The Unknown

by Angel Wedge

  With the pure white beams reaching out ahead of them, they could see a little more detail in the ground. A dozen sets of tyre marks converging. Whoever’s trail they were following, they had come this way many times. In and out, again and again. How long had they survived after landing? Elle couldn’t stop wondering if they were going to find a bunch of dessicated corpses in a pod from Wallace’s era, or a stowaway in a purloined modern habitation module. Or some jury-rigged habitat, and a bodged buggy, because of course something like that was too large to steal without being noticed.

  Her hands shook a little. She didn’t know if she was more disturbed by the idea that they might find a corpse, or a living fugitive. They were terrifying in their own ways, and her mind darted back and forth between the two.

  Eventually, they came to the back of the cavern. The path had extended much farther than they had expected beneath the cliffs. This was another find worth reporting, because keeping a shelter pressurised would be much easier inside a natural cave system. If the geology was stable enough, then they should consider moving the settlement closer before everything was deployed. It would be easier to move now, at the start of settlement, than to realise there could have been a better option once everything was laid out in a town, and the ship was stripped bare.

  But at the back of the caves, there was some proof that the tracks they’d following hadn’t come on the ship with them. There was a door.

  It looked like brushed aluminium, and was set into a heavy frame with pressure seals. A simple logo consisting of a red circle and three blue stars was painted in the centre, in the spot where a room number or lab name should have been engraved. It was the kind of door that would have taken several men to install, at least one engineering specialist, and probably more than a day’s labour. There hadn’t been that much slack in the schedule yet, surely.

  “A habitation module?” Jasper muttered, the engineer in him putting the ‘why’ questions to one side until he’d addressed the technical challenge. “You could wedge one into a narrow passageway, maybe a natural cave or maybe blasted out to be the right width, then use expanding foam to fill the gaps. You’d mix the dust into a kind of cement to make it look like natural stone, if you didn’t want to expose the skin of the module. Then on the other side, you spray the tunnel walls with a flexible air seal, and run the module’s air recycler at max until you’ve got a pressurised cave. Hardly needs any resources beyond a normal module setup.”

  “Smart,” Elle nodded, “We’ve got a dozen spare modules on the ship. So your hypothetical stowaways could wedge them into tunnels, making a stable environment in all the caves between them. Depending how far this network stretches, it could allow them to expand much more than the actual resources taken would indicate.”

  “And if we start moving people into these caverns, assuming they’re stable, then we have a lot more spare habitation modules. You’d space them through the tunnels, in case the native atmosphere starts leaking in anywhere, and all our worries about available space go away.”

  “I don’t think they could have done it in the time we’ve been here, though. Not without anybody noticing. Even stealing a single module would be a big deal. That’s even less likely than some guy born in the twentieth century making it in a home-grown rocket.”

  “We’ll check, then. Find out if there’s air in there. There’ll be something to tell us how long it’s been here, I’m sure. We’ve gotten so carried away asking all these questions, we’ve stopped looking for the answers.”

  At one side of the door, there was a release catch. Elle pulled down on it hard, as if trying to convince the world she wasn’t afraid of finding a corpse in there. There was a clunk.

  “The mechanism’s too old? No power to open?” she hazarded a guess.

  “Or the airlock’s cycling. You don’t know what state it was left in. It could be struggling with failing batteries, trying to pump all the usable atmosphere back into the module before the outer door opens. Maybe it’ll run for a fixed time, or maybe it’s got sensors, and it’ll keep us waiting forever while it tries to balance pressure against an impossible gradient.”

  “Or it’s just dead,” Elle presented the pessimistic argument, then lowered her hand in front of the lock mechanism. “No. There’s a light on, the batteries still have power.” The glow coming from beside the lever was faint, but it was enough to cast a red spot on her glove once shielded from the glare of the buggy’s lights.

  “They built things to last in those days,” Jasper chuckled, “Whenever that was.”

  “And we know it’s not one of our modules, the light’s the wrong colour and in the wrong place. Stowaway theory debunked. So, what do you think? Empty hab unit, or a crazy dessicated hermit? Will there be air once it finishes pumping?”

  “More likely biohazard. Whatever they brought with them, there’s bound to be some bacteria, and it’s got to be years old or there would have been a trail we could spot on the first orbit.”

  “I’ll keep my helmet on.” It was supposed to be a joke, but it fell flat. Neither of the explorers could think of anything else to say while they waited for the lock to finish pumping, or whatever it was doing.

  It was about two minutes before the pressure seals flexed and the steel panel folded outwards. Elle took a half step backwards, out of the path of the door. She was anxious, wondering what they would see, though she knew that they would probably still have no idea what was inside, they’d have to stand in the airlock and wait for the inner door to open before they could see what Mars’s first visitors had left for them.

  “I guess it could be automated,” Jasper hazarded, “A big hoax to freak us out. The early probes and rovers were simple enough that a home printer could probably duplicate them now. Cost a fortune, but some of those jokers would do it, send up a machine with a couple of wheels, a roller with footprints on, maybe a camera to record our surprise when we reach its…” he trailed off as he realised Elle was staring through the half-open doorway. He took a little sidestep closer, so that he could see past the thick metal panel, and he couldn’t think what to say either.

