January 18, 2018

MARTIAN HOLIDAY 118: DaneelAH & Company, and Stepan In Burroughs

On a well-settled Mars, the five major city Council regimes struggle to meld into a stable, working government. Embracing an official Unified Faith In Humanity, the Councils are teetering on the verge of pogrom directed against Christians, Molesters, Jews, Rapists, Buddhists, Murderers, Muslims, Thieves, Hindu, Embezzlers and Artificial Humans – anyone who threatens the official Faith and the consolidating power of the Councils. It makes good sense, right – get rid of religion and Human divisiveness on a societal level will disappear? An instrument of such a pogrom might just be a Roman holiday...To see the rest of the chapters and I’m sorry, but a number of them got deleted from the blog – go to SCIENCE FICTION: Martian Holiday on the right and scroll to the bottom for the first story. They are HanAH, the security expert (m); DaneelAH, xenoarchaeologist (m); AzAH, language expert (f); MishAH, pattern recognition (f).

QuinnAH had stopped both talking and taunting, hurrying through shabbier and shabbier corridors. Dust changed to debris, then became real garbage, accumulating into a grinding grit beneath their feet the closer they got to the razor-thin barrier separating the interior of the Domes from the thin, suffocating atmosphere of the surface of Mars. Ongoing terraforming and the increase in atmospheric pressure had raised it to something like a tenth of an Earth atmosphere after the addition of Krypton and Xenon gases from several comet strikes. The end point of a habitable surface was still a century in the future – and then there’d only be exit with complete environmental suits rather than hard spacesuits.

In other words, if anything happened to the Dome, everyone directly exposed to the Martian atmosphere here on the surface would die. Just as they had when FirstDome had been breached during the initial unrest. After that, the Unified Faith in Humanity had gained a strong foothold.
QuinnAH stopped at a hollow lift tube, slapping the activation pad. The floor glowed a dim red as he stepped onto it.

“I’m not riding on that!” HanAH said. “It’s so old it’ll quit halfway up!”

The boy shrugged, “Suit yourself. The stairs are down the corridor and to your left.” AzAH, DaneelAH, and MishAH stepped in with the boy.

DaneelAH waved. “See you upstairs.”

HanAH strode forward, muttering, “Someone in this pod has to use their head for something more than a battering ram!” He squeezed between the boy and his vat mates as the gMod lift tube started up to the surface.

There was a moment when the lift faded and they slid back down a meter or so. HanAH said, “I told you…”

They started moving up again. QuinnAH said, “They built stuff to last in the olden days, huh?” AzAH smiled faintly as the lift stopped. “Let’s go. Next stop is up!” He darted out of the lift and they four vat mates followed, longer legs meaning shorter steps.

“I should have brought my stunner,” HanAH said.

“You’d have lost it by now to a v-born,” said DaneelAH. HanAH only grunted. The boy took off down an alley and they had to pick up their pace to keep up. He stopped and turned into a recessed doorway that they found had a ramp leading another meter down.

AzAH said, “This is an old part of the Dome. It’s sunken into the permafrost here. Not supposed to, but it has. Who knows how weak the infrastructure is here…” She stepped into the darkened interior of a huge, abandoned warehouse. A few breaks in the roof and a shattered window high up let wan, red light in. “Spread out a bit. I don’t want all of us to fall into Mars if the floor collapses.”

“Ain’t gonna collapse,” said QuinnAH, suddenly appearing in a cross beam of light full of dust they’d raised with their passage. “He’s up on the roof…or…I don’t know…”

“Where was he when you last saw him, son,” asked DaneelAH. Quinn described what his master had been doing when he’d vanished.

HanAH said, “We need to get up on the roof?”

“I don’t think so – Stepan said that the stairs were leading down, into the building. Like in an lift shaft or something that had been boarded over; except he said there were stairs and there was like a room that went into the wall.”

They went to the roof first and met QuinnAH’s friend, the man he called Pastor.

HanAH was stood and was staring at the hole in the roof of the warehouse as he said, “How do we know he found them here?”

DaneelAH, AzAH, and MishAH all looked at him. MishAH finally managed, “Where would he get something like he’s just described?”

“He could have…” HanAH opened his mouth, knowing that he looked like an idiot and closed it before he could get himself into any more trouble. A moment later, after QuinnAH had tossed the gMod disk down to Stepan Izmaylova, he rose up slowly, a geological sample bag tucked under one arm.

The four Artificial Humans from Malacandra stepped forward. Stepan looked at them then pulled something from the bag. He set the bag down and lifted what he’d found. It was a bag, narrowing half-way down then flaring at the bottom; four meters long and obviously ancient. Darkened, it was obvious even so that there had been metallic parts that pierced the strangely shaped bag.

They stared, uncomprehending until suddenly AzAH said, “I recognize this.”

“You’ve seen something like this?” HanAH said.

“No,” she said.

HanAH looked at her, scowling.

“Not something like this. Part of this.”

“What?” said Stepan, AzAH, and DaneelAH in unison.

She shook her head. “I can’t even begin to speculate how they’re related, but I can only state that Mayor Turin, in his personal collection of Martian geological artifacts, has something like this. It has more metal and what were once four protrusions, though two have been torn away. Seeing this, I can only come to one conclusion: the two halves together would make a spacesuit.”

Pastor Stepan shook his head, “It can’t be. No one could fit into anything like that.”

“Not one of us, people. Not something Human.”


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