Allen Stroud
I came around on my side, my head heavy and eyes gritted shut. I blinked rapidly and tried to lift my hand to my face, but my wrists were tied; a knot of cloth, looping around them and the waste water recycling pipe.
I could hear a hissing noise, the sort we trained for on Earth. An oxygen leak in the dome meant trouble, serious trouble. The automated system maintained pressure and air quality, but eventually the tanks would run out.
The gunk gave way enough to see a little. Blurry shapes moved around me, one of them came closer, bent down.
“You awake?”
A woman’s voice. I blinked again, and my vision cleared; an unfamiliar face. Not possible.
“Who are—”
“I need the code for the computer on your ship. Give it to me.”
“How did you—”
The click of a safety catch, the cold steel barrel of a gun pressed to my aching forehead. “Passcode.…”
“Fourteen ten, dash twenty-six, dash sixty-two, dash twenty-three.”
A rustle of clothing, movement, and the woman went away, the sound of typing and a curse. “You lied to me!” she screamed.
“You can’t be here,” I said. “It’s impossible.”
I recognized where I was: the hydroponics lab. The other shapes were David’s plants. Where is he? A groan from the corner of the room; I turned my head and caught sight of a bloodied figure. “If you hurt him.…”
The woman laughed hysterically. “You’ll do what? Call for help? You’re a long way from home, a long way indeed.”
* * *
Two days earlier things had been very different.
Landfall on Mars. Landing site – NE Syrtis Major. A manned mission six years in the planning and a full year of journey time. My crew of four: American pilot Susan Gill, French botanist David Trevenne, Spanish engineer Adella Lopez, and me – Captain Thomas Gravener, RAF, requisitioned to the Sirius program for this project. We spent eleven months in cold sleep while our transfer ship, the Zacuto, made its way out from Earth orbit to its colder brother.
March 15th, 2077: the day human beings arrived on the red planet.
Susan’s deft hand on the thrusters of the Greenmark – our crab-shaped lander – brought us in, just like the simulation. A breath of fuel and we were down. The clunk – a sound I’d waited for – rekindled the child in me; that sense of wonder we get when we’re unburdened by responsibility. For a fleeting moment I was the dreaming kid watching the television and gazing up in to the night sky.…
Necessity and a hand squeezing my wrist brought me back. Susan gave me a lopsided grin. “Time to explore,” she said.
I nodded and returned the smile, keen and eager. I touched the comms. “David, you ready?”
“Oui, prête ici!”
David is quite the national celebre, back in France. We drew lots to go first and step out onto the surface, but I’d hoped he’d win; I never met a nicer man. Our lander’s exterior cameras all stared at the airlock, waiting for him. Lag time to Madrid remained at eighteen minutes twelve seconds, meaning we’d be celebrating with him back inside before they got the news. No extended trips tonight. The trip to the habitation dome would start in the morning.
It took years of preparation and there’d been a complete media blackout until we arrived in orbit. Robots built a biodome modelled on similar constructs in Antarctica; the whole place running on minimal radio and power, before we arrived. Pillinger Base on NE Syrtis Major; rocky and flat; ideal for an exploratory mission. If all went well, viable sites for a colony could be determined later. We didn’t need ground with potential, just stability and an easy landing. Outside, a few hundred meters away, would be a prefabricated compound with solar farm, recycler, and chemical exchange.
“I can see him!”
I turned to the view screen. David appeared on camera, fumbling awkwardly in the Martian gravity, a little over a third of Earth’s. The sky was like a dull day from back home, not the multicolored vistas you saw in paintings. Hard to accept this as another planet, the first visited by humanity. David managed the stairs and touched down, then waved and bowed; very theatrical!
Five minutes later he was back on board while Susan ran a bio scan. Five minutes after that, the champagne came out. When Madrid cheered, we clinked glasses and cheered too.
More plonk ended up in David’s beard than anywhere else.
* * *
“The code, captain. No messing around this time!”
I got a better look at the woman. A dark-haired Afro-American, judging by the accent. I couldn’t place the state – most Americans sound the same to me. She was emaciated and haggard, wearing a pressure suit covered in dust.
