“What is he saying about the four NASA astronauts?” Jean asked. “I used to be good friends with one of the women on that crew.”
“They seem to be operating below his radar,” Chad declared. “Or he thinks they don’t pose a risk because there are only four of them.”
“That’s good,” Jean said. “The best thing that could happen to them is that he underestimates them. Regardless of how cumbersome the agency might be, NASA’s training is tons better than what our company calls training.”
Sol 105, NASA base
“Good morning, Ewa,” Mike called in over the helmet radio.
Ewa yawned, glancing at the clock. It was a few minutes after seven. “You’re up early,” she replied.
“There was no way we were going to miss the drill hitting water,” Mike said.
“Want to come up and have breakfast? I only have dried provisions, but there’s enough.”
“No, you don’t have enough room in the cab.”
She looked out the window. A rover was sitting below her. One person was sitting on it while three others were standing next to it. “Oh, Lance and Sarah came along,” she said. “I’ll come down then, but give me a few minutes.”
“Yeah, they didn’t want to miss it either. But don’t you have to steer the drill from the cab,” Sharon asked.
“No, there’s access to the steering program down below, too.”
Ewa gulped down several dry cookies and drank some water. She relieved herself into a plastic container before she put on her spacesuit. It was just as well that the others had turned down her breakfast invitation. The facilities at the base were much better. She was already looking forward to being able to shower again tonight.
She shut her helmet, released the air from the space, and climbed out of the cab. The height no longer worried her. She greeted the NASA astronauts when she reached the ground. Lance and Sarah struck her as noticeably more reserved than Sharon and especially Mike. As Commander, it was perhaps a particular victory for him that, with her help, they had secured a long-term water resource for their station. Or maybe she was right and he was personally interested in her. But that part wasn’t important since she would be disappearing again soon enough.
“Should we check the current status?” she asked.
“Shortly,” Mike replied, holding her taser out to her with a gesture that seemed as natural as could be. “Here. We don’t need this.”
“Thanks,” she said.
Ewa hadn’t checked on the drill since waking up. The device would have notified her if it was about to breach the water layer. She pointed at the front right tower leg and strode toward it. A box was suspended at chest height between the two braces. She opened its panel, behind which a computer complete with monitor and keyboard was concealed. She called up the drill’s steering program on it. The screen showed an overview of the drilling process—delivery rate, rate of advance, temperatures in the drill hole and on the component parts, etc.
Ewa located the critical number when she switched over to the GPR. “Only fifteen meters to go,” she said, startled.
The others had arrived just in time.
“You’re surprised, aren’t you?” Mike asked. “Earlier, I searched for the drill’s data and estimated the drilling rate. From my simulation, I calculated that the drill would hit the water layer in another thirty minutes.”
“I had assumed that this drill would need a ton of water to keep it cool,” Sharon said, “but it doesn’t look like that’s the case.”
“I would’ve made the same assumption before I read the manual,” Ewa replied. “However, the entire installation is fairly self-sustaining. The drill turbine is cooled with water, which is also used for the extraction of the material. Then, it’s all pumped up to the surface for cleaning. The slag is dumped to the side, and the water is reused for the cooling process. Lucky for us, Mars’s surface is so cold that in comparison to drilling on Earth, we are saving a large amount of energy. The water that is lost during the process is supplemented from the supplies on board. The drive engine uses methane, and water is produced as a by-product.”
Ewa led the others in a wide arc around the drill site before pointing out a small conical hill. “That’s the slag from the hole,” she said. “I thought there’d be a much larger mound here by now.”
“If the hole measures thirty centimeters in diameter, then for every two hundred meters of depth, there’d be fourteen cubic meters of material,” Mike explained. “And if we deposit that in a circular area of four meters in diameter, then we’ll get a three-meter cone. Not really all that impressive. If you’d rather have a hundred-meter mountain, we’ll have to drill down to six thousand meters.”
“Show-off,” Sarah said. “However, you failed to point out that a cone of sand measuring four meters wide by a hundred meters tall would quickly collapse.”
Okay. Love-fifteen. I’m just a theorist,” Mike admitted with a grin.
“It’s great that both of you can do mental math, but may I ask something?” Lance interjected.
“Please,” Ewa said.
Where was Lance anyway? He didn’t seem to have followed them around the drill site.
“What will happen when the drill reaches the water line?” Mike asked.
As he asked his question, Ewa caught sight of Lance standing next to the switch box. She walked back to him. His face seemed to be practically glued to the computer screen.
“And... now!” Lance exclaimed.
“Now what?” Mike asked excitedly, jogging back toward him as well.
“The lines are now intersecting,” Lance explained.
“Whaaat? That went really fast,” Mike said.
“The drilling process took much less time than we estimated,” Ewa explained.
“That’s probably because the surface is predominantly made up of regolith,” Mike clarified.
“What does that mean?” Sarah asked.
“Basically, regolith is composed of compacted Mars dust. There’s no real rock in it. It’s the sediment left by the last few billion years.”
“What compressed it?” Lance asked.
