The Ruins of Mars: Waking Titan (The Ruins of Mars Trilogy) (27 page)

             
Rounding the curve of the tunnel and beginning an upward slope, he counted bulkheads until he was in the area where the last charges were to be placed. To his utter frustration, Julian saw that the final leg of his tiresome task was not going to be as easy as he had previously thought.

Instead of the bare and exposed wall he had been hoping for, there was a large room with a shuttered metal door. This was not totally abnormal, as several of the explosives he’d already set were rigged to the walls
within
certain storage or relay rooms. As was the case now, those charges had required Julian to gain access to the rooms before he could correctly attach them to the hull. However,
those
doors had all been alike.
This
door was different. This door was
locked
.

Lowering himself to the level of the handle, Julian tried to turn it. With a pinched expression on his face, he looked around for whatever was keeping the thing from opening. Noticing a small port a few centimeters above the frozen handle, his heart sank despite the zero gravity.

Cylindrical and complicated looking, the door had a mechanical lock, something not common in this day and age. Closing his eyes, he tried to recall if he had seen a key hanging weightlessly around the necks of any of the dead soldiers above. He couldn’t remember.

             
Why is this door locked? he screamed silently.

             
Pushing back from it a bit, he looked up at the lettering that stitched itself across the face of the entrance. Though his Chinese was beyond rusty, he was still very able to make out the Mandarin words for
Mission Intelligence Launch Bay
.

             
The launch pods, he realized. They locked the MI Launch Bay to keep it safe! They knew this might happen so they locked them in with a key!

             
Calculating the time it would take him to search every Extended-Sleep Chamber in the Crew Deck, Julian swore loudly.

             
“You alright?” came Aguilar’s voice in his ear.

             
“Yeah, I’m fine. How is the Lander coming along?”

             
“Good. I’ve put in most of the spare parts you sent over. Half of our dashboard is lit up like a Christmas tree. It’s fucking beautiful, man!”

             
“That’s good,” Julian said absently, already making up his mind about what he must do. “Just keep me updated on your progress.”

             
“Same to you, how many charges do you have left?”

             
“Two.”

             
“Well alright, man. It looks like we might just survive this ordeal after all!”

             
Slipping along the curved wall, Julian made for an access hatch and dropped down through it into a lower level.

             
“Live or die, today was a wild ride,” the Frenchman said as he headed for the airlock.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Drowning in blood

             
As the sun dipped impartially behind the jagged hills that cut the Martian horizon, Ralph Marshall labored to breathe. Thankful that Harrison could not hear his sucking wet gasps, the Lander pilot gulped at the air inside his helmet.

             
I’m drowning, he thought angrily. Drowning in my own damn blood.

             
The ribs he had broken during his tumble down the plateau were stabbing at him, sharp pain cutting each shallow breath even shorter as his lungs raked across the splintered bones. Worse still, the sun was sinking fast and the wind was picking up. Knowing that the Base was likely to be without lights in the wake of the latest Pulse, Marshall saw a very bleak and frozen future for Harrison and himself.

Last time he had been out after dark, the powerless Dome had practically disappe
ared against the landscape. Now adding to the predicament, a sandstorm was fast brewing, threatening to blanket them like a plague of locusts. If things continued like this, Ilia Base would be all but invisible

             
“Ralph,” shouted Harrison, leaning his head in closely to be heard.

             
“Yeah?” Marshall sputtered back, choking on the words and tasting blood.

             
“How far away do you think we are?”

             
Scanning the desert before them, Marshall pointed to a series of small hills ahead. “It should be over those hills a ways.”

“What’s
a ways
?” Harrison asked.

Unable to answer, Marshall simply shrugged, pinpoints of light dancing in his eyes from the pain the movement caused him.

This is bad, he worried to himself. I felt that through the drugs. This is very bad.

Behind them, the wind gathered clouds of red dust, building the furls up like frothy storm breakers. Racing to meet the tempest, rogue flurries of sand moved
like ghosts on the open plains—their whispering voices calling the two men to join them for eternity.

With the sun now fully behind the western peaks, only a faint orange glow remained to guide their way in the starless night.

“Sandstorm,” Harrison yelled. “Reminds me of the old days.”

Marshall nodded. It was all he could do. Talking seemed impossible. Feeling Harrison suddenly take his hand, the pilot looked over at the young man.

“So we don’t get separated this time,” Harrison said.

Bitterly fighting the desire to cry, Marshall gripped his friend
’s hand as if for dear life and worked at taking deep breaths.

