Fable Hill

by Christopher Uremovich

  The Yamada crew was now five hours and 637.98 kilometers into their nearly 3,100 kilometer journey to Syrtis Major. Frank obsessed over his instruments; the altimeter had reached a maximum target altitude of 944 meters.

  “Well I’ll be damned,” Frank said over open channel.

  “What is it?” Roland inquired, seated rather snugly next to Frank in the co-pilot seat.

  “Those bastards at Nagoya were right after all.” Frank pointed at the digital speedometer as it plateaued at seventy knots.

  “I don’t get it,” Roland said.

  Frank could feel pressure exerted on the airframe of the Goza. It wasn’t much, but it could be felt. The sounds caused by the wind pressing against the airship were relatively faint but could be heard without spacesuits.

  “How much longer?” an irritated Keiko asked. She grew weary of Mia’s non-stop enthusiasm and never-ending lecture.

  “Like fifteen hours, why?” Frank took a bit of pleasure in Keiko’s suffering. Keiko did not respond. Instead, she turned off her transceiver and sulked.

  “Try sleeping,” Frank proposed. He looked rearward. Alexei was slumped over in his harness already asleep.

  “Shame Renee didn’t want to come,” Frank stated to Roland.

  “She’s been content doing her own research and experiments,” Roland said.

  “The first Martian homebody,” Frank laughed.

  Afternoon turned to evening. The sun dipped below the horizon and gave way to two hours of familiar Martian twilight, or bluelight as the crew coined it. Frank often commented that if Mars had lakes, they would make for great fishing.

  Twilight turned to darkness. The sun’s rays reflected off Mars’s two moons, casting some light amongst the darkness. No longer could Mia, or anyone else for that matter, see the ground below. Frank turned on the internal lighting system as Mia shuttered the flimsy gondola door, retiring to the rear of the craft to rest.

  “We should have taken the MEV, this helmet is driving me insane,” Keiko said as she broke her radio silence.

  “Have an itch?” Frank asked in turn. “Blast your helmet fans, it helps a bit.”

  “Ugh, I’m going fucking insane!” she hollered immaturely over open comms, causing her to get berated by a very lucid Roland. An audible click was heard as Keiko once again switched off her transceiver in protest.

  As night progressed, Frank passed the time by admiring Phobos in the night sky. It shown brightly, its oblong shape so close to Mars it almost resembled Earth's own moon in size. Deimos on the other hand was much smaller, a star-like pin prick of light. He watched intently as Phobos transited Deimos.

  Frank's internal clock timer notified him that it was now 0000 hours. It beeped and kept him from nodding off. He so wanted to sleep, he couldn't wait to land. The rest of the crew had been racked out. Mia occupied the rear of the gondola because of a lack of seats.

  Using night vision cameras and satellite positioning system, Frank calculated another twenty minutes until touchdown. The only question was where to land. Phobos's reflectance was minimal at best and the darkness was overwhelming. Frank used infrared strobes to create an artificial light source for the night vision system.

  He remembered, while deployed, night vision was useless without ambient light sources, and on Mars they were few and far between.

  The SPS notified Frank they had arrived at Syrtis Major. Frank circled the landing zone, using what little light he could see in the cameras as his guide. He could barely make out any surface details as Syrtis Major’s basaltic terrain was as dark as coal.

  Frank initiated the filling process for each ballonet. Frank dropped the dual tethering cables and watched for any signs of touch down. His altimeter read ten meters but he couldn't see the ground to be sure.

  I guess . . . I guess we gotta trust the technology, he thought as the rope ladder descended.

  “Wake up, everyone,” Frank urged. “We have arrived.”

  The astronauts wasted no time rousing from their slumbers. Each of them had been inside their suits for far too long. Keiko was first to make the descent, her feet touching almost immediately. She gave a frightened yelp.

  “We're like ten feet off the ground, Frank!” Keiko scolded.

  “Whoops . . . whatever, I guess,” Frank replied.

  “You did good, Frank,” Mia said as they piled out into suffocating darkness.

