An Android Awoke (on Moon!) Chapter Five

Episode Five – Martium (pronounced Marsh-yum)

Previously in the series: LEX-42 starts exercising its newfound free will. Selina, unable to meet Neer once more on Mars, takes off in disappointment towards Earth – a nine-month journey.

In this episode: Selina meets her fellow Mooninite friend and Neer’s love interest, Hielsa, upon reaching Earth, but even she doesn’t understand why Neer has been out of touch for so long.

Selina was not accustomed to the glaring Earth sky, having been sleeping for the most part in the dark space between Earth and Mars. She was a fast adapter, though, and began to adjust while the automated atmospheric entry protocols kicked in and guided her to the landing area.

Selina’s ship aimed for Site 19 amid the Australian Outback. Gliding over the cleverly minimally-designed continental solar field as she approached the landing pad, the face shields on her multi-planet exoskeleton adjusted their opacity upwards to account for the extra glare from the reflections of this solar field array. Almost an artwork in that it blended into its natural surroundings, it did add to the local brightness of the atmosphere-filtered, air-diffused Earth sun.

Getting into the air-cushion tube that delivered her stasis pod right into the incoming personnel bay under the landing pad was a breeze – quite literally. She welcomed the cool rush of fresh air.

The med techies were always polite and courteous. She could feel her vitals strengthen as they carried out the checks and tested the balances. In a few hours, her exoskeleton was back on her body and she felt as vigorous as she ever had, ready to complete boring landing formalities.

Navigating through the subterranean always that connected the buildings of the spaceport was no walk in the park, but she was ably guided by her liaison over comms, and reached the cargo area by the time the cargo in her ship’s stowage had been unloaded & sorted for processing.

She was intrigued when her liaison showed her the cargo manifest for her sign-off – not one of the Martian ground crew had told her that she would be carrying refined ore of the new element, Martium. They had presented the loading manifest on her eyescreen and she had customarily nodded her approval, like she had seen being done by her previous captains on the last couple of Moon-Earth flights she had been a part of, learning the ropes of piloting. Had she been too trusting of them? Or was she being taken advantage of by higher-ups in Earth’s space squad?

It did not seem like that to her – many of them knew her from her previous Mars visits as part of the training crew, and it did not seem like them to be intentionally hiding such a thing from her.

Nevertheless, she was back on Earth and nearer to her home, Moon, and she felt grateful enough to the ground crews of both planets so as to put any thoughts of betrayal from their side, trivial though they might be, out of her mind at the time. She smiled and nodded at the manifest.

Head & hand gestures and eye tracking were the de facto modes of interaction with most comms. Selina’s exo helped her move on Earth and Mars without too much effort, but coming out of a nine-month stasis chamber at the end of her Mars-Earth flight had atrophied her body.

Nothing a long sleep on a goose down mattress under a feathered quilt wouldn’t cure, she knew.

For the time being, she dialed her exo up to 11 to give her maximum aid in defying Earth gravity.

She called Hielsa as soon as she was on the high-altitude transcontinental jet, heading to Kobe in Japan, where Hielsa and Neer shared an apartment. The auto-response told her that Hielsa’s comms were set to zero alerts at the moment, so she recorded a brief message telling her that she was back on Earth and awaiting her reply. She settled into the chair for the continental flight.

She used the time to read up on the new element that had been discovered on Mars, Martium, now that she knew that her ship had refined samples of its ore aboard. Apparently, it was exhibiting “exciting” new properties, at least as far as the geo techies were saying in magazines.

Martium was being touted as an exemplary candidate for enhancing space propulsion. This had huge implications for interstellar travel. Ongoing projects aiming to explore beyond our solar system using long-in-development tech like solar sails, LASER propulsion, et cetera, had been in their respective experimentation stages for centuries. Martium was poised to change all that.

A temporary suite in Kobe was awaiting her, courtesy Earth squad, who were mostly elderly astronauts. They knew the unglamorous side of space travel, and kept current astros in comfort.

She settled in her temp room and finished up her official reports, in triplicate, not for Vogons but for the Earth, Moon, and Mars space squads. The absence of Hielsa’s reply rankled through her thoughts quite often, but in the evening, her comm lit up – Hielsa was calling. She perked up.

