Part of Aliyaah's remit had been developing the refiners and she had played a significant role in the design of the station itself. This mission was the culmination of years of her life, but the events of the past few sols had left Aliyaah questioning a whole slew of decisions. If they had used different materials for construction, would they have been able to detect the organism earlier and contain it before it spread across the fledgling colony? Would they have fared better, been less vulnerable, if the fundamental shape and structure of the station had been different? The Commander should never have been able to destroy the refiners and the east wing, even if he had received help from Chief Frederickson. And now, with Hadley heading out to the biodome, Aliyaah was in command at the station. These people were relying on her, and she wasn't at all sure she could get them safely back to Earth.
Looking around at the crew, Aliyaah saw a group of exhausted men who were using their last reserves to build the walkway to Octavia, taking advantage of the brief period where GCRs were low thanks to the solar storms. In the last few hours, she had gone over her plan with the crew to devise a workaround for the pieces of the walkway yet to be built. She recalled Rover Four to the station, and assigned crew to cannibalise it for parts. They were using these alongside pieces from the earlier rover models in hangar storage to construct the missing parts of the walkway.
Now, with the first of three sections of the walkway in place, Aliyaah motioned to the crew to lock it down and take a break. Her limbs were burning from the manual labour and even with her suit's internal climate control, her skin still felt damp with sweat.
The lower gravity made things easier, but lifting the giant metal grills into position still required intense physical effort. While she rested, she was briefly tempted to alter the settings on her hormone pump. If she gave herself a corticosteroid boost right now, and a shot of testosterone, she could continue working through the pain and exhaustion into the night. She wondered how many of the men had thought something similar, and if any of them had acted on the thought.
Leaving her hormone levels to regulate themselves, Aliyaah activated her headset and contacted Schiff at the station, requesting an update. Schiff didn't respond, so she tried a different channel, hoping to get her lab assistant. There was still no response, and she was about to switch to another channel to contact Hadley when she heard someone whispering her name over and over. For a second, she felt hopeful, thinking that Silver was finally making contact, but then the voice grew louder, pleading with her to come back to the station. It was one of the men she had left working in the hangar.
The specialist yelled, "Chief! Chief!", then fell silent. Before she could respond, the line filled with screams, then abruptly cut out. Aliyaah was left frozen in place as clouds of dust lifted slowly from the ground, coating her, the crew, and the walkway in a fine red powder.
THIRTY-TWO
As he clambered into the driver's seat of the SEV, Hadley felt some of the tension of the last two sols fall away. A farm boy turned Colonel in the US Air Force, he had been flying planes and guiding shuttles for decades, and couldn't remember a time when he didn't know how to handle an ATV or drive a tractor. The familiarity of the machine was reassuring and Hadley felt a renewed sense of hope. Maybe it was still possible to save what remained of his crew, and salvage something from this mission.
Hadley ran his gloved fingers gently over the array of switches and buttons and took a deep breath. He checked that the SEV's tracking system was active and released the clamps to separate the vehicle from the station. He had only piloted the SEV a handful of times since arriving on the planet, but he had spent hours at the test site in Nevada, working with Silver and the other engineers to figure out adaptations to the vehicle that would enable it to better navigate the tough terrain on Mars. He had also spent a summer in the Canadian north, working on developing deep water submersibles to investigate stromatolites and microbialites on the ocean floor.
Piloting the SEV was a little like guiding one of those remotely operated vehicles. Its slow, lumbering motion was vastly different from that of an F-35 Lightning fighter jet, but he knew that this torpidity was deceptive. All too quickly, the wrong decision could incapacitate the vehicle and leave him stranded.