  Frank fiddled with the lighting. With a flash, several exterior halogen lamps cut a swaft through the darkness, illuminating the ground and surrounding area.

  The ground was solid rock, black as night and smooth, like walking on top of an upside down dinner bowl. Keiko, not being attentive, lost her footing and vanished.

  “Keiko!” people shouted.

  Keiko shrieked with surprise. “I'm fine, I'm alright!” She stood up inside a shallow trench. “It looks like a collapsed lava tube,” Mia commented. “Grab some rope from the carriage.”

  Alexei ran for the cargo hold, the grated cage tucked underneath Goza.

  They truly were in volcanic territory now, evident by the surrounding lava plains, fissures, and graben, all scorched from millenia of eruption events and slow-cooling magma.

  Roland ordered the group to set up camp. Helmet lights helped the crew set up a perimeter, marking dangerous areas with glow sticks.

  “Setting up camp is priority number one. Frank, hand me the spare oxygen tanks,” Roland said as they labored in the early hours of sol 57.

  In record time, thirty-four minutes, the crew had set up an impressive-looking base camp. Their previous record for a diamond shaped, four tent layout was fifty-four minutes back in Antarctica.

  “Frank, can you send me our location so I can plot it on my device?” Mia requested, her thick gloved hands clutched a dirty-looking tablet.

  Frank climbed back inside Goza, cutting the exterior lights so as to conserve power. “Are you ready?” he asked Mia.

  “Send it,” she replied.

  Mia’s tablet flashed with a message notification, receiving the grid coordinates from Goza’s satellite positioning system. 9°8'23.43"N 67°9'20.19"E, it showed.

  “Got it. Triangulating, give me a moment,” Mia said. She dithered over the map until suddenly, without warning, she ran over to Frank and hugged him.

  “Do you realize where we landed?!” she exclaimed with heavy enthusiasm.

  “Not particularily . . .” Frank replied. Mia continued to squeeze Frank to the dismay of onlookers.

  “Smack dab, right in the middle of Nili Patera,” she said. “Nili Patera, Frank!”

  Frank remained silent for a bit, processing the information. “Is that a good thing?” he asked candidly.

  “Don’t be coy, Frank, you landed us inside the caldera itself. We’re inside the volcano, you beautiful man!” Mia chest bumped Frank.

  The crew promptly retired for some much needed, spacesuit-free sleep, piling into their respective tents. With only four tents, two people would have to room together. Frank assumed he would stay with Roland but was quickly mistaken when Alexei and Keiko entered a tent together. Interesting, Frank thought. Oh well, more room for me.

  As soon as Frank closed his eyes, he opened them to find activity outside of his tent. He could hear faint sounds but the tent’s generator and life support drowned them out. It seemed brighter out and Frank wondered if Roland had ordered the airship lights turned on.

  Frank reluctantly exited his tent to offer any assistance, only to be greeted by a Martian sunrise. Glancing at his watch, Frank slapped the top of his helmet. He had been asleep for nearly six hours.

  “Good morning, Frank,” Keiko said. Her face appeared happy and content through the thick visor glass.

  “Good morning, Keiko, how’d you sleep?”

  “Best damn sleep I’ve had since we arrived on Mars,” she replied with glittering eyes.

  “Oh, I almost forgot.” Keiko handed Frank a sealed plastic bag. Inside was a freshly cooked egg omelet, smothered in c
heese. “Courtesy of Alexei. He cooked breakfast for everyone, wasn’t that thoughtful of him?”

  The new camp, codenamed Sierra Mike, sat on the precipice of a small unnamed crater within the Nili Patera volcano complex. The views were the most spectacular yet. Huge terraced walls, over a mile high, stretched as far as the eye could see. Steep valleys cut grooves within the caldera, each filled with morning fog.

  Now much closer to the equatorial climate zone, temperatures were well above those experienced at Lyot Crater. Even at 0700 hours, morning temps hovered around -16°C.

  Mia, following Roland, made announcements over the PA. “We have a nine kilometer trek ahead of us today, let’s get ready to leave,” she announced. Roland shouted orders, rallying everyone and preparing the mining equipment for utilization.