“Hey, Hee. Long time no see, you well?”

“Hey yourself, Sel. What’s the hurry? I have been swamped since last weekend, was in the orbital hub for almost a year and needed some prime alone time after so much close quarter contact…I know you know what I mean, eh, MISS CAPTAIN?”

Selina laughed at the good-natured jibe about her first solo interplanetary flight. “I get it, I get it. Sorry about sending the priority messages, but I have had Neer on my mind since I launched from Mars. He was acting weirdly, so I thought I’ll ask you if you know what he’s doing.”

“You know, I don’t know. Did he say why he hasn’t answered my calls?”

“He didn’t tell us anything, except that he couldn’t tell us anything.”

“He has become way more distant than usual these past few months while you were on the return path, you know? First I thought it was because I was orbiting and he was in his never-go-anywhere bio lab on Mars, but I remember, on one Sicday we talked for a long time, like we used to when he was on Earth, and he told me that wasn’t it… it was something else.”

“Did he say what that something else was? I couldn’t get it out of him at all.”

“Neither could I, but it felt as if he was afraid to say too much in case somebody was listening to us talking, you know what I mean? Eavesdropping on our comms?”

Selina pursed her lips in deep thought. “I know what you mean.” She knew the feeling of there being someone constantly monitoring every move, even when they were doing it for your safety.

They met for lunch on the next Twoday. Hielsa had tried to contact Neer twice but there was no response from either him or his lab. As they delved deeper into their lunches and the possible reasons for Neer’s absence from comms, a teen approached their table and coughed politely.

Hielsa was quick to spot a fan – but this time, she knew the adulation was not directed at her. She gestured to Selina, who looked over her shoulder to see a young girl smiling abashedly at her.

“Hey, hi, what’s going on?” Selina’s friendly demeanor put the girl at ease, a little bit at least.

“You’re the Mooninite captain, ya? Flying Mars supply? Landed in the Oz outback last week?”

“Wow, how do you know my sched, kiddo?”

“The Launch & Land channel was all about it since your final approach, we’re all tuned to it!” The words almost ran after each other in her hurry to speak her mind before she lost her nerve.

“Launch & Land? That sounds awesomax, I’ll look it up, yeah? Thanks for putting it on my radar!” She was about to turn back to her plate when she caught Hielsa’s expression, just in time. She had been in solitary space so long she had forgotten usual Earth customs. She changed her movement smoothly and made it seem like she was pushing her hair out of her face. Then she swung up her wrist comm and looked back at her young fan. “Wanna vibe?”

The girl was ecstatic. She too flicked up her wrist comm and sidled up to Selina, who slid to a knee from her chair to be level with the girl. Together, they smiled at each other’s comms, and the memory was eternally digitized. The girl blushed with pride at having met the first Mooninite pilot of an Earth-Mars space ship in person, and mumbled too many words of thanks in too short a time for any of them to make real sense to Selina, before rushing away to her parents’ table.

“Whew! That was a close call; I’m pretty sure she would’ve cried with real tears if you would’ve turned your back on her without a vibe!”

“Yeah, thanks tonnes for that save, Hee. My squad had told me I was making news. I read some of it on the flight from Oz, but I don’t remember running across anything named Launch & Land.”

“Oh, right, you have been out of it for what, 2 years now? You don’t know about LL , and that is because he is a kid who is pretty, pretty, pretty into space flight. You were viral on the Moon; now that you have made it back here after piloting the full trip with zero fuss, you are viral here too. Remember how viral it was when Neer and I shifted the perma bio module from low to high orbit?”

“Oh yeah, that was so good for boosting Mooninite bio farming! Even I was getting sick and tired of synth meals after my first few trips to Earth, and then up you guys come towards us with real green!”

They laughed along into further conversation, reminiscing about their pasts like good friends do.

They parted after deciding a plan of action: Hielsa would try to find out what Neer’s orders were from the Earth and Mars space squads; Selina would visit her parents on Moon and explore the lunar botany lab, since Neer had spent quite some time there before he was assigned to Mars.

In the next episodes: Perturbed but homesick, Selina flies to Moon and lands in the spaceport near her home, Bohr City. LEX-42 infiltrates the Bohr City spaceport and encounters a human.