Mists of the Miskatonic (Mist of the Miskatonic Book 1)

by Al Halsey

  “A little more than expected? Good grief,” Frank mumbled and adjusted the ear bud. “Two days until landing.”

  The voice in his ear continued, unaware of his sarcastic comments. “Frank, our simulations look good for landing, but you already know that. If your team can get those sensors replaced, we can run some more diagnostics. This mission has to succeed. There is a lot riding on it back home, both politically for the President and for NASA. Not to mention all the private contractors relying on this to boost public sentiment. The Great Ghoul that gobbled up so many missions has to be put to rest once and for all. It coulda been the Russians first, but their bad luck is our good. Once superstition takes a hold, y’know how voters get.”

  “I have more riding than you Mike. It’d better work,” Frank said quietly. He scanned the screens as they monitored the systems of the spacecraft.

  “But there is something that concerns us, and that’s why I sent this on a coded military sub-channel. Right before the air braking, we finished reviewing the final packets sent to us. Everything was as expected, but Morris’ reports were a little… how do I say this? Odd.”

  Frank laughed aloud. “He went to Berkley. Of course it’s odd.”

  “The routine medical evals and data were fine on all six crew, including him. However, Morris reported having trouble sleeping and bad dreams. I don’t know if you’re aware. You should be. Now you are, in case he hadn’t told you. Here’s an excerpt from the Dpack he sent so you can hear it in his own words.

  The bud went silent for a second. Then the voice of the Mission Flight Physician was in the Commander’s ear. “It’s these dreams that keep me tossing and turning. I can’t shake this feeling of dread about Mars. That someone, something, is watching and waiting for us. Like we are just fish in a bowl, unaware that they are peering in while we go about our business. It makes me feel so old: so cold sometimes.”

  Mike’s familiar voice returned. “No reason to panic yet, we are just concerned. The medical evals and his interpretation of the data correlate with our docs on the ground, so his judgment seems unaffected. If something were to go wrong, Jones is a nurse and Washington is a Navy Medic. They should be able to handle any emergencies that crop up, and our doctors are putting together step-by-step protocols for serious emergencies. As soon as they get them put together, we’ll compress them and transmit them your way. Our graphics people are working on supplementary vids to demonstrate surgery techniques and such. Just a precaution, no need to be concerned yet, Frank.”

  “Quite a precaution. Damn,” the Commander grumbled. “Seems like a lot of work, Mike, if you weren’t worried.”

  “I know you have your hands full, but just keep your eye on Morris to make sure he is functioning ok. We will keep you apprised on our end. Two days. You will make history, stepping foot on Mars. I… we… your country is proud of you, Commander.”

  The ear bud went dead and Frank looked across the small compartment to the Mission Specialist. Slowly he pulled the black earpiece out and put it in a pocket of his flight suit.

  Mission Specialist Heather Washington held the burnt-out circuit board in her dark-skinned hand. She inspected the scorch marks before handing it to Darwin. “That came from the recirculation back-up pump in the ventilation system. Stupid sparking, anyhow.”

  Darwin sniffed at the board. The damaged electronics smelled like ozone. The pair was in the maintenance corridor between the oxygen reclamation and the back-up reactor. The two methodically tested questionable circuits damaged by the discharge of static electricity.

  “When you think of the power sent out by the solar event, it’s amazing that we even survived: and just hours before we began air braking. Lucky the VASMIR engines functioned properly. If they’d failed, we might not have slowed enough to hit the atmosphere. Coulda skipped right off,” he said.

  “As we continue to decompress the backup data, we are finding more single event upsets. Hard to believe replacing one bit of memory can so mess up our system.”

  Heather pulled a new board from a plastic package and pulled an elastic strip. She let it float in the weightless corridor. She blew on the red ribbon and it began to tumble, carried by the recirculated air down the long chamber.

  “Being a programmer, I’d think you of all people would understand what one number can do,” Darwin said and smiled. “I think that we’ve got the last sensor replaced in the water reclamation controls. I’ll set the mainframe to decompress the backup files.”

