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  MARS, THE BRINGER OF WAR

  George P. Saunders

  © 2006

  Published by George P. Saunders. Copyright 2006 by George P. Saunders. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law, or in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Beware - for I am Death

  The Destroyer of Worlds

  Bhagavad Gita - Song of the Blessed One

  Mars, the Bringer of War

  The Planets

  Gustav Theodore Holst (1874-1934)

  Acknowledgements

  For my father, who always presented a challenge.

  Special thanks to Kaadi Taylor, Dr. Paulo Reyes, and, of course, Rose, without whom this book would never be.

  PROLOGUE

  For a hundred million years, the probe waited. It had crashed on the moon at a time when the great lizards on Earth reigned supreme. Its original destination was a planet with an atmosphere, someplace large, secure, easy to find. But the probe’s navigational programming had suffered a malfunction during transit and so its journey had ended here, on Earth's only natural satellite. Buried just a few meters under the surface, the probe through the eons had suffered the onslaught of countless meteor storms, cataclysmic tectonic activity, erratic thermal shifts. The Sel probe was not impervious to destruction but it was hard as hell to destroy nevertheless. The Sels had designed the probe for longevity and durability. The probe was their eyes and ears. Through it, they would know if life existed outside the realm of their own gigantic galaxy, Andromeda.

  The probe had journeyed through the Vortex for a thousand years. Nine quintillion miles ... in the span of a millennium. Arguably, God could not move as quickly. The distance was simply too great. But the builders of the probe were practically gods themselves. They alone in the nearby universe had harnessed the dimensional secrets of faster-than-light interstellar and intergalactic travel.

  The Sel Builders had conquered their own galaxy.

  Now, they were ready to conquer others.

  The small, spiral galaxy merely 2.9 million light years away, a galaxy known as the Milky Way, was a good place to begin.

  And so the probes were launched. The eyes and ears of the Master Race looked outward.

  The probe that waited here, today, had been dormant through the centuries. It would activate once the Sel Builders from Andromeda transmitted the message that a reconnaissance armada would soon make the first intergalactic jump. This probe, like many others, would respond by transmitting a binary signal, denoting its position in the new galaxy. Today, the probe’s job was easy. It had received a message, a message from home: The Builders were on their way. The technology that the Builders relied on for the intergalactic Jump would allow them to reach the outer arm of the Milky Way in twelve months. A far cry from a millennium ... in the days when the probes had been launched, one million years earlier.

  And so, the probe awakened and fulfilled its job as an interstellar buoy. It bleeped and twittered, a deep-range sentinel in an unexplored sea, assuring the Builders that their faith and trust in its resilience was not misplaced.

  A thousand other probes likewise activated across the Milky Way. Beneath the sands of distant moons, submerged in the ancient ammonia and methane seas of countless worlds, the sleeping sentinels to the Sel Empire came to life. The message of the gods traversed the known universe. The Sel Builders would triangulate their position with the many probes and map out the new galaxy in short order. The map would pave the way for exploration, and ultimately -- invasion.

  If there was anything worth invading.

  The probes had served their purpose. No other function was required of them. Unless, of course, there was contact -- contact with an alien life form. Such contact was rare, had in fact, been rare, in the Home Galaxy. Over the stretch of a million star systems, life was still a relatively infrequent occurrence, though what life existed in Andromeda had long ago been subjugated by the Sel Builders. The Sels knew there was life beyond their own galaxy – life ready to be studied, catalogued and analyzed. And they had prepared for such contingencies.

  The probes were also equally prepared. They could respond defensively, if need arose; more importantly, the probes could wage war.

  One probe out of a thousand would encounter a new life form. Perhaps this probe. Here. Now. On this small moon, overlooking a single, primary planet covered in oxygen rich water clouds and an atmosphere of mostly nitrogen... There was, of course, life teeming on this world; the world with an airless satellite and a probe from another galaxy residing just below its marred, cratered surface. The Great Lizards on Earth had fallen from their zenith long ago, supplanted by a new life form – humankind. Man, risen to great estate, now had the power and technology to touch the stars. Some years earlier, he had walked on this very moon. If the probe had been so programmed, it could have initiated communication with those first human explorers. Such had not been the case.

  Life would have to come to it. The probe’s job was to stay put, and continue transmission. It was not a Bio-Probe - a Life Seeker. It was merely a beacon … a chirping landmark denoting location within the perpetual vacuum of icy space.

  As life itself was prone to do, it would have to force the issue -- it, rather than the probe, would have to make first contact.

  Today, maybe. Or tomorrow.

  The probe waited.

  Waited...

  ONE

  CONTACT

  John Mars stared at the moon. As a child, he wondered what it tasted like. His mother had explained to him on occasion that the moon was a solid ball of green cheese. Even now, some forty odd years later, Colonel John Mars of NASA and current command officer on board Challenger Two, thought about the taste factor of moondust ... for no particular reason, short of the fact that he was about to land on that world he had only dreamed of once as a culinary oddity.

