Mars Wars - Abyss of Elysium

by Abyss Of Elysium (Lit)

  Within two hours of the start, the small sun had risen high over the horizon to her left, illuminating the desert with a clear, bright sky. As she moved cautiously, but rapidly for the MAT, on her southerly route, Suzanne began to see the terrain was becoming more and more rocky. She could also see that just ahead of her lay a row of hummocks and short hills. But it was not until she struck a large rock at high speed that she realized that this sol was going to be far different than any of the ones before.

  The rock was clearly in her path, but she was pre-occupied, staring at the short hills some kilometers in the distance. It was so large, that it caused the MAT to bounce, arching its nose into the air, then actually go airborne. The MAT seemed to soar interminably, then arc over toward the desert at a steep angle. Suzanne braced herself for impact.

  When it came, it slammed her forward against her restraints and her helmet crashed into the MAT's forward windshield. The MAT itself then dug its forward wheels into the sand and began an arc forward. It seemed that the MAT was about to roll end over end. But, at the last microsecond, it balanced in the air on its two front wheels, paused, and then slammed backward to come to a rest on all four wheels. One fraction of a moment later, one shred of energy more and it would have rolled over.

  Suzanne's eyes darted around in her helmet, stunned by the impact against the windshield. She desperately looked about the cabin's panels to see if her suit had lost pressure. It had not. All systems were normal. Then she sighed and burst into tears, slamming her fists against the hatch beside her. It was a close call, way too close.

  Minutes later, she composed herself, pressurized the cabin once again, then removed her helmet and wiped her face with a cloth. She pulled out the transmitter and sent an unscheduled message back to BC1.

  "Bob, I love you. All is well. Continuing on now." She then signed it with her position.

  Securing her helmet and evacuating the MAT’s air back into storage, Suzanne felt much better. She really needed that cry, she mused. It had been awhile.

  She now understood more clearly than ever before the razor thin margin that separated her from disaster and death. It was but one moment of inattention or one glance in the wrong direction. There would be, there could be, no second chances. Out here, no one could be counted on to save her. No one. The smallest breakdown would mean certain death.

  The MAT proceeded more slowly and cautiously now. Whenever she needed to look far ahead, Suzanne either slowed to a crawl or she stopped altogether. But she kept her eyes mostly on the desert just ahead of her vision - the sand on which her wheels were about to touch was paramount.

  Eventually, Suzanne came to the hummocks. They were the raised, chaotic ridges that marked the beginning of Cerberus – Tartarus features. It was far worse than anything they had planned for. Rocks and boulders were strewn everywhere - many larger than the MAT itself. As she tentatively rolled to the top of the first rise, she could see the image repeated all the way to the horizon - kilometer after of kilometer of absolute chaos.

  The Cerberus seemed to be the resting place of universal entropy. From mythology, the Cerberus was the horrible three-headed dog who guarded the entrance to the underworld. As she surveyed the chaotic scene, Suzanne mused that somehow the ancients must have dreamed of this place in their darkest nightmares. Here on Mars, the Cerberus was a great primeval, alluvium ghost-land of house sized boulders and rills, tossed by the hand of God into an ultimately chaotic scene of endless disarray and geologic turmoil. She had never seen anything like this. The ancient flood that deposited this must have been planetary in scope and awesome on a scale she could hardly imagine.

  The satellite photos had not hinted at this degree of disarray. With their limited resolution, they could not. But now Suzanne would have to somehow navigate this rolling sea of wave after wave of barriers safely and in time to make the rendezvous window. Yesterday it looked like she was going to arrive early. Now it looked as though her odds for survival were not good at all. But she knew she had to make it through this. She had long since passed the point of no return.

  Suzanne sighed deeply and looked at the path ahead. From this position at the top of the ridge, it appeared totally impassible. Worse yet, numerous boulders on both the right and left blocked her view of the paths on either side. The only solution would be to back down the ridge, sidetrack and drive back up until she found a safe, navigable path down the ridge. It was going to be extremely slow going.

  She managed to back down the ridge and drive laterally along the base, then back up again. This time she found a path down. But at the bottom of the rill and at the rise to the next ridge that rose some seven or eight meters high before her, she was blocked again.

  "This is not going to work," she said to herself bitterly. "I'm not going to make it."

  Suzanne felt the panic rise inside her. She felt her breathing increase and a tingle in the tips of her fingers. As soon as she recognized the symptoms, she stopped and closed her eyes. If she panicked, she knew for sure she was going to die. So she steeled her nerves, then opened her eyes again. She knew she needed a plan.

  She backtracked again and found a clear path to the top of the ridge on a steep, upward climb between huge boulders. At the top, she saw that the ridges rolled on and on to the south, directly in her path. Yet, again, she saw that her path down was blocked. Once more she would have to roll backward down the ridge and drive along its base to try at the top again later.

  Painfully, slowly, she backed down the steep incline to the base and threaded her way to another rise to the top. Suzanne then realized that this was an impossible task. At this rate, she would be sols behind schedule and would certainly die, hopelessly lost in the middle of this chaos. She stopped the MAT's motors. The overhead sunlight gave her a degree of confidence she did not have in the shadow of the boulders and inside the deep valley behind her. Here at least she could see the terrain for miles, regardless of how impassible it may have been.

