Mars

A One Shot for SciFi Spring 2024

Photo by Malik Shibly on Unsplash

Mars. The Red Planet, God of War, Earth’s neighbour. Once a blue-green marble with oceans, mountains, forests, and rivers, but now nothing but desert with the scars of habitability. Lacking the dense atmosphere required for liquid water, let alone life, only madmen and geniuses think there is value in traversing the millions upon millions of miles from Earth to Mars. Being neither mad nor a genius Cao Teng questioned his presence aboard Dionysus every minute since breaking Earth’s orbit. The journey had been smooth and straight forward, not that he’d had to do anything being an archaeologist, travelling at over fifty thousand miles per hour at felt like standing still. But now, with the Red Planet in view, Cao Teng could not stop pacing the length and breadth of the ship. Though the space open to crew paled in comparison to that afforded the luggage. Stacks upon stacks of technology, seeds, habitation domes, and far more stuff he did not understand, all to turn a small square mile of Mars from red desert to green fields. A vineyard was the eccentric goal, a single sprout the realistic one.

Lucia perched at a window pressing her forehead to the triple-paned glass to glance at a slither of humanity’s potential second, proper, home. Cao Teng passed her for the umpteenth time and cursed himself for accepting the offer of a lifetime. He was here as a precaution, a leftover thought from old science-fiction stories and little green men. Superstition plain and simple. Lucia, well she was a botanist, trained on the Moon and well acquainted with turning barren tracts of land into fertile valleys and plains. She would be busy, too busy to see non-existent ruins, tombs, or intricate make-believe cave cities. Cao Teng would be alone in his futile search. He reached the airlock that lead to the cargo bay and turned around.

‘Stop pacing and look,’ Lucia said, her breath steaming up the glass.

Cao Teng squatted behind her but all he could see were the stars and auburn hair. ‘Can’t see anything.’

Lucia tore her eyes away from the God of War and stepped aside, ‘If only we were allowed in the cockpit, bet Yu and Carson have a great view.’

Cao Teng grunted as he wiped her breath off the window with his sleeve. He didn’t enjoy speaking English, the sounds were too different and none of them fitted round his tongue so he smiled instead. Pressing the top of his head against the glass he could just see the western crescent of Mars and felt a strange pang of relief. Too long there had been nothing beyond the ship, save impending doom. Yet the sight of something solid, even if it lacked water and breathable air, gave a small measure of solace.

‘I have to turn that place green,’ Lucia said.

‘You and the rest,’ another voice added.

‘Yes, yes, it’s a team effort, Henry,’ she did not sound convincing.

Too full of herself, Cao Teng thought as he stepped away from the window. He smiled his thanks and returned to the comfort of pacing the length of the ship, safe in the knowledge that soon he’d be on solid ground.

The flames on entry in Mars’s atmosphere instilled a fear in Cao Teng he did not think possible. It was as if the planet itself resisted them, forbade them from being there. Yet thankfully those who’d planned and built the ship had prepared sufficient heat shielding, or so Zhang Yu claimed. Either way, after a few minutes the Dionysus burst into the atmosphere proper and calmly descended to an unassuming spot of red sand chosen back on Earth. The ship powered down and for the first time since leaving Earth there was silence, complete ear-screeching silence. Cao Teng shivered, a cold grew within him at the lack of rumble from the engines, the lack of jokes over the radio, the lack of anything familiar.

‘Thank you for flying, Dionysus, commemorative coins will be handed out as you exit the plane, please no pushing,’ Carson quipped over the radio, breaking the sacred silence. The cockpit door unlocked with a spin of the wheel and the two pilots emerged, stretching and groaning as if they’d been locked up since Earth, forbidden food, water, and a bed. Carson cracked his back with a twist and then bolted for the airlock at the back of the ship.

‘What are you running for? We already know Cao Teng is first out, he won the coin toss championship back on Earth,’ Zhang Yu said, between sips of water from the tube that sprouted out of his spacesuit.

Carson slowed to a stroll, ‘I remember…’ He halted and held his hands out to one side, ‘After you, our prized archaeologist.’

Cao Teng shuffled past and reached for his helmet, ‘This is the only thing I’ll be remembered for on this trip.’ He sealed himself in the glass dome before anyone could respond to his overly rounded vowels and nasally consonants. He stared at the airlock trying to imagine the planet beyond it but all that came to mind was home, the landing pad, the miles of clear grass land, the small control tower to one side, the viewing tower to the other. He would not see any of that when the doors opened.

