Day 153. 4 June, 2115:
Staley’s Tower lasted nine hours and twenty-one minutes.
“Some kind of electrostatic overload as we ramped up the signal,” Anton mourns, frustrated, and he displays the ruined components his team has pulled out of his pet project, spread out on the big Command Briefing Room table. They look intact—the damage is all in the microprocessors, which are hopelessly burned.
“We might be able to replace these,” Rick helps. “Cannibalize other systems. But it would be a waste if we don’t deal with what caused this, whatever’s blocking our signal.”
We started noticing the phenomena almost immediately: our outgoing was being reflected back at us as distorted static, as if hitting some kind of barrier. Anton tried to punch through it, figuring nothing was getting out into space but noise. He was careful about it, but either he burned out equipment that wasn’t made for the job, or the increase made the interfering field—something powerful and electrostatic—kick back.
I watch Matthew’s face go dark. His chest heaves with a deep, strained breath.
“Which gets us back to our friends from the ETE Corporation,” he growls.
“This may not have been intentional,” Anton defends. He calls up the old maps on the main screens, showing us the deep gashes in the planet’s equator that are the conjoined Chasmata that make up the greater Valles Marineris. “And we should have anticipated it, given the atmospheric density.”
First, he highlights the positions of the ten ETE generators that were operating before the Bombardment. Six are positioned around the roughly clam-shell shape of the central Melas Chasma, three-quarters of the way up towards the Datum line in elevation. The other four dot the narrower and much longer Coprates Chasma that connects to Melas on its east side, two generating stations on the canyon’s north rim and two on the ridge that separates the main canyon from the narrower Coprates Catena that runs parallel to the Chasma to the south. Both the Chasma and Catena open into Melas, but the Catena doesn’t run as contiguously long as the Chasma, which eventually “empties” out into the delta-like Eos Chasma three hundred miles to the east.
“The receivers we set up topside have so far triangulated electrostatic field emissions from at least twelve points, all above fifteen-thousand feet from the Melas floor, five thousand feet below the Datum line of the Planae,” he points out, lighting up new points that form a relative perimeter around Melas that includes the existing generators. “We expect there are probably more of these lining Coprates.”
“And they’re holding the atmosphere in?” Matthew questions like he’s not willing to believe it.
“In a way, Colonel,” Anton tells him. “This design was in the original ETE long term plan. They knew that they’d be facing a losing battle down the road, if they didn’t figure out a way to keep the air and free water they made from simply bleeding out into space because of the lack of a planetary magnetic field. I remember there were several proposals, including going so far as trying to re-liquefy the planet’s iron core.”
“Which would have destabilized the planet’s crust and maybe even the planet’s orbit,” Rick dismisses the fantasy.
“This option was the least invasive and least costly,” Anton continues, “creating an ionization ‘net’ that would help keep the atmosphere ‘held’ below certain elevations, by charging the particles that hit the field, creating a perpetual down-flow and using the walls of the valleys to contain the effect. The high iron content in the airborne dust makes it very effective, and it gets easier as the upper atmosphere thickens. Once the initial ‘small scale’ proved effective down here in the Chasmata, which is geologically ideal for it, they planned to eventually go global, but that was potentially centuries down the road.”
“It looks like the ‘small scale’ works pretty well,” Lisa allows.
“But it conveniently blocks our transmissions, and fries our gear when we try to punch through it,” Matthew accuses.
“There’s an incredible amount of power involved, Colonel,” Anton offers. “No idea how they’re generating it, but the air up there is hot enough to fry anything that isn’t EM-shielded.”
“Would it jam incoming signals as well?” I ask.
“It might play havoc with weaker ones,” Rick calculates. “But the bigger concern is that it’s likely keeping Earthside from detecting signals from smaller transmitters on the surface, at least inside the colonized valleys. Getting through to Earth from where we are would require an uplink powerful enough to handle cutting through the interference. Even then, we’d probably need a satellite aerosynchronous above us to boost signals through.”
“Which we don’t have,” Matthew concludes bitterly.
“Any chance Earthside would have picked up on our last attempt?” Ryder wants to know. Anton can only shrug at her.
“Odds are that we might be able to scavenge what we need to build a better tower if we can find the other bases reasonably intact,” Rick considers. “Or maybe the corporate colonies might have what we need—I’d have to review inventories.”
“But even if we can find them, there’s still the issue of getting there and back,” Lisa calculates. “The rovers we have won’t manage.”
“Same reason we can’t just fly up out of the valley and call out,” Anton kills the most obvious solution. “Not to mention the conditions outside this ‘atmosphere net’ are probably not much different than the Mars when we went to sleep. We’d have to work in shelters and pressure suits, and a long way from support.”
“We need the ASVs back up,” I conclude. “I’ll have Morales put priority on just getting them flying—we don’t need them to go into orbit, we just need the range. We’ll need them to go looking for survivors and supplies anyway.”
“We’re overlooking the obvious,” Matthew counters, and I feel him get angry. He turns to Anton: “What was the ETE’s planned projection for being able to build this atmosphere net?”
“Two decades, on the original designs,” Anton tells him. “But even that was still in the theoretical stage before it all went boom.”
“The technology didn’t exist before the Big Bang?”
Anton shakes his head. “Back to the power issue.”
“Somebody’s been busy, and after the bombardment,” Lisa tries not to sound worried.
“What would this ion net look like—or sound like, whatever—from Earth?” Matthew wants to know, sounding like he’s playing prosecutor. “Assuming that Earthside believes this kind of tech is still non-existent?”
“Widespread electromagnetic chatter,” Rick gives him after considering for a moment. “Blanketing the valleys—at least wherever the air was.”
“And what would widespread nano-contamination look like from Earth?” Matthew takes his next move. The look on Rick’s face answers for him. Anton’s eyes go wide.
“Convenient,” Matthew accuses.
“You think someone at ETE conspired to take the planet, and keep Earthside away from whatever they were doing with it by convincing them the planet is badly contaminated?” Lisa tries to challenge the idea.
Matthew locks my eyes across the table. “We’ve seen worse than this in our time—it can’t be that surprising. And yes, I did meet the ETE geeks. Enough to know they’re all dreamers and environmentally-sensitive hippie scientists. But that’s not where the money came from. And we know what kind of money Mars meant to those that knew how to exploit it. Imagine what they could do if they could get all the restrictions and resistance from Earthside to go away, by getting Earthside to go away.”
I give him a nod, chewing the inside of my lip. It’s an extreme (and extremely dark) possibility, but he’s right: we’ve personally seen humans do worse than this.
“I’ll tell Morales to make sure those ASVs are armed before we take them out.”