  The astronaut raised a hand in salute, palm outwards, and stepped out to meet them.

  Ambassador

  It didn’t seem any more believable twenty minutes later. Three figures sat on a regulation exploration buggy, bumping over the sand back to the main camp. They’d managed to exchange a few questions, but very few answers. Their sign language was similar, but not complex enough to find out anything that mattered, and it seemed that the suits’ packetised radio systems weren’t compatible. The other guy’s suit looked so different from what they were expecting, they could no longer even consider that he had hidden aboard the ship. It was built to a pattern that was familiar from textbooks and from the old videos of external maintenance on research satellites. Complete with the antiquated metalised visor, so that they could see nothing but their own reflections and maybe the faintest impression of some eyes behind it. But this wasn’t an aging museum piece, this was a relatively new suit, just without most of the innovations of the last fifty years.

  They could have come inside. The stranger invited them back into the airlock. But Jasper was nervous, not comfortable with the prospect of being in an unfamiliar environment where anything could be waiting. Not when they didn’t have the first clue about the stranger’s motives. And he found that he still didn’t trust the atmosphere; any bacteria or viruses that had come up on an earlier ship would have had years to evolve, and he didn’t want to risk contracting some unpredictable infection. And if he wouldn’t take his helmet off, they still couldn’t talk. So in a conversation that mostly consisted of pointing and waving, they’d persuaded the suited figure to accompany them back to the ship, where the biologists could determine how safe it was to have people from two different missions, years apart, breathing the same air.

  “Somebody less paranoid,” as Elle had put it. Jasper just nodded, he couldn’t argue with that. Whenever he
was nervous, he’d find himself washing his hands more than was strictly necessary. It was a nervous quirk, he said, and one that would do him no harm at all during the trip to Mars. None of them on this mission were strictly normal, and you couldn’t expect them to be after years in transit, a closed community of seventy specialists driven by some combination of ambition and curiosity. By the standards of the ship, he was reasonably sane. It was just a shame that his own issues had to manifest the first time he was involved in something major.

  “Someone’s comms not working?” a message came over the radio while they were still ten minutes away from the camp. Canadian accent, the slow grumbling of a scientist who was getting frustrated with the amount of secretarial duties she was forced to carry out. Whoever was monitoring the doors, making sure everybody was sticking to the programme, they would get that grumpy by the end of the day. Mariana was no exception, and was coping with her boredom by only keeping half an eye on the monitors. “I see three of you on the buggy, but only two transponder signals.”

  “We’ve found a Martian,” Jasper answered.

  “Very clever. Now, an answer I can put in the log?”

  “Seriously,” Elle backed him up, “Well, not a Martian, but not one of our crew. Guy in an obsolete atmosphere suit, looks kind of like an OLV-5. Think he’s got an analog radio unit, but we can’t get our comms to tune in. So we’re bringing him in, get some biologists to look at him and make sure there’s no biohazard, and maybe we can find somewhere to talk.”

  Ten minutes later, they were on the edge of the camp, and they could see the bustle inside the pressurised tubes that connected different modules. Everyone was rushing around, any scientist with the slightest excuse to be involved wanted to see the Martian. Mariana clearly hadn’t thought that this discovery merited any kind of secrecy. Most of the crew wouldn’t, now. Censorship was something only the sponsors back on Earth insisted on, and there was no privileged information on the ship.

  It took some scientists half an hour to take samples and pronounce that there was probably no hazard from mutated germs or anything else of that kind. Jasper still wasn’t happy, though, and declined to join in on the first interview.

  Elle was there, nobody questioned that the first person to make contact would be there. Beside her was Commander Lemuel, the man in charge. When he’d first got the message, he’d laughed at the idea of meeting a Martian. But then they’d sent him pictures, and he couldn’t deny that there was a woman on Mars he didn’t recognise from any of the crew profiles. So two people, the commander and the discoverer, went down to say hello.

  The interview was going to be held in a medical unit. It was just more convenient that way. A hundred different modules from the ship had been unbolted, carried down to the Martian surface, and connected with a slowly growing web of pressurised tubes. This one module had the benefits of being on the edge of the camp, connected by only one tube that could easily be disconnected, and having its own atmosphere recycler. Despite their assurances, the doctors wanted to keep their visitor in quarantine for now, because they couldn’t tell how well the two expeditions’ hygienic protocols would stack up against each other.

  On one side of a plastic table, its surface a white rectangle as thin as paper, Elle and Lemuel sat down. On the other side was the Martian. She was female, and looked a little older than Elle, maybe. It was hard to tell, but she certainly wasn’t old enough to have been around when Wallace was hunting for astronauts. She had flame red hair, spiked up in a style that could have been a buzz cut with a couple of weeks growing out. Her upper lip was pierced with a row of metal studs on one side, and more spikes and hoops than Elle could count decorated her ears. She had a strong jawline, and through the glare on her suit’s visor it had been easy to assume she was a man. Now she was wearing a recyclable hospital gown, courtesy of the medical staff.