He had almost twenty years of experience as a test pilot, flying over California, working on pitch control margin simulation and training the greenest of pilots as well as some of the best in the world. Throwing planes into a spin and pulling them out of crisis wasn't a game to him. He knew the risks he took as a test pilot and astronaut, having lost friends and colleagues over the years through human error, mechanical failure, and simple bad luck. Hadley wasn't immune to the feeling of terror as a plane plummeted to earth. If anything, it was this that fuelled his ongoing fascination with flight. His fear metamorphosed into something akin to the weightlessness of mind, if not body, Hadley felt when he meditated. He would experience a startling clarity of thought, as if time stopped and expanded, freeing his mind to explore myriad possibilities simultaneously. The resulting insights simply weren't possible without living the experience. This is what kept Hadley in the air, year after year.
Hadley's commanding officers recognised this capacity for almost beatific calm early in his career. They fast-tracked him through promotion after promotion, and assigned him projects where it was almost guaranteed that complex machinery would spiral out of control. As he rose in the ranks of the military, Hadley's technical abilities continued to impress. When his career trajectory threatened to take him away from the cockpit and into boardrooms, Hadley made the decision to apply for NASA, where his calm demeanour was also highly sought after.
In almost every other way, Hadley flew under the radar. His relationships with his fellow officers, pilots, and astronauts were only remarkable in how unremarkable they were. Where astronauts and officers married, divorced, and married again, Hadley remained unattached. It wasn't that he was unlikable, but he did appear to be a little aloof, and he hadn't put in any particular effort to form close bonds with anyone he worked with, or anyone outside of work for that matter. His colleagues couldn't mistake the rapport Hadley had with machines, but this facility only highlighted how little he seemed to connect with the humans around him.
A few of his senior officers had observed this quality in Hadley, but no one had questioned his command capabilities. He had an exemplary safety record and every project he led had been a success, even if it produced little fanfare.
When he was selected as second in command for Octavia it was the first time in his career that Hadley had considered turning down an assignment. He had just quietly celebrated his sixtieth birthday, and while he was committed to the mission to Mars, he wanted to focus on the experience and technical challenges without the distraction of having to manage a crew. He was still in excellent physical, but he knew he wouldn't be able to meet the standards required for the refinery crew. His only other option was to go to Mars as a civilian, but that would grant him few, if any, opportunities to pilot the rovers or SEV, let alone Octavia herself. So, in the end, he accepted the assignment and tried to reframe the responsibility as just another challenge to be met.
With the Commander's demise, Hadley had been thrust into a leadership role he had never wanted. Maintaining order among the crew and keeping the civilians calm was proving to be a challenge for which he felt unprepared. When technology malfunctioned, he could seek a solution. Managing people was a more nebulous problem, and Hadley was grateful both for Chief Diambu's assistance and to have this brief respite in the SEV.
This gratitude wasn't uncomplicated, however. Hadley couldn't avoid feeling a little disappointed in himself at having felt such relief when it became clear he would have to pilot the SEV this time. The desire to escape from the station, from the very people who now trusted him to guide them to safety, was not becoming in a Commander.
Hadley was sorely tempted to go slower than necessary in the SEV and, perhaps, to linger at the biodome, but
he resolved to find Antara, collect the samples and data, and get back to the station as quickly as possible. He needed to redirect the crew's nervous energy into more productive channels. They would need discrete tasks to keep them occupied and engaged while Mission Support figured out the next steps. He had every confidence in the Chief, but he should still get back to the station as soon as he could, before there was a full-blown mutiny.
Realising that he had been focusing only on the terrain immediately ahead of the SEV, Hadley took a moment to look around, making sure that the route he had chosen to the biodome was still the most efficient. The surface of Mars was barren; intensely dry dust storms blew across the landscape and carved strange and delicate shapes in the rock. Millennia of this subtle sculpting created geological formations not seen on Earth. Sometimes, the rocks seemed to form the strangest of objects: a floating spoon, a coffin, a fossilised iguana. Faces jumped out from the planet's surface. The sides of the craters loomed and danced with ever-changing patterns.
