by T I WADE
“When we go, we need more than this amount of gold to take with us to Earth,” explained Captain Pete.
“That’s fine,” returned Mars. “We should take SB-IV to the tunnel entrances. We have already discussed that the safety of the new ship doesn’t really change where it flies. The shuttle is in the same amount of danger in orbit, sitting out there, or flying us around. Also, Captain Pete, this railway train we have built looks fun to ride on, and since I’m in charge of security I get the first ride on it.”
They had got this idea of the tunnel carriage system from a very old movie from the Second World War when prisoners of war had built a tunnel underground to escape from a concentration camp they were in.
Everybody was surprised one day when, on a beautiful Martian day outside, Dr. Nancy told them, while they were harvesting crops in the shields, she reckoned that a party was in order. The crew had been on Mars for a year, and it was only ten months before they were due to leave for Earth.
Since the next flight to the tunnel was leaving the next day, and nobody had thought about an anniversary, it was a good idea. They could put back the flight a few days. There was no rush, as this was Mars after all.
Over the last twelve months they hadn’t seen any enemy flying the Martian skies. Everybody had completed hundreds of hours of boring guard duty outside in the shields when there wasn’t a storm, but the daily grind of always looking out for enemy spaceships continued.
“The sand has really covered up the blast holes,” stated Mars to Captain Pete as Saturn once again took them down to the tunnel location a few days later. This time they were in SB-IV.
They emptied the large rear cargo hold of the new wall and the two carriages once they had carefully checked the surrounding area for footprints or signs of others visiting the site. With the newly blown dust and red dirt, it was easy to see if anybody had been there, except where the new dirt had already been blown away.
Nothing was amiss, except that there was a new buildup of dirt inside the tunnel which had to be moved by the two mining robots they had brought.
Mars had been angry with himself when days earlier, and back at base, one member of the crew had asked if the old Earth-made mining robots could help them gather the gold. He hadn’t even thought of them. Nobody had. They had been used by his father VIN and Jonesy on DX2014 and had lain forgotten in the base for years under other equipment. Mars had never seen the antiquated robots in action, and he was quite surprised at what they could do.
It would take a full 48 hours before the old mining robots cleared the remainder of the gold and the new dirt out of the area they wanted to make the new atmospheric cavern, so Mars got ready for his ride westward with Johnny Walls, who had volunteered to go with him.
The build crew carried the carriage contraption, followed by Captain Pete and Dr. Messer, who was suddenly not so enthusiastic about being alone with two men on the trolley in a dark tunnel. Once the wheels had been set to the width of the tracks, there were enough willing hands to help set the short two-carriage unit onto the tracks several feet in from the most westerly blast hole.
“Ten thousand meters, huh!” stated Mars, reading out Dr. Messer’s latest report.
“Do you think two hand lasers are enough?” Captain Pete asked Mars.
“What should we take in, some tanks, artillery and commandos?” joked Mars back at the captain. “I’m sure there are no atmospheric conditions left to the west. If that blast blew all this gold so far, after melting it, I’m sure there isn’t anything living down there. Johnny and I are not too keen to head into any atmospheric area. That would be asking for trouble.”
“What do you think you will find?” Dr. Messer asked Mars.
“Twisted metal maybe, a few remains of bones if anybody died. What does one find in such conditions? We only have three hours. It should take us thirty minutes to get there. That we know from the thruster tests back at base. It should be reasonably flat, and we are giving ourselves 30 minutes, 45 minutes max, once we reach something, anything stops our westward travel. Remember, the old Matts can’t enter any area without safe atmospheric conditions. There are no shields erected above ground. It looks like the massive blast hole goes deep in the ground and if there is somebody there, the telltale signs of a shield wall will warn Johnny and me.”
Three hours later, with fully recharged suits, a small bottle of backup oxygen each, a small recharge belt battery each that gave the suit one extra hour of life, and two hand lasers, the two youngsters started down the tunnel once the others had retreated back. They didn’t need the thruster to begin with as the incline and a minimum amount of gravity started their free-wheeling journey at a walking pace.
Only when Mars had passed the area he had navigated on the last search and when it flattened out did he light up the tiny rear thruster, which without atmosphere silently pushed them further into the tunnel at about 10 miles an hour.
“See anything?” Johnny asked, lying on his stomach on the second trolley behind Mars. Mars was in the same position facing forward.
“No,” replied Mars, “but there is less dust and dirt down here. The lights are giving me about a hundred to 150 feet. I see nothing except the blackened bare rock walls. They are smooth though. That blast must have torn the lining off the walls when it melted it. Hold on, we are coming to a slight bend, and it is heading down again. Better let the thruster idle for a few seconds.” Johnny was working the thruster control from what Mars wanted. “Ok, it’s straight again. Add more power. I can’t remember the exact topography above us, but I thought it was pretty flat between the blast holes and the massive crater.”
They headed down a very long, straight section, and under Mars’ orders Johnny slowly eased the throttle open. The ride was very good. The round metal wheels made by the build crew, which looked exactly like the train wheels on Earth but only 6 inches high, were riding calmly down the very smooth track at speed. The walls began to blur, and they reckoned they had reached top speed, about 25 miles an hour, when Mars shouted at Johnny to hit the reverse thruster.
