The Ruins of Mars: Waking Titan (The Ruins of Mars Trilogy) (26 page)

When again the French engineer regained consciousness, he felt a tightness as if someone were sitting on his chest. Drawing in a breath, he tried to fill his lungs with air
, yet all he got was a burning pain that caused stars to dance in his eyes. Suddenly unconcerned with everything else in existence, Julian began to panic. He couldn’t breathe. He was suffocating.

Twisting in the air like a man wrapped in snakes, he clawed at the visor of his helmet. From the back of his mind, a voice told him that it was safe to breathe the at
mosphere within the Chinese Ark. Yet, even if it had warned him of certain death, he would have tried anyway. Finally getting a fingertip on the lock release, he pulled his visor up and sucked painful cold breaths of stale air into his lungs. Coughing savagely, he ignored the agony of breathing and continued to draw in air. As the panic faded with the pain in his lungs, Julian was finally able to assess the situation.

Clearly, he had suffered at the hands of another
Pulse, which explained why he had passed out, why his brains felt like dogshit, and why his Survival Pack had stopped pulling the air from the Chinese Ark into his reserves.

Tipping his head back, he looked at the cockpit high above and saw that the displays and LEDs of the
Flight Consoles were still shining brightly.

Good, he said to himself. The NavSat
Computer didn’t get fried. Thank God I was down here when the Pulse hit or else this piece of shit would be drifting like the ghost ship it is.

Checking his wrist
Tablet, he frowned at the blank screen.

What time is it?

As gently as possible, for he was still sharply sour all over, Julian pushed off and headed for the cockpit. Moving through the rows of crash seats, he swore quietly at each movement, dull pain rolling around in the back of his head like broken glass.

At the Flight D
eck, he checked the timecode on the NavSat Computer and nearly cried aloud. He had been unconscious for over an hour. Turning around in the air, he shoved off hard, ignoring the pain, and aimed for the exit to the maintenance tunnels far below.

I need to find Joey, he thought anxiously. We have to work fast if we want to pull this off.

              A crackle sounded from behind him as he raced away from the cockpit: static fizzling in through one of the Communication Console’s speakers.

             
“Julian?” came the voice of Joseph Aguilar. “Julian, are you there? Do you read?”

             
Cursing, Julian grabbed at a bulkhead and stopped his downward drop. Clumsily, he rotated himself and jumped back towards the cockpit. Landing harder than he would have liked, the Frenchman pressed the ‘transmit’ key and spoke into a fixed microphone.

             
“I’m here, Joey. Do you read? I’m here.”

             
“Jesus, man. I’m glad to hear your voice,” came a relieved Aguilar through the speakers. “I’ve been trying to hail you for a long time. What’s your status? Are you ok?”

             
“I’m alright,” Julian muttered. Then realizing something, his shoulders fell. “But my Survival Pack is fried, so I’m not sure how I’m going to get back to the Lander. If I try to go through the airlock, I’ll freeze.”

             
There was a long silence on the other end of the line.

             
“I’ve got problems here too,” the pilot said at last. “I was at the controls when the Pulse hit.”

             
“
Merde
.”

             
“My thoughts exactly. I’ve got the Console pulled apart and it looks like the Flight Optimizer is cooked. If I’m remembering it right, the Optimizer acts as a relay between the thruster engines and the controls, but I’m not sure what else is patched through it. Why’d you have to build this thing like the engine in a freaking Toyota? I can’t really see how it all connects.”

             
“You still have life support?”

             
“Yeah, is that a good sign?”

             
Julian peered around at the expanse of Chinese computers in front of him.               “Hold on. I’ll call you back in a few minutes. I might have a plan for how we can restore power to the thrusters and controls.”

             
“What about you?” Aguilar said. “How are you going to get back over here?”

             
“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll try to fit into one of these dead guys’ suits.”

             
“You know what time it is? The dashboard timecode must be connected to the Optimizer too because it’s dead.”

             
“Yeah,” Julian frowned. “We have about five hours until the ship hits atmo and those killbot-pods launch.”

             
“Motherfucker.”

             
“My thoughts exactly.”