  Frank sucked coffee from his suit’s internal straw. It was a dark roast, black, just how he liked it. He took in the view one last time before Mia gave the final order to depart. One by one the astronauts filed out of camp and headed east, into the unknown.

  Each astronaut carried a large rucksack, as much as they could carry. The Martian gravity allowed for obscenely heavy weight to be towed, one of the planet’s advantages.

  The terrain was hard and cement-like. It rolled and formed dikes, grabens, and shallow fissures. Occasional basaltic dunes snaked amongst the rolling crust, neatly sifted from years of erosion.

  Roland led the group of surveyors across the rolling lava fields, making sure they took the flattest paths possible. Mia stopped at times to collect soil samples from the numerous aeolian deposits situated randomly along the route. Mia was intrigued that not all the dunes were dark in color; some were composed of a white colored sand. Curious, she thought. It reminded her of the beaches in Cape Town. In no time she had vials filled with dark- and light-shaded sands.

  Two hours later, they arrived at their destination. The plains abruptly stopped and the crew were met with a brightly colored mountain, sloping at ten degrees. “Welcome to Nili Tholus,” Mia informed everyone.

  “It’s a volcanic cone within the caldera. We’re here to gather samples of anything and everything. If you see an object of interest, collect it for analysis,” Mia briefed.

  “Alright, fan out and explore the area. We will meet up at this location in three hours,” Roland added. “Make sure your transponders are activated. Roland out.”

  “Long time to get lost,” Alexei commented as he repositioned his rucksack straps.

  Frank lagged behind as the group made their way deeper into the mountain. He edited some of his suit’s climate control settings as ground temperatures reached 1°C. He was beginning to sweat profusely inside his gel-insulated suit. Frank opened a digital map and studied the area, attempting to figure out the next course of action. After some self-debate, he gave up and decided to just wing it.

  The other astronauts stayed together, now far ahead of Frank. They followed Mia as she traversed the low-angled slopes of Nili Tholus to the very summit. Travel was slow-going and stops were frequent to collect samples.

  Another hour went by as Frank slogged through three kilometers of loose aggregate. His feet sank deeper as we walked, each trudging step churning up gray sand over a rusted top layer.

  Frank rested at the rim of a small crater. He looked around and spotted the others some distance away, assailing the cone. He sent Mia his grid coordinates over text, reading: 9°6'34.57"N 67°21'44.58"E.

  After catching his breath and taking a long drink from his water reservoir, Frank took a step forward. To his surprise, the ground began to give way and a considerable section of the crater’s rim separated. The ensuing landslide sucked Frank several feet to the bottom of a subterranean pit.

  Buried in a heap of fine sand, Frank exhumed himself from an early grave. He brushed his visor and beat the sand from his suit.

  It was then Frank spotted the entrance to a cave, hidden away by the false-bottomed rim of the crater. The cave entrance was small, no larger than his own body, only about two meters in diameter.

  “Mia, this is Frank. Come in, Mia,” Frank transmitted, pushing forward through the entrance. The cave curved and hooked, sometimes barely wide enough for his bulky body to fit. Frank abandoned his rucksack and crawled through a small hole inside the grotto. It was now pitch black. Frank’s helmet light guided him through a winding, narrow passage into a spacious room—a dead end.

  Mia’s muffled and staticky voice cut in and out. The underground area seemed to absorb radio frequencies. Frank attempted to transmit again but received an audible squelch. Frank flooded the room with light, turning his settings on maximum. He stood in awe of what lay before him, unable to speak or think anything.

  It didn’t take long for the others to locate Frank. Light from several sources bounced through the walls of the cave as they approached the area that Frank occupied. Sitting on a rock, Frank greeted the others with a simple hand gesture.

  Roland gave the hand sign for ultra high frequencies, prompting everyone to switch to shortwave communications. The signal remained weak, as Mia attributed the cave to being some type of Faraday cage.

