I think should have split this chapter into two parts. It started out at a normal length of just over two thousand words but when I re-read it, it seemed to rush through a lot of information without any detail. I thought I'd just add a little more but when I was done, it was pushing close to five thousand words. As I said, maybe I should have split it into two, but I was just too lazy ;D
Chapter 65
"So... it doesn't matter that he got away?" Blue checked twice to see if he really understood what his mother was telling him.
"It would have been nice to have caught him, but then we would have needed to find something to do with him" April shrugged.
"Dragon food is one possibility" Calla suggested, making everybody laugh.
While feelings of relief ran high in the room, Doctor Vieira had something more to important think about; the technician with a bullet wound and Haley's concussion.
"Alright you lot, my patients need to rest; so you can all go anywhere else but here and chuckle your hearts out."
"Come on Doc, I'm fine" Haley protested.
"No you are not!" Quill replied sternly "You've had a serious head trauma; so you are to stay in than bed for the next twenty four hours, and then take it easy for the next few days. And certainly nothing strenuous for a week to ten days."
"But what about my dragon?" Haley continued to protest.
"Don't worry, we'll take care of Boris for you" Calla said reassuringly "Gage is with him now."
"That's not what I'm worried about. By the time I get out of here, everyone will have seen him and I was really looking forward to showing him off."
Haley's admission set everybody off laughing again, much to Quill Vieira's annoyance.
"OUT!" he demanded.
"Gotta go anyway" April decided "Sue still has my baby."
"Umm... actually Mom..." Abigail recoiled guiltily.
"What did you do with Rose" April asked sternly.
"We needed Sue to help us in the base, so we uh... left Rose with Smit Cloud Dancer" Abigail admitted.
The relief on Aprils face was intently obvious.
"Oh thank goodness" April sighed as she walked out into the corridor "As long as you didn't leave her with Shifty."
"HEY; that's not very nice!" Shifty looked offended as he approached the group from further down the corridor.
"Are you seriously trying to tell me that you are mature and responsible enough to be put in charge of a baby less than two months old?" April said accusingly.
"I guess you're right" Shifty agreed
"Damn straight!" April turned to walk away but then stopped "You are however... very handy in a crisis."
"Thanks Mrs. D" Shifty blushed.
"No, thank you for risking you life to keep us in touch with the outside."
"Well... we gotta do what we gotta do" he shrugged.
"But stay away from my baby" April insisted.
"Yes Ma-am."
'
'
The next month was a strange time for everyone in Western Sumatra. They had their base back, they had their lives back and the future held so much potential. People's reactions to the dragons at the complex was just as varied as it had been everywhere else in the world, but with one notable exception; everybody knew Blue, Calla and Haley, so they were all ready to believe what they were told about how friendly a dragon could be when treated right. Blue was surprised at how helpful Saffron turned out to be with all the knowledge she had gained from studying the Book of Gothi, and she soon filled an important role as Dragon Educator to people from all over the district.
Calla spent a lot of time catching up with her mother and father but still took time every day to fuss over Windstorm and go flying with her. Indeed all the riders took great care of their dragons, even Shifty who begged to be able to keep the Gronkle; not that Blue seriously tried to separate them because he could see how fond the dragon had become of his new rider.
It wasn't easy to teach Shifty the finer points of dragon care and piloting, because he had spent his entire life using the 'Learn by making mistakes' method. But with Saffron's help, Blue was slowly getting through to him and the riders were even getting used to the name Spud.
The remaining members of Sage's Raiders were put to work on the more low-tech areas of the complex, with the promise that they would be fed, housed and shipped off to join Sage on Mars as soon as the station-ship Deimos was ready to take them, assuming they still wanted to go.
'
'
During this time, the question had arisen about where to house the dragons and although the complex's massive garage at the lower end of the main tunnel seemed like the best place at first, Blue decided the ship had more advantages. Its large open bow and dark interior made it look a little like a cave (and dragons liked caves), plus being on the beach meant there was a ready supply of fish just off shore.
It did not take long for the Dragon Riders to set up quarters for both themselves and their dragons inside the hull, and the place soon started to look like the dragon stables on Berk. There were beds for the riders, all set well apart with open spaces for the dragons in between. Even though small dragons would normally separate themselves from the larger ones to live as a group, these Terrors had become accustomed to being part of the team and so they made their nests under their owner's beds.