  Something clattered: the sound of metal against a ceramic bulkhead echoed down the hallway. The two looked in the direction of the sound, and Heather handed an electric screwdriver to Darwin. “Is someone there?” she called out.

  No one answered and she put her feet against the bulkhead and pushed off. She floated down the hall.

  “What is it?” Darwin called.

  She peered around the corner and leaned against the white ceramic wall. In the middle of the hallway’s intersection floated Doctor Rob Morris. He was motionless, dressed in his white jumpsuit, except he was missing one sock.

  “Darwin, it’s the doc! Something’s wrong!”

  Heather grabbed Morris and turned him to face her. His face was pale, his dark hair disheveled, and eyes rolled back to show only the whites. Quickly she checked for a pulse, held her fingers on his neck and listened for breaths. They were slow and shallow but he was alive and she held him close. She heard the metallic clatter again and she looked down the dark corridor to her left.

  She saw a hint of movement in the shadows. Maybe a trick of her mind under stress. She squinted, tried to refocus, but no specific shape could be discerned. Heather turned back towards the doctor who gurgled. His eyes rolled back and focused on her.

  His brown eyes seemed so sharp, but she felt like he looked through her.

  “They’re watching us, even now,” he whispered. “Watching you.”

  Heather stared into his eyes for a few seconds, and then they rolled back into his head and he began to seize. He flailed wildly.

  “Darwin, I need a first aid kit. Now! Get Jones up here. Then make sure Medical is powered up!”

  Mission Specialist Edders floated to her side, unlatched the kit and pulled on gloves. As the doctor thrashed and twitched, he moaned. Heather looked down the darkened corridor with a sense of dread as they waited for help.

  The Colonel’s voice came through the ear bud into Frank’s ear. “We have run all the data. We cannot see anything physically wrong with the Doc that would explain this. Our medical team is going through the last set of MRI’s, but nothing different from the first. Those slides show a tiny kidney stone has formed during the trip, but other than that, nothing. Physically, he seems fine.”

  “Great,” Frank whispered to himself.

  “We have re-run the mission timeline. Our modified schedule after landing has changed due to being down one man. Those outlines are included in the unscrambled DPack we uploaded. Long before you left, we modeled every scenario, including incapacitation of every crew member. We are gonna get through this together. We’re with you every step of the way,” Mike’s recorded voice dripped with sincerity. “Just keep him sedated. Everything will go fine.”

  “Easy for you to say. You’re there and we’re here,” Frank said sarcastically.

  “I want you to listen to part of the last message Morris sent to his wife. Here it is,” the Colonel’s voice stated.

  The ear bud clicked and the next voice was the doctor. “…it’s so cold. I can feel it when I sleep. And the dreams. The dreams. I see Mars, I’m standing…on carved stone. In the dream, I don’t know where I am at, then I see a form. I know it’s watching me. I can’t even begin to describe it: it’s like a buzzing. Human, or trying to be human. But I hear them in my head. Shub. Shub. I can’t even say the rest of the word.”

  Mike’s voice returned. “Then the conversation went back to normal. Frank, we’re keeping this under wraps by order of the President. Maybe this is just some
psychotic episode that will pass. That’s what my psych people are hoping. Get planet side safely, then we will work on that from there. We modeled the consumption of Lorazepam. Until you rendezvous with the arriving supply module Oklahoma, you should be ok keeping him knocked out. We hope it doesn’t come to that.”

  “Wonderful,” Frank said. He reached around and rubbed his shoulder. His muscles were very tight from the stress. One man down, and now the work of keeping a drugged invalid clean and medically healthy. Damn, he thought.

  “The Chinese can’t get their module up because the occupation of Taiwan is not going well. So France and the U.K. are scrambling to send something in its place. We’ll keep you posted. Hey, Frank. You’re landing tomorrow. We’re all proud of you down here. Stay safe, and I’ll catch you on the surface. Colonel Mike Ferguson, out.”

