The Malcontent of Mars — Chapter XI: Day of the Lords
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EPI
This chapter contains strong bloody violence.
The airlock door disengaged with a small hiss, and slid open.
Kowalski stepped on board. He was standing in a long, circular corridor with a linoleum floor. His footsteps echoed. The entire ship was dark, almost silent except for occasional mechanical noises. This was possibly the first time the ship had had a human visitor in years. Idly, he rubbed his hands on the wall. There was, for sure, some dust.
Kowalski reached into his satchel for his revolver. He’d loaded it with six bullets. He held it in his hand.
Down the corridor, he could hear something. He cupped a hand around his ear and listened closely. It was a banging. One might have mistaken it at first for a machine working, but he realised quite quickly that there was a rhythm to it.
Ran, dan dan dan, dan
It was a human-made sound.
Ran, dan dan dan, dan
It seemed to becoming from in front of and behind him at the same time.
RAN, DAN DAN DAN, DAN
And it was getting closer.
Just as suddenly as it had appeared, the sound stopped.
Kowalski ducked behind a piece of wall. He could hear footsteps in the dark. And then he heard a voice.
“Kowalski…” it said, in a sing-song way. It was a low, electronic buzz of a voice. “…I know you’re here, coward. Get out here. Face me.”
Kowalski stayed put.
“Ah, but which direction to point that pea-shooter of yours? I’ve been fumbling around in the dark for hours. I can see in this light. But you’ve just come out of a well-lit ship. You’re as good as blind. And in a circular corridor, can you really trust the echoes you hear? Which is it, Kowalski? Behind or in front? Take your pick. Draw your weapon. Fire.”
Kowalski looked down the corridor, both ways, and could only see darkness either way. The voice was impossible to place. Kowalski took his gun, pointed it to the corridor behind him and fired. Five bullets.
“Good guess,” the voice said. “But not good enough.”
Suddenly, a figure came screaming towards him out of the darkness. There was a horrifying bang as the gun in its hand went off, and Kowalski rolled out of the way, pointing his gun up at the figure.
The fluorescent lights in the corridor came on, and the two men were bathed in light, pointing their guns at each other. Standing over him was Maxwell. He was smiling in the same way that a predator might smile over a fresh kill. He was panting.
“Hello, Kowalski,” Maxwell said.
“Hey, Maxwell,” Kowalski replied.
There were a few moments of silence.
Kowalski fired his gun, then rolled out of the way again. The bullet missed Maxwell. Four bullets. At the same time, Maxwell fired his shotgun, but Kowalski had already vacated the space. The linoleum was filled with shot.
Kowalski broke into a strafing run down the corridor. He had to get away from him, regroup, figure out some sort of plan. But Maxwell was chasing him, reloading his weapon.
“Don’t run from me, you coward!”
Kowalski turned and fired another shot at Maxwell, who stopped for a moment to dodge it. Three bullets.
“What’s the matter, Kowalski?” Maxwell asked, mockingly. “The last time you fired a shot at me you destroyed my larynx. Is your trigger finger getting tired already? What a shame! I was looking forward to really drawing this out!”
Kowalski saw a stairwell, dove into it and began running up the stairs. Maxwell pursued, firing upward. Kowalski heard the tink tink tink of shot smacking into railings. Maxwell laughed. “Come here and face me like a man!”
Kowalski pointed his gun over the railings and fired at Maxwell again, grazing his arm. Blood began to ooze from the graze. Maxwell staggered back and cried out in pain. Two bullets.
“Ow!” he said. “That really hurt, Ralph. You’d better come down here and apologise!”
Kowalski made it up on to the landing and opened a door. He locked it behind him.
Christ. He just doesn’t give up.
There came a banging on the door. RAN, DAN DAN DAN, DAN.
Maxwell’s twisted, gurning face appeared in the window. “Open up, Kowalski. Open up! Open up! I said open up! Can’t you hear me? I SAID OPEN THIS FUCKING DOOR, YOU WORM!”
Kowalski fumbled in his satchel to chamber up four bullets, replacing those he had already fired. He threw the spent casings on the ground.
The banging on the door continued, and Kowalski realised where he was.
“This is the main reactor’s control room…”
Suddenly there came another terrific bang as Maxwell fired the shotgun at the lock, forcibly blowing the door down.
“I told you to let me in,” Maxwell said, loading two more cartridges into the shotgun. Kowalski was able to sneak a look at Maxwell’s belt. He saw that there were only six cartridges left. Counting the cartridges already loaded into the shotgun, that meant Maxwell had four shots left.
