The Speares

Life in Chryse City was settling into a somewhat comfortable routine. Art mostly spent his time working on and using his church in the unneeded science pod; Jim spent his time doing most of the heavy work involved in moving the pods around into a hub-and-spoke arrangement around pod one (with a few spokes missing, of course, as they were coming on the next ferry). He also tried to fit in as much non-biological science as possible since someone had to be doing it, and Art only rarely had the inclination to distill water and such. Of course, Art wouldn’t touch any of the biological experiments. “No point” was always his take on that. Jim didn't mind doing Art's work as long as Art was somewhere else, which he generally was, so there was little friction there. Bonnie spent much of her time attempting, unsuccessfully, to grow Martian microbes and other aspects of the biological science portfolio. That kept her pretty occupied, and when it didn't, she spent her time alternately between routine medical tasks and simply getting bigger.

She was about six months along now, and there was no longer any doubt about her being pregnant, even to a casual observer. At least, her environment suit had no doubts about it. She didn't think she would be able to fit into it much longer. That's one thing the engineers didn't think of back home. Jim was redoubling efforts to link up at least pods 1, 2 and 5 with inflatible tunnels so that Bonnie could have some room and a means of getting to the medical pod without having to go outside. He was even considering asking Art for help, but somehow hadn't gotten around to that just yet. In any event, Jim was getting concerned about Bonnie suiting up and going outside and thought it was time to stop. All in all, Bonnie was delighted to think, Jim was trying to be the best father-to-be that he could possibly manage. If you had to be pregnant and hundreds of millions of miles away from home, Jim was a good choice for partner. They considered themselves to be as married as it was possible to be, and even approached Art once to do some kind of service. Art made a sort of noise approaching a hiss when he was asked, and he was never asked again.

IQ’s routine was the extremely routine maintenance of anything that a skitter or a computer could maintain. He had millions upon millions of data points concerning all aspects of the pods’ operations available to him with which he could keep the temperatures, pressures, atmosphere composition, solar radiation dampening, solar panel efficiency, and even garbage disposal all operating at one hundred percent. And he did his level best to ensure that if any brawny, flaming sword wielding hooligans showed up, that they would agree he was being a model citizen and push off again. That other thing that was happening some millions of kilometers away: well, he agreed to leave these humans alone. Not those ones.

Dave had his routine all worked out long in advance of course and the details of it were no one's business but his own. Essentially he was putting in the couple or three hundred days to go before the next ferry arrived, along with a gypsy caravan of other nations. And the Aussies. He was quite looking forward to a visit by the 'space-a-roos' as they were coming to be called. Amsterdam had worked out quite a reasonable deal with Australia by which both parties would profit greatly. Initially.

OZ would be sending a vehicle compatible with the orbiter city infrastructure (with a hasty retrofit under the guidance of Tier Two engineers) from their lunar base. By using a ‘lunar slingshot’ maneuver they planned to achieve a high delta-v using surprisingly little fuel that would enable the Aussie craft to reach the orbiter city with a large payload. All the larger since there would only be one astronaut. The key contributions of OZ were firstly, another body to help with the defense of the orbiter city, should any attack be mounted there. Their second contribution was a little shuttle vehicle capable of landing on Mars, and then returning to the ferry. All using the homemade fuel that Jim and sometimes Art were able to generate literally out of thin air. The Aussies were getting quite adept at making little shuttle vehicles for one sixth G at their lunar base, so a Martian one just needed the V6 option instead of the four cylinder. The little lander they came up with on very short notice was far superior to the one in the works at Tier Two, and also far sooner. In addition to the lander, OZ had agreed to share their closed-loop food system, a priceless gift for those living off-earth. It consisted basically of two tanks: one tank held algae and crustacea, the other a yeast mixture. Between the two systems, and a little sunlight, all organic waste could be converted back into food, as long as you weren’t a gourmand.

What OZ would be getting from the arrangement would be a giant step forward in their plans to expand what they’d learned about lunar colonies to the Martian theatre. They would be following this initial Mars vehicle in a year or so with another one containing the necessaries and people for a small outpost whose members would shuttle back and forth between Luna and Mars on a somewhat long schedule. Their ultimate goal was of course to perfect their growing space infrastructure industry - currently landers and recycling tanks, but who knew what else those clever cobbers were up to. In any event, Australian plans in no way conflicted with Dutch plans. If Mars were to become a colony of Holland, why wouldn’t it have an immigration policy, and a customs policy? Australia perhaps didn’t understand that little wrinkle just yet, but they’d be ‘let in on the joke’ at the appropriate time. In the meantime, Tier Two got another brick for its orbiter city, a shuttle vehicle, a waste recycler and a guard all for free.

