Fable Hill

by Christopher Uremovich

  “There’s a giant spider up there!” she shrieked.

  “A spider?” Renee puzzled.

  Roland walked over to where Keiko was standing and helped her down from the step stool. He grabbed his flashlight and peered inside the ventilation shaft. “Oh, yep, she’s right, big old spider,” he said, standing on his tip toes. With a long reach Roland grabbed the dinner plate-sized beast and revealed it to the crew.

  They all began to laugh hysterically at Keiko. She stood fuming in protest. “What the hell,” she said as laughter carried on.

  “It’s just a spiderbot, Keiko,” Roland said. He flicked its metal leg. “It must have died like the others.”

  “The others?! What is it?!” she said, feeling a bit silly now.

  “They’re spiderbots, they helped build this place. All the little screws and hard-to-reach areas, they constructed,” Roland said.

  “Pretty much anywhere a rover can’t go or reach,” Mia added.

  “I found a few on the floor in the medical dome. They are very interesting,” Renee said.

  Keiko walked over to Roland and snatched the small robot from his hands. The others poured back out of her room and continued their daily activities and tasks.

  •••

  “You two ready for your briefing?” Roland asked Frank and Mia.

  This was the first time Frank had been inside Roland’s captain’s room. It was much larger and roomier than the other living modules. Inside, Roland had a separate office, sectioned off by a blind.

  A small robot scurried along the aluminum floor, a relic of the past decade Roland had gotten operational again. Frank and Mia took their seats and faced Roland. Frank fiddled with his tablet computer, switching through the facility’s outdoor cameras. He zoomed in on Alexei who was busy lining up broken-down rovers.

  “Ok . . .” Roland said, folding his hands and letting out a tiresome sigh. He slouched forward on his desk and looked both astronauts in the eye. “Are you ready to be the first ones to travel by blimp around Mars?” he asked with peaked amusement.

  Frank flipped his tablet screen, showing Alexei towing a large plastic crate with the MEV. “Is that our blimp?” he smiled.

  “That’s the one, the Goza airship,” Roland said. “Amirah, display pipeline schematics please.” A projector displayed mission details on the wall of Roland’s makeshift office.

  “You two will leave in the morning. It’s a two hour, 106 kilometer journey to the crater’s edge. I have 20,000 meters of polyethylene piping that will accompany you. Now, it’s very important you do routine checks on the materials because there’s thermostatic insulation on the pipes that cannot get damaged, else passing water will freeze,” he said.

  “If I may?” Frank asked. “Why don’t we just drill down to the water table and get our water like you mentioned before? If Nagoya didn’t finish the pipeline, why should we expend the resources?” he pointed out.

  Roland took a second to formulate his response but was beat by Mia. “Because we don’t know if there is a water table below us, it’s all theory,” Mia replied.

  “Yeah but we could go check, right? There’s already a bore hole, let’s—” Frank went on, but was cut off by Mia, who in turn was cut off by Roland.

  “Frank, listen to me. Do you realize the infrastructure for this pipeline is already in place? A 450 meter thick glacier of ice has already been pre-screened, pre-selected, with a water extractor dug into its side with valves, pipes, and machinery standing by for us to activate them,” he said. Frank sat in silence.

  “Now that bore-hole is on our to-do list, make no mistake: we will discover water down there or we won’t. We will always expend the extra resources on fact versus theory, always. Alright?” Roland finished his diatribe.

  “Yes, sir, I understand,” Frank said. Roland swung around in his chair and pointed a red laser pen at the projected image.

  “The Goza airship will carry you to the objective point at 48°40'47.30"N and 28°16'49.55"E. This will put you, oh . . .” Roland paused. “Amirah, how much pipeline is there between the service station and the first phase point?” Roland asked.

  “Seventy-one kilometers, captain,” she said immediately.

  “Seventy-one kilometers between you and the service station,” Roland echoed.

