Mars

Several Hours Before

Humans with strong empathy know when they are in danger. Humanity's sixth sense, the gift of feeling, has never been scientifically confirmed but few doubt of its existence. When Marco Polo arrived in the woods of upper China, or when Christopher Columbus anchored his boat in a lagoon of what would become America, they both felt danger was lurking. As with all great adventurers, a determination to discover allowed both of these men to push aside this feeling of doom and move forward in the face of danger.

Today, the adventurer's name was Ronaldo Corvas was in the same situation with one slight difference: he was 12 light-seconds away from Earth in the deepest pits of Mars ready to enter caves miles below the surface of the red planet. Ronaldo was nervous, his heart was racing, but this was the exhilarating rush he craved.

President Emilio had finally granted him approval to come here. His pulse had not dropped below 74 for days, a dangerously high number for his body in the low gravity environment of this small planet. His brain was in overdrive, and aside from this shitty low gravity, he loved everything about his life at the moment. The man was built to take risks and this was the day he was born to live.

A couple of years ago, he agreed to leave his son behind on Earth, travel millions of miles away to head the Mars Recon team of the United Nations. He signed up knowing there would be risks, in fact that was the reason he did so in the first place. Ronaldo was born for today's mission. He felt he could die, but in his adrenaline and endorphin haze, that was fine. The four humans led by Ronaldo also knew they each were in grave and imminent danger of death, yet they were all here, suited up; on the doorstep of death, determined to move ahead.

Ronaldo often wondered what the President had meant when he personally chosen him for the mission. His words were odd, he joked ‘You are in for one hell of a ride. You need a safe word, it’s cantaloupe.’ But everyone knew Emilio operated on a different reality.

This was Mars, they were the first here, very deep below the surface in this massive natural canyon. Observation, the scientific post looming miles above, was anchored on the rim of the deep chasm. The scientists observed remotely the five kamikaze of the UN mission make their way slowly to the entry point. Ronaldo was the highest ranking officer and led these exceptional men and women. Mars-01, the full compound, now included over 100 scientists from forty different countries. These people were mostly lab rats with low body hygiene; scientists comfortable with research. Few were gifted as field operatives. The tall leader normally did not care, but today he had flanked himself with physical strength over raw brain power.

The scientists of the UN mission lived in pressurized Martian barracks. The larger portion of Mars-01 was a metal campground anchored on the edge of Valles Marieneris, the deepest natural canyon in the solar system. The Valles was without doubt the most inhospitable place on Mars, a planet already hostile to human life. Mars was cold and here the gravity and atmosphere was closer to Earth's moon than of Earth's. At most a handful of millibars of gas pushed on them even miles below the surface.

The only help for the immigrant-explorers was how a solar day on Mars was close to twenty-four Earth hours. In the greenish sky, the small distant Sun was at the edge of the mountains and the night was moving in quickly, but deep in the Valles, the position of the Sun made little difference. They were in a cold and dark environment where rays never directly touched the rocks. The team was comfortable operating in almost complete darkness. The visors of the tight suits enhanced natural light giving Ronaldo the impression it was daylight. The mission leader knew better; there was no shadow under his foot and the light spectrum of the dark helmet was wider and included the infrared and ultraviolet ranges.

Below their feet, the ground was composed of a mosaic of large flat rocks. From down here, the barracks on the rim of the Valles appeared as a speck of shining glass about 7,000 feet straight up. This distance was hard to imagine as it was more than five time the height of the tallest building in most large city. The walls were almost perfectly vertical; a rock wall no climber would attempt. The optical illusion from the bottom was so strong it made looking up dangerous.

The five humans were attached at the waist by a long black umbilical cord. Behind them, the tube was rolled on a hoist secured around the corner to a hitch. Impossible to see, the air and power feed was attached to the modules of the manned outpost three miles in the sky on the edge of the Valles. Each morning, as the Sun and deadly level of radiation rose in the Martian sky, the modules were cantilevered down about a hundred feet into the inside edge of the Valles. To help the mission, night was falling but the modules would stay inside the Valles so the cords reaching down to the team could hang down without a bent. In case of a problem, the plan was to power a hoist who would wind up and pull the team back in low gravity like a fish is hooked and reeled in a boat.

The danger was palpable and every possible precaution had been planned.

