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Detonation Event

Mars Wars #1

by
John Andrew Karr

Genre: Science Fiction

Pub Date: 2/5/19

For decades the Space Consortium of America has searched for new ways to
harvest resources beyond an increasingly depleted Earth. The ultimate
plan is about to be ignited. So is the ultimate threat to humankind.
. .

Detonation Event

Battle-hardened
Captain Ry Devans and his crew of the Mars Orbiting Station-1 are
part of a bold plan: resurrect the once-active molten cores of the
Red Planet with synchronized thermonuclear explosions, and terraform
the hell out of that iron-oxide rock for future generations. It’ll
change history. So will the strands of carbon-based Martian cells
that have hitched a ride on the ship.

Dr. Karen Wagner knows the microbes’ resistance to virus is incredible.
It’s the unknowable that’s dicey. Her orders: blow them into
space. But orders can be undermined. Two vials have been stolen and
sent hurtling toward the biosphere. For Devans and Wagner, ferreting
out the saboteurs on board is only the beginning. Because there are
more of them back on Earth—an army of radical eco-terrorists
anxious to create a New World Order with a catastrophic gift from Mars.

Now, one-hundred-and-forty-million miles away from home, Devans is feeling
expendable, betrayed, a little adrift, and a lot wild-eyed. But space
madness could be his salvation—and Earth’s. He has a plan. And
he’ll have to be crazy to make it work.

“Detonation Event starts with the unusual proposition that the
greatest difficulty in terraforming Mars will be not geophysics but
Earth politics--rising quickly to open warfare. Interesting and
intelligent.” --Dave Drake Author of Hammer's Slammers

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Prologue

2228 AD

The abyss and its twin gape at the Martian sky as if aware of the pain to come.

One in daylight, the other night, they disrupt a global desert. The tunnels thrust to the very heart of the planet, as if the God of War had twice speared his namesake and wrought its demise. Mars was never a kind deity, and while he is no longer capable of violence, his blood-colored world remains just as hostile to life.

Here the sun rises and sets without mortality to mark the passage of time. The thin air constricts no lungs. The cold bites neither flesh nor frond. Beds of ancient waterways gather dust, indistinguishable from surrounding barrens. Volcanoes stand as slowly withering ghosts. The underground reservoirs that once supplied them with magma cooled to rock millennia ago. Deeper still, the once-molten outer core endured the same fate, entombing the mass of solid iron, nickel, and sulfur that had been its heat source: the radioactive inner core. Both are cold now, and there is no geologic activity throughout the entire planet.

Mars orbits the sun—half again beyond Earth’s orbit—as a rocky corpse.

But perhaps not eternally doomed.

The tunnels are the first phase of a mission where the odds are seemingly light years long and without historical precedent. Even if the mission is initially successful, the duration is unknown. Something killed Mars before and can do it again. But a chance at life has arrived where there was none. An opportunity to restore the vibrancy of the planet’s youth, now only hinted at with subterranean ice and mysterious impressions upon the withered husk of the surface.

In its first billion years, the red planet may not have appeared red at all, but purple or even blue like Earth, depending on the ratio of breathable air to iron oxide particles spewed from volcanoes and lifted by wind from mountains and deserts. Surface water existed in the form of streams and lakes and perhaps even seas. Clouds of water vapor circled the globe. Lightning flashed and thunder boomed.

Rain fell on Mars.

And it was no coincidence that the planetary cores were active and “alive.”

Radioactive heat loss and convective currents of magma produced a magnetic field that bound the atmosphere to the planet in a geologic dynamo, the like of which still functions on Earth.

What killed Mars?

Perhaps its smaller size limited the amount of radioactive supply, and it simply ran out of energy. Or massive impact with an asteroid ejected the charged particles out to space. Whatever the case, death arrived soon after the Martian inner core went cold. Having lost its heat source, the molten outer core turned to stone as if succumbing to the Hydra’s gaze. The dynamo failed and its magnetism all but vanished. Gravity alone was too weak to hold the atmosphere. Air and water molecules escaped into space. Without a magnetic shield and atmosphere to deflect them, solar winds and radiation further stripped the surface dry.

Mars lost the means to support life beyond a microbial level.

Now temperature fluctuations spawn the only weather events. Night and polar regions regularly plunge two hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit; cold enough to freeze its most abundant gas—carbon dioxide—into dry ice, though at times the equator at full sun can reach as high as sixty degrees. Far less drastic temperature swings combine with the weak gravity in a near vacuum to spawn frequent dust storms. The greater the temperature difference, the larger the storm.

Dust, prevalent everywhere, is lifted rather than scoured from the surface. Storms of it can be monstrous, at times engulfing the entire planet except for the gargantuan Olympus Mons. Far more common are the dust devils that waltz through a desolate Hell.

Some of the rust-hued particles fall into the open maws and down the tunnels.

No twists or turns arrest their journey. They gain no purchase along laser-bonded walls. Down they drift like mineral snowfall, passing signal relays at every mile. The dust falls for weeks toward the core. Recent inductees will never reach bottom before Detonation Event.

Electronic relays form a spiral pattern and flash in sequence for two thousand miles, down and back again, each briefly illuminating a section of tunnel along the way. Constantly monitored by satellites positioned above, the relays are members of a large supporting cast.

The lead roles belong to the hydrogen (thermonuclear) mega bombs residing at the base of the each tunnel. These are cutting-edge nuclear fusion explosives; the latest in the class of Asteroid Busters.

Ever silent, Mars awaits its chance at resurrection.

John Andrew Karr writes of the strange and spectacular. He enjoys
creating fantasy, paranormal, horror, and science fiction, having
self-published novels in all these genres. He’s a North Carolina
resident, IT worker, and all-around family guy.

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