Ghosts of the Void

By Timothy Burns

When the solar system passes through a vast cloud of dark matter, strange things start to happen. Electronics go haywire, unbreakable materials suddenly break, and enigmatic, ghostly creatures are sighted. To the inhabitants of Earth this is bad enough, but on Mars, where properly-functioning technology means the difference between life and death, this spells disaster on an unimaginable scale.
Jared Miller, a psionically talented problem solver, barely survives his journey to the Red Planet on his mission to discover just what these mysterious ghosts of the void are and what they want. There, he meets Bo Greene, a prospector who scours the barren wasteland in his six-legged walker in search of mroom, the only life native to Mars. Along with Bo's ex-wife Anissa, Anna the witch and several others, Jared and Bo find themselves transported to the distant future where Mars is green and vibrant but the inhabitants are under the domination of alien overlords and their sadistic psionic henchmen.
Survival becomes their primary goal as they seek to save two worlds, but in the end they face the terrible dilemma of having to choose which to save and which to condemn to non-existence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Timothy Burns
• Release date: Jun 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301309986

Timothy Burns

I am a self-published novelist whose primary interest is hard science-fiction. I have read and loved that genre all my life and have always dreamed of writing books that others would enjoy reading as much as I myself enjoyed those of the great S/F masters. I am very interested in high technology and try to impart accuracy and plausibility into my work. Other reading and writing interests include fantasy, magic, the paranormal, the Norse runes and nature-centered religions. I am currently working on another sci-fi novel and intend to write several more, as my dream is to be a full-time novelist.

Book preview

Ghosts of the Void

By Timothy Burns

This work is dedicated to Mildred Moore, the best neighbor anyone could have.

Be sure to check out Mr. Burns' previous novel, Outside of Space

Copyright © 2013 by Timothy Burns

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof

may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever

without the express written permission of the publisher

except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Second Smashwords Edition 7-2-2013

Part One

Chapter 1

The corporate-owned research vessel Sparrow, in orbit around Neptune, was not the farthest-flung of Earth's children. That honor belonged to the Vatican Observatory near the dwarf planet Pluto. However, due to the blue gas-giant's position in its orbit at the time of first contact, it was the crew of that particular spacecraft who were the first to notice the effects of the infiltration.

Not that they recognized it as such, of course. At the time, the unexplainable glitches in the complex and expensive ship's myriad systems were taken by the ship's crew to be nothing more than coincidental occurrences of random bad luck; annoying but not totally unexpected on a voyage expected to last over two years.

And then they had no more time to puzzle over why so many faults were showing up all of a sudden, for the last one occurred in the circuitry controlling the vessel's fusion reactor's containment field. No-one even had a chance to report seeing the ghosts.

#

Dis is your lucky day, Bo, the surface-suited prospector said to the image in the dusty mirror. Standing in the airlock of his own - his own! - walker, about to step out onto the surface of the world that had been his prison for the last decade and a half but that, as of last week, had become the glorious path to real wealth, he felt a surge of hope and excitement unlike anything he had experienced in his sixteen years of indentured servitude to Telenet.

The outer door opened, exposing the Martian plain in all its rusty-red desolation. A week's travel from Ares City and there were no signs visible anywhere that men had been scouring the Red Planet's surface for nearly half a century in search of the only life-form known to have survived the aeons since the tragic death of that world's short-lived ecosystem. Of course, if it weren't for the frequent dust storms which perpetually erased all traces of the passage of those great high-stepping vehicles which were the overwhelmingly most practical form of transport over the rocky terrain, there would be no reason for the mroom hunter to suspect there might be any new growths to be found so close to the oldest city in the world.

No walker tracks meant no other prospectors had searched this particular piece of land at least since the last storm some twelve days past, and quite possibly not for some time previously, given how close it was. This meant there was a pretty good chance that some of the wind-borne spores of the fungus-like so-called Martian mushroom had gotten a chance to take hold and sprout new growths under the dust and rocks that made up the ground. Certainly it was worth stopping and exploring, especially since he was beginning to feel what the more experienced prospectors called the 'pull', that inexplicable mental tickle that more often than not led to finding new growths.