On their first night back after Sages sudden departure, the riders made a large bonfire on the beach where they, along with some friends from the railgun complex, could all relax while pampering the dragons with cooked food, as thanks for a job well done. Doctor Vieira had checked out the bullet hole in Boris's wing and pleased to find it was healing nicely. The only treatment he gave was to apply a mild disinfectant cream and order Haley to look at it several times a day and report any changes.
After they had finished dinner, another question was put forward about how the moon Deimos had been turned into a Station Ship and brought to Earth.
"Well a lot changed on Mars after we left" April began the story. "The Deep Council had been deposed less than an hour after they had been exposed and one of the first things the two thousand citizens of Mars did, was to question everything that had been done over the last twenty years; every policy and every action, along with every idea that had been squashed."
"Deimos was an old idea?" Abigail gasped.
"Yes it was sweetie, but there's more" April smiled "Two things were common knowledge on Mars at that time; firstly they knew they were self sufficient and they did not need help from Earth anymore, and secondly they were acutely aware that Earth needed their help. You see the last colonists had arrived over sixteen years ago, leaving behind countless family members and friends, many of whom are still alive to this day. A few years ago, once the base had been extended to beyond our current needs, I and a number of other people proposed sending for more colonists, arguing we could easily cope with twenty to fifty more per-year. The proposal suggested the number could be increased as the base expanded.
The leaders of Mars Base One, under the direction of the Deep Council, turned the idea down flat making it clear to everyone that Mars had to be under affective quarantine to prevent any unknown pathogen from travelling with future colonists and causing a disaster; that was when the Deimos Plan was developed as a replacement for the MTV."
"The MTV Star Cruiser" Calla pointed out, still wanting people to use the name she had given it.
"Yes, the Star Cruiser" April relented "Deimos was planned to be a combined space station, colony and transport. It could be moved to Earth orbit, take on many hundreds of people, and transport them back to Mars. They could live inside the Deimos O'Neill cylinders for over a year in effective quarantine, and then be allowed to come to Mars once their good health had been established."
"And that was when they started building it" Shifty stated, pretending to know what he was talking about.
"No the Deep Council turned that idea down too" April corrected him "The only good thing to come out of it was the commencement of Mars Base Two. The Mars leadership had been resisting the idea of starting a second base as well, because they feared it would be too difficult for them to maintain total control of the population; but after the Deimos plan, they realised they needed to give the engineers something to keep them occupied so they wouldn't keep trying to bring more colonists."
"Something must have happened though, because Deimos is up there right now" Haley pointed out.
"That's the funny thing about designer's technicians and engineers; no matter how hard you may try, you can't stop them from thinking about problems and how to solve them" April smiled.
"Do you remember the construction robots we sent to the MTV after Blue and Calla had retrieved Luis and Abigail?" Sarah Spencer reminded them.
"Yeah, they were built to work on Mars but modified for a micro gravity vacuum" Blue noted "Hopefully they're still working away on asteroid 16 Psyche."
"No they're not" April revealed "After you Abby and Calla left the MTV to return to Earth, our plan was to take your replacements back to the asteroid belt to advance construction, but I got a call from the new Mars ruling authority. Now that Deep Council no longer had any influence over them, the Deimos Project had been quickly resurrected and begun."
"They knew the Mars base as it stood, was essentially a gift from the people on Earth" Sarah noted "and they wanted to return the favour."
"To get the rest of their families off the doomed planet?" Calla asked.
"Oh more than that" April replied "It was common knowledge that I was teaming up with the railgun staff to start construction of a space colony inside an asteroid, but they didn't know where. So they made contact with me to propose we combine our efforts; we would work on the asteroid, and they would build the smaller mobile colony to transport over ten times as many people as the MTV Star Cruiser could handle. It sounded like a good idea, but Sage had already shot you down from orbit so we knew he was a risk. To counter that risk, I modified the idea somewhat."
"The problem at first was, April couldn't tell me about the plan because we didn't want Sage finding out by listening in on our transmissions" Sarah admitted.
"So that was why you came back to Earth" Abigail said to her mother.
"Yes" April admitted "With the Deep Council out of the way I could have safely returned to Mars to give birth to Rose, but I used the fake excuse of not wanting to go back there because I was holding a grudge against them; it helped make my presence plausible to Sage. I'd already come to an agreement with Mars to send them the four NTP rocket motors that were in storage on the ship."
"Okay I'm not up to speed on your spacey acronyms, so what's an NTP rocket?" Haley asked.
