Mother of Mars Read online

  Contents

  Copyright notice

  Dedication

  - Free eBook offer

  - Chapter 1

  - Chapter 2

  - Chapter 3

  - Chapter 4

  - Chapter 5

  - Chapter 6

  - Chapter 7

  - Chapter 8

  - Chapter 9

  - Chapter 10

  - Chapter 11

  - Chapter 12

  - Chapter 13

  - Chapter 14

  - Chapter 15

  - Chapter 16

  - Chapter 17

  - Chapter 18

  - Chapter 19

  - Chapter 20

  - Chapter 21

  - Chapter 22

  - Chapter 23

  - Chapter 24

  - Chapter 25

  - Chapter 26

  - Chapter 27

  - Chapter 28

  - Chapter 29

  - Chapter 30

  - Chapter 31

  - Chapter 32

  - Chapter 33

  - Chapter 34

  - Chapter 35

  - Chapter 36

  - Chapter 37

  - Chapter 38

  - Chapter 39

  - Chapter 40

  - Chapter 41

  - Chapter 42

  - Chapter 43

  - Chapter 44

  - Chapter 45

  - Chapter 46

  - Chapter 47

  - The Adventure Continues

  - Review Request

  - If you liked this book...

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2017 Douglas Pruden

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-0-9953013-3-7 ebook

  For Daisy, in memory of your faithful patience waiting for your walkies while I wrote this book. You are missed.

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  As a way of saying thank you, I’d like to offer you another free ebook for joining my email list.

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  Chapter 1

  Five years earlier, somewhere on Mars…

  Two men monitored the operation from the safety of their ground vehicle on a ridge twelve kilometres from the crater. Three drones and a dedicated imaging satellite fed them all the visual information they would require.

  “If this candidate is successful, it will change everything,” said the younger man.

  Talus Varr smiled at the remark. “You said that the last time, remember?”

  Carlos Montoya frowned and returned his attention to the biometric readout. “His vitals are steady. He’s surprisingly calm.”

  “That’s because he doesn’t know what he’s walking into.”

  “You didn’t tell him?”

  “You read his psych profile. He wouldn’t have agreed if I had told him the truth.”

  “So what does he think he’s doing?”

  “He’s to obtain a radiation reading from the artefact. I explained to him it was a crashed Terran probe.”

  “And how will you explain the body he has to walk past?”

  “I’ll deal with it if he gets that far.”

  The audio link crackled with the distorted voice of a young man. “I’ve landed near the edge of the crater. Another ship is here. It looks abandoned.”

  Carlos fixed his companion with an icy stare. Varr shrugged and activated the comm to reply. “It’s from an old terraforming survey from a couple of years ago. The mag coils overheated. We just haven’t gotten around to recovering it yet.”

  “Roger that. I’m heading up to the rim.”

  “You really are a bastard,” said Carlos after Varr had disengaged the connection.

  “I do what’s required.”

  The younger man shook his head and returned his attention to the console. “His heart rate is strong and steady at 90 BPM. He’s a fit one. Where did you find him?”

  “He was working at the refinery on Eros. We flagged him when he applied for an immigration visa.”

  “How did you know he was from the program?”

  “I managed to reconstruct some of the records.”

  A crackle on the speaker interrupted Varr.

  “Whew, that was a bigger climb than I thought. I’m at the edge and can see the crashed probe.” A long pause punctuated the transmission. “I think a person is at the bottom.”

  Carlos’s eyes met Varr’s. The older man frowned and activated the radio link again. “Are you sure? We don’t show anything here.”

  Carlos scowled and switched the monitor to one of the drone feeds. The half-buried figure of a spacesuit lay on the floor of the crater.

  “Yeah.” The voice sounded excited. “I’m pretty sure.”

  “Then you should check it out.” Varr sat back into his chair and shrugged. “If he makes it there, he’s one of them. Everything is easier this way.”

  Carlos shook his head while he watched the man’s progress via the cameras.

  Through the speaker they heard, “I’m at the base of the rim and heading toward the…ow, wait. Something’s wrong.”

  The two exchanged a look of disappointment, but neither moved to respond to the disembodied voice, which now filled their cramped vehicle with cries of pain and panic. Far too soon the sounds devolved into screams of terror. The video monitor showed the man rolling on the ground, his arms and legs flailing uselessly, trying to fight off some invisible assailant. Within two minutes, all movement ceased and a second figure lay face-down on the crater floor.

  The two men sat in silence, each lost in private thought. Carlos leaned forward and turned off the audio link, which now only played random pops of static discharge. Finally, he spoke, his voice breaking. “I’m never doing this again.”

  “No,” replied Varr without looking up. “We won’t do this again. I’ll come up with another way. Besides, there are no more candidates.”

  Carlos let out a sigh of relief.

  Varr raised his eyes from the floor and regarded the younger man. “What is it?”

  Carlos did not answer immediately, taking the time to study the older man. “I didn’t want to tell you, but I found her.”

