The Ruins of Mars: Waking Titan (The Ruins of Mars Trilogy) (20 page)

Operation
Columbia—
10 days after the Pulse

             
James Floyd sat behind a new desk in his corner office of Kennedy Space Center’s Wing Building. The brilliant Florida sunset outside the floor-to-ceiling windows was unable to sway his attention from the daunting task of replying to emails. Using the new Tablet he had recently bought, he typed a message to his Mars Team Project Chiefs.

Outlining construction dates, timelines, and future missions’ objectives, the email was really more of an official goodbye than anything else. Pausing for a moment, he made to speak to the empty room then caught himself in the action and frowned, suddenly lost in thought.

              “Um, Dr. Floyd, Sir?” came a voice from the new intercom unit on his desk.

             
“What, Phillip?” James replied to the box.

             
“You have a visitor: a Mrs. Eve Bear. She’s on her way up now.”

             
“Phillip, do you really think now is an appropriate time for jokes?”

             
“It’s no joke, Sir. She had high-level clearance credentials and a Secret Service envoy. She’s on her way up now. I—”

             
James turned off the intercom and tightened the knot of his tie. A soft knock emanated from the door, and he quickly got to his feet.

             
“Come in.”

             
The door opened and Eve Bear, wearing a dark blue knee-length skirt and white blouse,

walked in.

“Wait outside,” she said to the stony-faced Secret Service men behind her.

“Yes ma’am,” one of the men replied and shut the door.

              “I didn’t believe the receptionist when he said you were here,” James smiled, moving around to the side of his desk. “Can I offer you anything to drink?”

             
“It’s too late for coffee, Floyd,” Eve sighed tiredly as she sank into a chair opposite James’s.

             
“I wasn’t talking about coffee,” he replied, opening a small cabinet beside his desk.

             
“Whiskey and ice,” she said.

             
Handing her the drink, James quickly poured himself a Greyhound then dropped into his own chair. For a moment, only the sound of ice clinking against glass rose above the hum of the electric lights.

             
“Are you here on official business? James spoke, finally breaking the silence.

             
“Why do you ask?”

             
“Well, Barnes has me up for review after the Braun incident. I don’t think I’ll be here much longer. I just thought maybe they sent you to deliver the hammer blow.”

             
“I don’t fire people like you.” Eve said, sipping her drink. “And given what’s happened, I think your employment status is literally the last thing on anyone's mind.”

             
James nodded and fell silent.

             
“You have kids, right?” she asked, fixing him that calm-yet-smoldering gaze she was famous for.

“Yes, two daughters. Eight and eleven years old.”

“That’s lucky.”

“I know.”

“My granddaughter was five,” she said over the rim of her glass.

“I’m really sorry to hear that,” James muttered, not sure how else to respond.

Shifting gears, Eve set her drink down on the tabletop and crossed her legs. “You know anyone who didn’t make it? I mean, other than the obvious.”

“My neighbor down the street was eighty-one,” James shrugged, thinking of old Mr. Alberts slumped over his steering wheel on
James’s front lawn.

             
“Yeah,” Eve chuckled. “Three Supreme Court Justices dropped dead. Not a big loss if you ask me.”

             
“I heard,” said James. “How’s this thing affecting your guy’s shot at a second term?”

             
“Don’t know yet, too soon to tell. The world is in mourning. We can’t talk about politics right now.”

             
James finished his Greyhound and stood up, taking Eve’s empty glass in his other hand. As the amber-colored whiskey splashed over the melting cubes in her tumbler, James tossed a quick glance at the Chief of Staff to the President of the United States. Her silver hair hung limply at her shoulders, and she exuded the same tenseness that seemed to plague everyone in the aftermath of recent events.

“What are you doing all the way down here?” James said, handing Eve her second drink. “Florida is quite a drive from D.C., unless you flew, that is. You didn’t fly, did you?”

Moving a cube of ice around with her fingertip, Eve shook her head.

“God no. The Secret Service drove me.”

“That’s good,” smiled James as he took up his chair and leaned back in the soft leather. “So, why are you here?”

“I’m here on unofficial business.”

“Oh?” James said, cocking his head to the side. “And that
is
?”              

“We—the President and I—would like to know everything
you
know about what happened on the morning of July 16
th
. Not the stuff that’s in the reports. We saw all of that. I want to know what
you
know.”

Shifting in his seat, James blew out a long breath.

“Sorry to say that I know pretty much what
you
know.”

“Humor me.”

“Alright, fine. We know that whatever happened was like an electromagnetic pulse, only that it didn’t fry
every
electronic device, just the ones in close proximity to humans at the time the event took place.”

“What else?”
              “Judging by the reports that I’m sure you’ve already seen, the event lasted for less than ten seconds.”

“Ten fucking seconds,” Eve echoed. “That’s all it takes to kill nearly a billion people? Ten seconds?”

“Apparently yes,” whispered James.

Tipping her head down so that silver locks of hair fell in front of her eyes, Eve spoke softly.

“Have you ever heard of the Chinese extremist group called The Tenth Sun?”

“Yeah,” said James
, unsure where this was going.

