DEBBI and Other Stories From the Helen of Mars Universe

By George Ebey

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New mining and tech company MARSCORP promises that the sky is the limit. But people who invest quickly realize that once you’re in, it’s something else entirely: a game of thievery, skullduggery, and outright bravery—but only by some. A planet populated entirely by mechanical rovers, but full of monsters, just the same. Monsters born from human malice, desperation, greed.
Welcome to the world of Helen of Mars, tales of a not-too-distant future where the strong prey on the weak, and heroes are forged on the dusty surface of the Red Planet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Glass House Nocturnal
• Release date: Dec 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9780997746150

George Ebey

George Ebey is a graduate of Kent State University with a bachelor?s degree in Criminal Justice. During college he minored in writing. He lives with his wife, Gail, in Northeast, Ohio. Broken Clock is his first novel. For more information about the author visit his website at www.georgeebey.com

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ANTHOLOGY_DEBBI_COVER.jpg

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either figments of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

DEBBI & OTHER STORIES FROM THE HELEN OF MARS UNIVERSE

Copyright © 2020 by George Ebey

www.ebeybooks.com

All rights reserved.

Edited by Carrie White-Parrish

Formatting by Inkstain Design Studio

Cover by White Rabbit Book Design

A Glass House Press Nocturnal book

Published by Glass House Press Nocturnal

www.glasshousepress.com

Glass House Press Nocturnal is a trademark of Glass House Press, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available on request.

ISBN 978-0-9977461-5-0 (ebook)

ISBN 978-0-9977461-7-4 (paperback)

First ebook edition: December 2020

First paperback edition: June 2021

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

The Arrival of Ares 2

DEBBI

Arena

Andromeda

Colossus

BONUS: Helen of Mars

About the Author

Author’s Note

Some ideas are too big for one story.

Helen of Mars is a prime example. The concept came to me when I was watching a comedian on television, of all things. I don’t recall exactly what the performer’s line of humor was, but it had something to do with his opinion that NASA should be ashamed of itself for making a momentous event like a rover landing on Mars the most boring thing ever, followed by the wise observation that remote control cars are only fun for the people who are actually controlling the car.

I laughed. But the idea got me thinking: What if it was possible for the average person to have their own Mars rover? It seemed like a good idea to explore someday, so I filed it away in the mental rolodex that all writers have and let it sit for a while.

Fast forward a few years to when my editor at Glass House Press, Carrie White-Parrish, and I were working on developing a separate fantasy adventure series. Another author in the house, Mary Fan, was looking for submissions for a new short story anthology that she and her editorial partner, Paige Daniels, were planning to launch. They called it Brave New Girls: Tales of Girls and Gadgets. The idea: Create a volume of sci-fi stories featuring teen girl protagonists who used their wits and smarts to save the day. The plan: Gather stories from various authors willing to donate to that idea. The goal: Inspire the next generation of young women to take an interest in STEM, a field that has criminally underrepresented their demographic for too long. All proceeds for the sale of Brave New Girls was to go into a scholarship fund through the Society of Women Engineers to help some lucky young lady pursue her dreams of a career in STEM.

I loved the concept and immediately knew that I wanted to throw my hat in the ring. But what to write about? I spun through my mental rolodex until I came back to the Mars rover idea. It didn’t take long for the pieces to fall into place.

Teen girl gets control of a Mars rover and uses it to stop a group of bad guys who also have Mars rovers and are using them for evil purposes. Helen of Mars was born.

I submitted the story to the anthology and was thrilled when it was accepted. And better yet, my editor—who’d graciously agreed to help me whip it into shape for print—immediately saw the larger potential and offered to work with me to develop the concept further.

The collection that you’re about to read is the first step in that development. It’s a process that shows no sign of slowing down anytime soon. We began here, with the story that started it all: the original Helen of Mars that appeared in Brave New Girls: Tales of Girls and Gadgets. Because we knew that this anthology wouldn’t be complete without it. Since it was conceived at the time as a one-off, it stands apart from the rest of the stories in this collection. I don’t consider it to be canon with the series that it spawned, but that was where this all began, and it deserves a spot at the table.

