This is a fan translation of Road to Mars (Дорога к Марсу) by fifteen Russian science fiction writers.
This chapter was written by Eduard Gevorkyan.
I claim no rights to the contents herein.
Chapter 37
Space Day
The elevator dropped down silently, and Serebryakov inadvertently grabbed a handle. Several seconds later, the floor gently returned his weight, and the doors parted. Ivan followed a narrow corridor to the second elevator. He placed his hand to the scanner and waited for the elevator doors to open. After that he rode with an escort of two guards.
After the disinfecting shower, he was given disposable underwear and a white robe. No shoes. Walking barefoot on the soft carpeting was unusual but pleasant. He only got into the operations unit after a long interrogation-like conversation with a smiling bespectacled man, whose voice occasionally held commanding notes. After learning of Kirsanov's suggestion, the man smiled weakly and shook his head.
"Well… you can try," he said finally and let Serebryakov go.
Ivan descended a long ramp to the living spaces and found room 206.
"Hello, Lena!" he said timidly after entering.
A tall red-haired woman with large features smiled at him.
"Hello, Ivan! Everything is once again burning and changing?"
"I see you've been told already…"
The reheated mix smelled appetizing, but Bruno occasionally added spices in order to, in his words, improve digestion. They expected a decision on the Orion in a few hours, and the significantly improved digestion would've made being in a spacesuit uncomfortable.
"Problems?" Piccirilli asked.
"Not yet," Kartashov muttered.
Jeubin floated into the kitchen, followed by Bull. It immediately grew cramped.
"Smells of rosemary and thyme," Jeubin sniffed, sitting down next to Kartashov.
Freeing up room, Anikeev shifted over to the bulkhead and glanced at Bull.
"Who's manning the shop?"
"My watch," John replied. "Personal messages are coming, I have time to grab a bite."
"Givens?"
"In the infirmary."
"All right. We need to check the trains to the Orion."
"And if we don't get a green light?" Bull asked.
"Extra volume isn't going to interfere in any case."
Kartashov was about to grab the bottle with cranberry juice but froze with his hand outstretched. The walls of the compartment broke into tiny squares, then came back together, but changing the color from beige to green. Instead of Jeubin, it was Bull sitting next to him, while Jeubin was busy with the microwave. Anikeev was near the entrance and was handing a reheated pack to Givens… Givens?!
The squares once again appeared and disappeared, everything was back in its place, except the juice container was now in his hand.
"Spill, Bruno," Kartashov said. "Is the weirdness your work? Those are some spices you're adding to our food."
Piccirilli frowned.
"You don't like oregano?" he asked in concern.
"I don't like hallucinations!" Kartashov barked. "Just now it looked as if Givens was here instead of the infirmary. Or maybe we're not even flying anywhere right now…"
Only the microwave timer was ticking off weakly in the resulting silence. Bull snorted and said that he'd also thought that Givens was with them. And if Bruno had made something that caused identical visions, then he wanted in on it.
"I don't doubt Bruno's brilliance," Anikeev noted dryly. "Still, I didn't have time to eat and still saw Givens for a fraction of a second."
"Psychotronics," Jeubin muttered.
"I'm not so sure…" Anikeev was looking at the pack with the meat dish thoughtfully. "With tech like that, you can work on the planetary scale. Our small team isn't worth the effort. There has to be another explanation."
"For example?" Jeubin raised his eyebrows. "How do you explain these strange visions? I'm even seeing spiders—"
Kartashov choked, and red juice balls scattered all over the compartment.
"Even if it's dinosaurs!" Anikeev replied complacently. "Let's say we're not flying anywhere. Instead we're lying in sensory deprivation tanks somewhere in a Star City or Houston lab. And we're being convinced that we're on our way to Mars and running into frightening and unexplained problems."
"Que diable!" Jeubin exclaimed. "Why?"
"Testing whether human psyche can handle what awaits it in space. Or we really are on our way to Mars. But, so that we don't go crazy of boredom, we're in hibernation. When you're sleeping, you can not only learn a foreign language but also see the flight in every detail. Soon we'll be woken up and start working for real. By the way, does anyone here have incontinence?"
"I'd rather prefer the psychotronics possibility," Jeubin said. "What if we're a figment of the imagination of the Chinese?"
"Then it's a nightmare, not a dream," Anikeev replied.
The cockpit adjoined the module with the observation dome, so Kartashov could see Jeubin busy with the camera. Kartashov was sick of the red Martian blotches and was longingly remembering the green hills and the water of his own Mars. There was no fear. A warm feeling, like when he'd been riding through the vast steppe as a boy with his older brother and father watching over him, was keeping him comfortable.
