Grand Theft Planetary & Other Stories

Hank watched the Martian landscape with no interest whatsoever and drank his java. “Hello world,” he said to the unmoving vista. Every day, the same red landscape greeted him through the grubby wind screen of the habitat’s glass viewing port. Every day, he drank the same coffee, greeted the outside world in the same way, performed the same tests, recorded the results on his computer, and saved them them through space to an ever-impatient audience on Earth. He finished his drink and chucked the paper cup onto the rubbish-strewn floor, then sat at his science station and booted up the thin laptop. “Time to work on my experiments,” he said. The laptop had been a recent addition to his belongings, his request for a new computer quickly processed, purchased, configured, and then sent via the agonisingly-slow delivery service. It had taken three months in the end, and he’d had to travels five miles to collect it too. That was problem with delivering packages to Mars; the quarterly care packages from the company - once bountiful and full of luxuries but now containing only the bare essentials – were almost pot luck on where they would land. Sometimes Hank would see a tiny blue triangle floating down in the distance, sometimes he would need the homing beacon system that was integrated into Bessie, a solar-powered big-wheeled quad that allowed him to roam a little around the Martian landscape. Rarely, his bland monotonous fans would send something interesting like a letter or a request for a special project just for them, but Hank was usually far too busy to accommodate.

He executed the project application called InWerd and started to type. His fingers flew across the keyboard, barely keeping up with the formulas and methods he was imagining. The red dust that seemed to permeate everything surrounded his hands. “Bloody dust.” He could hear the clank and crunch of machinery outside, the gigantic science rig expanding and contracting according to the commands. “As I type, my machine does what I say.” He leaned to the window to watch; the science rig, a huge cylindrical train-like machine half-buried in the rust of the Martian soil, its appendages hanging out at odd angles, was simply a physical extension of Hank’s mind, a translator of neurons to movement. “Such shining beauty.” He returned to the console, and caught his reflection in the code-covered screen. A half-crazed bearded hobo peered back at him. “Who are you?” he asked himself. Why was he surprised of his appearance? He was a hermit completely cut-off from humanity. When was the last time he’d held a real-time conversation with someone? Sure, messages dripped into the server over time, but they were composed, official, and recorded.

The train-like rig hissed to a stop outside and awaited further commands. Hank started to program again but the screen beeped in error; THAWT, it reported. “Damn!” The mechanics exposed to the ancient Martian air were starting to become frail and unreliable, and a kind of malaise was slowly settling in. “Every day, I get errors, which means I need to go for a walk outside.” He suited up, grabbed his trusty monkey wrench and checked on his store of air tanks. “I have a few dozen left, and each gives about two hours of air, so I reckon I have a week’s worth left.” He shouldered a single tank and made sure it was supplying his paper-thin EV suit properly, then passed through the revolving door air-lock and made for the machine. “Goodbye comfortable living space, hello lethal alien planet,” he muttered. He didn’t enjoy the dangers of walking outside, but it was a necessity to get the ol’ machine working again, otherwise his experiments would stop and then… what? “The experiments are everything to me,” he said as he stamped a rock to red powder, “so I will do whatever it takes to clear those damn THAWT problems.” He found some comfort in narrating his activities. It made him feel calm, as if someone was listening to him.

He walked carefully across the Martian land towards the science rig, stones pressing into the soles of his feet. What troubled him the most about Mars was how silent it was. There was no breeze, no weather to speak of, with blistering hot days and freezing cold nights, and other than Hank, absolutely no life. “This is a dying planet.” Hank had discussed this with Peter; the lack of oceans, he had been told, meant that there was little heat differential on the surface of the planet, meaning that winds and life were highly unlikely. He stopped and looked around; nothing. “Just a huge silent plateau of stones and rocks.” It made his ears ring.