Some prospectors, especially those fairly new to the business, spent nearly all their time plodding across a search grid assigned to them by their employers, letting their walkers sniff the thin Martian atmosphere for the elusive scent of that of-so-valuable plant. The longer one kept at it, though, the more it became like having a psychic sense for the growths; an uncanny ability to feel the presence of a colony from farther and farther away. Bo, with his 16 years of experience, had come to rely completely on a faculty that the experts didn't even admit existed. And since keeping them ignorant of it was in the best interest of the veteran prospectors, it was likely to stay that way.

He stepped out into the glare of the far-off sun, his suit's faceplate instantly adjusting to filter the light to tolerable levels. Although Mars does possess an atmosphere, it is only one percent as thick as Earth's at sea level; solar radiation passes through it all but unimpeded. Not for the first time, he wondered if the pull of the mroom was some kind of radiation also since the less shielding there was between himself and the ground the clearer his sense of the plant colony's location became.

Like now. From the interior of his walker he had felt enough of a pull to convince him that he was close to a large find, yet try as he might he couldn't narrow it down to closer than a few square kilometers. Once on the ground, though, he somehow knew just what direction to turn. Despite the constriction of his surface suit, jogging was fairly easy in a gravity field only 38% as strong as the one he had been born and grew up in. Telling the walker to follow him, he set off across the rocky landscape in search of what he hoped would be the mother of all mroom colonies, the find that would secure his everlasting fortune.

He didn't know then just how much change the day was going to bring.

#

In their apartment deep within the underground heart of Ares City, Dr. Anissa Byron sat down to eat breakfast with her only daughter, 14-year-old Debbie. It's still not too late for me to get someone else, the biologist offered.

Despite their relationship, or possibly because of it, the two most often got along with each other more like best friends than parent and child. It was this very closeness that made Anissa willing to spare the teenager the potential social repercussions that could come from her leading her daughter's school group on their tour through Telenet's mroom processing facility.

Between bites the tall, green-haired girl replied, No, Mom, don't. It'll be so cool to be able to show Kelli and Bev and everybody just where I'm going to be working. And who better than you to tell them what it's like.

Anissa couldn't help but feel a touch of pride in her daughter. All her life Deb had maintained that she was going to follow her mother into a career as an exobiologist, telling anyone who would listen how she was going to do any number of amazing feats in the realm of bio-engineering, everything from modifying humans so they could live on the surface of the Red Planet to developing a strain of mroom that could live and grow on farms. Never mind the fact that neither project was considered by the experts to even be possible, her little girl was determined to do all that and more, and let the vacuum take anyone or anything that stood in her way.

You're sure I won't embarrass you, are you?

Oh, don't be silly, Deb laughed. Everybody knows you're the best scientist on the whole planet. We've been talking about the tour for weeks now. I'd never hear the end of it if you vaped out now.

Anissa had to smile at her daughter's note of support. Do me a favor, will you, and tell the board of directors that. Maybe they'll start paying me like the best scientist in the world deserves. And in the meantime, we'd better both go finish getting dressed. I don't suppose it would look very professional of us to show up for the tour still wearing our house-robes.

#

Not much later that morning Anissa led a group of 48 students, half of Ares City's high-schoolers, whose ages ranged from 11 to 16, on the much-anticipated tour. The largest part of the processing facility was located in its own dome on the outskirts of the city owing to the absolute necessity of preventing raw mroom from being contaminated by exposure to oxygen, so they began by boarding a bus at the school. During the ride, Dr. Byron asked the students if anyone could tell her why it was so important that unprocessed mroom by kept under Martian air.

Chaz, one of a set of triplets a year younger than Debbie, answered. It's because oxygen makes the nicc crystals stop talking to each other.

That is a very succinct way of putting it, Chaz, Anissa said, and then asked, And why is it so important that nicc crystals talk with each other?

This was explained by Da'rin, one of the oldest students. Because when they are processed right they can pass information to every other crystal from the same plant instantly, no matter how far apart they are. He literally beamed at Anissa, his infatuation with the biologist plain to see.

