Killing Time On Mars Read online

  Contents

  Title

  COPYRIGHT

  PROLOGUE

  ACT 1

  1. ARRIVAL

  2. TRESPASSING

  3. JOSEV

  4. THE CAVE

  5. MURDER

  6. REWIND

  7. LOVE AND POLITICS

  8. IMANI

  9. THE LETTER

  10. HU

  11. BIG NEWS

  ACT 2

  12. WEATHERING

  13. THE STORM

  14. EMERGENCY RESPONSE

  15. REPAIR

  16. MOLE HUNT

  17. PRESSURE

  18. PRIMAL RESPONSE

  19. RECOVERY

  20. MOVIE NIGHT

  21. REPERCUSSIONS

  22. THERAPY

  23. UNITY

  ACT 3

  24. PROOF

  25. ROAD TRIP

  26. MONSTERS

  27. THE SEARCH

  28. A BIG SECRET

  29. DREAMS

  30. AN ITCH

  31. DEATH

  32. REASSIGNMENT

  33. LIU

  34. THE COUP

  35. THE LAST PIECE

  36. WHERE ARE THEY GOING?

  EPILOGUE

  THANKS

  KILLING TIME ON MARS

  Alec Taylor

  COPYRIGHT

  Thanks for purchasing Killing Time On Mars. Please click here if you would like to be notified when the next instalment of the On Mars series is published, or connect with the author on Facebook.

  All rights reserved. Aside from brief quotations for media coverage and reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced or distributed in any form without the author’s permission. Thank you for supporting authors and a diverse, creative culture by purchasing this book and complying with copyright laws.

  Copyright © 2017 by Alec Taylor Cover design by Miguel Yamin Edited by Deanne Sheldon-Collins Copy editing by Rowan McAuley Thanks to my lovely wife, Shelly, and my wonderful, bright children. A huge thank you to my mentor, Rowan–this novel would not exist without your encouragement, suggestions and brilliant mind. And finally, thanks to the many people who read drafts and gave advice…too many to list, but all constructive and helpful.

  PROLOGUE

  I circled high above the desert, searching for a vehicle below. Polar ice glowed brightly in the haze to the north, and red dust shimmered in the south. The colony was a cluster of rectangular bumps in front of a rocky hillside to the east, and in the west, I could see the jagged shadow of the canyon.

  “Sweep the canyon,” I said to the autopilot.

  As the canyon widened into a deep bowl, I noticed a distant line of tracks. A dune buggy at the top of the cliff gradually took shape. The driver was sitting in the right-hand seat, left hand on the centre joystick, facing out across the void. I looked down and saw that it was a long way to the floor below. The fall would probably be fatal, even in the low gravity. The thought made me shiver.

  I called my boss and told him I had located the buggy.

  “Just keep him talking,” said Pete. “We’re on the way.”

  Clouds of dust swirled around me as I landed, jumped out, and walked slowly toward the buggy. When I was still a few metres away, I heard a voice say, “Just stop”. The projection into my helmet was so faint that I almost missed it, but I was sure it was the man I was looking for. I stopped.

  “Eli, it’s me, Mike,” I said loudly. “Do you know the transmitters on your suit and the buggy aren’t working?”

  He didn’t respond.

  “We thought you were in an accident. Are you okay?”

  “I disabled them,” he said quietly.

  “Oh, okay. We discourage that, you know. They’re for your safety.”

  He was silent again.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “Are you okay? Can I come closer so I don’t have to yell at you?”

  “You can stop pretending you don’t know why I’m here,” he said in a monotone.

  “But I don’t know why you’re here,” I replied.

  “I’m on your list. You think I did it.”

  It was my turn to pause. How did he know about my suspect list?

  “I don’t think anything yet,” I said. “Right now all I’m doing is recovering a lost buggy. That’s all this is.”

  “I don’t really care what this is,” he said.

  “Eli, it might not feel like it right now, but I’m sure there’s a way out of this. Everything will be okay.”

  He turned to look at me, the sun glinting off his visor. I noticed that his seat harness was not fastened.

  “You don’t get it,” he said in a much louder voice, suddenly hoarse with emotion. “Everything will not be okay. You think I did it, but I didn’t. Somebody killed her…and now she’s gone forever.”

  His voice trembled and broke. He slowly turned to face forward and bowed his head. The situation had a surreal, dreamlike quality; he was slipping through my fingers into the chasm below.

  Suddenly he looked up, smashed the joystick forward, and time slowed. The tyres of the buggy revolved and spewed dust into the sky. It accelerated away, sliding to the left. And then it was out over the void, in a flat spin, dust streaming off the tyres. It spun around in slow motion until Eli was facing me, and then dipped out of sight.

  I ran to the edge and skidded to a halt. Parts of the buggy were tumbling across the floor of the canyon below, colliding with rocks, and spinning up into the sky. Gases were spewing from the fuel tanks. Eli’s crumpled body was lying in the dust.

  I looked up and saw a small dark figure standing at the top of the cliff on the other side of the canyon. My legs crumpled and I fell backward, scrambling away from the edge. When I looked again, the figure was gone.

