need a lot more water and heat than we got on this dead rock.”
“Gwen said these—”
“Your astrobiologist sister. Couple of underachievers, you two.”
“She said these seeds are genetic badasses. Won’t take much to get ’em going. You could spit on one in the lab and it’d sprout.”
“Into what?”
“A plant! Some kind of jacked-up ground cover.”
“To eat? Like broccoli?”
“She’s got those too, but these babies are genetically modified for maximum oxygen generation. She’s got several test sites with seeds already in the ground.”
“Going to take a lot. And so close to the blast vent here, they’ll probably get fried with even more radiation than what they’d get from the solar winds.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” He turned and grinned. “After we’re done here, thought I’d jet past the hills about a mile from here and do some scattering. Same for T1, once the dust storm clears out.”
“I don’t know. It’s not on the itinerary.”
“CapD won’t mind. He loves straying from the schedule.”
Alicia Hamilton made a dubious sound.
She caught up to Wagner while he gazed around at the stars and shadowy landscape, as if this were his first landing. She hit his shoulder and together they strode toward the lake of darkness, where a beacon of green steadily blinked.
“Repeat transmission, Hans,” Trent Wagner, tapping his helmet for effect.
She didn’t need to look at him to hear the taps; the external mic of her suit was sensitive enough to pick up the whisper of the lonely breeze drifting through this planetary gravesite. “Got it.” Wagner turned to Alicia. “Word from engineering on the shuttle is—”
“Why didn’t he link me?”
“Dunno. Hans sounded kinda strange. Maybe he’s got a cold and forgot to patch you in. Anyway, steady signals from all the relays from here to the core.”
“He looked fine twenty minutes ago.”
Wagner shrugged.
“Weird, but okay,” Hamilton said. “These manual verifies are probably overkill anyway.”
“Yeah, but we get surface time out of the deal.”
She smiled. “This ought to take us all of three or four minutes at each tunnel.”
“If we stretch it,” Trent Wagner said, standing and then swinging the impulse reader around his hip. He aimed the device at the tall beacon before them as they walked. When it flashed, the entire tunnel mouth—wide enough to fit two planetary shuttles end to end—was illuminated in bright green. “Prelim check of the surface relay here says it’s fine.”
“Only several thousand relays to go.”
“All the way down to the firecracker.”
“Psh. ‘Firecracker.’ How can you micro down something meant to jump-start an entire planet?”
Trent Wagner grunted as he repositioned the strap of the reader over his shoulder. “You’d rather use the formal name for everything? I’d keel from the mind numbage.”
“That’s not a word.”
“Should be. It’s been around long enough. Look at the faces of the assembly line monitors as they check robotics all day long. Total mind numbage.”
“Please. Just watch you don’t fall into the hole here.”
Wagner glanced at the growing abyss, then up at the stars again as he walked. Had the atomizing lasers and bulldozers and molecular bonders not smoothed out the surface, Hamilton was sure he’d have tripped and fallen on his face shield by now.
Hamilton turned to look behind them. The shields had been pulled back from the shuttle bridge, revealing eight-inch-thick walls of space-grade acrylic. Captain Devans and four crewmembers watched from the fish bowl of the ship’s helm.
Copilot Nuro was not among them, Hamilton noticed. Though she was married, she found the large man, well, interesting.
Wagner broke her train of thought.
“Now that the mega-nukes are half of a planet away on the inside,” he said, “it’ll be interesting to measure how much blowback makes it to the surface, despite the relays popping off and collapsing the tunnel.”
“Yeah, interesting from up there.” Hamilton pointed up to the blinking lights of the receding satellite that was MOS-1. “Not so much here on the surface.”
“Yeah, that’d be major suckage, DE while we’re here on the surface.”
“I don’t even want to think about it.”
They walked in silence, both wondering if the mission to terraform the red planet would ultimately prove a waste of time and resources. Martian dust glittered over the yawning maw ahead.
“You’re more into the simulations and analysis than I am,” Hamilton said.
“Some show no blowback. Others, a lot.”
Hamilton swallowed. So, this was it. The last check before Detonation Event. All the preparation, the construction of lunar bases, the assembly of vast orbiters, the atomized mining and molecular bonding of the deepest tunnels in history, the development of the most powerful nuclear bombs in history, and placing them at the bottoms of the tunnels—all of it had led to the moments that would follow these final tunnel checks.
