Girl on Mars Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  by Jack McDonald Burnett

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  PART ONE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  PART TWO

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  THIRTY-FOUR

  PART THREE

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THIRTY-SIX

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  THIRTY-NINE

  FORTY

  FORTY-ONE

  FORTY-TWO

  FORTY-THREE

  FORTY-FOUR

  FORTY-FIVE

  FORTY-SIX

  Acknowledgments

  Copyright © 2017 Jack McDonald Burnett

  GIRL ON MARS

  a novel

  Jack McDonald Burnett

  BY JACK MCDONALD BURNETT

  www.scifijack.com

  www.scifijack.com/contact

  “Lost Moon: A Girl on the Moon Story” (2015)

  Girl on the Moon (2016)

  www.girlonthemoon.xyz

  Pauper (2016)

  Girl on Mars (2017)

  www.girlonmars.com

  Amethyst (forthcoming)

  Interstellar Girl (forthcoming)

  Read Jack’s short fiction on Wattpad

  www.wattpad.com/user/scifijack

  Visit www.scifijack.com to sign up for Jack’s e-mail list.

  If you like this book, please consider posting a review of it on Amazon or Goodreads.

  This one is for Cameron.

  Space flights are merely an escape, a fleeing away from oneself, because it is easier to go to Mars or to the moon than it is to penetrate one’s own being.

  —Carl Jung

  PART ONE

  Ships and sails proper for the heavenly air should be fashioned. Then there will also be people, who do not shrink from the dreary vastness of space.

  —Johannes Kepler, letter to Galileo Galilei, 1609

  ONE

  Jailbreak

  April, 2037

  Conn and Yongpo scrambled down a windowless corridor inside the Aphelial spacecraft. There was some urgency, and they weren’t graceful about it. They hadn’t moved much in the last few days, nor for many months before that, and they almost tangled with each other and fell as they listed and lurched. It didn’t help that the artificial gravity was twenty percent greater than that of Earth, and they felt like they were swimming against the tide. Aphelials were big, about seven feet tall, so the corridor was roomy, at least.

  Conn chanced a look behind her. No pursuit. Yet.

  She pulled up and pointed: “There!” Yongpo stumbled and spilled onto the floor.

  She was pointing at a small access hatch, just big enough for an Aphelial to fit through, but with plenty of clearance for humans.

  Yongpo huffed. “We need to find the way we came in,” he insisted.

  “The way we came in is up there,” Conn said, jabbing at the ceiling. “We went down a level when they brought us in here.”

  “Then we need to find stairs.”

  “Yongpo, our spacecraft is right—” she concentrated and spun about ninety degrees “—there. It can’t be more than twenty feet away.”

  “You don’t know that! The hatch might not even lead outside.”

  “I do know,” she said. “I was paying attention when they brought us here.We don’t have time to argue about this.” She glanced back the way they’d come again, then started toward the hatch. Yongpo grabbed her arm.

  “Conn, what if it does go outside? We’re pressurized.” Open a hatch from a pressurized environment into a vacuum and get ready to die violently.

  “You think the Aphelials haven’t figured out how to do away with airlocks? We didn’t come through one when they brought us here.”

  Yongpo frowned. “Yes, we did.”

  “That was ours,” Conn said. “No airlock on this monster, just a much bigger hatch than this one. Come on, we’re lucky we haven’t been caught. They’re coming.”

  Conn assumed, after a long friendship and almost a year of travel together, Yongpo knew he could trust her. He shook his head, and followed.

  Conn reached the hatch, and Yongpo grabbed her arm again. “What about that—tunnel, or whatever, that we went through? Between our airlock and here. What if it’s still there?”

  “We rip through it,” Conn said, turning a wheel on the hatch. “It’s got to be foil or something non-durable like that, right?” A portable passageway that didn’t have to endure heavy use or the elements would be as light as it could be—if they were talking about equipment in a human space station.

  Conn had a flash of doubt, but by then the wheel had turned as far as it would go, so she reached for the handle that would open the hatch. With a glance and a smile at her friend, she tugged it down. The door unlatched. She pushed it open.

  They didn’t explode. Yet outside yawned the vacuum of space.

  A stir down the corridor caught their attention. Three seven-foot humanoids jogged toward them.

  The Aphelials had imprisoned them as they’d been found, including with the T-field technology they wore. A T-field was a personal pressure field, a substitute for a space suit. It kept pressure and temperature steady, no matter the outside environment. A similar technology no doubt kept the spacecraft pressurized with an access hatch open to space.

  So, while the astronauts decided whether to launch themselves out the access hatch before the pursuing Aphelials reached them, they at least didn’t have to worry about depressurizing or freezing in the vacuum.

  Just breathing.

  Yongpo craned his neck, trying to spot their spacecraft, the good ship Cai Fang, nearby. He couldn’t find it. “It’s up and to the right—the airlock is,” Conn insisted. Yongpo looked at her, then at the Aphelials ten feet away and closing fast, and he sprung onto the lip of the hatch. He saw the Cai Fang, Conn could tell by his big grin. He lunged up and to the right.