  ACT 1

  1. ARRIVAL

  Time drags here on Mars. We use the same system of seconds, minutes and hours as Earth, but each second is three percent longer, adding the equivalent of about 40 minutes of extra time to each day.

  It also takes nearly twice as long as Earth for Mars to revolve around the sun—the Martian year is a soul-destroying 24 months long. We work for the first 23 months, and then in the middle of the northern summer, when the colony gets the most sun, we have a shorter holiday month. The harvesters keep working autonomously, and the colony still needs to eat and breathe, but most people can rest and prepare themselves for the long, cold year ahead.

  I joined the colony on a normal working Tuesday, in Month Nine, in the middle of the Martian autumn. It was more than six Earth-years after the first settlers arrived, 11 years after the discovery that made it all possible.

  I twitched and tapped my feet with impatience, looking around at the other new colonists waiting in the space station above Mars. Most of them were staring at screens that showed the planet silently revolving below us. Eventually we filed into the shuttle and strapped in for the drop. The prep seemed to take forever, and just when I thought I couldn’t stand it anymore we suddenly disconnected and dropped into the atmosphere.

  The curved edge of the planet rose around us as we descended toward the surface. We gradually slowed and felt a light weight on our shoulders. Touchdown was imperceptible—a surprising anti-climax to mark our arrival. It was around ten in the morning, local colony time.

  The lighter gravity felt strange—we had been accelerating and decelerating at Earth’s gravity for the entire journey and were clumsy with super-hero strength. We bounced and crashed through the air-bridge into the terminal, where our new managers greeted us.

  As I entered the terminal, I recognised Pete’s almost-bald head and chiselled jaw from his pre-recorded messages sent to me back on Earth. He was in his early thirties, but his lack of
hair and the deep lines around his eyes made him look much older. He shook my hand and held on to my shoulder to keep my feet on the ground. He said something that buzzed briefly in my ears, and then Karl, the Colony Chief Executive, said a few words of welcome to the entire group.

  Karl had a strange way of speaking, as if he had learned English from a textbook. He occasionally forgot to say ‘the’ or ‘a’ and had a faint Russian accent. His appearance was a stark contrast to Pete—Karl had a round face and thick black hair, so dark that I wondered if it was dyed. He smiled widely with his mouth, but not his eyes.

  We all bounced into the airlock in the low gravity. The freezing air turned our breath into plumes of condensation, but I was comfortably warm. The Martian undersuit is soft and flexible, designed to be worn without an outersuit while you're inside the underground colony. It’s a single quilted piece from head to toe, with an opening through the chest and a large overlap to capture warmth. My body was warm, but I could still feel the chill of the air on my face.

  My outersuit crinkled as I pulled the helmet over and locked the visor to seal it airtight. The backpack of batteries, compressed air, and electronics made it awkward to wear. The ‘heads-up’ display came alive on the inside of my visor and I could see the geo-locator was working. I checked the two little cameras on the outside of the helmet by glancing at an icon on the menu bar of the display.

  “Test,” I yelled at Pete, compensating for the helmet.

  “Test confirmed,” he replied, “but no need to shout. You know how the system works, right? When the suit visor is closed, the near-field comms system automatically interacts with other suits—it transmits your voice at the volume that it would be heard on earth, based on the distance between us. With our helmets on we can talk as if we were on Earth. You only shout if we’re far apart. When we’re this close you can just talk normally.”

  “Sorry,” I said in almost a whisper.

  Pete and I skipped out to the hangar for the short trip to the colony.

  “I prefer to stay on the ground,” said Pete, “so we’ll take a dune buggy.”

  We waited for the others to file out through the hangar doors. Most of them were going to the people-carrier outside, or one of the smaller hover vehicles commonly known as ‘hovees’.

  “Why don’t you catch me up while we’re waiting?” I said.

  “Okay. This colony, you know, is full of awesome, smart people doing amazing work. We’re all in this together, working in harmony to beat our production targets and expand the colony.”

  Ugh, I thought. He was effusively positive, and not very authentic. I also knew that he was lying about people working in harmony. Somehow his strong Californian accent made it worse, as if he was fitting a stereotype.

  “We’re over a thousand people now, so it’s a proper town. And even though we’re from all over, it feels like one big family. The great thing about Security is we get to see it all and work with everyone. From the Chief Executive through to harvest operations, we see everything. Mostly we’re here to make sure everyone stays safe, understands the risks, and uses their heads. Sure, sometimes we have to step in and help out if something goes wrong, but mostly we’re here to prevent problems, not react to them.”

  I found the way he described the role of Security underwhelming—it was as if I would be spending my whole time managing risks rather than doing police work. I briefly wondered why they had hired an ex-cop, until I remembered the activity log for the Security team, which I had reviewed during my training. The rate of incidents attended by Security had been increasing much faster than population growth, and it seemed that some kind of drug use had emerged. The colony needed a more visible and motivating security force, despite Pete’s positive spin on the situation. That was why I was there—to protect the colony, to keep the peace, to intervene.

  When the last of the new arrivals had filed through the hangar doors, Pete slowly drove our buggy out and into the light. I soaked up the scenery as we drove across the plain. We approached the colony and I started to see the shapes of the structures, with their strangely geometrical shadows.

