Space Eldritch
Page 10
“How far out?” Saxon asked.
“Kilometer and a half.”
On Earth, the pilot of a small airplane of about the skimmer’s dimensions and weight would have a chance to make the remaining distance even if the propulsion gave out, or at the very least to glide to a safe landing on the rocky plain. But Martian atmosphere wasn’t thick enough to support gliding; a skimmer which lost all power would only stay in the air for as long as it took to hit the ground, like a jeep going off the edge of a cliff.
Saxon punched the voice panel beneath the screen. “Kay-Kay, grab your kit and your pants and get to the garage.”
“Will do,” said a female voice.
“Left paragrav pontoon is out,” Rigby said. “It’s corkscrewing now. Definitely going down.”
Saxon pulled a breathing mask and harness out of an equipment locker and handed it to Rigby, then grabbed two more and tossed one to the figure who had just come through the door.
Kathy Kettrick, the base’s medic, caught it smoothly with the hand that wasn’t hauling her portable med kit. Her hair was messed and the skin around her eyes was puffy with sleep, but her eyes themselves were alert.
“Skimmer coming down,” Saxon said curtly, following Rigby to a rover jeep near the doors to the launch bay. “We’re going to meet it.”
“Any radio contact?” Kettrick asked as she slung her kit into the rover’s rear.
Saxon looked to Rigby, who tossed him a fur-lined jumpsuit and shook his head. “I thought they’d radio when they were in range, but nothing so far.”
Saxon pulled the elastic of the breath mask over his head, adjusted the attached goggles over his eyes, and made sure the radio earpieces were firmly seated before he flipped up his hood. The mask’s oxygen bottle sat against his chest, and he zipped the jumpsuit over it. Melting the carbon dioxide at the south pole had increased atmospheric pressure enough that full pressure suits weren’t required outside, but the frigid air with its whipped-up cargo of sand particles irritated exposed skin. If there had been more time, all three of them would have used the medical gel meant for covering and protecting the uncovered skin around the edges of their masks, but they couldn’t afford the delay.
With Rigby at the wheel and Saxon and Kettrick in the seats behind him, the rover jeep rumbled to life and crawled toward the jointed slats of the door to the launch bay. The door rolled jerkily up when they were a couple of yards away and clattered back down as soon as they passed under. The launch bay was a dark square of metal with a native stone floor, illuminated by sand-scoured skylights. Saxon’s ears popped as vacuum fans drew back a good proportion of the oxygen they had brought with them into the bay, bringing the air pressure down to the current surface norm. Then the outer door clanked up as the inner door had, and Rigby guided the rover out onto the gritty plain which was already reflecting its constant palette of dull oranges and creams and ambers under the recent dawn.
The dark dot in the sky was growing larger even to their unaided eyes, pinwheeling toward them like a poorly folded paper airplane. Rigby consulted the scope on the rover’s dash, then turned the rover to the left and flew through the gears as quickly as he could while maintaining traction on the sand.
They were still far enough from the skimmer when it crashed that they saw it skip across the ground silently before noise reached them—embarrassingly anticlimactic in the thin air, like an empty can being kicked. Rigby adjusted his course minutely toward the skimmer’s final resting place, half buried in the sand. As they got closer, Kettrick pointed to a smaller dark shape another thirty feet beyond the crumpled nose of the skimmer.
“Someone got thrown clear!” Her voice was close in Saxon’s ears, in contrast to tinniness of exterior sounds past his earpieces.
Rigby adjusted his course again toward the human shape.
“Kay-Kay,” Saxon said, “you jump out by whoever that is and start treating him while we check out the skimmer.”
The rover swung close to the body in front of them crumpled in its own skidding impact crater, and as soon as Rigby slowed down to turn, Kettrick jumped off the back with her gear.