The lip of the Schiaparelli crater separated Hadley and Biodome Three, and he watched the swirling dust form faces and bodies against its steep walls, like the russet-coloured ghosts of actors long since dead, playing out their parts on a colossal movie screen. Hadley resumed his journey, guiding the SEV carefully up the foothills of the crater. What he was seeing was classic pareidolia, apophenia; his mind was simply finding patterns where there were none. The surface of the red planet was not changing before his eyes, nor taking human form. It was just shadows from dust dancing in the dim sunlight.
Knowing that it was against procedure, Hadley removed his helmet and gloves and ran his hands over his face. His skin was rough and dry. Two sol's worth of stubble snagged against the callouses on his hands. Hadley rubbed the sleep from the corners of his eyes and was thankful that he had stopped wearing the cats-eyes a few sols before. Suspecting a malfunction in the implants, he had removed them and sent them to the lab for testing. When the Commander destroyed the lab, he also destroyed any way of confirming Hadley's suspicion that the implants had caused a drop in his melatonin production, affecting his sleep cycle. Given the events of the previous two sols, a disrupted sleep routine was hardly his top priority.
Hadley put his helmet back on and locked it into place, then pulled on his gloves and started the SEV moving again. As he drew close to the lip of the crater, the SEV's radiological alarm tripped then quickly fell silent again. He carefully brought the vehicle to a halt as soon as he reached a flatter stretch of ground. This high up on the crater wall, where the surface was steep and littered with scree, any abrupt movement could cause the SEV to lose traction.
He checked his sensors and scanned the area ahead for radioactive material. The monitors showed nothing unusual. He did a second sweep just to be sure, but the result was the same. Something must have passed on the wind. He took a breath to compose himself, then put the SEV into gear and gently pushed the lever. The vehicle crawled forward and he looked at the screen showing the feed from the roof-mounted camera, which now had a view over the lip of the crater.
Biodome Three looked no different than usual. It's great white walls curved up to form the dome, lit from inside by the banks of ultraviolet lights. Hadley blinked and checked the cameras again, then the radiologic scanner. Everything looked sound, if a little more brightly lit than was usual for this time of sol. He wondered if Antara had changed the sollight settings at the dome. Or the Chief may have adjusted things before she had left for Octavia.
Making his way down the inside wall of the crater, he followed the tracks left earlier by Aliyaah and Silver when they took the SEV to the biodome after the explosions at the station. When he arrived at the biodome's SEV dock, Hadley took a moment to check-in with Aliyaah.
"We're laying out the last of the walkway now, Sir," Aliyaah reported. "GCRs should remain low for the next little while, so I have most of the team heading to Octavia. I assigned a skeleton crew to finish up salvaging rover parts in the hangar. If we go in shifts, we should have everything done within a sol."
Hadley thanked her and then asked about Schiff, saying, "I haven't been able to get in touch with her, or her assistant. I wonder if there's a problem with communications in the temporary lab. Have you heard from her, Chief?"
"No, Sir," Aliyaah said. "I tried earlier and couldn’t reach her. I was going to check in once I got back to the station. Or I can send one of the hangar crew now to find out if there's an issue."
"No, no. She's probably just engrossed in the task. There are multiple bodies now, of course."
"Yes, Sir. I'll let you know what she has to say when I get back shortly. Hopefully she has determined a more accurate cause of death."
Hadley heard Aliyaah shout something to one of the crew, then she came back on the line to ask, "Any sign of Antara, Sir?"
"Nothing yet. I did a quick scan of the systems at the dome. Life support is still functional, as are comms."
"Be careful, Sir," Aliyaah said.
"You too, Chief. Over and out."
Hadley brought the SEV in close to the dock and activated the clamps to create an airtight seal. He made sure his space suit and helmet were secure, then released the door at the back of the SEV. The airlock was empty aside from the two suits hanging at either side, which looked disconcertingly corpse-like. Hadley chastised himself for such thoughts, but found it hard to shake the uncomfortable feeling that death was all around him.