Her eyes were wide, staring, and red rimmed, her mouth flecked with spittle. She moved in an awkward, desperate way that matched her look.
“You won’t kill me,” I said. “If you do, we’ll all die.”
“You think I care?”
“Yes, I do.”
I could still hear hissing. How long had I been out? I vaguely remembered a conversation about ration supplements and items being missing from the inventory before something slammed into the back of my head.
The gun appeared again, four inches from my face. “I may need you alive, captain, but I can hurt you. After a while, you’ll wish you were dead.…”
“How did you get here?” I asked.
The barrel lowered, aiming at my groin. “Passcode,” the woman repeated.
“You can’t have come with us,” I reasoned, “the lander is too small. I reckon you stowed away on one of the supply ships. That means you’ve been up here three weeks, at least.”
“Try two years,” the woman snarled, “more than enough for anyone. Now give me the code, I’ll reactivate your ship and get out of here.”
“Leaving us with no way back?”
“You’ve got supplies and they’ll send someone.”
I smiled. “What’s your flight experience?”
“Why do you care?”
“The lander takes training to pilot. I’d rather not commit murder by giving you the right code.”
The gun lowered further, the woman’s shoulders slumped. She sat down, her eyes flicking toward David’s prone form. “He’s still alive, I checked.”
“Very good of you,” I said, keeping my voice light. Susan and Adella would be alert to the leak, they’d realize something was up. “What’s your name?”
“Jade Langley,” she said, glaring, as if I should already know.
“We can’t leave David like that. You’ll need to untie me, so I can help him.”
She stumbled toward me, reached around and undid the cloth knot. I sat still waiting. No point in trying for her gun, she’d had more time to get used to the gravity. “Thank you,” I said when she was done.
I moved slowly and checked David’s pulse; steady and strong. His eyes fluttered open and he winked. I winked in return and turned to Jade. “You’re right, he’ll be okay.”
She didn’t reply; her eyes stayed on the floor. I glanced around. The leak had stopped, and a figure stood in the doorway out of sight: Susan, armed with a shovel from the emergency kit. I got her attention, shook my head and put a finger to my lips. She nodded.
“How did you end up on Mars?” I asked.
“You don’t know?” Jade frowned. “What’s happened down there?”
I caught a glimpse of the shoulder of her suit, the dust smeared away, revealing the patch beneath: a blue circle with a red line and the letters NASA stitched in white.
NASA? Suddenly it all made sense.
“You didn’t stow away,” I realized aloud. “You were part of a mission.”
Her eyes lost focus. “We landed, miles from here, set up the laboratory and transmitter, but got no response. Turned out the antenna was damaged. We fixed it but still nothing…no one.…”
“There’s no record of a NASA mission,” I said softly. “There was an explosion on Merritt Island in 2075…terrorists by all accounts.”
Jade glared at me, returning to the present. “You’re supposed to take me home,” she said.
“I can’t do that right away,” I replied. “Not until we plan this all out.” I reached out a hand. “You know how it is, we didn’t expect to find you here and we didn’t calculate fuel for five. We’ll need to do the calculations before anybody goes anywhere, and before we start all that, you must give me the gun.”
The idea jolted her, and the pleading expression vanished, replaced by something hard. She pointed the weapon at me again. Instinctively, I raised my hands. “Whoa! You want to be the first murderer on Mars?”
She flinched at that, but the gun didn’t waver. “I won’t be the first,” she muttered.
I let that hang in the air between us for a while before I spoke again, this time choosing my words carefully. “My friends will be wondering where I am, and David too. What happens then?”
“They sit down and do as they’re told,” Jade replied. “We make a plan, like you said, but I keep the gun – that way I’m safe.”
“You’re safer without it,” I said.
She shook her head. “I thought that last time I had a crew, but it didn’t work out that way. Turns out you can’t trust people. No, you talk to your friends and get them down here. Then we’ll talk, and you’ll take me home.”
* * *
Slowly, my head cleared. The wound was quickly taken care of with a synth skin strip from a medical box, but the after-effects took a little longer.
