The Piranha Solution: A Hard Science Fiction Technothriller (Ace of Space Book 1) Read online

  Books by John Triptych

  Wrath of the Old Gods series (in chronological order)

  The Glooming

  Pagan Apocalypse

  Canticum Tenebris

  The Fomorians

  A World Darkly

  Eye of Balor

  Mortuorum Luctum

  Expatriate Underworld series

  The Opener

  The Loader

  Dying World series

  Lands of Dust

  City of Delusions

  The Maker of Entropy

  Ace of Space series

  The Piranha Solution

  The Piranha Solution

  Ace of Space Book 1

  By John Triptych

  Copyright© 2017 by John Triptych

  All rights reserved.

  J Triptych Publishing

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and events either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, and/or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover by Deranged Doctor Design (http://www.derangeddoctordesign.com/)

  Interior formatting by Polgarus Studios

  For Luigi.

  Author’s note:

  Dear reader, I would like to thank you for purchasing this book. As a self-published author, I incur all the costs of producing this novel so your feedback means a lot to me. If you wouldn’t mind, could you please take a few minutes and post a review of this online and let others know what you think of it?

  As I’m sure you’re aware, the more reviews I get, the better my future sales would be and therefore my financial incentive to produce more books for your enjoyment increases. I am very happy to read any comments and questions and I am willing to respond to you personally as quickly as I can. My email is [email protected] if you wish to contact me directly. Again, thank you and I hope you enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it!

  Please join my exclusive mailing list! You will get the latest news on my upcoming works and special discounts. Subscription is FREE and you get lots of FREE books! Just copy and paste this link to your browser: http://eepurl.com/bK-xGn

  I would like to thank the following:

  Zachary Gallegos, planetary scientist, for graciously allowing me to use the term Mesopotamia based on his paper for a proposed landing site in Hellas Basin, Mars.

  Winchell Chung and his Atomic Rockets website for providing me with detailed information on getting the science right.

  And for the beta readers who gave a lot of their time in order to read my manuscript, and helping me out with fixing the science to make it a little bit more plausible: Michel Lamontagne, Jarno Kokko, Michael Cooper, and Phillip Gaynor.

  Table of Contents

  Books by John Triptych

  Author’s note:

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Thanks for reading!

  Also by J Triptych Publishing

  As for me, I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.

  — Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale

  But first whom shall we send

  In search of this new world, whom shall we find

  Sufficient? Who shall tempt, with wand'ring feet

  The dark unbottomed infinite abyss

  And through the palpable obscure find out

  His uncouth way, or spread his aery flight

  Upborne with indefatigable wings

  Over the vast abrupt, ere he arrive

  The happy isle?

  — John Milton, Paradise Lost

  Chapter 1

  Rover-14 continued its bumpy course along the outflow channel, while a bluish sunset cast the last rays of light over the Red Planet’s murky horizon. Formed over three billion years ago, the frigid, dusty riverbed of Ares Vallis seemed to look exactly like it was when the Martian waters receded, its remnants frozen underneath the lower levels of the ground. Within the last twenty years, the smooth surface of the surrounding terrain had been steadily disturbed by numerous vehicle tracks. The rust-colored regolith was ground up, revealing bits of crushed, green-grey sand underneath. Across the sky, the dust and gases of the planet’s thin atmosphere scattered the fading light with less refraction than on Earth, filtering out the other hues and giving the waning shine a blue halo. A long period of twilight was to be expected, since the sun’s rays on the other side of Mars would be scattered around the night edge of the world by the ubiquitous, high-altitude dust in the atmosphere.

  Geoff Menard frowned while gripping the rover’s steering wheel. He was coming up at the end of his two-year tour, and he couldn’t wait to leave. He had once been eager when he signed up for the job, but now a growing sense of lethargy and boredom permeated his very soul. The first few months in the colony was an eye-opening experience of new sights and pure wonderment. He was one of the few who actually set foot on the Red Planet, and that was now a member of an exclusive group of human beings to set foot on another world. But as the days turned to weeks, and then into months, the sheer monotony of doing the same tasks, eating the same boring food, and the same routine had ground down his interest in all things Martian. It started out as little things. First it was the lack of meat in his diet. While fish was somewhat plentiful due to the aquaculture department’s highly successful fish farms, Menard really missed the juicy, flavorful taste of a rare steak. There had been rumors that the higher ups in the company had private shipments of Grade-A USDA Prime sirloin and ribeye sent directly over to them, since they always ate in their private dining rooms. Even rumors of Kobe beef from Japan had been bandied about by the other engineering crews, though there had been an official memo coming from the colony director, which denied such incidents ever happened.

