“Liquid?” said Randy. “How is that possible?”
Sam stared at it with doubtful eyes. “Check the temperature,” he said to the Bridge.
Immediately Randy tapped away at his keyboard, running a test on the current temperature sensed by the rover. Everyone waited with bated breath, even though the answer was already right in front of them.
“Just above freezing,” he finally said, sitting up and resting his bearded chin on his palm, bewildered. “Three degrees Celsius.”
“So the temperature in this…structure…is higher than outside by what, a hundred degrees Fahrenheit?” Terri said with disbelief, running hands through her cornrow braids. She continued nervously, “What is going on here?”
A moment of collective uncertainty passed.
“Should we stop and tell FAER about this?” Mitchell asked slowly and uncomfortably over the comm set.
“It’s probably some kind of volcanic effect,” Rosalyn pointed out calmly. “We don’t know exactly what’s ahead, but we’re going to find out and handle it and report back once we have, just like we always do.”
In the cavern, Shauna mentally thanked Rosalyn. The woman had a gift for candor. And she was right—there were always explanations for the strange and the unknown.
With that driving her, she turned the camera straight ahead again and forged onward, the surreal sensation of what they were seeing nearly overcoming her.
Underneath the ceiling held up by the columns, the floor was scattered with debris. Piles of boulders rose nearly halfway to the damaged ceiling in spots, and there were some lifeless, gray-yet-glassy objects strewn about that weren’t identifiable but seemed like they must have been artificial.
They soon came to a drop-off that led down into a room that nearly made their jaws drop. The rover came to a stop near the edge, the light pointed outward into a profound abyss.
“Can you get a night-visual on this?” Shauna asked.
Rosalyn hit a few buttons and turned on the camera’s night vision setting. With it they could better see the gargantuan room that Sam and Shauna had stumbled upon. It extended outward for hundreds of feet, easily.
“It’s enormous,” marveled Rosalyn.“Most of this mountain must be…hollow.”
They stood there in sheer awe for a long minute, taking it all in. Although most of the room was shaped like a large oval, they could see that the room actually extended beyond the far side to parts hidden from their sight. There seemed to be four levels of the main, oval-shaped part of this colossal room. As far as they could tell, they stood on the second-highest level, and each of the levels, from lowest to highest, widened out further and further in size. Multiple huge, structural support beams stretched down diagonally from the room’s corners where ceiling met wall all the way to the room’s base, each one streaked with patterns of intricate lines and ripples, resting against the edges of each of the four floors.
All the way down at the bottom of the room they could spot some depressions and some elevations of land, pathways crossing under and over one another, and long, empty spaces of grayish floor. In the low light, it was tough to make out many clear details. Though all primarily a sight for the eyes, they could hear faint echoes as well: wind shifting, like the place was stretching in response to someone’s entry for the first time in an unknown count of years. Shauna rolled the rover down a rocky slope and near to the edge of the level, then turned to their left, where she saw the nearest of the huge cylindrical support beams, made of some metallic-looking material, stretching down from the colossal room’s corners, more than twenty-five feet in diameter. At the edge of this floor, Shauna saw a ramp leading up to the mighty beam and merging smoothly into it. It appeared that the beams were used for movement between levels as well as supporting the weight of the ceiling, in lieu of a normal staircase. She started the rover up the little ramp, moving at a controlled speed, and came atop the slightly-rounded surface of the structural beam. Down the beam they went, moving more carefully, the direction arbitrary. The panels of metal that made up the beam didn’t look pieced and welded together so much as they looked…grown together. As if it had been sculpted from a single mold. Sam was fascinated and unsettled by it. Still, both of them were caught up with sheer wonder.
Though they were in large spacesuits, the air still somehow felt more humid and more used than outside had, drenched in dusty matter suspended in air. It was tremendously bizarre and awe-inspiring all at once, and no one could really think of a single thing to say.
Rosalyn felt her uncertainty mostly overpowered by wonder. There was nothing that compared to that feeling. Nothing in the world. It was both strange and exhilarating.
Shauna and Sam reached the next level below them and decided to explore it. The rover rumbled across the floor through another hallway that looked exactly the same as the last one, only less marked by debris. The entire floor was made out of a similar, off-looking, metal material as the support beam. A few pieces of a column had broken away, and there were raised, rectangular boxes of metal in the center of the hallway that held some tightly packed material in them.
They kept on moving.
“What are we looking for?” Sam asked in wonderment.
Shauna had no answer for him. They needed to get further down so they could judge where to go. Maybe if she kept looking, Shauna would spot another ramp.
The walls, the floor, everything was like a skeleton. There were more ripples on the walls here, strange patterns that seemed more a byproduct of whatever method of construction was used than an intentional design choice. Yet there were some parts that looked etched into with abstract designs that might have been meant to represent something once. But who could tell?