Ronaldo braced himself so he would not fall back, and waved up.

"Hi big boy!" said the voice in his helmet of someone miles above. "Got you. God these cameras are sharp."

"Roger that. No need to bring theology into this."

"You need all the help you can get my friend. I donated a kidney for you last week, that should help. Hope that damn Gerard didn't put his hands on it, he would sautée it for sure." Humor was encouraged on the distant Martian settlements. The jokes made the team relax.

Such a long stay on Mars in this low moon-like gravity was a severe strain on any body. His heart rate was down to 35 on normal days as the blood needed less effort to reach the brain. Ronaldo hated being this weak. He was, back on Earth, tireless. Here he slept so much. The tall man was an expert in deep underwater and extreme-climate missions. He led many Arctic expeditions until the UN hired him to captain the first enforcement missions on Mars. His mission was to protect and defend the gifted an quirky scientists of Mars-01; this mission was after all to him nothing more than a job in a deeply frozen and depressurized environment. The low gravity of Mars added a wrinkle he had not expected. The rules of survival were, as ever, the same: caution, caution, and caution. Ronaldo was a good-natured man, few things ever stressed him, this mission was the exception.

Today's video feeds were classified Top Secret and that annoyed him. He wished his son could see him. Deep inside he knew President Emilio would make things right if he died. His son would know.

Over a decade ago, a flying drone reached this place at the bottom of the Valles, the miles-deep scar on the surface of Mars. It returned images of a dark strange regular opening. Because of the odd shape of the opening and its location at ground level, this discovery remained highly classified. Most of the Martian colonization budget was a pretext to hide a military effort to discover the origin of this anomaly. The man-sized opening looked like a little regular door. Possessed of a flat base, and a perfectly rounded upper edge, it now stood mere feet from the mission team.

The man in charge of the first drone who flew down here noted that the carved entry in the rock facade reminded him of a gate to an ancient Native American burial ground deep in the Nevada desert. This drone pilot described it simply as the door. The name stuck in the military vernacular. Each of the subsequent drone missions to the door failed miserably. The cascade of improbable technical reasons was unconvincing to the military experts. A mysterious force was in action denying them information as to what laid inside.

"You are Roger for entry," said the person miles above in his ear.

“Who is Roger?” They all chuckled nervously.

The ground around the door over a hundred feet in every direction was now littered with hundreds of broken flying robots and probes. The consensus was in, someone or something was making sure no one could pass through that door and after years of failures, the scientists were running out of plausible justifications. Nothing short of risking human sacrificial lambs could get a camera past the door. Holding the camera were these five poor souls ready to drop dead with no plausible reason.

A month ago, Ronaldo lost patience and threw caution to the wind. He agreed to head this first manned outing to the door. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it no longer did. The political climate helped him convince everyone the risks were justified and to gear-up this suit. He was told that because of political pressures back on Earth, the entire Mars project would lose its governmental funding unless they found 'something' of alien origin. He knew better than to believe this hype, but he understood the need for results; this mission was important and he also wanted to see what was ahead.

Whatever was orchestrating the failures of the unmanned explorations might think twice about interfering if he was standing there in the flesh. Now that he had arrived at the bottom of the Valles, he was not as bold. His job was simple, find a little artifact, a mural, or even a fossil and pull out.

Ronaldo had seen many movies about the discovery of alien life on Mars, and few had a happy ending for the first human walking in. These movies usually portrayed groups of preeminent scientists and researchers, equipped with extremely sophisticated equipment getting ripped apart by slimy monsters. This mission was less glamorous in many ways. His team had little equipment. Ronaldo wanted to bring every piece of gear from the lab but was reminded this was only a visual reconnaissance, their only survival chance was a quick pull out and weight was a problem, not the solution.

They now stood almost naked, like bait on a line.

"Door in view. Base, do you have my visual?" Ronaldo asked.

"We do. Image clear."

None of the movies about Mars showed astronauts wearing tight bodysuits. Yet here they were, wearing outfits ballet dancers would find too thin. At least they were of black color and there was no live camera feed to Earth. Ronaldo could not deny they were comfortable and perfect thermal insulators, but instead of an armor, he felt like a lifeguard on a beach or better yet, a triathlete about to jump in the water. The team was dragging their equipment on a small cart floating inches above large inflated tires. The tires were broken in four segments each containing pressurized oxygen. In case of emergency, they contained air for the team. The low gravity was at last a blessing; the heavy cart bounced easily as it moved and the tube floated inches above the ground.

