The Ruins of Mars: Waking Titan (The Ruins of Mars Trilogy) (23 page)

             
Clearing his throat, Amit looked across the Bridge Deck at Captain Tatyana Vodevski, muttering quietly into a headset, no doubt communicating with Earthside Command about Operation Columbia. Amit waited for her to finish speaking.

             
“Captain,” he said when she’d hit the ‘send’ key on her station.

             
“Yes?”

             
“I’ve been thinking since we lost Braun that he never told us
where
the alien radio signal was originating from.”

Frowning, Tatyana disengaged the magnets in her chair and executed a tight forward somersault, landing softly at Amit’s side.

“I thought the signal was coming from the metal ball that projects the mini-Sun,” she said, leaning in over his shoulder to look at his screen.

“As did I, but that might have been a mistake.”

“One of many, I fear,” Tatyana sighed.

Silently, Amit screamed at her, at everyone on the crew for so hastily throwing Braun to the monsters that circled below the sea of mystery surrounding these ruins. He wanted very badly to see his family again and cursed himself for not siding with YiJay more fervently.

Roll the dice
, he’d said. Do your duty. What a fool.

Hindsight is twenty-twenty, he reminded himself, attempting to find balance and calm. Unless you’ve got a time machine
, you better stop beating yourself up. Now is not the time for self-loathing. Now is the time to figure out if Braun is still alive and, if he is, how to get him back.

Whether or not Julian wanted to admit it, Amit knew that they needed Braun to make the trip home. Without him, the ship was trapped, stuck in orbit around Mars, their only choice being to abandon it and take up residence at Ilia Base.

However, if they could find the source of the signal, maybe they could stop it—turn it off. If his understanding of what had happened to Remus and Romulus was true for Braun as well, then maybe he wasn’t really dead, but rather held prisoner, so to speak, within the waves of the signal’s data. Maybe he’d been protected from the Pulse. Maybe he could be saved.

That is a lot of maybes, Amit frowned. But one has to start somewhere.

              “Cast a wider net,” Tatyana said, her tone official and infuriating to the Indian.

             
“Yes, Captain,” he responded, not betraying the slightest hint of his true emotions.

             
Turning away, Tatyana pushed off and drifted back to her station, an incoming transmission from Lander 2 dancing across the screen.

With his anger competing for control of his heart, Amit increased the net’s range to its widest capacity. It would take longer for the
Ears to find anything this way, especially since Braun wasn’t around to expedite the process, but if it was there, then the net would catch the alien radio signal eventually.

Jamming the tip of a finger down on the green initiation icon, Amit pulled himself free from his chair then floated towards the exit.

              “I’ll be in my cabin if you need me,” he said over his shoulder to the captain. “Reading, I guess.”

             
Nodding absently, Tatyana’s eyes were fixed on the screen in front of her, the image of the Chinese Ark fast filling its frame.

Rendezvous

              From the cockpit window of Lander 2, the flat grey hull of the Chinese Ark loomed like a tanker ship in a sea of stars. Embossed with red swashes of Mandarin Chinese, the ship dwarfed the little Lander like some prehistoric shark, its long and cylindrical body spinning slowly on its axis.

Taking the controls lightly in his hands, Aguilar broke from their flight path and accelerated towards the ship, skimming in low along its broad hull.

             
“
Merde,
man,” swore Julian as Aguilar tipped the Lander to avoid hitting a protruding ComSat dish.

Missing the snare by less than a meter, Aguilar eased the controls back and aimed for the rear of the Ark.

              “Sorry,” he said. “I’ve got to keep us close so we don’t show up on any Earthside tracking equipment.”

             
“Yeah, sure,” grumbled Julian.

             
Charging up the starboard-side thruster jets, Aguilar hit the ‘fire’ command and spun the Lander one-hundred-eighty degrees until it was pointing back the direction they’d come, towards Mars. Then, with one hand on the controls, he used the other to gently dial down the ship’s speed until it matched that of the Chinese Ark.

             
“We want the maintenance airlock, which is here,” pointed Julian, jabbing a gloved finger at a holographic blueprint of the Ark projected on the Lander’s window.

             
“Almost there,” Aguilar nodded, making slight corrections to his flight controls.

             
On the holograph, a green triangle, which represented the Lander, gently moved towards a red circle that marked the airlock.

As the Ark turned on its axis, a series of metal cylinders came into view, jutting up in rows from the hull.

              “What are those?” Aguilar said, tipping his chin towards the pods.

             
“I’m not sure,” Julian frowned. “They aren’t on the blueprints we’ve got.”

             
“Should I take us in for a closer look?”

             
Checking his watch, Julian shook his head.

             
“We’d better stick to the plan. Look, there’s the airlock.”

             
Reluctantly, Aguilar aimed the Lander for the red circle on the blueprints. Waiting until the icon which represented the Lander had overlapped the airlock on the screen, he carefully locked the controls and set the speed so that even as the Ark turned on its axis, the Lander would remain on target.

             
“Okay,” he exhaled. “It’s show time,
mon ami.
”

             
Reaching under their seats, the two men unclipped fully charged extended-EVA Survival Packs and swapped them for the ones they were currently wearing.

As a rush of cool air jetted in beneath his chin, Julian closed his eyes and took a long breath. He was nervous. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d actually been nervous before an EVA.

