H. G. Stratmann, page 2
They jerked back in their seats as the main engines fired. The vibrations rattling their falling, decelerating craft grew stronger as they entered the dust storm and the pictures on the screens showed only a thick, gritty red mist.
Martin glanced angrily at the malfunctioning radar altimeter and fought to keep their rocking craft upright as he yelled, “I can’t see where we’re landing! Hope it’s not in a crater or on a slope—”
A deep bass thump rattled the base of the rocket and quickly shot upward to shake its two occupants high in the vessel’s nose section. Katerina cried, “Main engines off!” Then she looked at Martin, sitting frozen at the controls.
The craft quivered as gusting winds flung themselves against its outer shell. Silence filled the tiny cabin. Katerina murmured, “Touchdown.”
Her smile vanished as she realized her body was slowly listing forward. The restraining straps keeping her confined to her seat strained to keep her from falling toward the display console. Someone outside the rocket would’ve seen it tilting like the Leaning Tower of Pisa—and then, like a towering oak felled by the last stroke of a lumberjack’s ax, the craft toppled over. Katerina’s cry as they fell was choked off as they smashed against the cold hard Martian ground…
As the rocket tumbled over, Martin’s mind flashed back to when he was thirteen. He was sitting in the log flume ride at an amusement park in nearby Branson for the first time—slowly ascending to a point nearly twenty meters high. Suddenly he was plunging down a steep chute toward the waiting waters below. As the ascent vehicle accelerated downward with him seated at about twice that height, Martin felt the same sickening tightness in his stomach he did as a teenager—but this time there was no thrill, only terror—
His teeth rattled and head whipped forward as the rocket’s side struck the ground. For an instant his consciousness faded—then a brief pounding headache made him realize he wasn’t dead after all. The lights and glowing displays in the cabin flickered but stayed on—for now. If the craft’s batteries failed it would be as dark as a coffin with its lid closed.
Martin winced from scattered bruises—but nothing felt broken. He twisted his body rightward to check on Katerina. Though the blinking face peering out from her clear helmet looked stunned, it showed no sign of obvious pain.
A terrifying second memory flooded his brain. He remembered reading about the last day of the modified Delta Clipper, the DC-XA—their craft’s ancestor. A faulty landing strut made the vehicle tip over when it landed. After it fell on its side, liquid oxygen from the unmanned rocket’s damaged fuel tank fed a fire that destroyed the craft. In a wave of frenzied déja vu Martin imagined smoke filling their cabin and the flames of a raging inferno engulfing them.
“We’ve got to get out!”
A calmer voice replied, “Yes, Martin. Help me with my oxygen pack.”
Katerina unfastened her restraining straps and leaned forward. Martin released the small square metal oxygen pack attached to the rear of her seat and secured it to the back of her plastisuit. As she returned the favor with his pack, he wondered what they could’ve done to escape if their craft had toppled over with them sitting upside down.
His crewmate stood on her seat and wriggled up through the small open hatch in what was now their curved ceiling. Martin followed her into the short, narrow crawlway that led to the storage compartment just behind their cabin. As he squirmed through the cramped passage, Martin saw Katerina lower herself feet first into another open hatch close to what used to be the floor of the compartment but now, with the vessel lying on its side, formed a wall instead. He looked down through the hatch and saw Katerina using the gear and supplies secured to the compartment’s cylindrical side and erstwhile floor as impromptu footholds and handholds to reach its bottom some five meters below.
She opened a storage container and extracted a large coil of rope. Her voice came over his suit’s radio. “I’m going to toss you the end of this rope. Then I’ll tie the heavier equipment and supplies we need to the other end so you can pull them up to the crawlway.”
They worked rapidly, bringing up tool chests, food, water, and spare oxygen packs. Martin yanked each item through the hatch, untied it, then pushed it ahead of him just beyond the sealed access door directly above the crawlway and several meters down toward the rocket’s base. He tried not to think about any fire that might be raging about the rocket as they worked—or the threat of an explosion.