I made a show of contacting the others and David ‘roused’ himself. Seemingly he put up more of a fight than I, but none of his wounds were serious. Jade let him sit with me. Presently, Adella joined us. Susan waited a few minutes before emerging from where she’d been hiding. She left the shovel behind.
“Tell me about your mission,” Jade demanded.
I shrugged in response. “If you’ve been here a while, you can guess. We were sent up here as an exploration team, scouting for viable colony sites.”
“Who by?”
“Eurospace. It’s the only agency attempting manned flight these days,” Susan chimed in. She stared at Jade. “Jade Langley, yeah, I remember you from the public personnel lists when I submitted my application. I always thought it was a tragedy you folks never got to fly before—”
“Well we did,” Jade interrupted. “Be careful what you wish for, sweetheart.”
“Our job is to assess and recommend a site,” I said, using the explanation to calm everyone down. “We’re due to stay six months, set up and take readings.”
Jade waved her hand dismissively. “How fast can you prep the lander for launch?”
I frowned at her. “We can’t leave straight away. We’ve only just got here. If you want to change our mission parameters, you’ll need more than threats to do it.”
“You’ll die if you stay here,” Jade said. “We all will.”
“Why? You going to shoot everyone?”
“No, but it might be better if I did, before they come for us.”
“Who do you mean?” Adella asked.
“You don’t want to know.”
I sighed. “Like I said, if you want to change things, you need to give us a reason.”
She turned away from me and stared at the wall. “NASA’s 2074 mission was launched under media blackout. They figured the journey time would be so long, people would just worry. Me, pilot Mike Samms, and flight engineer John Tann all went into cold sleep three weeks after we left. We woke up a day out and brought the USS Vulcan into parking orbit before we descended to do our Neil Armstrong bit. Six hours after we touched down we lost contact with the ship. Three hours after that, they came for us.”
“Who came for you?”
“Martians.”
I struggled and failed to stifle my laughter. I got a cold glare in response. “You think I’m lying?” Jade demanded.
I shrugged. “This planet’s been surveyed for more than a century. Despite plenty of science fiction being written, nothing more than microbial life was ever found.”
“Merde!” David said and rounded on me. “She’s given you an explanation and you dismiss it?”
“You believe her, then?” I couldn’t keep the incredulity out of my voice.
“Whether I do or not doesn’t matter.” David’s accent always made what he said sound beautiful, even if he was angry. “What matters is something happened and here is a human being in pain! You asked for more than threats and got reasons, now you don’t like the reasons!”
“What do you suggest, then?” Adella asked.
“We question, we detect, we investigate, we find evidence,” David said. “Until you can provide a better explanation, Mademoiselle Jade’s story stands.”
I looked at each of them in turn. Yes, I’m the captain of the mission, but Mars is a long way from Earth and maybe David is right, perhaps I wasn’t being a scientist about it. Besides, believing the woman might help us earn her trust. “All right,” I said. “But we can’t do much finding out of anything sat here at gunpoint.”
David turned to Jade. “Keep your gun, we’re not going to take it from you,” he said. “Show us what happened to you.”
“Okay,” Jade said. She stood up. “You’ll need to log in to your ship’s computer though, and then we go through it together and you judge for yourself.”
* * *
The ‘rec’ room wasn’t home yet. It still had that new house feel to it, but it was a good place with enough chairs and an access terminal. The only other location with the same space would be control, and I wasn’t ready to let our guest loose up there. Control would be locked up tight with thumbprint recognition needed for the doors. Any attempt to force a way in would trigger a security depressurization.
At that moment I realized why Jade was in hydroponics. It had probably been the only part of the habitation system with an atmosphere before we arrived. How long had she been stuck in that room?
Adella took the terminal box seat while the rest of us crowded round. “Okay, I’m logged in to the Santa Maria,” she said. “What do you want me to do?”
“First, start an orbital sweep for our transit ship,” Jade said. “As I told you, we lost comms pretty quick. It’d be nice to know if it’s still there. We also deployed three relay satellites. I expect you did something similar?”
I nodded.
“It may take a while to plot all the parking orbits,” Susan said. “What can we do in the meantime?”