  “Get a good look?” she said. Her accent could have come off any movie or TV show, an amalgam of different quirks that mostly cancelled out. She could have come from anywhere. “You want to see the rest?” Her hands went to the belt of the gown, opening it just enough to make her point before Lemuel interrupted.

  “No, no… I mean, I’m sorry if I stared. We’ve been looking at all the same faces for so long, it’s strange to meet someone new, and we never expected to find you here. How long have you been here?”

  “About an hour, I reckon,” the girl shrugged, and tightened her belt again. “So, Vulcan?”

  “I’m sorry?” Elle found her train of thought completely derailed in the confusion.

  “Yes, Vulcan,” Lemuel nodded, “You’ve been listening in on our data broadcasts back to Earth?”

  “No, it’s written in letters four metres high, right down the side of your ship. And on every door seal, in letters so small you could miss them completely.” It took Elle a couple of seconds to make the connection, to remember that Vulcan was the name of their ship. She’d had to write it on the application forms when she signed up for this voyage, what seemed like a lifetime ago. Back then, the ships had all been named after blacksmith gods from different ancient religions, like Vulcan, whose forge was a volcano. It hadn’t been until they launched that the committee decided to use the ships’ names to manufacture a new corporate image for the sponsors. The logo on the side of the ship was now identical to the brand identifier of Vulcan Airlines, for example, who had bought the rights for an unmentionable sum. It hadn’t been long before the crew had rebelled, in their quiet way, and started referring to the the ships only by number, or just calling it ‘the ship’. It was at least two years since she’d last heard the name Vulcan mentioned, and like most of them she’d managed to stop noticing all the places it was embossed or printed around the ship.

  “Politics,” she shrugged, “We’re the crew of ship one, and two will be along in a couple of weeks. What was your ship called?”

  “I haven’t got one,” the girl gave a half-hearted shrug that only included one shoulder, as if the question didn’t interest her in the slightest. It must have taken a lot of effort to seem quite so nonchalant. “Name’s Boudica, everybody calls me Boo. How about you? You going to introduce yourselves, or just keep asking dumb questions?”

  “Sorry. My name’s Elle, I don’t do last names. I’m an anthropologist, but until the camp develops some kind of culture I’m a general dogsbody. And this is Commander Lemuel, the guy in charge of this expedition.”

  “So, Boudica,” Lemuel started, “Would you care to tell us how you came to be on Mars without a ship? I’m pretty sure that airlock we met you by was repurposed from part of a shuttlecraft of some kind.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. My parents were on a ship. The Admiral Wallace, that’s one of the dumb names everybody laughs at if you say it. Is it the same with yours? You’re called Elle Ementary or something?” she giggled more than the line really deserved.

  “Something like that. But I’m still not saying. So, Wallace? That’s Emmanuel Wallace by any chance, the ship’s namesake?”

  “Yeah. All of them were. Captain Wallace, President Wallace, Archduke Wallace, they ran out of ones that don’t sound crazy pretty quick. Not all of them made it, of course. Saint Wallace exploded on the launchpad, I read that it was a big thing in the news on Earth, even if nobody knew who it belonged to or where it was going.”

  “Your parents…” Lemuel muttered slowly, “You were born on Mars?” He also made a mental note to have his contacts on Earth look through old news sites for an exploding shuttle; that might give them a better clue about where Wallace had got his fuel and money.

  “Yeah. First generation, right? They figured that without the governments back there pouring money in, there was no way to get here and back. So they came out and never thought about returning, made a new life here. I think the plan was to prove to Earth that it’s possible, and get a kind of shuttle running back and forth. Cheaper than dedicated missions, anyway. Then they kind of lost contact, just decided they didn’t care about Ear
th any more. No point dealing with a planet that’s not organised enough to have a single government, and where there’s people starving when there’s a food depot only a few hundred miles away. Better to start fresh, they said.”

  “I can see that,” Lemuel nodded, “I know there’s a few on our own vessels who’ve had similar ideas. Not the majority, I think, but quite a few scientists have been bemoaning the difficulty of changing an existing system, loaded down with the inertia of tradition.”

  Elle rolled her bottom lip between her teeth, deep in thought. She had questions of her own, but she couldn’t think of any decent way to phrase them. She listened as the commander asked a few questions about the politics and ideology of the people on the Wallace ships, and Boo gave noncommittal answers. She didn’t really care about politics, the system they had seemed good enough that she didn’t care how it compared to anything else. The Commander didn’t ask whether Wallace himself had been on the ships, and whether they were funded by him or just took inspiration from his fame. There were some questions that would just be too troublesome, whatever the answers were. Let the crew come to terms with the fact that this other camp existed first.

  “Are your parents still alive?” Elle eventually found a question she could inject when there was a pause.

  “One,” the girl answered, eventually. “I was born when the city was still setting up, the medical centre wasn’t really ready. And if you’re looking for a better way to ask it, that’s a good average. About half the original travellers are still around. Then there’s like sixty first-gen, my little brothers and sisters. Five second gen.”