Alicia Hamilton’s helmet and shoulder lights were tiny but sent plenty of luminescence toward the tunnel mouth, which seemed to consume the beams when darkness followed the periodic flashes from the top relay.
“I’m cold,” Wagner said.
Hamilton checked. “Your suit temp on my display says otherwise.”
“Yeah, but I think I should be cold. Ergo.”
“You can head back. I can handle this.”
“What fun is that? We’re about to kick-start Mars. How often has that gone down?”
“True.”
The lights all around the tunnel mouth flashed in rapid warning, and the main relay bathed them up and down in a strobe light. A clarion alarm sounded.
“Party time,” Wagner said, dancing in the lights.
“At the intersection of Tunnel and Blast. PS-9, would you kill the approach alarms?” Hamilton said.
“Engineering, did you copy?” Captain Devans asked over the comm link.
No reply, but the flashing stopped.
Hamilton and Wagner stood before the main relay tripod, a few feet from the tunnel. Legs bolted to concrete blocks, it reached Alicia Hamilton’s shoulder. One of its communication dishes pointed to the first relay a mile down the tunnel, another pointed upward into the Martian night. Line of sight took Hamilton’s gaze again to the cluster of lights that was the receding orb MOS-1.
Wagner waved a peace sign over his shoulder, then leaned over the tunnel lip to gaze at the spiraling flashes of the relays that faded with depth. “All these poor relays are just hours from self-destruction.”
He moved back before the surface relay, began methodically working some buttons and studying the display results on the mobile reader.
“Want to stay and roast marshmallows?” Hamilton said, watching his actions and also taking note of the relay results.
“Never had one, but I’m sure I’d prefer them less toxic.”
“Forgot you’ve spent more time on the moon than the home planet. You and Gwen. I would have thought Earth vacations would have involved camping.”
“Mom doesn’t really like camping, but she loves the beach. That’s how we learned to surf.”
After a few more moments of testing, Wagner turned to Hamilton.
“Main relay’s okay, Leash.”
“Okay, prep the mobile unit to monitor the relays for a series of test signals,” Hamilton said. “Make sure they fire in succession with the right strength, etcetera, etcetera.”
“Prepping.” Wagner took another couple steps toward the tunnel lip, held the mobile unit with both hands at the sides and tapped it. A single support rod telescoped downward, the tip thrusting several inches beneath the Martian surface. Now self-supported, the unit face opened. A monitor swiveled upward, and a keyboard unfolded.
Hamilton added a comm link frequency to the local one established with Wagner and the shuttle. “Landing Crew Chief Alicia Hamilton to Ordnance Operations Center, MOS-1.”
“OOC MOS-1 here, Chief. You and your partner and the shuttle are being shown on all monitors in the orbiters and the lunar stations. All SCONA, all the time.”
“Now I really should have curled my hair.”
“Hello, World,” Wagner said.
Hamilton paused. Wagner seemed oblivious to his own remark. The phrase had been made infamous by the game show guest host who would remain unnamed.
“Operations, prepare for test signals tri-zeta.”
“Affirmative,” came the return transmission. “Signals zeta on your mark, Landing Chief.”
“I like that ‘tri-zeta,’” Wagner said. “Nice and condensed.”
“Glad you approve. How about prepping for the verifications?”
“In progress.”
She gave him a look.
“No need to thank me,” he added.
Hamilton couldn’t tell if Wagner was chatty because he was nervous or because he was excited. Probably both. Same was true for herself, she realized.
Wagner looked up from his monitor and waved overhead. “All devices at T2 are powered and online. We’re sure these are just test signals, right, everyone? Ham and me and the crew of Plopper Nine would rather not get caught up in an epic surprise.”
Cross-signal laughter from the MOS-1 and the planetary shuttle crew.
Hamilton noticed Wagner’s face was uncharacteristically serious.
“Ready for tests, Leash,” Wagner said.
“MOS-1, send the zeta signals. Repeat request before acting.”
“Sending zeta signals, Chief. Look for it coded yellow on the relays.”
“Been a blast, Leash,” Wagner said, with a half smile and a wink.
Her brow arched inside the clear helmet. “Raging wormholes, did you really launch a pun my way? Child, please.”
He grinned. “At least you noticed. Maybe we should grab a dinner and a drink together when we’re done here.”
This young guy was flirting with Alicia while they stood above one of the bombs designed to rock an entire planet?
“Shut up, Trent Wagner,” she said finally.
