John Karr - Detonation Event

“Makes sense, Cap.”

Nuro eyed the engine pressure. “Wagner, strap your ass to a chair. Captain, we’re ready.”

Trent Wagner grinned over his shoulder. “Dull in a seat, spaceman.”

“Maintenance reported those marks you left on my wall,” Devans said. “And that nice fractured wrist didn’t make for great Martian crust work, junior.”

“I took some painkillers and pulled my shift, and it healed in a week. Plus I took full responsibility by saying I slipped at a table. Didn’t say which table.”

“You don’t want me to call security,” Nuro said. “You made Hamilton look bad, you know. And she’s been trying to hail us from the passenger cabin because there’s a vacant seat where a junior astrophysicist should be.”

“Tell her we’re letting him play pretend up with the adults,” Devans told Nuro.

“Leash gets too serious sometimes,” Wagner said. “She wouldn’t know fun if it kicked her in the nuts.”

“Alicia being female voids that line of observation, son.”

“You sure?” Trent said. “She’s as strong as Nuro here.”

“Alicia Hamilton was brimming with something less than admiration when she found the injury was both clandestine and preventable. Hamilton’s manager wasn’t all that juiced, either.”

“Ooops on that. No big deal. Richards splinted my wrist and shot it with re-gen. Evidently the dude blabbed on me. Where’s the medic-to-patient confidentiality?”

“Richards is tighter than two molecules on a laser-bonded meteorite. As lead security analyst, Hamilton has access to the bridge report.”

“Good thing she likes me,” Trent said. He held up rubber cords secured twice around the table and hitched to a belt at his waist. “Look, I’m harnessed this time. Happy?”

The pilots looked at each other.

“Cheap entertainment,” Devans said with a shrug.

They all knew space was beautiful, at times terrifying, and often boring after two years of survival while drilling holes in Mars.

“But, Wagner,” Devans said, “wipe out again and I’m gonna have Leash fold you up and stuff you in a locker during descents.”

“Deal.” Wagner assumed traditional surfer stance, blared his music through his ear implants and bobbed his head.

“Discontinue ion drive,” Devans said.

“Discontinued,” Nuro said.

“Prepare blast on my mark.” Devans waited. “ Audeamus !”

PS-9 shot downward on fusion power, shoving nine crewmembers deep into their seats. From the equivalent distance of the Martian moons, PS-9 raced toward the red planet.

Trent Wagner leaned side to side with knees bent. He held his lead arm low and rear arm high, then howled.

Nuro glanced over at Devans. “You’re really getting soft, spaceman. Surprised you’re letting him play again.”

Devans’ gaze rotated through several holographic gauges, the red planet before them, the young space surfer, then to his copilot. “Kid livens things up a bit. Reminds me of my boy back on the mother planet.”

“Your grown son, the lawyer-slash-campaign consultant? He’s a serious and capable man, doing important work, but not exactly a free spirit.”

“Not sure how important it is to help EFF operatives into power,” Devans said.

A flicker of annoyance crossed Nuro’s features and he appeared as if he was about to respond but turned instead to the meeting table. “I’m thinking this kid is more like you before you got rust on your shields.”

“That so? You gonna start charging for these psych services?”

“Nah, free stuff all the way.”

“Rust, my ass.”

“If you say so. Probably looks like our rock here.”

The barren red face of Mars grew before them.

The space shuttles of two centuries earlier had orbited Earth at roughly five miles a second. Doubling that speed, even tripling it—and in a hurry—was within easy capability of the PS-class shuttles.

Devans threw in a series of mild doglegs to make it a little interesting for Wagner. He had to admit, the youth had staying power. An hour later and Wagner hadn’t even taken a bathroom break. Two blips showed up on the main hologram of the planet below. They marked tunnel locations T1 and T2 as yellow-highlighted lines that shot straight down. Both had tiny right angles at the ends where the bombs were housed.

As they approached the space over T1, the surface camera feeds showed nothing but a mass of gray-and-red dust. Very little wind speed. It was thick but gentle, like a snow globe after its been shaken.

“Raise shields, Nuro,” Devans said. “Shannon, how about splashing our entry on the big monitor here and the feed to the crew?”

The shuttle’s shields warded off the entry heat and they entered the anemic Martian atmosphere.

“Withdraw shields, Nuro.”

“Withdrawing.”

“Nice sandstorm,” Devans said, gazing at the roiling wall hundreds of feet high.

“Dust storm!” Trent Wagner said over his shoulder as he leaned back and forth on the table as if shredding the galaxy’s longest wave. “This is the tail end of it!”

“How long until cleared?”

“Two or three.”

“Couple, three hours, not so bad.”

“Weeks,” Wagner said.

“And here I just had this thing washed. Let’s go to the dark side for now.”

The sun cut a divide on the red planet’s surface. PS-9 easily outdistanced the storm and raced over the desert surface to the dark side. The second blip beckoned them on the navigation screens. Near total darkness pushed against their vessel lights.

This was the eve of the moment they all had labored for… One last manual check and they would attempt to resurrect Mars with synchronized thermonuclear explosions at the core.

At least, that was the plan.

Intriguing. Come to the lab ASAP.

Highlighted in red, the mindtext from Dr. Karen Wagner was framed below a scrollable list of other messages superimposed on the right side of Paton Schiflet’s field of vision. His lead researcher rarely communicated in this way. Rarer still, the invitation to join her in the operations part of the lab.

His lab.

“Identity chip match for Paton Schiflet, Operations Director, National Institutes of Health, Lunar Lab Division. Further admittance contingent upon DNA evaluation and body scan.”

“Of course it is,” he said. “I wouldn’t bother if Wagner had replied to my reply. What could be so ‘intriguing’ that wasn’t present earlier today? She knows I’ve got a dinner meeting with the deputy director.”

The scanner had no reply.

Schiflet blinked three times to exit the message app and thus remove it from sight. He closed his eyes and massaged his temples. He was engaging a computer again. Vaguely troubling, perhaps even worrisome. It was possible two years had worn his psyche as thin as the boundary between life and death on this lunar bubble.

What was the tally today? Five or six; he wasn’t sure. Actually, he was sure. Six times he’d unnecessarily verbalized to either an object or himself.

In forty-five minutes the Deputy Director of Lab Sciences of the NIH and her staff would be looking bored as he spoke of the lunar lab’s activities and his desire to move up the command chain. Admittedly, he had little to offer the old crone in return for a promotion. Steady oversight was adequate, but hardly compelling.

He took a deep breath and opened his eyes.

He still stood in the hallway before the main entrance to his lab, the door closed before him.

“Prepare for sample extraction,” the computer voice said. “Place a hand on the scanner ledge.”

Laser beams outlined a section of flesh. Pincers no larger than a grasshopper’s mandible hovered over his hand, then dove and retreated. The few cells removed would not be missed.