Bull's shift was long over, but he was still there, reading over the message from home.
Anikeev appeared, dragging a thin coiled wire behind him. The Commander removed the cover above Bull and pulled out a cable with a hedge of colorful connectors.
The lock snapped quietly. A green light started blinking on the console in front of Bull.
"What did you do?" he asked. "The CPU load has risen."
"I'm copying everything on the Orion into our memory banks," Anikeev explained. "At Houston's request."
"Why bother?" Bull asked in surprise. "Everything was already being sent to Earth."
"There was communication interference. It happened to match the times when the Spirit rover would come back online."
Kartashov shook his head.
"It is eternal or something?"
Bull turned to the screen again.
"How's home?" Anikeev inquired.
"All good," Bull replied. "You?"
"Yana says hi," Kartashov said. "Although she looked nervous during the recording. When she touches a finger to her eyebrow, it means she's preparing a surprise for me."
"Really?" Bull asked. "A surprise?"
Something in his voice made Anikeev, who was busy attaching the wire to the panels, turn.
"I don't touch personal folders. But files are always scanned for malware. Here are the latest packets. Here's the video. The message from your wife, Andrew. And there's a small addition to it."
"A virus?" Kartashov's eyes bulged. "Did you have too much bourbon or something?"
"Calm down, Andrei," Anikeev butted in. "The recording was made in TsUP. Yana would have nothing to do with it in any case."
"It's not a virus, it's fragments of a text message," Bull explained. "A very old system for encoding a message in a picture or a video. Not that there's much encoding. Almost as if a part of a text file accidentally got into the message."
"Let's see the 'addition' on the screen," Anikeev ordered.
Piccirilli said he had no idea what the "addition" was talking about. Besides, it was his watch now. It then became more spacious in the kitchen. Anikeev watched the Italian go, then stared at the tablet again.
"I don't see the point," Jeubin said. "What do the Chinese have to do with that Bykov guy?" Is he our man on the Millennium Boat?"
Anikeev shook his head and was about to say something, but Bull beat him to it, "Bykov is in charge of the Russian portion of the expedition's scientific program. I remember him giving a speech with Baskin at a conference in Sacramento. A report on Lyapunov's dual variables as gravity benchmarks for some measurements. This is talking about a directed gravity emission, by the way. Someone is trying to slow down the Chinese. Your people?"
"With tech like that, we'd be exploring the galaxy right now," Anikeev grinned. "I doubt human science can even pick up gravity waves, let alone generate them. Then again…"
"I'm curious about something else," Kartashov opened the fragment on the entire screen. "There's mention of shapeshifting spiders and some detox procedures. It seems to be meaningless, but don't you think we've been seeing spiders a lot?"
Bull shrugged and stared at the ceiling, while Jeubin pursed his lips.
"We'll figure it out sooner or later," Anikeev said finally. "Now I suggest that we focus on the landing and ignore our overactive imagination."
Kartashov nodded silently in agreement. There was no point arguing. In a few hours, ground control was going to issue them its final recommendations, and even though Bull believed that they might very well nix the landing, it wasn't in Slava's personality to just sit there and wait for the rescue ship. They'd deal with the spiders later. It would be funny if the sealed compartment turned out to have spiders for settling the planet instead of a supercomputer.
"What's so funny?" Anikeev asked.
"Eh, it's nothing," Kartashov stopped smiling. "Listen, today's Space Day. They're probably already drinking in TsUP. We need to celebrate…"
"We can. As soon as the Orion is ready. For now, I don't want any problems."
He wanted to knock on the plastic tabletop, but then there was a loud click, the suspended containers swayed a little, and Bruno announced on the intercom, "We have a problem!"
The leak was at the very limit of the sensors' ability to pick it up, but even a minimal loss of air could turn critical in time. Then again, Anikeev thought, no one was panicking, even though everyone's nerves were at the limit. Jeubin and Kartashov were checking the compartments, Bull had extended a manipulator and was moving a camera along the outer hull, examining the foil thermal insulation foam. Piccirilli was on the comms, and then asked the Commander to take over.
"I can get a look at a third of the surface from the observation module," the Italian noted. "The second camera has a powerful zoom."
Anikeev shifted over to the screen, letting him pass, glanced at the rusty colors of Mars, at the module's cylinder, topped by the observation dome. And then he noticed a dark spot at the base of the module.
