They soon came to a drop-off that led down into a room that nearly made their jaws drop. The rover came to a stop near the edge, the light pointed outward into a profound abyss.
“Can you get a night-visual on this?” Shauna asked.
Rosalyn hit a few buttons and turned on the camera’s night vision setting. With it they could better see the gargantuan room that Sam and Shauna had stumbled upon. It extended outward for hundreds of feet, easily.
“It’s enormous,” marveled Rosalyn. “Most of this mountain must be…hollow.”
They stood there in sheer awe for a long minute, taking it all in. Although most of the room was shaped like a large oval, they could see that the room actually extended beyond the far side to parts hidden from their sight. There seemed to be four levels of the main, oval-shaped part of this colossal room. As far as they could tell, they stood on the second-highest level, and each of the levels, from lowest to highest, widened out further and further in size. Multiple huge, structural support beams stretched down diagonally from the room’s corners where ceiling met wall all the way to the room’s base, each one streaked with patterns of intricate lines and ripples, resting against the edges of each of the four floors.
All the way down at the bottom of the room they could spot some depressions and some elevations of land, pathways crossing under and over one another, and long, empty spaces of grayish floor. In the low light, it was tough to make out many clear details. Though all primarily a sight for the eyes, they could hear faint echoes as well: wind shifting, like the place was stretching in response to someone’s entry for the first time in an unknown count of years. Shauna rolled the rover down a rocky slope and near to the edge of the level, then turned to their left, where she saw the nearest of the huge cylindrical support beams, made of some metallic-looking material, stretching down from the colossal room’s corners, more than twenty-five feet in diameter. At the edge of this floor, Shauna saw a ramp leading up to the mighty beam and merging smoothly into it. It appeared that the beams were used for movement between levels as well as supporting the weight of the ceiling, in lieu of a normal staircase. She started the rover up the little ramp, moving at a controlled speed, and came atop the slightly-rounded surface of the structural beam. Down the beam they went, moving more carefully, the direction arbitrary. The panels of metal that made up the beam didn’t look pieced and welded together so much as they looked…grown together. As if it had been sculpted from a single mold. Sam was fascinated and unsettled by it. Still, both of them were caught up with sheer wonder.
Though they were in large spacesuits, the air still somehow felt more humid and more used than outside had, drenched in dusty matter suspended in air. It was tremendously bizarre and awe-inspiring all at once, and no one could really think of a single thing to say.
Rosalyn felt her uncertainty mostly overpowered by wonder. There was nothing that compared to that feeling. Nothing in the world. It was both strange and exhilarating.
Shauna and Sam reached the next level below them and decided to explore it. The rover rumbled across the floor through another hallway that looked exactly the same as the last one, only less marked by debris. The entire floor was made out of a similar, off-looking, metal material as the support beam. A few pieces of a column had broken away, and there were raised, rectangular boxes of metal in the center of the hallway that held some tightly packed material in them.
They kept on moving.
“What are we looking for?” Sam asked in wonderment.
Shauna had no answer for him. They needed to get further down so they could judge where to go. Maybe if she kept looking, Shauna would spot another ramp.
The walls, the floor, everything was like a skeleton. There were more ripples on the walls here, strange patterns that seemed more a byproduct of whatever method of construction was used than an intentional design choice. Yet there were some parts that looked etched into with abstract designs that might have been meant to represent something once. But who could tell?
On the left they suddenly spotted a gaping, flat, downward, ramp-like stairwell that was a little bit less steep than the structural beam had been. Shauna set the rover on course for it and it made its way down. It all looked safe enough.
It curved back around and led down to a lower floor—not one of the main four floors of the colossal room; this stairway hadn’t gone nearly that far down. It must have been a smaller, sectioned-off place. Here, the ceiling was lower and it wasn’t a wide-open hallway stretching endlessly side to side, but rather a small hallway with large, empty doorways at the walls. This place looked even darker than the last. That one ghostly light was the best they had, their helmet lights being useful, but less powerful.