Finally Martin used the rope to pull the last and most precious cargo through the hatch—Katerina herself. She crawled in front of him and then flipped into a supine position to depressurize the crawlway and unseal the access door above her. It opened outward—letting in a fine mist of reddish dust.
Katerina lifted her upper body through the open hatch and twisted around to scan their surroundings. “This dust storm is like a dense fog, Martin. The wind doesn’t feel too strong now. But visibility is only about four meters and we’re too high to see the ground through this dust. At least I don’t see anything that looks like a fire in the direction of our fuel tanks and engines.”
“Thanks for the weather report. Now let’s get our supplies and us out of here!”
After looping one end of the rope around the base of the open access door Katerina rappelled down the side of the fallen rocket to the ground. Over the next few minutes they repeated cycles of Martin pulling the rope back up, tying equipment and supplies to it, then lowering the rope to where Katerina could untie those items and stack them near her.
Finally Martin used the rope to join her on mars firma. Then he employed a long-unused skill he’d picked up before a rodeo competition during high school—flicking the looped end of the rope off the door until it fell at his feet. He wound the rope into a loose coil, then he slipped it over his right arm and onto his shoulder.
Martin looked at the fallen ascent vehicle. “So much for our ride home. Hope our bosses don’t take this out of our paychecks.”
He examined the containers piled nearby. “Good thing we have enough oxygen packs to last each of us over seventy-two hours. There’s plenty of water to resupply our suits’ reservoirs and power packs for temperature control—but we’re going to have to find some place where we can take off our helmets to use our food rations. You’re used to fasting a couple of days at a time during Lent, but I’m not. Maybe the atmosphere will be breathable inside the artifact when we—”
Martin glanced around him. “Katerina? Where are you?”
Only static crackled over his helmet’s radio. Dust swirled thickly around him like a bloody mist as he stood alone beside the wrecked rocket on a desert-like plain.
A nightmare vision of Katerina falling off the nearby edge of the caldera to shattering death kilometers below overloaded his imagination. Or perhaps she’d fallen prey to bloodthirsty sandsharks from an old Outer Limits episode erupting from the Martian soil. Maybe the aliens had returned and snuffed her out of existence with a single thought—
Suddenly he spied a wraith-like figure floating toward him. As he shivered and faced his doom the apparition spoke.
“The damage doesn’t look as bad from out here.”
Martin’s jaw dropped at Katerina’s presumably unintentional quotation from Episode IV. Her plastisuit’s form-fitting exterior coated with a patina of reddish-brown dust made her resemble a copper-colored version of C-3PO.
For an instant he was six years old again on a family vacation to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. He’d wandered away from his parents and older brother and hightailed back to a favorite exhibit. They’d found him sitting inside the mockup of a Gemini capsule working the controls as he orbited Earth. Now he reflexively repeated his mother’s words.
“You scared the daylights out of me! Don’t ever wander away like that again!”
He saw Katerina’s eyebrows arch through her dusty helmet. She replied, “Two of the landing struts fell into a small crater about a meter deep. If we’d landed a few meters to one side we wouldn’t have fallen.”
“Unfortunately we did, and there’s no way we can get the ascent vehicle upright again. But I think we have enough rope and supplies to climb down the escarpment to an altitude where we won’t need our suits or supplemental oxygen anymore.”
“First we need to do what we came here for, Martin—find the artifact and talk to the aliens.”
“Right. Just one problem, Katerina.”
Martin looked out several meters into the opaque dust storm swirling around them. “Where is the artifact?”
Katerina frowned. “We were heading toward the artifact when we crashed. I’m not sure how far away it is, but if we follow the direction the nose cone is pointing, we’ll come to it eventually.”
