Mission Mars

by Janet L. Cannon

  I place the scissors, needle, forceps and clamp in the sterilisation solution. I collect the birth remains in a compost bucket. I wipe the surfaces, twice, just as we practiced. Then, I refill the syringe with morphine.

  My knees liquefy. I sink to the floor. The blanket wrapped body seems to float into my arms. I place the full syringe on the floor. One last chorus, one last Home Among the Gum Tree, whispers past my salty lips. I kiss the forehead where wrinkles arch over eyebrows.

  Beside us, a raspy breath catches in Astrid’s throat and she coughs. It is not long before drool pools in the crease of her lip, but my trance has been broken.

  I grab the syringe. Metal to new flesh. Minus one.

  Exhausted and undone, I arrange myself on the floor. No longer sucking, the tiny lips fall away from my breast, cold and still. Astrid’s back curls into mine, warm and vibrating with breath. My heart beats. Blood circulates. My lungs expand and contract. I meet the basic requirements for life. It is all I need to survive. Exhausted, I close my eyes and rest.

  HELL’S DEEP

  Lloyd Vancil

  We had only been on Mars twenty-four hours when the first disaster struck. Rienholt was on the command-deck, Isabella, Pank, and I were on the surface. Isabella and Pank were running up the habitat, and I was deploying the mining equipment, when the sand under one of the lander’s strut pads shifted. Strut number four sank into the ground. As the sand under number four shifted, the lander, twenty-five meters of command-deck and living space atop twenty-five meters of hypergolic fuel and rocket motors shifted and began to lean.

  Thank our good luck that Rienholt was near the control board. If he hadn’t caught it, the lander would have fallen over. The explosion of ruptured fuel tanks would have turned us all into confetti, but his pilot’s reflexes kicked in. He fired the maneuvering jets and the cable-stay system. The jets roared in the thin Martian atmosphere, a whistling scream that was piercing even through my surface gear. Then the four cable-stays flashed out and their auger tips buried themselves in the ground. The robotic augers burrowed until they were anchored deep enough to keep the lander pointed toward the Martian sky. The cables snapped and sang as they pulled the lander’s nose back to vertical.

  The jets stopped firing with a pop that made me look up at the ports. I didn’t like that popping noise. A wisp of grey smoke floated away on the breeze.

  I began to breathe again when Rienholt said, “All systems clear.”

  “Schedule: add an additional maneuvering system inspection,” I told the computer and set my concern aside.

  “What’s up, Mac?” Rienholt asked.

  “The jet’s popped when you shut them down. They shouldn’t do that. Good catch, by the way,” I added.

  “Thanks. I happened to be looking at the right read-out. Why did number four start sinking? I can’t see it from up here.”

  “I’m trying to figure that out. Standby.”

  I walked over toward strut four. I needed a better vantage point to figure out what exactly caused the lander to shift—other than soft sand.

  “Merde!” Isabella, our metallurgist, cursed in French.

  “Isabella?” Rienholt and I both asked at the same time.

  “I nearly got clipped by the hatch. What was that?”

  “I’m trying to figure it out,” I reminded them. What I hadn’t known was that Isabella was coming out onto the ladder when the lander started to shift. She was stepping through the hatch when the door swung shut with a clang, barely missing her leg. I didn’t want to consider what could have happened if the door had closed on her leg. If it had, and her surface gear failed, Isabella would have lain in a grave on Mars years before she planned.

  As the cable-stay system hauled the Lander back to vertical, the other three pads sank further into the surface. I saw the sand under the fourth pad shift again, and then a dimple appeared in the surface where pad number four had been resting. The dimple deepened and grew. Sand streamed from the edges as the dimple became a cone-shaped sinkhole. Sand and small stones rolled down toward the center, where they vanished like sand in an hourglass. The depression grew deeper and wider; then it began to lengthen. It grew to nearly three meters long, and then stopped lengthening, but it kept getting deeper and wider. When it reached a couple of meters across, the sand-flow slowed.

  At the bottom of the depression, a ragged hole in dark, volcanic rock appeared. The dust, released by the sands as they slid towards the hole, didn’t rise in a cloud as it should. There’s negative pressure down there, I thought.

