Chapter 7: Volume 1. Chapter 7. Frank Arnold

November 6^th, 2047

     Frank Arnold prepared the next load of diggers for Brin and John. MARS1 was almost complete. One brain and two builders were finishing the third enclosure, and Frank bent over to lift the next crate when a torrential gust of air pushed him over the container. He landed, and all he saw was fine Martian dust pressed against his face plate. A check of the HUD revealed both himself and the suit to be okay. He used the helmet’s OpSense to flick a command and activate his radio. “I need help. Something just knocked me into the dirt. Anyone see what happened?”

     The radio came back silent for a minute. Frank scooped and pushed dust off himself. The silence dragged on for another few seconds before the radio clicked. Brin came on the line, and his voice was manic. “Fuck. Frank, is that you? We need help down here. John’s suit is punctured, and I think my arm is broken or dislocated. I taped his suit up. He’s alive. I don’t know where Lin is right now.”

     “Brin. What happened?” asked Frank. He used his hands to pull dust off himself and attempted to stand up and appraise MARS1.

     “We’re suiting up,” said Sarah. She cut the comm link. Moe and Sarah were off duty in MARS1.

     “Hurry, I don’t know what it was, but it shot the rover up in the air. We crashed back down, and that’s what sliced Johns’s suit.” Frank spent the next few minutes scooping handfuls of dust off his legs. He pulled against a crate and stood up just as Sarah and Moe were on their way out of MARS1.”

     “You good?” asked Moe as he performed the exaggerated okay gesture.

     “Yeah, suits okay. Oxygen is full. Let’s get down there and see what’s happening.” Frank bunny hopped in the stiff suit towards the canyon and MARS2. Sarah and Moe were right behind him. Without the rover, it took ten minutes to get to the canyon, and the sight stopped them all in their tracks.

     The head of the drill Lin used to collect core samples was impaled into the side of the canyon wall. The rover was flipped over about fifteen meters from the entrance to MARS2. In the middle of all that was what Frank assumed had been a borehole but made larger. It was at least two meters across, and it looked like something had exploded out of the ground and left a mushroom-shaped crater in its wake. The rover leaned against the edge of the borehole. ‘What the hell,’ thought Frank as he hopped down the slope. “Brin, where are you?”

     “A few meters down Lin’s borehole,” came the reply. “We got thrown in here after the rover came down.”

     Frank walked up to the edge of the rim and peered down into the hole. It was deep. Bottomless. It ended out of sight in pitch darkness. Brin and John huddled against the side where the borehole sloped down into the darkness.

     “Moe, can you figure out where Lin is using the suit tracker.”

     “Yup, already on it.” Moe used OpSense to access location data for each suit and searched for Lin.  

     Frank and Sarah worked out a plan to save Brin and John. The hole’s slope was too deep to crawl up, and the dusty sand slid further down every time Brin tried to move. Frank switched to a private channel, “Thoughts?”

     “We could try and rope them up with the belts used to hold all the gear in place.”

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     “How long to get everything at MARS1, come back, and prepare it?” Sarah knew what Frank meant. John’s oxygen reserve was low after the rip in his suit.

     “What do we do?” asked Sarah.

     Frank was ready to say he had no idea when Moe walked up behind them. They both turned to look. Moe shook his head and looked down at the ground. Behind Moe, near the entrance to MARS2, the Qbots were forming their little metal tentacle and hefting an iron plate into the air. Frank used OpSense flick commands to the Qbots. “Moe, head back to base and get the other rover loaded with oxygen for John,” ordered Frank.

The Qbots followed Frank’s commands and formed a line held together by tiny metal claws. Frank and Sarah attempted to pry them apart and couldn’t do it. Those hundreds of tiny little claws were too strong. They brought the line of Qbots to the rim of the borehole and fed it down to Brin. Brin wrapped the Qbots around John, and their claws locked in place. Frank and Sarah used the Qbot tentacle to pull John out of the borehole. After John was on solid ground, they did the same for Brin.

 

November 8^th, 2047

     Frank, Sarah, Brin, John, and Moe stood around Lin’s grave. They had just finished the service and streamed it back to Earth for Lin’s family, friends, and the world. They mourned in their suits. Their radio units were off for a moment of silence. Sarah flicked a command through OpSense, and the stream back to Earth ended. They finished before people back home had even started watching. Their biogeochemist was gone. They still didn’t understand what had happened. The drill had gone deep enough to hit a pocket of gas trapped underground. The gas rushed out under pressure while the rover was near the borehole. That’s what the scientists back home said.

     The ISC chose to cut the mission short. They planned to pack up and leave in two days. Frank loaded up samples they’d collected over the past few weeks. Even some of Lin’s rock samples were going back to Earth. Someone else would analyze them. Why was a pocket of gas underground on Mars? No one knew. All the scientists said it was some ancient trapped atmospheric gas that had been locked in place for who knows how long. They didn’t know why a light gas stream kept coming out of the borehole. It blew the dust out of the entrance, but they couldn’t analyze it. They didn’t have the equipment. 

     Frank wanted to see what was down that hole. So did everyone else. He’d designed a program for the Qbots to descend the borehole with lights and a camera. Maybe that would show them something. Frank, Sarah, and Moe carried their brain and modified digger to the hole.

     The dust in the canyon crunched under his feet as he walked through it. Off to his left, he could see the pile of dust that had covered Lin’s body before Moe found her. It was swirling in a small tornado near the side of the canyon. The rover was on its side, unrecoverable.

     The Qbots worked their way down the tunnel. It was just loose dunes of dust formed when the blast of air had blown upwards. The digger took a tumble and rolled down the shaft out of range of the brain. The brain didn’t have a camera, so they couldn’t see what was happening. After about twenty minutes, Frank said. “Well, that was worth a try,” and he started to close the laptop he’d brought out. Just as the screen was about closed, the computer chimed as the digger’s camera reconnected. They opened it back up and saw a cave filled with rocks, lots of rocks. Lin would know all about them.

     “That’s odd,” said Sarah. “Look at the shape of those boulders. They kind of look like golf balls.” Frank could see what she meant – the rocks were not round but oblong and roundish. Multiple flat surfaces made up their outer shells. It looked like the dimpled surface of a golf ball but magnified. It looked odd and irregular. They flicked a command down, and the Qbot crept closer to one of the nearby rocks.

     “Can you touch it?” asked Moe.

     Frank flicked down a command prompt commanding the Qbot to reach its claw and touch the rock. The claw sunk right into it like it wasn’t even there. “I don’t think that’s a rock,” said Frank.

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