3
Shauna shut off the rover light and let the beams of their helmets light their way in the constricted, shell-filled tunnel. They would need the rover’s battery for driving back once they scraped all the wheels clean of the sticky, fleshy shells.
She and Sam had checked through all their packed supplies for something to help them get the treads clean as efficiently as possible, and had come up with a couple of shovels and a metal heater rod. Sam was now crouched down beside Shauna, scraping away with a shovel at the fleshy parts of the scores of shells stuck to the treads while she tapped a button on the one-and-a-half-foot long heater rod and waited as it gradually turned bright red. She stepped carefully on piles of clinking dark shells.
“They’re probably coming for us at this point, right?” he said with a pant. “Wanna test the signal again?”
“Yeah,” she answered, feeling much of her patience supply exhausted. Irritation nagged at her constantly.
She switched her headset with a dial on her collar to reach out to the other headsets. “This is Captain Beele. Can anyone hear me?”
All was silence but the sound of their slow breathing and the scraping of Sam’s shovel on rubber.
“We’ll get it,” said Sam.
She nodded. The red glow from the heated rod was illuminating the hallway, seeping through and across every purple-liquid-soaked shell. She knelt down to the floor and pushed it against one of the shell-covered treads, just left of the one Sam was working on. It singed the strange, dead-looking flesh of the shells like a hot knife through butter. Sam looked over and grinned.
“That works a lot better than the shovel. I think… Wait, wait, stop—you’re burning the tire!”
She jerked it back. Faint smoke was rising from the tire. It was starting to look like a warmed Popsicle.
But that shouldn’t have been possible—the treads were meant to withstand temperatures far hotter than what the rod was capable of producing.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me. …Sam, did you get any of the shells off of your section?” she asked.
“Halfway off, yes.” He shined his helmet light on where he had been working on. Upon closer inspection, from the tiny space of exposed tread rubber they could see between half-removed shells, the same effect was happening on Shauna’s wheel.
“Whoa, what the heck’s going on?” he said with alarm.
Shauna crouched up close to it, nearly pressing the glass of her helmet to the rubber. She could make out here, as she had on the other tread section, a slight sheen of violet all around the broken shells and seeping onto the treads. The colorful liquid she had seen in the sticky pool they had driven over just beyond the piles. Shining her light over to the liquid pool, she noticed that it was dripping down the edge of the large hole in the hallway floor.
Sam looked at her, recognizing that pieces were being put together in her head, but not quite figuring out what they were yet himself.
She looked back toward the way they had entered, then forward again.
“This hallway is slanted,” she noticed aloud, “just the slightest bit.”
Sam looked around as she had, following her mental process two steps behind.
Turning off the metal rod, she reached a gloved hand down and picked up one of the unbroken shells at her feet to examine closely. It was a circular shell, like a flattened sphere with a spiral design on either of the flat ends. One side of the rounded edge was the hole wherein lay a mass of moist, pale-looking flesh. It didn’t quite look dead, but it didn’t seem very lively either. She retrieved a small two-pronged fork from their supplies and poked it into the dead shell’s flesh, pressing as deep as she could get it. The flesh was soft and weak, tearing apart at the pressure. It made a grotesque, squishy sound as she did.
She pulled it out, dropped the shell, and held the prod up where she and Sam could see it illuminated. It was covered in violet, sticky liquid. After a few moments, it began smoking faintly.
Realization hit them both, and they turned to the rover and saw the treads and wheels all melting down lower and lower.
With a cry of shock, they leapt into action. Hectically they tried a few solutions—pulling, then pushing the rover; contacting their fellow crewmates again; and sweeping the shells away from the floor with their booted feet. The bare floor underneath the shells was covered with the same sticky, purplish liquid. Only the unbroken shells were clear of it, at least on the outside.
Shauna shouted into her comm set, “Rosalyn! Randy! Terri! ANSWER, DAMN IT!”
She nearly lost her balance and was forced to stomp squarely on one of the shells. Looking down underneath her boot, she saw purple liquid pouring out of the creature’s shattered surface. With a yelp she wiped the steaming acid onto another shell.
Sam looked at the hole eaten through the hallway floor, which the purple liquid was flowing down into. It was growing larger—creeping closer to them.
“Forget it! RUN!” he yelled as he broke into a dash.
Shauna’s heart raced. The rover was sinking. They couldn’t leave it here. That would be tens of millions of dollars on their heads. But they couldn’t keep standing here in the acid. She took a metal cable from the rover, attached it firmly to the front of the vehicle, and started running behind Sam, letting the bundled cable spool out from her hand as she went. They ran fast, stepping as lightly as they could over the shells. When they finally reached the bare section of the floor, they stopped to catch their breath, sitting down and lifting up their heels to check how much of the acid had gotten on them. Thankfully, it was a minimal amount, probably not enough to get through the entire boot, although wisps of smoke were trailing from them.
Shauna stood up again and started pulling on the cable. “Come on!” she yelled to Sam. He joined her, heaving as hard as he could. They kept tugging for a few minutes, unable to see far enough to tell whether they were making progress.
They felt a powerful tug and lurched forward, falling onto their faces. The sound of something crumbling echoed through the hall, and the rover tumbled and crashed down with a horrifying series of cracks and bangs and crunches. The spool of cable burst out of Sam and Shauna’s hands and retracted for several yards before it came to a stop. The echoes died down slowly, and the two of them were left dazed and frozen.
Finally a curse escaped Sam’s lips and he rested his gloved hands on his knees, eyes wide and staring into the darkness. “I can’t believe that just happened.”
