by Terry Mixon
And speaking of Mars, he needed to decide what they were going to do when they got there. Admittedly, his heart wasn’t into it. He was worried about Jess and his other people. Still, he had to put on a good show.
Obviously, they’d want to see what was at the area where the aliens had marked their map of Mars. And, it was certainly an obvious choice. Olympus Mons. The tallest place on the planet. A volcano so impressive that one couldn’t see the edge of the lava shield from the summit because of the curvature of the planet.
The resolution on the images he had were too low to tell what part of the mountain might be so important. The orbiting satellites had certainly mapped the entire planet thoroughly before NASA abandoned them.
Nothing jumped out as artificial. If it had, every alien contact nutjob would’ve been screaming. Of course, it turned out they were right after all.
Except for the probing. That was never right.
Honestly, without examining the possibilities on the mountain first hand, he’d be very nervous trying to land. Yet, the climb to check from ground level would be brutal, even at gravity roughly a third that of Earth.
The atmosphere was almost all carbon dioxide, and so thin that even the most impressive dust storm would be like standing in a light breeze. The temperature might get comfortable during the day, but it was astonishingly cold at night.
They had pressurized habitats for use down there. The engineers had planned well. They just hadn’t known they’d need to put them on the side of a mountain. There were plateaus that would be wide enough, if they could set a lifter down on them.
He called the bridge. Lindsay answered. “Yeah, boss?”
“You said you’d already launched some new satellites toward Mars. When will we get the fresh data from them?”
“Hang on.” She tapped her console. “It looks like they’re set to enter orbit in about an hour. We have six altogether. I think we’d only have left a couple in Mars orbit for longer term mapping, but they wanted enough to get a lot of details fast.”
“That makes sense,” he said, leaning back. “I’m looking at the data we have now. It’s pretty good. How much better is the new gear?”
Lindsay grinned. “You’ll like this. One of your father’s companies—the same one that builds the military jets—won the contract to provide the NSA and CIA with their latest generation spy satellites.
“The units we have are built to the same specifications, only bigger and with finer resolution. Since we didn’t have to launch them on a rocket, we weren’t constrained by size or aerodynamics. These things are long and wide, built for space.”
“That sounds good, but what does it translate to?”
“I have no idea. Maybe you can see a wart on a Martian’s butt. I’d ask Jess or Ray, but they’re probably asleep, now that they have an area they can pressurize. We’ll know soon enough.”
That was certainly true. “Put one of the satellites in geosynchronous orbit over Olympus Mons. I want to target it on the mountain for detailed shots of any area we like. That’s priority one.”
She nodded. “Will do. I’ll look at the current vectors and get things adjusted. For a lightweight like Mars, the geosynchronous orbit won’t be nearly as high as it is on Earth. That should make for even more detailed images.”
“That would be good. Get the rest mapping the planet in close detail. I want an interactive map that I can zoom down and see those proverbial Martian butts.”
“Roger that. It’ll probably take several days to get the equator done and start spreading toward the poles. We’ll have to put one bird in a polar orbit. Once things are going, I’ll have a better idea on how long this will take.”
“Sounds good. I’ll grab something to eat and join you shortly.”
He made his way down to the cafeteria closest to the bridge for breakfast. The temptation to stay locked up in his office working on this was strong, but the crew needed to see him regularly. To feel his confidence. That’s how leadership worked. Even when the leader felt out of his depth.
Harry spent more time there than he’d planned, but the crew was visibly more relaxed after some of them stopped to chat with him. They needed to feel as though everything was going to be okay. Even if they didn’t come right out and ask him about it.
Once he finished, he made his way to the bridge. Lindsay was looking at a globe of Mars on the screen. He stopped beside the pilot’s console.
“Is that live?”
“Relatively speaking. We’re not too far off, so the time delay is down to less than two minutes. That’s the image from the geosynchronous satellite over Olympus Mons. It performed just as expected and came online perfectly.”
Harry could see the massive mountain spread across the image. “What about the other birds?”
“They’re entering their orbits now. Basically, they’re in place, but we’re still tweaking the final details with the thrusters. The high-resolution images should be coming in soon.”
He found the mapping data on his console and examined the volcano. It was shaped like a circus tent spread across hundreds of kilometers. The edges rose from the surrounding surface by up to eight kilometers.
That gradually increased until the caldera was almost two dozen kilometers higher. The massive shield of lava was so heavy that it caused the crust to sag, creating an angular depression around its base almost two kilometers deep.
That was impressive.
It was so large that someone on the summit wouldn’t be able to see anything except for the volcano. And someone on the planet couldn’t take in the full picture of Olympus Mons, either. It was just too huge.
Harry drilled down as far as the image allowed him and discovered that even from the distance it was orbiting, the spy satellite could see a hell of a lot and in significantly more detail than he’d expected. He wouldn’t have been able to read a license plate on Earth, but he could have seen the make and model of the car.