"Mission, we are climbing a little path to the door, it appears to be man-made. It is smooth. The door is on the flat wall only inches up from the path. Instruments show no unusual atmospheric flow in or out of the door. Temp stable at minus 59 Celsius."

The advance of the team was meticulous. Six minutes later Ronaldo spoke again. "We are now at the door. The shape is extremely regular, perfectly curved." Ronaldo slid his thin glove over the polished rock. "The first two inches on the edge is sanded to perfection. This is not a normal and natural rock formation. No part of the Martian landscape looks like this around here," he continued nervously. "This door was carved. Almost looks surreal like someone is playing a practical joke on me." With a push of a finger on the curved plastic screen attached to the forearm of his costume, Ronaldo exchanged the data collected from the sensors with mission command.

"Corvas, keep the wisecracks to yourself. This is no TV show. The people on the line are not...." the man refrained himself. Ronaldo Corvas imagined generals sitting in command rooms above hoping to see some Martian monster jump out and kill them.

"Tony, the one thing this sacrificial lamb, tied to this post gets to do is noise." He was nervous. "Requesting entry past the door's edge. Initiation of step two requested."

There was a silence on the line, followed by the sound some keyboard keys being punched. "Entry granted. Be extra careful. Keep the gas detectors on at all times. Remember the most likely natural explanation for the sanding around that opening is a phenomenon called degassing. It would happen as a blast at regular intervals from underground pockets of methane. These blasts coming out would need to be violent to polish this rock so well."

"Tony, you know I don't buy this story. The side is perfectly vertical. This was carved by someone or something," insisted Ronaldo. "This is a door, not a vent."

"We know... Let's hope I'm right, okay?"

"Run the heat map," said Ronaldo to one of his teammates. The three each pushed a button on their forearms and lit up the small infrared scanners in their visors. They each looked at the door at different wavelengths.

"Nominal readings." said one. They all gave a thumbs up.

The man over the comm could not resist making a joke. "If your hunch is right, it has been a pleasure knowing you."

"Really? You have everyone with clearance listening in, and you say this? Didn't you just tell me to watch my mouth?"

"I prepared more jokes. You want to hear them? All sensors are good here. I actually wish I was down there with you."

"For the record, your name never made it onto the volunteer list," replied Ronaldo with a smirk. He was sweating. The team was getting ready to walk in. They were standing before the door. Slowly they passed the door's edge. Nothing happened. They slowly began down what looked like a regular-shaped tube in the back of the door.

"Amazing," said Ronaldo as he slid his hand along the perfectly smooth wall. He was walking deeper past the door. He could feel a glass-like surface against his glove, it was still made of red sand. "This rock appears to be sanded. Perfectly smooth." He engaged the high-resolution camera in his visor. As the camera zoomed, the surface even at higher resolution remained perfectly flat. "Base, do you see the grains?"

"We do. The resolution is past fifty micron, down to about a micron. This level of flatness in any rock is impossible. Marble is not that flat back on Earth. Can you take a sample?"

"What? Negative base, do I look stupid enough to put a dent in this before I understand what it is?" He had one word in mind, desecration.

The man on the other side of the line softened the mood. "First thing I ask of you big boy, and the answer is no?"

"You bet, this is my call. Where am I going to hide a sample in these suits?" He knew a bulge joke was coming unless he continued. "Moving in. Trust me, on my way out, I will chip this baby up and box some souvenirs for your mom. My guess is, we are going to see something much better down there than a chipped rock with a flat surface."

The team resumed its way slowly down the passageway. The only evidence this team was in danger was a long white ceramic blade attached at the belt of Ronaldo. Puncture weapons so close to pressurized equipment was against the protocol. But the team leader insisted. This would have to do instead of his requested military escort. He knew that he was nothing more than an expendable scientist. With a hand, he felt the knife to reassure himself. At least there wasn't any water in that hole for once to further complicate things.

"Enhancing the infrared cameras in our visors. It is pitch dark down here." There was a sudden silence as the communication between Ronaldo and the base was lost. The line seemed to just cut out. "Mission?" he asked.