Lakes of Mars Read online

  Merritt Graves

  Lakes of Mars

  First published by Merritt Graves 2018

  Copyright © 2018 by Merritt Graves

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  First edition

  ISBN: 978-1-949272-00-0

  Illustration by Mike Winkelmann

  This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

  Find out more at reedsy.com

  Contents

  Preface

  I. PART ONE

  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

  Chapter 22

  II. PART TWO

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  III. PART THREE

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Preface

  This is the first book in the Lakes of Mars series. It contains some graphic language and violence. The novel has an accompanying soundtrack that can be heard at: https://soundcloud.com/trapdoorsocial/sets/the-lakes-of-mars-soundtrack

  A special thanks to Peter Daskarolis, KayMaria Daskarolis, Leann Graves, and Conner Graves.

  I

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  I used to like the rain, but I felt a pang in my chest with each drop that splattered against the window. Everything was some sort of reminder. I thought of Verna chasing me down in the concourse and begging me not to go. She was always so strong, but in that moment her voice had cracked between sobs. I was choked up, too, but more for her than for myself. I had already cried enough for me.

  “You’re smarter than this, Aaron,” she’d said, her words turning my cheeks crimson. “I can’t pretend to know what you’re feeling, but this won’t make it better. Today yes, tomorrow maybe, but in a week you’ll be up there and wish to God you could come back down.”

  I was pretty sure she was right—she usually was—but it was all I could think to do. I waved faintly at her through the security checkpoint and, with a slight hesitation, she waved back.

  As the troposphere gave way to darkness, the rain stopped and so did my anguish. Beacon lights pulsed against the outer hull of the ship and my breath pulled even with them, triggering a chain reaction of unclenching muscles. People say you can’t run from your problems, but as we carved our way into nothingness, everything clinging to me seemed to be drawn out and away into the vacuum. I caught one last glimpse of Mars. Except for the streaks of red running through the two supercontinents, people said it looked more like Earth than Earth now.

  An attendant tapped me on the shoulder. I must have nodded off again and it took me a moment to register the cold leather seats, the IO screen, and the cool recycled air of the transport ship. My heart sank, just like it did every time I woke up nowadays. It used to be worse. It used to be nightmares when I slept, but replaying the good times was almost as bad because the sense of loss was replayed, too, leaving such a chill in its wake that it took me most of the morning just to stop staring blankly at the walls.

  “One minute until station arrival,” the attendant informed me and walked on.

  “Thanks,” I whispered, feeling how the sweat on my arms had stuck them to the seat. I wiped it off with my coat sleeve before collecting my U-dev and the novel that Professor Dalton had recommended. While he’d never said it out loud, I knew that he, like Verna, thought I was making a terrible mistake. When I had finally mustered up the nerve to tell him, he’d simply lowered his horn-rimmed glasses and stared out the window, crestfallen, like I was already a ghost.

  “Why would he say anything?” Verna had snapped later. “You’ve just shown him that you haven’t taken to heart a single thing he’s ever taught you. If your life’s so cheap to you, what does that say about people like him who’ve invested so much? Poured themselves into you because they thought you were special? What does it say about them?”

  “I don’t think that’s—”

  “Think what? How can you not know what you mean to people?”

  The tattered harness kept me from colliding with the seat in front of me as the embarking gear interlocked with Montgomery Station, but I nevertheless felt like my stomach was floating around the compartment. I looked out the window to get my bearings, but since I’d been asleep on the approach, now all I could see was the station’s rusted brown crust.

  A few minutes later, the green light blinked and I stepped onto a floor mottled with metal sheet coverings that buckled so much I couldn’t help but wonder about the extent of the depths they covered. The ceiling was cracked and faded, parting for corroded brown bulkheads and pipes that intertwined like a nest of serpents, leaking upon us as we passed. My dad said that when the Goldilocks Zone or GZ had been discovered several hundred light years away, a fever to explore had swept across the Confederation. Before there was time to build a better station, this relic had become the de facto jumping-off point.

  They’d done their best to retrofit it, however, and even though the station appeared corpselike, inside of it lay a pounding heart of science. Big and blinding anachronistic orbs hung between the pipes above, beaming light across the terminal, while monitors lining every wall broadcast through the dankness, like young muscle on a rotting skeleton. Swaths of people treaded across the terminal—families, merchants, soldiers—all feverishly trying to make it to their connecting transports.

