Wei asked, “Do I need to mention the orbiter?”
Shan was growing frustrated, but reminded himself that his friend had been concussed. “They need to know about the orbiter in case it is involved in any way.”
“The orbiter?”
Shan said, “NASA isn’t supposed to have anything weaponized here, but neither are we.”
Wei understood. “Sorry, yes. I will.”
Shan said, “Release our video feeds to them and answer any questions. You’re our comms officer, so deal with them. Let them know we can release a drone if they want.”
Wei nodded and got to work setting up a comms channel to Mars Command One. In the meantime, Shan focused on getting his men back on task now that the shaking had passed. He opened a broad channel to his squad. “Wei will stay out here to update Command. Everyone else can get back to work in the lava tube.”
His men started to move, crossing the gully, sticking to the matted paths that were paved in Mars-colored compressed slabs made from gravel and dirt. The surface gave them walkways and workspaces to use that were solid and would not give them away to passing compromised orbiters by way of stray boot prints. The pavers were produced from the waste products of the automated factory units that harvested oxygen and hydrogen from the regolith.
Wei broke into Shan’s comms, also broadcasting wide. “Wait!”
Shan turned around.
His comms officer was staring back across the crater at the sky where a new light blazed. Burning bright in the Martian atmosphere, in spite of its thinness, another meteor raced down towards them.
This one was coming down much closer.
Shan ordered his men, “Get to the lava tube!”
The rest of the squad was already running.
Wei held his ground, letting his suit cameras catch the incoming object, as he tried to establish a channel to Mars Command One.
Shan went back for his friend and grabbed him, sending a direct comms. “Forget it, get to the lava tube! The remote cameras can grab the video!”
Wei didn’t fight Shan’s efforts, he just turned and ran with him.
Chapter 4
Houxing MingLing Yi (Mars Command One), Mars
Yong called his superior over as the detected anomaly tripped multiple alerts. He already had a video feed up from one of the secondary bases. “Commander, there’s been an impact near Base Five Two.”
Tung hurried over, but queried using the base’s official designation, “Yanjiang Er?” The commander knew if this was serious, Beijing would be all over the recordings later. While he and his command crew had been advised to go easier on discipline during routine tasks, he did not now want to be accused of being lax.
Yong nodded. He understood. “Yes, sir!”
Tung wove between the half dozen workstations in the pristine white of the Command Room. “How are the habitats?”
“It’s all external, but it’s big. One of the cameras covering the approach to the lava tube picked it up.”
Commander Tung arrived and looked at Yong’s screen to see a billowing cloud of dust rising far in the distance. He arched an eyebrow in surprise. “Replay it.”
Yong nodded as he took the feed back twenty seconds and then let it proceed.
The camera shot was from above the airlock entry to the sealed lava tube. The shot covered the approach down a short gully that ran from the crater rim wall into the basin. They could actually see some of the squad, suited, walking up towards the lava tube’s airlock.
Yong said, “They just had their first orbiter pass.”
Tung nodded, but didn’t respond as they continued to watch the twenty-second-delayed video.
Nearby, the base’s solar array lay spread out, including the retractable camouflaged covers used to minimize detection by the last few functioning American orbiters, although government hackers had long ago scrambled NASA’s data feeds. Further out, the reactor pod also sat in the shot, safely distant from the new base. All of the equipment in the open was camouflaged to help hide Beijing’s progress on the red planet.
Between the hacking of some NASA orbiters and the outright destruction of others, it was questionable if the Americans had access to any uncompromised data feeds.
Beyond the Chinese reactor, the basin of the ancient crater filled the screen. For a moment, nothing happened; the landscape just sat there, ochre and flat in the foreground, shadowed heights across the basin marking the opposite side of the distant rim wall, while the pale salmon-pink sky looked down upon it all.
Ordinary enough. A typical, unchanging Martian vista.
And then something brightened low in the sky, racing down to disappear behind the opposite crater rim.
A flash dazzled the camera as the horizon lit up.
Barely a heartbeat later, a great explosion erupted over the horizon, marked by a billowing cloud of red, brown, and white dust that climbed into the sky.
They both watched the sight, mesmerized by what must have been a meteor strike.
If they had been back on Earth, they might have considered the possibility of a missile hit, but they both knew there was nothing out there in that province. That region was marked for the third ring of bases, but construction wasn’t scheduled to begin yet.
And there was no one else out here that could engineer such an explosion. At least not officially.
Tung said, “Let that video run, but magnify the object in another window so we can see more of what it might have been.”
More squad members came into the shot as they left cover. A few headed for the lava tube, but most had stopped, staring across the basin at the distant impact.
“Yes, sir,” Yong said as he prepped a magnified playback.
“I will need to report to Beijing, so let us clarify what we can.” He turned to another officer sitting at a display and commanded, “Get in touch with their comms specialist and ask what is going on.”
As Yong worked, the current video continued in the original window. The vision there trembled for a moment as the fixed camera picked up the shock caused by the impact. A moment later, it settled, but the vista had changed.
The sky had lit up behind the billowing mushroom cloud thrown up by the impact, putting the blast into silhouette. The screen struggled with the brightening background, washing out almost everything, until that great roiling cloud was itself suddenly punctured by another blinding light that blazed through it, heading towards the crater in front of Base Five Two’s camera.
Yong cursed.
The impact overwhelmed the feed, whiting out.
After a heartbeat, as both men watched in stunned silence, the video began to settle as it filtered out what it could to reveal the horror of what had occurred.
The new impact had hit on the far side of the crater, but was already throwing up a great cloud of dust and debris. With each moment, the video grew more ominous as a dark cloud rose up angry, climbing higher into the sky. In front of it, moment by moment, debris ejected from the impact arced out and began to come crashing down.
The squad was running now, rushing for the lava tube, as they sought cover.
First, the debris landed on the far side of the crater around the impact site, but with each second more of the smaller impacts bloomed as they marched across the featureless basin, like incoming hail.
Each projectile crashing into the surface sent up clouds of dust and jaggedly tore up the Martian regolith, scattering dark chunks across the basin floor.
In the twenty-second-delayed feed, the first squad members had now reached the airlock and were hurrying in.