Shauna felt sweat on her brow, and she almost couldn’t breathe. The doubts she had pushed away just thirty minutes ago or so came back tenfold. If it was going to cost the company multiple tens of millions of dollars in wrecked equipment for Shauna’s crew to bumble around in here, maybe it would be of better worth to FAER to back off and just let them know that there was something to explore here so they could get someone else on it.
“We need to go back…and rethink this,” she said to Sam, trying to calm her distress.
“I’m in favor of that. This place is…not right.” He looked deeply disturbed.
They waited a few minutes, catching their breath, before she tapped her collar button again. “Crew of the Novara, this is Shauna Beele. Can you hear us?”
There was nothing.
Sam shook his head. “…Slowpokes.”
Shauna sighed. “I’m sure they’re coming for us. Can’t be too much longer. I want to wait here so we can all try to pull the rover back up and salvage what we can.”
Sam seemed less than happy about waiting, but he didn’t object. He got up and paced around for a moment.
“Well,” he said with a sigh, “since we’re down here, should we see what we can find?” He bit his lip.
Instantly Shauna replied, “Not if we find more of those acid-secreting shells.”
“For sure, for sure. It’s your call.”
“Don’t you want to get out of here?”
“Well…I don’t think we’re getting that rover back. I’m not opposed to trying and all, but I doubt it’ll work. And FAER is… You know, they’re not gonna be happy. Maybe if we bring something valuable back, we can justify this trip.”
She considered his words for several long moments. “So long as we’re careful and stay close by,” she answered finally, “I’m alright with it. But if we see anything out of the ordinary—like these damned shells—we need to head back here.”
Sam nodded in approval.
The two walked together and approached two large, open entrances on either side of the hallway. They chose the one on the right and stepped inside cautiously.
This new room didn’t stretch forward as much as it did downward. They came to a railing where they peered over to see three square-shaped levels below this one. A stairwell on the far end of the room connected each level, and along the walls were tall, metal pods atop short standees. Panels adorned the wall at chest-height by each pod, and stubby, one- or two-inch plasticky cylinders stuck out of them. The pods had a few sections to them, and a few were half-open, revealing hollow and empty interiors. It all looked long dead and in disuse, and the complete quiet seemed to violently echo pure eeriness.
They made their way to the steps and checked out the other levels, but it was all the same. Nothing they could take back to the ship or make sense of—at least not yet. They wandered around, searching for a few minutes, checking their communication systems regularly. Shauna said if they didn’t hear from them in the next thirty minutes, they would head back on their own.
She didn’t fear these eerie tunnels as much as she feared mission failure.
♦♦♦
Randy ambled his way down a pile of stones in his bluish spacesuit, eyes darting back and forth. His two fellow astronauts, also suited up, trailed behind him, distracted by the sight of this strange, huge alien cavern as he was.
“Captain Beele, can you hear us?” he said, hearing only static in response. He sighed.
He, Terri, and Rosalyn looked out at the enormous, multi-tiered chamber and took it in deliberately, hearing only the sounds of their own footsteps and the shifting of air. The silence did not seem to bode well in Randy’s mind.
“So, just what are we looking at here?” he asked, staring up at the buttressed ceiling high above them. His voice was transmitted into their headsets so they could hear him clearly. “I mean, this place was definitely…i-inhabited.”
“We’re the first people to discover evidence of intelligent life existing outside our planet,” breathed Rosalyn.
Randy looked back at them. Terri shook her head slowly, the magnitude of it hitting her. Rosalyn stared ahead with fixed eyes, deep in thought. Since she couldn’t reach her face while wearing a spacesuit, she had switched out her glasses for contact lenses, as had Randy.
“I don’t know if we’re all really grasping the full implications of that,” Randy said.
Rosalyn walked forward again. “Let’s just focus on finding Shauna and Sam.”
“Of course. It’s just…it’s going to be different for us from now on. That’s all I’m saying. This is not about minerals anymore.”
Though she said nothing, Rosalyn had to admit he was right. And that scared her.
They kept moving, each step bringing them further away from any known space of existence. They approached the colossal, slanted, metal support beam nearest to them, ascended the short ramp to stand atop it, and started walking to the next level down, following what they remembered seeing of Sam and Shauna’s path. They were pin-sized when compared to the backdrop of the expansive room, three short-ranged lights beaming where their heads turned.
Coming to the next level, they made their way through a hallway, retracing the steps of their colleagues. Shadows seemed to leap within the wall on their left, causing more than a few double-takes, primarily from Terri, but a few from Randy as well. Rosalyn’s breathing deepened, and she kept her eyes open. That terrible cold of outer space grew deeper in her, seeping into her and filling up the marrow of her bones. She didn’t like it one bit. Wearing these bulky, cold outfits was her least favorite part of her job. Yet she, like the others, was totally amazed by what she saw—it was like walking into a dream, or into some new discovery from ancient history. And it was that, in a way.
“What’s this?” Terri said, approaching a long, rectangular, metal, open box that stretched along with the hallway for at least fifteen feet. It was only a few feet wide, holding a firmly-packed, dark brown substance within. She came closer to it and shined her light on it.
“It’s…dirt.”
She put her hand into it and pulled out a handful. The others stopped in their tracks and looked at it with wonder. It looked like regular dirt, all right.
“It’s like a raised garden,” said Randy.
“Without any plants. I’m still not convinced there’s any life here.”
“What, you don’t want to meet someone new today? Aren’t you getting sick of us?” Randy said with a grin.
She shook her head and put down the dirt. “Should we take a sample on our way back?”
Rosalyn looked at it, unsure what to make of it. “We’ll see what Shauna has to say.” With how odd this expedition was becoming, she was almost glad to leave decisions such as that to Shauna.
Randy pressed a button on his collar. “Speaking of that… Shauna, are you there? …Hello? …Still nothing! We should be reaching them at this point. I know we’re close.”
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