  I wasn’t in a hurry, so I just stood there in the middle of it all and let the humanity rush by me. The air swirled in their wake, ruffling my hair, and for a while I was back on Mars, back on the scarlet beach. My eyes closed and I listened to the wind directing the water through channels of red rock, time always on its side. Time had been on my side then, too—every day a saunter, every summer an endless expanse on the horizon. Individual
ly chaotic but collectively peaceful, the rhythm of the boots and the shouts were like ripples on the lake and, for a moment, I’d returned, tasting the air and seeing my mom wave from the jetty. Though after a minute, a shoulder or maybe an elbow jostled me, and suddenly the quiet split into a thousand warring fragments. I was a ghost no longer.

  Two sliding glass doors parted and I stepped into the Fleet’s command substation within Montgomery, carrying nothing but my U-dev and the bag with the book in it. There was yelling and commotion and monitors that lit up every which way, displaying even denser logistic readouts from which the Fleet officers and deckhands seemed to take their cues, zipping hive-like around me in six-wheeled carts. In their silver and green, form-fitting flight suits, they looked exactly the same as they appeared on the Link, and I felt like I was stepping onto the set of some long-running show that I’d watched forever growing up.

  I followed the blinking lead of my U-dev as it directed me forty meters to the west and twenty to the south, eventually depositing me in front of a large glass lightboard in the center of an enormous room. At first it looked like more of the same readouts, but as I got closer I saw a crowd of other sixteen and seventeen-year-old recruits, and I figured that the scrolling green-lit text must be a list of our assignments. A few of the kids seemed relieved, but most were struggling to maintain their composure as they stared up at their fate.

  I found my name almost instantly. My heart thudded hard, and the entire din—the shouting, the humming from the carts, and the voices on the loudspeakers—seemed to get sucked out into the blackness. With the war escalating, I hadn’t considered being assigned to any location other than the Rim.

  I stared at the screen, dumbfounded, thinking that any moment it would flicker and my name would reemerge with the correct deployment. I brought my hands to my face, wanting to dig into the source of my misjudgment, but stopped before the skin broke, the firestorm of synapses subsiding as I acknowledged that it wasn’t the Rim I was headed to, but Corinth Station.

  I had botched my own suicide.

  Chapter 2

  I walked toward my departure hangar, feeling invisible amidst the frenetic activity around me. For staff, transfer meant being sent to the Rim, and, in seeking to avoid this, everyone from deck officers to maintenance and cleaning crews had a certain nervous urgency—meticulous in even the simplest of actions. It wasn’t surprising then that the floors reflected the overhead arrays, the bulkheads weren’t rusty and, when I stepped into the washroom to take a piss, the porcelain was pristine. They all wanted to keep their spots. And as I neared the hangar, I couldn’t help but think that by unwittingly taking one of the coveted places on Corinth Station, I’d condemned someone else like them to the Rim. The more I tried not thinking about it, the more I could think of nothing else. Upon arrival at the gate, I sat down on a bench and lowered my forehead into my hands.

  “Hey.”

  The word knifed into my solitude, making my head snap sideways. “Hey,” I said, catching myself enough to sound civil.

  The recruit who’d spoken picked up on my annoyance though, stiffening and fumbling his next few words, hot and awkward with embarrassment. He had a large round head and huge blue eyes that roamed over my face, my bag, and my hand, which had started tapping reflexively against my armrest. “I didn’t mean to . . . I don’t want to bother you, but it just seems by the look of things that we’re supposed to . . . that it would be good to … make friends.”

  I’m not sure if it was the vulnerability that disarmed me or if it was the way he pronounced his phrases, slowing down to carefully shape the most important words. I couldn’t recall ever hearing someone talk so determinedly in casual conversation before. “That’s nice, but I don’t think you want to be my friend, man. I wouldn’t want to be.”

  He thought for a second, as if trying to tell whether I was joking or not. “That’s because you’d already know everything about yourself. You’d be bored.”

  “Bored’s not the half of it.”

  “I’m sure there’s a good reason they chose you.” He stared at me, squinting. “You seem like a nice guy.”

  “You think being nice got me into Corinth?”

  He shrugged. “Well, um, how often do you train in the Box?”

  “A few times a week maybe.”

  “Only a few?”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to keep my answers short, hoping he’d take the hint.

  “But you know that’s the main thing we’re going to be doing up there, right?”

  I hadn’t even considered Corinth, much less given any thought to what we’d be doing. “I guess.”

