Losing Mars

by Peter Cawdron

  I blink and suddenly I’m standing before a brilliant red Chinese flag mounted on a telescopic pole. Like the Apollo-era Stars and Stripes, it’s hanging like a curtain from an extended cross-member. Bootprints surround the flag, compressing the loose dust and overlapping each other at various angles.

  Out across the plain, I can see the crashed wreckage of the Chinese lander, and beyond that the faint outline of the Redstone settled on the slope of the crater wall. Somehow, I’ve made it to the original landing spot.

  “What the hell— Shepard, are you receiving me?"

  I squeeze my eyes shut, feeling the stress of the moment, wishing I could rub the grit out of the corners, but my gloved hands glance off the glass dome of my helmet. When I open my eyes, the flag is gone and I’m back where I was, halfway between the downed lander and the Redstone.

  My heart races.

  “No. Not again.”

  I take a single step but instead of walking toward the crater wall, I’m back standing beside the Chinese flag hundreds of meters away. I panic, turn and run toward the dark ruins of the crashed lander. My boots skate on the rocky surface, barely able to touch the ground as I propel myself on. Gravity won’t oblige. The harder I push, the more the moon seems to recede beneath my boots, causing me to hang in near weightlessness, forcing me to wait for my legs to settle from the fall. I’m scrambling like a cat on a polished wooden floor.

  I topple forward, keeling over in slow motion, catching myself with my gloves and scrambling with my feet, desperate to stay upright and rush on. I’m frantic. I trip and land on my shoulder, skidding through the dust. After getting to my feet, I realize I’m running toward the Chinese flag, not away from it.

  “No. No. No. How is this possible?”

  I turn, trying to get my bearings. I’ve got to slow down and move deliberately toward the far crater wall. I’m desperate to make it back to the Redstone. The shadows around me grow long and dark as the distant sun sets.

  “This is not happening.”

  Try as I may, I can’t flee the brilliant red Chinese flag. Every step I take away from it ends up with me approaching from another angle. I swear, I never blinked, I never took my eyes off the landslide below the Redstone, but I arrive at the flag time and again.

  “Not good.”

  Darkness descends. Several kilometers above me, the rim of Stickney Crater is bathed in the dying light of the sun. Stars break through the pitch black sky. I’m hyperventilating.

  “I’m okay. I’m okay.”

  Who are you kidding?

  “I’m going to be okay.”

  I’m desperately trying to talk myself into being calm. I’ve got another seven to eight hours of breathable air, plenty of electricity. No need to panic. Easier said than done.

  As darkness falls, the realization sets in that I’m not going anywhere, not until I can see more than fifty feet. I try to take my mind off what’s happening by examining the original landing spot picked out by the Chinese expedition. There’s a smooth patch of ground where they set down, with the regolith swept clean by their rocket exhaust. Dust spreads out from that point in a radial pattern. It’s as though a meteor struck without leaving a crater. There are four evenly-spaced circles around the blast crater, marking where the legs of the lander compressed the dust.

  A bunch of boxes have been abandoned on the surface. I make sure I get a good shot of them with my helmet cam. I’m on sacred ground, not willing to disturb anything. I have no idea what instruments the crew mounted as the labels are written in Chinese.

  Phobos is eclipsed by Mars, having moved into the umbra, the darkest portion of its orbit. I don’t know how long this will last, but the darkness terrifies me. My spotlights are feeble on the open plain, illuminating no more than fifteen to twenty feet directly in front of me. To either side, there’s nothing but inky black shadows. The stars are inviting, but being so deep within the crater feels as though I’ve descended into the underworld.

  I lose sight of the flag. Whereas moments ago, there were hundreds of bootprints on the ground around me, now they’re gone. I’m not sure if it was me. Did I stray from the landing site or have I been caught in another illusion? I should stop. I should wait. Just don’t go anywhere, Cory. But I feel compelled to try something, to go somewhere, even though the odds are I’m moving away from the Redstone. Three hundred and sixty degrees in a circle, right? Three hundred and fifty nine ways to get lost. Only one leads back to my capsule. Even though I know this, I press on. To do something, anything, feels important. I hate myself for losing my nerve. I’ve got to find those tracks. Hunker down by the Chinese flag and wait out the night. It’s short. It’ll be over soon.