‘Everyone zipped, sealed, and locked in?’ The stern voice of Mission Commander Zhou rattled over the radio. Thirty people responded in alphabetical sequence, as was standard. ‘Open the door, Dr. Cao.’

The order froze his blood and parched his throat, there was no relief to either beyond the door on this cold and barren rock.

‘Dr. Cao, I’m waiting,’ Commander Zhou growled.

Cao Teng reached for the wheel and spun it. Red lights turned green and the door popped open towards him with a hiss. As his prize for winning the gauntlet of coin tossing back home he entered the airlock alone, the door sealed, the pressure equalised, and the air became unbreathable. A lightness overcame Cao Teng and when he stepped forward he felt he would float away. The door to the outside beeped green and with a spin of the wheel it opened outwards.

Flat.

That was the only thought that came to mind. Flat. Endless flat rusty brown. Cao Teng descended the steps in mesmerised silence, his boot crunching the dirt untouched by man or any living thing ever.

‘No words?’ Carson quipped.

Cao Teng’s throat was as rough as the desert he gazed upon. The endless red sand and smeared grey-gold hazy sky made him queasy in its wrongness. The horizon was wrong, the sky wrong, the sun too far away, almost familiar, comforting, until he realised it wasn’t home, it wasn’t Earth. He was an alien on an alien world. He swallowed a thimble of sick and walked further out into the haze. To the west were rolling hills scattered with big rocks and small rocks, to the east, very distant east, were mountains, harsh grey blades rising to pierce the sky. ‘Man’s second home,’ Cao Teng managed to say.

‘Now that’s a quote,’ Carson said. ‘Shame it’s wrong, the Moon is our second home.’

‘The Moon is a shed in Earth’s garden. This is a second home,’ Lucia said.

‘Cut the chatter,’ Commander Zhou repeated in three languages. Everyone spoke English but hearing the order in their own language made each listener sharpen up.

The airlock was soon packed with people alighting the Dionysus ten at a time. The ship would serve as their home for the first day or so while habitats were erected and atmospheres created inside them. Cao Teng savoured the few minutes he had alone on Mar’s surface. A frontier like none other lay before him one in which… he stumbled, the low gravity allowing him to catch himself before falling flat on his face. Glancing at the stone that tripped him he did a double take. It was smooth, a perfect oval, with two concentric circles chiselled in the middle, a dot in the centre. A queer sensation between fear and excitement grabbed him by the stomach as he reached down for the stone. The airlock opened and ten giddy children, with two dozen doctorates between them, leapt through the air to float gently down to the surface of the Red God.

Lucia walked, mouth agape, over the flat plain. ‘There was a river there, you can see how it flowed in the weathered rock. Is that ice on the mountains?’ She stopped by Cao Teng, staring at the oval stone in the palm of his hand. ‘How can you stare at your hand with all this around you?’ She glanced down.

‘That’s not a natural formation,’ Cao Teng croaked. He swallowed hard and held it up to Lucia.

‘You sure? Water can do weird stuff given enough time,’ she returned her attention to the horizon. ‘Soil samples. I need soil samples,’ Lucia trotted off to the ship to assist in the unloading that had begun under Commander Zhou’s watchful gaze.

‘Dr. Cao, I have a job for you,’ the Commander’s voice boomed in his half-glass helmet.

Cao Teng slid the stone into a pocket on his thigh and hurried over.

Cao Teng lay in his bunk aboard the Dionysus staring at the oval stone in his hand. He rubbed the concentric rings with his thumb wondering what two rings around a point meant, could mean, that would be understandable to him. If it where alien he had no frame of reference, no means to interpret the markings save for the age-old description of “religious”, a way to save face and never say ‘I don’t know.’ That would not satisfy. A return journey home was months away, years if this initial mission went well and he didn’t fancy being limited to manual labour for the botanists or geologists. The peculiar stone would be his saving grace.

After a breakfast of nutripaste and recycled water Cao Teng made for the surface. Lucia, Henry, and other botanists joined him out the airlock. There was a silence, Lucia frantically tapping and scrolling on her tablet. Results were in from the first test of Mars’s dirt and from the sounds of it they weren’t good. Cao Teng kept quiet as the doors hissed.

‘Found any aliens?’ Henry asked.

‘Not yet, you?’ Cao Teng said.

‘No, not even a hint of organic substances. If there was life here… well, there isn’t a long enough timeline for this. Unless they’re underground of course. Could be whole cities in the core,’ Henry smirked while he spoke.