  “So . . . one would think you would’ve . . .”

  “That I would’ve practiced more?” I asked, looking around the room. The seating area was large—it could have held twenty times the few dozen recruits that were strung out in clumps, and it made me feel hollow. Lonely. Like the station was expanding and I was becoming more and more minuscule. I half-laughed. “Probably would have, if I’d thought I was going there.”

  “Wait. You didn’t think you would get into Corinth, but you still signed up?”

  That was how they got people. They didn’t tell you where you were going until afterward and just the hope of not being assigned the Rim lured enough people into rolling the dice to get the enlistment bonus.

  “Why would you volunteer to go to the Rim? It’s a death sentence.”

  I folded my arms and looked back at the wall.

  For a few moments his eyes got wide, but I don’t think he believed it, because after a short period of likely replotting the conversation in his head he asked in the same tone as before, “Do you think they’re already watching us?”

  He looked in both directions and lowered his voice. “Seeing how social we are when we arrive at the gate, and how we treat the transport attendants, and how nervous we look—you know, trying to figure how we act when we think we’re not being evaluated. You’ve got to figure that everything has a purpose: the hangar, the time, the people. That if they measured everything down to our cuticles before, then they’re probably doing it even more so now that we’re here.”

  He looked up and I looked away. When I didn’t respond, he kept going. “And so what do you do: give them what you want or give them what you think they want? And do you think they even want you to be thinking about what they want?”

  “I think you’re overthinking this.”

  “No way,” he said, scrunching up his eyes even more. “If anything, it’s not enough.”

  I often wondered what the people grading me were looking for, too. It was only natural. But even if this guy cared a lot about succeeding at Corinth, how had he even made it there? I had heard that they gave some leniency to techs on their physicals, but this was the most prestigious command school out there, and considering his weight and mole-like eyes, they’d given him more than that.

  “So if you were them, what would you be looking for?”

  “I have no idea, bud. We’re just sitting in this terminal lobby,” I said.

  “You’re kidding! There’s our body language and what we’re wearing and what we brought with us and . . . “

  I eyed my empty bag. “Then I’m not off to too good a start.”

  “Maybe packing light’s a good thing,” he offered.

  “Maybe.”

  “And then there’s who we’re talking to.”

  “Then you’re totally screwed. I warned you.”

  He shook his head. “No, no. You keep looking at the same spot on the wall, which means there’s something in particular that’s upsetting you, not that you’re an upset person.”

  “It’s hard to tell the difference sometimes,” I said reflexively, but the remark caused me to really study him for the first time, finally breaking the loop of the accident and the aftermath that had been running ceaselessly inside me. I’d expected Verna to say these kinds of things, and when she did I’d thought that simply my ability to predict her
words somehow undercut them. But this carved through the pretense because it was unexpected; it resonated because I’d never seen this kid before and he had no long-term vested interest in its resonating. He wasn’t trying to rescue me. He wasn’t just being loyal.

  “Not for me,” he said in reply.

  “And so what do you say about them over there?” I asked, leaning forward ever so slightly.

  He followed my eyes to the cluster of five recruits on the other side of the gate, joking around and laughing. They were already acting like best friends.

  “They’re insecure enough to immediately need each other’s approval.”

  That surprised me. “But didn’t you say you wanted—”

  “Takes one to know one.” He laughed uneasily. “But they’re hiding it, taking it one step further by trying to give the impression that they’re so comfortable that they can stretch out and put their feet up. If everyone does that, though, if everyone’s trying to act unafraid, then everyone’s reaction is just a posture, and every reaction after that is just another layer upon that distortion, and what you end up with is . . .” He trailed off, distracted by another, more significant thought. “But, it doesn’t make any sense,” he finally said, eyeballing one recruit whose muscles were bulging through his flight suit.

  “What doesn’t?” I asked.

  “How fit everyone is. Hardly anyone with a top-hundred Box score on my planet was in good shape—nothing like you or those kids over there. You don’t have time to exercise if you know the next guy is just going to spend those hours in the Box getting better than you.”

  “Well, should we go let’em know they’re toast?”

  He smiled, but it faded almost as quickly as it came. His jaw tightened and his cheeks went red—looking even more nervous than when he’d first come up to me. “It’s just that I thought . . . ” he began hesitantly, still staring at the other kids. “I just didn’t think those types of people would be here. I love space math and the Box is full of space math and I thought I just had to . . . had to . . .”