However, try as he might to abate the growing panic, his breathing was getting shallower by the minute. Soon, with legs that refused to work properly, Marshall staggered then dropped to his knees. Still clutching Harrison’s hand, he sucked helplessly at the air in his helmet as if through a straw.

“What’s wrong?” Harrison called, the glass of his visor touching that of Marshall’s.

“I can’t—” Marshall gasped. “I can’t breathe. I think I have a punctured lung.”

“What?”

Wanting to say more, something in Marshall’s brain wouldn’t allow him to waste what little breath he was able to gather.

“Let me carry you,” Harrison said, dropping to one knee in the sand.

“Your heart,” wheezed the pilot fitfully. “You can’t stress yourself. It could stop beating again.”

Ignoring his friend’s plea, Harrison scooped Marshall up in his arms like a child. Thanks to the feeble gravity Mars exercised on its inhabitants, the muscular man was light enough for Harrison to carry without excessive strain.

Resting his head against his friend’s chest, Ralph Marshall pretended that he could hear the beating of Harrison’s heart through the fabric of his
Tac Suit. Using the imagined rhythm, he tried to regulate his labored breathing. Like a goldfish in an inch of water, Marshall continued to survive.

A wild ride indeed

Nearly out of time and totally out of other options, Julian Thomas depressurized the airlock of the Chinese Ark.

Reaching the small chamber had taken longer than he had hoped. Almost getting lost on the way down, he’d become confused in the maze of tunnels and narrow shafts.

Occasionally when he became pressed for time, Julian missed things: little things like where he put his car keys or what time he was supposed to pick his daughter up from school or, most recently, which access hatch bypassed the radiation shield of a Chinese spaceship.

Swinging the
airlock door open, diffused red light flooded into the chamber like liquid magma. Across the space that separated the two ships, the white hull of the Lander shone in sparkling hues of ochre and orange, its polished ceramic hull reflecting back the haunting glow of Mars.

Poking his head out, Julian looked
up
the length of the Ark at the Red Planet, big and bright in the starry sky. Adjusting his perception so that the nose of the ship and Mars were now
down
, he swung out into space and grasped a rung of the nearby maintenance ladder.

Though he did not really want to know what it said, he checked the
timecode on his left wrist. Chewing his upper lip, he stared at the numbers as they flicked past.

Calculations began to run through his head, swirling and mixing with the echoes of promises he made and the faces of those he’d let down time and time again. Slowly turning his attention to the grappling hook
that connected the Ark to the Lander, he allowed several more beats to pass.

Finally, with the weight of resolution settling over him, he dug in the duffle sack and produced a small amount of C4. Placing the little charge on the base of the grappling hook he inserte
d a spare blasting cap, but no Wireless Time-Delay Ignition Switch. Finished, he took one final look at the sleek Lander hanging by a thread above him then turned his back to it and climbed sidelong up the hull of the Chinese ship.

Following the curving path of the ladder as it brought him around the circumference of the hull, he counted each rung in his mind, using their spacing as a sort of measurement to help him keep his bearings. As he neared another ladder running from tail to nose, he pivoted, aligning himself with the direction of the new rungs then began moving down the length of the ship towards the cylindrical launch pods of the Chinese MI.

Fiery and imposing, Mars bore up at him like an angry red eye. Growing nearer, the silhouettes of the launch pods were black against the rusty glow, and though he knew his mind was just playing tricks on him, it seemed to Julian that the long-dormant God of War was stirring with the anticipation of violence.

Having had no time to waste finding a harness or any other safety equipment, Julian climbed, unsecured, down the exterior of the massive Chinese ship, each movement holding the possibility of disaster. Despite the fact that every synapse in his brain was telling him to go slowly and choose his actions with care, a glance at the
timecode on his wrist easily trumped his better instincts.

Thankfully, he soon came to the launch pods and began scanning the area for the best place to set his first charge. Everywhere, weld marks cut across the grey hull, their fat beads of steel glaring like scars on the hide of an elephant.

Standing as tall as eighteen-wheelers turned on end, the MI launch pods spawned long shadows that moved like those on a sundial as the Ark continued to roll on its axis.

Shaking his head inside his bulbous helmet, Julian cursed the dormant killbots for their role in sealing his fate then turned his attention back to the hull.

Before him, about a meter to the left, two seams crossed one another in the shape of an X. As he reached into the duffel sack, his memory tingled, scanning its vast reserves for the source of the nautical nostalgia attached to such a symbol.

