James Scotson - Planets Falling

“Mom,” Fuerst sipped his cranberry juice, squeezed from fruits grown in the depths of the planet. “I was scrolling through reports of the incident. I know I’ve asked lots of time before. But I uncovered some new information. It involves your old friend Will Holst.”

Both Pinch and Jon shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Adam was obsessed with the big breach that occurred so long ago. No suspect was implicated. And no trace of the biological substance that caused the breaches was ever found. They assumed that Holst, Heldren, and the company knew more, but their queries to the corporate leadership were always met by evasiveness. Holst had died the year before. It was an apparent suicide. He walked into an airlock, deactivated the safeties, and strolled about ten feet out onto the martian surface before collapsing from extreme exposure. He was found by maintenance staff curled in a desiccated ball in a small patch of moss. Within a few hundred years, he would have been able to sit in that patch of vegetation and suffer only a bit of a chill.

Adam gazed at his stricken parents. “Now that I’m involved in governance and we’ve gained autonomy from the company, I have access to communications between the colony leadership and the corporation. There’s a bunch of puzzling encrypted notes between Holst and someone high up in the company immediately before and following the incident. I had Billings in computing and mathematics write an algorithm to decrypt them. Most of the messages are reports about productivity, personnel evaluations, and costs. But directly before hell broke out here, one of the messages says something like, ‘project underway, chimera released’. After the incident, Holst made several references to ‘unintended consequences’ and strangely a reference to the moon phobos and what appears to be coordinates on its surface.”

Ferris looked at her son sadly. She hadn’t aged visibly in years, although her eyes were deeper, darker. “So Will had something to do with the release. Adam, we haven’t been entirely honest with you or ourselves for that matter. The incident wasn’t caused by explosives.” She and Jon described the events of those few days and the impact of Tash’s bacteria. The pancakes grew cold. “We always thought that Heldren, the security director at the time and Holst either caught the perpetrator or at least knew more about the event. They always were wrapped in the corporate drama. But we just dove back into our science and let things sort themselves out. Typical researchers. Now it seems that Will had some hand in this. But why?”

Jon sighed, an exhalation of decades of concern and guilt. “Adam, we’re so sorry. We really should have pushed harder. I mean, kids died that day. If Holst was remotely responsible, he should have paid. What do you think is on phobos?”

Adam smiled at his parents. His ability to immediately forgive people and to see their point of view were traits that made him a great leader and research collaborator. It also rendered him, like his mother, a bit too trusting. “Perhaps an answer to the mystery. I plan to take a shuttle to the moon and check out those coordinates.”

“Mind if I tag along?” Jon asked. “It’s been a while since we’ve done any space hopping together. I miss those trips with you.”

Phobos was a tumbling lump freefalling towards the surface of mars. In a few million years, it would crash, undoing any works that humans had managed to accomplish. As they lifted from the surface, Jon imagined what awaited them. Was it a confession? A vial of the bacterium? Meteors and an occasional piece of spaces debris routinely hit the moon, so it might be possible that nothing but a crater would be found there. The shuttle entered space and Adam was humming some tune that Jon could not recall. The moon neared and the ship mimicked the tumbling spin of the satellite in anticipation of an approach toward the predefined coordinates. They descended and the ship landed in a puff of dust. The low gravity made excursions dangerous, so Jon remained in the vessel while Adam departed, tethered to the bulkhead. While he shuffled to the site, Adam kept humming.

“Stop making that noise kiddo, I am trying to concentrate on your vitals and the gravity readings.”

Adam chuckled. “Sorry dad, popular tune that all the kids are listening to right now. Okay. I’m here. Nothing obvious but a pile of rocks. Wait, I see something.”

Jon peered through the window. “Be careful. Is there a sign of any traps?”

“Do you think this is some bad movie, dad? No traps, bombs, or snapping alligators. It’s a relay of some kind — a small power source, a keypad, and what looks like a transmitter. I think its still operating and sending signals to somewhere. We need to know where it is pointing.”

Jon swiveled his seat to the navigation panel. “Let me see whether the ship’s receiver can capture the bandwidth. Also, I’ll have the computer calculate the trajectory of the signal. Attach a transmitter to the antenna.”

The computer analyzed the signal, randomly tuning through various known frequencies looking for a pattern. After about half an hour, it captured the signals and deciphered their destination — earth. Specifically, it was relaying messages to the location of a small transmission satellite belonging to the corporation. The individuals privy to this information were likely very high in the company hierarchy. The message on the relay was a recording, generated by Holst just a week before he died. The encryption was the same as the one Adam had deciphered earlier. The computer cracked it easily and revealed its content. It said: “Chimera stolen. Location unknown.”

Later that day, while the shuttle’s engines cooled in the transport bay, Adam convened a meeting of the family leadership of the Institute — mostly human a few naurons. After explaining to them what he learned from his parents, he conveyed the troubling information that Holst sent back to earth. Concerned, surprised faces riddled the room.

Adam maintained his control. “I suspect that the some faction within the corporation intended to clear non-scientists from the colony and use it solely for terra-development research. This probably wasn’t a popular idea among the leadership. Most board members plus the shareholders wanted to keep using the colony for recreation and housing. Thus, Holst and whoever he was collaborating with in the leadership decided to use an incentive — a terror attack to scare people away. The bacteria that Tash developed would be convenient and clandestine. All Holst had to do was spread it in several locations and wait for it to cook. I don’t think he intended for it to be so robust or deadly. Regardless, it worked. Years passed. I guess Holst stashed some bacteria. When it was lost, he couldn’t bear the possible consequences and killed himself.”

“Or someone killed him,” Maggie Natano suggested. She was the daughter of one of the founding computer engineers and was a competent mechanical engineer. She and Adam circled around each other for many years. When she finally pushed him to commit toward marriage, Adam turned away and buried himself in his research. She was one of the few in the Institute with a skeptical view of Adam’s leadership qualities and his apparent selflessness.

“Come on, Maggie. The security override to get through the airlock was done using his unique codes. There wasn’t evidence of foul play,” Adam countered.

“Our first priority is to set up detectors throughout all the domes, planet-wide,” Sarah Anderson from microtechnology noted. “We can set them to look for a set of fatty and amino acids unique to the strain. I have a new detector design that’ll work very nicely.”

“Thanks Sarah. We’ll get you all the resources and personnel necessary. In the meantime, I’ll assemble a security detail to determine where the pathogen might have been stored. We also need to identify who would have known about it and then stolen it.”