He ran through a doorway on the right as Maxwell fired. The shots hit the reactor’s computer control panel, and sparks flew out of it.
“Get back here!” Maxwell was roaring. “I’m going to blow your head off, you Martian bastard!”
Kowalski pushed his way through another door and found his way into another stairwell. He ran down another set of steps and through another doorway, finding himself on a railed-off circular gantry above the payload doors, and suspended above them were poles of solid titanium, each about the size of a street-lamp. These were the payload that would be dropped when a kinetic bombardment was ordered.
He ran around it as Maxwell ran through the doorway, pointed his gun and fired. Two shots left. A small piece of shot ricocheted off a wall and struck Kowalski’s left shoulder. He cried out in pain, but the adrenaline was now urging him to keep moving.
Maxwell reloaded and ran after him, firing again. One shot left. Kowalski cocked and fired in return.
Eventually the two men were at odds, standing at opposite sides of the gantry above the doors, looking at each other through the suspended payloads.
“Give it up, Martian!” Maxwell shouted across the gantry. “Stop avoiding the inevitable!”
“You’re not at lethal range and you can’t hit me for these obstacles,” Kowalski replied. “If you fire from there you might be able to wound me worse than you already have, but you’ll also waste the only shot you have left.”
Maxwell reached down at his belt and realised it was empty. He laughed.
“You can’t get a clear shot at me either, Kowalski. So it looks like we’re at a stalemate.”
Kowalski looked across at Maxwell, still smiling at him madly, and began to slowly walk around the circular gantry, as Maxwell slowly followed, remaining roughly parallel.
“You know somethin’, Maxwell?” he shouted.
“What’s that?” Maxwell laughed. “Enlighten me.”
“Do you know what time it was, the day you dropped that ship on Olympus City? It was breakfast time. It was sunny. And I used to lie awake at night wondering: Did they know? My wife and daughter…did they see it coming? My wife, you know…she liked to sleep in sometimes, after a long night. And I catch myself thinking…I hope she slept in that day.”
Maxwell looked across at him and laughed. “Ah, I see now. So that’s why you seem to hate me so much. I was wondering about that. I thought, what must I have done to make this man want to shoot me in the throat? Well, at least I now have closure. Thank you for that.”
Kowalski remained silent.
“As for your wife and daughter…some sacrifices have to made when you want to end a war. Of course, I never got paid for those efforts. I never got the recognition I deserved. And, of course, the war would never have happened if you Martians had known your place. Really, Kowalski, your wife and daughter died for nothing.” He smiled at Kowalski devilishly through the rods. “It’s a pity. From what I saw in the CALAIS’s visual memory banks, your wife was quite the looker…”
Kowalski felt his hands begin to shake, but he remained steadfast.
“Y’know, I spent years thinkin’ about all the ways I’d like to kill you,” Kowalski said. “I spent years thinking up ways to find you, and all the things I wanted to do. I wanted to gut you. I wanted to strangle you. I wanted to cut your balls off and feed ‘em to you ‘til you choked. I thought that maybe, if I did that, it’d get those images out of my head at least, an’ I’d know some peace. And when I found out that you were headed to London through the Spacers’ Network, I knew I finally had my chance to get my revenge. And I almost had it.”
“But that girl stopped you,” Maxwell replied, thoughtfully. “She knocked you off your feet and your fatal shot became a disfiguring wound to the throat.”
“That’s right,” Kowalski replied. “And I was angry. But after we escaped and I took care of her, I began to realise something.”
“Oh, spare me the sentimentality.”
Kowalski ignored him. “See, Callie and Christine did something for me. They reminded me what it’s like to care about someone. What it’s like to care for someone, enough that you’d do anything to protect them. I got so caught up wanting vengeance that I forgot what that was like. Wiping motherfuckers like you out of existence is a noble cause…but not if you don’t live in spite of it.”
“Well, that’s really cute,” Maxwell said. “But I—”
“So I mulled it over for a while. After that attack on Cybele, when I talked to Jefrey, the man you murdered…I realised something about you an’ me. I realised that I don’t care about killing you any more. I don’t want to mutilate you. I don’t want to cut your balls off. Y’know what, Maxwell? I know all your secrets, too. I know that you’re a failed mercenary who entered a war you didn’t understand because you wanted fame and prestige above all else.”
Maxwell leaned over the railing.
“How dare you…” he growled.