"NTP stands for Nuclear Thermal Propulsion" Sarah informed them.
"Nuclear; isn't that dangerous with the radiation and the contamination and the long term dying?" Shifty said, slightly panicked.
"These are heat engines, not bombs" Sarah laughed "Natural uranium has a radiation level of less than 1%, and what we use is low enriched uranium with a level of under 4%. The really deadly stuff is highly enriched weapons grade at 90%." You see a normal chemical rocket had a propellant like hydrogen, and an oxidiser to help it burn extremely hot to create thrust. The NTP superheats the hydrogen as it enters the combustion chamber meaning you don't need to carry tonnes of liquid oxygen. The thrust is also twice as powerful and can burn longer; just right for moving something with the mass of a small moon."
"So after Dad had dropped you and Saffy off on Earth, he took the NTP motors to Mars" Blue nodded.
"Yes except he went the long way via 16 Psyche to pick up our construction team and all their autonomous constructors" April corrected her son.
"What's an autonomous constructor?" Shifty wondered if they would ever say anything he could understand.
"A robot" Saffron smirked
"So are you saying Amos, Jeana and Sid are on 16 Psyche, but they're up on Deimos?" Blue asked
"Along with Ruth and Jarred Kinderman and a several technicians from Mars" April added "They needed your Dad to travel with them on the way back to Earth because construction was not yet far enough along to hold the entire crew, so when they weren't working, the engineers and technicians would transfer over to the Star Cruiser to rest; it also gave them a good place to do maintenance on the autonomous constructors."
"Ah... the robots" Shifty repeated, proud that he had learnt something technical.
"So what did you do to stop Sage and the Raiders?" Calla asked.
"Effectively nothing" Sarah grinned "We gave him exactly what he demanded; a trip back to Mars. If he hadn't been so paranoid, he could have taken all the raiders he wanted; but because he went crazy upon seeing Deimos, things did not work out as he'd planned. We were hoping he would want to be one of the first people to leave Earth; then by the time he realised Luis was no longer on board the MTV, it would have been too late. There was even a chance he would not notice Deimos drifting along behind the ship, but an asteroid moon with a diameter of about twelve kilometres, is not an easy thing to hide.
"So he's gonna make it to Mars and take over" Calla gasped "What will happen to all your friends when he gets there?"
"Oh I wouldn't worry about it if I were you, I'm sure they'll all be fine" April smiled reassuringly
'
'
After a long, cramped and extremely boring journey through space, the raiders did eventually arrive in Mars orbit and began to prepare themselves for the upcoming attack on Mars Base One. Sage had spent much of his time during the trip going over the layout of the base with his men, and the important areas each team should take as soon as possible. To the best of his knowledge there were no firearms on Mars, but security did have torch batons and electric shock devices; fortunately for Sage, the Mars Security Office didn't even have enough members to make up a good poker game.
"Now remember" Sage barked as the men got into their landing capsules "Don't shoot unless you have to and only shoot people, not the vital base equipment. None of the people you encounter have ever been trained in combat techniques, so you should have no problem intimidating them, rounding them up and locking them away until we have the base under our control. Remember to fan out and not let anyone flank us, and we'll take the base sector by sector. Right... let's go."
A few minutes later, the capsules undocked one by one and started down towards the surface. Because the MTV had slowed down considerably before going into orbit, the capsules did not enter the thin atmosphere at an excessive velocity, enabling the use of large drogue chutes to keep control of decent until the landing rockets fired twenty meters before touchdown on the mobile landing pads.
When all four pods had landed safely, Sage took control of the mobile pads propulsion systems and moved the capsules into the open door of the currently unpressurised hanger area. The whole place looked surprisingly empty but that only made it easier to manoeuvre the mobile pads into position. As the last one passed by the entrance threshold, Sage started up the door close mechanism and re-pressurisation procedure, before picking up the comms microphone.
"Alright men; when the light above the hatch turns green, open it and move quickly to a defendable position."
It took a few minutes to seal the hanger and pressurise it with a breathable atmosphere, but when the process was complete, the raiders followed orders and made their way out. Thirty five raiders was considerably less than the sixty Sage had planned for, but he still felt confident he could have taken the base with only ten if he had too. There may be two thousand people on Mars, but many were children, elderly or just simply useless, in his twisted opinion; and on top of all that, he had the only trained army with guns.