He found himself under the shadow of the science machine in less than ten minutes, and marvelled at its magnificence. It was truly awe-inspiring up close, able to provoke joy and fear in Hank - depending on its current configuration, of course. About fifty feet long and thirty high, the silver cylinder had been designed and built by Hank so that he could perform his experiments on Mars. “This is the reason I’m on Mars. Complete solitude, away from nagging interlopers and spies, no chance of any interference.” It had been his choice to take this one-way ticket to a self-induced solitude from mankind, but he had not expected to survive after the completion of his first experiment; he had not expected his experiments to be a success, so here he was still, and so was the machine. It was stuck in a curious position, its appendages sticking straight up into the Martian sky, either in victory or in pain. Hank studied it for a few more minutes, willing it to move by itself, then reluctantly proceeded to work on the mechanics. “Come on you stubborn bastard.” There was a special way to get the train working again, a number of game-like exercises to reset its logic patterns and begin the flow of data. He tightened up a couple of nuts in a square pattern, then tapped sixteen times on an angry red button. He followed a sequence of flashing LEDs as quickly as he could, almost missing the final light because of a speck of dirt in his eye, but slowly, the machine started to work again. “Once again, you live.” It was a dull victory.

Curiously, his shadow split into two and sprinted away from him, stretching out towards the clanking machinery. “Where are you going, shadow of myself?” Hank turned to see the source of the light, an enormous green fireball burning through the atmosphere at a surprisingly slow speed. He’d seen a few meteorites in the years on Mars, but this one was much bigger than any of the others, and was moving almost parallel with the land. Hank was stunned by its beauty, unable to turn away until it disappeared below the horizon. A rapid flash of light signalled its touchdown. He waited for the explosion, but there was none. “Disappointing,” he said sadly. In fact, Hank had been mildly disappointed from the first day he’d agreed to be the first man on Mars. “Two years developing the machine, then a six month training regime followed by a three month journey through space, topped off by a three year stint performing tasks that I hoped would mean something to someone somewhere.” Angrily, he kicked at the stones around him. He’d signed up to this one-way ticket for the fame of working his own machine, but he had hoped – maybe assumed – that there would be aliens and strange things to see and do on the red planet. He wouldn’t need to make up his experiments, he could simply report the fantastic life-forms on Mars. But no; there was nothing here but whatever he made, and therefore he had to compose every single experiment from scratch. It had been a fool’s errand, an irreversible shot-in-the-dark and a gamble that had not paid off. He closed the maintenance hatch on the machine and headed back to the oblong habitat slowly, glad that he had fixed his THAWT problem. If he had more air tanks, he might have considered going to investigate the landing site of the fireball. Maybe he’d wait until the next supply craft arrived. He was long overdue one.

Back at his desk, he continued coding the machine as he pondered. “What was the fireball? Maybe it was simply a piece of rock. Or maybe it was an alien artefact, an infinite and invincible power unit that had drifted through space for aeons, debris of a millennia-old space battle between two races hell-bent on conquering the universe. Or maybe it was a satellite from a now-extinct race, a science machine that had been forgotten about and had been slowly sinking in orbit.” He stopped typing and waited for the machine outside to cease its clanking. “What else was there to do in this red dead land of rocks?” He could take three days’ worth of air aboard Bessie, and simply go in the direction of the flash, see if he could at least spot the crater. Reluctantly, he decided against it; what if the habitat started leaking in the near future? It was wise to keep a good reserve of air handy. And anyway, he had another week to go until his latest experiment was finished. He’d wait until the next supply drop; it’s not like anyone else would beat him to the landing zone.

There was a cuckoo sound from the grimy server under his desk; “Look at that. A video message has arrived.” He saved and closed his experiment, boiled himself a coffee, then settled down to watch the message. “I wonder what it’s about.” The face of his line manager, Peter Burgles, filled his laptop screen. He was a fat-faced bumbling fool, but had fought Hank’s corner in every legal battle and financial concern during his relocation to Mars. He had a good heart, but absolutely no grace or style. Despite the video equipment recording, Peter always sat completely still for the first few seconds, as if posing for an old-fashioned photo. That was his way. Eventually, Peter smiled and began his message.

“This is Peter,” he said, just in case Hank had gone mad or blind, “calling all the way from earth. I hope I find you well, Hank.”

“Same as usual,” replied Hank. “How are you?”