  “We’ve landed on a lava tube,” I reported. “The weight of the lander caused a cave-in. There’s nothing under pad four but air. The hole in the tube is about thirty centimeters wide and twice that long. The surface depression is much larger. I don’t dare get any closer to the area. I don’t want to know how big that tube is.”

  “Do you think we need to reposition the lander?” Isabella asked.

  “Can’t with the cable-stays out, and the lift-off pressure might drop the whole area into that tube,” Rienholt said.

  “Mac, I don’t blame ya,” Pank, our roboticist quipped. She is skinny, plain, and blond, but smart. Pankratii ‘Pank’ Escobar took care of the machines that did a lot of the physical work. She was also responsible for recording and reporting all of our geologic investigations and metal discoveries—an Earth Corps condition of our surface lease. “I’ll get a crawler on a tether down there, so if it tumbles in we can retrieve it.” She had four robot crawlers intended for investigating dangerous places.

  “Before you go looking for Martians, Pank,” I said, “let’s get the rest of the habitat equipment out of the cargo module. Then we’ll get the habitat’s compressors started. After that….” Pank didn’t let me finish.

  “If the tube is big enough, we can move in. It would be better than a surface shelter, even after we cover it.” Pank said. The plan called for an inflatable habitat covered in Martian soil mixed with resin.

  “We were told that Lunae Planum doesn’t have the geology for lava tubes.” Yet, here we have one, I thought. “Look, we have the equipment to set up a surface shelter. Once the frame is inflated and the resin cures, we will bury it,” I replied. This was an old discussion with Pank. One I was tired of having. I could see her, about twenty meters away, standing next to a crate she had pulled from the cargo module.

  “You’ve seen the test results, Pank. On Earth, the bare hab, inflated, cured, and secured to the surface with tie-downs, survived hurricane winds. Covering it gives us the shielding we need, and covering the domed rectangle shape with half a meter of dirt mixed with resin makes it safer than a hole in the ground—one that might collapse like that tube just did.

  Pank gave a lazy wave and got back to unpacking whatever piece of equipment her list said was next. She just won’t give it up, I thought.

  My task was to deploy the nano-miners. I had twenty spears, Selectable Precision Extraction Assembly Regulators, to deploy. I stopped watching the sand fall into the hole. Each SPEAR contains and manages a couple billion nanometer scale machines. The nano-bots collect the molecules that the system is set to.

  I sat the first SPEAR down on a flat spot and pressed the button on the top to activate it. The tube separated into two sections and telescoped up to its working two-meter height, while an auger in the base of the SPEAR dug into the ground to provide stability. The super conductor magnets along the rod pulsed, and a magnetic field unfolded around it. I backed out of the field. The lower part of the spear opened, and golden “nano-dust” spilled out onto the ground. I set the mag field to maximum area and adjusted the collection settings for gold, silver, and iridium—iridium being the ‘cash cow’ of this mining expedition.

  “First SPEAR deployed. Computer, access and monitor,” I ordered. The machine beeped to let me know it understood.

  A few seconds later the computer announced, “Connected—SPEAR one nominal.”

  I expected it would take days to collect enough
material to see. Nano mining is not the fastest process in the universe.

  “Our clock starts now,” Pank said. I could hear the smile. We had a wager over how long it would take the first iridium crystals to be visible to the naked eye. She thought it would take a day or two. I thought a week might not be long enough.

  Nineteen SPEARs later, I walked back by the first spot. At maximum magnification, I could see a tiny iridium crystal growing in the center of the ore tray as the nano-bots assembled it. It was gorgeous, pure black iridium covered with golden veins of nano-bots crawling over it.

  The hab was nearly fully inflated so I stepped into the airlock and started the airlock cycle while I used the vacuum to clean the dust off my gear. Inflated, the habitat is a rectangular structure with short vertical walls and a domed roof. It has rigid airlock assembly at one end and an equipment bay at the other. When it is completely set up it will look like an oblong hill with antennas and vents sticking up from its crest.

  Inside the hab Isabella, Pank, and Rienholt, in shirtsleeves, each worked on their assigned tasks around the work bench.