Even though the hanger had been exposed to the deadly Martian atmosphere when open, Sage still did a thorough search of the room for any Mars Base personnel, who may have hidden in the room while wearing a pressure suit for protection. When the room had been swept, his men took up positions on either side of the main airlock door, ready for action when it opened.
It opened, and there was nobody there.
"I had a feeling they may be hiding" Sage smirked "We'll probably come across some kind of surrender party soon but keep alert, just in case they foolishly decide to fight back. Cook; take ten men and make your way down the left corridor, everyone else follow me."
"Yes sir" Joshua Cook nodded and picked out his team.
The two corridors acted as ramps leading down into the vast underground base, and both parties reached t bottom having found nobody in any of the side rooms. All was quiet in the first arched roofed plaza, giving Sage an idea as to what was going on.
"Is it just me, or does this place look like a cleaner version of the Railgun Complex we just left?" one of the raiders asked.
"The complex in Sumatra was built as a test of the Mars Base design" Sage explained "But of course Mars is now much bigger since expansion has never stopped."
This information felt quite comforting to the lower ranked raiders, who had begun to question in their minds if they had made the right decision in coming to Mars. Knowing now it was lust like the place they had left made the base feel more inviting.
"If it were me on the defensive, I'd put all my non-warriors in their rooms down in the accommodation section. And then I'd set up barricades on the far side of the engineering section; there are a lot of places to hide in there for an ambush. So we'll continue in that direction, but don't forget to check every room and closet on the way; a hostage or two would certainly help."
The raiders cautiously moved on through the base, crawling through every possible hiding place until they reached the sought after first engineering section, where Sage found a big surprise.
"What the... where's all the equipment? There should be CNC lathes in here, additive manufacturing... all kinds of machines and tools."
"Where do we go now sir?" Cook asked.
Sage shot an accusing glance at Cook as his mind raced searching for a solution, till eventually a light came on inside his mind.
"Yes; we need to get to one of the control stations" he realised and turned back towards the passage they had just left.
None of Sage's followers knew where they were going or why but after sneaking around blindly for so long, it felt good to have some sense of purpose at last. The sound of hard soles on hard floors echoed through the hallways as the entire group still followed behind their leader. Some more doubt was creeping into the minds of more of the men, again about whether listening to Sage and coming to Mars had been such a wise move but even now, no one dare raise the subject. At last they came to a room that looked to them like an updated version of the control room where Sage had overseen the launches back on Earth. He sat down at an already running computer and moved the mouse back and forth, bringing the monitor out of sleep mode and back to life.
"Now we'll find out what's going on here" Sage grinned as he made his way through the base systems.
"What have you got there sir?" Cook asked when Sage found the readings he wanted.
"This is a rundown of carbon dioxide levels throughout the base" he explained "There are air quality monitors all over the station, directing higher ventilation to areas with higher levels of CO2; and wherever you find elevated levels of CO2, you find people breathing."
Sage pointed to different section of the screen and continued his explanation.
"Look at this section near the airlock where we entered the base; a constant line of low CO2 on the graph until we arrived when the levels rose slightly, falling again when we moved off. You can see more signs of us proceeding through the base as CO2 levels in different sections rose a little before going back down. And here; this is where we will find everyone."
Sage now pointed to a graph that indicated a constant midrange level of carbon dioxide.
"I assume you know the section that particular reading is coming from?" Cook checked.
"Indeed I do" Sage grinned as he rose to his feet and returned to the door.
After the confusion he had felt after their first search attempt, Sage's ego was once again puffed up by the success of his plan to check the environmental control system for information.
The raiders walked on through empty corridor after empty corridor, still continuing to check every room but becoming less and less vigilant now that they knew where to find the humans n the base. When they came to the first habitation section, everything was the same as the other places they had encountered, but they knew they were close to their destination. One noticeable change was that most doors were wide open, but a few were still shut and locked.
As the group of men continued on deeper into Mars Base One, a door suddenly slid open ahead of them, and every last one of them suddenly stopped short in anticipation. The first thing to emerge was the sound of a flushing toilet, followed by a man in his mid sixties.
"LYNCH! What's going on here?" Sage growled, making the man jump.
"Oh... Commander Sage... you really gave me a fright; I wondered how long it would be till you arrived" Warwick Lynch said, still breathing heavily.
"That's General Sa..." Colonel Cook stepped forward to rebuke the old man, but Sage just held him back.
"Where is everyone Lynch?" Sage demanded "I know they're close."
"Oh most of them are in the gardens or the botanic factories, but a few are out and about doing maintenance."