“They’re really fired up about this,” Eve went on. “In fact they’re taking it as a si
gn, a telling of things to come.”

She paused to take a long pull from her drink.

“You know what they’re calling it?” she asked, spitting ice back into her glass.

“No. What?”

“The Purge,” she said flatly. “They’re calling it, ‘The Purge.’”
              James was silent for several beats as he tried to comprehend—really truly comprehend— just how terrified and wounded the world was at that moment. Never before had the future been so uncertain. Never before had the total annihilation of the human race seemed so plausible.

“What else do you know?” said Eve, sitting
up straighter in her chair as if doing so would better mask her fear.

“Well,” began James slowly. “In most cases, people over the age of eighty or under the age of seven died instantly. We don’t know why some lived and others didn’t.”

Watching Eve’s face carefully, James thought he saw a flicker of pain behind her eyes but it was gone so fast he wasn’t sure if it had really been there.

“What else?” she said, picking her drink up then quickly setting it back down.

“We’ve created a timeline of events after the, um,
Pulse
, and discovered that the first failures of electrical equipment happened on Bessel Base, then the High Earth Orbit Shipyard, then the Low Earth Orbit International Space Station, and then, finally, on Earth itself.”

“What does that mean?”

“We think it means that we, us—the humans—acted as some kind of lightning rod. None of our solar monitoring equipment picked up anything, yet many of the survivors, including myself, reported seeing the aurora just before passing out. It’s like this
Pulse
raced across open space, doing no harm to anyone until it came into contact with us.”

“Not just us,” corrected Eve.

“Yes, that’s true. Not just us.”

“So they’re all dead?” she asked, her green eyes fixed on James’s.

“Yes. All of them. And before you ask, we don’t know why.”

“July 16
th
,” Eve said in a heavy tone. “The day the Artificial Intelligence went extinct.”

             
“We’ll grow more,” James offered hopefully, though in his heart he felt the deaths of Copernicus and Alexandria with a deep emptiness that threatened to stretch on to infinity.

AI were not like humans, and their lives had been placed on a different scale because of it. Though their race had existed for fewer than thirty years, each second had been like a week to them. Each minute a year. Each day a lifetime. And now they were all dead. Mankind owed a hefty debt to the AI, for without their perspectives and suggestions, many of the technologies that James’s crews depended on would never have existed. For civilization, measuring the impact of the AI would be like measuring the importance of fire or the internet.

“Will it happen again?” asked Eve, bringing James back from his sad reverence.

             
“The Pulse?” he shrugged. “We have no idea,”

             
“Comforting. You guys are doing a great job here. Remind me, what’s your annual budget?”

             
Chuckling, James nodded towards Eve’s empty glass. “You want another?”

             
“Why not,” she said with a defeated smile. “For all I know, it might be my last.”

             
“If you’re trying to tell me that you’re seventy-nine, then I need to get the name of whatever juice cleanse you’re on.”

             
Face turned to the sunset, Eve snorted and held out her glass.

Taking it, James refilled their drinks, feeling the liquor melt the edges off his anxiety like the corners of the ice in their glasses.

             
“Thanks,” Eve smiled, taking her fresh drink from James. “How’s your crew?”

             
“Are you asking officially or unofficially?”

             
“I have the official reports,” she said softly. “I want to know how they’re doing.”

             
Taking a long sip of his Greyhound, James relished the bitter sweetness of the drink.

             
“They’re okay,” he sighed, crushing a piece of ice with his molars. “They were able to restore their base-to-ship Com link pretty quickly. I think just being able to talk to each other has been a big boost for them.”

             
“Anything new out at the ruins? Future missions maybe?”

             
“Well, seeing as how the moratorium on non-essential EVA is still technically imposed, that would be a big
no
. Also, they’re nervous about going outside in case there’s another Pulse. My safety team is working some things out for them now. You know, survival tips and what not.”

“Were the Landers damaged?”

“No, because nobody was touching them when the Pulse hit. Both Lieutenant Aguilar and Lieutenant Marshall have reported back with full maintenance checklists. Landers 1 and 2 are fine.”             

“Did the
Pulse affect their suits?”

             
“Not sure. No one was wearing one during the event. But my safety team says it would likely fry the CPU and probably also cook the automated functions in their Survival Packs.”

             
“Is that bad?”

             
“If the suit’s CPU goes out, then they would lose cursory function like Augmented Vision and communications. If the Survival Packs go too, then they would lose their air supply and the liquid chemical heating elements in the suit would stop circulating.”

             
“So it’s bad.”

             
“Yeah, but as long as they have spare Survival Packs on hand, they should be able to make it long enough to get back inside a pressurized environment. Why do you ask?”

             
“The Chinese ship.”

             
Nodding slowly, James now saw why Eve was here on
unofficial
business. It amazed him that even during a time of so much upset and personal loss, she was able to steer him right into a conversation he had been trying to avoid since first learning of the Chinese Ark. Like some calculating predator, she appeared to have no problem compartmentalizing and ignoring all of the horrible things happening around her, focusing on the duties of her office as if they were prey.