“Scan around Pillinger in an expanding circle. You should find the remains of the NASA base we abandoned. It’s not far, otherwise I’d never have made it.”
Adella tapped in the necessary commands. “That’s working as well.”
I stepped back from the group and straightened up, facing Jade. “What more can you tell us about your time here?”
She grimaced, but she was visibly calmer than before. “We survived in the mission shelter for six months. When supplies were running out we picked up the signal from the first robot lander coming down to build this place. By then, the buggy had been wrecked and Tann broke his foot. When he could walk, we decided to take a chance on getting here. We set out tethered together, but a storm blew up and they came for us in it. Eventually, I was left alone, nearly out of oxygen, attached to a strand of rope. Thankfully, the robots finished hydroponics and I was able to get inside.”
“When you say ‘they’, you mean the Martians?”
“Yeah.”
“So, you never saw anyone?”
Jade’s expression hardened. “You want to go back to the plants, captain? I can assure you they’re a tough audience for eighteen months.”
Susan laid a placatory hand on my arm. “We’re just trying to get the facts, Jade.”
Jade shrugged. “Those tethers are a woven plastic polymer. There isn’t anything that’d snap them without a whole load of force. If the storm took one of us, it’d have taken us all.” She fished into her dusty suit pocket and pulled out a section of the line. It was frayed at one end, but severed in a neat, even cut. “I never felt a thing,” she said.
“Orbital scan is finished,” Adella called out from the terminal. “That’s weird.”
I leaned in once more. “What did you find?”
“Three satellites, like Jade said, but no USS Vulcan.”
“Did we miss it? It’s a big heap of space.”
“Unlikely,” Adella said. “The whole point of us bringing the remote orbitals was to set up a decent tracking network up here and down there. Our computer has picked up Mangalyaan, Express, Odyssey, MAVEN, Ma Xian and the MRO, as well as the three new rigs Jade mentioned. Some of those ships are ancient, but they’re still up and receiving the signal. No sign of anything else.”
“Do you have access codes for your satellites, Jade?” I asked.
She nodded. “Of course.”
“If we had them, we could check the historical plotting and find out what happened to your ship.”
“What will you trade?” Jade asked.
I chewed on my lip thoughtfully. “Gun and codes for a user account on our system. I also want your word you’ll stick to a group decision on when we leave.”
There was silence as she mulled it over, glaring at each of us – even Adella, who’d turned away from the terminal screen. Eventually, she pulled the pistol out of her pocket, reversed it, and held it out to me.
“Thank you. You get the gun back if things get dangerous.” I turned to Susan. “Take Jade into control and get her sorted. I want everyone back to the job we came here for – arrival assessment. We factor in everything Jade can tell us and then we make some decisions. One hour, then we discuss around the rec room table, understood?”
David grinned, his bloody beard making the expression a little savage. “Fine by me,” he said.
“Adella, I want whatever results you get from both scans,” I added. “Anyone needs me, I’ll be in the archive.”
* * *
It made sense to me to withdraw and let Jade think she had won me over. Susan had experienced the NASA program before it shut down – they’d be able to talk alone, share some of that American superiority about space that occasionally bubbled to the surface. They still weren’t used to the way things had changed.
The archive room held all the black box data, a hard-coded recording of the construction robots’ activities as they built the station. Much of the information was in control, but a lot of the core function history wouldn’t be; there wasn’t much point unless you were searching for something.
Which I was.
It wasn’t a big room, barely big enough for me to squeeze between the three dormant robots. Emergency lighting flicked on as I shut the door. I flipped out the terminal and chair, so I could sit down. This was a secure and isolated system, designed to handle charging and routine storage while Pillinger was being built. One of our first housekeeping tasks would be to take the data cores and manually upload them to the network before broadcasting it all back to Madrid.
But there were some answers I needed first.
After the terminal initialized, I called up the headcam video feeds from the constructors on smaller split screens, spooling past their landing, deployment, and drive to the habitat site. I watched the domes being constructed at superfast speed until I caught spotted signs of red dust blowing in the wind.
The storm Jade talked about.
I slowed the feed. The robots were still moving around much faster than at the time, but now I was checking for details. When I got to the point that the hydroponics lab was almost complete, I adjusted it right down to real time.