  Whenever he looked at the moon, he remembered a poem he had read on the eve of his entry into NASA:

  Yet we’ll go no more a roving,

  So late into the night,

  Though the heart be still as loving,

  And the moon be still as bright...

  The poet was Lord Byron, and John had found the passage in The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. There was a sadness, a loneliness to the verse that was evocative for Mars -- his acutely technical mind was uniquely predisposed to non-technical images ... and to all things vaguely tragic.

  The Irishman in me, he thought. Always dreaming. Always seeing leprechauns under clovers or green cheese in the moon...

  NASA shrinks had made note of Mars’ active imagination on more than one occasion, theorizing that one day such a predisposition to whimsy might prove problematic. Command prerogative cluttered or corrupted by willy-nilly distractions was a liability no one could afford in space. For all the worry, however, command prerogative had thus far failed to be compromised. John Mars was legendary as the finest flight officer in the space program … if not a little unpredictable.

  The skills of command had been forged years earlier by heartbreaking experience on the field of war. Those years left scars, painful ones, crammed with memories of fallen comrades and battles too horrendous for daily recall. The shrinks had initially worried about this, as well. Mars had been privy to wartime trauma, a quantitative unknown in the long term when dealing with multiple space missions. At least one hypothesis had been purported that John Mars might one day crack under the strain resulting from a lifetime of unna
tural stress, a delayed post traumatic fatigue syndrome that would rear its ugly head at the wrong time, wrong place. The crack-factor could not be ignored, and NASA remained vigilant for any emotional hairline breaches in their most publicly celebrated astronaut.

  John Mars had yet to crack. He understood the concern, the paranoia, the justifiable expectation that one day, his valiant psyche might just one day do the funky chicken and blow a gasket. But he knew himself well, his strengths, weaknesses, the panoply of other human failings he possessed. Mental and emotional collapse was not on the menu.

  Mars looked out of the enormous viewports of the shuttle and marveled at the complexity of the lunar surface. Pulverized cosmic dust comprised of iron and nickel blanketed the impacted landscape, ending suddenly as sheer canyons burst from the ground like tortured rock giants looming for the distant stars. Craters of all sizes and depth speckled the surface, the four billion year old end result of incessant assault from space debris unimpeded by any kind of atmospheric shielding. Weird lambent lights suffused the terrain. Here was wasteland, a tortured lonely place that made Death Valley back on Earth look like an Amazonian rainforest in comparison.

  You could almost sense the place calling to you, Mars thought. Look if you have the eyes, listen if you have the ears. What do you glean in this vast unearthly brilliance invested in a panorama of Nothingness? The answer is inexorable, yet satisfying.

  Only silence. Everlasting. Eternal. Absolute. Nothing moves, not even cosmic wind over this monolithic expanse of barren void.

  Yet … if there are angels to be found, demons to be hunted, look to the moon first. For here is a place of sacrosanct mystery. I have walked on that virgin ground, he thought. In a few minutes, he would do so again, perhaps for the last time in his space-faring career.

  Mars sighed to himself. What he wouldn’t do to be part of the first Mars mission! Of course, that was still many years from now … but still … his peers back at NASA had given him the last name of Mars long ago, based on his obsession. An Irishman with the original name of O’Malley, John liked the appellation of his favorite planet, and thus kept it. John Mars. Yep, much better, he thought. More suiting of a celebrity astronaut.

  The honor of the first Mars trip, John knew, would go to younger men, perhaps men not yet born. Human exploration of the red planet was still several generations away, despite optimistic projections by futurists and self-described visionaries. One couldn’t argue with science – the planet Mars was fine for robot probes, but sending men on a nine month journey through the void and their ultimate Red Planet destination … well, these things couldn’t be hurried. John predicted men would walk on his favorite planet in no more than fifty years – and certainly no less. Certainly not in his lifetime. John Mars accepted this inevitable fact without rancor, yet not without a touch of wistful sadness.

  Though the night was made for loving,

  And the day returns too soon,

  Yet we’ll go no more a roving,

  By the light of the moon...

  John Mars smiled to himself as he continued to mull over the poem in his head. The whimsical musings of an overactive imagination, he thought. He could indulge himself for approximately thirty seconds more. After all, I am the Senior Astronaut in the program. Forty-eight years old and counting. What the hell.

  “We’re ready to detach from Challenger,” the co-pilot, Jerry Lindon announced.

  “Let’s do it,” Mars responded, and hit a button to his left on the control panel. The shuttle responded instantly, gliding to the preprogrammed descent vector already plotted by the onboard guidance control system.

  Marvelous piece of machinery, Mars couldn't help but think to himself, as he felt the shift in the spacecraft's glidepath. Though in twenty years, he thought, even this aeronautical wonder might very well be obsolete against the new and improved orbiters already being designed back home.