Saxon watched the scope as Rigby spun close to the twisted skimmer, alert for any sort of energy spike or dangerous heat signature, but the skimmer didn’t seem to be in danger of exploding or bursting into flames—not that fire would last long on the surface of Mars. The canopy had sprung when the metal chassis had corrugated on impact, tossing the pilot. As Rigby and Saxon hopped out and approached the skimmer from opposite sides, Saxon could feel the warmth of the overtaxed paragrav pontoons against his exposed forehead. Both the seats were empty, and the cargo area as well; whoever was lying out in the red sand, he had been the only occupant of the skimmer on its return journey.
“I’ll need to know why it crashed,” Saxon said.
Rigby nodded. “I’ll come back out with the flatbed.”
Kettrick called through the radio link. “Hey, Saxon, need some help.”
Rigby and Saxon trotted to where she was kneeling beside the crumpled form. It was Caldwell. He was breathing raggedly, and finger marks in the red dust showed where Kettrick had readjusted his breath mask to fit over his face again.
“How is he?” Saxon asked.
“All I know is that he’s unconscious and breathing,” Kettrick said. “But look at this.”
She pointed to his right hand, gloveless and red from the cold. His fingers were fastened so tightly around a shard of metal that its edges had cut into his hand, and clotted blood now glued it into his grip.
“I’m going to need help getting him back.” She pulled a small bundle out of her kit, and with the flick of her wrists, two collapsed rods extended and became the poles of a lightweight webbed stretcher. “I don’t know what kind of internal injuries he has,” she said, gesturing the two men to positions around Caldwell and the stretcher. “We need to get him onto this without making any breaks worse.”
Under her directions on the count of three, they rolled Caldwell onto the stretcher. Kettrick pulled the webbing over the top to strap him in, and she and Saxon positioned the stretcher in the back of the rover, holding on while Rigby got back in the driver’s seat.
“You two can consider yourself in a race,” Saxon said. “First one to tell me what’s wrong, either with the skimmer or with Caldwell, wins.”
***
Rigby won hands-down. He had Chu drive out with him on the flatbed and a paragrav forklift—a tricky operation, Rigby said, maneuvering damaged paragrav generators by paragrav—and while Chu drove back, Rigby started examining the wreckage. He barely waited for the garage doors to seal before he buzzed Saxon and had him come down.
“I can tell you exactly what went wrong with the skimmer,” he said as soon as Saxon came through the doors. “The damned fool skipped his pre-flight. No warm-up, no cycle-through, no power-balance routine. Just hopped aboard and shoved the thing into drive.”
“You said Caldwell is certified. He knows how to operate it.”
“I know that and you know that, but he sure as hell acted like he didn’t know that. See these lengthwise fissures in the pontoons? There’s no other way to get them.”
“Was he trying to escape from something?” Saxon asked. “He might have needed to get out of there in a hurry, wherever they were.”
“That’s what I thought, too.” Rigby motioned to a diagnostic box that he had plugged into the skimmer’s cracked instrument panel. “But what I see here shows a steady power consumption record from the time it went up, and it was nowhere near full speed. He wasn’t in a hurry. It’s like he just didn’t know or didn’t care how to run the thing right.”
Saxon punched the voice panel. “Kay-Kay, it looks like Rigby wins the contest,” he said. “What have you got for runner-up?”
“A whole bunch of half-answers,” she replied. “Come on up and I’ll share them.”
***
As Saxon walked into the medical bay, he said, “Got the coffee ready
yet?”
Kettrick smiled from polite habit. As the medical director, Kettrick was also in charge of the base personnel’s nutritional regimen, which included vat-grown yeasts, attempts to find a terrestrial crop that would yield produce in the Martian soil, experiments to make the native pseudo-lichen both edible and palatable, and their carefully rationed store of freeze-dried foods brought from Earth, kept in a secure storeroom accessible only by Kettrick. For two years Saxon had been hoping she’d find some secreted coffee, despite her denials that there was any such luxury in the inventory.
Caldwell lay on a bed tipped up at an angle for ease of examination, with goose-necked lights aimed at him from various directions. An inflatable pad had been bandaged around his right shoulder, and an oxygen tube supplemented the base’s air; his lungs still sounded labored, but his chest didn’t rise and fall so violently anymore. His right hand, outside the thin sheet covering him, was bandaged as well.