Peter brandished an official piece of paper. “The usual agenda. Firstly, I hope you’ve been reading the newspapers emailed to you.” Hank had marked all email as spam long ago. He wasn’t interested in things that didn’t concern him, especially things happening on another planet and outside of his own world. People annoyed him. “It was very worrying here for a few days. We were seriously considering joining you on Mars, but the tides have receded and the world is picking itself up. Millions of people in the poorer countries have died though. Bodies are appearing on coastlines everywhere.”

“That does sound interesting,” replied Hank. “I might read some of those emails later. Anything else?”

“Secondly, I’m pleased to announce that my wife has given birth to our third child. Bertrund, we’ve called him. After Jane’s grandfather. Both mother and baby are doing well.”

“I couldn’t care less,” said Hank.

“Thirdly…” Peter coughed into his hand.

“You only cough when you’re nervous,” said Hank. “What’s gone wrong this time?”

“…thirdly, we have a bit of bad news. Remember when we said that your next supply shipment might contain something special, so be ready for it?” Hank didn’t remember. “Well,” Peter coughed again, “everything was going fine, but about three days ago, we lost track of it. It must have collided with something and veered off-course. The last thing our passenger said was something about a rushing noise, and then that was it. Gone.”

“Passenger?” Hank sat up. “What passenger?”

“Anyway,” continued Peter, “the surprise was that we were sending a person to join you on Mars. A woman. She was…” he struggled with words for a moment,”… a good scientist. Nothing more than that. She’ll be sadly missed by her friends here.” He rubbed his hands nervously. “I know you don’t send us any video messages in reply, and your emails are sparse to say the least. I can only assume you’re fit and healthy. In fact you’d better be, because that spaceship was carrying your quarterly supplies. We’re launching another ship tomorrow, but you’re going to have a meagre three months coming up. If you can find the time, please video message me back. It’ll be good to – “

Hank closed the message, unable to contain his rage. “How dare they!” he shouted at the Martian landscape in the window. “I come out here to be alone, and they try to send someone to interrupt me! Well serves them right! Serves them and that bitch right!” He stormed around the living room, kicking at the rubbish lining the floor. “I’m the only one living on Mars. I’m the only one here, with my machine. I’ll have no-one else reading my works, not before they’re finished! Fuck!” He was trembling with anger, something he’d not experienced for many months. “Imagine if she’d made it! Poking her nose in, reading everything! My god…” His body and mind weren’t used to such powerful emotions, not real ones; his experiments dredged up similes of passions long-forgotten, but they were pretend feelings. He put his hands against his temples and squeezed. Hard. “I will have no-one ruining my works! No-one!”

And then he saw the thing, its evil red eyes and enormous grin leering at him through the window. Its head was thin and jet-black, and it jerked uncontrollably as it stared inside the habitat. In a quivering wail, muffled by the thick walls of the habitat, it screamed, “It’s over!”

The thing had plagued Hank a few weeks after landing on Mars, around the time when Hank had discovered that his machine had been compromised before launch by a small transmitter that cloned his commands and sent them to a rival company on earth. As Hank removed the bugging device, a shadow had fallen over him. When he looked up, the nightmare face had been there to greet him. How he’d made it back to the sanctuary of the habitat he couldn’t rightly remember. For many nights, Hank had cowered in his bed cubicle out of sight of the main window, unable to move in frightful anxiety, knowing that if he looked into the living space, the thing would be there, staring into his home. Since his computer was in the view of the thing, it meant that Hank’s experiments had simply come to a halt for weeks. Then suddenly, the thing had disappeared, and no trace of it could be found. No tracks, nothing. Hank had eventually convinced himself that it had been a hallucination, but now there was no doubt. Hank was not alone on Mars.

He covered his eyes and ran straight for the bed cubicle, colliding head-on with the door frame. He thrashed around on the floor in a daze, struggling to get back on his feet. The voice wailed again, louder this time. “You’re alone!”

The pain and the fright suddenly gave Hank a kind of second wind, and he rolled over to face the thing. “What do you want?” he yelled.