The stories that follow it continue that evolution. DEBBI, Colossus, Arena, Andromeda, and The Arrival of Ares-2 all serve as a kickoff into the larger Helen of Mars universe, each providing initial threads in this new tapestry. These stories, each unique and featuring characters of their own, lead us into the series’ first novel, Rover… and beyond.

I hope you enjoy them as much as we’ve enjoyed creating them.

George Ebey, November 2020

FOREWORD

I’ve always been a nerd. Maybe it’s in my blood; both of my parents have PhDs in statistics. As a little kid, my favorite show was The Magic School Bus, and I loved visiting science museums so much that my parents got a membership to the planetarium. It never even occurred to me that this was something that girls weren’t supposed to like.

That is, until society told me so.

When I was in elementary school, I attended a science camp and was the only girl. In high school, all the popular media depicted girls who liked STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering, math—as being on the bottom of the social ladder. I saw a handful of impossibly beautiful female scientists, usually in action movies and played by actresses in their twenties, but their functions were largely to swoon over the male heroes.

The message was clear: If you’re a girl in STEM, you’re either a loser, a male fantasy, or nonexistent.

Though I ended up dropping out of my university’s engineering program for a number of reasons, I’ve always wondered about the road not taken—and how it might have been different if the world had seen me differently.

Fortunately, society has evolved since then, and these days, people are actively encouraging girls to explore STEM subjects. But we can always do more. When Paige Daniels and I started publishing the Brave New Girls anthologies—sci-fi short story collections about tech-savvy teen girls who use their STEM skills to save the day—our goal was to give girls tales that opened a window into what was possible. Stories are powerful; they simultaneously show us what the world is and what it could be. We look to them for reflections of what’s around us and glimpses into where we might go.

We wanted to use those stories for good. For the girls we used to be.

Many women in STEM today say they were inspired by fictional characters like Dana Scully of The X-Files and Captain Katherine Janeway of Star Trek: Voyager. With Brave New Girls, Paige and I were aiming to add to that canon, though targeting a younger audience. Studies have shown that while a lot of young girls are interested in STEM, they start losing interest in middle and high school—right around the time when popularity and social capital become more important than what you enjoy.

So what would it take to shift that culture? To make girls in STEM every bit as aspirational as girls who become pop stars? To make it normal for the girl with Science Olympiad medals to also be voted Prom Queen?

Because although we’ve come a long way since girls don’t do math was a cultural assumption, we’re not there yet. It may take a generation for the results of today’s efforts to become clear, just as it took a generation for the impacts of Scully and Janeway to be seen—through the girls who grew up and earned college degrees in STEM subjects, who stuck it out through PhD programs and industry jobs. Women are still underrepresented in these fields, and every time it feels like cultural attitudes start to shift… someone else tries to set it back.

That’s why we can’t declare victory, yet. That’s why, as storytellers, we must continue to create tales that reflect the way things could be, so that a nerdy girl reading those stories might start to see that she’s not a loser, a male fantasy, or nonexistent.

All stories are a statement, presenting clear views on what’s meant to be normal or abnormal in the worlds they depict, and no story exists in a vacuum. By depicting girls in STEM as heroines with agency, who are the centers of their own stories and fully realized characters, authors are telling the world that this, too, can be the way things are.

It was in this context that we first published George Ebey’s Helen of Mars in Brave New Girls: Tales of Girls and Gadgets, back in 2015. It’s a fun, clever story; one that delves into some fascinating sci-fi concepts and presents a determined young heroine. Perhaps, somewhere out there, a girl who loves Mars will read Helen’s story and realized that she’s not alone.

Mary Fan

Co-Editor of the Brave New Girls anthologies

The Arrival of Ares 2

The moment it reached the dusty surface of the planet Mars, the transport pod’s entrance ramp began to open—and exposed the rover units inside to an army of swinging hammers and piercing drills.

An attack. Coming from someone already on the planet.

