The Attempt (The Martian Manifesto Book 1) (13 page)

Two months later…

Chinese moon base chief scientist Li Julong watched
with trepidation as the spaceship from Earth approached. He had not been told who his additional companion upon the journey to Mars would be, and Julong suspected he would not be happy.
“It’s going to be another silly military adjunct, I’m sure, whose only assignment will be to constantly spy upon me,”
he thought
. “I wonder what they promised the poor fellow to get him to come all this way on a fool’s mission.”

The long slender spaceship was slowly descending on its four strap-on engines
which were arranged symmetrically around its base. The engines had been specially designed to make them easy to snap in new fuel modules while traversing the emptiness of space. For this leg of the trip, the ship had utilized fuel that Julong’s group had launched into Moon orbit via the mass driver.

As the ship reached eye-level of t
he upper rim of Shackleton crater, the scientist turned and headed for the elevator. “I should be there when this fellow disembarks from the landing pad next to the mass driver below,” he muttered. “It would be just my luck that he decides to commandeer some of the container transports that I need for the next fuel launch for the Mars trip, putting us behind schedule.”

As Julong waited for the elevator, he noticed that it was taking an extraordinary amount time to arrive, as if many people were using it. Finally the elevator chimed and the doors opened. The scientist quickly entered
and punched the bottom button for the crater floor. In a few moments, the elevator chimed again and Julong stepped through the door into the hangar control room.

H
e could see that he was too late to meet his visitor at the ship, and indeed the fellow was already there in the hangar directing many of his Korean workers. They had already closed the hangar doors, removed their suit helmets, and were using the transports to maneuver multiple containers around the rails of the mass driver and into one corner of the hangar. In fact, he saw that one of the transports had fallen over onto its side, and had spilled the contents of a container all over the hangar floor and onto the mass driver rails. A few of his workers were trying to manually tip the transport back onto its wheels.

Julong determined that he needed to set a precedent, and stormed out of the control room onto the
hangar floor. “Stop!” he yelled as he ran towards the group. “No one moves equipment without my direct authorization. You might have damaged the mass driver!”

The scientist came to an abrupt halt and stared at the contents that had spilled from the container. “Guns? Rifles? Who brings guns on a spaceship?” he cried. “
And are those hand grenades? Are you crazy?”

Julong turned and faced the new visitor, and
almost swallowed his last words. The new arrival was staring at him with cold black eyes that seemed almost soulless. The man was squat and built like a tank, with a prominent scar running from his ear to one side of his mouth. On the right upper arm of his suit was the sword and lightning bolt insignia of the PLA Special Operations Forces.

“Quiet, old fool,” the man said through gritted teeth. “I am in charge of this mission now. You and your men will do exactly as I say. I have the full authority of the Committee on this. The situation on
Mars has changed once more. I am NCO Wong, but from now on, you and your men will address me as ‘Sir.’ You will follow all of my orders to the letter. You will provide me a list of the men who are going to be on this Mars mission by twenty-one hundred hours tonight. You will inform them that every day at oh-nine hundred they are to meet here in the hangar, fully suited, for three hours of weapons training out on the Moon’s surface. I can already see that they are incompetent,” he said, pointing at the scattered munitions, “and it will take me every day until we leave to get them into a modicum of preparedness. I wished to bring my own men for this mission, but I was overridden.”

Julong stammered. “Three hours of training each day? We are already stretched to the limit trying to get ready for the mission. How am I to accomplish this?”
As the man glared at him, the scientist added quietly, “Sir.”

“Work them harder,” the special ops soldier stated. “The exercise will do them good. They’ve become weak
in this meager gravity field. Why, they can’t even move that transport with three people,” he said as he pointed towards the Koreans who were still struggling to get the transport flipped back up. “Out of my way,” he commanded as he waved his arms at the workers.

Julong watched as NCO Wong grabbed the transport and with a gigantic heave righted it.
The transport crashed onto its wheels, kicking up Moon dust everywhere. “I am going to my quarters now,” the man said. “See to it that all of the arms are put back in the box and stacked in the corner with the rest of the shipment,” he ordered the scientist. “And make sure that none of you idiots shoot yourselves while you are at it!” he yelled at the workers.