  Conn tried to follow, but an Aphelial got hold of her hip and spun her around. She kicked at him, catching him on the underside of his enormous forearm. His arms were bare, all of their arms were. Aphelials favored minimal clothing. These three were typical: something akin to a sash, something that could be a kilt, and lots of gray-green skin, with dozens of dark blotches appearing, roiling, and disappearing on its surface.

  Conn crouched, took a deep breath, then sprung backwards through the hatch. She smiled and waved to her would-be captors as they sneered at her. She looked up and saw Yongpo scrabbling his way up the Aphelial spacecraft toward the tunnel connecting it and their own vehicle, and she smiled more like she meant it.

  Then she realized she was drifting away from the Aphelial spacecraft. By instinct she tried to swim back toward it, to no avail in microgravity. She panicked.

  Seconds passed. She looked behind her as best she could, and saw nothing but stars. Yongpo might be able to rescue her somehow—if either of them had a breathing bubble. Her heart raced, not helping matters.
She’d come all this way, farther than anyone ever, just to die adrift in space—

  She hit her head on the hull of the Cai Fang. The blow forced some air out, and she gritted her teeth and tried not to growl out any extra air. She was at least fifty feet from the airlock. Yongpo was nowhere in sight. She realized he wouldn’t pressurize the airlock and breathe himself until she was in there with him, and she panicked again on his behalf. She began to pull herself toward the airlock as fast as she could go.

  Clearing the lip of the spacecraft and arriving at the tunnel, she didn’t see Yongpo or any hole he might have made. More panic. She was never going to make it on one breath, drifting and hitting her head and panicking so much. She tore into the foil (yes!) of the tunnel herself, and only then saw what she presumed was Yongpo’s hole. That was a relief. She clambered into the tunnel, and there in the airlock, with the outside hatch open, was Yongpo, distress easy to read on his face. Conn lurched into the airlock and closed the door. Yongpo punched the button to aerate and pressurize the airlock.

  Yongpo didn’t look like he could make it the twenty-five seconds it would take the process to be complete. Conn was seeing stars.

  Just when she was sure she couldn’t hold her breath any longer, the green light came on and she took a huge gulp of new air. Her head pounded. She called out to Yongpo, and saw him hanging limp in microgravity.

  She turned his head to her and checked—he was breathing. She tried to wake him, without success. Wincing at her headache, she muscled open the interior door and towed her friend into the spacecraft proper. She shut the door and tried to wake him again. Nothing, but he was still breathing. How long would a lack of oxygen knock someone out? She needed his help.

  That was when she heard the airlock begin to depressurize.

  Someone was trying to get in from the outside.

  TWO

  Run For It

  April, 2037

  Five days earlier, they had dropped out of fifth-dimensional space into the Mizar and Alcor system, in their “borrowed” Pelorian vessel that belonged to Dyna-Tech, Yongpo’s employer. They were eighty-three light years from Earth, after a forty-nine-week journey. They’d been discovered, boarded, and detained within hours of arrival. The first thing the Aphelials had done was upload their language into Conn’s and Yongpo’s brains. Then they’d questioned the astronauts about where they were from and what their purpose was. The Aphelials didn’t seem satisfied with their answers.

  This made Conn even more nervous than she’d already been. The Pelorians, humankind’s new neighbors on the moon, had warned Conn about the Aphelials, that they were dangerous—that they might even seek humankind’s extinction. The Aphelial Conn had met in orbit around Saturn had not contradicted this (that one had been accidentally killed before he could give up any more useful information). Conn wanted to travel to Mizar and Alcor to find out what, if anything, Earth had to fear from the Aphelials.

  They’d had company all five days they were locked in the brig: neighbors on either side of the cell they shared. Yongpo and “his” neighbor, as Conn came to think of him, talked for hours at a time, animated all the while. He was a scientist, a dissident of some kind. Yongpo told Conn that he was learning the theory and practice of teleportation, instantaneous travel from one place to another. “We tried talking in general terms about what they know about physics that we don’t, but I couldn’t process it,” he said. “So, we talked about how and why what they call their ‘portal’ technology works. That way I don’t have to understand how the assumptions came about, just what they are. I’ll unpack it all later, if I can.”

  After many months with only each other to talk to, both astronauts were relieved to be able to interact with someone new. “Her” neighbor didn’t talk as much as Yongpo’s. He—Conn had yet to encounter an Aphelial female, as far as she knew—was named Brakaan and was part of the crew. Something he’d done negligently had led to a crewmate’s death. Conn never did find out what.