The thing jerked away violently, then reappeared at the window. “Get out!”

Hank kicked himself backwards into the bed cubicle and fumbled around in the small wardrobe in the wall. His fingers curled around the bulky laser rifle that Peter had secretly shipped to Hank (after many days of pleading for a firearm just in case he needed it). Hank turned the gun on and impatiently watched the power meter go to 100%. “Full charge.” With a surge of confidence, Hank strode into the living area and raised the rifle, lining up the grinning black face between the iron sights. “Fuck you then!” he said, and squeezed the trigger. A fist-sized hole melted through the window and hit the thing in the forehead, destroying the face in a shower of black ichor.

Immediately, red alarm signs flashed to warn of the depressurisation, and the rich air in the habitat was replaced by the foul lifeless air of the Martian world. Hank dropped the laser rifle in numb shock. “Shit, what have I done?” He donned his EV suit from earlier and held his breath until the helmet was securely on. Panting and panic-stricken, he fetched his weapon again and approached the window. On the sands outside, the thing was laid out on its back, its head missing and its black skin oozing into the ground. “So it is real,” he said to himself. “I wonder where it came from?” He cycled the airlock to look at the creature close-up. It was still moving, its whole form shimmering slightly. Without its head, it looked like a very long thin beetle, but otherwise was devoid of any other features. No genitals or adornments, no clothes or devices. Hank went back inside and surveyed the chaos caused by the decompression. Other than the hole in the window, nothing else had suffered any damage.

However, what initially seemed like a simple patching exercise became a more worrying affair when he realised that he would not be able to fix the window. Even with a metal plate affixed to the glass with adhesives, air continued to leak from the damaged area after Hank pressurised the habitat. As the watery sunlight died away into the night, Hank sat and cried; there was no way he could repair the window. Eventually, he was going to run out of air and die. He’d mortally wounded himself.

He slipped into a troubled sleep about suffocating, and awoke in a panic. He ran to the air gauge for the habitat and gradually calmed; there was still air, although the leak was getting a little worse. The window itself was probably cracking slowly, and would eventually fail. He couldn’t patch the entire window.

He made himself a coffee and looked out at the Martian landscape, partially obscured by the metal plate. The alien body had disappeared. Glass shards glittered in the sands. “I am fucked,” he said simply, then sat at his station and made some notes. He could try patching the window again, but his limited engineering skills didn’t give him a lot of faith in this course of action. He could try to seal the bed cubicle and live in that, but this was similar to being trapped in a coffin. “I’d rather die.” He performed some quick calculations, and realised that his air supply – including the mobile tanks – would run out in two weeks.

“If only the supply ship had made it,” he said, then stopped; the fireball he’d seen – could that have been the supply ship? It had certainly looked big enough to be a supply ship… but what state had it been in when it hit the ground? There had been no explosion, so it could have survived the entry into the Martian atmosphere… or it could have been completely vaporised.

There was a grinding from the window, the unmistaken sound of glass-on-glass. Hank put the helmet to the EV suit back on and made a quick decision. “I can’t stay here,” he said, and depressurised the habitat, returning the air to the tanks. He spent an hour loading Bessie up with food, water, and air. “Two weeks,” he said out loud, and then took a last look at the habitat, the place he’d hidden inside for three years. In the background was the machine, its spindles lifeless and limp across the sand, dead without Hank’s mind to control it. He shouldered the laser rifle and climbed inside the cramped compartment of the buggy, and slowly pulled away from his ruined life with tears in his eyes.

The landscape was an easy task for the large puffy indestructible tires of the electric vehicle, and Hank started to enjoy the bobbing motion. “It’s like being in a boat, sailing a red tide.” He wondered if Mars had been full of oceans in the past. Marine life may have at once time been swimming above him on this very spot; he imagined a giant whale-like creature overshadowing him and the buggy, but felt giddy by the size of the thing and so stopped.

The buggy crested a hill that overlooked a huge expanse of the Martian land. “Nothing but rocks and craters,” he muttered, and checked the scanner. There was no beacon active, or at least in range. He’d travelled only twenty miles in the slow machine; he didn’t have much time to find the fireball. Even if he did find it, there was only a silver of hope that it was a supply ship. Statistically, it was a rock, and Hank was already dead as a result.