“I just meant that as a description. It’s like snow on a glacier. When new snow falls, its weight compresses the material underneath it, creating solid ice,” Mike explained.
Lance suddenly jumped into the air and slammed his heels into the ground. “Feels pretty hard,” he said.
“For a good drill like this one, it’s as soft as butter,” Mike remarked.
“Uh, I just remembered that nobody answered my question,” Lance said. “What’s going to happen when the drill hits water?”
“The water is presumably under pressure down there. So, it’s going to try to equalize this pressure and push up through the drill hole until it creates a happy fountain up here,” Mike explained.
“Exactly,” Lance said. “So can you tell me why we’re still standing around with dry feet now that the drill has reached the boundary line?”
Everyone stared at him as if he had uttered the impossible. But Ewa knew that this was unfair. Lance’s question was a good one. She was afraid that there was only one answer to this, one that nobody wanted to hear. And in reality, no one said anything. Sharon started to pace up and down.
Mike tried to scratch his head, but his helmet got in the way. “We just need to drill a little deeper,” he said, finally breaking the silence.
Ewa walked over to the screen in the switch box. She pulled up the current GPR imagery. It still corresponded with what they had seen yesterday. There was a line that the drill had seemingly reached, but there wasn’t a second line. They could keep drilling, of course, but it would be a big coincidence if they hit water down there somewhere.
“You win some, you lose some,” she said. “I think we...”
Something began to rattle. Ewa heard a sound that didn’t seem to be coming from herself. That was practically impossible. It must be an ear-splitting sound, otherwise the noise wo
uldn’t have been able to reach her through the thin Mars air. But she hadn’t just heard it. She had felt it. This occurred to her now as she thought about it.
The ground had suddenly shaken a few millimeters. She quickly pulled up the seismometer data. She hadn’t imagined it. There had been a very short tremor. Billows of white smoke suddenly erupted from the block sitting on top of the drill hole.
“Is that the water we were expecting?” Sharon asked.
“Please don’t get any closer,” Ewa warned. “I’m not sure what it is. It looks more like smoke than steam. Something’s not right here.” She frantically scrolled through the menus on the screen.
The drill head! Maybe it had something to do with that. Shit, she thought when she saw the data from the drill turbine. Everything was registering zero. “I’m afraid something happened to the drill head,” she shouted into the helmet microphone. “It seems to be stuck and isn’t turning anymore.”
“Do you have any idea why?” Mike asked.
Ewa turned to the manual and flipped to the last pages where the most common errors were listed. Unfortunately, this text for non-professionals wasn’t very specific. If the drill head stopped running, it had either gotten stuck or the turbine had a defect.
“The manual’s not helping,” Ewa said. “Either the drill is stuck or broken, but we already know that.”
“Should I take a look?” Mike offered.
“Just looking at the screen isn’t going to make more information appear,” she pointed out. “But please feel free to check it out.” Ewa stepped away from the switch box to give Mike room.
“He gets like this,” Sharon said to her. “Everyone’s stupid except him, but luckily he only acts like this when he’s panicked.”
“That’s comforting in a commander,” Ewa said.
“There’s just the four of us. We basically make all decisions via consensus,” Sharon said.
Mike returned from the box, his arms slack at his sides. “There’s nothing we can do,” he said.
The manual’s final tidbit of advice was ‘Call a service provider.’
“They’re still thirty sols out and will do damned little to help us,” Ewa said.
“Yeah. My grandmother used to say that ill-gotten goods never prospered,” Mike declared.
“Hey, you were the first in line to advocate for this drilling,” Sharon pointed out.
“You’re right. Sorry about my behavior just now. I wasn’t myself. It really would’ve been marvelous if we had discovered water for our base.”
“It looks like we’ll need to be patient a little while longer,” Sharon said.
“That’s not my strong suit. Hopefully, we can at least get the drill back in working order,” Mike replied.
At that moment, the Mars surface cracked open. A thin line ran between Mike and the others. Ewa watched it in astonishment. At first, it looked like one of those cracks that appeared in dry clay soil. The speed with which the crack formed between them was concerning. In clay soil, patterns like this took hours, not just a few seconds, to appear.
Ewa tracked the crack as far as she could. It didn’t seem to terminate before reaching the horizon, as would have been expected with the increasing distance. No, it was growing and growing. Ewa stared back down at the ground right in front of her. The hairline crack had become a small fissure. Mars’s dust trickled into it. The fissure was growing wider. How deep must it be by now? Two centimeters?
Ewa nudged Mike and pointed at the ground. The others noticed her gesture. Sharon took a step backward since the fissure had almost reached her. She gave a cry.
“Shit, what is that?” Lance asked. He didn’t get an answer. Everyone was gazing at the rift in shock.
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Mike said.
“I have,” Sarah said. “On the West Coast, during an earthquake.”
“You mean—”
“I don’t mean anything, Mike. Or did you feel a quake? The crack formed when the ground moved.”
“I picked up a mini-quake beforehand,” Ewa said. “More specifically, it was one single tremor. Did any of you feel it?”