“He’s got a broken clavicle,” she said, “probably from the impact. Bruises on the head, so he might have a concussion, but no other fractured bones that I can find. His lungs have sand in them from breathing through an unsecured mask, but it should work its way out, and his blood oxygen’s almost up where it should be.”
“Has he been conscious?”
Kettrick shook her head. “I’m about to run some X-rays for head trauma.”
A surgical tray sat on the side table, and on its blue paper liner, Saxon saw the shard of metal. “That was what was in his hand?”
Kettrick nodded. “I haven’t had much of a chance to look at it, aside from making sure that it isn’t radioactive.”
Saxon picked it up by the surgical tongs, then ran it under the pressurized nozzle in the sink to remove the clotted blood and sand. Outside, under the warm rays of the Martian dawn, it had looked just as red as its surroundings. Now, under the white clinical light of the examining room, Saxon could see a distinct greenish gleam to its reflective surface.
“This isn’t a part of anything on the base,” Saxon said.
“A mineral sample, maybe?”
Saxon held it up and examined its flat outside surface against the lit ceiling. “It looks refined and machined,” he said. He reached to the voice panel on the wall and called the garage. “Rigby, you didn’t find anything in the skimmer that didn’t belong, did you?” he asked. “Like maybe some more pieces of metal?”
“Nothing at all,” Rigby said. “Not even any of the equipment they took, and definitely nothing that’s not supposed to be there.”
“Thanks.” Saxon thumbed the panel off and scowled at the metal fragment.
“You want to say it, or should I?” Kettrick asked.
“You go ahead,” he said. “It gives me plausible deniability.”
“It looks an awful lot like the metal that makes up the Artifact,” she said.
Saxon nodded. “Noted and seconded,” he said.
***
“Could it be the Russians?” asked Rigby, turning the shard of metal between his fingertips. Around the conference table—which was, three times a day, the meal table—the rest of the Sabaea Base personnel watched the green gleam that played off the mirrored sides. At the very tip of one end of the shard was a ninety-degree bend in the surface, as if it had been splintered off a metal box or cube.
Saxon said, “Command on Earth says that no intelligence points to the Soviets paying any attention to Mars. They’re still putting all their efforts toward a foothold on Venus.”
Rigby nodded as if he’d expected that answer. “I suppose it could be the Chinese...”
Chu said, “The Chinese government is a full partner in this present expedition. We have no interest in also funding a competing project.” His voice lost some of its officiousness as he added, “Or, frankly, the resources.”
Saxon said, “I think we can safely conclude that that—” he nodded his head toward the shard, which Rigby had passed to Cooper beside him “—isn’t evidence of any other government trying to establish a Martian toehold.”
Cooper hefted the shard, then rotated it between her fingers as Rigby had done. “That leaves us two possibilities,” she said. “Either it’s natural, and just resembles incredibly well a fragment of refined metal by happenstance...”
She reached across an empty chair to pass the shard to Huyck. There were fourteen chairs at the table, of which three were empty: Caldwell was in the medical bay, Kettrick was with him to monitor his condition and Ishida was still unaccounted for.
There was an uncomfortable silence, as no one wanted to be the one to put into words what they were all thinking.
“Or someone else made it,” Saxon finished simply.
“I think we’re misfocused,” said Draney, arms folded across his chest at the far end of the table. “Yes, evidence of an alien intelligence would sell the tabloids like hotcakes back on Earth, but in the meantime, we have a man missing, and that needs to be our priority.”
“And it absolutely is,” Saxon said. “We don’t know what happened to Ishida, where he is, under what conditions. That—” he gestured to the shard, which had now made its way to Draney, who examined it grudgingly before passing it on “—is the only clue we have—a pretty poor one, but I’ll take what I can get.” The shard passed around to Swann, Mendez, Duchesne and Chatterjee before ending up back in front of Saxon.