  Surprised, Varr sat up straight. “You’re sure? Where?”

  “She’s working on a freighter that runs out of Luna.”

  “How is she? Have you seen her?”

  “No, and I’m not going to. I’m drawing the line at anything to do with her.”

  Varr nodded. “I understand. Don’t worry; you won’t need to have any contact with her. I’ll come up with a way to recruit Melanie Destin.”

  Chapter 2

  Aggressive…abomination…purge…abomination…purge…ABOMINATION…PURGE!

  I shot upright. My pulse pounded out of control, and I thought my heart would leap out of my chest. Sweat clung to my skin and the sheets stuck to my breasts like wet tissues. Another fucking nightmare.

  “Are you okay?”

  Why Dylan still slept with me was a mystery. Lately, he got no more rest than I.

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” A full bladder prompted me to rise from the bed and make my way to the lavatory.

  My cortical implant told me the time was 0:400. Right on schedule. The same damned nightmare every night. It didn’t matter if I retired early or stayed up until I collapsed from fatigue, the dream came to me like clockwork.

  There was no point in returning to my bed. The sheets were soaked with my perspiration,
and I didn’t feel like changing them for another hour or two of sleep I wouldn’t get. I stepped into the hot shower and allowed the warm caress of water to soothe my rattled nerves.

  Dylan poked his sleepy face around the corner. “When are you going for that MRI?”

  I avoided looking at him through the door. “It isn’t scheduled yet.”

  “Melanie! What the hell?”

  “Okay, okay. Don’t lecture me.” He only called me by my full name when he was upset with me. He grumbled something, and I heard the door close behind him. I couldn’t blame the guy for being pissed at me. This had gone on for six months.

  They began as occasional, ordinary, run of the mill, weird, post late night pizza and beer experiences. The kind to visit you when you go to sleep on a full stomach. Initially, they were not even frightening, just weirdly memorable. Though I didn’t generally recall my nighttime fancies, I remembered these, or, I should say, this one because the same phantasm repeated every night.

  At first, it was mercifully benign and brief: someone calling me from a great distance. I think I just transitioned into another dream and continued the REM sleep cycle. Strangely I never recalled the others, only the one that was to become my torment in the weeks to follow.

  Finished my shower, I towelled off and inspected myself in the mirror. On the wrong side of thirty-five, I had yet to discover any grey in my short auburn hair. Signs of my interrupted sleep hung below my blue eyes. Though vainly proud of my retained youthful figure, I had to admit my recent lack of appetite contributed more than any form of self-discipline or exercise.

  After deciding my appearance could be addressed later with a bit of makeup and some strong coffee, I entered the bedroom wrapped in a towel. Dylan, wide awake, sat in bed reviewing some files. He frowned at me.

  I plopped next to him on the bed, snuggling into his shoulder. “Okay, I’ll schedule the MRI today. Satisfied?”

  “The same dream again?”

  “You know it was.”

  “Describe it to me.”

  “Why? You’ve heard me a million times.”

  “Humour me, Doctor Destin. I can’t sleep anymore, and you might do yourself some good. Your shrink said you should talk about it.”

  “That quack.”

  “You may not think much of him, but he’s the only psychiatrist on Olympia, and you promised.”

  “Blah, blah, blah. Okay, I remember my promise.”

  He flashed his annoying victory grin at me, and I elbowed him in the ribs.

  “It starts off in the darkness, and I can feel a presence.”

  “The god-thing?”

  “I don’t know why I call it that, but yes. We went through the usual twenty questions routine. I even remembered some of the ones I was supposed to ask.”

  “What kind of answers did it give you?”

  “The same vague responses, but it was more agitated and spouted conflicted gibberish.”

  “That’s new.”

  “It has happened a bit before, but this time was more intense. The voice repeated the words ‘abomination’ and ‘purge.’”

  “Was it talking about you?”

  “It wasn’t entirely sure about me, and it seemed upset, I suppose as if arguing with itself. Hey, do you think it needs a psychiatrist?”

  He smirked at my attempted humour.

  “I felt the need to escape, but I couldn’t move. Then, when its conflict rose to a crescendo, there was a blinding flash of light.”

  “Then you woke up?”

  “No.” Vividly recalling everything, I sat up straight. “Not this time.”

  Dylan leaned forward to look me in the eyes.

  “This time, though I wanted to wake up, something held me there. Millions of invisible insects crawled all over my body, trying to smother me. The voice screamed, ‘Abomination. Purge. Abomination. Purge,’ like it had finally made a decision to destroy me.”

  “Why would it call you an abomination, Mel?”

  I cocked an eyebrow at him. “Like you can’t think of a reason?”

  “Your hybrid nanites? Those have been out of your body for…”

  “For six months. Right when the dreams started.”

  “You think this is connected?”

  “It bloody well seems that way.”

  “Zo,” he said in a fake German accent, “perhaps you are harbouring zome kind of zuppressed anxiety at ze loss of your nanites, ja?”