"No need to hurry," he said. "I found it!"
"That's good news," Bruno cheered up.
But it was too soon to celebrate. The open hatch of the module was sunk into the wall. The leak was somewhere behind it, but when Kartashov pulled on the hatch, I didn't move. He jerked a little stronger, heard a cracking sound, and immediately let the handle go. The plastic here felt cold. Bull refitted the manipulator and tried to bring the boom with the sealant can to the module. He couldn't reach it and informed them that they'd have to seal it from the inside. Anikeev and Piccirilli were busy looking at utility line diagrams.
"Here." Anikeev pulled up a mesh of multicolored lines on the screen. "The green line. Is that water?"
"Hold on," Bruno muttered. "Backup cooling, a self-contained line. The pipe burst, the water froze, and blocked the leak. Good."
"Not really! The hatch is frozen to the hull, if we force it open, we'll tear out a sizable chunk of the hull with it. We need to hurry."
"The hatch is made from thick plastic," Piccirilli considered. "Boiling water is too dangerous, it'll just scatter all over the place. The hair dryer in the shower? Integrated."
Jeubin floated into the compartment.
"Isn't it strange that the meteorite has struck it from the direction of Mars? That can't happen."
"It can," Bruno replied. "The Martians have shot at us with a cannon."
Shorting, Jeubin asked if it was time for a bite.
"The microwave!" Bruno said.
"Use hot dishes to thaw the hatch?" Anikeev asked in surprise.
"No, they'll cool down before we can get them there. But the microwave with its door open will heat the water through the plastic. We'll have to shut off the module's power, or it'll fail."
"Hah," Jeubin said. "When I was in college, that was how I fried my dormmates' speakers."
Two hours later, the microwave was put back where it was, the utilities had been restored, and the opening filled with sealant. Bull had attached an additional boom to the manipulator and picked out what they believed to be a meteorite. After seeing the first-sized object made of a material that looked like melted plastic, Jeubin declared that the alien artifact was going to shut the skeptics up. Kartashov examined the artifact through a powerful magnifying glass then, ignoring Jeubin's complaints, wiped off a small section carefully.
"CN12/64," Kartashov said. "Greetings from Mother Earth. And also an image of either a bee or a fly. Where's the hacksaw?"
Jeubin floated off into the kitchen, explaining that he needed to eat away his disappointment.
"Maybe it's a part from one of our missing Martian probes," Anikeev decided. "Both Americans and we lost several of them on the way to Mars and Phobos."
"No, this is different," Bull said. "In time, they decided to replace heavy and expensive craft with many small and cheap ones. The Swarm Project, I believe. Private companies bought old ICBMs that were supposed to be decommissioned for cheap and launched many such tiny things to the planets of the Solar System. For every hundred of them, there's one that's a little bigger. Like a server, it collects the information, exchanges it with others, and transmits it to the ones closer to Earth. Some had webcams and, if they got lucky, they could look at planets. Others had sensors of some kind, uploading data to the web for the scientists to study. Thousand, if not tens of thousands of such toys. But the general public quickly got tired of them, and then one of the companies was caught selling the missiles to terrorists. Some of the servers burned up in planetary atmospheres, some disappeared, but many continued flying or orbiting. Then, suddenly, the control servers started sending information that didn't make sense, and then all connections ceased. As if they were struck by a virus."
Meanwhile, Kartashov had managed to saw the artifact open. The circuits were outdated, but their layout was impressive.
"Interesting," Anikeev said. "Basically, they created an information network, even if it was a pale imitation of the one on Earth. Could it have possibly somehow connected to another information network that worked on entirely different principles? And the users of that other network are trying to communicate with us, but the protocols don't match. And after the, let's say, unfriendly absorption the alien network got infected, or "humanized," and is trying to establish contact using semantic codes rather than digital ones. And we're perceiving them as hallucinations. Maybe that's where the constant appearances of a spider. Where there's a spider, there's a web. Attempts to build a system of symbols…"
"I'm a skeptic," Bull replied. "I could believe that our tiny probes, and though them the Earth networks, connected to some intelligence that's observing and watching over us. But I don't believe in these Chinese products!" He pointed at the ruined artifact to which Kartashov was bringing over a microscope. "That old binary crap could barely handle standard protocols, there would simply be no space or power for any others."
"What if they were upgraded? Significantly," Kartashov muttered.
"What do you mean?" Anikeev tensed up and turned to the screen.
The screen was showing that each processor, each capacitor cylinder was covered in black stars that looked like spiders.