Mission Mars

by Janet L. Cannon

  “In another six minutes, give or take, the video will be on the screens of some very powerful—and very nervous—people. No more than thirty minutes after that, coded messages will be sent to Cydonia Base, and within minutes after that, a squad of inspectors will be headed our way, flight time two hours, at most. They won’t be coming to inspect; they will be coming to destroy what we found. Our camp and our bodies will be at the bottom of a sudden subsidence. After that, the area will be tagged as too dangerous for colonization. It happened before.” She put her face in her hands and sobbed.

  “That’s crazy,” Isabella said. Her voice sounded more like a question, rather than a statement.

  Pank turned on her and growled. “You and everyone else, too wrapped up seeing yourself on Mars, instead of seeing Mars!” Isabella jerked back at Pank’s vehemence. “Cydonia Base isn’t anywhere near The Face. It isn’t even in the original Cydonia region. They renamed the original Cydonia. It’s Hell’s Deep on current maps.”

  “But that’s the most unstable—” Rienholt began. Pank cut him off.

  “They prohibit travel into Hell’s Deep, claiming massive subsidence danger and seismic activity. Some Earth Corps people have been running expeditions in there for years.” Pank punched the button on the video feed, turning it back on. “They have been searching for that.” She pointed at the airlock door set into the wall of crystals on the video feed. Next to the airlock, a sixties-era space suit lay with its legs spread towards the camera, and its body leaning against a large crystal. The suit’s helmet lay upside down on the tube floor, and a desiccated face turned sightless eyes towards the roof. The airlock door was propped open by a basketball-sized crystal. Wisps of dust floated through the air and into the open door. “So, we have two hours.”

  “Maybe three,” Rienholt said.

  “Maybe three,” I agreed. “Pank, put the comm feed back up. Provide a running voiceover. Tell them who and where we are, how we found this. Isabella, you and I are going down there. Rien, you are on cables and communications. Let’s move.”

  I tossed Isabella and Rienholt their helmets, then pulled my own on. Outside, we located some climbing equipment, winches, and enough cable to reach the bottom of the tube and loaded them into the rover. Rienholt secured my winch to a large rock and I stepped over the lip of the subsidence. As I slid down the side, I saw him running an anchor from Isabella’s winch to the front of our rover. Isabella stepped over the lip and sent a cascade of dust down on me. When I reached the bottom of the subsidence, I had planned to step off into the hole in the roof of the tube, but nature beat me to it. I was pushing a wave of dust ahead of me and I watched a piece of the tunnel roof vanish as the wave of sand reached it. The hole doubled in size. I was suddenly swinging at the end of my cable while tons of sand poured down from the surface. I heard Isabella’s whoop and then delighted laughter as she joined me.

  “Mac, Isabella, I’ve got the winches at top speed. The subsidence area is growing. I’m afraid it is going to reach your anchors before you get to the bottom.” Rienholt was near panic. I looked between my feet at the pile of sand and rocks that had already poured through the hole.

  “If it looks like the anchors may go, we will drop on your say so. Be ready to move the rover,” I said. The peak of the sand pile grew closer every second. We didn’t have the time to reach it.

  “Mac, Isabella! Now!” Rienholt’s voice was even closer to panic. I saw Isabella’s body jerk upwards and then she fell free of the cable. My cable went suddenly slack.

  “Incoming!” Rienholt screamed into the radio.

  I unsnapped my quick release and hit the sand, hard. Instead of trying to get to my feet in the soft dust I just rolled and tumbled to the bottom of the pile. I ended up on my back, half buried in sand, just in time to see an explosion of dust and fragments of tunnel roof explode around a rover-sized rock as it fell through the widening hole in the ceiling of the tunnel. The rock hit the mound of sand about half way up. It sent another explosion of dirt into the air. Then it rolled gently to the bottom of the pile. It stopped with a grinding, crunching, noise between Isabella and I.

