In the Shadow of Deimos

Book : Terraforming Mars

by Jane Killick

Genres: Media Tie-In; Space Exploration; Space Opera

Synopsis

Mars is the new frontier for humanity, as we launch an epic saga of inspiring planetary exploration based on the award-winning Terraforming Mars board game.



Mars, 2316. The recently created Terraforming Committee arbitrates the dramatic development of Mars by powerful rival corporations. When a rogue asteroid crashes into a research center and kills its lone technician, the fragile balance between corporations is shattered. The World Government's investigation into the accident reveals a multitude of motives, while a corporation insider stumbles on a dark conspiracy. Two Martians with very different agendas must navigate a trail of destruction and treachery to uncover the truth and expose those responsible, before Mars falls to Earth's corruption. As lines blur between progress and humanity, Mars itself remains the biggest adversary of all.

Release date: August 3, 2021

Publisher: Aconyte

Print pages: 352

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

Martian dirt crunched under Luka’s boot as he took his first step onto the planet that was to be his new home. After another step, he was finally free of the landing vehicle and paused a moment to feel the solidity of Mars beneath his feet. It was good to be heavy again. The gravity was not much more than a third of Earth’s, but after six months floating in the near weightlessness of a spacecraft its presence was reassuring.

Turning away from the landing vehicle, Luka looked out across the vast, majestic landscape of the untamed planet. The rusty, red dirt stretched as far as the horizon to meet a sky tinged with pink by the dust in the thin, unbreathable atmosphere. In the distance to his left, the triple mountain peaks of Tharsis Montes reached up to touch the small, bright, white disc of the sun, while what felt like less than a kilometer to his right the ground fell away into the canyons of Noctis Labyrinthus. The enormity of the expanse ahead of him was almost frightening after the confines of his journey, and the quickness of his breath echoed inside his helmet.

Because Mars was not only beautiful, it was also dangerous. Without his rad-suit, Luka would freeze in average temperatures of minus thirty, suffocate in air with almost zero percent oxygen, and eventually succumb to the effects of cosmic and solar radiation.

Luka walked further from the ladder and almost stumbled in gravity he wasn’t used to as the next migrant descended from the landing vehicle. Luka, like the other forty-nine people who had left Earth with him, had turned his back on the planet where he was born to seek out a new life. Most of them believed the advertising which hailed the migrants as pioneers taking the chance to grasp exciting opportunities in the new frontier. Even if it meant the only way to afford their passage was to sign up as indentured labor for the ThorGate corporation. But for Luka, it was the chance to leave behind the pain of his life on Earth. The overpopulated, polluted, blue-green planet was the place where his family died and turning his back on that was the only way he felt he could survive.

“Welcome to Mars!” came a woman’s voice over the speaker inside his helmet.

He looked around and, from the way the other migrants were doing the same, he knew that she was broadcasting to them all on their team channel.

“My name is Anita Andreassen,” came the voice again, in a Norwegian accent. “You can see me over here with the flags.”

Standing a little apart from Luka’s fellow confused travelers, all in identical white rad-suits, was a suited figure waving two triangle flags like someone guiding an aircraft into land. Each flag was printed with a lightning symbol flashing through a blue and red depiction of a doorway with sliding doors which were the elements of the ThorGate logo.

“One of the things you’ll learn on Mars is that everyone looks the same in a rad-suit,” she continued, lowering the flags as all the migrants seemed to have worked out where the voice was coming from. “We’ll get you settled in to your habitat soon, but I know that you’ll be keen to have a look around and stretch your legs after the journey. Please go slow. It takes a while to get used to the gravity and the closeness of the horizon. Also, make an effort to look at where you’re walking. You might not realize how restrictive the view is out of your helmet until you kick a rock you didn’t see and fall over. We’ve all done it, so if it happens to you don’t be embarrassed.

“Anyway, I’m sure you’ve heard all the safety briefings so many times on the journey that you can recite them in your sleep. So, take a few minutes to look around – it’s a view you’ll get used to, but never get tired of – then we’ll board the bus to your habitat where a special welcome meal is waiting for you.”

Anita pointed to her left where the “bus” was waiting. It was more like a military vehicle than the sort of bus Luka used to take to school when he was a child in Cologne. It had six, fat, off-road wheels, high sides dusted with particles of red Martian soil and windshields at the front and the rear.

“What’s that?” A male voice came over Luka’s helmet speaker. It took him a moment to realize that Anders, one of the other migrants, had turned on his communicator to broadcast to them all. He pointed up into the sky.

Luka raised his head and saw, against the pink backdrop, a pinprick of light as bright as the sun.