  Suzanne pressurized the MAT and removed her helmet. She then called up displays of the charts, maps and satellite photos before her. The onboard computer caused a tiny, lighted "bug" to crawl across the map and stop on her location, blinking. She asked for an enhanced display of the latest satellite imagery on her monitor. It could not show the details of the chaos all around her, but it did clearly show the faint outline of the ridge she was on and her projected path to rendezvous. At her current rate of travel, the computer estimated she would not even come close to making her deadline.

  Suzanne’s mind then interpreted the lights and shadows of the maps from her past route to her current position to indicate a rough degree of the terrain's irregularity or measure of chaos. She was gratified to know she seemed to be in the worst of it, but it was still far too rough to try and thread her way deeper into the Cerberus. She looked at the chart carefully to see if there was a clearer path through. By the chart she viewed, it seemed to be mostly chaotic.

  It was then that she realized she would have to try and go around the Cerberus entirely. This option had been discussed in great detail before the mission as one of the possible scenarios. Since no person or probe had explored here before, there was no way of knowing that the region was virtually impassible. But in the event that it was, an alternate route was devised around it. Unfortunately, even under the best of projections, going around required far too much time and energy. The MAT simply had to go through it, period.

  Suzanne's mind began to work at a frantic pace. She began to calculate how much time it would require backing out and re-routing. She compared her former route and the satellite photos of an alternate route. She then spotted a faint trace of what appeared to be a less chaotic route on the far eastern side of Cerberus, just to the edge of a formation called Orcus Patera. The entire region was rough except for what looked like a clear thread. And it led very near, or possibly even directly, to the rendezvous position.

  It was almost noon. Suzanne calculated the time required to backtrack and
the time it would take to go around. No combination of calculations showed that she could make it at all.

  Then she realized if she could find a mostly clear path, she could drive at night, using her lights. Suzanne recalculated again and discovered that, by driving all night at some reasonably safe speed, she could barely make it at the end of the rendezvous window.

  "Yes!" she said, and topped off her suit water reservoir and swapped the carbon dioxide canister for a new one. She ate a few high-energy "cruise bars" and popped her helmet back into position. After depressurizing the MAT, she then began to thread her way backward, slowly, out of the chaos of the Cerberus.

  By mid-afternoon, Suzanne was free of the worst of the boulder field and tracking nearly due east along the nearest ridges. The terrain was nowhere near as clear and clean as the sol before, but at least she was on the move. Remembering the near tumble she had endured that morning, she was cautions. As the sun began to dip closer to the western horizon, she began a long, slow arc southeast toward Orcus Patera. And as she did so, her eyes looked for the trace she had seen on the map of a clear route south. But the road ahead of her was still rough and getting rougher. Suzanne was continuously jolted and bounced and grew weary of the beating. But she knew there would be no rest if she were going to live.

  She debated stopping once before nightfall to swap carbon dioxide canisters and eat a bite, but she decided to rest later. BC1 was going to miss a regularly scheduled transmission, but now minutes counted and they would have to wait. She felt sorry for Bob who would worry, but she would have to put it off until mid-evening.

  As night fell, Suzanne realized that although the route was rough, it was passable and she was tracking right down the center of what the chart had shown to be the clear path through. As the sun neared the horizon, she realized that she had no choice but to slow down. She sighed, knowing that she was very tired and overly stressed, probably suffering from high carbon dioxide levels but that this route would require an even slower speed and greater attention to detail.

  Realizing this, Suzanne forced her eyes to focus on the sand in front of her. And it was at that moment that she discovered she was riding in the tracks made by another vehicle.

  Illuminated clearly by the setting sun, this time the tracks were obvious and distinct and ran out before her. She stopped the MAT, checked her suit pressure and stepped outside the vehicle. She bent down and looked at the deeply set tracks closely. They appeared to be somewhat wind blown, but they were distinctive. They were also deep, which indicated they had been made by a relatively heavy vehicle, and wide, indicating a manned vehicle. Suzanne had never heard of any nation launching a probe with this large of a track base. It did not take much deductive reasoning to understand that the vehicle that had made these tracks was almost certainly Soviet. With that thought, she sighed intensely. If the tracks continued, she could probably follow them safely around the Cerberus.

  By this time, it was almost totally dark. Suzanne slid back into the MAT, pressurized it and immediately set up her communications gear. She carefully considered her transmission and sent it. She relayed the scarce details of her re-routing, her decision to drive at night and added, "AM FOLLOWING TRACKS. BELIEVE THEM TO BE SAR."

  She had no way of knowing that her transmission would never be received.