  “Everyone alright?” I asked. My suit monitor was quiet and my display showed Isabella’s and Rienholt’s icons in green, so I knew they were okay, and their suits were intact.

  “What a ride!” Isabella said. She was just two decibels short of a shout.

  “I’m okay,” Rienholt said. He sounded shaky.

  “Three hours, ten minutes,” Pank said.

  “Rien, did the subsidence get any closer to the lander?” I asked in sudden panic.

  “No, it moved about three meters closer to the hab but it stopped right after that bolder rolled in.” He replied.

  “OK, keep a sharp eye on it. Right. No rest for the wicked,” I said climbing to my feet. Isabella bounded over the rock and landed next to me.

  I flipped on the work lights built into my helmet. Isabella flipped hers on, and gestured towards the optical cable from Dante. “Shall we?”

  “No time like the present,” I said.

  It took little time to reach the wall. In moments, we stood looking down at the mummified astronaut. The nametag over the left breast of his suit was concealed by the collapse of the body. I bent and moved the fabric so I could see it. J. Farr. Could have been Jack or Justine, but the fringe of stubble on cheeks and chin left little doubt about the sex of the body.

  “I wonder why he committed suicide,” I mused aloud.

  I heard a click and Pank’s voice came over the radio. “NASA astronaut candidate Julian Farr, Major, US Army. Deceased. It says here he was killed in a training accident in 1963.”

  I was thankful again that quantum storage devices that could hold most of the Internet’s information weighed next to nothing. Iridium, being the major component in making them was the main reason we were on Mars. We had a snapshot of the Internet in a cube half a meter on a side. It’s also a quantum computer. Pank was searching it instead of sending the data queries to Earth, six light-minutes away. We didn’t have time to wait for a search to go to Earth and return twelve minutes later.

  I pulled the body away from the door and discovered he was lying on a clipboard. Papers fluttered from it and skated away on a breeze, into the airlock. Isabella, nimble and quick thinking, stamped on the clipboard catching those that had not fluttered away. As she bent and picked up the remaining papers, I dragged J. Farr out of the way and gathered up his helmet. I arranged him on the ground with his arm around the helmet and then returned to Isabella. I peered over her shoulder at the writing on the papers. Long strings of equations wandered across the sheets. Some of them written carefully and clearly, others scrawled in a barely legible hand, slashed across the papers. The paper was desiccated and crumbled easily. Isabella’s shoe print obscured much of the writing on the top sheet, but what I could see didn’t make any sense to me anyway.

  “Pank, can you capture a good image of these pages? I’m afraid the paper is going to turn to dust now that it’s been handled.”

  “Sure. Bella, hold the clipboard at arm’s length. I’ll grab a frame from your video for each page.” Pank said on the team channel

  Isabella held the papers at arms length. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  After a few seconds, Pank said, “Next.”

  I tuned them out and went to examine the crystals of the wall. I pulled my analyzer from my pocked and pressed it to the nearest crystal.

  “Holy crap! These crystals are iridium! This entire wall is pure iridium!” I was gobsmacked. In nature, even so-called “pure” crystals are not one hundred percent pure structures of one element or compound. “It’s pure, unalloyed, unadulterated, iridium.” My voice had fallen to a whisper as the reality of that settled on me. Excited beyond imagination, I pressed my analyzer to every crystal surface I could reach. Same answer. Every time.

  Pank had finished taking pictures of the sheets, so Isabella had begun to press her analyzer to crystals as well. “I
mpossible,” she said. “You could slice and polish these and mount them for drives or CPUs without any modification.” Wonder was written across her face as well.

  “They might already be memory-ready and complete processors, Mac.” Rienholt said. My knees went weak at that idea. I staggered and almost collapsed. He was correct, of course. The crystals might have already been some form of computer or memory bank.

  “Estimate three hours remaining,” Pank broke in.

  “Well, we just knocked the bottom out of iridium prices. Shall we see what other damage we can do before the Government’s bully boys land on us?” I asked around a grin.

