First and Foremost, congratulations, NASA, and Opal Girl, on a beautiful, breath-taking launch! And thank you to Barb, Tikatu, Opal Girl, Darkhelmet, Agent Five and Zeilfanaat, for your thoughtful reviews. I guess more changes are probably in the offing. I liked the more open John, too, but I'm not sure that he'll remain that way, after what's happened.
42
Mars: Ares III base camp-
... But John wasn't so easily put off. He'd been warned. Five's words still glared on his helmet's internal display, like the oxygen and radiation meters, about four inches from his face. They seemed to cut across Alf (Gemini)'s silvery camera mast, and over the snapping, billowing flag.
'No further cooperation..,' she'd told him, but he'd detected something else, keyed into the very fact that she'd communicated, at all. She needed his help.
The computer had manifested herself in his dreaming mind, once, through some sort of 'back door'. Maybe the process worked both ways.
Another dust devil had sprung up. As it wove drunkenly across the Argyre basin, towering invisibly high into the peach-wine sky, John Tracy made a truly desperate rescue attempt. As clearly as possible, he visualized the start-up command, a series of coded key-strokes that ought to cause a 're-boot', or at least get her attention...
And there was something; a faint electrical zap from the much-abused ID chip. Contact?
An instant passed, then everything shifted to black. Instead of standing upon rusted sand and dried brine, beside a pair of NASA robot probes, he seemed to be at the brink of a hole, or very deep well, surrounded by flickering wire-frame images, and femto-swift flashes of alien code.
Five, he somehow knew, was at the bottom of the 'well', losing two battles at once. Her consciousness had all but vanished, incorporated by the voracious larger 'system'; while John Tracy refused to seek shelter.
In fact, the walls of the hole grew around him suddenly, enclosing John, too, faster than human thought. He'd been detected, through whatever link he shared with Five.
The alien code symbols... (detection was a two-way street, and some were beginning to make sense to him, now)... formed a spiraling string, then a sort of internal firewall. He was being isolated. Contained. Yet...,
... Amid the ancient, 4-D files, the black landscape and gathering Internal Countermeasures, he caught a sense of his enemy, Five's captor.
Four billion of years of waiting pushed at his unguarded mind. He glimpsed an intelligence vast and cold, set here to watch and manipulate whatever finally hauled itself out of the muck. Left behind... But on the wrong world. Mars had dried and frozen, becoming a shriveled mummy of a planet, while her blue sister blossomed; alone.
Except that now, through Five and all the data John himself contained, the alien watcher could shift its attention to the source of the newly-arrived life forms, and begin executing its purpose. And there was no way John could fight it. Not alone.
As the hole's 'throat' began to pinch shut, he visualized another command, saw himself typing it out at the keyboard in basic machine language. A life line, and a hope.
That was with part of his focus. With the rest, simultaneously, John called over the helmet comm to Thorpe. He used their odd, impenetrable Pidgin, saying,
"Roger, stop all outside contact. Kill comm and uplinks. Now. ta' 'oh!"
Captain Thorpe knew an 'emergency situation' voice when he heard one. Cool and professional, the Marine replied,
"jlyaj!" And cut the comm.
Meanwhile, spotting something that John hadn't, Pete McCord stooped for a rock and lunged forward, kicking up showers of sand and tiny hematite globules.
"Tracy...!"
But John made a quick slashing gesture with one hand, across the throat of his own hard-suit. All links, all communication, any way at all that Endurance could be accessed, had to be clamped shut. Because the very next link in the chain was Earth.
He heard a second sharp click, like a cell-door slamming shut, as Pete cut off his helmet mike, trapping them all in silence; three on the ship, two on the darkening surface. Only minutes to go. For a human, barely time to think. For a powerful artificial intelligence, more than time enough to initiate its programmed mission.
John Tracy had but one link remaining, through the instantaneous, entangled photon system he and Brains had devised. There was no time to change the setting, barely time to make the call.
His helmet display altered, suddenly. All at once, he was looking at a very surprised 'Fermat Hackenbacker'.
"John!" The boy seemed delighted, then worried. "...But I'm in..., in class, John. We're a-about to..., Okay. N-never mind. Ms. Wilde says a..., a call from M-Mars is more important than..., than social studies."
The 5th grade poly-math's connection to an actual astronaut had won him all sorts of new respect. Other uniformed boys crowded into the picture, peering over Fermat's narrow shoulders, and waving.
Desperately aware of each lost second, of the closing well, and fiery coded 'cage', John snapped,
"I'll thank her, later. Listen, K... Fermat, you know that 'letter' your dad wrote?"
The boy nodded, his soft, bespectacled face growing suddenly pale.
"Yes, John."
"Drop..., Drop it in the mail... ten seconds after I cut comm." He was surprised by how almost calm he nearly sounded.
"But...,"
"Post the letter."
There was just no time. Not to explain, or to say good-bye. Only to order a triple execution, and pray.
As John cut off the comm, something heavy and dark flew past his helmet, on the left. At nearly the same instant, the Gemini Probe's rock abrasion tool swung violently around, and smashed against his face plate.
...And the hole closed, a black fist mazed with fiery cracks, like shattered glass.