Martin shook his head. “Not necessarily. Those winds we went through on the way down blew us sideways and spun us around. I wouldn’t trust using the rocket as part of a game of ‘Spin the Bottle’ to point where the artifact is.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
Martin walked over to a metal case on the ground and opened it. “Maybe. Remember when we explored that first artifact the day we landed? The metal platform the aliens made emitted lots of RF energy, like an analog radio transmitter.”
He extracted a rectangular palm-sized transceiver. A short flexible plastic-coated antenna extended from the device’s top.
Katerina smiled. “That’s right, you used one of those to pick up their signals!”
Martin turned the handheld transceiver on and pressed small buttons on its front. One of the buttons wirelessly linked the transceiver’s audio with the radio in his helmet.
He scanned through several bands. “I still remember what frequencies that other artifact used. Good, there’s a strong am signal at 700 kHz with what sounds like a test tone … and some fm carrier waves between 824 MHz and 894 MHz with a weird warbling sound!”
Martin held the transceiver in a fixed horizontal position in front of his chest. He slowly rotated his body back and forth in short arcs—listening to how loud the transmission was and checking the signal strength bars on the device’s small display. “The signal’s strongest in that direction—right in front of me and about forty-five degrees to the right of where the rocket’s nose is pointing. Now to do some triangulation and estimate how far away the artifact is.”
Katerina watched Martin walk sideways to his left, measuring off the distance with meter-long strides while he kept the transceiver’s antenna oriented toward where the artifact’s signal was strongest. Two minutes after he’d disappeared into the dust storm he hadn’t returned.
“Martin?”
Only static answered her. She reassured herself he was simply out of range. The radio frequency energy the artifact produced could be interfering with the signals from the radios in their helmets—reducing the distance they could communicate.
Three minutes later he still hadn’t reappeared. “Martin! Are you all right?”
No answer. She began edging away from the ship in the direction he’d vanished. As she lost sight of the rocket, Katerina tried to keep her bearings so she could retrace her steps before becoming hopelessly lost—
A shadow moved at the very edge of visibility several meters away. It resolved into a spacesuited figure walking toward her with a slight limp.
“Martin!”
The figure stopped. “Thank goodness! I was moving in the right direction!”
Martin frowned. “Wait a second. Where’s the rocket?”
“Right over there—I think!”
He grabbed Katerina’s hand. “Hope you’re right!”
She was. Safely back with their ship and supplies, Martin said, “I was coming back after triangulating the artifact’s position when I stepped in a crater the size of a gopher hole and took a tumble.
“The transceiver flew out of my hand. Took me a while to find it—and when I did it wasn’t working. Might’ve hit a rock when it fell. Then I realized I wasn’t sure which direction you and the ship were. Fortunately I guessed close enough to find you before we both got lost!”
Martin placed the damaged transceiver back in its metal case. “No way to repair it here. At least I know from my signal strength measurements that the artifact is about three kilometers away.”
He oriented himself beside the ship. “This is the approximate direction I was facing before when I got the strongest signal. Guess that’s the way we should go. Still—it’d be nice to have the transceiver working to make sure we weren’t veering off enough to miss the artifact in this storm.
“But even if we find the artifact, how will we know which way to go to get back to the ship? We can carry several extra oxygen packs and supplies with us when we go meet the aliens—but we’ll need some of this other equipment here to climb down the side of Olympus Mons afterwards. Too bad we don’t have any breadcrumbs to leave as a trail back here.”
Katerina bent down and opened a metal case on the ground. “I went over the ascent vehicle’s cargo inventory list last night. This case should contain—yes!”
She handed Martin the spare transceiver and smiled as its display lit up when he pressed the power button. “I hope you like your gift, Martin.”
“I’ll treasure it always—and keep it away from rocks!”
Katerina opened her other hand and displayed a small circular object. “You’ll like this compass too. It wouldn’t have worked on the ‘old’ Mars—but when the aliens terraformed the planet they gave it a magnetic field complete with north and south poles similar to Earth. Now we have everything we need to keep our bearings.”