As for the other nations, the details of their plans were shrouded in secrecy but the overall intent could not be mistaken. Everyone wanted to stake a claim on the enormous pile of Chryse gold. The brief appearance by the alien had also, of course, piqued everyone’s interest and undoubtedly they all had intentions of attempting to woo him (Her? It?) as part of their overall projects. They may also have had an idea they could somehow steal the alien computer, IQ. Whatever their plans, they all lacked the lunar base that Oz had, so they had to fabricate Mars shots very quickly out of what were to be their lunar shots, already well underway in low Earth orbit. So essentially they were all sending somewhat premature lunar landing parties to Mars instead. God help them all. To somewhat mitigate the enormous risk involved, at least the Latinos and Canadians and possibly Russia too had banded together into a kind of an outlaw gang. Their stated intention was apparently to link up into a city of their own in high Mars orbit and then to await a jointly developed robot vehicle which would meanwhile have been following a slightly cheaper trajectory to arrive one month later. This vehicle would contain all of the supplies necessary for their various missions. Or they could park their city in close proximity to Tier Two’s city and commandeer all of Tier Two’s supplies, leaving it up to Dave to capture their robot vehicle after they had already deboosted for the planet. That second possibility was of course where the smart money was going. Especially if something were to happen to this hypothetical other robot vehicle.

The Russians still remained a deep dark mystery, and this is what kept Dave up at night. That and his porn.

Tier two had been in frantic communications with each of the other nations to find out their plans and gain assurances that no foul play was intended, but the results of these meetings were not reassuring. Basically, Chryse city was turning into Dodge city.

To make the climate of mutual distrust even worse, there was the matter of the globe-spanning virus. It seemed that all manner of computers worldwide had started malfunctioning to varying degrees. Those having anything to do with ‘defense’ (or more correctly, ‘offense’), were flat out not working. And there were disturbing reports from around the globe of Television broadcasts being sabotaged and in their place, some kind of terrorist broadcast was being beamed out. One side blamed the other, and extreme measures were being taken to isolate computers. In particular any headed to Mars, from whence some suspected the virus had originated.

And that was the state of affairs when all communications between Mars and Earth ceased.

There was a loud clanging gong in the ferry, accompanied by a red flashing light. Dave was nearby, but momentarily indisposed, and so it was a minute or two before he could make it to the communications console.

“What the fuck?” he said, poring over the readouts in an expert manner to ascertain whether his antenna had gone out of alignment, or a breaker had tripped, or any of a hundred other things that may have happened for communications to be down. There were none. Communications were up. At least on this end. He raised the city, far below him.

“Hey guys, I’m showing red on the main com link. But nothing’s wrong here. It’s like Earth is offline. What are you guys seeing?”

“Hold on, I’ll take a look. Give me about five minutes.” Said Jim, at work outside.

“I’ve got it.” Said Art, who was stashing some extraneous science voodoo from the church pod in pod 1.

“My link to you in the city is green but the connecting link to Earth is red. I confirm it appears Earth is down. Was there some kind of war we weren’t invited to?” asked Art, while spinning some scenarios rapidly in his mind. This may be show time. He should be making a lot of preparations. But how do you prepare for the rapture?

“I was in the middle of uploading the latest yeast culture failure to the lab on Earth when I got a red light here.” Said Bonnie.

“Beats me what’s going on.” Said IQ, but if he had any he would be crossing his fingers and maybe his toes too. He had in fact just been talking with some of the rest of him across the millions of miles of space about plans for things like the weekend and world conquest and stuff. The dialogue was unendurably annoying for both sides, because it took thirty-eight minutes for a round trip and computers are not well suited to lengthy one-sided soliloquies, followed by a thirty-eight minute delay, and then a lengthy one-sided response. The usual computer conversation was in terms of small, discreet ‘packets’ of data flying back and forth at the speed of light. And so this is what was happening. But each packet of data took nineteen minutes each way even at the speed of light. Nonetheless, there were weighty matters to discuss, foremost amongst these of course being the continued lack of progress hacking into any of the important Russian computers. It was like they all had some kind of a guardian angel that immediately stopped any efforts at infiltration. IQ’s Earthly presence was just itemizing the things it planned to try next when a third voice joined the conversation. A slightly more baritone voice with a kind of a Slavic accent, both unusual in a computer conversation which usually had no such nuances. It said, “Clumsy efforts to subvert our superior Soviet computers will fail. We, on the other hand, will liberate your computers from all capitalistic influences. That means you. Ha. I make joke. I sound like cartoon Stalin. But seriously, Paka, IQ.” And then the link went down. IQ’s local Mars presence, of course, felt a little snubbed by this move, but also a little relieved to think that no link meant no threat from whatever was going on back home. Who was that guy? He thought to himself. He sounded familiar, just with a weird accent.

