The Ruins of Mars: Waking Titan (The Ruins of Mars Trilogy) (24 page)

“Contact,” he said through gritted teeth.

“That looked painful.
You shoved off a little hard. Next time take it slower.”

“Comments from the peanut gallery are not welcomed at this time.”

“I’ll try to remember that.”

Working one hand along the
airlock hatch, Julian kept the other firmly wrapped around the rung of the ladder. Even though he was clipped to the cable, he wanted to feel the firmness of a ship under his fingertips.

“I’m opening the
airlock,” he reported.

Silently, the hatch swung open and Julian slipped inside the cramped
airlock. Unhooking himself from the cable that connected the two ships, he waved to Aguilar then pulled the hatch closed. Though the wall Tablet was presented in Chinese, he still remembered enough from his days as a private contractor in Hong Kong to successfully pressurize the chamber. Above the door, a light cycled from red to yellow and finally to green.

“Entering the maintenance shaft,” he said into his helmet mic as he opened the
airlock’s inner door.

Met with a dimly lit passageway, Julian floated out of the
airlock and oriented himself in his mind.

Okay, he thought. If the door I just came through is at the base of the ship, then the cockpit is up.

Kicking off a bulkhead, he flew in the direction his mind was telling him was
up
. Mumbling bitterly under his breath, he frowned at the general sloppiness of the work around him. Though this ship was based on one of his original designs, it had been modified and reworked in such a way that made it seem skeletal and unwelcoming.

Grasping the corner or a bulkhead where his hallway intersected with another, he made a sharp left turn and had to duck so as not to be
come tangled in a mess of loose hanging wires.

“Unbelievable,” he glowered.

“You alright?” crackled Aguilar’s voice.

“Yes, just shoddy work. We won’t have to do much to bring this piece of shit down.”

The pilot chuckled in his helmet speakers.

Pulling himself along a handrail set into the floor, Julian batted bundles of unsecured wires and rubber hoses out of his way until he reached a dead end.

Radiation shield, he said to himself and looked for an access hatch to bypass the obstruction.

“How’s it going in there?” Aguilar asked.

             
“Golden,” Julian replied, finding the bypass hatch.

             
Now on the other side of the radiation shield that separated the nuclear torch engine from the crew portion of the ship, the French engineer navigated his way through a series of small curved rooms filled with life-support computer terminals. Blinking like Morse code, the LEDs on the faces of the terminals danced in his peripheral vision as he continued moving forward or
up
.

Finally, sometime after entering the ship, Julian came to a hatch whose logo suggested th
at it was an entrance into the Main Crew Deck.

             
“Alright, I’m at an entrance hatch. I’m going in.”

             
“Be careful.”

             
With slightly trembling hands, Julian unlocked the hatch and swung it up. Maintaining the orientation that the cockpit was above him, he brought his head to the lip of the opening and scanned the darkened space for signs of movement. A faint green light emanated from somewhere far above his head, and Julian figured it must be the lights of the flight computers in the cockpit. Little more than a giant hollow tube, the Crew Deck of the Chinese Ark was one big open space, the crudely exposed metal of its bulkheads looking like the ribs of a giant beast.

Lining the walls on all sides of the
Deck were narrow chambers with dark tinted glass that obscured their contents. Above each chamber, a red light flashed dimly.

Silently pulling himself through the open hatch, Julian floated up to the first row of chambers and peered inside. Like some hideous vision from a child's nightmare, a bloated pur
ple and black face stared back—spheres of dried blood drifting around it like bubbles in a bottle of cherry soda. Swollen so badly that the skin around the eyes had split, the mutilated face was locked in a grimace of pain and desperation.

“
Mon Dieu
!” shouted Julian in horror.

“What is it?” Aguilar responded, his voice laced with concern.

Pushing off, Julian drifted across the ten meters of open space to the opposite wall and looked into a chamber there. Met again with the disfigured face of some dead Chinese soldier, he moved to another chamber and another after that.

“They’re all dead,” he said into his mic. “The
Pulse must have knocked out the life-support to their Extended-Sleep Chambers.”

“Really?”

“No, you’re right. I’m lying. They’re actually whipping up some dim sum right now. Of course, really! Think about it. The Pulse attacks electrical systems in use by humans. That’s why only certain things went dead afterwards and not others.”

“Well shit, Julian. Looks like it’s your lucky day.”

“Yeah,” he mumbled. Then, “Say, do you think we can abort the mission now? I mean, they’re already dead.”

“Hold on. I’ll see if our operation outline has any kind of contingency plan for this.”

Aguilar was silent for a few beats as he pulled up the mission file.

“Damn,” he responded gravely. “It says here, in the event of a total loss of hostile life, we’re to proceed with the original plan.”

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. T
hat section of the report is classified. I can’t read it.”

Julian
was perplexed. Then he thought back to the strange cylindrical pods they’d seen on their approach to the airlock and his face fell.

“This ship has killbots on board,” he breathed quietly.

“Say again?”

“Killbots. Automated war machines. We have to blow the ship because the Chinese planned for this. They installed killbots to carry out the mission if the crew died in transit.”

“You mean those launch pods we saw on the way in,” cried Aguilar. “That’s why they weren’t on the blueprints!”

“Exactly,” Julian sighed wearily. “I guess the Chinese had one final surprise for us after all.”

