Station seven wasn’t there.
Frank studied his map, and he was definitely in the right area. He knew the locators were only accurate to a hundred yards, so that merely gave him an idea of where he should be looking, but there were no obscuring features, no fresh craters, no debris, nothing. When Yun had planted the equipment, it had been a quarter of a mile from the caldera edge: there’d been no landslides or collapses that could have carried it off.
It had just gone.
He instinctively wheeled south. The ground was open, more or less all the way down to the plain, and then beyond. The dust-load on the rock was light, and moving even as he watched. Any tracks that might have been laid down had gone, along with Station seven.
The wind wasn’t strong enough to blow anything over, though, let alone carry it away, and he should be able to see it. He’d seen all the others. If he drove over to Station eight, then he’d spot it long before he got to it. It was the only artificial object in an entirely natural landscape.
Could there be any other explanation for this? Jim dicking around, maybe? But he wouldn’t interfere with science, and neither would anyone else. It made no sense.
M2 were supposed to be in the past. History. And with this one discovery, they came roaring back.
Goddammit.
17
[Message file #147146 3/1/2049 0542 MBO Mission Control to MBO Rahe Crater]
I’m so sorry you’ve had such a scare. We’re working on it. There’s going to be a natural explanation for this, and we’re exploring what that might be with our NASA colleagues. We’re still certain that M2 has failed, but in the highly unlikely event that even one person has survived, it’s probable that they’re only trying to fix their comms with scavenged parts from the weather station. There’s no threat to you or the rest of MBO.
The only thing you can do is tell the truth: you don’t know what happened. You don’t know how it could have happened. Because you don’t. We don’t either. All of our models show that M2 is either dead or dying. If there is anyone left, they can’t survive much longer. I know that sounds terrible, and that your instincts are to try and help them, but you can’t. You mustn’t. And say nothing about M2. You’d jeopardize everything you and me have worked together for, and you’d risk your trip home.
Just hang on. We’ll clear this up, and things will get back to normal soon enough.
Luisa
[transcript ends]
Eventually, in the darkness of his bed cubicle, light off, tablet on, he found it on one of the satellite pictures. There was something that looked like a trench, or a spillway, or an entrance to a mine where the trucks enter along a sloping road that slowly sinks below the ground until it disappears beneath it.
It had to be a natural feature: it was some five miles long and over half a mile wide, and if XO could excavate such a thing, they didn’t need NASA, or anyone, let alone him. But there it was, and the trench deepened towards its western end, where it appeared—difficult to tell from a satellite map—to carry on into a tunnel. Certainly the trench didn’t seem to end. Above ground, there were hints of a sagging roof, possible partial collapses, but if the entrance was clear, that was a huge space under cover.
There could have been a solar farm, but it was difficult to tell as it was a few brighter pixels, without definition. He definitely couldn’t see any habs, and guessed they’d be set up underground, out of reach of the cancer-causing radiation that he worked and slept in every day. But the telltale shadow of the descent ship was right in the trench, a few hundred yards from the suspected cave. The time of day that the photo had been taken lent itself to long, deep shadows, cast from the west.
It was a straight-line distance of seventy-nine miles away. It was suspiciously convenient for M2 to be just within traveling distance, and Frank was the suspicious kind. Despite Luisa’s soothing words, he knew Station seven’s disappearance was down to XO’s other base. He knew it in his bones. They were lying to her, and she was passing that lie right on to him.
Reporting back to Yun that her instrument had just… vanished, while keeping a straight face, had been hard. Thank God for radio and being alone—at least at that moment—on the volcano. He’d had the majority of the conversations he’d needed to have before he’d got back to CU1.
The chat with Lucy had been excruciating: more of an interrogation as far as he was concerned. She’d conducted a one-on-one with Yun, then with Jim, and Frank last. He didn’t want to lie to her. He knew he’d had to, and felt wretched for the rest of the evening.
The next day, they were on lock-down. Not quite lock-down. Experiments still happened, maintenance was still scheduled. But the daily jaunt up to CU1 was on hold while Lucy talked to NASA.
If he could spot a ship, surely someone from NASA could? He’d messaged Luisa, and she’d told him that Mars was huge, and redacting individual frames in the public domain was straightforward. Just a smudge here and there, and all trace of a landing—a doomed landing—would be erased. There was nothing to worry about.
Frank wasn’t at all sure. The growing ease he’d felt had evaporated in that moment on the volcano. He found himself wishing that M2 would just die already, and hated himself for doing so. M2 had a face: a gaunt, hungry face with sunken eyes and a wet, fetid smile. He’d had to put up with that in his dreams as well as seeing his former crew, and now it took center-stage. Hungry, so very hungry.
The fear was that Lucy, or anyone, would work it out for themselves. That the only way the weather station could have disappeared was if someone had moved it, and if it wasn’t one of the MBO crew, there was only one logical conclusion.
But as the day wore on, Jim started talking about sink holes and lava tubes, sand-traps, ice lenses, and other geological phenomena, and annoying Yun with the idea that she’d made a major discovery at the expense of one of her instruments. NASA proposed installing the planned seismic net early.
Even if they’d got away with it this time, surely this wasn’t a sustainable strategy from XO. If—when—M2 failed, there’d still be something for someone to discover, at some point, even if they died and fossilized out on the plain. There were going to be questions. This? This was just firefighting, and the whole building was in danger of burning down.
Eighty miles. Fifty miles from CU1. There was a danger that, within the lifetime of the current mission, someone—Jim, probably—would want to go out that far and look at the cave. Was Frank going to be expected to clean up M2 too? How was he supposed to explain his absence to Lucy?
He wasn’t going to be able. He told Luisa his fears, and she provided his only comfort. He couldn’t tell anyone else.
He caught up with his maintenance. He went around the greenhouse. He couldn’t eat, let alone sleep. He shuddered every time his tablet pinged with an incoming message, and he dreaded anyone speaking to him. The few times that Isla had tried to engage him, he’d barely heard a word she said. She gave up, and he just hung on, waiting for the all-clear from Luisa. That M2 had either finally made contact, or that they were definitely dead.
In the end, in the middle of the night, he wrote a message:
“Luisa. If you’re not going to tell them about M2, I’m going to tell them. You want me to keep it secret, but it can’t be a secret any more. I don’t even get why M2 is supposed to be a secret: what are they even supposed to be doing out there? It’s just a matter of time now before NASA find out, and I’m the XO guy here. I can tell them I didn’t know about it, that you hadn’t told me, but Leland will open me up like a can.