“That must be the asteroid,” said Anita. “A little bit earlier than I thought, but don’t worry, the guidance system will bring it down at a safe distance. Although, asteroid crashes are best viewed from inside, so let’s get you all on the bus.”

The migrants around him didn’t move. They were mesmerized by the light as it became larger and brighter. The ball of fire streaked through the sky with a plume of gas trailing behind it. The more Luka stared, the more the fiery missile seemed to have two tails. Luka blinked to clear his vision and, when he looked again, he was sure there were two objects hurtling through the atmosphere.

“It’s coming towards us!” shouted Anders, over the comms.

With terror, Luka realized his fellow migrant was right. There were two fireballs. One sailing overhead like a shooting star, the other cutting a blazing path towards them.

“On the bus so we can get to the habitat,” said Anita, with a hint of concern in her voice.

Some of the migrants stumbled towards the bus, but others were still mesmerized by the falling asteroid. More had turned on their comms to broadcast generally, and the sounds of panic in several different languages reached Luka’s ears. His beating heart was telling him to run, but in the rad-suit and the unfamiliar Martian gravity he feared he wouldn’t be quick enough and might fall. The migrant next to him dropped to the ground like a soldier taking cover under enemy fire. Luka took one last look at the flaming asteroid – now so large that it blotted out the rest of the sky – and ducked down to do the same. Instinct caused his knees to buckle, and he landed on all fours.

Dust blew up all around him as the space rock shot past. Heat from the fire passed over him and the breeze from the asteroid’s wake unsettled the thin Martian atmosphere. Puffs of vapor from Luka’s fast, relieved breath briefly formed on the inside of his visor before they were cleared by the ventilation system of his suit.

The asteroid disappeared less than a kilometer away and fell into the nearest canyon of Noctis Labyrinthus. Luka didn’t see it crash, but he felt the tremor ripple through the ground and tensed his muscles to steady himself. Above him, a white contrail hung in the sky, like a witness to the rock’s trajectory, pointing into the chasm where a cloud of red dust had been thrown up by the crash.

Anita’s voice called out across the cacophony of amazed, scared, and confused voices clogging up the team’s comms. “The asteroid was supposed to crash a long way from here. I don’t know what happened. Stay here while I go check what damage has been done.”

She ran to the bus, using the half-hopping method that people who live on Mars had developed, and dropped her flags at the hatchway. Climbing on board, she promised to return.

But, as Luka watched the bus leave with its fat wheels kicking up dust, he had the horrible feeling that they had been abandoned.

 

CHAPTER TWO

Julie stood at the window of her office and watched the cloud of dust rise up against the horizon as the asteroid slammed itself into the bedrock of Mars. The kinetic energy of such an impact would be enough to heat the ground and cause it to radiate warmth for many centuries. It was a crude but effective method of terraforming that, one day, would play its small role in making the globe habitable by humans.

Even so, she cursed the maverick chief executive of CrediCor corporation for the flamboyant way he did things. Multibillionaire Bard Hunter was so full of himself that he liked to hurl asteroids at the planet in full view of all human settlers, rather than away from the equator or on the other side of Mars. The Terraforming Committee, so eager to encourage him to contribute his own fortune to the enterprise, entertained his whims without question. Just thinking about it made Julie’s hands clench into fists.

It would never have happened when she was in charge. But that was all taken away from her in 2315 when the World Government invited corporations to play an official part in terraforming Mars and lured them into the project with universal tax funding. That was the moment that she, as the head of the United Nations Mars Initiative, found she had to fight for resources alongside all the other organizations on the planet. Officially, UNMI’s projects had favored status when they put their terraforming proposals forward for approval. In reality, UNMI’s status didn’t make up for the business acumen and investment the other corporations had to offer.

So, she cursed Bard Hunter and all he represented in the knowledge that today’s asteroid crash would be tomorrow’s dust accumulation: on their solar panel arrays, the city’s roof, and the dirt tracks which were the closest thing they had to roads on Mars.

The sound of rapid knocking on her office door caused Julie to turn from the view. Kareem, without waiting for a response, barged in. Her deputy appeared flustered. He had swept back his jet-black hair so many times that the grease from his palm made it sheen and his bare chin, where he had recently shaved off his beard, seemed to exacerbate his worried expression.

“Have you seen the asteroid?” His usual quiet and reserved English accent made his concern sound even more alarming.

“I saw it.” Julie glanced back at the window where the crash site was a haze of dust.

“You’re not watching ICN?” Kareem said.

“I’m perfectly capable of watching an asteroid crash without some idiot commentator at Interplanetary Cinematics telling me what I’m seeing.”

“Then you didn’t see it!” said Kareem. After all their time working closely together, he’d seemed to have gotten used to Julie’s particular brand of sarcasm. He looked over at the view of Mars. “Window, switch to ICN.”