  “Fuck.”

  I stagger on, my boots barely kicking at the soft dust. At least I can always backtrack. I can follow my own path back to the flag. Yes. That’s it. I can retrace my own steps.

  I look around. There are no tracks anywhere. It’s as though I’ve been dropped on this patch of dirt.

  “Why?” I turn to the stars, with my voice echoing inside my helmet. “Who are you? Why are you doing this?”

  Who am I kidding? No one is going to answer out of the void. Whatever this thing is, if it wanted me dead, I’d be sucking on vacuum.

  As my spotlights fall back to the rocky surface, I spot a set of boot prints in the dust leading toward the crater wall. I skip forward, kicking gently off the rocks. The tracks are Chinese. US boots have thick bars running parallel across the under sole. The Chinese use a rubber lattice that forms a criss-crossed pattern in the dust. It could be fake. Hell, I have no idea what’s real any more. If it’s fake, it’s not my own footsteps being replicated. I think they’re genuine.

  I follow the imprints over a low rise to the base of a cliff. Boulders lie scattered across the ground, some of them the size of an M1 Abrams tank. Anything could be behind them. Or nothing. Given I’m in a lifeless vacuum, it’s got to be nothing. Right? Right???

  My spotlights catch on the side of a shattered boulder, casting dark shadows beyond.

  “What the hell were you doing out here?” I ask my imaginary Chinese friends, following their tracks, but I already know the answer. Just as I’ve been compelled to come here, so were they. I’m not sure who or what they followed, but I doubt they simply wandered this way of their own accord. Is that it? Is this a glorified mousetrap? Am I doomed to repeat their steps? To follow in their fate? Will I lose my life as well?

  Above me, the starlight fades to black, but I’m distracted. I see something ahead, hidden in the shadows. Something alive. It’s surprising how much detail I recognize as my body goes stiff and my muscles seize in fear.

  Sharp teeth glisten in the darkness, catching the light from my helmet. They’re white with yellow stains down low by the gum line. Some are cracked, others chipped. Bits of rotten meat have been caught in the narrow gaps. Hundreds of daggers are set butted up against each other in the open mouth of a hunter, an apex predator honed by millions of years of evolutionary pressure. Black eyes stare through me. I dare not move, but there’s no reaction to my presence. As I drift slightly in the low gravity, it becomes apparent the creature is staring beside me, not at me. Is it dead? Is it a statue? Who would craft such a monument in orbit around Mars. I’m confused.

  I approach the animal, unsure exactly where I am. I’m no longer on the surface. I’m somewhere in the caverns beneath Phobos. Thick, leathery skin covers the creature. Long claws reach into the darkness. It’s a theropod, a dinosaur with stunted front legs acting as arms, standing erect on it’s muscular hind legs. Motley skin and bits of feather cling to its hide, but the feathers are stunted, barely the length of my fingernail. Scratches mar its hindquarters. Scar tissue has formed on its belly from an old healed wound. There’s a long tail, stretching easily the length of the torso again, allowing the animal to retain its balance when running. I feel as though, were I to reach out and touch it, the creature would spring to life and turn to face me. My gloved fingers d
rift slowly, just inches from its skin, longing to touch it, if only to reassure myself I’m not hallucinating, but I dare not wake the monster.

  Slowly, I step to one side, keeping the spotlights on my helmet on the dinosaur, nervous as hell that it’s somehow going to lunge at me. Dark shapes move within the shadows, or is it the motion cast by my spotlights?

  I turn. I’m standing on some kind of raised walkway. No handrails. The theropod is suspended in space without any visible means of support. There are hundreds of specimens stretching into the distance. Row upon row of them, above and below the walkway, grouped into like forms. I walk along, noting how their body shapes slowly change, perhaps each representing a different sub-species.

