Mars Station Alpha

by Stephen Penner

  Stanton pounded on the wall, yelling, "Oksana! Aleksandr!" But it was no use. Lin and Gold stayed back while their captain exhausted himself against the blast wall. Then he turned and glowered at Gold.

  "Did you really have to shoot?"

  "Do you think she would have stopped with just one shot if I hadn't?" Gold replied.

  Stanton didn’t care what the answer to that was. He'd just lost two more crew members.

  That reminded him. "Mtumbe," he murmured.

  Lin dropped the now redundant flashlight and sprinted into his cabin. A moment later, she ran back into the commissary, her normally composed countenance in complete disbelief.

  "He's gone!"

  Chapter 61

  "Gone?" shouted Stanton. "What do you mean he's gone?"

  Lin cocked her head at the captain. "I mean he is no longer there."

  Stanton got a hold of himself. "Right. I know what you meant. I just don't understand how."

  Lin nodded. "Neither do I, but it is the truth."

  "Let's take a look," suggested Gold and the three remaining crew members walked to the sleeping berth in question.

  When they reached Mtumbe's room, Stanton put out an arm to hold Lin back. "Did you touch anything when you came in before?"

  She frowned. "Yes. When he wasn't in his bed, I came in and threw everything aside looking for him. I pulled back his sheets. I looked under the cot. I opened the closet door. I even checked in the dresser drawer. I was stupid, I know, but I guess I wasn't thinking clearly."

  "You weren't stupid," Gold reassured her. "You were looking for your friend."

  "So what could have happened?" Stanton asked the group.

  "Most likely, he got up and wandered off in the darkness," Gold suggested. "He was probably disoriented from the infection and didn't know where he was or what he was doing."

  "Agreed," said Stanton. "Any other possibilities?"

  They all thought for several moments. Finally, Lin said, "Well, ..." but then she stopped herself. "No, never mind."

  Stanton shook his head. "No, go ahead, Lieutenant. There are no stupid ideas here. It's a brainstorming session."

  Lin grimaced. "It is stupid, I assure you." She shrugged. "It's just that I can't help think of what happened to Dekker and what Petrov said about rusalkas."

  Gold raised her eyebrows, but didn't say anything. Instead she looked sideways at Stanton. Lin couldn't help but notice.

  "See, I told you it was stupid," Lin said. "I'm sorry I even mentioned it."

  But Stanton shook his head. "No, no. It's good to voice these things. If it'll make you feel better, I had a similar thought."

  Gold's eyebrows went up again. "You think he was body-snatched by a Russian ghost?"

  Stanton shook his head. "Not exactly. Petrov said that happened after they die, and I'm still hoping he's alive. Petrov told me he was trying to take the evil spirits away from Daniel by handlings those figurines. He said he wasn't long for living. And he was right. I was thinking that if he was right about taking the evil spirits away from Mtumbe, that might explain how Daniel could have gone from so bad just a few hours ago to well enough to get up and wander away in the darkness."

  He grinned at Lin. "So you're not the only stupid one."

  "That gives me some solace," Lin replied with a soft smile.

  "Can I make a more constructive suggestion?" Gold asked.

  "Of course," replied Stanton. "No ghosts involved?"

  "I don't know," Gold said. "Why don't we see if ghosts get picked up by surveillance cameras. Didn't you say they were all up and running now, Lin?"

  Lin's eyes brightened. "Yes, they are."

  "So," continued Gold, "we could review the tapes for any sign of what happened to Mtumbe, including seeing him wander around."

  "I'll check the tapes!" Lin practically yelled.

  "And I'll search the station for any sign of him," Stanton said. "Gold, you should check the ship. See if he may have stumbled into there. If he's delusional, I don't want him to drive the ship through the station wall."

  "Agreed," replied Gold.

  Stanton's face looked the most determined it had since they'd left Earth six months earlier. "We need to find Daniel. Go to your assigned tasks, then we meet back at the comm center in twenty minutes."