‘X marks the spot,’ a voice from his childhood recalled. ‘Just like in
Treasure Island
.’

“Julian, what’s your ETA?” Aguilar said in his ear, scattering the Frenchman’s fond memories.

“I’m just getting ready to place the last two charges,” he responded, taking a shrink-wrapped ball of C4 out of the sack.

“Now? What’s taking you so long? You should be on your way out.”

Sighing, Julian resisted the urge to inform Aguilar that he was, in fact, already
out.

“I just ran into a little setback but it’s no problem. How’s the Lander?”

“She’s back up and running! I’ve taken her through all the major checks so she’s ready to jet as soon as you get here.”

Clamping a rung of the ladder between his knees, Julian let go with his hands and began assembling the first explosive charge.
“Do me a favor will you?” he said, flicking his eyes to the timecode on his wrist.

“Sure, what do you need?”

“Sync my Tablet to this radio channel then open the file ‘Jean Marie Thomas’ and hit ‘play.’”

“I didn’t know your daughter was a musician.”

“She is. Will you do it?”

There was a pause on the other end. Then, the slow and tremulous melodies of a lone cello filtered in through the earpiece of his headset.

“Thank you,” he murmured.

As if in time to the music, he measured out the correct lengths of wire, formed the plastic explosive
, and primed the blasting cap. Adding the final cherry to the deadly sundae of C4, he inserted the Wireless Time-Delay Ignition Switch then pressed the charge firmly against the welded X on the hull. It held solidly.

Looking up from the bomb, he shivered at th
e sight before him. Mars was a Leviathan in space, pulling the Chinese Ark towards its waiting jaws with the invisible tentacles of gravity.

A light, red and startling, flashed across the inside of his helmet’s visor. Chinese symbols spelled themselves out in block letters behind it, partially obscuring his vision. Not needing to decipher what the message meant, Julian gazed down through the translucent symbols at his wrist
Tablet. He was out of time.

On cue, Aguilar cut through the calming melodies of his daughter’s genius.

“Where are you man? What’s going on?”

“I’m almost done.”

“Then why is the airlock door open? Where are you?”

Peering down at the unfinished charge in his hand, Julian
slowly began to assemble it. “I’m outside on the hull.”

“What?! Why?”

              “There was a locked door. I couldn’t get in. It doesn’t really matter, Joey. What matters now is that you have to go.”

             
“
Go
?” shouted the pilot. “Go? What does that mean: go?”

             
“It means, leave me here,” Julian sighed, working the parts of the charge together in a kind of trance.

             
“I’m not leaving you!”

             
With Chinese characters still flashing across his visor, Julian knew it would only be a matter of minutes until Amit’s doctored Flight Path took the ship into an entry trajectory and the MI pods initiated an emergency launch.

“Joey, you have to go now. I need to stay and finish my work.”

“Fuck that,” the young pilot swore. “I’m coming to get you. Where are you?”

“Don’t be stupid. The crew needs you alive. Who know
s what’s happened on the ground? You might be the only Lander pilot left. You have to leave.”

“But—”

“But nothing, my friend. The Ark will be in atmo soon. You must go.”

“No,” Aguilar said with finality. “I’m not leaving you. We’ll figure a way out. Fuck the last charge
. Just come back to the Lander now. We don’t need it.”

“I can’t. The last charge has to go near the MI launch pods
, and I’m not leaving the work unfinished. This ship needs to be utterly destroyed or else our friends aren’t safe.”

“Julian,” Aguilar implored. “Think about what you’re saying, man.”

“I have,” the Frenchman replied, pulling out the detonator. “Keep the music playing all the way until the end, alright?”

Selecting a charge from the digital readout of those he’d primed, he blew the grappling hook off the hull, releasing the cable that connecting the Ark to the Lander.

“You son of a bitch,” Aguilar breathed, no doubt seeing the flash from the Lander’s open hatch. “You cut the cable. Why?”

“Call it intuition,” Julian said, turning his attention back to rigging the last charge. “I kind of figured there wouldn’t be enough time and I didn’t want you getting yourself killed too. Imagine how angry
the captain would be if I didn’t return you in one piece. I did promise her, after all.”

Only silence replied from the other end of the line.

“When you get back to the ship,” he continued. “Don’t let all of this overshadow how you feel about her. She likely didn’t have a choice in the matter. Kiss her, my friend. Love her.”