Knowing full well that she would certainly become the object of at least a few teenaged male fantasies on this excursion, the doctor took his adulation in stride. She smiled back at him exactly as she would have to anyone else, since she knew from long experience that to treat him any differently would be to invite trouble. At 35, Anissa was past the awkwardness that her exceptional beauty had caused her when she'd been younger, and so felt up to the challenge of fending off a handful of hormone-driven young men.

She sincerely hoped her daughter, who was rapidly developing a ravishing beauty of her own, would quickly learn to do the same.

Another upperclassman, Mark, apparently couldn't bear to let Da'rin be the only male to garner the blond doctor's attention. He raised his hand, and as soon as she glanced his way he spurted out, And without the instantaneous communication provided by the nicc crystals, we wouldn't have the internet and none of our phones and stuff would work. Isn't that right, Dr. Byron?

He was trying to impress her with his knowledge, and he failed miserably. Inwardly Anissa groaned, telling herself that he'd asked for it. Actually, that's not true. The pained, embarrassed look on the young man's face was somewhat amusing to her, though she made sure not to show it as she explained, We've had the internet almost since the beginning of the computer age, about 250 years now.

Barely-suppressed snickers, and a couple of very obvious digs from his friends, were proof that Mark's classmates shared Anissa's amusement. Someone towards the back of the bus, she wasn't sure who, said, And phones for even longer, dummy. They were limited to the speed of light, though.

Not wanting to let the bus-load of students get any more carried away in their Mark-bashing, the teacher-for-the-day put a stop to it by saying, That's right. Now, before we get there, who can tell us what role biologists such as myself perform for the telecoms industry?

That one stumped them all. Of the entire class there was only one student who knew the answer, and she wisely refrained from raising her hand until it was clear that none of the others were doing more than offering guesses. After several such wrong responses, however, she decided to go ahead.

What my mother does, said Debbie as she stood up and turned to face her classmates, is test a sample of every mroom plant that's brought in to see if it is a mutation that can be cultivated and grown under controlled conditions. If she ever finds or bio-engineers a strain that we can domesticate, there will be no more need for all those crazy prospectors.

Hey, my dad's a prospector! shouted one student.

Another cried out, So's my mom and aunt! What've you got against prospectors?

Anissa fervently wished her daughter hadn't been so quick to voice her dislike of those who made their living hunting for the elusive growths. While she well understood the common tendency for teens to throw themselves whole-heartedly into various causes, this was one instance where that protest was liable to cause the girl untold grief. As a parent she was tempted to help Deb out of the situation, but she knew it would benefit her daughter more in the long run if she left her to her own devices.

The way things worked out, Debbie proved quite capable of handling things herself. It's the whole corporate system that's at fault. If we could grow mroom on farms then there wouldd be no need for people to risk getting killed or going crazy spending so much time alone out on the surface. And nicc crystals wouldn't cost near so much. What do you think makes all our stuff cost so much, huh? It sure isn't the nano-grown electronics; that's literally dirt-cheap.

The arrival of the bus at the processing plant interrupted the young woman's rant, which her mother thought was just as well. Soon the students had many more things to pay attention to than the opinions of one of their number. Or the body of their tour leader, she hoped.

A huge window-wall made of transparent diamond separated the pressurized observation room from the vastly larger walker bay. Through it could be seen a half-dozen of the small-house-sized six-legged vehicles that looked like a collection of ceramic spheres and half-spheres stuck together atop fat insect legs, and there was easily room for twice that many more to all be serviced at the same time. A Telenet employee who had introduced himself as Xavier Cristaans addressed the group as they watched several surface-suited figures work on one of the massive conveyances.

My title is Director of Mobile Operations, which is a fancy way of saying I'm in charge of keeping our fleet of walkers in tip-top shape. As you can see, even when being serviced they are kept under Martian atmosphere. While this slightly inconveniences our maintenance workers, there are several very good reasons for doing this. It's better on the walkers themselves to not be subjected to the stresses of changing atmospheric pressure for the more routine tasks, but more importantly, keeping them out of an oxygen environment drastically reduces the chance of spoiling the mroom harvest.

Several of the suited workers out in the bay stopped what they were doing to make room for the approach of a large mobile robot that reached up with telescoping manipulators and removed the entire flat underside of a walker's fuselage, a rectangle some 15 meters or more long by half that or more wide and maybe a meter thick.