One of these cameras must have caught her entering.
A moment later I found what I was looking for: a shadowy outline against the outer skin of the lab, slipping away as the robot turned to spray sealant onto a section of hardening polymer composite. I froze all the screens, flipping through all the available cameras at that point to see what they had captured.
Nothing, except the one image.
I went on, checking the next few hours or so meticulously, but saw nothing else. I went through the sensor logs too, noting the anomaly of a tear in the hydroponic lab wall which had been fixed the moment it was discovered, only a few minutes after the shadow was recorded. Everything seemed to match Jade’s story.
I went back and stared at the shadow. It was blurry and indistinct, but I thought it could have been two people, not one.
Had Tann or Samms survived with Jade and got inside the base?
* * *
An hour later and I was in the rec room with a printout of the silhouette, having pulled out the main table and drawn up a chair. None of the others arrived on time, but David was only a minute or two late, his hair damp from the recycling shower. He smiled apologetically at me. “Someone had to go first, and I thought the blood gave me a good excuse.”
I shrugged, not returning the expression. “I guess you’re right.”
His smile evaporated immediately. “What have you found?”
I pushed the picture across the table toward him. “Construction footage printout. Would you say that’s the shadow of one person or two?”
David stared at it, then at me. “You get any others?”
“No, just the one.”
“Then we can’t be sure of anything, can we? Other than what Jade’s told us, I think we believe that.”
I frowned at him but took the image back and pocketed it as Susan and Jade came down the steps from control. “Sorry, there was so much to set up,” Susan said and glanced around. “Where’s Adella?”
“Wasn’t she with you?” I asked.
“No, we left her here working on the terminal and running the scans.”
I got up and went to the station. The chair was turned away from it and the two processes had completed, but the results were still on the screen. I felt the others join me, peering over my shoulder. “Odd, I’d have thought she’d have compiled all this like I asked.”
“Who was in here first?”
“Me, then David. I didn’t see her.”
“Nor me. She never came down to hydroponics.”
“She never came into control, either.”
I stepped away and looked at each of them in turn. “We’ve only six rooms in this place. How can she disappear?”
Susan slipped past me to the terminal and keyed up a bio hotspot search. A two-dimensional map of the base appeared with moving red spots where we were standing and in the hydroponics lab. We all stared at it. “She’s been gone less than an hour,” Susan said. “Even if she was…there was a body, it’d show up.”
“It’s like she was never here,” David said.
“Now do you believe me?” Jade muttered in a low tone. “We have to get out of here.”
Susan stood up and unclipped a small handheld radio from her belt. “Old tech, but I thought one of us might have to go back to the lander.” She handed it to me and passed another one to David.
“We go in pairs and check all the rooms,” I said. “Jade, you’re with me.”
“We won’t find her,” Jade said.
“All the same, I’d like to be sure.”
* * *
It took ten minutes to confirm Jade’s statement: Adella was nowhere to be found.
As we searched the sleeping quarters and the science lab, I tried to picture her as I’d last seen her, staring at the terminal. We’d been quite close for a while during final training. The whole team of eight – mission team and alternates – had spent the best part of a year in each other’s pockets. Adella was married but things were difficult with the long separation. We’d had one or two late-night conversations chatting out the issues. I’d convinced her to stay on the program, but she was hoping to get back to her family afterward. You’ll regret it for the rest of your life if you don’t go once.
Now she had vanished.
We looked everywhere, but it wasn’t like losing a book or your keys. There’s only so many places a human could hide or be hidden. As I’d been alone, I insisted we check control, which pissed off Jade enough to counter with a search of the archive. With two of us in there we could barely move.
“You don’t trust me,” she said.
“You jumped me when we first met,” I replied. “That makes you hard to trust.”
Jade grunted. “Y’know, the Brit accent’s like a special tie on a white-guy suit. You go to a private school too? I bet all the ground team just love you, don’t they?”
I stared at her. “I’d feel the same about anyone I’d met under these circumstances.”
“Sure you would,” she drawled. “Ever had to fight for something? I mean, really fight?”