As the rover rolled onward past the two wide-open, tall doorways, Shauna stared at the floor. There were a lot of odd-looking rocks there. Very uniform in size, close to the size of a volleyball, and flatter. Not rocks at all, actually, but…shells? They broke underneath the vehicle’s sturdy, treaded wheels with a sound that was as much squishy as it was crunchy. The pile grew higher and higher. The treads struggled a bit but managed to get through it all, slogging along as if in a bog. They passed three more open doorways on either side along their way, but couldn’t tell what lay beyond them.
They approached a very sudden drop-off in the darkness, one Shauna may not have caught herself if the automatic brakes hadn’t kicked in.
“The floor’s broken here… Maybe by some kind of acidic material,” she said, noticing exposed sections of rock that appeared eaten into. The drop was not far at all, in fact just a few feet down revealing some large tubes running along, with the appearance of translucent bone. Everything was drenched with a mucky-looking, purplish liquid.
“Maybe we should go back to the large room,” Sam questioned.
Shauna reluctantly voiced her agreement. None of them were experts at this kind of exploration, and she didn’t want to waste their time or possibly head somewhere dangerous.
The rover turned around and went back. It seemed to struggle more and more, its pace slowing. After ten seconds it stopped completely. A mechanical whirr noise entered their ears. The rover’s treaded wheels spun in place.
It was stuck.
Alarmed, Sam said, “What’s going on?”
Shauna angled the light around for a minute and discovered two things. First, the floor all the way up to the drop-off was lightly covered with that dark violet liquid/gel-like material she’d seen in the drop-off. Second, that material had painted the treads, and many of the shells in huge piles that they were passing back over were now stuck to the wheels, most of them cracked and in pieces.
“We’ve got a problem,” she said, unbuckling her seatbelt and jumping off of the rover.
Sam followed suit, and they both inspected the treaded wheels. All three of the treaded sections, thick as they were, had gotten so thickly covered with shells and shards of shells that they had no traction and were getting jammed. Pushing the pedal more when they got stuck had only furthered the problem, breaking the shells and exposing more of their fleshy interior, spreading it all over the treads. The rover couldn’t get anywhere in this state.
On the Bridge, Randy, Terri, and Rosalyn were staring at their screens in confusion; the video had been growing grainier the further down they went, and now it was impossible to see what was happening; there was only static both in video and audio.
“Captain Beele, we’ve lost our eyes. Can you fill us in, please?” Rosalyn said with arms crossed.
“Our ———— starting t—— like cotton c—dy wheels,” came in Sam. “Lots of organic ————ck to the whe—.”
Rosalyn gritted her teeth a bit at the audio static. Something stuck to the wheels? “Do you have any blow-torches, or a solvent of some kind?”
“You’re brea—ng up,” Shauna said, static building and twitching. “—rd—— we — got — t—ch——of—————”
Terri and Rosalyn gave each other side
ways glances in their seats. Amid colorful and brightly-lit buttons, beeping alerts, and digital keyboards on computer stations all around the Bridge, their screens all showed nothing but static.
“Damn it,” breathed Randy.
“Did we lose them?” Mitchell asked on their comm sets.
Terri sighed. “They’ve gone pretty far underground.”
“We’ve gone underground before,” Randy grumbled.
“Not this far, with this much interference, I guess.”
“Keep trying,” ordered Rosalyn.
A few minutes passed as the three of them on the Bridge worked to restore their connection and contact Sam and Shauna, with no success.
Randy rubbed his face with his hands, pushing up his glasses. “Well, this isn’t good. Do we go after them?” His voice showed more frustration than anxiety.
Al’s voice came on. “You might get lost.”
“We won’t get lost,” Rosalyn countered. “As long as we follow their footsteps, we’ll at least get close enough to pick up their signal again.”