The wreck

              After having been violently revived from an extended flatline, Harrison sat with his back against a boulder, taking long breaths and listening to the regular
thump, thump, thump
of his beating heart.

The air had become thick with swirls of sand as the stone spires, taller than any office building on Earth, churned the wind into a frenzy. With a haziness that reminded Harrison of trials gone by, the skies above Mars grew steadily angrier.

Soon, Ralph Marshall returned to the crash site, finished with a wider search of the area. Stooping, he held out a hand and helped Harrison to his feet.

Numbly, the young archaeologist surveyed the destruction around him. Everywhere, smashed and splintered sheets of metal and ceramic jutted out of the sand or rested against boulders. An odd detachment from the carnage made it hard for him to feel, really
feel
, much of anything beyond a dim sense that they were in trouble.

Beside him, Marshall was flipping large pieces of bent steel over to look beneath them for supplies. As his friend worked, Harrison caught a glimpse of a blue sticker on Marshall’s fresh
Survival Pack.

             
“Hey, Ralph,” he said, though he soon realized that without the radio functions in his suit working, Marshall couldn’t hear him.             

             
Walking over to the pilot, Harrison tapped him on the shoulder.

             
“Yeah?” came Marshall’s voice, all but lost in the thin Martian atmosphere.

             
“You saved my life again.”

             
“I know.”

             
“How?”

             
Standing up, Marshall shrugged.

             
“I woke up over there,” he said, pointing to the still-somewhat-intact cockpit of the Lander. “I was strapped in and couldn’t get the seat belt to unlock. I used my boot knife to cut myself free and—”

             
“We have boot knives?” Harrison interrupted dumbly.

             
“Sure,” Marshall nodded then tapped the side of his boot. “It’s inlayed in the plastic. You have to push the handle in to release it.”

             
“I’ll be,” Harrison smiled, popping the knife free from the side of his white boot.

             
“Didn’t pay much attention in class, did you?” Marshall said sarcastically.

             
A gust of wind whipped violently around them, howling through the twisted metal bones of the dead Lander.

             
“Anyways,” Marshall continued. “I cut myself free and started looking for you and Viv. You were right over there—”

He gestured to Harrison’s seat lying on its side a few meters away.
A steel girder stuck from the sand like a spear, inches from where Harrison’s head must have been.

             
“You weren’t responsive, so I got a couple of Lizzy’s spare Survival Packs from under the pilot’s and copilot’s chairs, and gave us each new ones.”

             
“That explains this funny numbness I’ve got,” Harrison spoke, leaning in closer to be heard above the rising wind.             

             
“Yeah, we’re both high as kites right now,” Marshall laughed. “But you, man. You just wouldn’t wake up. I had to zap you four times with the defibrillator.”

             
“I remember,” Harrison muttered.

As the wind screamed loudly again, Harrison thought about something Marshall had said. Quickly looking around, he scanned the scene for another figure in white and blue.

“Where’s Viv?” he shouted.

Marshall shook his head.

“Didn’t you look for her? She might need help!”

Again Marshall shook his head. “It’s no good
, man,” he said flatly. “She’s dead.”

             
“You don’t know that.”

             
Reaching out, Marshall squeezed Harrison’s shoulder tightly. “Yes I do. She went out that big tear in the hull, buddy. She’s over there a ways. What's left of her, I mean.

             
Slumping, Harrison dropped onto his haunches, the reality of their situation finally penetrating the drug-induced haze.

             
“What are we going to do now?” he said, more to himself than to Marshall.

             
With a grunt, the pilot bent down beside him and pointed to the west.

             
“The base is back that way. I figure we’ve got maybe four or five hours until the sun goes down, at which point we’re screwed. These are just spare Survival Packs, not meant for nighttime use. If we get stuck out here, we’ll freeze. We have to walk back before it gets dark and we can’t see.”

             
Remembering his dream, and how he had been blind in the darkness until the Martian workers had come along with their strange light poles, Harrison gazed up at the pink sun above. Even though millions of years had passed, it was the same sun that shone down on the dream world of ancient Mars, existing somewhere in a construct of seamless digitally resurrected reality.

“I was there again, Ralph,” he said absently, his mind slurred with fatigue and drugs. “Back in ancient Mars. In the caves.”

