H g stratmann, p.1
H. G. Stratmann, page 1
THUS SPAKE THE ALIENS
by H. G. Stratmann
Life is a neverending series of tests, but it’s not always obvious what’s being tested—or why
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the superman—a rope stretched across an abyss.
—Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
Earth was doomed.
Katerina Savitskaya, the woman responsible for her world’s impending destruction, knelt alone and miserable on the metal floor of the sole dwelling on Mars. The filthy blue jumpsuit shrouding her shapely thirty-three-year-old figure like sackcloth reeked with sweat and fear. Tears stung her ashen cheeks as she prayed before the colorful religious icons attached to a closed locker door in the habitation module’s science lab.
The young cosmonaut’s trembling hands clutched the heavy golden three-barred cross hanging from her neck on a gold chain. Her hazel eyes gazed penitently upward—begging for humanity to be spared and for her to be forgiven.
But the devout grandmother who’d inspired Katerina’s fervent Russian Orthodox faith had never taught her orisons for a sin this great. Greasy lifeless strands of long auburn hair draped Katerina’s shoulders like a cloistered nun’s veil as she waited for some heavensent sign that her prayers were heard. But no soothing miraculous whisper murmured from the mouths of the sacred icons before her. The painted pinpoint eyes of the Savior and her patron saint, St. Catherine of Alexandria, stared blindly back at her.
Katerina rose to her feet. Her black boots tapped the muffled rhythm of a funeral march as she passed through the openings in the habitation module’s compartments. She paused at the module’s open exit and viewed a spectacle only two humans had ever beheld. Though it was afternoon twenty-five million kilometers away in her native St. Petersburg, here the young Russian watched the rosy light of a Martian dawn gradually brighten the surrounding reddish-orange plain.
But today, on what was March 9, 2036 in the city of her birth, she was oblivious to this scene’s beauty. Her throat ached as unbearable grief turned the warm, moist, oxygen-rich air filling her lungs into sobs.
Katerina trudged down the short ramp that led from the module, a compressed cylinder nine meters wide by five meters tall supported by multiple short legs, to the barren ground. Her boots kicked up clumps of paprika-tinted mud that fell back to the rocky plain almost as quickly as they would have on Earth.
She stopped, wondering if the mysterious aliens who’d terraformed Mars were listening to her thoughts now. Because of her they’d condemned this world and Earth to mutual annihilation. Perhaps she should pray to the aliens—not to the God who’d abandoned her and might as well be dead.
Over the past ten years those enigmatic beings had used godlike powers to change Mars from a frigid stillborn world to a wet balmy “paradise” where humans could walk its cinnamon-colored surface without protection. With superhuman skills they’d increased the planet’s gravity to 0.91 g and moved it to a circular orbit only seven million kilometers farther from the Sun than Earth’s average distance. After devoting such enormous energies to those projects, perhaps the aliens might still be persuaded to reconsider their decision to destroy their work by obliterating both Mars and Earth in a titanic collision.
But first she had to plead her case. The aliens appeared and disappeared at will. Yesterday afternoon they’d passed judgment on her and vanished before she realized she was responsible for their decision to sentence the entire human race to death. Throughout the longest, darkest night of her soul she’d tried repeatedly to summon them back by her thoughts and words. She’d even set the main transceiver in the module to transmit a continuously repeating recorded message on the frequency the aliens themselves had suggested to call them on her first day on Mars.
So far her appeals were unanswered. There was one more thing she could try to get the aliens’ attention—even if it meant her own death. Before taking that desperate measure, Katerina closed her eyes and extended her arms straight out from her sides like the transverse beam of a cross, in a humble gesture of supplication. She murmured, “Please answer me. Do whatever you want to me—but don’t destroy billions of innocent people because of what I’ve done!”
A low, dark voice replied, “Nothing you say or do will change anything. Earth is doomed.”
Katerina opened her eyes and turned around to face the only other human on Mars.
Martin Slayton stood several meters away and returned his slightly younger fiancée’s gaze. The expression on his clean-shaven face now showed more disappointment than the anger and contempt it held yesterday when the aliens revealed how she’d deceived him. The boots and blue jumpsuit he wore matched Katerina’s, though his uniform was cleaner and filled out a taller, muscular frame. After a troubled night’s sleep he’d just finished showering, dressing, and mustering enough courage to track down the woman he’d loved.
The farmboy-turned-astronaut from Marshfield, Missouri ran a hand through his close-cropped black hair. “I heard you praying and moving around in the module every time I woke up last night. After I cleaned up this morning I went to use the transceiver to check in with Mission Control and found that message you’re transmitting. It won’t work. If the aliens wanted to see us beg for mercy, they would’ve reappeared by now.”
“I agree, Martin. That’s why I’m going to them.”
“Good luck finding them! Who knows where they come from when they pop out of nowhere or go when they disappear? Even the few times they’ve talked to us, it’s like they’re barely there. Just a telepathic voice in our heads and sparkly psychedelic lights like the cheap special effects in a late-1960s acid-trip movie.”
“They appeared after we explored the two artifacts we found here. If they created a third artifact, I expect I’ll find them there too.”