“I was in the Royal Air Force and flew over the Baltics in sixty-five.”
“Not what I meant.”
No one had been in the science lab, or at least, no one was supposed to have been in there. The door sighed a little as it swung open and I caught a scent of stale air before the recycling system whisked it away.
Tools were strewn all over the table. The chairs were upended, and several glass sample containers lay smashed on the floor.
“What happened in here?” I said, blurting out my thoughts in surprise.
“How should I know?” Jade replied, stepping past me and into the room. Her battered boots crunched on the glass. “I’ve never been in here.”
I lingered at the door, thinking about police procedures, crime scenes, and all that stuff about preserving evidence, but then I realized we had no cop show detective to investigate, just us.
“David needs to take a look at this,” I said. “He’s the best qualified to find clues.”
Jade shrugged. “The longer you take, the worse it’ll be,” she said.
“Is that a threat?” I asked.
She stared at me, but this time there was no anger, just a kind of broken expression; a little pain mixed with resignation. “Doesn’t take long for the prejudice to come out, does it?”
“I don’t mean it like that,” I said. “You’ve been here, we haven’t.”
“And you’re full of jumping to conclusions.”
“Whereas you’re pressuring for evacuation. I want to make the right choice based on evidence.”
“People go missing and someone’s been in the lab. What more evidence do you need? You think the things that do this are going to sit still and pose so you can size them up?”
“What, like you did?” I pulled the archive printout from my pocket and held it up. “Care to explain why the robot camera saw more than one person breaking into hydroponics?”
Jade squinted at the picture. “That’s not me,” she said. “I broke in from the other side. I’m sure if you print the construction logs you’ll see where the repairs were done.”
Damn. I hadn’t checked where the repair had been, I’d just assumed—
The hand radio beeped. We both looked at it. I turned away from Jade and unclipped it. “Susan?”
There was no answer.
* * *
We raced back along the corridor to the rec room, control, and hydroponics. There was no sign of Susan, David, or Adella. When we got to control, Jade dropped into a chair and activated one of the screens.
“Airlock’s been opened,” she said. “Pressure’s re-equalizing.”
“Why would they go outside?” I thought aloud.
“Maybe they got sick of waiting for you to see the fucking obvious,” Jade said. “We need to suit up and get to the lander, please! You can decide whether to take off or not, but if we don’t leave.…” She left it hanging.
I pulled her pistol out of my pocket and handed it to her. “Okay, we’ll go. The EVA lockers are next to the inner pressure door. You lead the way.”
“Still don’t trust me?”
“You have your gun, don’t you?”
We found the lockers untouched; stranger and stranger. I took a moment to pick up a motorized wrench then suited up. Jade did the same and we checked each other’s seals, like in training, only this time, how could I trust—
“Okay, let’s go.”
She keyed in the timed sequence, unwound the wheel lock, and stepped into the chamber. I followed, almost afraid to blink in case I lost sight of her. The automated system closed and locked the door behind us. I heard the hiss of air being sucked out of the room and pulled down my visor, switching on the suit comms.
“Susan? David?”
“No, only me,” said Jade.
There’s a bond you forge with people when you rely on them; work colleagues in an office, pilot and co-pilot, a sport team, whatever. When they’re gone, it’s like losing an arm. You feel broken and lost. Someone else might be able to do the job you need them to do, but it takes time to accept a replacement. Jade and I had no time.
The outer airlock opened. She stepped out, as did I. The arid landscape might have been an Earth desert, but I knew it wasn’t. We left the womb of Mother Earth long ago, but she held on to us. Now we were at the mercy of an alien womb, the womb of Mars; a world labelled by us as male and warlike.
What manner of creature could be born of such a place?
The door closed behind us, a faint sound outside my pressure suit and helmet. I knew instantly we were vulnerable.
“Where’s the lander?”
“This way.”
I led, Jade followed. Low gravity and urgency lengthened our strides, but there was still some distance to make up. We’d be out here for thirty seconds or so, even at speed. I couldn’t feel the motorized wrench through my gloves, but I knew it was there, the power lever under my thumb if it was needed.