The others nodded their heads. “And they’ll stay close to the rover. Won’t be a problem,” said Terri more calmly than she looked, albeit somewhat annoyed. Setbacks like this could dramatically lessen the productivity of the trip.
“Alright, who’s going?” said Randy, his eyelids low.
Rosalyn nodded. “Let’s us three go, and Al and Mitch can stay to watch the ship. Does that work for you guys?”
Al answered, “Uh…yeah, fine with us.”
“Okay.” She let out a sigh, steeling herself for what was to come as they would enter this strange new place. “Let’s go.”
3
Shauna shut off the rover light and let the beams of their helmets light their way in the constricted, shell-filled tunnel. They would need the rover’s battery for driving back once they scraped all the wheels clean of the sticky, fleshy shells.
She and Sam had checked through all their packed supplies for something to help them get the treads clean as efficiently as possible, and had come up with a couple of shovels and a metal heater rod. Sam was now crouched down beside Shauna, scraping away with a shovel at the fleshy parts of the scores of shells stuck to the treads while she tapped a button on the one-and-a-half-foot long heater rod and waited as it gradually turned bright red. She stepped carefully on piles of clinking dark shells.
“They’re probably coming for us at this point, right?” he said with a pant. “Wanna test the signal again?”
“Yeah,” she answered, feeling much of her patience supply exhausted. Irritation nagged at her constantly.
She switched her headset with a dial on her collar to reach out to the other headsets. “This is Captain Beele. Can anyone hear me?”
All was silence but the sound of their slow breathing and the scraping of Sam’s shovel on rubber.
“We’ll get it,” said Sam.
She nodded. The red glow from the heated rod was illuminating the hallway, seeping through and across every purple-liquid-soaked shell. She knelt down to the floor and pushed it against one of the shell-covered treads, just left of the one Sam was working on. It singed the strange, dead-looking flesh of the shells like a hot knife through butter. Sam looked over and grinned.
“That works a lot better than the shovel. I think… Wait, wait, stop—you’re burning the tire!”
She jerked it back. Faint smoke was rising from the tire. It was starting to look like a warmed Popsicle.
But that shouldn’t have been possible—the treads were meant to withstand temperatures far hotter than what the rod was capable of producing.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me. …Sam, did you get any of the shells off of your section?” she asked.
“Halfway off, yes.” He shined his helmet light on where he had been working on. Upon closer inspection, from the tiny space of exposed tread rubber they could see between half-removed shells, the same effect was happening on Shauna’s wheel.
“Whoa, what the heck’s going on?” he said with alarm.
Shauna crouched up close to it, nearly pressing the glass of her helmet to the rubber. She could make out here, as she had on the other tread section, a slight sheen of violet all around the broken shells and seeping onto the treads. The colorful liquid she had seen in the sticky pool they had driven over just beyond the piles. Shining her light over to the liquid pool, she noticed that it was dripping down the edge of the large hole in the hallway floor.
Sam looked at her, recognizing that pieces were being put together in her head, but not quite figuring out what they were yet himself.
She looked back toward the way they had entered, then forward again.
“This hallway is slanted,” she noticed aloud, “just the slightest bit.”
Sam looked around as she had, following her mental process two steps behind.
Turning off the metal rod, she reached a gloved hand down and picked up one of the unbroken shells at her feet to examine closely. It was a circular shell, like a flattened sphere with a spiral design on either of the flat ends. One side of the rounded edge was the hole wherein lay a mass of moist, pale-looking flesh. It didn’t quite look dead, but it didn’t seem very lively either. She retrieved a small two-pronged fork from their supplies and poked it into the dead shell’s flesh, pressing as deep as she could get it. The flesh was soft and weak, tearing apart at the pressure. It made a grotesque, squishy sound as she did.
She pulled it out, dropped the shell, and held the prod up where she and Sam could see it illuminated. It was covered in violet, sticky liquid. After a few moments, it began smoking faintly.