“We make a good team, Katerina. I can’t think of anybody I’d rather be marooned on Mars with more than you.”
“Let’s hope we can impress the aliens too.”
The dust storm grew murkier around them as they trudged cautiously across the rock-strewn plain. Martin led the way with his transceiver directing them towards the signal transmitted by the artifact. The coil of rope lay draped around his shoulder. He’d cut off a short piece of the rope and used it to tie two extra oxygen packs together. Then he’d hung the cord across the back of his neck. The metal oxygen packs rattled across his chest as he walked. His free hand clutched a toolbox’s handle.
Katerina carried a similar chain of two oxygen packs across her neck. She walked hunched forward slightly, trying to keep the packs from bouncing against parts of her chest more prominent and sensitive than Martin’s. Her left hand carried a case containing spare water and supplies. The compass rested in her right palm.
Several meters ahead of her Martin said, “Too bad we don’t have a pedometer. I think the artifact’s close now—what the—!”
Suddenly Katerina couldn’t see him anymore. She trotted forward shouting, “Where are you?”
Suddenly she stopped—dazzled by bright glaring light. Her raised right hand cupped the compass and shielded her vision from the awful radiance around her. Then she realized where that blazing brilliance high above her originated.
It was the Sun.
Katerina stared up at a clear blue sky with a pinkish tinge dominated by that golden orb at its noontime zenith. She turned her head and saw the opaque dust storm she’d just exited seething a meter behind her—as if separated from her by an invisible curtain. She was in a column of still air and light like the eye of a hurricane that extended up to the heavens and across a circular plain three hundred meters in diameter. In the center of the plain stood the tall dark structure whose top they’d spotted during their descent—its full form and immediate surroundings now cleared of the dust storm still raging outside this oasis.
Martin cried, “Look at that!”
He stood near her—gazing up at a tower formed of gleaming gray metal. Its height was every centimeter of the four hundred meters the orbiter had estimated—a rectangular prism with a square base a hundred meters on a side. Halfway up the artifact, beginning two hundred meters above the ground, a pair of solid cubes one hundred meters in all three dimensions jutted out from the main tower. Each of those cubes was attached to one of the tower’s two visible sides.
Martin snorted. “Let’s hope the aliens didn’t get the idea for that artifact from one of the 1950s monster movies in my collection. Don’t think I’ve shown you that one—it’s called Kronos. I can’t see from this angle if that thing has a really big rabbit ear antenna on top—but if it starts coming toward us on humongous pillar legs moving up and down like pile drivers, we’re in big trouble!”
Martin squatted, laid his tool chest and transceiver on the ground, and removed the chain of oxygen packs from around his neck. Then he opened the chest and removed a pair of high-resolution image-stabilizing binoculars. He raised them to his helmet and adjusted their focus to compensate for the longer-than-usual distance between his eyes and the device’s eyepieces.
Katerina set her burdens down too. “Do you see any markings on it or an entrance anywhere, Martin?”
“No. Looks all solid—just the same gray metal the aliens used to make the other two artifacts. Except—there’s a thin horizontal line indenting it about a quarter of the way up from the ground—then another line halfway up…”
Martin lowered the binoculars. “The main tower isn’t one continuous piece. It looks like four cubes stacked on top of each other—like some gigantic child’s building blocks. Then Junior put some glue on one side of those two cubes most of the way up the main tower and stuck them on the sides of that third cube from the bottom…”
He groaned. “Oh, no!”
“What’s the matter, Martin?”
“Wait here!”
Katerina watched him run toward the artifact and disappear around its right corner. He didn’t answer when she called to him over her helmet radio. Just as she decided to go after him, he rounded the left corner of the tower and trotted toward her. His panting voice reached her several meters before the rest of him did.
“I was afraid of that.”
“What, Martin?”
He pointed toward the artifact. “See those two cubes attached to each side of that third cube from the bottom? There are two more just like them attached to the other two faces of that cube.”