  Pank was assembling one of her explorer robot crawlers. Rienholt was sorting rations, and Isabella was assembling our radio equipment. I leaned on the bench and watched the material between the roof ribs ripple as the atmosphere regulator worked to bring the pressure in our habitat up to spec.

  “The miners already have a detectable crystal of iridium growing on one of the trays,” I said. They all looked up. “About three microns across, just visible at high magnification.”

  “Sweet!” Rienholt said.

  Pank grinned, Isabella, stepped over, wrapped her arms around my neck, and gave me a big kiss, which I returned with enthusiasm.

  “Isabella, I would love to keep doing that, but we are on a schedule,” I said, grinning. Isabella stepped back, “Slave driver,” she said with a mock pout and a bedroom smile. Pank looked up from the little robot and gave me a wink. Rienholt smirked.

  I sat down to pop off my left prosthesis so I could look at the stump of my lower leg. I didn’t see anything wrong, but the pain was mixed with an itch that was driving me a crazy. I rubbed my stump vigorously. Ever since I lost my lower legs to a wire mine during the New York Intifada of 2028, I’d had to wear prosthetic legs and feet — and the moniker “stumper.” Earth Corps preferred stumpers. It cost less to lift us into orbit.

  Isabella looked over and raised a questioning eyebrow. “Something wrong, Mac?”

  I shook my head. “Just a fold in the sock, I think.” I said, as I pulled the sock and the leg back into place.

  At the supper table that night, we discussed the tasks on the schedule for the next day.

  “We need to set aside the schedule to explore that tube,” I said after each of our lists had been reviewed. Pank nodded and grinned.

  “It’s a good idea. We might have to move cargo and the Hab,” Isabella agreed.

  We weren’t a military outfit, and, since we were all cross-trained within a hair’s breadth of boredom, we often just agreed without votes and consensus exercises. We each had daily inspections to carry out that could not be put off or ignored so we decided to let Pank explore after we finished our morning chores.

  Then we retired to our own rooms, each of us too tired to think of anything but sleep.

  The next morning we found gleaming crystals of iridium, gold, and silver growing in all twenty trays. The computer reported that the nano-bots were still finding iridium at a depth of three to five centimeters.

  Pank had her little robot crawler, christened Dante, attached to a fiber optic tether, and ready to descend into the hole under strut four before breakfast. After those chores we all retreated to the hab to watch the feed from Pank’s little guy.

  “Dante?” I asked.

  “He descends into the under world!” Isabella and Pank chorused. Rienholt snorted.

  As the newly christened Dante made its way down the slope under strut four, sand was continuously sucked into the hole at the bottom.

  As more sand disappeared into the hole, dust from the sand-fall was being sucked into the hole, too. “Negative pressure down there. I wonder why,” I mused.

  Once the crawler reached the bottom of the pit, it crawled out onto the dark surface that formed the roof of the tube.

  “I’m sending Dante in to find out,” Pank said as the image of the hole on-screen grew and then darkness filled the monitor as the robot tipped over into it. Lights on the robot snapped on and we had our first glimpse of the Martian underground.

  The lights showed a dizzying drop and a pile of red sand in the bottom of the space. Pank swiveled the lights and camera around. We could just make out, far below, that the bottom of the tube was flat. The roof arched away to vanish in the gloom. The walls were too far away to see.

  “Echo ping,” Pank announced as she sent the command. Dante emitted a string of five sharp beeps, waited, and then banged out five more every few seconds. Each time it waited longer between pings. Each ping updated a 3D model on the computer screen.

  “Our camp, the lander, and our mine, everything, is sitting on top of the largest lava tube yet discovered. Our entire enterprise could vanish into a subsidence crater like those on the flanks and lava fields of nearly every volcano on Mars,” Pank said. Her voice was little more than a whisper.

  The 3D map showed a cavern more than forty meters across, and nearly that from floor to roof. There were no ends in either direction along the tube beyond five hundred meters.

  “That’s a big hole. Down we go,” Pank said. She lowered Dante to the pile of sand that had come down from the hole in the roof of the tube. It reached the bottom of the pile and paused. “Which way?” Pank asked.