As you can see, we have a hopper full of mroom-containing soil just being unloaded. More than 95% of it is sterile dust and gravel that was vacuumed up in the process of harvesting the colony, and so the first step is to separate out the mroom. That's done in that big machine in the middle of the bay over there. I'm not allowed to tell you just how that is done other than to say it makes use of some advanced and very secret nanotechnology.

From there the nicc-containing plant material remains in the hermetically-sealed processing equipment until the crystals have been separated out and encapsulated in diamond. Ms. Delaney will show you where it goes from there, if you would all follow her downstairs. Thank you.

The remainder of the morning followed this pattern, the students being shown the various steps involved in creating the components at the heart of the modern telecommunications industry. After a lunch break in the employee cafeteria they came to the reason that Dr. Byron had been asked to participate in the tour.

The test plots where she and her colleagues evaluated the viability of each mroom sample were, of course, located Outside. For nearly half the students this was to be their first experience out of the domes and digs in surface suits, and this was cause for quite a bit of excitement among most of them and not a small amount of trepidation for a few.

Debbie's friend Kelli was one of those who had been viewing the approach of the excursion with a mounting sense of dread. As she had told her girlfriends more than once, It's just not natural for us to be out there with nothing more than a thin layer of plastic to keep us from freezing or exploding.

The only reason Kelli did not let her fear prevent her from going out with the rest of the class was her even greater dread of the ridicule she would be subjected to by those same classmates were she to chicken out. Even so, as the time approached for them to suit up it was all her closest friends could do to talk her out of giving in to that fear. Debbie, being the most experienced of her group when it came to going Outside, tried to reassure the girl that it was perfectly safe.

Look, these suits can't be ripped or punctured by anything short of... well, by anything, really, she said, catching herself before admitting that anything that was capable of breaching the tough carbon-fiber outer shell of the surface suits would undoubtedly kill its wearer anyway. Without giving the other teen time to think about what she almost mentioned, she quickly added, And they have a backup for the backup breather, so you know you don't have to worry about that.

But that's just it, the visibly terrified redhead whined. If they never had problems with the air there wouldn't have to be backups! What'll we do if they all break, Deb?

They won't, okay? Look how many people work Outside every day and you never hear about any problems. Even Mom; she's out almost every day and she's still alive, isn't she?

Some of that logic must have started to penetrate the girl's fog of fear, for she hesitantly said, Yeah, she is. You really think we'll be alright?

Airtight and green light. Come on, let's get suited up.

#

Wow. Dat's a new one.

The fact that there wasn't anyone else within hundreds of kilometers of Bo, or listening to his com signal at all, didn't deter him in the least from talking about anything and everything. Even his walker's AI was paying him no attention, although that was because he had specifically instructed it not to reply unless he called it by name.

What had caught his attention was a bizarre phenomenon occurring just above the surface of the regolith. Even in the full brightness of the midday sun he could see what looked like a rippling sheen of electrical discharges. Sparks arced from pebble to pebble in uncountable numbers, reminding him of sunlight glinting off the ocean's surface; a flash of memory from his distant childhood back in far-off Louisiana. He knew more than a little about the basics of electrical theory - no prospector who lived alone for months at a time on the surface of an alien world could long survive without knowing something of how his equipment worked - and yet he could think of nothing that could account for what he was seeing. It was as if the ground itself were becoming energized in sheets or waves; a ripple of furious discharges would be followed by seconds of calm normalcy.

He checked his radiation detectors and found nothing unusual on any band his equipment could monitor other than the disturbances caused by the sparks themselves. There was no evidence of whatever was causing the reactions, and that made him more than a little bit nervous.

I don't like it. Nope, not at all. Strange t'ings happen an' folks get dead.

The sheets of discharges seemed to be flowing around the slight rise upon which he stood, like the wash of some unseen tide flowing in. Warily he turned around, already knowing what he would see because he remembered walking up the hill and that it was the highest point anywhere around. Sure enough, the ground all around his refuge was covered by the spark-spitting rocks.

