Seclurm: Devolution

by Noah Gallagher

  As Terri returned to her seat, Shauna turned on the intercom to reach the others not on the Bridge—Sam, Randy, and Al—who would be busy monitoring engine performance and taking care of general ship maintenance. “We are nearing the outer atmosphere. Standby for further directions. We’ll see how difficult this atmosphere wants to be.”

  “Oh, yeah—atmospheres. Forgot about those,” said Randy, half-joking. Landing on asteroids was simpler than this would be. He begrudgingly recalled how he had imagined that the next time they would tear through an atmosphere would be when they returned home to Earth, where he’d reunite with his girlfriend Lilah, who worked in FAER’s Research and Development department. But no such luck.

  The Novara moved through empty space at supersonic speeds, but now that it made contact with something pushing against it, it really felt like it was hauling. The rattling increased dramatically and they could hear faint wind rushing as the grayish-white orb consumed their entire field of view. Rosalyn and the others could feel their bones shaking, their fingers almost buzzing. The ship rocked, shaking the seat-belted crewmates in the Bridge. Captain Beele gave orders for the other crewmates below to brace themselves, making sure they hadn’t been injured. This entry of atmosphere had happened to them many a time upon past return journeys, but it still had a way of shaking them up. Not to mention the fact that they were used to breaking through Earth’s, not 730-X Zacuali’s, atmosphere.

  After several minutes, Rosalyn’s breath grew steadier as the ship gained more control. The air around them seemed to tremble still. Actual features of the planetoid’s surface came into view: barren, icy plains and mountains and frozen lakes, bits of rock being tossed about in storms of wind. The sight of a new place that had existed for untold hundreds of billions of years, but had never been set foot upon before…it always gave them a sense of sacred awe, even in the midst of the great noise of atmospheric entry.

  “Entering the lower atmosphere,” said Shauna. “How’s our entry looking?”

  Randy typed and tapped furiously. “Took a little bit of a dip, but we’re rebalanced. Looking good.”

  She touched her hand to her headset and barked, “How’s our engines?”

  After a moment the voice of Al Chittering came on their headsets. “Everything’s solid down here.”

  “Fantastic. Rosalyn, direct us toward that mountain. It should be marked on your screen.”

  Sure enough, the radar data had pinged a particular mountain range as the one they were to visit. It was a flatter-than-standard set of mountains with lots of rocks slumping over one another. A huge, violent storm looked like it was raging on the far side of the mountain, but thankfully they were headed just east of that.

  Chatter continued between each of them as they combined expertise to ensure a balanced and smooth landing. Rosalyn shrugged away the surreal feeling of being on another planetary object as she did her work.

  “We’re headed towards that big ledge there,” she said to the others.

  There, about one quarter up the height of the mountain, was a flat outcropping of rock that connected with the steepest section of the mountain on this side where a small, dark section opened up into the caverns. An ideal landing spot.

  Some powerful winds slapped into the ship now and then, but at last it seemed that they were in the clear. Each of them breathed sighs of relief as the Novara slowed down more and more and came closer and closer.

  “Get that landing gear out,” Shauna said, voice like a whip.

  Terri smashed some buttons and then they could hear the shifting of mechanical pieces and extending of the landing gear. Rosalyn missed a sidelong glance stolen at her.

  The humming and rushing of machinery gradually diminished until the ship reduced to minuscule speeds. Everything came to a soft, final stop as they collectively felt the weight of the ship settling against the weight of 730-X Zacuali, and a sense of disquiet settled upon them. They had made it there.

  Now they had to explore it.

  2

  Captain Shauna Beele sat in the computer room poring over some data and checking the numbers, finishing up a quick tuna salad lunch. Rosalyn entered, stepping around the many computer stations to stand beside Shauna, and casually glanced at the large screen.

  “Sam is ready to suit up,” she told her.

  “Good. I’ll be ready to join him soon. Just double-checking everything one more time.”

  “I think that’s called triple-checking.”

  “Hm. Yeah, I guess that’s accurate.”