  “Fuck off, Freud.”

  “All joking aside, you need to discuss the possibility with your shrink.”

  “I’m seeing him the day after tomorrow. The MRI results will be available by then.”

  “Zo, not zychotic, only a little crazy, ja?”

  My elbow found his ribs again. “You should be so lucky.”

  Despite his silliness, Dylan might have been right. Half a year before, the hybrid nanites that ran throughout my system suddenly all died. I’d acquired them, created them, actually, during the disastrous Helios mission almost two years before. Erik Dunn tried to kill me with a nanoweapon called the Ares virus, and I only barely survived and saved Dylan when I managed to Frankenstein an antinanite. Pure dumb luck and reckless desperation had supercharged my immune system.

  Then, inexplicably, six months ago, they all began to die off. Their demise, admittedly, puzzled and upset me. They had allowed me to achieve my life’s ambition of living on Olympia and establishing a prominent medical practice for the elite aboard the habitat. Only a limited few in the government were ever informed about my nanites and fewer still about their loss. I felt like an exposed charlatan.

  Maybe the dream was a message of mourning from my subconscious. That would make my quack psychiatrist even more insufferable. John Ross had always contended it was related to a superwoman complex or some such other bullshit psychobabble. I only continued to see him as a concession to poor Dylan.

  I realized I now looked forward to getting the long-avoided MRI. A little part of me wanted it to show something wrong with my brain. Ridiculously, I worried I was being attacked by my sleep, and that made me sound slightly insane. An abnormal scan would mean another cause existed, other than psychological. I didn’t want to be crazy, but I knew if these dreams continued much longer, I would be.

  Chapter 3

  Regis Mundi chewed on the inside of his cheek, a habit he thought long ago eliminated. He forced himself to stop and glanced beside him. He hoped his lieutenant hadn’t caught the relapse. He didn’t want to convey nervousness.

  Felix Altius sat straight-backed in the passenger seat next to him, eyes fixed on one of the myriads of reports in his lap. The trusted servant gave no indication of noticing the tic, but Mundi knew otherwise. Even when apparently absorbed in another task, his servant’s enhanced, synthetic senses gave him insightful data on even the most insignificant detail missed by anyone else. It was one of the reasons he considered Felix so valuable, besides his unquestioning loyalty.

  “Dominus,” said Altius without looking up, “I advise you to monitor yourself. The slightest sign of weakness will be exploited.”

  Mundi coughed and repositioned himself in his seat. “Merely a relapse. I have myself under control.”

  Felix raised his head and studied the older man with his milky blue eyes; eyes that bored into a person and seemed capable of plying the depths of one’s soul. “Of course, sir.” He returned his attention to the document.

  Mundi shifted himself once more. He tugged at the uncomfortable business suit. A toga remained his preferred attire. Now he recalled why he so rarely ventured from his compound on Luna. “How long until we arrive?”

  “Four hours and seventeen minutes, Dominus.”

  “This trip is taking forever, Felix.”

  “The timing of this meeting is unfortunate. Mars is near aphelion.”

  “You are well aware I did not choose the timing.”

  “Yes, Dominus.”

  “I am annoyed enough at being kept waiting almost two years f
or this. Why did they insist we come to them? Things would be far more convenient if we waited a little longer and shortened the trip.”

  “Agreement to their terms is a minor concession if they intend to invite you back into their ranks.”

  “Yes, yes, we discussed this and I agreed. I just forgot how much I hate space travel.”

  Mundi sat in contemplation for a few minutes and grew more agitated. “Do you think they have other intentions?”

  “Given your history with Talus Varr, there are probably other motivations for this meeting. Your last encounter with him did not end optimally.”

  “I bloody well insulted him. They still owe me a debt. Isn’t that what they said in the message?”

  “The exact term was ‘rebalance the tally sheet.’”

  “Exactly; that can only mean they intend to reward me for everything I did for them. They wouldn’t possess their bioweapon if not for me. They certainly wouldn’t hold the cure without us.”

  Felix was silent, having put down the paperwork to devote his full attention to his master.

  “Well, don’t just sit there staring at me like that. Tell me what you think,” Mundi finally blurted.

  “It is impossible to plumb the motivations of the Triumvirate. Your one apparent ally is Janus Virito. His compatriots, however, are divided in their support of you. Talus Varr…”

  “Talus Varr hates me.”

  “Yes, Dominus, that is so. Glynn Tennant is undeclared, making him the one on whom to focus our attentions. Talus Varr must accept your reinstatement if Tennant supports you.”

  “How have our efforts gone?” Mundi had reviewed the details with Felix a half dozen times during the long journey.

  “Our network is not able to penetrate above the administrative levels. Our ability to influence is restricted. The usual gifts have, of course, been sent, but I am uncertain as to their effectiveness.”

  “Well, they must have accomplished something. Why else would we be summoned to this meeting?”

  Felix let the question hang, unanswered. He got up and poured a cup of wine for his master.