  Challenger Two was exactly twenty-six feet longer than its tragic predecessor, which exploded nine miles above sea level back in 1986 seconds after takeoff. Mars had been a fledgling ground deputy team leader for the Challenger disaster on that dreadful day in January. He had prepped the seven astronauts for weeks, including the young civilian schoolteacher, Christa McAuliffe. When Challenger disintegrated seventy two seconds after take-off, John Mars sobbed, yet swore in those dreadful moments thereafter to be part of a shuttle renovation program that would never allow such a tragedy to occur again.

  During the two and a half years that the Shuttle fleet was grounded after that disaster, hundreds of modifications, some major, some minor had been incorporated into the Shuttle System. The main engines underwent the most aggressive ground testing program in their history and the improvements from such testing had produced newer, more powerful generations of orbiters right through the 1990s, and especially after the Columbia tragedy in 2003. Now, the new generation of Challenger’s design specifications included a lunar module, which piggy-backed the shuttle as the shuttle itself had once done on the back of an airplane so very long ago. Politicians and presidential science advisors had argued that sending the space shuttle to the moon was more costly than the old fashioned booster-rocket throw-back to the Apollo program, but the NASA community won out eventually on this issue. The shuttle was, to mix a metaphor, a wonderful technological animal, and ways had been found to minimize fuel costs and preserve the shuttle’s reputation as the most viable space vehicle in the history of space exploration. That being said, normally, the shuttles were not assigned lunar expeditions; but this current mission was under the auspices and authority of the Defense Department. Reason for this was simple: Something was going bleep on the moon -- something which had yet to be identified: to wit, an acoustical signal was emanating from within a crater called Mare Imbrium. Earth stations failed to determine the clearly artificial anomaly, so therefore someone needed to go up there and have a gander.

  That someone was the collective crew of John Mars and its non-stop ride by way of Challenger II.

  Half a dozen theories thrown on the table more or less agreed that the signal was probably man-made -- an abandoned transistor by one of the Apollo missions, or one of the long range satellites that crashed years earlier sent up by either the United States, Russia or China. Still, the element of uncertainty regarding the source and nature of the signal proved irritating enough to prompt a manned mission once more to Earth’s only natural satellite.

  The mission was top secret, at least in terms of the investigation phase. Publicly, however, Challenger Two was on a scientific expedition to dig up core samples that might possess ice crystals. The publicity hobgoblin went something like this: in January of 1998, the Lunar Prospector probe had found clear evidence of frozen water mixed with lunar soil. Such a discovery implied the existence of a vast untapped water supply. The projected long-term net worth of such a discovery meant it might be worthwhile to send some folks up to the old moon, and don't forget the shovels, thank you very much. Very exciting stuff, NASA insisted. Worth a mission, and the price tag is just under a hundred million dollars.

  Blah, blah, blah, it was a believable cover story and NASA nursed it right up to take-off. There were a thousand reasons the experts could think of for the need to snow the public; more importantly, there were a thousand reasons they couldn’t think of for the sham.

  NASA had asked John Mars to brief the press and Congress himself as to the necessity of such a costly mission. Congenial, courteous to a fault, and with the mature good-looks of a soap opera star, NASA's veteran representative was convincing. Congress coughed up the requisite coinage from appropriations and the mission was implemented less than two weeks later.

  It had been a hurried pre-launch period, but so far, everything had gone off without a hitch. Perfect, was the word Mars didn’t want to use, but couldn’t help but apply to launch and inflight thus far.

  Aye, laddy, you’re getting’ superstitious in your old age, the Irish in him teased again. Nothing’ wrong with a littl
e perfection in yer’ life.

  Amen to that, Mars agreed with the little mental fairy tapdancing in his head.

  In space, there was no room for anything but perfection.

  The lunar module, an elongated, streamlined cylinder twice as large as its progenitor on Apollo 11 over four decades earlier, slowly detached itself from the superstructure of the shuttle. John Mars, commander and pilot, made a controlled descent toward the cratered world below - a world as old as the Earth itself.

  “Mission Control, we have separation,” he said, activating his communication link with Houston, nearly 400,000 miles away.

  “Roger that,” the Mission Director responded. “Happy trails, John. We have you on inbound telemetry. We will lose you on voice to voice in approximately ten seconds. Good luck.”

  “Luck has nothing to do with it,” Mars said, grinning. He was the best pilot in the fleet, and knew it. “Disengaging autopilot and switching to manual, over.” And for just a moment his mind wandered... still an affordable indulgence and good for at least half an orbit.

  For the sword outwears the sheathe,

  And the heart outwears the breast,

  And the soul must pause to breathe,

  And even love, must rest...

  Nice poem, Mars thought. Always liked it. As much a poem about love as it was about the moon. And then he thought of Anna back at home. Captain Anna Carpenter, one of the most accomplished astronauts in the fleet. Anna, his best friend. Anna, his future wife.

  Mars now glanced at his altimeter, and his mind snapped back to the immediacy of landing. He called out cross-check commands, eyes scanning both the lunar horizon and the myriad of blinking lights on the CRT control panel which kept the spacecraft perfectly operational and its crew breathing and alive.