The surface relay flashed a sequence in all yellow, nonstop for ten seconds. Then it went dark and flashed once, then remained dark. The first relay down in the tunnel wall went dark, flashed yellow, then went dark again. This sequence was repeated with the next relay in the chain and on to the next and so on down the line.
Hamilton leaned out over the gaping maw. The relay lights fired yellow, one after another in a seemingly endless vortex that disappeared into a single dot and then beyond human visual perception, even beyond the prowess of modern enhanced eyes.
“Leash, switch to local comm, just you and me,” Trent said.
“What for?”
“Off the record.”
“Standard freq?”
“Standard.”
“Okay, what’d you want?”
“Just leave it there a few, okay?”
“Okay, weirdo.”
Hamilton stared down into the tunnel, then to the image on the reader’s monitor. The unfired relays held green as a steady state, now interrupted with a yellow flash as the test signal was relayed. “All the way down to the core…there they go. Hope this works like the other checks did. Did you speak with your mom on Earth moon? Hey, don’t fire up your jet pack. Wagner, what the hell?”
Bright blue propellant illuminated a thin section of rock wall as Wagner eased out and over the tunnel.
“Are you crazy?” Alicia said. “I didn’t authorize a joyride over the tunnel!”
“Yeah, but you didn’t not authorize one, either. Just checking the relays from a new vantage.”
“Sure, that’s what you’re doing. And here your evals had you all wrong as a safety-head. Get you away from Earth moon too long and you go space cowboy. So this is why the local frequency?”
Wagner gazed down. “Just think, Ham, this thing goes to the center of Mars.”
“And we only had to replace our Cyclops atomizer twice to get there. And if your jet pack fails, down you go. Just how cozy do you want to get with that mega-nuke resting way, way, way down at the bottom?”
Wagner dipped beneath the lip and rose again, spinning slowly, arms wide. Suddenly the blue light disappeared and he plummeted from view.
“Wagner!”
Hamilton fired up her own jet pack, grabbed a metal clip from her belt, and pulled an arm’s length of cable. She flew toward the tunnel mouth, hoping the weak gravity would slow him enough to grab, when blue light appeared in the relative darkness once more. Her boots kicked up dust clouds as she planted, then slid toward the edge. She lifted and descended on the last few inches of red ground before the abyss.
The light was on its way up. Fifty feet, thirty, ten.
“The backup jet is operating fine, Chief!” Trent Wagner said as he hovered over the tunnel lip beside her. “Redundancy, redundancy!”
“Asshole!” Hamilton said, glaring up at him. “I almost went in after you!”
“Thanks, but I had control.” He described slow circles around her.
“Hell you did. What if your backups failed?”
“But they didn’t, and I still had power to the back jet. I just turned it off for the test.” A befuddled expression played on his face.
“Shut up! Devans is hailing our asses on three-three-seven…get there.” Hamilton switched frequency. “Yes, Captain? He’s fine, sir. I asked him to personally record the test event display. Thought he’d do it from the tunnel lip, not the center! Yes, he’s getting wild these days…yes, sir! Understood.”
“Sorry, Cap!” Wagner said with a grin.
Devans painted the comm link blue with inventive curses and then told them to finish up and get the hell back in the shuttle.
Hamilton switched frequency again and glared at her landing partner. “That was asteroid-headed! Do you think all this equipment is free?”
“Your concern for my well-being is overwhelming.” Wagner switched his main jet back on and cut the backup. “Just trying to get a final feel for the magnitude of it all.”
“You know I have to restrict your ass now,” Hamilton said.
“We won’t be able to return for a while anyway. I’ll work some magic by then.”
“Chocolate ain’t gonna be enough for this, Goldilocks.”
A warning beep from the mobile reader made Wagner stop and hover. He flipped up a cover on his forearm and tapped it a few times. “The mobile and my arm unit just picked up a heat spike along the wall at mile three.”
Hamilton gazed at the mobile display and played back the last three minutes of scanning. “I see it, but now it’s gone. The relays all passed the signal along. There’s nothing volcanic on this entire planet. Maybe a pressure spike against the tunnel wall?”
“I dunno. It was relatively shallow. We’re talking skin deep compared to the entire nine and twelve hundred miles of tunnels we’ve got going, respectively.”
Laser mining had not only atomized pathways to the centers of the red planet, but molecularly sealed the walls as well. Molten core, a thick atmosphere, and immense gravitational pressures would have made similar tunnels impossible upon Earth.