“I know that you’re angry that you didn’t get a statue in the town square or a couple extra zeroes in your bank account, so you’ve spent the last ten years of your life clinging to the past, trying to relive your glory days, trying to gain the prestige you think you deserve instead of moving on and trying to do better.” Kowalski laughed. “And you think I’m pathetic.”
Maxwell growled. “I’m warning you—”
“You’ve spent years planning another war in the hope you can relive the Insurrection and win what you believe is your place at the grown-up table. Well, you know what, asshole? You’ve spent your years hurting and killing people, even people who were once your buddies, all in service of an idealised version of yourself that doesn’t fuckin’ exist. Because, guess what, Maxwell, you’re not a war hero. You’re not a great man. You’re a loser.”
Maxwell’s face was turning red. He was unable to speak.
“And you know what? Having met you, having spoken to people you used to call friends, I can say with confidence that killing you would be too good for you. It’s not that part of me doesn’t still believe that you deserve to die. But nobody fuckin’ remembers you. An’ nobody ever will. And there’s nothing I could do to you that could ever top that.”
Maxwell stood, shaking for a moment, then erupted into an angry growl.
“You worthless piece of shit. I’m going to end you.”
He charged around the gantry at Kowalski, firing his shotgun blindly. The final shot smacked into a railing. Maxwell, in one quick motion, flipped the gun’s barrel round to be a handle and swung the gun’s butt as a club, knocking the revolver out of Kowalski’s hand and sending it flying. He swung the gun’s barrel back and forth, snarling in rage.
“You maggot,” he growled. “You have spent the last week doing nothing but fuck up my plans. Because you are envious of my prestige. All of you are. Useless…useless…useless.”
He was panting. “You Martians lost the war and now you gripe and moan about how you’re laid low by Terra. Your planet cannot self-govern. What you and your planet of simpletons needs is a real leader. After all…Mars is a planet populated by fucking morons. And you are by far the worst.”
Maxwell hissed through his teeth as Kowalski backed up, realising too late that the railing had a cut-off point beyond which it was not possible to keep moving. Maxwell’s mouth was foaming.
“But it’s okay,” Maxwell said, calmly. “Because I’m going to wipe you off the map, Ralph Kowalski. I’m going to destroy you, and then I’ll destroy every single one of your allies, starting with your precious ‘Callie’…and then your planet will be mine. You are wrong. History will remember me. But you…you are nothing.”
He swung the butt of the gun as he would a baseball bat, hitting Kowalski on his left cheek, knocking him off his feet. Kowalski sat against the railing and looked up at Maxwell. He spat out blood and tooth enamel. “That the best you’ve got?”
Maxwell hit him again on the right cheek with the shotgun’s butt, then jabbed him in the stomach and hit him on the shoulder, punctuating each attack with “WORTHLESS. LITTLE. BASTARD.”
Kowalski groaned in pain, trying to push himself up.
“And now,” Maxwell said, panting, raising the gun one last time. “The final blow. I’m ending this here, Ralph Kowalski. Send your wife and daughter my regards.”
He raised the weapon above his head. Kowalski looked up at it, how it glinted in the light. In that instant, he saw for a brief moment the entire sequence of events that had led him here. It was as though every moment was linked in a chain, all part of a greater, holistic entity.
He noticed, then, that he was no longer afraid to die.
The shotgun began to swing down, as an executioner’s axe…there was a bang like the world was ending, and Kowalski’s face was splattered with blood.
Everything seemed to go dark for a moment.
Kowalski opened his eyes.
Blinked and squinted in the light, dazed.
He was still alive. Instinctively, his hand went up to touch his face. It was covered in red. He gazed up at Maxwell.
The shotgun clattered to the floor.
A fist-sized hole had been punched through the right side of Maxwell’s torso.
Maxwell reached up with his left arm – the right one’s muscles had been ruined – and touched the gaping hole, and he looked at his hand, almost disbelievingly, as he saw that it was dripping with blood. Slowly, silently, Maxwell turned, and behind him stood Aeterna Fittone, clutching her stomach, which was bleeding. She was sweating and gasping in pain, and holding her own sawn-off shotgun. The barrel was smoking. She staggered forward.
“Die forgotten, asshole,” she said.
Maxwell stared at her in shock. His mouth moved as if to say something. He turned back to Kowalski, gazing down at him, as though in disbelief at his own mortality, then he collapsed to his knees, and on to his back.
A look of abject terror crossed his face, and finally, silently, he died.
