Is There Life On Mars? (part ten)

Note: This is the tenth part of the story Is There Life on Mars? If you missed the beginning, maybe you should start there (just click on the link.)

Day 8 on Mars

I’ve been busy with all these recovery trips to the automated landers and the whole “settling in” thing. The general mood is good, but it could be better. As we try to get all the systems up and running, it turns out that some parts of the base are not working at all. The most troubling is the dome.

We couldn’t get into it on the first day. It was sealed and locked, as it should be. It wasn’t until Mindy tried to unlock it the next day that we realized we just couldn’t. We fully understood the reason when the maintenance crew went outside to plug in all the solar panels. They didn’t know how to tell us at first, but… it’s broken.

The dome is broken! Badly broken.

There’s a gaping hole in its southeast side! Remember the sand I saw covering it before we landed? It’s not on the surface of the dome at all. It’s inside the dome!

It’s going to take weeks, probably months, to fix it and make it habitable for animals and plants.

We had to make contingency plans. Some living spaces had to be turned into gardens, chicken coops, and a barn for the surviving cow (Daisy died; the lander carrying the cows had a hard landing).
No one had the courage to retrieve the pigsty, even though the module landed smoothly and was only a few hundred meters from the base.

I gave up my room. It’s a garden now. During the last weeks of the voyage, I really got used to living in the cargo bay. It was quieter and I had more space. It’s the same here in my new quarters, which double as storage.

Okay, here is the disturbing thing I need to talk about. Yeah, more disturbing than the broken dome.

Noel.

At first, he was very confused and concerned about the situation with the dome. The last time he saw it – this is the live feed he sent us before we landed – the place was perfectly fine. And a normal sandstorm couldn’t have done that much damage. And even if it had, the sensors would have picked something up. There was the storm that prevented our welcoming committee from arriving, but it was closer to Base X. No storm has been detected here for weeks.

When we talked to him about it, he told us to stay put and keep doing what we were doing. He complimented us on the replacement gardens in the tunnels. We could be assured that everyone at Base X was working to find a way to repair the dome as soon as possible. He would send a team immediately to assess the damage and come up with a plan of action, and…

That was the last we heard from Noel or anyone else at Base X.

Our communication line went down the next day, just before our scheduled emergency meeting with them.

No assessment team has arrived. It’s been a week.

The trip was supposed to take two days at most…

(to be continued)

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Author(s)

DavidB

Frenchman, exiled on the other side of the planet, DavidB writes. It's not always very good, but who cares, the goal is to write. Sometimes, he also does other things.

MetaStructure is one of his longest-running projects. It was started in the early 2000s. Stopped many times. Started over a few times. Let's hope this time is the right one.