  We spent a few moments examining the outer airlock door to assure ourselves that we could operate it from either side, then we moved the crystal fragment which had been blocking the door and kept it from closing.

  When we closed the door and spun the locking wheel, lights came on. I realized the inner door was also propped open. This time, the upper body of a woman slumped in the doorway face up. Her left arm was flung out, as if reaching for the man in the tunnel. The cause of her death lay a few inches from her outstretched hand: a forty-five auto, with its slide locked back. The bullet that killed her had punched a hole just to the left of the tip of her nose. Isabella stood looking down at the corpse.

  “What the hell happened here?” she asked.

  My cheerful attitude evaporated. “We won’t find out standing here.” I said stepping past her and examining the inner door of the lock. It was purely mechanical, and in good order.

  “I’ve got a question,” Rienholt said. “Why are these two desiccated corpses and not bones? Isn’t ninety years enough for a corpse to disintegrate?”

  “There’s a couple of things; we don’t know what the environment was in the tube before we knocked a hole in the roof. Judging from the negative pressure, it could have been near vacuum. Second, I’ve read about five hundred year old mummies found in the Andes on Earth that were in better shape than Major J. Farr there, and they were exposed to the elements,” Pank said.

  I stepped over the threshold, pulled the woman’s corpse aside, motioned Isabella into the space beyond the door, and closed it as well. As soon as the door closed, the lights came up and it became apparent the door had been closed when the bullet ended the woman’s life. Dried blood and bits of her anatomy, long desiccated, fell to the floor. I stepped over to the corpse and pulled her lab coat out to display a neat little nameplate above a logo that made no sense to me at all.

  “Doctor Delores Nickolls, MD, PsyD, Biomechanics,” I read. I made sure Pank could see it via my video feed.

  “Doctor Delores Anne Nickolls, Deceased 1963,” Pank replied.

  “Training accident,” we said together.

  “Just out of curiosity, what happened, and how many more people are we going to find down here that died in the same accident?”

  “Seems their plane went down in the Superstition Mountains during a long distance training flight. It says, too, that the plane hit the side of the mountain and Search And Rescue was unable to recover remains. There were seven people on board, including crew.”

  “I am so not looking forward to finding five more bodies,” Isabella said. “What could have driven them to kill themselves?”

  “Not two suicides: a murder-suicide,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Bella, if you were going to kill yourself with a gun, how would you do it? I don’t think you would hold the gun at arm’s length and shoot yourself in the face.” She flinched. “That isn’t a contact wound. The gun was at least three feet away when it went off.” She nodded.

  “From this little tableau, he used his last round on her, opened the airlock, and then pulled her body into the doorway to keep the door open. Then he dropped the gun, stepped outside, blocked the door with that rock, and sat down to take off his hat.”

  “I’m not going to ask you how you know that,” Rienholt said. He sounded a little nauseous.

  Isabella and I hurried to explore the rest of the room with Pank and Rienholt looking over our shoulders through the video feed. The room turned out to be a suit locker, sort of a mudroom for the rest of the place. The walls were corrugated steel. Nine lockers along one wall yielded five more names and the enigmatic designations A-1 and A-2. The other names corresponded to the names of the people that died on that training flight. The two extra lockers were smaller, made of a pebbled plastic that shimmered like oil on water. I opened them only to find they were empty.

  “Estimated arrival, two hours thirty,” Pank said. I pushed open the door that stood opposite the airlock and stepped into a hallway. The walls were smooth, white plastic. To my right, the hall extended a meter or so, and ended in a featureless wall. To my left, the wall curved away to the left. The wall to my right piqued my curiosity. As I reached out to examine it, the wall shimmered and vanished.

  I stood there looking at a circular room about five meters across, with a ceiling so low I had to crouch to keep from bumping my head. Three chairs occupied the center of the room. Each chair faced a different direction. Two were occupied. Together, they could observe the entire room. The wall was an expanse suggesting a screen or some kind of display.