Chu raised his hand. “Ishida isn’t the only mystery,” he said. “What’s with Caldwell? If there was an emergency or accident, why didn’t he radio in as soon as the skimmer got in range?”
Saxon looked to Rigby. “Anything wrong with the skimmer’s radio?”
“Well, there is now,” said Rigby. “But as near as I can tell, it was working fine before Caldwell plowed a ditch.”
Saxon looked around. “Before I start putting together a search and rescue detail,” Saxon said, “is there anyone who doesn’t want in?”
No hands were raised.
“Then let’s get ready.”
***
Forty-five minutes later the meeting broke with each person, whether tapped for the rescue mission or not, diving into his or her assigned tasks. Saxon went straight to the medical bay; he had left orders with Kettrick to buzz him in the conference room if Caldwell showed signs of responsiveness, and the silence of the voice panel annoyed him.
Kettrick was staring at an illuminated set of X-rays, a sacrificial pen being mauled in the corner of her mouth. She didn’t bother to look up. He stood behind her and surveyed the X-rays.
“What am I looking at?” he asked.
“Absolutely nothing.” She scowled at Caldwell, lying in the bed with no change in position. “No evidence of concussion or any kind of head trauma. According to these, there’s no reason he shouldn’t be conscious.”
“Just like Caldwell to be sleeping on the job.”
“Hey! Caldwell!” Kettrick yelled. “Stop goldbricking and scaring the crap out of us!”
Saxon glanced over to the medical scope which showed heart rate, temperature and blood pressure in a series of rhythmic green lines. There wasn’t so much as a burr in the readings.
Kettrick sighed. “Worth a try, I suppose. What came out of the meeting?”
“We leave in two hours in the six-man,” Saxon said. “You’ll be in charge here while we’re gone.”
“You’re leading it yourself?” Kettrick asked.
Saxon answered with his expression.
“I just hope we’re not throwing personnel down a hole, one after another,” Kettrick said, grinding the pen between her canines.
“Chatterjee is sending the radio satellite up over Isidis Planitia,” Saxon said. “It won’t hit its position over us until two hours after we get there, but at least we won’t be operating in complete radio silence the whole time.” He glanced at Caldwell, to all appearances a man just catching up on his rest. “I should have done that for Caldwell and Ishida.”
“Of course you should have,” Kettrick said. “O
ne of the qualifications for your position was precognition, didn’t you know?” She changed the subject with a look, staring at Caldwell’s passive face. “Well, I’ll let you know as soon as anything changes. If it does.”
Saxon left medical with Kettrick’s offhand words echoing in his head: “I hope we’re not throwing personnel down a hole.”
***
In two hours, the six-man skimmer was loaded. If Ishida were still alive, he must have encountered some sort of problem in the caverns he and Caldwell had meant to explore, either a collapse or some other injury which had trapped him. With that in mind, the skimmer had been loaded up with plasma saws and the smallest paragravity winch—the same equipment used to create Sabaea Base from native Martian stone. Every time someone had mentioned the possibility of using paragravs while under the surface, Rigby looked like he was suffering from indigestion, so Saxon had tapped him, the paragrav expert, as second in command of the team. Chu had paramedic training and functioned as medical backup to Kettrick, so he came along as field medic. Mendez had had some cave-exploring experience back on Earth, and Swann filled out the team more as an extra pair of hands than for any particular expertise. Cooper had protested being left off the roster, but Saxon couldn’t afford having both paragravity specialists on the same mission with its unknown hazards. One seat was left empty for Ishida; Saxon hoped he wasn’t in any condition which required the stretcher, as there simply wasn’t room for it within the skimmer’s canopy.
Just after the anemic sun reached its noontime zenith, the six-man pushed through the garage and out onto the Martian plain. Rigby went through a quick but meticulous pre-flight, and then they were airborne. Saxon felt the now-familiar lurch in his stomach as their quick liftoff and the rapid acceleration, evident to his eyes, clashed with the completely inertia-free operation of the paragravity propulsion.
“Barring some storm snarls,” Rigby said, “we’ll make Caldwell’s landing point about two hours before sunset.”