Marshall’s cracked blue visor stared back.

“I saw Braun. He’s alive just like the twins.”

“Come on,” the pilot said, standing up. “Help me look for anything useful. We’re leaving in ten minutes.”

             
“Didn’t you hear me?” Harrison protested. “I said I saw Braun, man. He’s there too.”

             
“I heard you, buddy,” sighed Marshall. “But right now, I don’t give two shits if Braun is here, in ancient Mars or in Cabo San Lucas. We need to stay alive long enough to prove all of that. You get me?”

             
Reluctantly, Harrison got to his feet, the stupor of depression barely held at bay by the thinning walls of his will to live. Wishing for an instant that he didn’t have to go through whatever trials lay ahead, he envied the dead. He was tired: both physically and mentally. Mars was wearing him down, beating him into dust like it had with the ancient Martians. However, just when his foul mood seemed most amplified by the bleakness of their situation, he saw the defibrillator Marshall had used to save his life lying in the sand. Before he could stop himself, he wrapped his friend in a tight embrace and held onto him for several moments.

             
“Thanks for saving my life again,” he said.

             
“You kidding me?” Marshall laughed. “This fucking planet has it out for us. We have to stick together, you and me.”

Chapter Twenty-One

The new plan

              Joseph Aguilar rubbed his gloved hands together. Numbness, brought on by switching out his broken Survival Pack for one of the drug-laced backups, had begun to spread from his fingertips to his palms. Though he was concerned in a detached sort of way, he knew that if Julian’s plan worked, numb or not he could fly the Lander.

             
“Okay, I’m almost to the airlock,” crackled Julian’s voice in his new earpiece.

Swiveling his head around, Aguilar searched for his helmet in a sea of floating debris. Objects as small as screws and as big as access panels cluttered the air of the cockpit, betraying the hasty and feverish way in which he had attacked the
Flight Console, looking for the source of its malfunction.

Realizing with a dull sense of frustration that he was already wearing his helmet, Aguilar slipped out of the cockpit. Careful not to bring any of the screws or other disassembled parts with him, he closed a partition that separated the cockpit from the rest of the cabin and went to the hatch. Victims of the fried
Optimizer, many of the lights within the cabin were out, casting the space into dim shadows that softened around the edges.

“Alright, Julian,” Aguilar said into his mic. “I’m opening the hatch.”

Lifting up on the lock, he pushed the door out and squinted as the distant-yet-undiluted sun struck his eyes like a laser pointer. Though his senses were dulled to the agony of the Pulse, an aversion to bright light still managed to work its way through the protective blanket of painkillers. Across the gap of some nine meters, the airlock on the Chinese Ark opened and a yellow pressure-suited figure emerged from within.

“Cool threads,” Aguilar chuckled.

“Thanks,” radioed Julian flatly.

Reaching from the safety of the
airlock, Julian’s yellow-gloved hand clipped the black bag he’d worn over, to the cable that connected the two ships.

“Okay,” he said in a ti
red voice. “Here’s the new plan: you repair the Lander, I rig the ship.”

“You sure?” frowned Aguilar. “That’s a lot of work for just one person. I could come help you then we could get the
Lander up and running together.”

“There isn’t enough time for that.”

Nodding inside his helmet, Aguilar searched his hazy mind for the fear he knew he should be experiencing.

“Ready?” Julian asked. “You better catch this. There’s only one
Flight Console here and I don’t have the time to go tearing into their Landers for more parts. No second chances, okay?”

“I read you,” Aguilar said, focusing on the black bag as it dangled from the cable.

Placing his hand behind the thing, Julian gave the bag a strong push and sent it sailing across the abyss.

Arms outreached, Aguilar caught the sack and felt himself pressed backwards from its minor mass and velocity. Unclipping it from the cable, he opened it and gazed at the pilfered parts inside.

“By my watch,” Julian radioed. “We have just a little less than four hours until we reach Mars atmo.”

“That’s not much time,” Aguilar replied, an edge of something like concern working its way slowly through his mind.

“You’re telling me. Just have the Lander up and running when I’m done so we can get the hell out of here.”

“You got it.”

Turning, Julian threw one last wave in Aguilar’s direction before closing the Ark’s airlock and disappearing again into its bowels.