"Show me!" Sage continued to be sharp.
"Certainly... this way."
The raiders followed the older man as he led them past all the accommodation in the sector, down several more passageways and into a large open area filled with vertical growing racks of plants and aquaponic systems, where about dozen people could be seen working.
"Would you like to address everyone?" Lynch asked.
"Yes; get them all to assemble in the plaza outside" Sage demanded.
Warwick Lynch went to a phone mounted by the door, pressing the PA button and relaying Sages order to the entire base. The people he could see in the room stopped what they were doing and made for the door greeting Sage along the way. They did not seem very pleased to see him, but tried to be respectful out of a desire to continue existing. When Sage stepped out into the plaza, he saw people walking in from several directions until about thirty Mars Base citizens stood attentively and waited for the man to speak.
"Where is everybody else?" Sage wondered.
"Oh this is all who are left" Warwick replied "The rest are gone."
"GONE WHERE?" the upset general shouted.
"Mostly to Base Two, but also to Phobos and Deimos; I think some have even returned to Earth but that might just be a rumour."
"Base Two is still under construction. It couldn't possibly support two thousand people" Sage insisted.
"Ah yes but you weren't here when the Deep Council was exposed and overthrown" Lynch explained "At first we were all put under house arrest while the new ruling body and the people of Mars decided what to do with us. One of the first things they did was to scrap all the slow moving plans we had made, and instead threw most of their efforts into the expansion of Base Two so more people from Earth could evacuate here. But when Doctor Spencer informed them that it was only a matter of time before you would return to take over, they changed their plans and started to move everything from here over to Base Two as space became available. You have to remember that the site of Base Two was chosen because of its proximity to several large underground caverns and lava tubes; so once those had been sealed off, they had a lot of space to store everything they needed. The first people left a few weeks later and there has been a slow but steady stream ever since. The last ones departed not long after we received word from Earth that the MTV was on its way and you were on it."
"SO WHY THE HELL ARE YOU STILL HERE?" Sage fumed as he realised his predicament.
"We had no choice; a few low ranking Deep Council members were shown mercy and were allowed to go too, but we were left here as prisoners."
"My prisoners?" Sage wondered.
"If you want to look at it that way but in real terms, you're all prisoners too" Lynch shrugged.
"I'm no prisoner" Sage growled "Colonel Cook; ready the men; we leave for an assault on Base Two in twenty four hours."
"Sorry but I'm afraid you won't" Lynch corrected "We don't have any long distance surface vehicles; former Base One personnel took them all, along with all the equipment to refurbish and refuel the space capsules you came in. Sorry Sage but you're stuck here with us, but don't worry; it's a very nice and spacious prison and we promise to teach all your men how to keep this place going before we all eventually grow to old and eventually die; you and your friends will have a fine life here."
Sage was incensed but surprisingly calm. He had long dreamed of returning to Mars and getting his revenge on the members of the Deep Council, and now he felt robbed. Florian Klein, the man who had tried to kill Sage was already dead, and although he was still furious with the rest of the Deep Council for not trying to stop Klein, he could not do anything to them now because he needed them.
Mostly he was angry with April Dias and Sarah Spencer; they had known what he would find on Mars but had kept the information from him, using Sages own desires against him. Suddenly his mind was changed; Sage no longer wanted the safety of Mars, he did not to rule over a captive society, even if the rest of his followers eventually did arrive from Earth. No; now he wanted to return to Earth, the doomed planet. He wanted to teach Spencer and Dias the valuable lesson that fooling Neville Sage was a certain death sentence.
Unfortunately being trapped on a hostile planet would make this impossible, but in his arrogance Sage figured he had managed the impossible once or twice before.
'
'
Hi :D
I hope you didn't mind me going over some old ground with what had happened on Mars in the last book, but I was worried the sudden appearance of Deimos in Earth orbit would look like a lazy writing method of solving a story dead end. The whole thing (though highly improbable) had been planned from way back, but had to be going on behind the scenes for the sake of suspense.
I also hope the fate of Sage was satisfying enough for you Vin (and everyone else of course). There was a lot of conflict in my mind as to what to do with him including death by a fireball in the face from either Boris or Speedy, or not making it into orbit and crashing back to Earth to cause more trouble later. In the end I decided to go the route of 'Be careful what you wish for, you may not like it when you get it.'
What I assume will be the final chapter will be up in a few days, as soon as I've finished doing the re-writes.
Thanks for sticking with it, Marty.