  “Left,” Rienholt said.

  “Either,” I said. Isabella shrugged; her eyes were glued to the computer.

  Pank turned Dante left and set it trundling up the tube. The scene the little robot sent back from its camera was a wide flat surface that vanished into the dark ahead. Far off to the left and right, the walls of the tube reflected dim, rippling waves of light.

  “How much fiber optic cable do you have in that spool?” I asked.

  “Three kilometers, Mac.”

  “Can you get another sonogram?”

  Pank typed a command and the beeping started again. “If we get to 3k and haven’t found something interesting, I can detach the transmitter and roll on for another kilometer on radio control,” Pank said.

  “Look at that.” Rienholt said, wonder in his voice.

  On the map the sonar displayed a vertical wall that seemed to fill the tunnel.

  “What is it?” Isabella asked.

  “Whatever it is, it’s about three hundred meters ahead.”

  “The lights should let us see it in a couple of minutes,” Pank added.

  We fell silent and watched the video monitor. Two minutes passed. I glanced at the range numbers on the sonar display. “It’s still over a hundred meters away.” While I watched the numbers spool down to ninety, light on the video monitor began to bounce back to the camera as flashes and sparkles.

  “What the…?”

  “Looks like diamonds,” Isabella whispered.

  I saw a glimmer of light run up a column that looked like black glass. Pank stopped Dante and panned the camera left and right, then up toward the ceiling of the tube. A jumble of columns filled the tube, floor to ceiling and wall-to-wall. Large, glassy, crystals grew out of the floor and met meters, or tens of meters up. Where two or three crystals met, a large spiky ball made of smaller crystals, like an explosion frozen in time, marked their joints. More crystals shot off across the wall to meet other crystals from other junctions. The crystal columns were layered to form a solid wall of obsidian-colored glass. As Pank panned the camera back to the left, I thought I saw something that didn’t belong.

  “Pank, is the Dante on the centerline of the tunnel?”

  She sent out another series of pings.

 
“No, I’ve drifted about five meters right of centerline. Why?”

  “Pan back to the left.”

  She moved the camera until I said stop.

  “What’s that?” I asked pointing to something that looked remarkably like a piece of structural metal.

  Pank shook her head and moved the robot five meters to its left, and then pointed its camera at the object.

  “What the…?” I said.

  “I don’t believe…” Rienholt said.

  “Can’t be…” Isabella whispered.

  “I knew it! Those rat bastards!” Pank shouted, overriding the rest of us.

  She slapped switches on the monitor and shut the video feed down. “Shit. Shit, shit, shit.” She repeated as she collapsed into a chair. “We’re dead. It went out over the comm channel. Damn it!”

  I looked at Rienholt and Isabella; they both looked as bewildered as I felt.

  “Pank, calm down. Start at the beginning and explain what’s going on.”

  She looked at me with pity in her eyes.

  “Might as well. I’ve killed us all any way. Be right back,” she said as got up and headed to her room. She returned in a few seconds, clutching the seventy-year-old vodka she brought as part of her personal allotment, along with four small, antique shot glasses. A few more seconds passed as she poured shots for each of us.

  She picked up her glass and held it to the light, admiring the golden light that filtered through the glasses and the vodka. “Prost!” she exclaimed and slammed down the ounce of golden lightning. We joined her. Then I said, “Spill it, Pank. What the hell’s the matter?”

  “Fifty years ago, and more,” she began without preamble, “the United States and the Soviet Union were very interested in Mars. Mars weirdness and human’s ability to see faces in patterns of light and shadow led some people to believe Mars was inhabited.”

  “Pareidolia,” Rienholt supplied.

  “Yes, pareidolia provided NASA and others the excuse they needed to conceal the possibility that someone had been, or might be, on Mars. Several conspiracy theories held that some governments had bases on Mars and the Moon. At the time, the idea that the United States had bases on other planets was laughable. That airlock is proof that the conspiracy buffs were not crazy. The video from Dante went out over the comm link with location meta data attached.” She grimaced and continued. Tears were gathering in her eyes.