  Roland flipped through slides until a colored image showed the edge of a cliff face with large amounts of sand at the bottom. “That right there.” He motioned the red laser pointer on a very small, dark object. “That is the dead rover. We should be able to get it running again. You will have a maintenance manual with you. Alexei has the toolbox,” Roland said, leaning back in his chair. He rested his feet upon the desk.

  The briefing carried on for another thirty minutes as Roland finished the twenty-something page slide show. He hit on the piloting portion for Frank, going into detail on the characteristics of Goza.

  “Top and side walls of the craft are coated with photovoltaic cells for power, lifting, gas is hydrogen. Four monopropellant rockets provide thrust. Maximum speed with empty load is 115 kilometers per hour,” Roland briefed. “Are there any questions?” Neither astronaut had any and Roland dismissed them.

  Inside the atrium, Keiko tended to her garden. Though the garden was still small, it occupied a vast amount of the real estate of the main dome. Many plants were only two months old, having germinated whilst in space.

  Nagoya had planned for the atrium to be turned into a biosphere. It was specifically designed to house hundreds of different plant species. So far there were only three species present.

  Keiko toiled, setting up different aeroponic pumps and trellis networks. Plastic housing units for the plants that required them would be created with 3D printers once the machines themselves were operational. So far, only tomatoes, asparagus, and lettuce occupied space, still too young to produce.

  “You’ve done a blinding job, dear,” Renee said as she admired Keiko’s hard work and determination.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” she replied.

  Renee, with hands outstretched, caressed the delicate budding flowers on the tomato plants. She lightly pet a few small, green, unripened fruits beginning to uncover.

  “They’re beautiful, what breed?”

  Keiko swiveled to answer Renee but the large cage she was setting up came crashing to the floor in pieces, flinging screws in every direction. Renee came to her aid, helping to set the trellis back in position.

  “Thank you, Renee. They’re cherry tomatoes,” she replied, her face pink with embarrassment.

  “You must be very chuffed about them,” Renee stated.

  “Err . . . yes, I suppose I am,” Keiko replied with a genuine, happy smile. “This is it for now. Not until we get more water can I plant the rest of my seeds.” A sliver of uncertainty and anxiety echoed in her voice.

  “How many seeds do we have?” Renee wondered. She held the trellis in position for Keiko, who lined up the next screw and cranked clockwise with her screwdriver.

  “They gave me sixty-four different plant species, though I doubt I will plant all of them,” she replied.

  Renee scanned the surrounding area, her eyes fixed on several glass boxes arranged in rows. “What are those?” Renee asked.

  “Oh, those? Grow chambers,” Keiko replied. “I hope to have seedlings in them by week’s end.”

  “God willing.” Renee handled another trellis and continued to assist Keiko.

  Chapter 16

  0611 hours, Sol 11

  Ōme Station, Lyot Crater

  Earth Date: May 15, 2045

  The Martian sunrise crested the gently rolling hills to the east of Ōme. It was officially morning, or solbreak as the Nagoya astronauts had coined it. A great shadow covered the crew from the now-hydrogen-filled Goza airship. It’s semi-rigid, carbon-fiber skeleton and aluminized BoPET filament hung imposingly over the entire research station.

  Dual tethering cables moored the airship to metal stakes. Frank hooked a portable w
inching station to one of the tethers, summoning the airship to the ground. Frank and Mia, with rucksacks in tow, clambered into the gondola. A second caged section to the rear of the aircraft housed nearly twenty kilometers of polymer piping. They bid farewell and Alexei released the winch-locking mechanism, lifting the airship gradually into the rose hued sky.

  Inside the eight-by-six gondola were four cardboard-thin seats. On the left side were flight controls. Frank took his seat and visually assessed the flight controls. His options were limited. The memory of his twelve-hour training unit on the various Nagoya vehicles was coming back to him, albeit slowly.

  There was a lone joystick to his left, a control panel with a large screen and three buttons in the center, with a cup holder to his right. What the . . .? he thought. On the control screen, Frank pushed and held down the center button which booted up the system. Nagoya’s logo appeared, followed by a brief loading screen. Mia stared longingly out the gondola window. It was not pressurized, and they would need to survive on personal oxygen reserves.

