Judas Unchained

A pale light began to shine through the force field. Wilson turned to face it, seeing faint shadows growing across the floor behind all of the team. The light was deepening, becoming amber, then heading down toward ginger. His heart began to pick up as the color flipped all sorts of switches in his brain. Why the hell am I putting myself through this? He hadn’t realized just how much Mars had been haunting him down the centuries.

The wormhole opened. After a break of over three centuries, Wilson was once again looking out across Arabia Terra.

“Clear to proceed,” the gateway controller said.

Wilson drew a breath, staring at the stone-littered landscape. Thin wisps of ginger dust were scurrying through the ultra-thin atmosphere.

“You want to go first?” Nigel asked.

How envious he’d been of Commander Dylan Lewis all those centuries ago, the first man to set foot on another planet. Except he wasn’t; Nigel had been there waiting. Some strange atmospheric phenomena carried Ozzie’s laugh down the ages to reverberate around the chamber. “Oh, man, don’t do that, you’re going to so piss them off.”

“Sure,” Wilson said briskly. He walked through the force field.

Martian soil under his feet. Pink-tinged atmosphere banding the horizon, fading to jet-black directly overhead. A million pockmarked, jagged rocks scattered about, with rusty dust in every crevice. He scanned around, placing himself against the geography and features he could never forget. Off to his left was the rim of giant Schiaparelli, which should mean…There, just off north. Two mounds of red soil smothering the lower third of the cargo landers. Their white titanium fuselages had been scoured by the storms of three centuries, blasting away all markings and color. Now the exposed sections were tarnished curves of dark metal, the originally sharp edges of the parachute release mechanisms abraded down to warty clusters. Holes had opened up in several places, revealing the skeleton of internal struts caging black cavities.

So if the landers were there, then…He turned slowly to see the Eagle II. Sometime down the years the undercarriage had collapsed, lowering the spaceplane’s belly to the ground. The sands of Mars had claimed the craft, creating a smooth triangular dune of soil whose upper fingers of coppery grit gripped the top of the spaceplane’s fuselage. All that was left of the tailfin was a stumpy blade of bleached and brittle composite, half its original height.

“Damnit,” Wilson muttered. There was moisture in his eyes.

YOU OKAY? Anna sent in text.

SURE. JUST GIVE ME A MOMENT. He walked a little way across the icy landscape, allowing the others to come through the wormhole. Tarlo drove the transRover out, bouncing across the rough ground.

“Whoa, this low gravity really screws up maneuverability,” Tarlo exclaimed. “And these rocks don’t help. I’ve never seen so much rock lying around in one place. Was there some kind of massive meteor shower or something? How did you drive when you were here, sir?”

“We never did,” Wilson said. They’d brought three mobile laboratories with them, the best that twenty-first-century technology and money could build. They were still inside the cargo landers; his mind could see them like dead metal fetuses, every moving part cold-welded together, their bodywork flaking away in the terrible hostile atmosphere. “We just went straight home again.”

“You could have stayed and explored,” Nigel said. He didn’t sound very contrite.

“Yeah, we could have.” Wilson was trying to work out angles against the landscape and its poignant relics. He walked over toward the Eagle II. Its dimensions were scripted perfectly in his mind, allowing him to draw its shape through the raggedy mound of soil. The profile dynamic wings had been fully retracted for the landing, shrinking back down to a squat delta; there was the smooth curvature they followed to merge with the fuselage. Both narrow sections of the windshield were buried; he was glad of that, the equivalent of closing the lids on a dead man’s eyes. He didn’t want to see inside again.

He bent down slowly, and began scraping at the fine sand. Little swirls of it puffed up as his gauntlets raked around.

“We’ve acquired the Reynolds beacon, sir,” Commander Hogan said.

“Three kilometers away, bearing forty-seven degrees.”

“Well done,” Nigel said. “You guys scoot over there and get us some answers from the science equipment, huh?”

“Yessir.”

Wilson thought he might have got the position slightly wrong. After all, the Eagle II could have shifted around, twisting as its undercarriage struts collapsed. He saw the transRover start to rock and jolt its way across the rucked sands, all six navy personnel clinging to the frame.

“What are you looking for?” Anna asked.

“Not sure.” He moved a few paces and bent down again. “Okay. The flag, actually. I know we got the damn thing up. Must have been blown over.”