“We have reached tangled metal, the remains of a wall,” stated Mars as they ground to a halt. Johnny looked up and forward. Tiny remains of a wall stuck out from the sides of the tunnel. “I reckon we are about halfway,” said Mars, looking at his external instruments. He saw that the tunnel’s temperature was only 5 degrees below zero Celsius, there were no atmospheric elements, and they had been traveling for twelve minutes. “Temperature is higher by twenty degrees since we left,” Mars added.
They ploughed on, the tracks clean, and several minutes later another jutting piece of metal less than an inch wide stuck out from the sides of the tunnel. This time, on the other side of what was left of the wall, the tracks began to go uphill slightly.
After several hundred feet, the angle became quite steep. Still without atmosphere the tiny thruster moved them forward at a walking pace.
At the remains of a third wall, they reached an intersection. Now two tunnels headed out in front of Mars. The right-hand tunnel had tracks, the other didn’t.
“I reckon we have reached something,” Mars said.
“We should have,” Johnny replied. “Time from start is 27 minutes, temperature has risen to one degree above zero Celsius, and there seems to be radioactivity around us. My suit’s Geiger counter is rising.”
“My suit is showing the same readouts, but I think the tunnel is getting lighter. I’m sure it’s lighter in here than before,” added Mars. He was right. Less than a hundred yards further they nearly fell into a massive hole. Johnny’s quick reaction to Mars’ orders to hit the brakes stopped them from going into the hole by just a few yards. The tunnel virtually disappeared, and only when both guys played their lights forward into the massive cavern did they see the remains of the Matt base.
The cavern was about the size of the cavern they had pulled the gold from in the Sahara. In fact, it looked exactly the same size, except that the blast had ripped out the f
loor levels, if there had been any.
Areas of faint sunlight was coming through a gaping hole in the roof of the cavern. The hole must have been at least fifty feet across. Mars thought for a while. Something wasn’t right.
“Temperature went up about thirty degrees further back in the tunnel, right?” Mars asked Johnny. Johnny agreed. “Then how come it is so warm in there with this hole in the roof? Shouldn’t it be the same temperature as outside throughout their tunnel system?” Johnny couldn’t answer that one.
There was nowhere to go. The drop below them was vertical and at least forty to fifty feet to a dark floor, so they pushed the trolley back to the junction.
There they readied it for the return journey. With his back remembering the last time he tried walking down the small tunnels, Mars led the way down the rear tunnel.
A few hundred feet down the second tunnel, another wall appeared in his light. His light was much brighter down this tunnel as the gold was back on the walls, as if the blast hadn’t blasted this part of the tunnel so badly, and the lining reflected the light very well.
Within 100 feet, a small hole on another wall appeared, one large enough for them to crawl through. It was where a door had once stood; the door had been half ripped off its hinges and its silver shape could be seen melted into the wall lining.
“It seems the blast wasn’t so strong down this tunnel,” Mars stated.
A hundred steps further on another half-ripped-open wall appeared in his light.
“Radiation still high, and temperature climbing a few degrees,” replied Johnny.
For a further couple of hundred feet the tunnel headed downwards, steeper than the angle of the tunnel with the tracks, and the temperature rose.
Then they came to a wall which completely blocked their way. Both astronauts couldn’t believe their eyes. Right in front of them this time was a see-through wall, like one of their silicon-glass walls back at base. Behind the wall was an underground stream or river of what looked like water, and it was running. Mars couldn’t believe his eyes. Here and there, lying each side of the foot-wide stream, were bodies, several of them, and they looked small, about five foot tall. Each body was a skeleton dressed in a blue spacesuit, and they were spread out around each side of the stream.
It looked surreal, like a picture of an underground cave that could be found on Earth.
“I can’t believe this—those bags of bones don’t have helmets on. I can’t see one space helmet in the entire room,” said Mars.
“There must be atmosphere in there,” suggested Johnny, hardly able to reply. “Look, there is a second wall and a door on the other side of the liquid stream.” Johnny was looking over Mars’ shoulder. “I’m sure it is. That one isn’t see-through like this one, it’s black, pitch black, not yellow like the blast on the walls. Mars, we are past our time, but one thing is weird. The temperature here, right by the wall, is 10 degrees Celsius, and the radiation is the lowest it has ever been on my readouts since I noticed it going up.”
“We need to get back,” Mars stated. Unhappily they hunched down to return to their ride.
“Water?” asked Captain Pete, helping Mars off with his helmet back in the shuttle.
“Real flowing water?” added Dr. Messer. “Impossible on the surface of Mars.”
“That’s what we thought until that water supply my father and Jonesy found had real water in it,” replied Mars, stretching after their forty-minute ride back to where the others were waiting.
They were back inside SB-IV and had just been relieved of their suits.
“And it was flowing or moving?” Dr. Messer continued.
“Ja, Frau Dr. Messer, it vas moving ever so slowly, far slower than a river would on Eart,” Mars replied jokingly and copying the way the doctor spoke. He got a half-hearted slap across the head for his attempt at comedy by the short doctor.