After sealing the door to the SEV, Hadley deliberated over adding extra security clearance at the airlock. This would prevent anyone but him from accessing the vehicle, but it would also slow him down. He decided to leave security as it was. Depending on what he found in the dome, he might need to leave quickly. He started the decontamination process and then switched to one of the EV suits hanging inside the airlock. After locking his helmet into place, Hadley opened the door to the outer dome and stepped through.
THIRTY-THREE
The ambient temperature in the outer dome was colder than Hadley remembered from his previous visits to the biodomes. He checked the oxygen levels and saw that they were only at fifteen percent. The temperature stood at zero, making the inner atmosphere just a little warmer and slightly more oxygenated than conditions outside of the dome.
This perplexed Hadley. The life support system showed no malfunction, which meant that Antara, or someone else, must have manually reconfigured the dome's environment. Hadley checked the atmosphere and temperature in the inner dome, figuring Antara must be holed up there, perhaps waiting for help and unable to leave if she didn't have a space suit.
The readings showed that the inner dome had also been reprogrammed. Oxygen was at ten percent and the temperature was down to minus five degrees. It would have been impossible for Antara to survive the last few sols in such conditions. Hadley began to think that the Chief was right. Antara must have become infected and grown confused like the Commander, leading her to reprogram the environment and unwittingly bring about her own demise. The only way for Antara to still be alive would be if she had remained in the bunker beneath the dome.
Hadley approached the control panel just outside the inner dome and began a system sweep. He knew that Lidar would be useless inside the dome. Any scan for signs of organic life would be confused by the plant life and imported microbes they were using to enrich the soil. Instead, he checked for any large heat signatures, thankful that the lamps in the inner dome had been disabled so they wouldn't throw off the scan. Nothing unusual emerged, but Hadley did notice that the UV lights were turned way up.
He hadn't spent much time at the biodomes, and was surprised to see the extent to which some of the plants were thriving. Many of the plots were empty, or contained plants that were dead or in serious trouble, but some of the beds contained dense foliage, which made it hard to see any real distance across the inner dome.
A scan of the bunker showed the same conditions as the inner dome. It was highly unlikely Antara was still in there, oblivious
to the storms having passed.
Hadley searched for any open comms channels in the bunker, but there was no sign of activity. Aliyaah had reminded him of the lack of a PA system in the biodomes, so he knew he had no way to let Antara know he was there and to ask her whereabouts. That problem seemed redundant now anyway; he wouldn’t expect her to respond even if he could send out a message.
He listened intently for a moment or two, but all Hadley could hear was the noise of the dome's air filters high above him. They were louder than he remembered, and their typically steady hum had been replaced by a staccato whining and clacking sound. The filters seemed to be labouring, as if clogged with something. Ordinarily, Hadley would have climbed up to take a look. He was firmly of the mind that problems should be addressed immediately, but dysfunctional air filters were far from his top priority, and Hadley no longer had any desire to linger in the biodome.
The Chief had told him where she had last seen Silver with the samples in the inner dome, and where the two bodies were located. Hadley decided to enter the inner dome first, so he walked towards the airlock and ran the decontamination procedure. Once it was finished, he stepped into the inner dome.
Every metallic surface glowed with a peculiar phosphorescence. Not only was the plant life triffid-like, the floor was covered with a strange growth of white flakes, a carpet of glowing mulch that amplified the light from the UV lamps overhead.
The effect rendered Hadley snow-blind for a few seconds. After his eyes and the light shield on his visor adjusted, he took a step forward and watched as the flakes beneath his feet rippled outward. It was as if he was walking on water. He took another step and the same thing happened again. Mesmerized, he watched the ripples make their way towards the centre of the dome. The movement was languorous, and not really liquid-like. Instead, it was as if the floor was made of millions of tiny interconnected hairs reacting, in turn, to the impact of each of his steps.
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