  “How high will we go, Frank?” Mia asked curiously, staying attentive as the people below disappeared behind mountainous terrain.

  “It depends on the sun, gas, and atmospheric pressure,” he said, surprised that she would ask such a question to him. She’s the one with the fancy pants degree, he thought.

  The three buttons, Frank recalled, were for the onboard instruments. The left button was for high-definition video and imaging. The middle button was an alpha particle x-ray spectrometer for detecting rock and soil composition. The right button was a weather sensor for atmospheric pressure, air and ground temperatures, humidity, radiation, and wind speed calculations. It was simple but effective. A second, much smaller screen gave Frank flight information.

  “We’re at 150 meters and barely climbing. The sun must heat our envelope before we can reach the thousand meter target altitude,” Frank said.

  Frank watched his compass-like altimeter as it climbed by a meter every few seconds. Mia took her seat on one of the flimsy provided chairs diagonal to Frank. She opened her backpack and began taking an inventory of her supplies.

  “How much oxygen do you have? Mine says twenty-eight hours’ worth,” asked Frank.

  Mia did not respond immediately and Frank rolled his eyes, expecting it to be a long journey in complete silence.

  “Same,” she said at last. “I brought the portable habitat and a perchlorate generator.”

  “Huh . . . I figured they would already be in here. Isn’t there a ‘break in case of fire’ box?” Frank half-joked.

  “You must not know Nagoya very well,” she replied, rustling through her bag’s contents. Frank could hear her counting aloud with an open mic.

  As the morning progressed into midday, the temperature rose by a staggering fifty degrees Celsius. This heating effect caused the Goza airship to become overpressurized, rising slightly above the target altitude of a thousand meters. The semi-rigid airship was designed to fly on its own weight up to nine kilometers in altitude, but was over its recommended load-bearing weight.

  “Are you ready to get this show on the road?” Frank asked, but no reply came. Mia was slumped over in her chair. Frank assumed she was sleeping and input the command prompts, provided in his flight manual, into the airship computer.

  Pressurized gas in two of the four canisters released. A steady stream of dry ice particles fired out the back end of the airship, creating a lazy thrust forward. Frank watched his pitot-static instrumentation, which reminded him of his first flight in a propeller-driven airplane. The gauges were not computerized and he figured it was for more accurate readings.

  The airspeed indicator stabilized at a dismal fourteen knots. In response, Frank activated the other two canisters. All four carbon dioxide rockets were now firing compressed ice particles in fantastical jet streams. The airspeed indicator stabilized again at twenty-eight knots, a far cry from the reported sixty-six knot top speeds Nagoya scientists bragged about back on Earth.

  Looking over his right shoulder, Frank could see Mia again, looking out the window. In her hand she grasped a sketch book and pencil, even though her helmet’s camera system was 4k resolution and the most advanced heads-up display in modern engineering.

  “Goza, this is Ōme, radio check,” Roland’s voice came over comm. “Lima Charlie,” Frank said out of instinct.

  “Say again, Goza?” replied Roland.

  “Loud and clear!” Frank shouted into the hands-free mic. “How me?”

  “We are reading you loud and clear, over,” Roland said.

  Frank couldn’t help but laugh hysterically. “Frickin’ civilians, man,” he said to himself.

  The ellipsoid craft soared high above Lyot Crater’s impact-formed terrain, and entered southern lowlands. These lowlands, characterized by their dark-colored sand dunes, were 6,400 meters below the topographic datum, some of the lowest points in the northern hemisphere.

  Mia and Frank took turns photographing the terrain. The abysmal speed of the airship made cataloging terrain features a breeze. Frank would return to the controls periodically and monitor flight data.

  Twenty minutes into initial acceleration the CO2 rockets sputtered their last bits of compressed gas. Each canister began suctioning atmosphere under high pressure, using the photovoltaic cells as a power source.