              “You good?” Aguilar asked.

             
“Oui.”

             
Typing at his Flight Console, Aguilar executed the command for decompression and Julian felt the floor beneath his boots shudder as the pumps purred to life. Outside the window, the Chinese Ark no longer turned as it had when they’d arrived. Now that the Lander was matching the ships slow rotations, it was space that seemed to spin. After a minute-and-a-half, the vibrations in the floor abruptly died and a green light flashed across the window.

Hitting his seat belt release, Aguilar floated up out of his chair then shoved off towards the back of the Lander. Deftly skimming over the tops of the empty seats, he stopped himself at a storage locker and popped the clips
that secured the lid. Inside, a matte black rifle was nestled in a bed of temper foam, two balloon-tipped grappling hooks on either side of the barrel.

             
“Everything there?” Julian said from the cockpit.

             
“Yeah,” responded the pilot, gazing down at the gun. “It’s just real, you know?”

             
“
Real
?”

             
“Yeah. I mean, we’re really doing it. I never thought when I signed up for this mission that I would be doing anything like this.”

             
“So says the military man. Think how I feel. I’m a civilian.”

             
Prying the rifle free from the memory foam, Aguilar slung its strap over his shoulder then pulled the two grappling hooks loose and tucked them under his other arm.

             
“They better give us medals for this shit,” he said as he made his way back to the front of the vessel.

             
“Somehow, I think not,” Julian laughed, meeting Aguilar at the Lander’s hatch.

             
With his boots pressed firmly against the floor, Julian reached up to the ceiling and gave a silver latch handle a quarter-turn then pulled. Swinging down, a section of paneling revealed the grappling turret that Braun had used to anchor the Lander when Julian had gone EVA to repair the cracked laser dome. Quickly disconnecting the lead of the woven Alon cable spool, Julian held out the loose end out for Aguilar to attach to one of the grappling hooks.

             
“Too bad Braun’s not here,” Julian sighed. “I’m not sure I trust your aim.”

             
“I think that’s why they give you two hooks.”

             
“Comforting.”

             
Placing a hand on the hatch lock, Julian turned to Aguilar.

             
“Ready?”

             
“Yeah.”

             
Inside his helmet, Julian whispered the names of his daughter and ex-wife then pulled up on the lock. Swinging the hatch out into the void of space, he fought the strange sensation of vertigo. Even though there was no
up
or
down
, he still felt as though he were standing on the edge of some infinite abyss.

             
“Help me get strapped in,” Aguilar said, gesturing to a harness secured to the wall with Zip Ties near the open hatch.

             
Slipping the chest piece over his head, Aguilar grinned as Julian brought the leg loops up and around his groin.

             
“Don’t get too comfortable down there, Frenchy,” the young pilot teased.

             
A battery of French swear words drifted through his helmet speakers, but soon, Julian had clipped the last sections of the harness together. Using anchors on either side of the open hatch, Aguilar secured the harness until he was like a blue-and-white wasp caught in the black web of a giant spider.

Suspended in the multitude of straps, Aguilar looked out across the span of eight or nine meters to the
airlock of the Chinese Ark. Spotting the metal rungs of a ladder that passed to the right of the airlock, he shouldered the rifle and gazed down the barrel.

“Load me up,” he said.

Taking the balloon-tipped hook that had been fastened to the cable spool, Julian slid it into the barrel of the grappling gun and twisted it until it would not turn any more. A green LED illuminated on the top of the rifle, signifying that it was loaded and ready for use.

“Okay,” Aguilar sighed, his eyes trained on the ladder. “Here we go.”

With that, he squeezed the trigger and was instantly pressed back against the web of his harness. Sailing across the void, the little yellow-tipped grappling hook made contact with a rung of the maintenance ladder and suctioned down.

             
“Nice shot,” said Julian, reaching up to press a button on the side of the cable spool.

             
Reeling in swiftly, the line soon became taut: its thin silver strand forming a bridge between the two ships.

Carefully, Aguilar unclipped the harness from its anchors then went to work taking the thing off. When he was free, he kicked the mess of straps and hooks back into the rear of the Lander and turned to a wall-mounted storage bin. Opening the weightless lid, he dug out a black cloth front-pack—like the backup parachute a skydiver might wear—and handed it to Julian.

“Amit uploaded the doctored Checkpoint Flight Path onto a Tablet so all you’ll have to do is plug it into their NavSat Computer. As soon as his program has taken control of the ship, it will be safe for me to leave the Lander and come across to help you place the explosives.”

“You know, you’re starting to sound like
the captain,” said Julian mockingly.

“That’s actually a compliment,” Aguilar responded with a smile.

Clipping a safety line onto the bridge cable, Julian paused in the open hatch.

“I guess it kind of is
, isn’t it?”

With a last look around the cabin of the Lander, he pushed off and careened out into open space. Zipping along the line, he realized too late that he was moving very fast and tried to brace himself for the impact of meeting the Chinese Ark. Legs out in front, Julian’s boots connected heavily as they struck the hull of the ship, a dull pain vibrating up from his knees reminding him of his age. Working quickly to counter the forces that wanted to send him ricocheting off the ship into nothingness, he grabbed at a rung of the ladder and pulled himself gently to the cold metal of the hull.