The image on Julie’s window, which was actually a live stream from a camera on the outside of Tharsis City, switched to a different Martian landscape. This view had the subtle logo of Interplanetary Cinematics News in the top right-hand corner and the words asteroid crash emblazoned across the bottom. The feed was from a camera looking at a different part of Mars which Julie recognized as out towards Noctis Labyrinthus. The familiar vista appeared as it always did, with the red dirt stretching out across the Tharsis upland and the mountains rising in the distance. But in the middle of the image, was the white wisp of a contrail and the haze of dust slowly dispersing into the sky like a trail of smoke from a campfire.

The sound of an excited commentator burbled out of the speakers: “…no idea what, if any, damage has been done. We’re also still waiting for any word from CrediCor…”

“Window, sound off!” Julie ordered and the commentator abruptly shut up. She frowned at her colleague. “Kareem, what’s going on? I saw the asteroid crash. It came down exactly where it was supposed to.”

“The main piece did, but it must have splintered on entry because a piece broke off and came down over there.” He pointed at the image on the window.

“Isn’t that near ThorGate’s new construction site?” asked Julie.

“Yeah,” said Kareem, rubbing the point of his chin. He grinned at her. “Want to take a look?”

She knew they shouldn’t, it really wasn’t any of UNMI’s business. But Kareem’s curiosity was infectious.

“Let’s take a rover,” she said.

The asteroid was so large and had struck the canyon with such force that it acted like a missile, creating a path of devastation through the deep valley. Most of the space rock had shattered into rubble on impact, but several large pieces had survived to lodge themselves at the base of the five kilometer deep channel. It was still possible to see where the pieces had been blackened by the heat of its searing descent through Mars’ carbon dioxide atmosphere and where they had broken. The light gray material of the inner asteroid contrasted against the red of the planet.

Julie watched it all on one of the screens of ThorGate’s mobile monitoring stations, which had been brought within a few meters of the canyon. An observation robot had been sent down the slope and was relaying pictures to a cluster of people in rad-suits. Kareem watched by Julie’s side, occasionally stepping from left to right to see past the helmets of people who had more right to be there than they did.

“Is that a piece of metal?” he said over their private comms channel as he pointed at the screen.

Jutting out of the rubble, Julie could see a twisted piece of something silvery which could be steel but was most likely magnesium. Strong, light, and abundant on Mars, magnesium was cheap and efficient to find on the planet and didn’t risk oxidization. She stared, dreading what that small scrap of debris meant.

“It must be from ThorGate’s research station,” she said, stating the fact without allowing emotion to seep into her voice. “The one which caused all that controversy when they proposed building it last year, remember? All the other corporations lobbied against allowing ThorGate to set it up in such a prime location.”

“Were people stationed there?” asked Kareem in concern.

She nodded, recalling the uncomfortable statistics she’d once read in a report. “An initial team was supposed to go in to set up, as far as I remember. After that, it was due to accommodate twenty, maybe thirty scientists.”

He swore.

Julie looked closer and she saw more evidence of human habitation crushed beneath the rubble. If the asteroid had made a direct hit, the station would have been completely obliterated by the force of its missile-like strike, but it appeared to have been on the edge of the impact zone. Some remnants of the building might have survived, but anyone inside would almost instantly have been killed. They might have experienced a moment of terror before they were either crushed by the asteroid or made to suffocate and freeze to death if they were exposed to the unforgiving Martian atmosphere.

She turned from the image on the screen and tried to push the unpleasant thought from her mind.

Further down the ridge, a news crew from Interplanetary Cinematics with the yellow, red and black logo of their corporation emblazoned on the back of their rad-suits, was capturing footage from every angle possible on that side of the canyon. Back at Tharsis City, Julie was used to seeing a single operator remotely controlling several HoverCams in a room, but out on the Martian surface the thin air meant flying something even as light as a camera required helicopter blades more than a meter wide which could be dangerous, especially if the required personnel for safety backup and maintenance wasn’t on scene yet, so each camera had to be handheld by an individual person. Personally, Julie thought it was the practice of ICN to make reporting more personal for viewers.

Others without a corporation logo on their backs milled around the canyon like confused tourists, some of them perilously close to the edge and leaning over to get a closer look. From what she could tell, they were the migrants who were due to build the nearby city and had landed shortly before the asteroid crash. One woman, who seemed to know what she was doing, went down the line telling everyone across the general comms channel to move back. By the sound of her accent, it was likely she was part of the ThorGate corporation which proudly maintained its Nordic roots. As she turned, Julie caught a glimpse of her face through the bubble of her helmet and recognized her as Anita Andreassen, the corporation’s Head of Martian Projects.