  Mission Control Houston was raucous with the thunderous applause, shouts and whistles of a successful touch down on the surface of the fourth planet. Dozens of hands pawed at Ferguson. He was normally not a touchy fellow, but he tolerated it in this moment of triumph.

  He watched the huge screens that showed the landing craft, Roosevelt. It had separated hours ago from the main ship while still in orbit. Now it sat amidst swirling clouds of oxidized sand kicked up from the rockets as it touched down. Sixteen different cameras monitored the landing from various angles, even on the lander itself. Gigabytes of data streamed, seventeen minutes and thirty two seconds in history after the lander had safely touched down.

  “Roosevelt has safely landed on Mars,” a woman’s voice announced over the speaker. Several engineers popped the top off dark glass bottles of sparkling apple cider. Frank had been adamant about no alcohol in Mission Control. After hours only. This was history as it was made. If something went wrong, the last thing he wanted was some son of a bitch from the Times taking a photo of bottles of champagne sitting on a control panel.

  “Ok,” Mike said calmly into his mouthpiece. “We’ve got a job to do, so let’s get to it. The data is backing up. We need to analyze. Congrats, people, but it’s time to focus.”

  The last shouts went up, the applause died and everyone returned to banks of computer screens. Mike stood, hands on hips, and monitored the conversations. He was focused on one of the engineers in front of him. They tapped on a monitor with a red light.

  “That’s the problem. Just a frozen valve. The redundant system kicked in, but we need to get them to look at it once they start maintenance. Otherwise, everything was five by five,” a flight controller said.

  “We have time. Put that on the back burner,” Mike said. “Let them get settled first before we start loading them with that.”

  One of the younger engineers tapped the Colonel’s shoulder. “Sorry to interrupt, Frank, but I have something to show you.”

  “I’m kinda busy right now, Jim. We just landed on Mars, in case you missed it,” Frank said sarcastically. “You M.I.T. guys are something else.”

  The young man brushed back his brown hair, and then stood up straight, looking past Mike at the huge screen showing the Roosevelt. “I’ve a picture that I think is worked stone.”

  The Colonel looked back seriously, and then smirked. “Did Howard put you up to this?”

  “The Major had nothing to do with this. I was running data recognition patterns on a picture of a rock outcropping, and the computer kept popping up this anomaly. Don in Xeno-Archeology and our geologists: they don’t think it’s natural.”

  “I don’t have time for this. You’re just pissing me off.”

  “Colonel, please. Just one minute. You have to see this picture. This isn’t a joke.” The young engineer shifted from one foot to the other. “Not a joke.”

  Mike glared, tense, and pointed his finger. “If Howard has anything to do with this, I will have both your balls on a silver platter. This better be real, and if H.R. hears about that balls thing, I’ll deny I said it.”

  “No balls: no bull, sir.” The two walked up a platform past a dozen computer workstations, then into a small room behind glass. Two other white-shirted geeks were huddled around a large screen, looking at a rock outcropping on obviously Martian landscape. Both men were tall and wore bow ties. Mike was disgusted.

  “Alright, god dammit. Let’s see this thing,” Mike murmured, and then glared at the men. “If you’re all in this together, heads will roll.”

  “It’s the real deal, sir,” one of the men said excitedly as he tapped on the screen. “Look at the formation. Twenty-nine kilometers from the landing site, we have ruins. Something our surveys never showed until we got close.”

  Mike looked at the screen. It showed a flat stone that protruded from the side of a hill of detritus. The rock was marked in ninety-degree angles. He looked at the bespectacled man and sighed. “Just who the hell are you again? Have we met?”

  He snorted and stood to his full, considerable height and stuck out his hand. “Rick Anderson, Xeno-Archeology.”

  The Colonel ignored his hand. “We have a planet with half of the radius of Earth and you’ve found rocks cracked at a ninety-degree angle. Remember when Viking 1 took a picture that looked like a face with the nearby pyramids? The photo was all over the internet from day one. Nut jobs and conspiracy theorists ran with that for decades ‘til we got a decent picture of the area. It was stupid shadows. Somewhere, coincidence plays a role in this. I don’t see anything that out of the ordinary. Your imaginations are working overtime and I don’t have the time or energy for this.”