“Impossible,” she retorted.
“It seems nothing is impossible the longer we stay on this planet,” added Captain Pete, shaking his head.
“And I have a nasty feeling we could bring all this peace we have on this planet to an end if anybody notices our breach of the wall to the eastern side of their base,” stated Mars. “I don’t think we are ready for a fight with any enemy at this moment. Something is making the hairs on my neck crawl. Yes! I know what it is!”
“What?” asked Johnny.
“Johnny, I might be having weird thoughts, but wasn’t the gravity near the last wall stronger? Like being on Earth?” Johnny thought about what Mars had said, and slowly nodded in agreement, saying nothing. Standing there looking at the several dead bodies through the wall, it had felt like he was standing on Earth.
“Well, we have one more day before the atmosphere is ready for us to breach the wall. Maybe we should return to your river tomorrow, Mars, instead?” suggested Captain Pete.
“There is a hole in the cavern’s roof we should be able to see from above. Instead of the trolley, we should see if we can find another way in. I’m sure part of the base was built into one of the hills we saw around the blast site, and not in the blast crater itself.”
The next morning, the shuttle took off and headed downto the area where the tunnel was expected to be. Mars counted off the distance as he remembered it from the previous day.
“The fork should be down here,” stated Mars in the co-pilot’s seat, his face close to the cockpit’s front silicon glass. “Look!” he added, pointing past Saturn in the left seat. “On that ridge over there, about a hundred yards from the blast crater. There is a decent-sized hole. It looks like the one we are looking for.”
The ridge was a hundred or so feet above the blast crater that stretched out for more than a mile in front of them. There was enough space for Saturn to put the shuttle down. Then Captain Pete warned that the western horizon seemed darker than it usually was, and Mars immediately ordered Saturn to head back to base. It looked like a storm was brewing.
“Have we left anything out in the open?” Mars asked Dr. Messer, who was in one of the rear cockpit jump seats. Dr. Messer shrugged her shoulders and looked over at the head of the build crew in the third seat.
“No, Captain Noble. We only have the air tanks in the new sealed chamber with the trolley system ready to go. We make sure that nothing is outside in case the enemy flies past. The air tanks and train will be there for us when we come back. Also, the mining robots are inside the cave and we already have the gold pieces they cut up yesterday, about two tons, in the rear hold.”
“Saturn, head home, full power,” ordered the mission captain.
Reluctantly, with so much to investigate underground, the crew managed to return to the base an hour or so before the storm hit. It was a big one, so it was lucky for them Captain Pete had noticed the dust storm tens of thousands of feet above the surface.
The dust was swirling as Saturn glided the larger shuttle into the only vacant blue shield. With the storm picking up in intensity, she had to really fly well to slowly enter the shield. With the winds already clocking a hundred miles an hour, and visibility only several feet in front of her, she used all the instruments she had to expertly bring her craft into an accurate landing position.
Once the craft landed, and the pulling on the craft ceased, the base crew ran inside ready to tie the undercarriage and wings down to nails already in the rocky surface so that the storm couldn’t move her.
“Phew! That was close,” said Mars. “Captain Pete, you saved us from sitting up on orbit for the next few weeks or months.”
The size and darkness of the front wall of this storm reminded him of their last mission to the planet.
Day after day, week after week it raged, never letting up. It also gave them a warning that nobody forgot—that they only had an hour or two at the most to return to base if a storm was detected. They had food and air reserves aboard each vessel for up to a year in orbit if they were cut off from the base, but with this storm, even those supplies weren’t enough.
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For sixteen long months not a second of clear air could be seen outside the shields.
They celebrated miserably on the last day they could have launched for the first opposition’s return to Earth. Exactly four months after the perfect center of the opposition window, the possibilities of reaching Earth in a year, the length of the food and air supplies aboard ship, closed until the next window would open nineteen months later. They were stuck on the red planet for two years longer than the returning crew had wanted.
Chapter 17
2030JD
“I have the asteroid visual on radar,” stated Pluto Katherine Richmond over the intercom at about the same time Captain Noble and his crew, nearly two billion miles away on Mars, realized that they weren’t going home yet.
Her remark woke up the sleeping crew on all four ships. She was flying SB-II ten miles off the starboard bow of Astermine One. Each of the three Astermine craft were a safe ten miles apart. They had been travelling for 41 days to reach the asteroid everybody down on Nevada had pinned their hopes on having all the riches they ever needed.
She was asteroid mission commander, and her sleepy husband Gary was beside her in the co-pilot seat.
“Your guard shift is over. I’ll take over command of the vessel,” Gary suggested.
They exchanged roles, as they had done for the last 40 days of straight travel from Earth past the moon to where they were to meet up with the asteroid in three days’ time. It was the last day of slowing before she turned her fleet in the same direction the asteroid was traveling so that they could come abreast of it.
Much had happened down on Earth since the Mars mission had left over two years earlier. Ryan Richmond was a grandfather two times over, not that he knew it yet, thanks to Lunar having her second son Mark Allen. Ryan would hopefully meet them in eight years’ time when DX2017 came within range to wake him and the others.