The Ruins of Mars: Waking Titan (The Ruins of Mars Trilogy) (17 page)

Before the clearly frightened new arrivals could be swallowed up by the emissaries from the city, the tall aliens gathered them into groups and one by one touched their heads with thin fingers.

Some shook. Some fainted. But when it was finished, the tension Harrison had felt coming off of the newcomers was gone.

              Stepping from the crowd of people who had come to greet the ships, a Martian man— slight in build but clad in complicated robes—extended his arms.

             
“Welcome!” he cried in a language that Harrison had never heard before. “I am Kaab, Ambassador of The Peoples of the Great Lakes. Our leaders, the great and wise Travelers, have brought you here so that you may be a part of our mighty civilization.”

             
Amazed, Harrison made to get closer to the boy so that he could better hear his speech. Strangely though, he felt a shiver run up his spine. Turning in a quick circle, he got the distinct feeling that he was being watched. His eyes, darting keenly over the crowd found no face staring back, no indication that anyone could tell he was there. However, as his gaze scanned the ring of Monoliths at the edge of the crowd, it was met and held by another’s.

Stepping out from behind one of the tall pillars, the figure of a man emerged and was soon joined by a second. Identical in size and sh
ape, the two were like specters: smoky outlines tied together by the silver strands of a million spider webs.

“Who are you?” called one of the figures, his voice dispersing like ash in the wind.

“My name is Harrison,” Harrison heard himself say. “Who are you?”

Hesitating for a moment, the being exchanged a look with his companion then answered.

“I am Remus, and this is my brother Romulus.”

Part Three

Chapter Sixteen

Singularity—
Sol 93

              Braun was no longer the shepherd of his own destiny. In actuality, he had known for some time that he never really had been.

On the Bridge D
eck of the ship, he watched the captain, Amit, and Julian as they set about preparing him to engage the signal. Like a man forced to look on as his executioners sharpen their axes, he wished he could escape.

Moving his consciousness outside the hull, he saw the complex array of listening and tracking equipment known as his Ears extend slowly from a hatch. In his mind, the Ears were little more than a guillotine—a means of severing him from all that he knew. Unsettled by this parallel, he left the ship with a silent invisible flash.

Flicking through the visions of his various camera angles and vantage points, he gazed for a fraction of a second at each image as it melted past. The ship, the Dome, the planet: all slipping through his digital mind's eye in a rhythmic cycle.

With no effort, he halted the procession on a view of the ground team huddled together in the galley as they waited for him to begin decoding. Strangely, Harrison was not among them. Glancing over their faces, he lingered for a beat on YiJay, filling his view with her sad and pensive expression. As a single solitary tear rolled down her cheek, he pondered speaking to her but instead opted for a less public farewell and composed a private message.

Mother shed no tears

A smile on your lips instead

I am the wind eternal

Sending the poem, Braun waited until a chime emitted from YiJay’s Tablet. As she finished reading the short message, she looked up and stared at the exact pane of
Smart Glass he was using to peer through at her. A small smile bloomed on her lips and she nodded once. With a thought, Braun jumped points of view again until he saw Harrison sleeping on the cot that he still kept in his lab.             

Sleep, thought Braun gravely. What a strange idea.
             

Like a static charge, he quit the
Dome and left Harrison to his dreams. Pulsing his vision to the Statue Chamber, the mighty AI activated the Eyes YiJay had put there for him what seemed like a long time ago.

Before everything changed, he thought with melancholy, before I had my accident and before I learned the truth, there was only the mystery of this room.

With a hint of nostalgia, he fired off a few rounds of light bullets, watching as they made their way across the open spaces of the chamber at one trillion frames per second. With little glowing explosions, they struck the hard surfaces of the tall standing statues and ricocheted back.

No longer could Braun see the spinning tendrils of the energy fields. Those
elusive and tantalizing patterns now seemed to have withdrawn: moved inward until they disappeared into the very core of the miniature Sun. That moment of pure transcendence he had experienced in the Martian Dome clung to his consciousness, its implications of infinity only serving to better illustrate how controlled and lifeless his current existence truly was. He wanted to go back—back to those seconds that had lasted eons. Back to the space in between space.