“The test signals have been down and back,” Hamilton said, gazing at the monitors. “Maybe we should order another series while we’re all here.”
“Yeah, maybe.” Wagner went prone, raised an arm up by his helmet as if he were reclining on a sofa. “Hey, thanks for almost saving me back there.”
Hamilton rolled her eyes. “Damn showboat.”
He flew slow circles around her again.
“It won’t be as easy for you to float around like a cherub if we ever get an atmosphere on this rock.”
“Too bad it won’t come soon. Can you imagine surfing around here? Get my favorite board. Shred down a—”
The mobile reader chirped, then went off repeatedly.
“That heat spot again,” Wagner said.
“Huh. This time the relay itself is sending out warning pulses.”
Hamilton changed frequencies. “Captain, we’ve got a relay warning and possible malfunction.”
Devans was quick to reply. “You gotta be joking, Leash! Now? We just had a successful test and SCONA’s all giddy for us to get going!”
“Not the best timing, I know.”
“Wait—yeah, now MOS-1 has seen it too, though they realize signal relay still functioned okay. We’ll have to swap it out and retest. Hamilton, you stay put with the monitor. Weasel, get a drone out of the shed. Task it to place the new relay in the wall and synch it with the array.”
“Will do,” Hamilton said.
“Back in a minute,” Wagner said.
And he was.
Beside him, the drone cruised under its own ion power, a four-foot-long robot specially made for tunnel work. Small lights blinked on stem and stern. It had two multidirectional arms, a power pack, and recessed legs ready to bite into the tunnel wall to hold its position. One new relay was positioned on a special slot on its back, leaving the arms free to detach the other and work a new mount into the wall.
Also moving along with Wagner was a relay supply platform, a narrow plank of metal mesh with ion jets beneath, meant to hold the hand-size relays and not much else. Three more relays were held in its special tower bays.
“A little overkill with the platform vehicle, isn’t it?” Alicia said, as he approached.
Wagner shrugged.
“I have a lock via the mobile reader here,” she said to him. “You can drop your connection now.”
“You got it.” He tapped his forearm monitor a few times and halted the platform beside Hamilton. “I’m off.”
“Hit the front flood lights…and down it goes.”
They watched the drone descended at a rapid but controlled rate, the area lights on its nose marking its passage. They switched the mobile monitor to a window dedicated to the video feed of the drone.
“Landing team, this is Devans.”
“Captain.” Hamilton glanced toward the ship.
He stood in the shuttle nose, legs wide and hands behind him in a commanding posture.
“Good work, both of you. We have locked control of the drone and will take it over from the ship here where we can navigate easier than that mobile unit.”
“Aye, Captain,” she said stiffly.
“Just a precaution, Alicia. The time crunch is on now.” Devans knew she reverted military speak when acknowledging an order she didn’t particularly agree with. “You two can return to PS-9 until the new installation is complete. Then we’ll need another test.”
Trent shook his head at Alicia.
“Think we’ll hold outside, Captain,” she said. “Shouldn’t take long for the relay exchange.”
“Crap!”
The new voice on the comm link was Hans Klemmet, lead engineer.
Alicia frowned at the shuttle. “Spill popcorn on the console again, Klem?”
“Leash…?” Trent said, pointing to the tunnel just as the frequency broke into cross chatter.
“Reverse! Reverse the drone!” Devans said.
“It’s not responding!” Klemmet replied.
“Override, override. Keep trying!”
“Trying…”
Alicia and Trent peered down the abyss with full magnification on their helmet lens apps. Even with such aid, the light of the descending drone became fainter at an alarming rate.
“It’s going down!” Alicia said, almost to herself.
“It just passed the bad relay,” Klemmet said. “That was the set destination. I do not understand this malfunction!”
Devans’ voice now, his breath quick, like he was running. “Nuro, you’ve got bridge control—Nuro! Where…? Is he back with you, Shannon?”
“Said he had to take a bio break,” Burroughs replied.
“Looks like you’re it until he’s off the crapper. MOS-1 is hammering my ear already. They want to know if the orbiter should linger while we sort this out. Jump in on the pilot freq and tell them to keep going but not beyond sector DM-8. That’s the limit of our ability to rendezvous using PS-9.”
“Doing it,” Shannon Burroughs replied.
“Klem, can you shut down the drone’s ion drive, ram it into the side of the tunnel, anything?”