  “Would you like to head straight in, or take a tour out here?” asked Pete.

  “Let’s keep going out here,” I replied.

  “That’s the main hangar,” he said as we drove past its open mouth.

  “How dusty does it get with the doors open?”

  “Like you wouldn’t believe. They blow it out every now and then, and the extractors in the airlock keep the dust out of the inner colony.”

  “And we only close the doors for a storm?” I said, remembering the protocol from my training.

  “Yep.”

  Pete drove past the hangar and headed toward an opening in the windbreak around the greenhouses. The windbreak was a massive pile of dirt, designed to push the wind up and over the greenhouses in a storm. At the last moment Pete changed his mind, turned slightly to the left and drove straight up the mound.

  “Better view from on top,” he explained.

  The greenhouses were laid out in a grid. There were six rows of ten, with three backbone passages running between pairs of rows. The greenhouses were enormous plastic tubes, held up by air pressure and held in by giant curved ribs that pinched the plastic every ten metres. A ventilation system pushed air from the far ends of each greenhouse through to exhaust vents and pipes beside the entrance.

  “The greenhouses supply about a quarter of our oxygen,” said Pete, “and we get the rest from electrolysis. They also give us fresh vegetables and the raw materials for plastic.”

  I knew from my training that most structures and machines in the colony were manufactured from hardened plastic, which was synthesised from the plants. However, the plastics produced locally tended to be in short lengths, and not as strong and flexible as metal, so JOSEV sent rolls of alloy for strengthening structures and for machine parts. In the first year of the colony, they also sent a ceramic smelting oven and Bessemer converter, for onsite smelting of iron into steel. The early colonists had found iron ore and carbon deposits, but the oven would have consumed an enormous amount of oxygen, and Earth sent enough metal so the oven remained unused. It effectively became an insurance policy, in case supplies from Earth were somehow interrupted.

  “Seen enough of the greenhouses?” asked Pete.

  The rocky hillside swept up behind the greenhouses, where the underground colony had been tunnelled into the rock. The main hangar, the first refinery, and a few smaller structures were all behind us.

  “It’s bigger than I was expecting,” I said.

  “It’s a proper town.”

  Pete gently pushed sideways on the joystick and we turned around and drove back down the face of the windbreak. He drove all the way around the greenhouses and pulled up in front of three steel boxes standing in front of the rocky hills at the northern end of the colony. Each of them was the approximate size and shape of a shipping container back on Earth and had a big cable trailing from the side down into the sand.

  “The power plants,” I said.

  “Yup,” said Pete. “I know you know all about them, but it’s good to see them with your own eyes.”

  The power plants were designed so they could be deployed anywhere on the planet, in any conditions. Their casings were built from a blend of titanium and carbon fibre, and they had been engineered for strength. They were pinned to the rock beneath the sand and ran in parallel to a junction box, so that if any one of them went offline the others could pick up the slack.

  I noticed a camera on a pole sticking out above the first plant and asked, “How do the cameras go in the storms?”

  “We’ve only had a couple of really big storms, and the cameras have survived everything. They’re useless during a storm, though. Zero visibility.”

  He pushed the joystick forward and to the left, the tyres dug in, and we turned to go back around the greenhouses to the main hangar. When we got there Pete slowed, drove through the big sliding doors
, and parked in a long line of buggies. We hopped out and walked over to the airlock—I was still bouncing in the low gravity and tipped forward at one point, landing on my hands. Pete was gliding along beside me and laughed as I fell over.

  “Damn,” I said, pushing myself back up too quickly and almost tipping onto my back. The low-gravity harness I had trained in back on Earth had been poor preparation.

  “You’ll get used to it,” said Pete with a slightly condescending sneer. His attitude was the first tangible sign of the jaded and gloomy mood of the colony that I was about to join.

  We entered the airlock, the doors closed behind us and thin wisps of icy condensation swirled and mixed with the dust. Pete pushed up his visor and stomped the dirt off his boots onto a metal grate beside the door. The grimy airlock was a jarring contrast to the bright landscape outside.

  My resilience was about to be tested.

  2. TRESPASSING

  The dust was sucked off our suits and out through several exhaust vents. I noticed the hum of the extractor fans and could feel, almost smell, a cold dry electrostatic charge in the air. Pete’s suit remained a mottled red and brown—it was permanently stained. Once inside the staging area, we pushed our helmets back, and I noticed that Pete pushed the hood of his undersuit back as well. We had all left them on during the journey from Earth.

  “It’s warm enough to have the hood off?” I asked.

  “If you’re wearing an outersuit,” he replied. “Otherwise no, not really. After a few months, exposure to the cold will give you more brown fat cells, and that helps, but you still need the hood. Come on, I’ll give you the tour inside.”

  I bounced down the passage, nearly bumping my head on the ceiling with every step. On the way to the inner colony’s main airlock, we passed airlocks to the greenhouses’ three backbone passages on our left.

  Beside the main airlock door there was a big red button and a comms panel with a camera.

  “Every airlock in the colony has the same system,” said Pete. “Paired doors with comms panels to use in the event of an emergency.”