  Chapter 62

  Stanton began at the nearest end of the station as Gold and Lin hurried in the opposite direction to their destinations. He started with the commissary, checking every cupboard and under every table and chair.

  Next he crossed the corridor and checked the crew cabins. Dekker’s. Gold's. His own. Lin's. Rusakova's. And a double check of Mtumbe's. Nothing.

  He stared at Petrov's sealed room and realized Mtumbe might have stumbled in there. If so, it was too late to help him. Stanton shook the idea from his head.

  "Keep looking," he told himself.

  Next was the communications center. That was quick work, there being nowhere really to hide.

  Then down the hall to the command center and Lin. "Any luck?" he asked her.

  "Not yet," she shrugged. "I'll keep looking."

  "Comm me if you find anything."

  "Yes, Captain," and she turned her attention back to the screen she was examining.

  Next Stanton worked his way to the west airlock. He couldn't see the place without thinking about how Dekker had died there. And how his body had disappeared. Just like Mtumbe's.

  He shook his head again. "No such thing as ghosts," he tried to tell himself. "At least not on Mars."

  He pretended not to think about the seven crew members who had died before them and where their souls might have ended up. He'd read once that ghosts were the souls of those who either didn't realize they were dead, perhaps from some sudden accident, or those who knew they were dead but couldn't make it to the next world. Were souls that died on another planet able to make it to the afterlife? And if not, wouldn't they have no choice but to haunt the place they died in?

  Again Stanton shook his head. The thoughts were coming too fast now, crowding out his goal: finding Mtumbe. A quick check confirmed he wasn't in the west airlock bay.

  On to the entrance to the south equipment bay, and past the sick bay. The blast wall was still down. Stanton wondered what it looked like in there. Had they just overlooked Dekker’s body? Was it really just under something, drying out, rotting, mummifying in the Martian air? And what had happened to the antibiotics that had worked so well for Mtumbe and then seemed to abandon him completely?

  Daniel. Must find Daniel.

  The only area left was the entry bay. Again no sign of Mtumbe. On a hunch Stanton checked the spacesuits but none were missing. Mtumbe hadn't left the station for a sleep-Marswalk.

  Stanton pressed the airlock pad and passed through into the ship.

  "Gold?" he called out into the half-lit bridge. "Are you here?"

  Gold stepped out from the rear quarters of the ship. "Right here, Captain." Then she held her hands palms up. "No sign of him. He's not on the ship."

  "He's not in the station either," Stanton replied. "And obviously those can't both be true. So one of us must have missed him."

  Stanton sat down in his pilot's chair. "Let's comm Lin and see if she found anything on the video."

  Instinctively he passed his hand over the command glass to set up the comm link, but then remembered the ship's comm system was down. But they were about to notice bigger problems.

  "Right," Stanton realized as soon as he did it. "This won't work."

  He reached for the personal comm link on his suit collar, but Gold stopped him.

  "Wait," she said, holding out a hand. "Look at the command glass."

  Stanton did, but he didn't recognize what he saw. The usual icons and charts and information screens were scrambled and nonsensical.

  "What the hell?" he said, standing up to get a better look at it.

  "Looks like the poltergeist got onto the ship too," said Gold dryly.

  "Don't ev
en joke about that," Stanton said. "This is too damn serious. If the ship's computer is down, we may be stuck here for eighteen months whether we like it or not, waiting for the next rescue ship."

  "Let's hope they have better luck than we've had," said Gold.

  "Let's hope we have better luck than the first crew had," Stanton answered.

  "Too late," joked Gold. When Stanton didn't laugh, she stepped over to the control glass. "Maybe it's some sort of hardware problem," she suggested. "Crossed wires or something simple."

  Stanton shook his head. "Nothing's been simple so far. We're down to three crew members—"

  "Four," Gold interrupted. "Don't give up on Daniel just yet."

  Stanton smiled. He needed that. "Thanks, Gold."

  She smiled too. "Call me Cassie," she said. "No one calls me Cassie."

  She stepped up to him and laid a strong, soft hand on his chest. "I don't know how this is going to end, but I wouldn't want to be anywhere else right now than with you, John Stanton."

