Day 6:
“Fifty years.”
Halley lays it on the table without preamble.
We all sit in numb shock. The Officers’ Mess goes silent as a funeral.
All I can think of is that it should be more of a surprise, but I’m still feeling the dust-burn from that lung-full of Martian air I gulped down yesterday. Air that shouldn’t be there, not even with the Environmental Terraforming Enterprises’ best PR spiel, not for at least twice as long as Halley’s answer.
“That’s based on what we found when we pulled apart the Hiber-Sleep systems,” she qualifies. “The chemicals and nutrients are almost fully depleted. We were down for the maximum time the system could keep us. And that was a lot longer than it should have been, except MAI apparently figured out an algorithm for adjusting our sleep feed to make it last almost two decades beyond what the original system specs projected. It did a damn good job, too, considering how well we all made it through.”
“If we can find something resembling a working telescope, we could probably confirm based on planetary positions,” Lisa offers, the shakiness in her tone letting us know she’s not really eager to confirm Halley’s estimation. But from the looks on the faces around the table, no one doubts Halley. All they’d have to do is poke their heads topside without a pressure suit if they needed convincing—and I know almost anyone who could walk far enough to get to the breached bay has at least gone up long enough to experience the unbelievable first-hand.
Anton especially doesn’t look surprised at Halley’s numbers. He looks tense, scared, angry.
“I’m still not sure what happened,” he tells us. “It looks like MAI went into some kind of modified sleep mode for extended periods, and had to give itself several restores. There was corruption. Hardware degradation. Memory is lost. Yet it worked a miracle in keeping us alive, managing power, tweaking the Hiber-Sleep systems.”
“Did it have help?” Lisa asks him, thinking of her mystery footprints—footprints we found more of in the breached vehicle bay.
“Someone was down here,” he admits. “But there’s no record of it. And no record of what happened to Colonel Copeland. It could be that MAI just overwrote the security files to save more critical software along the way. Or it could be tampering.”
“But who would come down here, check on us, maybe adjust our sleep meds to keep us out longer, then leave us here, erasing their passing?” Matthew doesn’t buy the benevolent visitor theory. His eyes are still distant—he can’t get the experience of standing on the surface without a suit out of his mind. None of us can. “What about the air?” he changes the subject. “Anybody figure that out yet?”
“The Terraforming Stations weren’t targeted by the nukes,” Lisa tries. “No one wanted to burn something that expensive and that would give this rock a future for mankind, not even when it went public that the corporate labs were moving their scariest projects to the Stations to protect them from the Ecos and the Discs. So they’ve been running all this time. Even if the crews were dead, they’d just keep cooking the planet on automatic.”
“And if the crews weren’t dead, they would have made contact with Earthside,” Matthew concludes bitterly. “Either that, or we just figured out who’s been behind the Discs. Someone at ETE wanted the planet to themselves?”
“Interesting theory, Colonel,” Anton agrees, an unusual darkness in his tone. “Add this into it: The nuking actually helped them. That’s probably why the air outside is twice as thick as it should be, even given ETE’s best projections. I ran a few simulations through MAI: The nukes generated heat, lots of heat. And freed up lots of water from the deep permafrost. On top of that, they threw tons upon tons of crap into the sky. On Earth, that would spell nuclear winter. On Mars, we get a greenhouse effect. Think about what the ETE generators do: they’re big, hot reactors. They free water, raise the temperature, pump what would otherwise be fluorocarbon pollution into the atmosphere to make a solar radiation shield, make the air thick enough to hold the heat they put out and what the sun beats down. Over time, the sun plays a bigger and bigger role because there’s more to absorb its energy. The stations all get this big bonus boost. And all this time their processing plants have been freeing oxygen, stockpiling byproducts in the form of hydrogen fuel and iron ore.”
“And they conveniently got the colony labs to hand over their hottest science for ‘safekeeping,’” Ryder adds in, agreeing with Matthew’s suspicions, her voice edged with the persistent rage that comes from grief.
“So the ETE Corporation planned this whole thing out?” I question. And I realize I’d like to have a target for my rage as much as anyone down here, but it doesn’t add for me. “How could they benefit financially from this if they effectively cut themselves off from Earth?”
“Maybe they got themselves evacuated a long time ago,” Anton considers grimly. “Declared us all dead, covered their tracks, smuggled the profitable research home.”
Matthew is nodding in agreement.
“I can’t see it,” I counter. “What about Earth? Did they just take the ETE crews at their word, evac them and not look any further? Then close the book and don’t come back? For fifty years?”
“If the ETE Corporation—or whoever—could pull off the Disc attacks and set off the Ares’ Shield, then maybe they could sell Earthside a hopeless worst case,” Lisa throws out, “make it look like everyone else was dead—and maybe everyone else was dead. With us conveniently buried.”