  Suzanne then quickly ate a few more cruise bars, replaced her helmet and started again. If driving the MAT during the sol was torturous, it was positively inhuman at night. Suzanne soon discovered it to be a near impossible task. She could not see the tracks at all from an upright position, so she had to lean her body as far as she could to the right and peer out a tiny window at the base of the egg shaped MAT where she could barely see the tracks. That required that she drive to the left of the tracks themselves so she could see them in the lower window. Then she had to sit upright and watch out for boulders. She discovered that the tracks often led her between boulders so that driving to the left was a hazardous proposal. After about an hour of this and two near misses with large boulders, she was near exhaustion and realized that something was going to have to change.

  Suzanne stopped the MAT, repressurized it and took off her helmet. She then took a small screwdriver from the MAT's toolbox and pried the interior camera off the upper instrument panel. She bit through its wires with her teeth and spliced into a two meter length of wire she had ripped out of a rear light panel. Using a sticky label from a fuse panel, she insulated the splices. Then she put her helmet back on, depressurized the MAT, popped the door open and attached the camera with silver tape to the front of the Mars vehicle. She would not be able to latch or pressurize the door with the wire running through it, but it did not matter; her suit was pressurized anyway.

  She got back inside, tied the door shut with a length of wire and switched her large front-facing monitor to the camera. Now she could clearly see the tracks illuminated by the MAT's external lights!

  This process had cost her an hour, but it was worth it. Suzanne was able to more than double her speed. She could clearly see the tracks before her and boldly pushed ahead in the darkness. At this rate, she would make it to the rendezvous even before the deadline! Over an hour later, Suzanne was alarmed when she noticed the tracks veered sharply east. She stopped and looked at her displayed chart. This would definitely lead her away from the rendezvous point. If she continued following the tracks at this pace and in that direction, she could not possibly make her deadline. Yet, there was no hope of making it by trying to blaze a totally new trail at night. Stopping until daylight would be fatal as well. There was always the distinct possibility that this path led around some obstacle and would turn south again soon.

  Suzanne then prayed out loud, "Oh, God, please let this lead me to the right place." Then she started up again and faithfully, blindly began to follow the tracks in the darkness. Soon, the tracks began to turn south. Within another hour, they pointed directly at the rendezvous point. Realizing this, Suzanne sighed and relaxed against her seat. The tracks were so well defined that they seemed to miss most rocks and the ride became gentle. So gentle, in fact, she soon fell asleep.

  Less than a minute later, the MAT crashed head on into a house sized boulder.

  33

  t BC1, the last transmission from Suzanne had been received in the mid morning of the second day: an unscheduled, cryptic broadcast routed through the clumsy patch-through from the navigation satellites. While she was on schedule, they felt it was very unusual that it was sent out of sequence and with few details. Three hours and twenty minutes after receipt of that report, Toon informed them that the navigation satellites themselves had also failed. They would not be able to receive any messages at all from Suzanne. Now, they were totally cut off from the entire planet as well as the rest of the solar system.

  Peter immediately arranged an emergency meeting in the Command Center. He called Francis, Toon, Gorteau, Kerry and Brinker. Hammonds was manning the controls.

  "Toon: analysis," he commanded with some great degree of frustration, noting Bob Kerry fuming silently to himself.

  "I have no clue, boss," Toon replied. "It's not software. It's not uplink equipment or downlink equipment. They’re just not there anymore as far as we can tell."

  Peter's mind raced for ideas - something.

  "Okay," he finally stated. "Contact the Soviets on their birds and tell them we have a situation."

  "I already did that," Toon replied. "They're not home."

  "What do you mean, they're not home?" Kerry asked in undisguised anger.

  "I've had Hammonds on this from the beginning. It's like they're just not home."

  "Give me the damn microphone," Kerry said, bursting with anger, grabbing Hammonds by the shoulder and pulling him around in his seat.

  "Back off, sir," Brinker replied stepping forward.

  Kerry stared back at Brinker in fury.

  "I said, back off," Brinker said evenly, locking his eyes onto Kerry's.

  Kerry released Hamm
onds and turned away. "This isn’t happening," he said with resignation, facing the wall.

  "Fabian, what's your assessment?" Peter asked firmly.

  "None of this adds up, Peter. The raw probabilities of losing all our satellite links in the manner in which we have are staggeringly small. In the absence of data, I would suggest human fault is at play here."

  "Define," Peter replied, pursing his lips in tension.

  "Since very little of this can be controlled by the Soviets, I would suggest our processes here are either in error, which is causing us to lose control, or there is deliberate human intervention."

  "Toon, you control these processes, what about it?"

  Toon smiled his best fake smile and replied, "Ok, blame the operator. But if you feel you can do any better, have at it!" he remarked, dramatically sweeping his hand over the consoles in the Command Center.

  "It's got to be Covenant; that’s the only explanation," Francis replied quickly.

  "Then where is he?" Peter replied. “How can he hide out here where there is absolutely no place to hide? How is it that he could somehow sabotage our equipment without the operator catching something amiss? And if he has system interface, then from where? Toon, have you checked this?" Peter demanded.

  "Top to bottom, Boss. The system is clean."

  "Geoff, have you gone behind him? Checked every line of code, every piece of equipment?"

  "As best I can, Peter," Hammonds replied with an obviously limited confidence.

  "If Covenant were up to something, don’t you think we would have seen something?" Peter asked Francis.