The scientist watched as the soldier turned and tried to goose-step march towards the control room. He lifted his leg straight forward and hopped ten feet with it extended, and then landed and hopped with the other foot extended. The scientist couldn’t help but wonder whether he had practiced that while walking from the spaceship to the
hangar.

Li Julong turned towards his Korean workers. “Well, you heard him. Put those guns in the box and get it stacked
with the others. I’m going to go talk to the general and straighten this situation out.” He started to turn to walk away, and then turned back. “And for Buddha’s sake, be careful!”

Mars mission biologist Charles Winston peered through the microscope at yet another slide of the alien creature’s remains. For the past two months he had examined various parts of the eel-like animal, as well the material that the other creature had seemed to be guarding, and nothing added up. The material from the center of the crater was simply a tube filled with fluid. There were no cells or DNA that he could locate. At first he thought it might have been excreta, but he was slowly starting to think that it was actually a decoy that he was meant to go after, resulting in his falling into another pit during the battle. He remembered that there had been a Peruvian spider that was discovered a few decades back that built decoys of itself, so at least that was a remote possibility.

But what was most surprising biologically was the body of the one creature that had not disintegrated. It appeared that parts of the creature contained strands of pure metal. Under magnification, the strands seemed to branch the same way that normal nerves did.
“It’s a shame that the head of the creature dissolved away,” he sighed. “It probably would have provided answers to many of my questions.”

Charles dutifully gathered together his latest images and findings to transmit to the Ames Research Lab, as he had done every day for the past two months.
“I asked them in my last transmission why I hadn’t heard back any comments from the NASA Astrobiology Institute members, and they’ve been strangely quiet on that point,”
he thought.
“You would think that by now I would have received at least one suggestion on a new line of inquiry to pursue.”

Just then, the speaker on his console came alive. “Chuck, it’s Grant. Come up to the main room. We’ve received a new message from Mission Control that you need to hear. I’m calling everyone together for a meeting.”

Charles closed up his work, went to the ladder and climbed up to the main central room of the base. He saw that the others were already seated, and grabbed a chair next to Sergey. The commander was standing by the monitor, which had a paused image of Brick Shinefield from Mission Control on it.
“Uh oh,”
Charles thought.
“Brick isn’t in any sort of disguise this time. This must be pretty serious.”

“Alright fellows,” Grant said. “I’m not going to sugar coat this message that I received a few moments ago. You’ll just have to watch it the way I did, and then we can discuss our next steps.”

As he activated the video message, Brick started speaking to them. “Gentlemen, first let me apologize for our inability to provide you much in the way of direction the past few weeks. As soon as you discovered alien life, especially what has been determined from your videos to be hostile alien life, we were mandated to unseal specific protocol documents. These protocols directed us to contact a certain secret committee to convene which reported directly to the President of the United States. The committee’s first action was to immediately confiscate all of the material about the incident, and to direct us to keep you safely locked down at the base and our mouths shut. It is for that reason that we had ordered you not to go out and retrieve the rover until we had more information. The committee has now come back to us with additional directives. I need to remind you that this comes directly from the President. You are all to stay at the base when the AB Cycler completes its pass of Mars in three months. You are not to come home.”

“What?” yelled Charles as he jumped up out of his seat. “Are they nuts? We have to stay here for another three years?”

“Wait,” admonished Sergey. “He can’t hear you, and we need to hear what else he says.” Charles slowly sat back down, watching the screen.

The video message continued. “Commander Roy Olstein and Pilot Sam
antha Tuttle, who are currently on the cycler, will not be your relief mission. Instead, they will join you there at the base once they have gotten the Brother Jacobs colony settled. The committee determined that you will need the increased numbers for the next phase of operations that they have laid out for you. You will start stockpiling methane and oxygen for fuel bombs, and we will be sending you directions for your 3D printers to start manufacturing small rockets to deliver them.”

The four astronauts stared dumbfounded at the monitor. “Oh this just keeps getting better and better,” mumbled Charles.

“Commander Olstein and Pilot Tuttle will be using the manufacturing facilities aboard the asteroid cycler to create launch tubes for mortars and bazookas, which they will bring with them when they arrive. You are to do nothing, and I repeat nothing, until Olstein and Tuttle join you and you are provided with further instructions.”