  “Is this an ark? A museum?”

  If it is, the collection isn’t exhaustive. Further along, there’s an abrupt change. Sauropods. Long necks protrude over the walkway, passing several meters above my helmet. Their massive bodies fade to black, hiding their tails in the darkness. I can’t see either the ceiling or the floor within what feels like a vast warehouse buried within the moon. The various dinosaurs appear to be floating in space, but that’s not possible—the same gravity that holds me loosely on the surface of the walkway should drag them down. I crouch, leaning out beyond the walkway, touching at where I imagine the floor should be. My spotlights illuminate another creature on the level below—a stegosaurus with large diamond-shaped plates set along its spine, decreasing in size as they lead down to a spiky tail.

  “Not possible. None of this.”

  It’s not that I doubt what I’m seeing, but that these creatures are chronologically set millions of years apart! My niece is dino-mad. Posters everywhere. Stuffed toys. Hand-painted models. Books. Movies. She’s always talking about dinosaurs. I pretend to be interested. She surprised me a few years ago, pointing out that more time separates a stegosaurus from a T-Rex than from a T-Rex to us. Deep time is deceptive like that. The temptation is to think all of the different species of dinosaurs lived at once, but they thrived in a variety of forms for hundreds of millions of years. No one species remained for more than a few million years at best, being supplanted by some other evolutionary development or wiped out by asteroids or disease.

  “They must have been watching us for eons.”

  ‘Us’ is a loose term for anything from Earth because these specimens existed anywhere from sixty to a hundred and sixty million years before hominids arose.

  “What the hell happened here?”

  I’m on my knees. I reach out. My gloved fingers touch at what feels like glass, but there’s no reflection. The light from my helmet passes through the surface as though it were entirely transparent. I’m not sure there’s any material on Earth that acts like this, not even glass. I get to my feet, looking around, trying to gauge the size of the warehouse, looking for walls, a floor, the ceiling, but all I can see are creatures frozen in time, stacked on either side of the walkway, stretching into the pitch black darkness.

  I blink and I’m out on the surface again. Starlight gives Stickney Crater a soft glow. From the orientation of the darkened planet above me, I think I’m on the far side of the crater, easily a mile from the Redstone. I rest my gloved hand on a boulder, but not because I’m weary, more to assure myself of reality.

  A crack runs through the floor of the crater near the cliff. It’s less than fifty meters long, but it’s fractured, branching across the surface, leaving various sections of the crater floor at different heights. At points, the chasm is wider than a bus. The ground is littered with pyrite crystals, if that’s what these things really are. They form different sizes and shapes, but they’re reminiscent of the alien device the Chinese recovered. I ignore them, stepping past them as though they were landmines. They light up beneath my spotlights, glistening with the colors of the rainbow. It’s as though they’re coated with a thin layer of oil.

  Bootprints surround an indentation in the dust. This is as far as the Chinese came. They recovered one of the devices from this spot and returned to their craft. From here on out, I’m in uncharted waters.

  Call me crazy, but my fear is gone. I’m curious.

  Who collected those specimens? What the hell else is down there?

  Since my suit is bulky and gravity’s low, I take my time, lowering myself to the dusty surface and inching toward the edge of the gaping hole. It’s a bit like lying on a frozen lake. The ground is hard. Cold seeps through. Spacesuits are designed to regulate temperatures, but even though outer space is insanely cold at something like negative 450 degrees Fahrenheit, normally that’s not an issue. The human body is a radiator, a tiny calorie burning furnace, and snuggled away within a spacesuit, there’s no way of losing that heat—no atmosphere to carry it away. More often than not, our biggest thermal challenge is overheating despite the cold. As soon as I lie down, though, I’m making direct contact with a surface that’s frozen to negative 450. The insulation in my suit helps take the edge off the cold, but can’t defeat it. I have to know. I have to see. I slide forward, gripping the edge of the smashed regolith, and peer over the ledge. Small rocks tumble from beneath my gloves. My spotlights illuminate a crypt.