“Negative, Captain. The drone’s onboard navigation has been hacked, damn it! It thinks down is up and the only option to take.”
“You can’t override the code?”
“It won’t accept the transfer…data port’s been inactivated.”
“Fuel…?”
“Enough, unfortunately.”
“…to reach the bomb?”
Klemmet exhaled loudly. “Yes, damn it.”
“How much time if it we let it go down?”
“Wait, something’s giving in the comm link…I’m able to get…I’m in unit override for engine thrust! Can’t cut the whole thing off, but switched it to maintenance mode. Now setting it into an infinite loop so it can’t close the comm link. Quarter speed. It keeps trying to reset higher, but so far I can hold it there!”
“Good stuff, Hans, you bought us a little more time,” Devans said.
“We can take it out with an atomizer beam!” Trent Wagner said.
“Not at this distance, kid.”
“What if we were closer?”
“I’m not taking PS-9 down the rabbit hole, if that’s what you mean.”
“No. Just me.” Trent checked the hand atomizer at his hip. Fully charged. Using the lighter gravity of Mars, he smoothly hopped up on the hovering supply platform.
Alicia turned. “Again, Wagner? Wagnerrrr.”
“Stand by, Leash.”
“Stand by? That drone is headed for the bomb. We need to get back to PS-9 and fly the hell outta here, not stand the hell by!”
“The extra boost jets on this board make it faster than the drone right now.”
“Are you star-shined? These platform transports hold supplies for the drones in a stationary position. They aren’t damn surfboards!”
“Maybe not, but they fly down to the location sites. And at speed when necessary. Every install drone has a platform drone linked to it. You know that.”
“Yeah, but not like—”
Captain Devans cut in. “Hamilton and Wagner, new orders. Asses back to the shuttle. We are bugging back to MOS-1.”
“Tell him, boss.”
“But the drone might kill more relays on its way down and even hit the bomb itself,” Wagner said. “It could scrub the mission.”
“Or not,” Devans returned.
“I can catch it, Captain.”
“Wagner, do I need to come out there and bounce your head against a fat Martian rock?”
Trent hand signaled Hamilton up two notches to a local frequency.
“Leash, if Klem can keep it in maintenance speed, I can catch it.”
“You’ll fly off that thing. There aren’t handrails!”
Wagner placed his boots wide onto the drone, wedged them into the recessed indentations for the relay stacks. He tapped his forearm computer pad several times, then moved his arm up, down, side-to-side, forward and back. The board responded in kind to every motion. “Okay, see you in a few!”
She held up a fist, fired her jet pack to get to his level. “I’m not letting you go, jackass!”
“Do you think SCONA will foot the bill for another attempt at this? If that bomb goes off without the right timing from the other one, this mission is a bust! When I take out the drone, we can still synch the detonations.”
Alicia Hamilton closed and opened her eyes. “I’ll go.”
“You’ve got a family.”
“And you’ve got a mother and sister.”
“They’re adults. And you’re not fast enough, Leash. I know I can get close enough for a clean shot! Used to buzz droids for fun on Lunar One. Come on, Leash, we’re wasting time!”
She glanced down the tunnel, then back to him.
“It’s the only way we can stop it cleanly,” Wagner maintained. “I’m going.”
“All right, damn it! At least set your comm channel back to the shuttle freq and talk to us.”
He thumbs-upped her, crouched low, and turned toward the abyss. His pack jets and the jets beneath the board flared ice blue. He thrust his arm out and down and shot silently into the void.
Hamilton’s face shield lit up with the red flashes of hailing attempts. She switched frequencies.
“Hamilton here, sir.”
“What the crap, Hamilton!” Devans said. “Why’d you let the kid dive in?”
“He volunteered, sir. Was I supposed to pin him to the ground?”
The entire frequency fell silent.
“We wait, then,” Devans said finally. “Burroughs, get the satellite to zoom into that hole with the infrared as far as possible and play the feed on the screens. I’m suiting up and sending another platform drone after him.”
“I want to help,” Shannon Burroughs said. “Out there.”
“No, I need someone on the—”
“I’m back now,” Nuro said. “Heard it over the live feeds. How about I go?”
“No, I need you in the bridge.”
“You sure? I can head in after the kid.”
“Nobody else goes down the damn hole! It was a bullcrap reckless move!”
“Gutsy, though,” Nuro said.
“Burroughs, come with me,” Devans said. “Let’s hope the fool makes it back.”