  Isabella squeaked and then said, “Wow.” I turned to her and realized she was standing up straight. Since she is taller than I am with my legs on, I realized that the ceiling had moved up.

  “Wow indeed,” I said.

  “What?” Rienholt and Pank asked simultaneously.

  “The room, it changed to accommodate our height,” I said.

  “I agree. Wow,” Rienholt said. Pank was quiet.

  I turned my attention back to the chairs and their occupants. I moved to my left until I could see that the third chair was larger, and a helmet like something out of a sixties B movie was suspended on wires above it. A mess of iridium crystals and wires clung to the back of the third seat. I turned back to the body in the chair nearest me. It was child sized and wore a form fitting grey suit that covered everything except two small slits where a nose would be and two enormous, dead, black, eyes. The number “1” was painted on its chest. A small round hole and a smear of something blue marred the creature’s chest.

  As I wondered what the number meant, I heard Pank whooping and laughing over the channel. All I could make out was something about ships. I looked at Isabella. She shrugged and tapped her wrist display. I looked at mine. It said 24 C and breathable. I opened my faceplate and sniffed cautiously.

  “It’s okay. Any idea what this is about?” I said tapping the side of my helmet.

  “I think she’s celebrating those,” she said pointing to the bodies in the two small chairs.

  “Pank,” I said.

  “I knew it. I knew it.” She said several times.

  “What, Pank? What is this?”

  “Isn’t it obvious? Those are aliens. All of the legends are true! The face, Roswell, it’s all real. We have been transmitting the whole time you’ve been down there. It’s proof that we are not alone!”

  “Pank, are there any incoming from Cydonia Base?”

  “Who cares? Mac? Don’t you understand? We just answered the question man has been asking since the first person looked into the sky. We just put the proof on the net. They can’t cover it up. The truth really is out there!”

  “Pank, do they know that?” I asked. She fell silent.

  “Rien, copy everything Pank has sent to the Earth Corps Science office at Cydonia Base. See if you can get it to CMN. I don’t remember the name of the editor there. The one that interviewed us. We need this whole thing to be public knowledge.”

  “Why, Mac?” he asked.

  “The discovery is public. If something happens to us, CMN will ask questions that the bad guys don’t want to answer,” Pank said.

  “Exactly. Pank, when the bully boys call, put them on the net and patch them to me.” I was grinning. Things were going to change—on Mars and back on Earth. Our little Mars Mining Corporat
ion had just kicked the rock off the mountain and it was rolling downhill. By now the reporters receiving the news feeds on Earth were probably clamoring to speak to all of us. In another hour we would all be beyond the reach of the goons at Cydonia Base. In a week, well, things would be different.

  “I wonder what they really found at Hell’s Deep?” I asked.

  “I think I’ll get a chance to find out,” Isabella said.

  “Count me in,” Pank said.

  “Yes, sir,” Rienholt added.

  I looked at my reflection in those big, black, alien, eyes and nodded. “Me, too.”

  THE RUSTLE OF THE WIND

  Carolyn Agee

  Friday, 22 April 2050

  In the dream, Gwynn is begging me not to go. Revisionist history at its best. Her face is starting to fade from my memory. I can no longer remember the exact shape of her nose or the color of her eyes….

  I wish I could say the same for Kirkoff and his leering.

  It has been a year ago, almost to the day—Earth time. At least, I think so. Bit hard to keep everything straight. So many rapid changes. Spend six months of your life on a ship, wishing you could be anywhere else, and then, once you’re finally off, it doesn’t seem so bad, the idea of being on it again. At least it’s familiar: the monotony, the boredom. The vaguely stale air, and staring at the same faces every day. Memorizing every tone, the length of their footfalls, when they will take a breath in each story, because you’ve heard each story that many times. No wonder the Donner Party ate each other.

  These days, I don’t really see much of anyone anymore. I mean, after a flight like that, even the hardcore extraverts need a little downtime. Is it strange that I miss them, even though they’re right down the hall?