  She leaned up and kissed him on the cheek.

  For a moment Stanton just looked at her. Then he kissed her on the mouth. She kissed back, hard.

  They kissed longer than they should have under the circumstances, but not long enough. When their lips finally parted, reluctantly, Gold laid her head on Stanton's chest. He leaned down and kissed her hair.

  "Let's find Daniel, fix the ship, and get the hell out of here," he said.

  "Aye aye, Captain," Gold replied as she lifted her head and stepped away.

  Stanton pressed his comm link. "Lin? Lin, do you copy?"

  There was no reply.

  "Lin, do you copy?"

  Still no reply.

  Stanton looked back toward the station. "I've got a bad feeling about this."

  Chapter 63

  Stanton and Gold hurried through the airlock and directly to the command center. But they were too late.

  Lin was hanging heavily from a metal support beam, a thick communications cable around her throat, her toes just off the ground.

  "Holy shit!" shouted Stanton and he rushed in to lift her body upward.

  Gold didn't say anything. She just stood and stared.

  "Help me get her down," Stanton said as he held the body aloft, slackening the cable. Gold grabbed the chair from the control desk and stood on it to untie the cord. The metal wire was too thick to cut, and the support beam was just out of her reach, so Gold was forced to insert her fingers between the cord and Lin's flesh to undo the knot around her comrade's neck.

  Stanton recalled learning that in the heyday of hanging, the poor unfortunate's death was usually caused by a broken neck from the fall through the gallows trapdoor. But strangulation could cause the death as well and that was clearly the case here. Lin suffered the broken eye blood vessels and swollen tongue indicative of the painful process of the brain being deprived of blood and oxygen.

  Once the knot was finally undone, they laid Lin on the floor and cast aside the cord. Stanton sat back on his heels and sighed.

  "This doesn't make sense," he said.

  "Maybe she was distraught over Mtumbe?" Gold suggested, not very convincingly.

  Stanton shrugged. "Maybe," he said. "Let's check the video. Maybe she saw something overwhelmingly distressing."

  The monitor had gone into sleep mode, but when they slid a hand over the glass a paused image popped up onto the screen. It was of Mtumbe, but not with nefarious spirits carting away his body, or of him writhing on the ground in Petrov's cabin as his lungs exploded from the onslaught of Martian air through the bullet hole, or even of him sneaking out through the south equipment bay in a hijacked spacesuit.

  It was an image from their first day there. He was beaming that disarming smile of his and glancing toward Lin.

  "That's a nice picture of him," Gold said. "Maybe she was distraught over him being, well, missing anyway."

  Stanton examined the image on the screen. He wasn't convinced. "Maybe, but it hardly seems like something you'd just kill yourself over."

  "Well, we've all been under a lot of stress," Gold suggested. "Maybe she finally snapped."

  "Petrov snapped," said Stanton. "Lin was very unsnappy."

  He leaned forward and examined the image carefully. "Where is this? The entry bay?"

  Gold reached out to the control glass. "Let's zoom out and see."

  She tapped the glass and the image pulled back to show not only Mtumbe and Lin, but the entire crew, even Dekker, assembled in the entry bay. They were all wearing their travel suits. It must have been right after they disembarked.

  As Stanton studied the image, he realized something. "Wasn't Petrov in the entry bay when he first said he saw a ghost?"

  Gold shrugged. "I don't know. I was on the roof with you." She gave a nervous cough. "And I was kind of out of it. He thought I'd been possessed."

  Stanton shook his head. "You just had too much oxygen and not enough experience. Your first spacewalk can be overwhelming."

  He thought for a second. "Rusakova and I found him hiding on the ship. He said he'd been in the entry bay when he saw a ghost in the control glass. Reflected in the control glass."

  Stanton returned his attention to the image on the monitor. "Weren't you going to tell me something about that 'Croatoan' word. Didn't you say it was related to the carving in the catacomb somehow?"