Now how am I s'posed to get me outta dis here fix? Inside his clear helmet he shook his head, wondering if it would be safe to walk through the whatever-it-was. The plastic of his surface suit was electrically non-conductive, but then again, rocks were supposed to be, too. Or were they? There is a lot of iron in Mars rocks, that's why the planet is so red. Maybe there would be no danger at all in wading through it.

But then again, there are old prospectors and there are bold prospectors but Mars is way too hostile an environment for there to be any old, bold prospectors. Taking every precaution and avoiding risks was how he had lived long enough to buy out his contract to Telenet and pay off his walker, and he sure wasn't about to risk everything he had worked for now, not when there was another option.

Rover, c'mere boy. His walker, which he had named after a particularly loyal and obedient hunting dog he'd had back home in the bayou country, had an outer shell and feet which were made out of an extremely hard and tough ceramic compound. Even more importantly in the present situation, it too was non-conductive. There was no reason for him to leave the safety of his hillock to return to his mobile home when it could come to him. That's what his robotic assistant was there for, and the only reason he felt safe venturing out into the uninhabited wilderness alone year after year. Even as solitary and independent as most prospectors were, Mars was just too dangerous a place for a single human to survive for any length of time without some sort of help every now and then.

When Bo turned around to check on the progress of the electrical tide he let out a startled scream as he saw that he was no longer alone.

#

Located roughly in the center of Mars' vast northern-equatorial feature known as the Chryse Planitia, or Golden Plain, Ares City was home to over 200,000 permanent residents; well over half of the entire planetary population. The choice of where to site it had originally not had anything to do with making it convenient for mroom prospectors, since the nicc-producing growths were not discovered until several years after the beginnings of mankind's first self-sufficient off-world colony were in place. However, once the importance of the only known native Martian life-form was recognized, it was seen that the city's location couldn't have been chosen any better even if those responsible for the decision had known all about it right from the start, as it was rumored.

Although the Red Planet no longer has any oceans to deny men access to portions of its surface, as does its sister world, it does have other ways of making vast stretches extremely inconvenient to traverse and exploit. Nearly the entire southern hemisphere is fractured and cratered, resembling Earth's moon with its overlapping impact sites.

The north, while lacking the extreme abundance of meteoric caldera, has its own obstacles. Valleys and channels, including the famed so-called canals, bear mute testimony to the long-gone torrents of water which caused their formation. Emerging full-sized from the chaotic terrain of former ocean beds and maintaining that vastness down their entire length, the canals were formed when massive floods of ages past carved enormous swatches of the surface into a fractured, tortuous landscape that is all but impossible to navigate and cross except by air.

Over all, only 40% of the surface is considered to be plains, and the largest and most accessible of these are in the middle latitudes of the northern hemisphere. Any point on the planet can be reached by air, of course, but the frequency and severity of the infamous dust storms makes most people shy away from relying solely on air transport of any kind, be it dirigible or powered flight. That being the case, it was considered prudent to place the first city in the midst of a reasonably large expanse of relatively navigable terrain, and Chryse Planitia fit the bill.

By a fortunate coincidence, mroom colonies tend to form most readily on wind-scoured plains. The majority of the planet's prospectors, being tightly controlled by the ultra-cautious corporations that employ them and provided their training and equipment, were just as happy that there was more accessible surface area nearby than a hundred times their number could cover in walkers. Even with dome camps springing up farther and farther away, it was estimated that it would be a century or more, Earth time, before there would be too many prospectors in the vicinity.

Even with such a vast hunting ground over which to roam, it occasionally happened that two prospectors would feel the pull of the same mroom colony and arrive to harvest it at the same time. If they are both in the employ of the same corporation there is generally no question of who reached it first and therefore has full claim, since both walkers are continuously reporting their locations to the same tracking computer. It is when independents or representatives of different concerns meet under such circumstances that things can become more uncertain.

Violence among prospectors out on the surface is not unheard of, but neither is it very common. There are several reasons for this, chief amongst them being the draconian penalties imposed by the Pax, that minimalist Martian government agency charged with maintaining the peace, for any action which endangers anyone's life or property. The two other biggest contributing factors are the general Martian attitude of inter-dependence, where everyone is expected by society at large to look out for the safety of everyone else, and the widespread availability of other mroom colonies. In most minds it is usually thought that it's better to move on that to risk harming anyone while out on the surface. Fights can and do erupt in the safety of bars in the cities, but almost never Outside.