‘Quit the chatter,’ Lucia snapped. ‘We’ve got work to do,’ the airlock door hissed open and the botany team leapt out and over to their laboratory pod. A simple radiation proof dome that, eventually, would have breathable air, an airlock, and be attached to a central living quarters replete with kitchen and many, many, many meals waiting for rehydration. Until then it was nutripaste.

‘Yes, boss,’ Henry raised his eyebrows to Cao Teng and sighed. He leapt after his team and padded down a few paces from the botany dome. The geologists were already up and out collecting rocks and minerals from the nearby hills.

Cao Teng felt for the marked stone in his pocket and wondered where to go. He strolled towards the flat horizon until he was about three hundred feet away from anyone else and stared at the oval stone, his thumb following the two deep crevasses around the dot. There was a pull, an instinctive feeling, towards the hills where the geologists had begun collecting samples.

He reached the rolling hills with small and big rocks as the geologists were moving their barrows back to the ship. Neither spoke to the other and Cao Teng figured they hadn’t found much of interest, at least not to him. With the smooth oval stone in one hand he wandered, feeling his way across the dusty hills that rose and fell. The dust was so fine it could almost float and tumbled over the hills in a fine sheen with the slightest of breezes. Wind, he hadn’t expected wind on Mars but of course all the planets had wind in some way he figured. He couldn’t feel the wind through his spacesuit but the fine layer of grit on his glass helmet showed him it was there. Cao Teng stopped atop a hill picked of most of its big rocks. Pebbles and chunks of red stone remained, none of it showing evidence of intelligent markings, he picked at random anyway turning the stones and pebbles over in his hand before tossing them away. None had any markings, all were rough, all were somewhere between red-grey and red-brown in tone. How did a planet have such uniformity of colour, he wondered. A question for the geologists over a fine helping of nutripaste, he figured. Cao Teng continued on climbing the rolling hills, none ever rising higher than ten feet. He turned to look back at the ship only to realise how far he’d come, his tablet read three miles from Dionysus. The hills were oddly uniform in height and distance from each other. He connected to the geologists radio channel. His ears flooded with inane chatter about baseball.

‘Dr. Cao Teng here, have you noticed the hills are all the same height and width?’ He said.

‘Yes, Dr. Cao, we have. It could be natural but we’ll know more once we know the composition of the rocks here,’ the speaker didn’t introduce themselves but from his tone was short, annoyed almost.

‘Have you done any tests beneath the surface?’

‘No,’ the geologist let out an elongated sigh. ‘That will be in a week or two, whenever our lab is set up. If you want to find out quicker, help build it,’ there was a chuckle from a handful of the other geologists.

‘Thank you,’ Cao Teng disconnected from the group.

Burial mounds was his immediate thought, small ones, single person ones perhaps, or ancient cairns that had been covered in ten thousand years of grit and dust. Either way he’d have to dig to find out more and he didn’t fancy waiting a week. He trudged back to the ship to load a barrow with shovels, brushes, trowels, and all the other tools of his trade.

Cao Teng pushed the barrow out three miles answering any questions with a short, ‘Just in case.’ There was no point telling anyone anything, least of all Commander Zhou who was overseeing the construction of the seven-spoked habitat with the aid of chemists and physicists who’d drawn the short straw. Cao Teng set his barrow the shallow valley between two mounds, took a shovel to the peak one and began digging. The thin clay-red sand came away easily because there was so little moisture but soon he struck denser, thicker dirt with larger stones and outright boulders that he struggled to lift.

He dug and dug until the mound was reduced to the level of the valley. What stood before him was a pile of large red rocks, arranged into a cairn; or at least what looked like a cairn, it could have simply been a pile of rocks. Cao Teng paused to catch his breath and found the smooth peculiar stone in his hand, his gloved hand working over the concentric circles. He paced around the mound of stone, lazily glimpsing at sections as they came across his vision until a little shimmering pebble caught his attention. Cao Teng stumbled over to find a second peculiar stone with two concentric circles around a dot, polished to a fine finish. The second etched pebble was nestled between two rocks near the top end of the cairn, red dust filled the circles and dot. Cao Teng picked it up, blew out the sand, and compared the two stones. They were identical.

A frenzy overcame Cao Teng and he began to dismantle the cairn boulder by boulder, the top ones he levered out with the shovel and watched as they crashed down into the soft red dust. Beneath those were rocks he could fish out with two hands, panting and sweating to the point his helmet began to steam up he stopped when he’d made a gap into the mound of rocks. A dark chasm beckoned him closer. He flicked on his helmet’s torch and a human skull stared out at him from the gloom of the Martian burial cairn.

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Thank you very much for reading!