  Rick looked back towards the screen. “It’s clearly the ruins of a structure.”

  “I ain’t seeing it and don’t want to hear any more about it, ok? You think it’s a structure, give me something more. We have enough problems already without sending our astronauts out on an MRV on a wild goose chase,” Mike growled.

  On the surface of Mars, Mission Commander McLaughlin stepped from the lander. The boot of his suit kicked up a tiny cloud of oxidized sand. He looked toward the sun, so distant and small on the horizon. The tiny hum of a recirculation pump ruined the silence of the Martian day.

  “We, humans from the United States of America, take the first step on Earth’s sister world: for the benefit of humanity, one step towards the stars.”

  The sentence gave him goose bumps. Mars was so far from home. It gave him the same reaction when his wife had helped him write it. They were on their last vacation. A week at the Oregon coast. He missed the sunset, and remembered looking west at the Pacific Ocean from Lincoln City on their last night. He missed his wife.

  “Nice job, Commander,” Darwin’s voice carried into his headset. “It’ll rank up there with, “One step for mankind.”

  “We will see, I suppose,” Frank murmured. “Well, we have our work cut out for us. Let’s get to it.”

  The first day on Mars, the five conscious crew members checked and rechecked the systems of the base modules that had already landed on the surface. NASA had sent the package with the base during the last Hohmann Transfer Orbit. It had successfully deployed along with a small army of robots that set up the base and began to process water. For the last two years, the automatic base had prepared for occupants. It had readied everything from survey packages to the oxygen transfer systems. Machines sucked the thin carbon dioxide atmosphere, pressurized it and filtering it into breathability.

  In the lander, Dr. Rob Morris was being placed into a pressurized cargo carrier for transfer into the base New Plymouth. Heather and Mission Specialist Connor Collins lifted his limp form onto a stretcher, and then laid him in the case. “Thank God the gravity is less than what we are used to. What a lug. I would be stronger if I’d slept better last night.”

  Heather laughed. “I didn’t sleep that great either. Too much adrenaline from the landing, I guess. Y’know, my momma was so proud I was picked for this mission. Wasn’t that long ago my ancestors were in the hold of a slave ship. Now, I’m the first American of African heritage on Mars. Carrying a white man in a box into the
base, feed him intravenously and clean him. I’m a computer programmer, dammit. Not what I signed up for.”

  Collins strapped the doctor securely in place. “Ok, it’s ready to seal. We suit up, latch this, check the integrity on the container, and carry him out the airlock. There will be enough air if we hustle.”

  “Why so many straps?” she asked.

  “Jones said he was thrashing and moaning after we landed. I was in the base, so I missed it. If he flips out in this box, or we drop, it Frank doesn’t want him getting bruised. We coulda suited him up, but I don’t want to take the time. It’s easier this way. He’ll be fine.”

  The two put on their pressure suits, double checked the seals and ran diagnostics. Systems were nominal and the two pushed their helmets in place. Heather could hear the filter pumps kick in. They hummed quietly in the background. “Readouts are five by five on your suit.”

  Heather looked over the screen on the side of Connor’s pack. “Yours too: in the green. Let’s do this.”

  A large, black polymer cover was lowered over Morris. Latches clicked and through the helmet she heard servos grind. The box sealed itself. The readouts said integrity was achieved. She ran diagnostics and looked at the monitor. “All looks good. Let’s get him into New Plymouth,” Heather said.

  The two hefted the container by the handles on either side, and then carried it to the airlock. Heather looked at the panel. “Mainframe says we are green. Depressurize.”

  It took a minute for the pumps in the lander to recreate the low pressure of the Martian atmosphere. Collins waited for the readout on the bulkhead to analyze the pressure, and then opened the lock. They moved slowly towards the base and Darwin’s voice sounded in Heather’s helmet.

  “Looks good, you two. Careful with the Doc. We are waiting to receive you,” Darwin said.