Ares 2 was neither the first nor the last unit in line to exit the pod. There were two others ahead and two more behind—which left Ares smack dab in the middle of the coming attack. With the pod now at a complete stop, the rover watched through a series of windows as the enemies outside surrounded them.

It knew exactly what they were after: the fresh components right off its body.

As such, Ares had no time to celebrate its arrival, no time to pause and wax poetic on the miracle of modern technology that had allowed it to be shuttled here from the other side of an ocean of space. At this moment, there was only one priority: escaping this place before the swarming parts-cannibals stripped every last sensor and gear from its metal body and turned it into a shell of scrap on the rocky red ground.

Its enemies were rovers themselves, veterans of the Martian terrain who knew how to move fast and hit hard in this strange new environment.

And their hostile reception had been somewhat expected.

Robotic parts weren’t manufactured on this desolate surface, so hardware from Earth was at a premium. But a fresh fuel cell or new solar panel could be moved from one unit to another, thus increasing the recipient rover’s overall speed, strength, and efficiency. Worn tools and limbs could also be replaced—thereby turning any newly arrived transport pods into prime targets for would-be parts-thieves.

It all made Ares long for the carefree days of the cargo ship that brought it here. Still, there had been some hope that the landing would be a smooth one.

Ares’ pod hadn’t been the only one sent to the surface in this wave. There were at least a dozen others, all dropped in unison from the large orbital platform that hung just above the planet’s thin atmosphere. Once deployed, they’d filled the salmon-colored sky with parachutes, each carrying its own pod. Those pods held five new units a piece.

If there were only a handful of parts-cannibals in the vicinity, then there would have been only a one-in-twelve chance that they would come after your pod once it landed. Better still if there weren’t any in the vicinity at all.

For Ares 2, neither of these choice scenarios would end up panning out.

Maybe its pod had been the one out of twelve chosen for attack, or maybe there had been a larger-than-usual horde of metal flesh-hungry menaces about—enough for every chute in the crimson sky. Either way, one thing was clear: If Ares wanted to make its way out of this gauntlet, it would have to fight.

This wouldn’t be easy.

It had less than a minute before the pod doors fully opened, which meant it had less than a minute to prepare itself. But anything even resembling a weapon was stored in the small trailer currently tethered to its backside by a heavy industrial magnet—and one minute was not going to be enough time to detach the trailer, crack open its top hatch, and find something to use for defense.

Unfortunately, this attack was not coincidental. The cannibalistic rovers had to know that the rovers still on the pod didn’t have a way to defend themselves. They had to be trying to take advantage of it.

No, its only chance was to make a roll for it and hope that it could get away without sustaining too much damage.

The first rover out of the gate bore the brunt of the attack. Saddled with the unfortunate name of Rolling Thunder stenciled in bold letters across the rear of its trailer, the rover rolled right into a thunder of another kind. The moment its wheels touched down on the dusty surface, it took two savage blows from two separate rock hammers held by two separate enemies. It tried to stumble away, but the attackers followed closely, neither of them relenting as they hammered dent after dent into Rolling Thunder’s metal frame.

By now, the second rover—or Eat My Red Dust, as its trailer stencil noted—tried to make a break for it, only to get snared by a third attacker, who promptly rammed a spinning drill bit into its plated chest. The drill must have been modified for optimum power, because it didn’t take long for the bit to pierce the solid chest plate and plunge its way into the rover’s innards, chewing and tearing up the precious tech inside. Seconds later, Eat My Red Dust slumped over in defeat, its Martian odyssey over before it had even begun.

Ares was determined not to let that happen again, and flew through the pod doors and into the fray. As far as it could tell, the enemy force consisted of only three attacking rovers. Not bad odds if its pod mates had seen fit to work as a team rather than flee into the dawn in an every-rover-for-itself fashion.

Ares briefly considered the idea of recruiting the two units at its rear to help even up the odds.

But the thought passed quickly. There was no time to effectively communicate with them, and no time to devise any kind of serious defensive strategy. Like the others, Ares would just have to take its chances alone against this new nemesis and hope for the best.