  “You feeling optimistic still?”

  Shauna frowned thoughtfully and nodded her head. “Yeah, I think so. Not quite optimistic enough to notify FAER yet, but still optimistic. I don’t want to get their hopes up quite until we know for sure. Just a few hours of looking around the caverns should do it.”

  Rosalyn thought for a minute. Then she said, “If this does end up being a potential mining station, everything’s gonna change, isn’t it?”

  “Most definitely. FAER has no reason to send the Novara or any other ship around looking for mince meat on asteroids when they can send all their resources to mine one big jackpot.”

  Rosalyn nodded. It was commonly accepted that FAER’s boldly-stated mission of discovering and researching the unknown tended to come second to making the most profit. “That’s true. In all likelihood we’re all gonna be shifting jobs pretty soon, if this ends up being what they’re looking for. Hopefully they’ll still bother sending all of us out, even if they decommission the Novara.”

  She leaned over on the table, staring down and trying not to be overly concerned with the worst-case scenario.

  Shauna sat back in her chair. “We’ve got several days to all become experts on this planetoid so they’ll need us along no matter what. I’ll make sure they keep us on the mining project.”

  “All of us? You’re not gonna smooth-talk yourself into a promotion and throw the rest of us under the bus? Not very opportunistic of you.” Rosalyn smiled at her.

  She chuckled. “You’ve got a point. Oof. Hey, start risking your life more so your captain can get her bonus already.”

  “Ah. That’s more like it.”

  Shauna beamed.

  At that moment, something crashed behind a computer desk, causing them both to jump. Rosalyn stood up and moved towards the sound with slight unease. A white cat emerged beside a fallen box and looked at her.

  “Brady!” said Rosalyn.

  “I never should have let Mitchell bring that thing,” said Shauna with a chuckle. “I’m sure FAER feels good about helping the crew’s mental health by sending us out with it, but I just know it’s gonna wander off and hurt itself one of these days.”

  Rosalyn picked Brady up and moved to the door. “I’ll bring him to the common room.”

  Rosalyn left Shauna to finish her lunch and computer session before heading over to the loading deck.

  The ramp opened downward and turned on its axis, angling closer and closer to the barren ground below and making a loud, mechanical noise as it went. The instant it started moving, the sounds of intense wind enveloped the inside of the loading deck. Shauna and Sam, thanks to slim, blue spacesuits garbing their bodies, were shielded from the intense cold and oppressive, debris-strewn atmosphere as they stood at the opening, waiting for the ramp to lower fully.

  The crew had spent the better part of an hour performing more tests, analyzing the atmospheric content and gauging the weather patterns to ensure that their first mining venture could be done in safety. Subtle unease like a heavy blanket blocking out light seemed to swaddle them. It happened every time they went to an unexplored place, but it wasn’t much of a concern; they had dealt with this sort of thing many a time.

  Shauna strapped the mining rover with plastic boxes of supplies, her dexterity hampered slightly by burly spacesuit gloves. Liquid food, lights, water, metal cable, electric heaters, oxygen tank, space tent. They were always prepared. Around them in the loading deck were nume
rous shelves filled with mining and other supplies and a few other rover-like machines that they would all make use of once Shauna and Sam confirmed they’d found a good place to mine.

  The mechanical sound of the ramp dropping down came to a stop as it slammed against the planetoid’s stony surface. Dirty wind swept over its metal material.

  Shauna climbed up onto the narrow rover at the front of its two seats. Sam sat behind her, adjusting the collar of his spacesuit.

  “Do you have visual, Terri?” Shauna asked.

  From the Bridge, Terri responded, “Affirmative.”

  “We’re starting off. We’ll test again once we’re near the entrance, and then again once we’re deeper inside the mountain.”

  She pressed a lever forward and the rover started rumbling down the ramp, moving with impressive speed on three sets of long treads. It was the size of a pickup truck, only slightly thinner, with a white-colored frame, a heavy-duty camera on the front, and a solid, metal center piece housing multiple devices for scanning, drilling, and picking up and storing things.