After many hours of bouncing across rocks and stones, the sun faded away and the void rushed in to surround Hank. He was tired, and hungry, but also aware that every second meant another breath of his precious oxygen, and another step towards death. Reluctantly, he parked next to a huge boulder and broke open a meal. Without a moon or a thick atmosphere, the night sky was absolutely astounding to look at, a carpet of diamonds studded into a black velvet sheet. “Why didn’t I pay more attention to the stars?” Hank said to himself. He wished he had more time. His experiments had been important, but to who? “Me?” Others? Did it matter? “Look where’s it’s gotten me. Alone, and about to die alone on a lonely planet.” He finished his meal and continued his journey underneath the stars, pale headlights illuminating a few feet in front of him.

On the third day, Hank was at wits end and looking at the laser rifle with some consideration. He hadn’t slept for at least two Martian days – a Martian day being almost exactly the same as an earth day, which to Hank was evidence that there was a higher power at work in the universe. He was frazzled, his panic growing with every hour that didn’t reveal a crash site, and he was starting to suspect that another one of those black horrors was following him. Often, he would turn his head and glimpse something darting behind a rock. He had the rifle though. He could kill that one too if it did appear. Still, it wasn’t helping his state of mind. He stopped on the edge of a large crater and got out of the small cabin to stretch his legs. “Bloody hell,” he said, “why is stretching such a nice feeling?” He bent down to touch his toes, savouring the pain from his muscles. He felt his heart jump; through his legs, he saw another pair of legs standing just behind him, thin and black, and shimmering slightly.

With a cry of fright, Hank fell forwards and fired awkwardly at a rapidly retreating blur. He got to his feet and climbed inside Bessie, his fight-or-flight response fully activated. He turned the lumbering machine into the opposite direction that the thing had gone, but then stopped; he’d be travelling with his back to the thing’s last position, allowing it to sneak up on him. It was also the opposite direction of any possible crash site. He stared behind him and willed himself to calm down. It was OK, he had escaped harm. This time. Next time, he wouldn’t be so lucky. He gripped the rifle and tried to quell his terror. He had no option but to carry on. He couldn’t go back, not to his old home. He’d destroyed that. He had to face the void horror, whether he liked it or not. Slowly, he turned Bessie around and continued his search.

The buggy rounded corners, boulders, and bobbed down valleys and craters, but the thing didn’t show itself again. When night started to fall, Hank began to panic once again. He couldn’t hide from the thing, not in a glass canopy stuck atop a vehicle in the middle of a never-ending Martian desert! The last of the light faded away from the red landscape leaving Hank vulnerable. He chewed a stick of jerky and stared out at the void, willing the creature to show itself and get it over with. His tired eyes started reporting movement at the peripheral edges of his vision, raising his anxiety ten-fold. “Come on out you bastard,” he growled, starting at every point of movement, but the thing was nowhere to be seen. He realise that it probably was there, grinning at him and gibbering uncontrollably, but the darkness was hiding it. Hiding them, he corrected himself. He had killed one but another had taken its place. There could be a million of them out there, all staring at him, laughing at him even. Hank dropped into a semi-sleep state, his eyes flicking open at random periods, his dreams filled with the nightmare creature.

Eventually the sun filtered through and the rocky land was revealed once again, empty of the Hank’s fears. Feeling safe in the morning light, Hank hopped down from the cockpit and stretched. He wanted to sleep, plain and simple. He hated that he couldn’t. “It’s not fair,” he said woefully, “I just want to sleep!” And suddenly the thing was there, grinning in his face.

“You’ve failed!” it sobbed. Hank fell to the floor and snapped a shot at the creature. He missed, but instead hit the edge of Bessie’s air tanks. The buggy exploded as all the air tanks ruptured, showering Hank in plastic shards and expanding gases. He covered his helmet instinctively, trying to see if the thing was still present – and still a threat. When the air had cleared, Hank could see the thin being about twenty feet away, grinning insanely.