“If they decide to make another artifact. Or they might reappear if you tick them off again like you did yesterday!”
The fury in Martin’s eyes dissipated as quickly as it appeared. “Sorry, Katerina. I know you were trying to do the right thing when you tricked me. I never disagreed with you that the power the aliens gave us could be dangerous in the wrong hands.
“But it hurts that you didn’t trust me enough to believe I wouldn’t misuse those powers—that you didn’t think I was smart enough to avoid inadvertently using them to destroy the world. Sure, I saved millions of people from dying due to natural disasters, disease, and famine. But what if you’d let me use those powers to change human nature—to eliminate our capacity for violence and war, to instill a sense of empathy and conscience into every person?”
Martin shook his head. “It’s too late now. You renounced your powers because you never wanted them in the first place. I made the worst mistake of my life and gave them up because you made me think I’d used them to temporarily destroy the human race. And because the aliens believe we’re cowards or worse for giving up that chance to improve humanity, they’re going to destroy it and search elsewhere for a better, more ‘suitable’ species than us.”
“I realize what I did was wrong, Martin. I know that being sorry and asking forgiveness isn’t enough. I’ll do everything I can to make things right again—or die trying.”
Martin studied the determined look on Katerina’s lovely face. “And I’d die trying with you—if there were anything we could do to save the world. But there isn’t.”
“There is, Martin. The aliens have created a third artifact. We can go to it together. And if the aliens are there, they’ll have to either listen to us—or kill us.”
Martin stiffened. “How do you know there’s another artifact?”
“I kept in touch with Mission Control while you were sleeping. Twelve hours ago the Scout orbiter spotted a new anomaly on top of Olympus Mons. Our superiors in Houston said that based on imaging and radar data it looks like a building four hundred meters high.”
“And I bet it suddenly appeared when nobody was looking, just like the aliens’ other artifacts. But why’d they put it there? Their other two artifacts were designed to attract our attention and lure us to explore them. They were also in locations we could reach easily.
“The top of Olympus Mons definitely doesn’t qualify as easy to reach. If I remember correctly, it’s about three thousand kilometers away and almost twenty-seven kilometers above sea level. Even with the atmosphere on Mars being similar to Earth’s now, we’ll need our spacesuits at that elevation. It also took us over two days of fast traveling in the rover the other week to reach just the outskirts of its base—and that was over three hundred kilometers from the caldera complex at its top. Even if we drove to Olympus Mons, there’s a steep escarpment six kilometers high surrounding the central plateau on its top. We don’t have the skill or equipment for that level of rock climbing!”
Katerina sighed. “Mission Control said the same things when I talked with them. Then I told them how we could reach the top of Olympus Mons.”
“Unless you found the transporter NASA forgot to tell us they built into our habitation module and plan to beam over to that mountaintop, there’s no way—” Martin’s eyebrows arched. “Our ascent vehicle. You told them we could use the only way we have to get off this planet and back to Earth.”
“It’s perfect for a short suborbital flight. We have plenty of propellant for a round trip and enough reserves to refuel it for whenever we need to reach orbit. I’ve already moved all the equipment we’d need into the vehicle and programmed the flight path. We can start launch procedures immediately.”
&n
“Of course not. But they can’t stop us.” Katerina’s hazel eyes bored into her fiancé’s darker ones. “And only you can stop me.”
“Launch systems go. T minus 50 seconds and counting.”
Martin listened to Katerina’s calm voice over their helmets’ communication link and tried convincing himself he wasn’t making the second-worst mistake of his life. Katerina, rubbing shoulders besides him on his right, showed no trace of the doubts distracting him from his pre-launch tasks. She calmly checked the ascent vehicle’s instrument displays through her clear helmet and continued the countdown.
Though the form-fitting white plastisuits Katerina and he wore were less bulky than a standard-issue spacesuit, they were scrunched together so tightly in their padded seats within the rocket’s tiny windowless cabin that it was hard to move. Normally he would’ve enjoyed sitting so close to his fiancée and the way Katerina’s suit accentuated her curves. Instead it felt like they were strapped together in a flying coffin.
“T minus 45 seconds.”
Even if they managed to reach the top of Olympus Mons, find the aliens and persuade them to not destroy Earth, then fly the vehicle back to the vicinity of the habitation module—well, in the immortal words of Ricky Ricardo, they’d have some ‘splainin’ to do to Mission Control. Then again, getting on NASA’s naughty list was the least of his worries.
“T minus 40 seconds.”
Martin checked the propellant pressure gauges and reflexively pressed a switch with his gloved hand. He wondered if the aliens were peering inside the rocket right now—laughing at the puny humans who thought they could still save their world.
Maybe those omnipresent extraterrestrials were also watching when Katerina talked him into going along with her crazy scheme. She’d said the last word from Mission Control was that Mars was still spiraling slowly inward toward the Sun. Data from the orbiters overhead and ground-based observations indicated the planet would cross Earth’s orbit within a year.
“T minus 30 seconds.”