Running across Mars was like EVA, but not; the personal sounds are magnified, like being in space, but gravity and the fact you can hear a little of the world is strange. You must remind yourself this isn’t Earth, you can’t crack open your helmet and take in a lungful of air. It’s a seductive instinct, forcing you to think consciously about everything the whole time. We’ve trained for this, of course, but still.…
As I ran, I glanced left and right across the vast plain. The dull sky and swirling sand gave no hint of danger or threat, but the farther we got from Pillinger, the more I sensed something amiss, a presence, strange but watchful. I knew it was moving as we moved.
“Believe me now?” Jade breathed over the comms. “You never had to fight to survive before. Welcome to reality beyond the manor gate.”
“I’ve never been to a manor!”
“Your whole country’s a manor,” Jade snarled. “There ain’t no silver spoons to help out here.”
The lander wasn’t far now, but in front of it I saw two figures, standing as if waiting for us. For a moment, I thought it might be Susan and David, but then I recognized the blue uniforms.
“Is that.…”
“Oh no.…”
NASA astronauts Michael Samms and John Tann stood in our way. They’d been stripped of their pressure suits, their exposed skin like the mummies you see in old Egyptian tombs, husks of the men they might have been, their flesh a written tapestry of suffering. They had no eyes or teeth but turned their heads toward us in perfect synchronicity as we approached.
I stopped. Jade did the same, halting a few paces to my left and brandishing the pistol. “Stay back!” she growled in my ear, a warning these ruined shells would never understand. It was no idle threat; the gun would fire even in Mars’s rare atmosphere and they were not her old crewmates, but they were long past caring.
Somewhere, sometime, Tann and Samms had been sons, friends, and more to their kin, but those men were long gone. Their bodies were vessels of something we could not perceive or comprehend. They were being used as a bridge, something familiar that could reach out to us and communicate; something we might understand.
Every instinct urged me to run, to scream, to fight, but I didn’t.
I stood, and I waited for the message.
Slowly, both figures raised their right hands, palms outward and fingers extended. The gesture spoke more than any other might. I remembered the lessons on Pioneer from my training and the etched plaque; the man waving, like this, while the woman stood at his side. How did they know? The Pioneer spacecraft had never come to this world. Had they watched us and learned? Moreover, they both performed the action. Did this intelligence understand gender?
I dropped the mechanized wrench and raised my own hand in response. I wanted to ask about Susan, Adella, and David, but I knew they would not hear. For several moments, we remained like that, Jade the odd one out. Then, the two bodies slumped and collapsed to the ground as if they were puppets whose strings had been cut.
Jade lowered her weapon. “What does that mean?” she asked.
“I think it means you were right,” I said. “We need to take our chance, get into the lander, and take off – now.”
“Glad you’re finally making sense.”
We piled up the steps and into the airlock, sealing the door behind us. Each moment it took to repressurize was another moment to consider the awful position we were in. We were intruders on another world, encountering intelligent life that knew about us, when we were ignorant of them.
When the air indicator light went green, I pulled off my helmet and began stripping away the pressure suit as fast as I could. But Jade hesitated. “They killed Mike and John,” she said. “They probably got your friends, too.”
“We can’t know if that was intentional,” I said. “But we also can’t know if they are peaceful either. All we do know is that they are letting us go.”
Jade nodded as she stepped out of her suit. “Would we do the same for them? If they came to Earth?”
“I doubt it,” I replied.
We moved into the launch cabin. Jade took my co-pilot’s seat, and with a wince I dropped into Susan’s chair. It was the only choice we could make, and I said a little prayer that my flight skills would hold up.
Not that a prayer to the gods of Earth would be heard on the surface of Mars.
“They don’t understand us,” Jade said. “We don’t understand them.”
I sighed. “Two vastly different creatures, separated by a gulf of space, both vulnerable, and both dangerous. The only way there’s a hope of us getting along is if we get back.”
“It may be our only chance to warn people, too.”
“Agreed.”
Twenty minutes later we completed pre-flight checks and blasted off. We found and rendezvoused with the Zacuto, spent the best part of two days replotting our course, and left orbit for Earth soon after.
Four people came to Mars. Two people went home.