“I’m dead,” said Hank, getting to his feet wearily. “I’ve no air, no vehicle, and no home.” The being shivered in response, uncaring, and laughed. “You’re evil, and I’m taking you with me.” Hank Hbroke into a run and fired the rifle as he surged forward, but the horror darted behind a rock.

Hank rounded the boulder and stopped in shock. He was on the edge of a large and ancient crater littered with sizeable boulders and scars from smaller impacts over the millennia. In the middle of the crater was a smaller, fresher crater – it was the rogue supply ship, half-buried in the centre of a blackened gash surrounded by fragments of metal and debris. Next to the crashed ship, intact and undamaged, a new habitat and a new science machine glistened in the new morning sun like a silver cigar. The horror was nowhere to be seen, so Hank staggered down the crater, tears rolling down his cheeks in relief and joy. “I’ve been saved!” he cried.

As he walked, he passed his eye over the debris thrown out by the crashed ship. It was mostly the interior parts of the spacecraft, miscellaneous parts that should be holding a plate to a surface or regulating pressure in a pipe. Something to his right caught his eye; there were a dozen or so unexplainable machines that had been jettisoned by the impact lying in the sand. He turned one cuboid over with his foot. It was undoubtedly the product of an experiment like Hank’s, but the professionally-machined skin was vastly superior to anything Hank had created. He felt saddened; what was the point in his own experiments when others were creating these wondrous machines? He depressed a button and the machine folded open, revealing its internal workings. Unlike its cover, the machine was basic, unadventurous, and by-the-numbers. There were millions like it, and nothing like Hank’s. He closed the object, his confidence restored, and made for the habitat.

Just outside the revolving doorway of his new home was a large blackened chunk of wreckage. Hank dragged it a few paces before realising that it was a voluminous pilot’s chair, and it had a body of a woman strapped into it. “Oh my god,” said Hank, dropping the chair in shock. This was the passenger that Peter had told him about. Hank felt a little guilty; he’d wished her dead, but not like this. It was a shame really; even in her half-charred exposed state, she looked noble and beautiful. In fact, she reminded Hank of someone he once knew. He peered at the woman closer… then jumped in surprise. He recognised her! Unbelievable! He tried to remember, tried to roll back the years in his mind to a time before red sand and science machines and black things and air supplies. He remembered a face, laughing, shouting, scowling… and also moaning in pleasure. “I know you. You were… you were…” She had a name, but he remembered that her title was more important to him. That was her relation to him and how he knew her.

“You were my wife.”

He scrabbled at her uselessly, trying to unstrap her from the chair, but the heat of the crash had fused her into the fabric. He raised her lifeless head and felt a void within him reappear, one that he’d trained himself to forget; long ago, he’d left her to work on his experiments, ignored everything that had gone between them to concentrate on his work, threw away her love for him in favour of personal gain and status. He had lost his wife because he had put his work above her. He was now truly alone - completely, infinitely, and unforgivably.

Behind him, the thing wailed something incomprehensible. Dropping his wife’s freeze-dried head, Hank ran into the safety of the new habitat. It was a newer version of what he’d abandoned, but it was all quite familiar. More importantly, there was a new laptop on a work bench, and a coffee machine next to it. Keeping an eye on the fiend outside, he made himself a hot drink, his mind desperate to slip back into the routine he’d held for so many years. This was odd, like he had just entered a new life and been given a fresh start. In a way, he had; his estranged-wife had delivered him a new means to live. It wasn’t much different from his old life, but he now had the knowledge that he was, technically, single again. “I can concentrate on my experiments!” Hank said, feeling the void of his ex-wife starting to heal up. The black horror wailed once more, but it was distant and receding. Feeling rejuvenated, with the prospect of working on a new machine, Hank watched the Martian landscape with all the interest he could muster and drank his java. Out on the rusty sands, the thing gibbered and convulsed to itself, a small speck of doubt on a vast expanse of hope.

“Let’s start this all over again,” he said, and sat at the work console. The silver machine started to move.