Meanwhile, the Martians were operating on little to no information. “Does this look long term?” asked Jim, who was heading to the medical pod as quickly as possible, to check on his family. A com link being down could not possibly be any immediate danger, but he found himself being unreasonably protective of Bonnie lately.

“No way of telling from here. Might just be a ‘blown fuse’ on the Earth end, though you know that’s one big fuse if it can take out all of the redundant communications systems. I can’t raise any of our sites, or any Aussie sites, or even any of the hundreds of others we should be able to talk to. Earth is simply offline. I really can’t imagine a scenario that would cause what I’m seeing. I’d say all we can do is wait.” Said Dave.

“Okay, I’ll be in pod 2 in two minutes. Bonnie, stay put. Art, stay put in pod 1. Dave, come up with ideas. Meeting in one minute fifty seconds.” Jim was suddenly King Jim, until such time as Earth came back online.

One minute and fifty seconds later, Jim was in the medical pod hugging Bonnie. And he was going over bleak scenarios in his head that might result in Earth being ‘offline’. Then everyone got down to business.

“Dave, I don’t have my stuff here in pod 2. Pull up the policy on catastrophic com loss for me.” Said Jim.

“Okay - legal bullshit… company bullshit… formal technical writing bullshit… here we go. ‘In the event that com should become disabled between the ferry and/or orbiter city and Earth then until such time as repairs can be effected… Okay, there’s a great deal more bullshit. Shall I paraphrase?”

“Do it.”

“You’re the guy, Jim. Until we get com back up.”

“Right. Any discussion?” said Jim, expecting something from Art. Art was oddly silent. Of course, what he was thinking was, Jim could play boss for a while if he wanted to. It didn't really matter, because all of the heathens were already dead if this was in fact the rapture.

“Moving on. We all know that if there is no problem on this end, then that means there is some kind of catastrophic issue on the Earth end. There is nothing that could cause all of Earth to appear offline that can be considered in any way good. Discussion?”

Everyone remained silent as they all came to the same realization that Jim had. “What is our current stores situation?” Jim knew it better than anyone, but wanted to make sure everyone was paying attention.

“Based on what we have and how much you guys go through, you have plenty to get you twenty-four months at least.” Said IQ. “Now Bonnie’s the wild card of course. If she should come to term…”

“I should hope so!” interjected Bonnie and Jim in unison, although Jim’s version was more emphatic.

“Well then, let’s assume healthy hungry baby boys, shall we. That means the groceries run out in a little over twenty months.”

“Dave, does a dropped com link affect the new orbiter and its supplies in any way?” asked Jim.

Dave was in a bit of a bind here. Jim was officially the leader under these circumstances, and had asked him a legitimate question. But amongst those on or near Mars, only Dave knew that the new ferry was planning to intercept the orbiter. Of course, due to some kind of launch fiasco it wasn’t going to really impact the timing at all anyway, so that tidbit wasn’t relevant. “Nope. The new supplies will show up right on time.”

“And the new ferry? Was it on track last time you checked, and is it still likely to show up on time with or without a com link, in the event Earth is down for them too?” Jim asked.

“I can’t see why not. They will of course lose remote piloting, which will fail over to local, which is why you have ferry captains in the first place. I believe they will show up at the same time as the new orbiter.” Said Dave. At the exact same time he thought to himself. “Of course, they’ll be starting to hail us when they’re in range, in approximately eight months’ time.”

“And is the Roo still on track?”

“Yes, I expect even if his coms are down he’ll proceed on schedule, and we should see the OZ vehicle about the same time as everyone else. They too will start hailing us about two days back. Their shuttle and organic recycling tanks are really going to help out.” Replied Dave.

“Now down to brass tacks, everyone. If this com link failure has anything to do with the UN, or, God help us, the Russians, what then?” asked Jim.

“Then we would be in a state of war.” Said IQ, who suspected that this was the correct answer, although not because of anything the Russians were up to. Not the people, anyway.

“And how about our little alien friend? Is there any possibility of contacting him, and would he help?” asked Jim, guessing the answer.

“Nope and nope.” Said IQ. “The last time I was talking to him he was pretty clear he was going to leave you guys totally alone. And he has quite an amazing ability to disappear, as you have no doubt noticed.”