  Three more acceleration events preceded the pair’s arrival to the drop point. Frank used the airship’s high-definition mast camera to guide him to the crater’s edge. Looking out the gondola window, Mia identified the cliff-like terrain of Lyot Crater’s southern rim. She recorded large amounts of ejecta-created fretted terrain. The urge to acquire her first soil samples were high.

  The sun’s light reflected off of possible ice deposits in various locations around the airship. Frank commented on the phenomena to Mia but was ignored. She was in her element now as the resident planetary scientist and geologist. She snapped pictures and took notes on her tablet computer.

  Hovering over the landing zone, Frank anchored dual guide cables to the surface. Once touchdown was confirmed, the door to the gondola swung open. A braided rope ladder lowered downward.

  “Ōme, Goza,” he called, the hiss of wave-like static on the other end. “Ōme Station, this is Goza airship,” he said again, once more receiving nothing but static.

  Mia secured her equipment with carabiners and D-rings and scooted to the edge of the gondola. Martian air enveloped the cabin with wind resistance. They felt it brush against their suits for the very first time.

  “I can’t reach Ōme on the—” Frank said but was interrupted by an unfamiliar voice.

  “Frank, switch to x-band frequency 7.25 gigahertz,” Amirah transmitted.

  “How is she even transmitting on this frequency if it’s a bad frequency?” Mia questioned.

  “Ōme, this is Goza,” Frank said. He followed up a second and third time before finally receiving an answer.

  “Goza, Ōme, send message,” came the reply from Amirah.

  “I'm going down,” Mia stated as she dangled her boots over the edge.

  “Wait! I haven't started depressurizing the vessel yet!” Frank cried, but was too late. Mia dropped over the edge and rappelled down the grounded tether. “Dammit,” Frank muttered. He entered the command for depressurization, fat-fingering it several times before getting it right.

  Two ballonets inside the semi-rigid airframe filled rapidly with Martian air. A negligible amount of hydrogen seeped out in the process but nonetheless Goza began shedding altitude.

  On the ground, the two astronauts searched for a suitable spot to hammer iron stakes into. They tethered the airship to the stakes and radioed in their status and coordinates. The X-band frequency that Amirah had sent worked flawlessly, with no more static interference.

  In the distance, Mia spotted what she thought might be the Deuteronilus pipeline. On closer inspection, she was right. The pipe was no bigger than an oversized garden hose and lay simply s
trewn in a long line with no support structure. They continued to follow the hose-like polymer tubing until reaching their initial landing zone.

  Covered in a thick layer of dust sat the remains of a Nagoya rover. The machine had laid dormant for years, its retractable reel still carrying substantial amounts of piping. It sat on the crevice of the crater rim, dangerously close to the edge.

  “How was it supposed to navigate this in the first place?” Mia asked. “I mean, it’s almost as if they had no plan to navigate it.”

  Frank agreed. He walked around the rover looking around intently, careful not to accidentally plunge to his death. The debris apron below the cliff would surely kill him if he fell. Mia began brushing dust off the rover’s solar cells while Frank activated his helmet’s rangefinder from the cliff edge to the ground below. He watched as data poured onto his HUD.

  “It’s a 4,700 foot drop,” Frank stated on the returned data from the laser.

  “That’s deeper than Blyde Canyon back home,” Mia added.

  “Almost as deep as the Grand Canyon.”

  He stepped back from the crater’s edge slowly and cautiously, bits of sand sprinkling off its edge. A slight breeze swept through, pouring even more sand off the precipice. However, Frank did not notice. The effects of wind on Mars were barely noticeable to the crew because of the lack of barometric pressure.

  They tumbled the rover’s spindle, cranking it by hand, each motion releasing large amounts of dust into the thin air. The plastic tubing descended down the cliffside to the debris apron below. It took nearly twenty minutes to lower the entirety of the pipe. Frank’s arms throbbed by the end. He shook and rubbed them vigorously.

  The two debated how to execute their next move: finding a way to traverse the cliff. Frank used the airship’s grounding cables and tied a knot around the defunct rover. They rendezvoused with the airship, firing small controlled bursts of CO2 from a single canister. They scraped the sides of the cliff and lowered into the crater itself.