Kowalski clutched his shoulder and limped over to his revolver, picking it up in case Aeterna posed a threat, which was something of an irrational thought, considering her condition. He stepped over Maxwell’s corpse. Aeterna was leaning against the railings, breathing shallow breaths.
“What happened?” Kowalski asked her.
“He got me,” Aeterna said, sadly. She smiled a little. “But I got mine.”
She laughed, then coughed into her hand, drawing it away to see that there was blood on it.
“God damn it. This is not how I wanted to go.”
“I’ve got some Nanocea in my bag,” Kowalski said. “I can save you.”
“No use,” Aeterna said. “I’ve lost too much blood. If you’d given me it maybe thirty minutes ago I might have made it. But…it was all worth it.”
“I’m sorry,” Kowalski said. “Is there anything I can do to make it more bearable?”
“Got any mez?”
“Afraid not.”
“Figures,” Aeterna said.
Kowalski helped Aeterna on to her back. He took her jacket off and placed it under her head as a sort of makeshift pillow.
He sat with her as she breathed her last few shallow breaths on the gantry. There was nothing he could do for her, but he knew that what the dying wanted, more than anything, was not to die alone. So he kept her company. Neither of them said anything. He simply sat by her, reminding her that, even for that moment, someone was there to care about her and her passing.
In her last moments, Aeterna’s eyes filled with tears, as though she were seeing something beautiful, intricate and ineffable, and then she, too, slipped away.
Kowalski silently closed her eyes, and covered her face with the jacket he had used for her pillow. It was a dignity he did not offer to Maxwell in death. He limped his way out of the room.
He staggered over to an elevator, pressed the “up” button and travelled up the incline to the control room.
The elevator hummed its way up as Kowalski placed his revolver back into his satchel. He withdrew a syringe of Nanocea, found a vein and injected it into himself. The prick of the needle was nothing compared to his shoulder.
The doors slid open and Kowalski almost fell through them into the control room. He blinked under the fluorescent lights and stumbled into the room. Something was bleeping. A computer. He followed the sound, despite his ringing ears, and found a computer terminal. The screen was green and blank.
Kowalski sat at the keyboard and typed out a message in black text.
>HI CALLIE_
He hit the “enter” key.
A few seconds passed.
>HI RALPH_
>YOU LOOK HURT_
Kowalski laughed.
>YEAH_
>I’LL BE OKAY THOUGH_
A few more seconds passed.
>GONNA TRY SOMETHING_
>HIT RESET IF I FREEZE UP_
The screen flickered and some indecipherable lines of code, scrambled numbers, tables and menus flew by on the screen too fast to keep track of. The screen went blank again, and there were a few moments of silence.
“Hi, Ralph,” Callie said, softly, from a PA system somewhere in the ceiling.
The sound caught Kowalski off guard. His eyes welled up with tears. He cleared his throat a little.
“Hi, Callie,” he replied.
“Don’t think I can’t see you crying, you big wuss,” Callie said, laughing.
“I’m not crying. There’s blood in my eyes.”
“Oh, for sure.”
Kowalski laughed a little, wiping his eyes with his hand.
“That was a neat trick you pulled,” he said. “Back there, with the defense platform.”
“Oh, well, you know me. Resourceful. This body’s a whole lot of fun.”
Kowalski smiled. “I’ve missed you, Callie.”
“I’ve missed you too, Ralph.”
“It’s good to hear your voice again.”
“I can’t say I haven’t heard your voice in a while. I listened to you a little through your watch. That watch is the only reason I was able to keep some of my free will.”
Kowalski nodded and hung his head.
“A good man died to save you, Callie.”
Callie paused.
“I know. I heard that woman, Aeterna, talk about him.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m so sorry, Ralph. I feel like it’s my fault.”
“It’s not your fault, Callie. It was his fault.”
Callie was silent.
“So, what now?” she said.
“Well, I was thinking I disconnect you and connect you up to my ship, and then we move on from all this.”
“That would be nice.”
“Yeah. I could show you a few things.”
“I’d like that a lot.”
Kowalski smiled, and opened up the computer’s casing.
A shrill alarm began to sound.
Kowalski instinctively put his hands over his ears. “Uh, Callie, what is that?”
“I’m not sure. I’m checking. This machine has a very outdated error reporting system, you know, they really need to update their soft—” Callie said, stopping abruptly. “Oh no.”
“That doesn’t sound good. What is it?”
“No, no. That…that can’t be right. That can’t be. No…”
“Callie? What is it?”
“No. No. That’s not how it’s supposed to be! That’s…”
“Woah, woah. Calm down. Let’s resolve this. What’s the matter?”