The margin of error in those measurements was too great to determine if the two worlds would collide when that happened in the ultimate Torino 10. But neither the two of them nor anyone on Earth could come up with a more optimistic reason why the aliens had decided to move Mars again. Martin shuddered as he remembered the last words they’d directed at humanity through Katerina and him.
You have failed our test. You are like the animals you call cattle and sheep. Your kind has no future.
We grant you enough time to prepare for your end.
“T minus 20 seconds.”
Martin wondered when the aliens would end this quixotic farce. Those beings from beyond could move planets at will. They’d terraformed Mars in a decade and were well on their way to doing the same to Venus. They could read minds, create illusions, control weather, perform miraculous cures, and build gigantic artifacts out of nothing. Surely annihilating a spaceship and its crew was child’s play to them.
Still—if this was the end, at least Katerina and he had spent these last few hours together. He remembered her shouting at him, “You can be like the cattle and sheep the aliens called us if you want. I’d rather die trying to save the world than cower here doing nothing like you!”
Common sense crumbled before that kind of argument and determination. And so, freshly encased in their plastisuits, they’d exited the habitation module for probably the last time and trudged the half kilometer north to the ascent vehicle. The rocket had landed on the ochre Martian plain over sixty sols before Katerina and he descended in the habitation module nearly four months ago. It was the most advanced single-stage-to-orbit craft ever developed—a distant descendent of the venerable Delta Clipper from the early 1990s.
A recent shower had washed most of the fine coating of reddish Martian dust from the vehicle’s white surface. It was shaped like a blunt-nosed cone over fifty meters tall, with its broad base resting firmly on five stubby landing legs. After Katerina and he sealed themselves inside they’d started the same protocol used before a spacewalk—switching the internal atmosphere to pure oxygen for them to pre-breathe and gradually reducing the cabin’s pressure to meet the lower pressure requirements for their suits before finally putting on their helmets.
“T minus 10 seconds.”
Martin squinted at the OLED screens showing the scene outside caught by the vehicle’s external cameras. The rocket began to vibrate as Katerina’s countdown reached zero and the engines ignited. He felt himself pressed back into his seat as the two of them headed up face-first into the clear Martian sky. The ground displayed on the screens receded and vanished in a billowing cloud of exhaust and dust as they rose higher and faster.
With the displays still showing all systems nominal, Martin glanced at Katerina. Her lips were moving in prayer behind her helmet. As the rocket arced gracefully toward Olympus Mons he thought of Alan Shepard’s fifteen-minute voyage back in 1961. Their suborbital flight would last only a few minutes longer than his. Martin grimly recited the bowdlerized version of the prayer America’s first astronaut said when Freedom 7 blasted off.
“Please, dear God, don’t let me mess up.”
Katerina stopped praying as the vehicle began shaking and warning indicators flashed on the display console. The attitude jets were malfunctioning. They’d been designed to maneuver the rocket primarily in space so it could dock with the fully fueled return vessel waiting in orbit to take them back to Earth. But until now they’d done well adjusting the craft’s orientation for a nose-up landing on the summit of Olympus Mons now only ten kilometers away and three kilometers below them.
Martin’s hands beat hers to the controls. His voice crackled through the transceivers in their helmets, “Switching to manual.”
Katerina scanned the display. “Propellant levels still good. Orientation still go for landing—”
Suddenly she was thrown against Martin’s shoulder as their craft jerked down toward the left. The rocket threatened to go into an uncontrolled tumble as her crewmate strained to right it. Though the vibrations rattling the craft stayed strong, Katerina relaxed slightly as the instruments showed the rocket was back in the base-downward direction needed to fire their main engines.
Then a reading on the display grabbed her attention. She cried, “The attitude jets aren’t the problem! Look at the wind speed and atmospheric pressure around us!”
Martin grimaced as he fought to maintain control of the ascent vehicle. “That’s impossible! It’s like we’re in the middle of a windstorm! There’s not enough air at this altitude to do that—unless the aliens are—”
His words were cut short as they both stared at the images on the OLED screens. The cameras on their craft’s outer hull were pointing down toward the layered caldera complex on top of Olympus Mons. But beneath them a raging dust storm roiled like a dense reddish-orange fog—covering and obscuring over thirty square kilometers of the cratered landscape rushing toward the rocket.
Katerina cried, “We’re heading right toward that storm!”
Martin nodded. “And we don’t have enough leeway in our trajectory to avoid it.”
He stared at a display, then flicked it futilely with his fingers. “Great! Radar’s on the fritz so we can’t measure exactly how far above the ground we are! No telling how high the dust is above the surface or what visibility is like inside it. Let’s hope we can see the ground well enough to use the jets to maneuver us someplace that’s level enough to land!”
“At least we’re on target! There’s the artifact!”
One screen showed the uppermost end of a gigantic solid shaft poking up out of the swirling opaque cloud of dust. It looked like a gleaming gray metal cube one hundred meters on a side floating on a billowing ocean of fog the color of dried blood.
Katerina shouted, “The artifact’s supposed to be four hundred meters tall. Based on how much of it we’re seeing, the dust storm must go up about three hundred meters above the ground!”
“Thanks for the info, but we’re still in big trouble!”