“And the planet hopelessly contaminated,” Matthew plays in. “Or at least made to look that way.”
“And the ETE leave their stations running in hopes of coming back some day,” Anton adds on.
“Corporate raiding at its finest,” Matthew finishes his nightmare.
“But I can’t see Earthside just leaving it at that, no matter how bad it was,” Halley protests. “They’d at least keep watch. Survey the established sites. Even if the other colonies and bases were all nuked, we weren’t. A close look would have shown that. They would have come for us.”
“Maybe they couldn’t,” Lisa considers. “Maybe the Discs were waiting to fight them back, keep them away. They trashed our entire incoming shuttle network in minutes, took down the docks. If the Discs established a blockade, controlled orbit…”
“And Earth would just leave it at that?” Ryder denies.
“We’ve got a makeshift receiver dish up on the surface now,” Anton reminds us. “It’s dead quiet up there. No signals. Not from any of the colonies. Not from the other two bases. Not from orbit. Not from Earth—granted, we’re sitting almost opposite from the sun if the date’s right, but I’d expect to pick up noise if they were still sending.” He lies back in his chair, still so very easily fatigued—youth doesn’t seem to be much advantage after we’ve all slept the last half-century together.
“Maybe they gave up,” Matthew throws out darkly. “Maybe they tried. Tried some more. Got nothing. Took the ETE or whoever survived at their word that there wasn’t anyone left to save. Or maybe they lost too many more lives trying.”
“I can’t buy,” Ryder bites back. “They’d have to be watching the planet growing an atmosphere, see the stations still humming. They’d come back. If the Discs met them, they’d come back harder. They’ve had fifty years to fight their way back here.”
“Maybe they have,” Anton offers. “Maybe they came and went.”
“And didn’t find us?” she counters harder, her anger flushing her. “I’ve been up there. Yes, the base is buried, but you can still see signs of it if you know what you’re looking for. And even if you couldn’t see it from space, global positioning would pinpoint it for you, or you could just find it on a map…”
“Somebody found us,” Lisa considers, flashing her mystery footprints up on the table’s holoscreen.
“And left us here,” Matthew finishes the obvious thought. “Maybe kept us asleep longer.”
“It would have been easier to kill us all,” I make clear. “Al
l they’d have to do is cut power to the chambers. Why didn’t they?”
I get no theories, only uncomfortable squirming.
“But the footprints mean somebody’s been walking around recently,” I try to progress Lisa’s thought in a more promising direction. “Someone was here. And that means everybody isn’t dead or evacuated. And it wasn’t a rescue crew, or we wouldn’t still be here.”
I see a look of validation in Lisa’s eyes—the mystery of her footprints have been almost an obsession. And, like me, she doesn’t believe they were simply made by Colonel Copeland before he met whatever fate he did.
“We don’t know what the surface looks like from orbit—or from Earth,” Lisa tries. “Someone else could have found a way to survive, just without a means to be seen or heard from space. Marineris is twenty-eight hundred miles long and hundreds wide—it’s a lot of territory to search. We know slides came down all over. There’s a good chance the whole landscape is different. Everything in the valleys could have been buried if it wasn’t nuked, or maybe the survivors had to evacuate their established sites and dig in elsewhere—they could have gone unfound. And maybe the surface does show signs of contamination—if those labs weren’t breached before the bombs fell, odds are hot they broke open during the bombing.”
“It’s been fifty years,” Ryder reconsiders, sounding beaten, sounding like a woman who’s just coming to grips with her husband dying in an unimaginable genocidal atrocity, and simultaneously trying to grasp that it happened fifty years ago. “Who knows what could have happened…”
“And we can’t risk jumping in to find out,” I focus them on the present. “Not yet, anyway.” Then I tell Lisa and Anton: “Just keep a passive listener on the surface for now. Don’t send any signals out until further notice. Just in case. We’re in no shape to respond if the Discs are still waiting out there, and if they are, then they’ve effectively held the planet for all this time.” Then I turn to Halley and Ryder. “Rehab is priority one. We need back on our feet before we can do much about anything. Next, we concentrate on getting this pit as livable as possible, figure out the long term. If we don’t hear anything from the Discs by then, we go up, dust the place off, start making noise. See and be seen. I just want us to be in fighting shape if bad comes. Which means digging out and repairing the batteries, the tracks, the rovers, the ASVs that are still down in the hangars because they wouldn’t fly…”
They nod in solemn agreement, but I can tell they wish I would give them something more. So I do:
“First we get on our feet. Then we get some wheels and some wings. And some guns, as many as we can get functional, just in case. Once we do that, then if nobody comes looking for us when we start making noises, we go looking for them.”
Chapter 2: Cry in the Wilderness