  “Tokoharu, can you test your headset?” came the voice of Rosalyn. The audio was slightly shaky.

  “Testing… How do I sound?” Sam replied, now fidgeting with his seatbelt as winds pushed tiny bits of rock and ice and dirt scraping against his suit.

  “Sound is good. You’re all set.”

  The rover rumbled off the ramp and onto the ground, leaving tread prints in the frosty-looking stone as it turned towards the cavern’s entrance. Shauna let out a deep breath as she and Sam surveyed the semi-dark atmosphere of 730-X Zacuali in total awe. It was nearly uniform in color, a light gray frosted with icy white, all fields and rolling hills of stone whipped with winds that blew dust and ice in sheets across the land. Strange rock formations could be spotted in the distance, mountains and mesas and rocks in bizarre shapes. Clouds and dust overshadowed the dismal land. Granular bits of dust scraped against the glass of their helmets, and pebbles and gravel crunched beneath the treads of the rover.

  Shauna glanced over her shoulder to see the Novara perched on the stone like a dark bird. Rosalyn, Terri, and Randy would be watching them every step of the way. Although there was shared awe amongst all of the crewmates, a niggling sense of unease was also present. Shauna expected it. Space travel, for all its advancements, was still such an unexplored frontier; uneasiness was a natural, inevitable human response to things so vast and unknown.

  Sam spoke up. “Well, Randy—Roz—Terri—sit back and relax while Captain Beele and I make history. One of you is writing this down, right?”

  “That’s why we’ve got cameras. So that we don’t have to write things down,” said Terri.

  “True. Well, make sure you get my good side.”

  “We can’t see you.”

  He smirked. “Then you’re doing great.”

  The dark of the cavern ahead grew closer and closer until it finally consumed them. The dusty, icy wind now only roared behind them. The light on the sphere-shaped camera at the head of the rover turned on automatically to light the way, as did its autopilot systems, which Shauna trusted in for the most part, only guiding the craft occasionally. She felt calm, feeling the warmth of the spacesuit and the blow of her breath in the helmet. The cavern was just wide enough to let them inside.

  Boulders had fallen and nearly trapped this place away, leaving space enough for the rover to snake its way through across a floor of gray sand, bending on two separate sets of hinges for its three sections.

  “We are inside the cave. You getting all this?” said Shauna.

  Rosalyn’s voice came to them. “Looks like a tight squeeze.”

  The ceiling was taller than it was wide, probably twenty-five feet high or so, where there was a ceiling that looked smooth. Very smooth. Like…cement.

  “There’s something really…clean about this tunnel…” she started as she narrowed her eyes, but trailed off. She stared forward again. The light on the rover pointed ahead with a wide spread at a forty-five degree angle, illuminating a path that was starting to open outward into something.

  “Holy crap,” said Randy from the Bridge.

  The ceiling dipped a little lower twenty feet ahead of them in a wide-open section stretching from left to right, supported by what were, unmistakably, columns. Rippled columns with weathered edges that twisted upwards about fifteen or twenty feet in a chaotic, yet expertly-crafted fashion. They weren’t singular shafts, but instead separated into a spread of five or six individual poles of various widths, branching out further and further as they reached to a cement floor, like the strings on a harp. Yet it looked utterly bizarre, unlike any sort of structure they had seen before.

  A stunned silence came over everyone.

  “It’s a hallway,” Randy said, stating the obvious.

  Yet it was so hard to grasp that the obvious did need to be stated. A structure…built on an empty minor planet. This was something no human eye had ever seen before. But the rover made no notice of the discovery, rumbling ignorantly, fearlessly onward.

  “Just what are we looking at here?” asked Terri.

  “I—I don’t know,” stammered Shauna.

  “FAER said no humans have ever been here before…”

  “And we’re not looking at human structures,” breathed Sam in astonishment, completing Terri’s thought.

  There was an uncomfortable pause, and Shauna felt her breathing grow more rapid as she looked around at the passing columns. They had not come expecting this.