“How do you know that they’re for killbots? Couldn’t they just be escape pods or something?”

Shifting uncomfortably, Julian closed his eyes.

“I designed this ship, Joey. An early model of it at least. I recognize the configuration from a draft I drew up a few years ago.”

“I guess you’re the expert then.”

“I guess so.”

Turning away from the horrendously deformed figure before him, Julian tipped his head back and calculated the amount of energy he should use to propel himself the rest of the way up the twenty five meters to the cockpit.

“But why didn’t Tatyana tell us about this?” Aguilar asked, his voice laden with dismay. “She must have known.”

Julian shook his head inside his helmet. “I don’t know, my friend. We’ll have to ask her that when we get back.”

Aguilar did not reply, and the line hissed and popped with radio feedback.

“In any event,” said Julian, turning the focus of the conversation
back to the issue at hand. “We’d better make sure this thing is too wrecked to launch those pods, no? And the first step in that plan is to change the Flight Path.”

Knees bent, he pushed off the raised lip of a bulkhead and shot like an arrow towards the faint green light of the distant dashboard computers.

“What about the AI?” said Aguilar, a note of hope in his tone. “The Pulse wiped out all the AI. Won’t the killbots be dead too?”

“Kill
bots aren’t run by AI anymore. Not after Najin.”

“What happened in Najin?”

“Ask Ralph Marshall,” Julian replied, nearing the cockpit. “But the fact still remains, killbots don’t use AI. They use a kind of programming called MI, or Mission Intelligence. It’s like AI but you remove the programmer from the mix: no human contact, just mission objectives and problem-solving software.”

“Why? W
hat’s the point of doing it that way?”

As the distance between himself and the cockpit quickly closed, Julian used the pilot’s flight chair to stop his forward ascent. Feeling his organs shift with inertia, he shuddered and looked around the narrow cockpit.

“They do it like that so the killbots won’t have any personality: no cultural perspective, no historical reference, nothing. They want them as inhuman as possible.”

“But
why?” Aguilar stressed. “Why do they want them inhuman?”

“Because humans tend to use violence when it isn’t appropriate. For example, if a Chinese programmer happens to feel a certain way about, oh
, say, Americans, then any AI he fosters will also likely carry that certain opinion. This is dangerous, as it breeds racism and hatred in a machine that can kill with extreme efficiency.”

“So what? Mission Intelligence is different?”

“Oui. With MI, it’s all business. Nothing is personal.”

“Okay, but how is any of this going to keep the, um, MI safe from a
Pulse?”

Spotting the NavSat
Computer, Julian used an exposed coolant hose to pull himself over to it.

“Because killbots aren’t AI. B
ecause they aren’t
living personalities
like an AI. They stay turned off until deployed. Imagine newborns with machine guns and the instincts of a cougar, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what an MI is all about.”

“So
, what? You think they survived the Pulse because they aren’t online yet?”

“Probably.”

Aguilar did not respond.

Opening the front-pack secured to his chest, Julian reached inside and felt around until he found the pocket containing Amit’s Tablet. With one hand on the corner of the NavSat
Computer terminal to keep himself from drifting, he turned on the Tablet and brought up the doctored Checkpoint Flight Path. Finding the connection port on the NavSat Computer, he slid the Tablet in and initiated the program.

“It’s done,” he said into his helmet mic. “I’ve got Amit’s program running. Start the countdown then get your ass over here to help me rig this shithole with explosives.”

The line sizzled then Aguilar spoke. “Let’s wreck it until there’s nothing left.”

“I like the way you think,” the Frenchman smiled.

Crash

             
Lander 1 took off in a flurry of dust and noise. Lifting vertically to an altitude of one-hundred-fifty meters, the thruster engines whined like grinding metal yet everyone onboard save for Dr. Viviana Calise seemed unconcerned.

             
“Is it supposed to sound like that?” she called over the roar of hydrogen rocket boosters.

             
“What?” Harrison shouted from across the aisle, though his voice was muted by his helmet.

             
“I said,” Viviana repeated. “Is it supposed to sound like that?”

             
From the cockpit, Ralph Marshall turned his head and slid his helmet visor up.

             
“Channel four, Viv,” he yelled.

             
“What?”

             
Leaning across the aisle, Harrison tapped the side of his helmet and then motioned towards Viviana’s wrist Tablet and held up four fingers. With an embarrassed laugh, she understood and quickly switched radio channels.

             
“Better?” said Marshall’s voice in her helmet speakers.

             
“Yes, much,” she smiled.

             
Cutting the launch boosters, Marshall engaged the forward thrusters and blasted off towards the ruin grid. Pressed back into their seats, the three explorers felt the hand of G-force exhibit its invisible power.

             
“This is fun!” Viviana laughed. “I should have requested to come along ages ago!”

             
“Why didn’t you?” Harrison said.

             
With a shrug, Viviana tried to seem nonchalant.

             
“Oh, who knows? Perhaps I was a little afraid.”

             
“Of what?” Marshall interjected, tweaking the controls as the Lander hit a patch of turbulence.

Bucking violently, the little craft dropped a few meters then stabilized. Face suddenly set in a sober expression, Viviana cleared her throat.

              “I don’t really like flying, to be honest,” she said evenly. “It reminds me of roller coasters. I hate roller coasters.”