  Standing in awe, the astronauts joined Frank in admiring the stalagmite- and stalactite-filled cavern. Dozens of pristine, shark tooth-shaped rock formations hung from the ceiling. Others jutted up from the brown cave floor. Different colors of red, yellow, dull silver, and charcoal plastered the walls of the cave, evidence of thermal ionization.

  Mia walked amongst the alien formations, being careful not to disturb their hundred million year slumber. She gently touched the taffy-like splash stalactites that littered the cave. They had a soft-lustered appearance, with oranges and reds dominating the color spectrum.

  “What do we do now?” Frank asked.

  Mia thought for a moment, rubbing a stalagmite with her gloved hand and looking it over closely. “As much as I want to preserve this lava tube, we must take samples,” she said. “Look for another entry point, no matter how small. No doubt this is part of an extensive tunnel. It doesn’t end here.”

  They fanned out across the space and attempted to locate some kind of hole or new doorway further into the mountain. Mia used her collapsible sledge hammer and chipped, delicately, pieces of rock from the formation.

  It didn’t take long for a new passageway to be uncovered. Hiding behind a cluster of beige stalagmites lay a narrow corridor no larger than a human child. Keiko was chosen to explore it, as she was by far the smallest of the group at just under five feet tall.

  Keiko scaled over a rock and went head first down the narrow hole. She army crawled as far as she could go before the passage became too narrow to traverse.

  “Pull me out, I can’t go any further,” she replied as the others rescued her with a tied rope.

  The crew spent hours ferrying material out the cave and staging it at the entrance. They returned to camp just as the violet sun set beyond the caldera rim. Mia documented their findings in painstaking detail, sleeping little that night so she could finish her research before morning.

  For the better part of three sols, the Yamada crew explored Nili Patera, and further south the less interesting Meroe Patera. Mia commented that it would take them months, even years, to study Syrtis Major in any kind of relevant detail. In any case, they soldiered on, further northeast into Nili Fossae.

  From the air, the crew could see large fault-like formations that cut deep into Mars’s crust. Frank used the opportunity to launch signal flares for the first time. A dozen or so green flares, housing smoke canisters, burst over the target area, marking the location for further study.

  The Goza peeled eastward for half an hour, and great plains stretched for as far as the eye could see. Frank landed Goza at the boundary between Nili Fossae and Isidis Planitia. A small, unnamed crater, partially broken apart by unknown forces, provided a suitable landing pad.

  “Thirty kilometers to the nearest graben,” Frank stated to Mia, who was deep in study over notes.

 
The Goza touched down on a flat surface within the crater. The crew disembarked and set up another camp, only to tear it down when Mia became unhappy with the location. “I need to be closer to one of those fault lines,” she demanded. Roland gave in to her request and just like that they were off in the Goza once again.

  “Not much sunlight left,” Frank said, implying they should land. “I'm sending you a new grid, land there,” said Mia.

  The new location was a deep chasm. It was a perilous landing site as Frank could not find suitable ground. Crew members argued amongst themselves as Frank leveled the airship down a narrow cliff. Mia was steadfast and defended her decision to the others. Even Roland chimed in to the debate.

  “Steady . . . steady,” Frank spoke softly to himself. Now within the confines of the chasm, Frank leveled the airship. “Hang on,” Frank uttered. The Goza yawed and overshot the designated landing site, striking the side wall of the cliff. Keiko fell from her chair as the others were jerked forward and side to side.

  “We're good, everything’s fine,” Frank reassured. Goza descended delicately to a secondary landing spot, scraping the bottom of the gondola as it glided to a drawn out stop atop a rocky embankment.

  Silicates swirled in a torrent around the airship with wind speeds in excess of sixty-four kilometers per hour, highly unusual for this time of year. Roland radioed Ōme, updating Renee and verifying their transponder was still active.

  “I read you loud and clear, Roland,” Renee called back. “The tracking software froze, I'm still showing you at ten klicks south, how copy?”

  “Frank, give me a damage assessment,” Roland said through pursed lips, fighting the urge to lash out.

  Mia wandered off a bit from the group as the others inspected the airship. Strips of tattered synthetic fibre filaments hung from the impact location, revealing a second layer of unknown fabric.