Bag in hand, Aguilar swung the Lander’s hatch shut then locked it firmly. Pulling the partition open, he drew in a slow breath and frowned at all of the floating wires and parts. With a conscious effort, he tried to hold on to the sense of urgency he had felt a moment ago, knowing that its presence would only help him work faster.

Onboard the Chinese Ark, Julian chafed inside his new pressure suit. Not only was its color the most unflattering shade of mustard yellow, but the thing was too tight in all the wrong places.

Drifting quickly through the maintenance tunnels back up towards the
Crew Deck, he envied the unconcerned—almost loopy—quality of Aguilar’s tone. His own body was still in a state of utter rebellion: aches and pains alien to his normal gripes assaulting him at every movement. As if all the lubrication in his joints had been sucked out through a straw, the mere action of reaching for something felt like bone grinding on bone.              

At the hatch that bypassed the radiation wall, Julian pulled himself up to the next level then headed for a storage room he had passed on his way down. On the opposite side of the ship from the life-support stations, this room contained the weapons and explosives. Cast in an ominous red light, rows of newly minted assault rifles lined the walls and large bins full of ammo comprised most of the floor.

Entering into the room, Julian frowned at the guns and made a mental note to stop pitying the dead soldiers above him in the Crew Deck. With his memory of the ship’s blueprints as a guide, he soon located the box that contained the explosives. Loading up a mesh duffle sack with as much as he figured he would need, Julian then found the blasting caps and a wireless remote detonator.

Cargo in tow behind him, he navigated up two more levels until he reached the first place Donovan’s instructions had said to place explosives. Though never formally trained in munitions, Julian knew his way around dangerous combustible materials. After all, he had been the one to design a ship whose primary source of launch speed came from detonating a nuclear bomb within its engine.

Figuring that each set of explosives would take him between ten and fifteen minutes to prime, Julian felt relatively good about their chances of survival. However, carefully stored away in the back of his mind, as he secured the first explosive charge to the wall, was the reality that rigging the Ark was supposed to be a two-man job. Without Aguilar there to do his share of the work, Julian's timeline was a little less fixed than he would like.

Each explosive charge had to be carefully arranged along weak points in the structure of the hull, yet some of those points were obstructed by bulkheads, rooms
, or even divided between two levels. Far from being a matter of just slapping the plastic explosive to the hull and jamming a blasting cap into it, each little bomb needed to be linked via a Wireless Time-Delay Ignition Switch so that they exploded in a precise order. If it were to look like an accident, the Chinese Ark would need to break apart in a kind of controlled chaos, the weak points of the hull buckling and separating in just the right fashion.

Finally finished with the first charge, Julian floated back a bit and admired his work. The soft grey mass of C4 stuck to the wall of the ship like gum on the bottom of a shoe. From the center, two sections of red-and-black wire connected a blasting cap to the small digital face of a
Time-Delay Ignition Switch.

Checking his watch, Julian’s thin smile fell and he let out a woeful sigh. The charge had taken him eighteen minutes to rig. He would need to work faster.

Desert

             
As swirling tendrils of sand wound upwards into a darkening Martian sky, two pressure-suited figures trudged across the top of a tall plane. Far ahead of them, the flat expanse of semi-exposed rock dead-ended at the horizon. It gave the impression that when one reached the edge of the plateau, he would have reached the end of the world. However ominous the sight was, both Harrison and Marshall knew that in reality it was just an optical illusion brought on by Mars’s diminished size.

Leaning his head in closely to be heard through the thin air, Marshall touched Harrison’s arm to get his attention.

“If we keep moving along this plateau, we should eventually see a canyon about eight-to-ten kilometers long. By following that, we’ll be able to spot the Base before nightfall.”

“I remember it,” Harrison nodded. “I always thought it looked like a lightning bolt from above.”

“Yeah, it does.”

Falling silent, Harrison let his eyes scan over the hazy panorama of the landscape.

Below in the valley, diffused late afternoon light washed over the stones and ancient riverbeds, filling the empty spaces with shades of grey and brown.