“I didn’t notice anything,” Lance remarked. “But you think that might have something to do with this?”
“Please show me the recording,” Mike said. “Please, I don’t mean to be a smart ass. I just happen to be a geophysicist.”
Ewa carefully stepped across the fissure and walked over to the switch box. She pulled up the records. “See, there.” She could see through the helmet window that Mike was squinting.
“Sorry, that can’t be right. That wasn’t a tremor, barely a jolt. Something like that couldn’t have created this crack.” Mike pointed at the fissure. Ewa estimated that it was now about three centimeters deep. That was a dramatic development.
“Do you have a better explanation?” Ewa asked him.
“Fault lines like this are formed when something pushes upward, like when two continental plates collide and mountain ranges are created.”
“Mars doesn’t have any plate tectonics,” Sharon said.
“I know. I was just using that as an example,” Mike responded.
“What else could be lifting here on Mars? I mean in a real, concrete sense, not just an example?” Sharon asked snappishly.
“That’s the problem. Mars is considered inactive. They’ve never found any active volcanoes here,” Mike explained.
“What does this have to do with volcanoes?” Sharon asked.
“Well, let’s assume that instead of boring into a water deposit, we drilled into a magma chamber that would also like to equalize its pressure. In that case, an event like this wouldn’t be unusual. But as I said, there shouldn’t be any magma chambers here, especially at such a shallow depth. If there were, we should’ve been measuring a much stronger temperature spike.”
“But that currently seems to be the most plausible explanation,” Lance concluded.
“A magma chamber like that,” Sarah asked, “what would it look like on the GPR?”
“It would hardly look different from a water deposit, at least in our situation. We didn’t have any point of comparison, or even the slightest concern that we would stumble across something like that. All the Mars scientists on Earth assumed that Mars has been geologically dead for a long time.”
“So, we’ve perhaps unerringly managed to locate one of the last signs of planetary life?” Lance suggested.
“No. I understand that the explanation is temptingly simple,” Mike said, “but what about the temperatures? Magma is hot. Very hot. We would’ve noticed something!”
“Were we watching for that?” Lance asked.
“Not directly,” Ewa said. “But we’re talking about the difference between a few hundred and several thousand degrees. The software would’ve warned us in that case.”
“I’m afraid I have to interrupt your discussion,” Sarah said. “Take a look at the crack. It’s grown larger still. If it doesn’t stop soon, it’ll be a meter deep by this evening.”
The others gathered around Sarah to examine the fissure in the ground. For the first time, they could see almost ten centimeters into the surface of Mars. On Earth, they would now be staring at fertile soil, but here it was monotonous sand that had been hardened over the years. There was no visible structure.
Sarah took a couple of long strides westward, parallel to the crack. “What strikes you about this?” she asked. “The fissure is running almost due west, toward our base. I have a bad feeling about what this might mean.”
The others stopped moving and gazed to the west, where the base was located beyond their line of sight. No one had to ask Sarah about her bad feeling.
“I think we need to get back as quickly as possible,” Mike finally said. “With the rover, we can get there in thirty minutes.”
“I disagree,” Lance said. “The problem started here. This is the only place we’ll be able to solve it, if that’s even possible. What do you think
you can do about the crack? If it happens to hit the base, we can just forget about the structure. We’ll never get it airtight again.”
“I’m afraid Lance is right,” Ewa said. “The problem is buried beneath us. We caused it with the drill. Maybe it’ll stop if we fill in the hole?”
“Uh oh, look at this,” Sharon called. She had walked a few meters southward.
“What is it?” Mike asked.
“Another crack. How deep is yours?”
“By now, maybe twelve centimeters,” Mike said.
“The one over here is at least twenty,” Sharon replied.
“Shit,” Mike said. “Where there are two, there will be more. We have to do something. Fast!”
“What do you suggest?” Ewa asked.
“We could try to seal the hole to prevent the eventual pressure equalization.”
“I didn’t think you were convinced it was a magma chamber,” Ewa remarked.
“Whatever it is, it has something to do with the hole. So, perhaps it will go away if we seal it off,” Mike said.
“You told us earlier that the drill head uses water to stay cool,” Sarah said. “Couldn’t we divert the water so it can flow into the drill hole? The surface temperature is minus twenty-five. At this temperature, we should get a really nice layer of ice.”
“That could work,” Ewa said. “But I’ll need to take care of that from the cab.”
She ran off as soon as she said this. Sarah’s suggestion was definitely viable. She could adjust the machine so that it would spray water into the drill hole. Ewa reached the ladder and climbed up. The hatch was still open. She didn’t waste a moment to close it behind her, but went straight to the steering console. The special functions were well-hidden. Ewa cursed twice as she mistakenly pulled up a sub-menu. However, she then found the right commands. The system confirmed that the new configuration had been accepted. Water was instantly sprayed into the drill hole.
“Is it doing anything?” Ewa asked over her helmet radio.
“No, there’s nothing to see yet,” Mike replied.
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