But first, he needed to check if anyone else had survived, and then seek out the crew’s lander.
If the lander was damaged, his options would be greatly reduced, especially if he could not fix the breach.
His gaze drifted over the strobe-lit devastation.
There was so much damage…
He shook his head.
And only bodies…
He took one last deep breath.
So, he reminded himself, the journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step!
First, he would account for his fellow squad members, then he would check the crew lander. Once he had done that, if his chances of survival seemed secured in the short term, he would then establish communications with Command. After that, he would check over the breach and take inventory of what supplies and equipment he had.
Satisfied, he exited the airlock into the survival tent and went to get a helmet from one of the backup suits before tackling what awaited him.
He paused for a moment, listening to the jarring ring of the klaxons.
CLANG! CLANG! CLANG!
Wei could see a control panel.
He’d look at it and see if he could kill the emergency lights and klaxons. For that matter, he thought it might be best to switch off everything but the grow lights, as he couldn’t be sure what was left of his power supply. The hail of debris thrown out by the impact had been lethal enough to have probably shredded the solar panels.
He could also see a comms deck.
The deck had power, but no signal. He tested it.
Nothing.
Wei could guess the comms array for the base was probably smashed.
That wasn’t a good sign for either of the landers.
He reached across the panel and turned off everything except the grow lights. He needed to conserve his resources until he knew more about his situation. Right now, he had no way of knowing if this was his last hour of light or lungful of breathable air.
Chapter 10
Houxing MingLing Yi (Mars Command One), Mars
Commander Tung sat in his office. The small room had two doors. One led back to Mars Command One, while the other was locked by biometrics and went to his private quarters. His quarters were his own private haven, a place he relished even more than some of the lush experimental green zones they had growing in nearby canyons, caves, and lava tubes. The base and all of its infrastructure was, of course, carefully camouflaged and designed to remain hidden from hostile orbiters.
He slumped back in his chair, the video from the impact playing on his desktop display. He ignored it. Instead, he gazed outside through a small window that showed a vista of red and orange rocky gullies and a distant dune field, all lit by a beautiful Martian sunset.
Tung had just sent his preliminary report to Beijing, including a video parcel of the impact and the various feeds that showed the effect of the breach on Yanjiang Er. Now, he waited. The encrypted message would take ten minutes to get to Earth at the moment because of the position of the two planets. An initial response was likely to be put together very quickly before then being sent back to him subject to the same delays. Both signals would be routed via Chinese lunar assets to minimize signal intercepts.
While the reemerging Americans were the main long-term concern in regards to discovering the scope of the Chinese presence on Mars, the Russians were the ones most likely to make the intercept.
The Americans were now working to revive NASA and their own reach for the stars after decades of economic malaise and a war that had finally come to a close. The new president in Washington had not just energized the nation, but galvanized it to look to the challenges of the future and meet them. Of course, as NASA had been stripped of funding for so long, they had a lot of work to do just to rebuild their reach, knowledge, and hardware to what they had once so proudly been. And then they could begin to chase China’s growing lead.
In that sense, the Americans would take decades to catch up.
But the Russians were different, although the Putinists in the Kremlin did not represent the same long-term threat to a Chinese Mars that the Americans did.
Moscow’s presence on the moon was substantial. From there, via their own network of orbiters and surface-based infrastructure, the Kremlin might be able to intercept communications and unravel the true scope of China’s Martian secret.
Commander Tung could already guess what Beijing’s reply would be: a request for more information. In fact, before his report arrived on Earth, he was sure people back there would already be studying the alerts. He was supposed to be in control of the Mars end of his planetary link, both in and out via Mars Command One, but he did not doubt for a second that Beijing had the ultimate control over his feed of information.
He also was certain they had access to more Mars-sourced data than he could gather.
Beijing would be working together information from other orbiters, robotic missions in the field, and lunar and Earth-based telescopes right now. Having access to all that data meant they would already have people back at Central Command in the capital—or wherever the secretive center was—weaving it all together in a way he never could when stuck so far away on Mars.
He only had a few hundred men in Mars Command One and very limited resources, but back in Beijing, they could call upon the might and intellect of all of China if need be.
The Chinese space program had two parts. One was the public face that trumpeted the success of their own lunar base, space station, and countless robotic missions to Mars. Then there was the secretive program that dwarfed the public program. The Party had initiated it way back when the Western media had started talking about Chinese ghost cities and the Communist state’s huge appetite for resources. It was true that most of China’s industrial production, construction, and tech industries had legitimate markets on Earth, but a small percentage of all that had been diverted by various state-owned industries.
And that percentage had been big enough to build the secret Mars programs.
Analysts in the West loved to read about wasteful ghost cities, metropolises built with stimulus dollars but left unpopulated and empty. They were the ultimate, supposedly, in what Westerners called white elephants.
Baisa da xiang.
But the truth was different.
Across the more isolated regions of China, in particular Inner Mongolia, strings of ghost cities were in truth the hubs of Beijing’s secret Mars programs. Places like Ordos.
One day maintaining the secret would no longer matter. By then, whether the programs were triumphantly announced by Beijing or uncovered with outrage by the Americans, the Chinese people would stand proud. The Party bosses in Beijing would score a huge propaganda win, and the world would not be able to deny the reality of the Chinese claim.
By then, if he and his comrades could continue to advance their mission plans, red Mars would be Chinese.
If they could proceed without setbacks.
Setbacks like Yanjiang Er…
The destruction of the second-stage habitat, a trial lava tube, and the loss of a squad of men was a setback, but not a catastrophe. Tung still felt confident they would achieve what they had come to Mars to do. And one of the reasons he was confident was because of not just all they had already learned and done, but his sense that they had enough leeway and control to give them ownership of what they were doing.
They were setting the foundations for Chinese civilization on a new world, and they would forever be credited with that. Not only would they know glory, but their descendants would live with honor and great opportunity.
That leeway and sense of control, here so far away from Earth, gave them the space to maintain not just their sanity, but to dare and dream of a better future that they themselves would have a hand in building.