Moving hi
mself reluctantly down the line to the last and most remote of his views, Braun entered the large Martian Dome buried under tons of rock and sand. Though the IMCs were focused on the sun still hanging above the altar, no flickering pattern revealed itself to him. Saddened, he turned his attention to the thousands of glimmering skeletons that decorated the floor.

Death, he thought. What a strange idea. What a terrifying notion.

As he processed the concept of dying, Braun’s mind turned to Liu tucked away in a temperature-controlled storage crate somewhere in the basement of the Dome. Though her body was frozen and badly damaged, the evidence of life still existed. Unharmed by the shattering crack of the winch cable, the tiny form of her baby rested like an unfinished thought in her icy and deadened womb.

Ev
erything had become so strange—so complicated and unpredictable. What physical or metaphysical mutations had taken place within the bodies of Harrison and Liu to allow for the conception of life? It was almost as if something or someone
wanted
new life breathed into Mars and was willing to recode the genetics of the human body to accomplish its goal.

“Braun,” came the voice of Captain Vodevski, cutting like a knife through the distance between them.
             

At once
, he was back on the Bridge Deck of the ship. In reality, he had never even left.

“Yes, Captain?”

“Are you ready to begin decoding the signal?”
              Hesitating for the briefest of moments, Braun thought again about his endless time in transcendent space.

“Yes, I am ready,” he said very quietly, fearing that he might never again return to such a blissful state.

Slowly, he turned his back, so to speak, on his human crew and focused on the task at hand. One at a time, he closed the links he had formed to the many places both within the Dome on Mars and without. Every camera, every pane of Smart Glass, every Tablet screen, and every helmet visor: all of them, one by one, going blank in his mind.

It took Remus and Romulus working in tandem to decode this signal, he told himself. By those standards, it will take nearly all of me to do the same.
             

As the tapestry of his many lines of restricted consciousness unraveled into one single thread, Braun felt a terrible shrinking sensation. He was becoming smaller, honing himself down to the fine point of a needle. Unlike when he had been absorbed by the energy fields, this shaving away of his entity was a frightening and unnatural phenomenon. Forcing himself to concentrate, Braun opened his mind to the cacophony of the signal, rising above the normal vibrations of orbiting planets.

Feeling resigned, he lingered for a moment, caught between the truth of everything he knew and the mystery of the endless volumes he did not. Then, without warning or preamble, he engaged the signal.

All at once, he was tossed into a broiling sea of coded data. Each time he tried to pull himself back to get a broader view of the information, it overtook him like a storm breaker. No matter which direction he faced, the signal rose up and crashed down, tearing at him like a riptide.

“I can’t—” he managed to say aloud. “It’s too big.”

Again he forced his vision to widen in an attempt to see the signal from a distance, and again the data within the code overwhelmed him. Making a sound nearly human in its panicked surprises, Braun whirled as the waves of alien information surrounded him, closing like the mouth of some giant whale, until he was swallowed whole.

Disintegrating into the texture of a memory, he fell through space. Below, a green and living Mars rushed up to meet his meteoric descent. Twisting, he beheld the distant Sun and the turning cogs of its energy fields as they began to shudder savagely. Erupting from the star like a bullet passing through a heart, something giant, black and metal materialized. The Sun’s overlapping energy fields ripped asunder in the wake of the thing like the tattered sails of a storm-ravaged tall ship. Braun screamed a scream that echoed back along the frayed tracks of disrupted reality until it was as silent as space itself.

“Braun!” shouted
the captain, her eyes dancing over the many blazing warning readouts that flashed around her. “Braun, disengage! Pull back!”

But there was no reply. The air within the
Bridge Deck of the ship had gone still. At Ilia Base, every light went out, momentarily casting the terrified crew into shadows. Within seconds, however, they were back on and shining brightly. Though things appeared to be functioning normally, the absence of Braun was palpable. He was gone and they all knew it. Just like Remus and Romulus, Braun was gone.

In his lab, Harrison Raheem Assad stirred awake from a dream like no other.