  But Conn got some of her answers from her reticent neighbor, as much from how he acted as from what he said. He didn’t hide his contempt for Conn and her species, a sense of affront that a race that could travel to Mizar and Alcor (albeit with borrowed technology) was still alive and reproducing. More than once he exhorted Yongpo’s neighbor, the dissident scientist, to stop educating the humans, the way he might have ordered a child not to feed the goats at a petting zoo. Conn expected somebody to put a stop to Yongpo’s lessons on teleportation, but no one did. She surmised that the spacecraft’s crew didn’t know what to do with them—as best she could glean from her neighbor, the spacecraft was a cargo ship of some kind. Or else they were as good as dead anyway, and it didn’t matter what they learned.

  Brakaan tried to convince Conn that the Aphelials did destroy inferior races, leaving them without useful technology or wiping them out altogether, like the Pelorians said. She wondered, though, how much of what he said she had unconsciously fed him. There were “cells” in the galaxy, he said, territories demarcated by the dominion of single, superior races like the Aphelials. The Aphelials snuffed out any potential challenge to their technological superiority before it could really germinate. Brakaan didn’t appear to be morally or otherwise disturbed by any of this. She wasn’t entirely sure he was telling the truth.

  So maybe the Pelorians had been right: the Aphelials threatened humankind, or at least races like humankind. Right before he died, the Aphelial that Conn met on Tethys, the tiny moon of Saturn, had hinted at a special relationship between the Aphelials and humans. Brakaan could not be prodded into talking about that. To be fair, Conn wasn’t sure he knew what she was talking about.

  She had interrupted Yongpo and his neighbor, Cartaig, so she could ask Cartaig about this special relationship. Difficult as it was to tell in an alien, Conn got the distinct impression that he was uncomfortable with the question. He dodged it long enough for his conversation with Yongpo to pick up again instead. It hadn’t been long after that, now that Conn thought about it, that they had fetched the two astronauts to move them out of the brig. By sheer luck, they’d had an opening during the transfer to run, and they’d taken advantage.

  # # #

  Now they were back aboard the Cai Fang, though maybe not for long if the Aphelials got into the airlock. In forty-nine weeks aboard the spacecraft, Conn had learned every button, screen, and toggle, but she still looked for anything that might stop the airlock from depressurizing. She had it: opening the interior door should do the trick. The system would stop depressurizing the airlock to keep from depressurizing the whole spacecraft.

  She tried to open the interior airlock door, but it was locked tight. She planted herself and tugged as hard as she could, without success. Preventing the interior door from opening while the airlock filled with vacuum was a useful feature, now that she thought about it.

  Instead, she lunged to the controls and powered up the spacecraft. She cycled its engines, getting ready to break away as soon as possible. “Yongpo, I need you,” she growled. Yongpo groaned. Conn sighed in relief. “Hurry up, I need some help,” she said loudly. He tried to rouse himself.

  The engines were ready. Yongpo was coming back to life. Conn heard the exterior airlock door open.

  She goosed the attitude jets and spurted away from the Aphelial spacecraft and its portable airlock tunnel. The latter caused a screech that made her wince. She hoped she hadn’t hurt anybody. An alarm warned her that the exterior airlock door was open. She swiped the alarm away. Once they were as clear as they could get in a hurry, she urged the spacecraft forward. She heard Yongpo tumble and cry, “Ow.”

  Yongpo said something. Conn replied, “Chinese.” Yongpo repeated himself, in English, which she had helped him master on their long journey to Mizar and Alcor.

  “What’s happening?”

  “We’re running, for all the good it—”

  She heard the exterior airlock door slam shut.

  She froze. Inertia, she tried to con
vince herself. We decelerated—somehow—and it slammed shut. Just inertia.

  Then the airlock began to pressurize.

  Again, she couldn’t stop it from her side. She growled in frustration. The pilot should have airlock control. For . . . when somebody is trying to break into the spacecraft through the airlock. Which had to happen all the freaking time, right?

  Yongpo stiffened, as though beginning to appreciate what was happening. Conn looked around, now for something to defend herself with. Her black hair was floating around her head, obstructing her vision. She didn’t have time to tie it back.

  Maybe only one Aphelial was in the airlock when she broke away. Even if so, one was enough to overpower the two of them.

  The airlock finished pressurizing. She floated out of her seat and faced it.

  The door opened.

  A giant ducked through it. He cleared the door, gray-green skin, shoulder-length dark hair afloat. Unarmed, Conn noticed. Nothing but a breathing bubble, which floated behind him like he’d wanted his hands free. He’d had to duck and crouch and he still stretched from the floor to the ceiling.

  “Welcome aboard,” Conn squeaked. She cleared her throat. “We just want to go home. Coming here was a mistake.”

  “Right about now, I’d agree with you,” the Aphelial said.

  “Then let us go. We won’t be back.”

  The Aphelial pulled himself forward, toward the two astronauts, in a slow creep.

  “That’s far enough,” Yongpo said. He pulled out a pistol and pointed it at the Aphelial. Conn looked at him like he’d whipped out a live parrot. A gun?

  “This is an explosive projectile weapon. At this range, I won’t miss.”

  “You’d better not,” the Aphelial said, but stopped advancing. “You’ll kill us all.”