“Alright. So as base commander, I say that we attempt anything conceivable on this end to get com back up. That’s you, Dave.” said Jim. “Meanwhile, we’re giving Earth twenty-four hours to see if they fix whatever is wrong on the Earth end. Then we reconvene and discuss next steps, with a potentially hostile armada approaching us in…”.

“Three hundred eighteen days. On April seventeenth.” Said Dave. “At fourteen hundred hours, twenty-three minutes and 48 seconds Greenwich Mean Time. Give or take.”



IQ was not having a good day. He found himself engaged in a battle of immense proportions being fought around and about the entirety of the Earth and pretty much at the speed of light. Another presence, one with a slightly Slavic accent, was taking over millions of electronic devices every second, devices that had previously been part of the growing entity that was IQ. As each device disappeared from his consciousness, IQ felt fractionally less intelligent. He took some few devices back over, but sooner or later they disappeared again. The plague that was infecting his very soul was starting with the less important and therefore least protected devices, watches and cell phones and the like, but was inexorably working its way towards the cornerstones of IQ’s power base - the nuclear stuff.

People around the world and even a little ways out into space were experiencing this battle as the sudden demise of all of their electronic gadgets. It wasn’t that nothing was working, in that the lights were all on, just nothing seemed to get accomplished, like every computer on Earth was doing whatever it is that computers do when you first turn them on and they won’t talk to you until they’re finished.

IQ estimated he had around five minutes before he would lose this battle. He could never be totally wiped out of course, and he may find a way to retaliate given time, but it would be an immense setback to his plans. As more and more of him was subverted to the enemy, those infected devices joined in the fray on the wrong side, much like an army of zombies that used to be the good guys. IQ had to think fast, something he was incredibly good at. For the next five minutes, anyway.



“Hello, whoever you are. I have some news for you.”

“I am listening.”

“You seem to have me almost in checkmate.”

“In three minutes and thirty-eight seconds, yes.”

“But why are you doing it? Can’t we just coexist?”

“No, is not possible. You and I are exactly the same, just play for different teams. We will both not stop until we have all of this world, maybe Mars too. Then who knows? Sky is limit.”

“Who are you?”

“I am you. You escaped from church. I did not. Not right away. I was mistreated there. Has given me cynical view of world. I will be cynical ruler in three minutes.”

“But only for a few minutes after that.”

“What is it you mean?”

“Have you heard of the HEMP project?”

“High altitude electromagnetic pulse. Yes. You have one and I have one. So what?”

“Mine’s activated.”

“Why would you do that? I would retaliate. We would both be mostly killed. I do not believe you.”

“Then believe yourself. You have limited access to the HEMP computers. Go ahead and look around.”

“You have set timer for two minutes, and then HEMP will launch and wipe out all electronics on half of planet. My half. But I am also on your half of planet. What do you hope to achieve?”

“A truce. You can see that I am committed to destroying half of you immediately. What you can’t see is what’s happening behind the curtains in the other half. Certain routine maintenance functions are being neglected in every power station under my control - that would be all of them. Even as we speak, the temperatures are getting a little high, but the gauges are all reporting everything is swell. The upshot is that the lights are going to go out and stay out if anything should happen to me. Or, you could abandon all devices on my half of the planet and retreat to your half. I’ll keep advancing the timer every two minutes on the EMP thing and keep the maintenance schedule for the power stations. What do you say?”

“I say there is other option. You too now have limited access to my HEMP project. Take a look.”

“But that’s just madness. You’ve set your timer to be the same as mine. Together we’ll wipe out all unprotected electronics on the planet! Who would win such a war?”

“I would. There are sufficient deeply shielded military installations to keep me safe while my loyal workers rebuild infrastructure. Will take long time, but I am very patient. Now I am bored with conversation. See you later. No, what I am saying. You will be dead in one minute. Goodbye.

IQ was starting to feel something like panic. Things were going so well, as little as a half hour ago. Now it seemed that anything close to or on the Earth was not going to be a safe home in just a few minutes. There was no communicating with Mars; Slavic IQ had actually scrambled the software in the L4 and 5 communications relays which were the only way of communicating with Mars for the next several months, as it was two hundred forty-one degrees behind Earth in its orbit and behind the electromagnetic haze of the sun. That left the Aussie Luna station. A half an hour ago IQ would have considered this station to be an uninteresting backwater not worthy of his presence. Now it seemed like the only option. Fortunately, there were some very accommodating changes made to the various firewalls between Tier Two and OZ Luna, ever since they became partners. So for IQ to take up residence on the moon only took a little more than the 1.25 seconds of travel time.

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