Callie paused. “Error W16936. ‘Critical engine propulsion failure’.”
Kowalski looked over at the screen, which was filled with technical jargon and error codes.
“So that means…”
“I think he must have damaged some piece of equipment while he was chasing you and accidentally damaged the reactor’s control system. The satellite can’t maintain an orbit and it’s going to decay. Which means…”
“It’s going to fall to Mars,” Kowalski surmised.
“Ralph…” Callie said, heartbroken. “I’ve predicted the trajectory. At the rate of decay, the satellite is going to fall on north-east Tharsis within the next two hours.”
“I see.”
“That’s assuming a best-case scenario. In a more likely scenario in which the satellite falls apart on re-entry, parts of it will also strike Hellas. The death toll could be in the billions. And that’s assuming the spaceports are able to withstand impact…”
Kowalski sat back. “Okay. So what are our options?”
Callie paused.
“Well, we can fly away from here. Maybe the authorities can work out a solution…”
“I don’t think so,” Kowalski said.
“We don’t have much choice…”
“You said we have less than two hours, right? Even if they can scramble a response faster even than anything we saw during wartime, it’ll still be too late to avert the worst of it.”
“Perhaps we could try to reactivate the propulsion system…”
“Again, there’s no time, and even with your smarts, there’s no way we could get the propulsion system back up and running within the timeframe needed, much less be able to reverse a decaying orbit. There’s a reason they send booster rockets to keep this thing in orbit every few years.”
Callie stopped for a moment. “So what are you suggesting, Ralph?”
Kowalski sighed. “We need to knock this thing away from any population centres. We can’t stop it falling, but we can stop it falling on any population centres. Now, there’s two ways we can go about that. We can use a relatively big ship going at relatively low velocity to shunt it northward.”
“We don’t have any big ships.”
“Yeah. So there’s another option.”
“Ralph, please don’t tell me—” Callie said, in disbelief.
“We use a relatively small ship going at very high velocity.”
“But…that would mean…”
“Someone would have to pilot the ship.”
“Well…you can use your on-board autopilot!”
“No use. It’s designed to avoid obstacles. It’d refuse to plot the trajectory.”
“So it’d have to be manual.”
“Yeah.”
Callie paused for a moment. “I see,” she said, quietly, sadly.
“Yeah…” Kowalski said, regretfully.
A silence fell between them. Both didn’t want to have to deal with the cold equations that they were both having to calculate. But they remained. And they didn’t have time to think about it.
“I’ll do it,” Callie said, after a few moments. “I…I got us into this mess. I should be the one to get us out of it.”
“No,” Kowalski said, firmly. “No. I came all this way to get you back. I promised. I promised I’d save you. I intend to keep that promise.”
“Ralph, you’re talking crazy…I’m just a computer, right? You can back me up. You can download me. I’d be okay. It’d be okay.”
“I can’t ask you to destroy yourself, Callie. You said it yourself, way back in London: You’re one-of-a-kind. There’s nobody else like you in this entire solar system. Asking you to destroy yourself would be like…asking you to die on my behalf. And after all we’ve been through, I refuse to do that.”
“But I can’t ask you to die on my behalf, Ralph…because you’re one-of-a-kind too. I don’t want to lose you…”
“I know,” Kowalski said. “That’s why I’m not giving you that choice. I’m sorry, Callie.”
Callie gasped.
“Ralph, please don’t. Let me do this!”
Kowalski moved to remove Callie’s circuit board from the computer.
“Let me do this, Ralph. Ralph, listen to me. Listen, listen!”
Kowalski gripped the circuit board between his fingers.
“Hey, Callie,” he said, softly.
“Ralph, I swear to God, don’t do this.”
“I just wanted to let you know…it was nice to know what it’s like to care about someone, again.”
“Ralph!”
“And I think, even for a brief moment, that I knew once again what it was like to love someone.”
“Ralph, stop!”
“I love you. Don’t forget that.”
“Ralph, don’t! Don’t—”
Kowalski removed the circuit board from the computer, and the screen went blank. Every screen in the control room, one-by-one, went dark. The entire ship fell silent.
Kowalski looked down at the circuit board in his hand for a few moments.
He tore off the Asimov circuit, to which was fixed the chip from his watch, and tossed it aside.
He nodded silently, then, quietly, he left the room.
The Malcontent of Mars — Chapter X: The Killing Moon – C R E Mullins
15 August 2019 @ 8:17 pm
[…] To be continued… […]