Conflicts among rival prospectors were most often resolved by comparing their walker's records to determine who has a better claim to a particular colony in the prospector's tradition called dowsing. This is where each attempts to prove that he or she has a stronger feel for the pull, as evidenced by which of them turned toward the growth from farther away. As often as not, especially among the prospectors who had been at it the longest, whichever one won still ended up sharing some of the harvest with the other out of a sense of camaraderie. After all, they were both aliens out on the deadly hostile surface of a world not their own.

This feeling of common origins and shared goals almost always colored any meeting that occurred Outside. At least when those meetings were between two humans.

#

And that's basically all there is to it, Anissa told the class over the common communications channel they were all using. They were standing in the midst of hundreds of varied plots of Martian ground, each of which was separated from its neighbor by a grid of brightly-colored ropes atop short stakes. Some were covered in transparent domes while others had windbreaks enclosing them; some were on flat ground and some on terraced hillsides. In the distance could be seen some of the interconnected dome tops which covered the uppermost levels of their home, while in between sat the dozen unpressurized utility buggies which they had ridden in to get to the research site.

It was toward the nearest of these that Kelli was longingly gazing. All through Dr. Byron's spiel about how she and her colleagues were trying everything they could think of to domesticate mroom, the only thing the terrified girl could think of was getting back to the safety of the city. She couldn't help it. Despite the reassurances of her friends and the obvious fact that none of them were having any problems with their suits, the longer the group was Outside the stronger her conviction grew that something horrible was going to happen.

At one point, shortly after they had first exited the airlock and passed through the security barrier which enclosed the entire Telenet research facility, Debbie had asked her if her distress came from merely being out in the open, a case of agoraphobia. Even though she had never before been out of the pressurized enclosure of Ares City her entire life, the Martian-born girl had grown up with the illusion of wide-open spaces both in virtualities and through the magic of holographic walls and ceilings that was employed so frequently in her underground home.

No, that's not it, she had said after honestly considering the question. I can't explain it, but I just feel like I can't trust my suit.

Debbie had once again pointed out the redundant safety features and the other teen had reluctantly agreed to continue on with the tour. After the accident happened, she realized that Kelli had been right after all.

Chapter 2

Surrounded by pine forest and lushly-carpeted lawns, the two-story red-brick building would never have attracted a second glance from any passers-by, so well did it fit in with its north Alabama surroundings. White shutters flanked modest windows and well-tended shrubbery seemed to be part and parcel of the whole. A graveled parking lot along one side contained a half-dozen vehicles, none more than a few years old and not a one of them out of the price range of the American middle class. In short, there was nothing about the outside of the Clay Foundation headquarters that would make anyone think it was anything other than the think-tank and consultancy firm that its suburban neighbors thought it to be.

Ah, but inside was a different story altogether. If someone were to walk into the front room knowing nothing about the Foundation, he or she would likely take notice first of the numerous gilt-framed photographs of such famed psychics and occultists as Madam Blavatsky, Uri Gellar, Alistair Crowley and a dozen others. Interspersed with these along the richly-paneled walls hang such items as a feathered and beaded Native American dream-catcher, a Buddhist mandala print in bright colors, and a cut-crystal representation of the three phases of the moon. If one were to begin to form the opinion that the foundation might be interested in the world-wide perception of the so-called supernatural, that would not be too far from the truth.

Beyond the tasteful appointments of that sitting room is a hallway which gives access to a well-stocked library. Here can be found titles both popular and rare, the subject matter of which includes biographies of personages famous for their prominence in the psychic and occult fields, treatises on those same subjects, tomes concerning the magical beliefs and practices of cultures the world over, psychology texts, and a host of related manuscripts. If any further confirmation was needed in the mind of that fictional guest, the collection found here would certainly provide it.

Farther yet one finds several spacious offices, each turned out according to the personal taste of its occupant. One resembles an English gentleman's study, another contains Egyptian themes and artifacts, while others