Realization hit them both, and they turned to the rover and saw the treads and wheels all melting down lower and lower.
With a cry of shock, they leapt into action. Hectically they tried a few solutions—pulling, then pushing the rover; contacting their fellow crewmates again; and sweeping the shells away from the floor with their booted feet. The bare floor underneath the shells was covered with the same sticky, purplish liquid. Only the unbroken shells were clear of it, at least on the outside.
Shauna shouted into her comm set, “Rosalyn! Randy! Terri! ANSWER, DAMN IT!”
She nearly lost her balance and was forced to stomp squarely on one of the shells. Looking down underneath her boot, she saw purple liquid pouring out of the creature’s shattered surface. With a yelp she wiped the steaming acid onto another shell.
Sam looked at the hole eaten through the hallway floor, which the purple liquid was flowing down into. It was growing larger—creeping closer to them.
“Forget it! RUN!” he yelled as he broke into a dash.
Shauna’s heart raced. The rover was sinking. They couldn’t leave it here. That would be tens of millions of dollars on their heads. But they couldn’t keep standing here in the acid. She took a metal cable from the rover, attached it firmly to the front of the vehicle, and started running behind Sam, letting the bundled cable spool out from her hand as she went. They ran fast, stepping as lightly as they could over the shells. When they finally reached the bare section of the floor, they stopped to catch their breath, sitting down and lifting up their heels to check how much of the acid had gotten on them. Thankfully, it was a minimal amount, probably not enough to get through the entire boot, although wisps of smoke were trailing from them.
Shauna stood up again and started pulling on the cable. “Come on!” she yelled to Sam. He joined her, heaving as hard as he could. They kept tugging for a few minutes, unable to see far enough to tell whether they were making progress.
They felt a powerful tug and lurched forward, falling onto their faces. The sound of something crumbling echoed through the hall, and the rover tumbled and crashed down with a horrifying series of cracks and bangs and crunches. The spool of cable burst out of Sam and Shauna’s hands and retracted for several yards before it came to a stop. The echoes died down slowly, and the two of them were left dazed and frozen.
Finally a curse esca
ped Sam’s lips and he rested his gloved hands on his knees, eyes wide and staring into the darkness. “I can’t believe that just happened.”
Shauna felt sweat on her brow, and she almost couldn’t breathe. The doubts she had pushed away just thirty minutes ago or so came back tenfold. If it was going to cost the company multiple tens of millions of dollars in wrecked equipment for Shauna’s crew to bumble around in here, maybe it would be of better worth to FAER to back off and just let them know that there was something to explore here so they could get someone else on it.
“We need to go back…and rethink this,” she said to Sam, trying to calm her distress.
“I’m in favor of that. This place is…not right.” He looked deeply disturbed.
They waited a few minutes, catching their breath, before she tapped her collar button again. “Crew of the Novara, this is Shauna Beele. Can you hear us?”
There was nothing.
Sam shook his head. “…Slowpokes.”
Shauna sighed. “I’m sure they’re coming for us. Can’t be too much longer. I want to wait here so we can all try to pull the rover back up and salvage what we can.”
Sam seemed less than happy about waiting, but he didn’t object. He got up and paced around for a moment.
“Well,” he said with a sigh, “since we’re down here, should we see what we can find?” He bit his lip.
Instantly Shauna replied, “Not if we find more of those acid-secreting shells.”
“For sure, for sure. It’s your call.”
“Don’t you want to get out of here?”
“Well…I don’t think we’re getting that rover back. I’m not opposed to trying and all, but I doubt it’ll work. And FAER is… You know, they’re not gonna be happy. Maybe if we bring something valuable back, we can justify this trip.”
She considered his words for several long moments. “So long as we’re careful and stay close by,” she answered finally, “I’m alright with it. But if we see anything out of the ordinary—like these damned shells—we need to head back here.”
Seclurm: Devolution Page 4