  There’s a drop of maybe ten to fifteen meters, probably forty or fifty feet. Rubble lies scattered across an otherwise unnaturally flat floor. Looking at the crevasse itself, I make out distinct layers in the rock I’m lying on, something that shouldn’t be present on an asteroid. The lowest layer forms the roof of the open cavern. It’s thick and bends inward. Rock doesn’t bend. That has to be some kind of metallic alloy. This place was destroyed by an explosion, but it wasn’t structural failure, like rapid decompression, blowing outward. Something punched through the roof of what must be a subterranean shelter. They were attacked. The realization is startling.

  “Oh, Shepard. Tell me you’re seeing this.”

  There’s no reply.

  I’ve got to go down there. My personal video camera will loop until it’s stopped, holding at least half a day’s footage at any one time. I’m not sure how long I’ve been on the surface. A quick glance at my wrist pad confirms it’s been almost two hours since I left the Redstone—ten hours remaining. I’ve got to get this on video.

  I clamber to my feet. This is Phobos. Forty feet is nothing. Might sound insane, but even with all my gear, in this low gravity, out on the surface of the crater I could take a running start and jump, easily clearing a football field, bouncing around like The Incredible Hulk. Coming down might be a bit messy, but not dangerous. No more so than anything I’ve faced on Mars. I dust the front of my suit, stalling for time, trying to talk myself through the decision, wanting a crystal ball to see the future. What if this is a mistake? What if I go down there and I can’t get back? What if the floor gives way and I fall further into the alien structure?

  I’m an astronaut, a scientist, an explorer. For me, the unknown is magnetic, alluring, hypnotic, pulling me in despite my reservations.

  Lost in the Darkness

  The darkness has always scared me. I think it scares everyone. It’s an illogical fear, irrational—few will admit it, but there’s something unnerving about not being able to see what’s around you or where you’re going. It’s the lack of control, which for me speaks loudly of my Mr. Fix It mindset. Damn it. If anything, that realization convinces me I need to go down there, if only to face my demons. The footprints I followed stopped well short of the crevasse. At this point, I’m pretty sure I’m moving beyond the taikonauts.

  I position myself carefully, looking at the edge of the hole just inches from my boots, assessing the fall, making sure I’m not going to collide with anything on the way down. I step off the ledge.

  The actual jump is like sinking within a swimming pool. Rather than plunging, I drift, falling like a leaf in autumn. I have my arms out for balance, which is a strange sensation. Normally, on Earth, there’s little or no time for fine adjustments, but here on Phobos, gravity is lazy. Out on the surface, it felt surreal waiting for each boot
to connect with the rock, but in free fall, it’s like a dream. It takes a full minute for me to descend to the floor below—an entire minute to fall a distance that, on Earth, would be fatal and over within seconds. I’m Peter-goddamn-spaceman-Pan.

  By the time I land, I’ve accelerated to the point where I’m covering about a meter a second, which is still rather sedate by Earth standards where it’s a full 9.8 meters per second squared. It feels like I’ve got Bungie cords attached to my back, arresting my fall, and I land with barely any effort, crouching to arrest the impact and lessen any rebound. As it is, I bounce a little before coming to a stop.

  I didn’t anticipate quite how dark it would be down here. Phobos is in the shadow of Mars, but there’s starlight up there. Down below the surface, there’s nothing. My spotlights illuminate a corridor running left to right. Out of habit, I sound off, even though I doubt anyone can hear me.

  “EVA elapsed time is one hour, fifty seven minutes and I’m in the hold of some kind of artificial structure.”

  Even though I know it’s alien, I can’t bring myself to say that particular word. ‘Alien’ has too much baggage and conjures up images of monsters in the dark and little green men in flying saucers. I really don’t need either of those concepts bouncing around inside my head at the moment.

  Time is fluid. I can feel myself moving through spacetime even though I’m standing perfectly still. The darkness swirls around me, consuming me.