Scanning the entire mountain was going to prove time consuming. He’d send the data back to his father and let him add people and computers to the job. It still might take them weeks to find what they were looking for.
“Virtually the entire volcano would make a good landing area,” Lindsay said. “The slope is only about 5º until you get to the central area. And there you could land inside the caldera. Though, fair warning, the atmospheric pressure up there is very thin, even for Mars.”
“How thin?”
“The surface of Mars is already about 1% of the pressure on Earth at sea level. Up there, it’s only 12% of Mars standard.”
He nodded. “Yeah, that’s pretty thin. I suppose we can forget about all those stories where we humans could get around on Mars with just additional oxygen.”
“No,” she said. “I think you can rule that right out.”
He brought the caldera up on his screen. There were several overlapping craters. “It does look solid. If we have to land an exploratory party, that might be the place to do it. How long since it was active?”
She checked her console. “My data entry for it says about 150 million years. I think we’re probably safe for the short term.”
He laughed. “And the long term. I doubt anything down there is still active.”
“I wouldn’t count on that. This entry says that the volcano might still be a going concern. It was created by a hotspot, like the one in Yellowstone. Only Mars doesn’t have moving tectonic plates, so it just sits down there.”
“How far down?”
“This says they think the magma chamber is about thirty-two kilometers under the caldera floor. The calderas are sixty to eighty kilometers across and 3.2 kilometers deep.” She looked at a different part of her console. “We’re getting our first low pass now, Harry. I’m targeting the caldera.”
The images started coming in and the computer quickly sorted them correctly. Now he could see a Martian’s butt. Or read a license plate. The resolution was good enough to see stones on the surface
of the caldera.
“I set the computer to scan the images for anything that seems unusual,” Lindsay said. “It came right back with something. I’m putting it on screen.”
An image of what looked like the caldera floor appeared. It was a section right up against the wall. Harry couldn’t quite make out what it was, but there was something there. A rock fall, maybe.
“Can we enhance any of the images?” he asked.
“Some. The software has some default settings for that. A trained person could probably do a better job, though.”
“Let’s start with what we can do ourselves. I think it might be a rock fall. I’d like to get a better look at it. It might mean we need to pick a different landing area.”
The section of the image in question popped up on the main screen. Lindsay highlighted it and the computer went to work.
Image enhancement had to do with colors, shadows, and sharpness. That whole business on the TV shows where they took grainy images and sharpened them so they could see things was bull. The detail had to be there to begin with. At least mostly.
The computer lightened parts of the image and it became clear he was looking at a large pile of rocks that had slid down from above.
Part of it was too regular, though. He could just make out something with the same basic outline as the rear of the crashed ship on Earth sticking out from under the pile.
It wasn’t an avalanche. It was a crash site.
Chapter Eleven
Jess woke, groggy and unsure of where she was. She sat up and blinked at the people moving around her. Ah. Now she remembered. She was in the area they’d pressurized on Freedom Express.
Getting the large compartment ready for occupation had taken long enough that everyone had to change the air supplies in their suits twice. They’d gotten things set up just in time. The suits were reaching their limits on storing bodily wastes. That would’ve been messy to clean up.
The large room had been for storage, they thought. At least there had been a few crates stacked off to one side. They were gone now, taken somewhere else to examine.
Harry had sent over equipment designed for field use on Mars, so it worked here, too. After a fashion.
The cots were designed to support a person in weak gravity, so they were a bit uncomfortable at a full G, but she’d slept on worse. The portable toilets worked well enough, as did the kitchen.
The room had plenty of space for all three dozen of them to stay in relative privacy. They’d hung a curtain between where the men and women slept. That was good enough.
They’d set aside one corner of the room for examining their finds and for the computers. Doctors Young and Powell would work there.
Jess rose to her feet and stretched. The water recycler was more than efficient enough to allow showers, thank God. She took one when her turn came up and then got dressed for the day. She’d slept more than twelve hours. She’d needed it.
She took her reconstituted breakfast over to where the restoration specialists were already hard at work.
“Morning, ladies. I hope you have good news for me.”
Rachel Powell looked up from her screen. “Some. The man watching the pilot’s console indicated we passed Jupiter’s orbit while you were sleeping. Congratulations on leading the first ship out of the inner system.”
“I don’t know if it counts when we don’t have a choice in the matter. What about the controls. Anything?”
The other woman shook her head. “The language is still a barrier. We need to find more translated works.”
Paulette Young gestured toward the table where she was working. “The crates they found in this room were filled with medieval manuscripts. We’re scanning them and preserving them as best we can.
“We hope there are translations on one of these systems. If we can just increase the sample size, I’m sure we’ll be able to make some kind of difference.”
“I didn’t think we had access to their computers,” Jess said.
The preservationist shrugged. “You’ll have to ask Ray about that. He seems to think he’s making progress.”