  “Captain Beele,” said Rosalyn, her voice betraying some anxiety, “do you want to continue going forward or regroup and do more tests? It’s your call.”

  “See if the rover’s picked up anything,” Sam suggested.

  Shauna brought the rover to a stop and tinkered with buttons on the panel in front of her for a long minute. “The…scanners aren’t picking up anything new,” she said eventually, trying to contain and manage the storm of thoughts in her head.

  Sam thought on that. A part of him wished the sensor had found something. Rising in him was a desire to explore. For a moment he didn’t just want to get his money and get home and buy more beer.

  He marveled as he said quietly, “We’re the first people ever to lay eyes on anything like this.”

  That same thirst started to well up in Shauna. She wasn’t the captain of an explorer’s vessel, per se—their job was to do simple mining operations and give FAER pointers on what places might make good mining sites, or even a possible mining colony—but she was the captain of the Novara. If this venture was to suddenly turn into an exploratory expedition on the spot, it was her decision to make, provided she felt that it was a decision her superiors would sanction after the fact when she contacted them later. When she weighed that in her mind, she recognized that FAER’s mission statements, although bold and lofty, were really more financially based than anything else. Their mining branch was their most profitable and therefore most focused-upon, while their exploratory branch was more home-research based, rarely granted the funding to go on expeditions like this one. But they were already here, she reasoned; the money was already spent, so why not explore it? Not to mention the fact that what they were discovering was so remarkable that she would be hard-pressed to believe any of her superiors would balk at a decision to go onward.

  “We’re gonna keep going,” she finally said. “See what we find.”

  Back on the Bridge, three stunned faces were glued to their individual screens. They heard the voices of Al and Mitchell from the engine room asking what was going on, but it barely registered in their minds.

  “Hellooo? Can someone tell us what they’re seeing, please?” repeated Mitchell.

  With eyes still wide, Rosalyn cleared her throat and got the words out. “I-it’s a structure of some kind. There are a number of columns. We can only assume this was constructed by something.”

  She heard slow breathing on the other end. Everyone was still, processing those words.
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  “What in the hell have we found?” Terri whispered.

  This was monumental. But it was no time for a stupor. Rosalyn saw something on the monitor. She straightened up in her chair and said, “Shauna, before you move on, can you angle the camera up and to the right?”

  The rover halted. Shauna pushed another lever to turn the camera, swinging it up so the ceiling near one of the columns would be lit. There was something dripping from a sizable crack in the stone.

  “Liquid?” said Randy. “How is that possible?”

  Sam stared at it with doubtful eyes. “Check the temperature,” he said to the Bridge.

  Immediately Randy tapped away at his keyboard, running a test on the current temperature sensed by the rover. Everyone waited with bated breath, even though the answer was already right in front of them.

  “Just above freezing,” he finally said, sitting up and resting his bearded chin on his palm, bewildered. “Three degrees Celsius.”

  “So the temperature in this…structure…is higher than outside by what, a hundred degrees Fahrenheit?” Terri said with disbelief, running hands through her cornrow braids. She continued nervously, “What is going on here?”

  A moment of collective uncertainty passed.

  “Should we stop and tell FAER about this?” Mitchell asked slowly and uncomfortably over the comm set.

  “It’s probably some kind of volcanic effect,” Rosalyn pointed out calmly. “We don’t know exactly what’s ahead, but we’re going to find out and handle it and report back once we have, just like we always do.”

  In the cavern, Shauna mentally thanked Rosalyn. The woman had a gift for candor. And she was right—there were always explanations for the strange and the unknown.

  With that driving her, she turned the camera straight ahead again and forged onward, the surreal sensation of what they were seeing nearly overcoming her.

  Underneath the ceiling held up by the columns, the floor was scattered with debris. Piles of boulders rose nearly halfway to the damaged ceiling in spots, and there were some lifeless, gray-yet-glassy objects strewn about that weren’t identifiable but seemed like they must have been artificial.