On the left they suddenly spotted a gaping, flat, downward, ramp-like stairwell that was a little bit less steep than the structural beam had been. Shauna set the rover on course for it and it made its way down. It all looked safe enough.
It curved back around and led down to a lower floor—not one of the main four floors of the colossal room; this stairway hadn’t gone nearly that far down. It must have been a smaller, sectioned-off place. Here, the ceiling was lower and it wasn’t a wide-open hallway stretching endlessly side to side, but rather a small hallway with large, empty doorways at the walls. This place looked even darker than the last. That one ghostly light was the best they had, their helmet lights being useful, but less powerful.
As the rover rolled onward past the two wide-open, tall doorways, Shauna stared at the floor. There were a lot of odd-looking rocks there. Very uniform in size, close to the size of a volleyball, and flatter. Not rocks at all, actually, but…shells? They broke underneath the vehicle’s sturdy, treaded wheels with a sound that was as much squishy as it was crunchy. The pile grew higher and higher. The treads struggled a bit but managed to get through it all, slogging along as if in a bog. They passed three more open doorways on either side along their way, but couldn’t tell what lay beyond them.
They approached a very sudden drop-off in the darkness, one Shauna may not have caught herself if the automatic brakes hadn’t kicked in.
“The floor’s broken here… Maybe by some kind of acidic material,” she said, noticing exposed sections of rock that appeared eaten into. The drop was not far at all, in fact just a few feet down revealing some large tubes running along, with the appearance of translucent bone. Everything was drenched with a mucky-looking, purplish liquid.
“Maybe we should go back to the large room,” Sam questioned.
Shauna reluctantly voiced her agreement. None of them were experts at this kind of exploration, and she didn’t want to waste their time or possibly head somewhere dangerous.
The rover turned around and went back. It seemed to struggle more and more, its pace slowing. After ten seconds it stopped completely. A mechanical whirr noise entered their ears. The rover’s treaded wheels spun in place.
It was stuck.
Alarmed, Sam said, “What’s going on?”
Shauna angled the light around for a minute and discovered two things. First, the floor all the way up to the drop-off was lightly covered with that dark violet liquid/gel-like material she’d seen in the drop-off. Second, that material had painted the treads, and many of the shells in huge piles that they were passing back over were now stuck to the wheels, most of them cracked and in pieces.
“We’ve got a problem,” she said, unbuckling her seatbelt and jumping off of the rover.
Sam followed suit, and they both inspected the treaded wheels. All three of the treaded sections, thick as they were, had gotten so thickly covered with shells and shards of shells that they had no traction and were getting jammed. Pushing the pedal more when they got stuck had only furthered the problem, breaking the shells and exposing more of their fleshy interior, spreading it all over the treads. The rover couldn’t get anywhere in this state.
On the Bridge, Randy, Terri, and Rosalyn were staring at their screens in confusion; the video had been growing grainier the further down they went, and now it was impossible to see what was happening; there was only static both in video and audio.
“Captain Beele, we’ve lost our eyes. Can you fill us in, please?” Rosalyn said with arms crossed.
“Our ———— starting t—— like cotton c—dy wheels,” came in Sam. “Lots of organic ————ck to the whe—.”
Rosalyn gritted her teeth a bit at the audio static. Something stuck to the wheels? “Do you have any blow-torches, or a solvent of some kind?”
“You’re brea—ng up,” Shauna said, static building and twitching. “—rd—— we — got — t—ch——of—————”
Terri and Rosalyn gave each other sideways glances in their seats. Amid colorful and brightly-lit buttons, beeping alerts, and digital keyboards on computer stations all around the Bridge, their screens all showed nothing but static.
“Damn it,” breathed Randy.
“Did we lose them?” Mitchell asked on their comm sets.
Terri sighed. “They’ve gone pretty far underground.”
“We’ve gone underground before,” Randy grumbled.
“Not this far, with this much interference, I guess.”
“Keep trying,” ordered Rosalyn.
A few minutes passed as the three of them on the Bridge worked to restore their connection and contact Sam and Shauna, with no success.
Randy rubbed his face with his hands, pushing up his glasses. “Well, this isn’t good. Do we go after them?” His voice showed more frustration than anxiety.
Al’s voice came on. “You might get lost.”
“We won’t get lost,” Rosalyn countered. “As long as we follow their footsteps, we’ll at least get close enough to pick up their signal again.”
The others nodded their heads. “And they’ll stay close to the rover. Won’t be a problem,” said Terri more calmly than she looked, albeit somewhat annoyed. Setbacks like this could dramatically lessen the productivity of the trip.
“Alright, who’s going?” said Randy, his eyelids low.
Rosalyn nodded. “Let’s us three go, and Al and Mitch can stay to watch the ship. Does that work for you guys?”
Al answered, “Uh…yeah, fine with us.”
“Okay.” She let out a sigh, steeling herself for what was to come as they would enter this strange new place. “Let’s go.”
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