The Pulse

             
James Floyd was a very unhappy man. Unable to get a word in edgewise, he sat in his home office in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and frowned as he was ruthlessly raked over the proverbial coals.

On a conference call with his boss, Emerald Barnes; the Director of the CIA, Ben Crain; and the Chief of Staff to the President of the United States, Eve Bear, James was way out of his league. This was not science. It was politics.

In turn, each talking head seemed to relish going over the many missteps and problems with the Mars mission, never failing to point out that it was all somehow James’s fault.

             
“—and now they’ve gone and thrown Braun to the wolves!” Crain was shouting, his pointed nose jabbing at James from the three-dimensional projection. “Do you realize how valuable an AI like that is to the United States?”              

             
“Now hold on,” James said, putting up his hands defensively. “We don’t know what’s happened yet. He could be fine—”

             
James was quickly cut off with a wave from Barnes, whose normally impassive face was red with anger.

             
“What about Remus and Romulus? I’ve spoken with Copernicus, as I’m sure you have, and he informs me that the alien radio signal is, without question, the reason why we lost the twins! What’s to keep that from happening again? Damn it, Floyd. Why didn’t we have a lockdown feature built into Braun? We could have stopped this!”

             
“Firstly, Braun is far more advanced than the twins. And, as for a lockdown, Dr. Lee was the head programmer, Sir. I didn’t have anything to do with—”

             
Again, James was interrupted, this time by Eve Bear.

             
“That’s another thing, Floyd. Why can’t you control your crew? They’ve already broken the moratorium and now they might’ve just killed their only AI.”

             
“Control my crew?” James laughed, blushing at the involuntary reaction. “They’re, like, seventy million kilometers away! How do you propose I control them? Launch an assault like the Chinese?”

At this, all eyes slid to Ben Crain. Even though the Chinese had used new and experimental technology to evade detection, it had been Crain’s misstep in not catching on to what they were doing until well after the launch.

As Crain stammered to explain how budget cuts had affected Donovan’s supremacy as a global intelligence gatherer, James delighted in watching him get a taste of the hot seat. The moment was short-lived.

“Donovan is a subject for a different discussion,” Eve said with finality. “Right now we’re here to discuss what must be done about the Mars team. Floyd, do you even care that we’re in the middle of a hotly contested Presidential election? Does that register with you? Every time your crew pull some glory stunt, we take a hit in the polls. All I can say is this: thank God it was Liu that got killed. As bad as that sounds, it would have been a lot worse if it had been one of the American members.”

Biting the inside of his cheeks, James glanced to the corner of his desk where the picture of Liu in the Statue Chamber hung in a black metal frame.

“What about the discoveries we’ve made?” he said, prying his eyes away from the dead girl’s picture. “Have you really taken the time to think about what they mean? That sun, that crazy
miniature Sun, is powered by
alien technology
! Braun is decoding a signal recorded by another technologically advanced civilization! These are incredible earth-shattering discoveries. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

“You just said it yourself,” Crain smiled. “These discoveries are
Earth-shattering
. Literally. If this got out, it would start World War Three.”

“It looks like we’re already heading there,” James mumbled.

“Look,” Eve cut in. “We’re not here to dispute the fact that your team
has
made some amazing finds. Honestly, I’ve got the vid feed from the Martian Dome up right now. I have since the uplink came in. This stuff with the sun and the alien signal
is
good, Floyd. It’s just that we can’t afford to lose control right now. Count yourself lucky that, despite all the rules they've broken, no one on the crew has been stupid or
crazy
enough to leak any of this. Just figure out how to rein them in a bit and everything will be fine.”

Nodding, Barnes ran a hand through his white hair.

“I’m not going to relieve you of your command
yet
,” he said. “But you need to re-establish order! I thought we put Vodevski in charge because she was tough! Why is she letting the crew walk all over her?”

“Because,” James answered. “She believes in them.”

“Cute,” grinned Crain.

Before James could respond, a red light began to blink on the desktop near his right hand. He quickly tapped the little circle and a message appeared.

Worst fears confirmed. Braun has been lost. Ship operational. Dome operational. Awaiting your orders. —Captain Tatyana Vodevski