“I think we should go,” said Kareem over their private comm channel. “Before they find any bodies. That’s not an image I want to have in my memory.”

“You’re probably right.” She was about to head back to the rover when the news crew began running over to where another rover was driving up to the throng of parked vehicles.

“What’s going on?” Julie asked.

“No idea,” said Kareem as they watched the camera operators gather around the rover’s hatchway.

The hatch slid sideways, creating an opening in the body of the rover revealing a rad-suited figure.

“Rufus, can I get your reaction?” said an eager voice over the general comms.

Immediately, Julie knew who it was who had attracted the news crew’s attention. Rufus Oladepo was the Chair of the Terraforming Committee and, therefore, the closest thing Mars had to a head of state.

“When I’ve had a chance to look around,” came Rufus’s recognizable booming voice in response. He had what many termed an “international” accent with hints of American, South African, and Nigerian reflecting the cross-cultural world of politics in which he operated.

Rufus stepped out of the rover and strode purposefully across the plain. Two camera operators chased after him and two others ran backwards out in front, pointing their cameras towards him and trying not to fall over. Julie realized he was heading directly to the part of the ridge which she and Kareem had selected as an appropriate vantage point. Deciding she needed to leave before they got caught up in the media circus, she began to step away. But Rufus had already spotted her.

“Julie Outerbridge!” he declared as he closed in on her position. “What interest has UNMI in this crash?”

Julie accessed the controls on the arm of her rad-suit so she, like him, was broadcasting on the general channel. “Just seeing if we can help,” she said, aware that everyone around her, including the news crew, was listening. “UNMI has been operating on Mars for longer than most corporations and we have a great deal of expertise.”

“Commendable,” said Rufus, but his expression through the bubble of his helmet, hidden from the cameras, revealed he remained suspicious.

Just as Julie remained suspicious of him.

The attention of everyone out on the ridge was drawn to Rufus and they swarmed around his position, meaning Julie could no longer get away without it being obvious. She shot a look across at Kareem who shook his head to suggest they would have to stay.

Rufus peered over the edge to where the person on the safety line had successfully negotiated the slope of the canyon to reach the bottom. He maintained a safe distance and turned to the cameras so he stood tall within the dramatic landscape of Mars.

“Like everyone,” he began, “I was horrified to hear of the asteroid disaster which occurred this morning. It was especially disturbing to learn that the fragment crashed here at the site of ThorGate’s new project to build Noctis City. By some miracle, no one was stationed at the research unit at the bottom of this canyon when the asteroid hit. If they had been, the tragedy could have been much worse.”

Julie’s own sense of relief was echoed in the audible sigh of those around her who were still broadcasting over the general comms.

“But, nevertheless,” Rufus continued. “This is something which should never have happened. It is my intention–”

“I’ve found something!” yelled a young, male voice, cutting across Rufus’s speech. It was one member of the team who had remained clustered around the screen, which showed the observer robot’s camera stream, while everyone else was listening to the Chair of the Terraforming Committee.

“What is it?” came Anita’s voice. She hurried over with bounding strides.

“I think I can see something… human,” said the man with quiet concern.

A sick feeling welled up in Julie’s stomach as she thought about the horrific death the person must have suffered.

“Are you sure?” said Rufus, pushing his way past the onlookers to stand directly in front of the screen. “I have it on good authority that no one was there.”

“I’m afraid I am certain,” said the man. “It’s an arm. I think it’s wearing a WristTab.”

“Can you access it remotely?” said Rufus. “Does your robot have that capability?”

“If the WristTab’s not completely smashed,” the young man replied.

The tension increased as they waited and watched the screen to find out. Or, perhaps, it was only in Julie’s imagination that everyone around her was nervous. Cocooned in her rad-suit with only a few people broadcasting across the general comms channel, there really wasn’t any way to tell. The observational robot pivoted and zeroed in on the flickering WristTab, but not enough to see anything. The young man concentrated his efforts on the screen’s mechanics to see what information the WristTab could offer.

“OK,” said the man. “There’s some residual power. Not enough to pull any data, but it’s still possible to read the identifying tag. The WristTab belongs to Giovanni Lupo.”

A female scream ripped across the comms and Anita clasped her gloved hands to the bubble of her helmet. She staggered sideways with the weight of the news and someone standing next to her had to grab her arm to stop her from falling. “Gianni? No!” Her grief-stricken cries echoed terrifyingly through every helmet in the vicinity before they were cut off as she switched her comms away.

The same rad-suited figure who had taken her arm led her away from the canyon. A shocked silence, punctuated by the occasional hiss of static, filled their helmets.

Rufus turned from the scene of devastation and seemed to become taller as he raised his chest in a defiant pose.