  Gold was surprised by the sudden shift in conversation. "Er, yes. Um, I learned about it in one of my college American history courses. One of the theories of what happened to the colonists was that they sought refuge with or were captured by one of the nearby Native American tribes. That theory received support from an archaeological dig almost four hundred years later that found a ring with that same horse and X design on it. Apparently that was the coat of arms of the leader of the colonists. The ring was found in the middle of a Native American settlement from the same time and area."

  Stanton nodded. "Leader of the colonists, huh?" He looked at the image again, then knelt down and started examining Lin's neck.

  "What are you doing?" Gold asked, kneeling beside him.

  "There," whispered Stanton, pointing to the purple bruising around the neck. "Look at that."

  "What?" asked Gold, not whispering.

  "The bruising," Stanton whispered again

  "Well, of course there was bruising," Gold succumbed to the whispering. "She was strangled to death by a cord."

  "So why are there fingerprint bruises?" Stanton illustrated the shape of the bruise by placing a finger against one of the faint purple circles above the dark, straight bruise from the cord.

  "Did I cause that when I undid the cord?" whispered Gold.

  Stanton shook his head. "No, bruising happens when blood gets pumped into the skin from broken capillaries. Her heart was very much not pumping when you touched her. These are pre-mortem."

  He stood up again and pointed at the surveillance image. "Do you see that?"

  "That shadow?" Gold confirmed. "Sure. What about it?"

  "Doesn't it look like a person's shadow?"

  Gold analyzed it critically. "Sure. I guess."

  "So who's casting it?" Stanton asked. "Not anyone in the picture. The lighting is all wrong. Someone else is there."

  Gold frowned at the image. "Do you think it's a ghost? Some kind of Martian shadow person?"

  Stanton shook his head. "No," he said heavily, slowly rising from his crouch over the monitor. "It's no ghost."

  He turned and looked around the room, up and down, at the ceiling and floor, and all the seam joints in the metal walls.

  He clenched his fists. "You can come out now."

  "Who?" asked Gold, taking a step toward him and looking around as well for some idea of what Stanton was talking about. "Mtumbe?"

  Stanton put an arm around Gold's waist and waited. "No," he growled. "Not Mtumbe."

  Then one of the metal wall joints behind them started to shake. They turned and watched as a section of the wall popped out and
slid over. Then, from within the station's walls, stepped a large, tired, desperate man, Gold's first gun displayed in his meaty hand.

  "I wondered if you were gonna figure it out, Junior."

  Chapter 64

  Stanton just stared at him. Although he'd figured it out, he still couldn't quite believe it.

  "Agent Cassandra Gold," Stanton said, "may I introduce Captain Bruce Ferguson, leader of the first manned colony on Mars."

  "Pleased to meet you, ma'am," Ferguson grinned. He had a deep baritone voice, his barrel chest practically shook when he spoke, and it almost sounded like he wasn't insane.

  Gold didn't respond. Instead her hand started to slide up her hip toward her gun.

  "Uh, uh, uh," warned Ferguson, raising his own gun from the low ready. "Don't be stupid. I've been watching you and I know you're not stupid."

  "Where have you been this whole time, Ferguson?" asked Stanton. "Not behind that wall there."

  "No, Junior, not just behind this wall here." Ferguson nodded toward it but didn't take his eye, or the gun, off of Gold and Stanton. "There's an emergency interior section to this station, in case of something truly catastrophic. You should have known that from the blueprints. It was tiny to start with, really not much more than a small safe room, but I've had nine months to expand it into a self-sufficient station within a station. And I could monitor everything you all did from inside there."

  Gold asked the obvious question. "Why?"

  "Well, young lady," he started. "I wished no ill to your crew. I just didn't want you to stay either. I was hoping you'd leave after you saw the station abandoned. That's why I carved the word 'Croatoan' in the wall. So you'd think the colony was lost—just like Roanoke—and you'd return home right away."

  "Didn't you want to go back to Earth?" Gold pressed.

  Ferguson shifted his weight uneasily. "I don't think there's a lot for me back on Earth. Especially after what happened out here."

  "What did happen out here, Ferguson?" Stanton asked.