Brad, the geologist,
laid his head on the table as he listened. He too could not believe the direction that this had taken.

“I know this sounds extreme,” Brick continued saying, “but
a four-star general has been put in place as the head of the committee and has been running the show. The Chinese have been acting up here on Earth again, and our space surveillance has picked up that they’ve been launching some types of packages towards Mars from their Moon base. The military is sure this is no coincidence, and has taken over the strategy sessions. They created a small task force to recommend defensive and offensive strategies, and given that you have no explosives on Mars, but do have plenty of rocket fuel, they came up with this whole scenario of creating bazookas and similar weapons. The committee has not provided any details about what you are to do with these once you create them. All we have been told is that you will be given further instructions when the time comes.”

“Grant, we don’t have to listen to them, do we?” Chuck moaned. “
They can’t force us. We aren’t soldiers; we’re explorers and scientists, for God’s sake.”

Grant shook his head at him and said, “Hold your
comments until the message is done.”

“Since the committee
confiscated all of your communications, and has begun collecting everything that you send to us daily, we have not been able to analyze the alien biology from your correspondence,” Brick continued. “However, some of the guys here think that those creatures were manufactured, and not natural. The way they melted away seemed to be specifically designed so that we could not learn more about them. The consensus is that there is some type of very advanced intelligence out there where you had the encounter. Perhaps what you met were mere scouts, and there are even deadlier things out there. We concluded that the military mentality of creating weapons might not be such a bad idea. We feel that at least that will give you some options. For now, hunker down, and keep the doors locked. Mission Control out.”

The four astronauts all sat there as the screen went dark. Charles was the first to speak. “This is just great. We finally find alien life, and the military wants us to bomb it to smithereens. I didn’t sign up for this.”

“As Brick said, perhaps having the option is not a bad idea,” Sergey said. “After all, look what one little creature did to me,” he said as he waved his still bandaged arm in the air. “I, for one, do not relish having a close encounter with an even bigger one of those things.”

“But bombs?” Brad chimed in. “We might blow the whole habitat up in the process if we’re not careful. You heard them; they want us to package
up methane and oxygen into rockets. There are three things that you need for an explosion: fuel, oxygen, and an ignition source. One stray spark and kablam, that’s all she wrote.”

“They can’t force us,” Charles said emphatically. “We’re here, and they’re over sixty million miles away. We should think for ourselves, and not just listen to some military wonk.”

“Serge, do you think you could create small rockets safely?” Grant asked, turning to the mission engineer.

“Da, if we keep the fuel and oxygen
separated in their own small packages,” Sergey replied. “I will need to check the 3D printer instructions that they send to us, but as long as the volatiles are separated in the small missiles, we might be fine.”

“And I don’t relish being defenseless,” G
rant continued. “As Brick said, maybe having the option is not such a bad idea. Okay, let’s take a vote. All in favor of following the instructions, raise your hand.”

Grant and Sergey raised their hands, but Brad seemed hesitant. “You’re not going to go along with this foolishness, are you?” Charles said looking at the geologist.

“Well, I’m not sure,” Brad replied. “The only thing that saved you before was that I could use the laser on the rover. If we didn’t have that as an option, things might have turned out really badly.” Brad thought for a moment, and then continued. “I think I’ve changed my mind and we should make some weapons.”

“Brad, we’re scientists! We’re supposed to study and learn. We should save any discovery, even if it means we get destroyed in the process
, not go blowing it up because we’re scared children.  It’s the knowledge that’s important, not us!” Charles exhorted.

Brad
shook his head and slowly raised his hand.

“Alright, that’s three to one. Serge, go check those instructions and report back to me on what you find. Brad and Chuck, you’ll need to let your families know that our mission has been extended. You are not to tell them why.
Just tell them we’ve made an important discovery and it’s classified. In addition, from now on, whenever any of us go outside to perform maintenance or to work in the greenhouse, we go in twos. No one is to be outside alone at any time. There’s no telling if there are any more of those creatures out there.”

As the astronauts went their separate ways, they did not know that downstairs, the alien hopper had heard everything that had been said. In the months since it had snuck aboard the transport and made its way inside the habitat, it had remained hidden and transmitted everything it saw and hear
d back to its mother probe. What was done with that information was not its concern. Its only instructions were to hide, record, transmit and wait.