“I’ll check once I’ve made my rounds. Surely, these computers have some kind of useful data on them. We just have to find it. Any other interesting information?”
“We have piles of small equipment,” Rachel said. “Ray examined them and seemed interested in a few. Nothing big.”
Jess was disappointed, but not surprised. This was going to be a long haul. They’d be at their destination before they found anything useful, she suspected. She only hoped this thing came to a stop when it got there.
She finished her bland breakfast and headed for the airlock. They’d fitted some racks for the suits beside it and one of the techs was on hand to verify everything was good before anyone went into the vacuum.
Suiting up took about twenty minutes. Reaching the core another ten.
That’s what they’d decided to call the central chamber. The core. It was at the center of the comet, so that only made sense.
She found Ray Proudfoot at the main control console. He was looking at a screen that wasn’t familiar to her.
“Morning, Ray,” she said, peering past his shoulder. “What’s this?”
“I think I found the primary life support controls. The screen is split between an overview of all the systems, individual controls, and a map of the ship.”
“That sounds useful. What’s what?”
He pointed to an image of a stick figure standing on the floor. “This is the gravity controls, I think. When I touch it, I get a screen that has the entire globe on the left. I can touch that and it seems to select an area. I get bars I can move. I have someone in the area now. I was about to see if I was correct.”
“Well, don’t let me stop you.”
“We’re on channel six. Rex, you ready?”
The special ops scout answered him. “Ready. Try not to squish me to paste. The ladies don’t like paste.”
He’d stayed with Jess’ team to provide what security he could. She was grateful to have him.
Ray touched the bar with his knuckle and slid it down a little. “Anything?”
“Yeah. It does feel a little lighter.”
“Okay, I’m taking it all the way down,” Ray said. He slid the bar slowly to the side.
“Yep. I’m in zero-G. Give me a minute to get myself back into some kind of proper position before you crank it back up.”
“Roger that.”
Jess was impressed. That was the first ship’s system they’d manage to identify and control. “Good work, Ray. So, you can control single areas. What about the ship as a whole?”
“There’s this sphere at the top of the display. If I select it, all the areas light up. I didn’t want to screw with it right now, though. You ready to get heavy, Rex?”
“Ready.”
The chief engineer slid the bar back up to full. An icon that looked like a clock with one hand appeared beside it.
“That’s new,” Ray muttered. “How you doing, Rex?”
“Back at normal weight, I think.”
“Hang tight. I have something else I might want to test. Shout out if anything changes.”
“Roger.”
Ray touched the dial and it expanded. There was a solid line from the center of the dial to the twelve o’clock position. The grey fill came out to about three o’clock.
“I think this might let me take things up a bit more,” Ray said. “I’ll move this slowly.”
He touched the dial and dragged the line down to the six o’clock position. “How now brown cow?”
“Ooof. Heavy. I feel like I have a full pack on. Well, maybe a bit more. Possibly double my weight. How high does that thing go?”
“If the scale is true, four Gs.”
“Let me sit down for this. I don’t want to fall and crack my helmet. I’m ready.”
The engineer ran it all the way up. “Rex?”
“Man, I need to lose some weight
. Yeah, this could be about four times normal. I’d sure as hell have trouble walking.”
“Okay. I’m taking it back down to normal.”
Ray ran the dial back down to one G and a tap dismissed the dial to the background. “You good?”
“Yep,” Rex said. I’m back to my normal weight. Any idea how this crap works?”
“Not a clue. Stand by. I’m going to look at a few other screens.”
“Nice,” Jess said. “What other stuff do you have?”
The engineer left the gravity controls and went to a different screen. It seemed to show a lot of systems at a high level. Almost all were purple.
Three were orange. One had an icon that looked like a wave, one had a cloud, and the last had a symbol that resembled a thermometer, she thought.
“I wish we knew what the colors meant,” Ray said. “I’m betting orange means something bad, but I’m not sure about purple. Is that good or bad?”
She shrugged. “We’ll figure it out.”
“I think these two are air and water. This last one is temperature. The systems that someone shut down after murdering their friends.”
They’d recovered twenty-six bodies. The ones in the core had gone back over to Liberty Station. They’d laid the rest out in the area where the small ship parked.
“Well, then,” she said. “By all means let’s get the air turned back on.”
Ray selected what he thought was the air and she saw the bar was all the way at the bottom. He tried to draw it up, but the bar stubbornly refused to move.
“Maybe something in the system is still broken,” he said.
“Or maybe it’s because the area is still open to the rest of the ship,” she said. “Look at the globe.”
Rather than highlighting a single room like on the gravity screen, this time a fairly significant area on that deck was marked.
“That might be it,” Ray said. “Rex, I’m going to have you close some doors.”
It took almost half an hour to close off all access to the area. Then when Ray tried to move the controls, they worked.
“I’m hearing something,” Rex said. “I think air might be flowing into the area. One of your guys is here with an analyzer. He says the mix is good, but the pressure is light.”