Surprised by how high up they were, Harrison couldn’t help but wonder if this fact had played a hand in their survival. Not realizing before that the Lander hadn’t actually fallen all the way to the desert floor, but rather skidded to a stop atop a high plateau, he doubted if they would have lived had the little craft missed the plane and fallen the rest of the way to the ground.

Turning his attention to Marshall, Harrison dimly fretted about the state of the pilot’s pressure suit. Long cuts and gouges had been filled in with pressure foam, creating scabs over the wounds, but still the sight of so many abrasions concerned him.

Either unaware or uncaring, Marshall appeared more fixated on getting back to the Dome before nightfall than on the condition of his suit.

They walked on quietly, neither speaking as their boots squished into the powdery sand. Finally, after what seemed like a very long time, they reached the edge of the plateau and stared out across the curving expanse of desert before them.

Off in the distance, just before the purple horizon swallowed the land, the tip of a deep canyon cracked the otherwise-smooth facade of the desert.

Careful to pick the least treacherous path down the sloping side of the plane, Marshall went first, pointing out loose rocks and other death traps as they made their way.

Stopping to catch his breath halfway down, Harrison leaned his back against an oblong chunk of rock that stuck up from the steep side of the plateau’s hill like a tooth.

As if following them, a cruel wind lashed up cyclones of sand and grit, which peppered their suits and helmets.

In the growing static, Marshall stopped as well and rested his boot on the hard surface of a car-sized boulder. Suddenly, without warning, the rock slipped. Scrambling to regain his teetering balance, Marshall cursed and threw out his hands, grabbing at another huge stone nearby. With the cruelty of fate and bad luck, it came free as well.

Before Harrison could even blink, Marshall was tumbling down the steep hill, the two enormous dislodged boulders rolling after him like charging rhinos.

Ignoring every warning in his brain, he raced off after his friend, thick clouds of dust jetting into the flurried air in the wake of the rolling stones. Heart skipping a beat, he felt his boot catch on something and within seconds he too was clattering, end over end, down the side of the plateau.

With a hard thud, Marshall sprawled on the flat ground of the desert floor and rolled to the side instinctively. Passing by him within a few centimeters, the first of the tumbling stones thundered off into the soft sand and came to a halt. On his feet in seconds, Marshall turned, saw the second rock bearing down on him and dove out of its path, feeling the gravity of the thing as it crashed by.

Pulling himself up again, he caught a glimpse of white and blue as it somersaulted over him in a tangle of arms and legs.

Dust thick in the air, Marshall found Harrison on his back a meter from where he himself had landed. To his relief, the young man’s chest was rising and falling in steady rhythm.

Twice is two times too many, thought the pilot warily. I won’t be able to take it if he dies again.

Pulling Harrison to his feet, Marshall felt a strange pop in his side.

“You okay?” he said loudly, ignoring the growing cramp in his ribs.

Quickly patting himself all over, Harrison seemed satisfied and shrugged.

“Yeah, I think I’m alright.”

Doing the same, Marshall ran his hands over his arms, legs, stomach, and chest feeling for any sharp pains. There were many—mostly on the left side of his chest.

“
Me too,” he lied.

Face hidden behind the cracked blue shield of his visor, the Lander pilot spat and saw red droplets of blood freckle the glass.

Great, he frowned. Busted ribs and maybe more. This day just gets better and better.

Lock and Key

              Julian Thomas blinked sweat out of his eyes as he finished rigging his third-to-last explosive charge. Fingers shaking ever so slightly, he fed the exposed wire of a blasting cap into the plastic explosive, holding his breath as he did so.

Per Donovan’s instructions, most of the charges had been placed in a two-story-tall section of the ship, between the radiation shield and the
Crew Deck. The feeling Julian was getting was that the Chinese Ark had been built in pieces then later assembled, thus leaving weak points mostly all clustered in one area. Unlike Braun, who had been built from the frame out, the Chinese had not possessed the time or money needed for such an undertaking and instead opted for an effective-yet-dangerous construction style.

             
Satisfied with his work, Julian shoved off from the wall and began tracing his path along the outer passageway. Glancing at the timecode on his wrist Tablet, he felt a small smile turn the corners of his mouth up. With the last two explosives needing to be placed only five meters away from each other and in the same section of the hull, he realized that he might actually make his deadline.