  Then it was the things he saw on TV that would depress him. Menard could still remember the smell of home, and its recollections would come to him at the most inopportune times. From the whiff of pine trees, to the earthy smell of the waters by the lake house in northern California that he shared with his wife, it all started to irritate him. Breathing in stale, ionized air that would sometimes stink of sweat and piss from the ones he worked with was steadily making it all unbearable. Even the processed cheese that was produced in the colony was lousy compared to the organic stuff he bought at the farmer’s market back on Earth. It was all crap now, and he counted down the days as if he was a soldier stuck in a war zone, waiting to be airlifted out.

  The sleeping young man sitting beside him began to stir. Menard gave a quick glance at him before returning his gaze past the front windshield of the rover. When the maintenance alert came through the network, Menard had initially wanted to wait until dawn before proceeding over to the southern transportation corridor, but his assigned partner Katsumi Fujino had insisted that they go out right away, even if it meant that they would arrive at the waypoint sometime during the evening. There were no strict protocols when it
came to working at night, but it was an unwritten rule of the other maintenance crews that it should only be done during emergencies, since the solar cells of the rovers would not be able to recharge without sunlight, and if something unexpected was to arise, then it would make everything worse. Nevertheless, Katsumi had insisted that they go out, since there had not been any contact at all with the robots in the southern waypoints for the past two days. Not wanting to be put on report for failing his assigned duties at the eve of his departure, Menard reluctantly powered up the rover and off they went.

  The planetary rover they were riding in had the official designation of MMWV, or Martian Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle. Manufactured by Flux Motors, everyone called them Mwevs for short. The vehicle issued to Menard and Katsumi was one of the older models that was produced on Earth, and sent over during the original construction of Eridu Colony, almost two decades ago. Even though this particular rover had been upgraded with new, high-performance solid state lithium-sulfur batteries, and a more advanced GPS navigational system, Menard still grumbled that they were working with old, outdated equipment. Heck, even the remote, artificial-intelligence robots that had been assigned to them had more advanced vehicles than they had. What made it even worse were Menard’s superstitions, for there never was a Rover-13 assigned to the colony, and he naturally considered the Mwev they were riding in as the thirteenth one since it was the one that came after Rover-12.

  A slight beeping noise started coming from the heads-up display on the Mwev dashboard. Menard had already activated the vehicle lights, and the red sand and countless rocks around them now had a bluish-grey hue. The sound indicated that they were coming up at the waypoint. In the past few months, the numerous maintenance crews of ACE Corp were laying out navigational waypoints along designated landmarks towards the new colony boundary they were planning to erect in Mar’s Chryse Planitia region, as well as a landmark system that would allow vehicles to navigate back to Eridu Colony at the southeast. Menard, Katsumi and four others had been assigned to a pre-building outpost near Batos Crater, just north of the easternmost outflow of Ares Vallis. They had the task of supervising the digger and assembly robots which would do most of the heavy work for infrastructure construction.

  Katsumi blinked and sat up. “Good evening,” he said. Like all the Japanese he worked with, Katsumi was always exceedingly polite, and was reluctant to show his innermost feelings to his partner, even though they had been working closely together for almost six months now. ACE Corp’s Japanese contingent was the experts when it came to robotics, and many of them were regularly assigned to maintain and repair any malfunctioning AI unit. All that Menard knew about the young man was that he was a recent graduate from Tokyo University, and was single. Menard figured he was probably still a virgin too.

  Menard pursed his lips while continuing to stare straight ahead. “Did you have a good rest, Katsumi?”

  “Yes, thank you,” Katsumi said as he leaned forward and started running his small fingers on the touch screen display on his side of the dashboard. Since the Mwev could depressurize the main cabin into a less pressurized, pure-oxygen atmosphere, all the instrument panels and interfaces had non-friction surfaces, lest a single spark ignite and create a catastrophic fire inside the airtight vehicle. It was standard procedure to keep all personal gear in the huge glove compartments and storage bins, so as to lessen the chance of bad habits forming even when the Mwev was fully pressurized.

  “We’re coming up on the waypoint just about now,” Menard said. Although standard operating procedure had mandated that he use the Mwev’s self-driving AI, he preferred to use the manual controls since the lidar range finder of this vehicle was on the blink. The AI suite for the self-driving system also drove very slowly, and it would have taken them all night to reach the waypoint if he engaged it.

  Something was on the surface of the dried riverbed just ahead of them. Menard put on the brakes just as soon as the object came into view. Both men stared out into the illuminated night in shocked silence. It was one of their assembly bots. The bipedal, vaguely human-like machine was lying sideways on the ground missing one of its legs. For a long minute neither of them said anything.

  Menard gritted his teeth and silently cursed. He had thought that perhaps there was a problem with the com-link on the robots, and all they needed to do was to restart the software remotely once they got within rage for a manual override. But with a stricken robot lying on the ground in front of them, they would need to do some extra vehicular activity, or EVA. The Mwev had a rear cabin that served as both an airlock and extra storage, and its sides had the crab suits they could climb into and detach from the vehicle. Menard turned his head and looked at the younger man. “Can you get linked up to it?”

  Katsumi was typing in commands on the dashboard to give out to the robot, but he kept getting an unsatisfactory response. His English delivery was both halting and rapid-fire whenever he was under stress. “I’m sorry, but… the modem interface seems to be turned off.”

  Menard gave him a quizzical look. “What? That’s an RUR Industries heavy lifter bot out there, from what I know there’s no way you could turn off its modem. Even if it’s damaged, you should still be able to access its basic input-output system since that thing is shock and tamper proof, right?”

  Katsumi shook his head slowly. “I am sorry, but no response even from BIOS.”

  Menard sighed. Robots on Mars had multiple redundancy systems. This wasn’t supposed to happen. “Jesus. That’s the first time I ever heard of this. Are you sure?”

  Katsumi placed both hands on his lap and tilted his head down. “Yes, I am sure.”

  “Great, let me call it in first,” Menard said as he brought up the com-link on his HUD. “Rover Fourteen to Batos Outpost, come in, over.”

  At first there was nothing but static. Menard frowned as he checked and ran a diagnostics on the communications system. When the readouts turned out okay he repeated the same message again. For a few minutes there was nothing but an empty silence on the other line, then some strange electronic noises nearly blew out the speakers in the vehicle. Both men instinctively placed their hands over their ears as the shrill cacophony continued for a few seconds.

  Just as Menard was about to mute the volume, a distant, droning voice could be heard, despite the constant crackling sounds in the background. There was no video feed, only audio. “Batos Outpost reading you, over.”

  Menard squinted. It sounded like Ron Simms, the base camp commander, but the voice seemed oddly misplaced somehow. “Ron? Is that you, over?”

  “Yes, over,” the voice answered.

  Menard put his other concerns at the back of his mind and focused on the immediate problem. “We’ve got a situation here. We found one of the heavy lifter bots lying by the gully. It looks like it’s damaged and it’s not responding remotely. Request EVA for a closer look, over?”

  “Yes, go ahead,” Ron said. “Contact me again when task completed, over.”

  Menard sat back and drew a deep breath. That was the first time Ron had ever been so brusque and to the point. Normally the outpost commander would be very talkative, even regaling them with a corny song over the com-link. Ron’s voice seemed weird as well, as if he had a sore throat or something.

  Katsumi unstrapped his seatbelt. Robots were his specialty, so it was only natural that he be the one to go out there. “I shall go EVA.”

  Menard checked the status of the Herp-Tech hard shelled “crab” suits that were embedded along the sides of the airlock. With both rigid upper and lower torsos connected to the helmet, the suits resembled eggs with limbs attached to them. Both life support packs and suit batteries were at full charge. “Do you need me to depressurize the cabin first?”

  “No, that is not necessary,” Katsumi said as he moved his chair back and got into a crouching position while making his way to the rear cabin. “I shall use the crab suit, not my skinsuit.”

  Menard was thankful for that. The hard-s
helled crab suits had high pressure atmospheres inside the suit, which meant that they would not need to depressurize into a pure oxygen atmosphere and spend ninety minutes of pre-breathing exercises, in order to prevent decompression sickness before either of them exited the vehicle. The problem with the crab suits was that they were bulky, and their hand sockets did not have the full range of precise feel or movement, unlike the flexible skinsuits. An operator in the crab suit couldn’t move his head or bend his torso. Both types of suits had their strengths and weaknesses, but the last thing Menard wanted to do right now was to spend a couple of hours doing isometric exercises while depressurizing.

  Katsumi made it into the rear cabin. After sealing the hatch behind him, the young man carefully entered through the open rear panel of the crab suit, making sure that there were no loose items lying around inside, lest they would create a hazard once he wore the gear. The moment he got his head up and into the helmet, the internal sensors of the suit activated. After verbally inputting the password, the open access way behind him was instantly closed as the backpack, which contained the life support systems of the suit was automatically attached to his back, completely sealing him in an airtight environment. The faceplate of the crab suit was equipped with smartglass, and the optical readouts indicated how much oxygen and power he had, along with numerous visual enhancements that could be activated by voice command. Katsumi tested the semi-rigid but flexible arm and leg joints, then ran an internal pressure diagnostic. Everything seemed fine.