Chapter 15

Theta Coronae Australis System
Away Team, Arwen
02/10/42 NR 0650 Hours

“Absolutely nothing,” Jacques Hammel muttered as he touched faceplates with his partner. The pair had been trudging along the wall of yet another unnamed crater in the never ending darkness and cold of their own, personal hell. April Ogilvy, his teammate, had stepped on a loose rock and had nearly fallen on the treacherous slope. Now, she sat panting from exertion and terror, while Jacques tried to comfort her. “We’ve been out here for days now, and there is just nothing here at all.”

“Can you raise anyone on your comm?” April’s dark face was streaked with sweat behind her visor. She was not certain she could walk, and they were fifty meters below the rim of the crater whose unseen depths yawned in the stygian blackness before them. Luisa had insisted the map coordinates led to this accursed place, and they had stomped over a half dozen craters and jagged hillsides searching for a base, or anything else that may tell them what that damned map actually said.

Jacques activated his holo display and consulted it. “No, not yet. The ship won’t pass overhead for another fifteen minutes.”

April nodded and rubbed her sore ankle through the tough material of her spacesuit. The Armstrong was in a low orbit to avoid detection if the Terrans came calling, and it only was visible at the away team’s position for ten minutes of every hour and twelve minutes. While she and Jacques searched this crater, Luisa McDaniel and Harold Bauman were about a kilometer away, slogging through the loose regolith left from untold millennia of asteroid bombardment against this godforsaken moon. She sighed. “Okay, Jacques, can you help me up? Our air reserves are getting low.” Jacques stood, and then took her gloved hand in his and hauled her to unsteady feet.

An hour later, Jacques’ helmet light picked another boulder out from the cloying gloom ahead. The slope had eased on this side of the crater, where another, newer impact had ruined the perfect symmetry of the larger crater. Of course, newer was a relative term, since, according to the geological evidence, there had been no large impacts here for at least a thousand years. That later impact had flung rocks and dust for a hundred kilometers in all directions, including the rock in front of him. The exogeologist stepped around the obstruction, and halted so abruptly that April nearly walked into him.

“Whoops! Sorry,” April said over the comm. “What’s wrong?” She took a step downslope and moved up beside a motionless Jacques. “Are you...” The question died on her lips as she followed his gaze upslope.

The pair stood at a saddle between two craters, the broader one they had been exploring, and a narrower crater that had been formed later. This smaller crater had been blasted partly from a steep hillside that towered two hundred meters over their heads. Although the system’s primary was occluded by the hills, the hillside was lit by reflected light from Gandalf. The great planet’s glow also illuminated a cave entrance in the hillside. What had to be part of a metal craft of some type sat in the cave, its metal gleaming softly in the dim light. April realized that the hillside actually overhung the cavern entrance, making it impossible to spot from above.

“Oh, my,” Jacques breathed. “Luisa was right!” He pointed ahead and to his right. “It looks like that lip over there goes right to the cave!” He turned to look upslope. “I think we should go straight up here. If we do, we can get a good signal to Luisa and Harold!” He was so excited he was actually panting for breath.

“Okay, first, we...” Jacques yelped as a stunning impact smashed into his back. His holo display died, and he stumbled on the slope as he tried to turn around. Something yanked him further around, and he stared in horror as April came into view. The engineer had a jagged rock clutched in her gloved fist, and she smashed it against his visor. Jacques, still reeling from the blow to his back, screamed and tried to close his outer visor, but April struck him in the face again and again until the visor shattered completely – and then she struck his unprotected face.

April’s heart pounded in her ears as she watched Jacques die. Contrary to fictional accounts, no one can survive contact with hard vacuum for more than thirty seconds before losing consciousness, and she had made certain by knocking the unfortunate Jacques senseless. She dropped the rock and effortlessly held his body upright in Arwen’s gravity as his life dissipated in a cloud of blood and water from his shattered helmet.

She picked him up, and moving carefully, stepped over to the steeper part of the larger crater’s slope. She lifted Jacques’ motionless body and heaved it into the darkness as hard as she could. He disappeared instantly into the eternal night of the crater, for no light ever touched the bottom of that abyss. April’s heart ached for him, but she simply could not allow the alien map to be decoded.

Luisa braced her hand against an outcropping of gray rock, careful to avoid the jagged edges. With no wind or water to polish the edges, the rocks here could cut as quickly as any knife, with fatal results. Her hostile environment suit was as tough as Genevan technology could make it, but everything had its limits - including her air supply. Luisa consulted her holo display; an hour’s worth of air was pushing the limits of safety and common sense. The rover was ten minutes’ walk away, and it was time to go.

Harold had gone to look for Jacques and April ten minutes previously. The pair should have reported in a half hour ago, and Luisa looked speculatively in their direction. They were both experienced spacers, practically born on airless rocks like this one. There was absolutely no reason to believe that they could possibly run into something they couldn’t handle. There was also absolutely no reason for them to run their air supplies down this far.

The Martian stepped away from the rock face she had been examining, and started back toward the rover. If they had gotten in trouble, one more person low on air wasn’t going to do anyone a lot of good. “Harold, I’m going to bring the rover,” she broadcasted over the team’s comm net. She skirted a pile of rocks and a boot-sized crater as she picked her way across the broken landscape.

Luisa was halfway to the rover when she saw something moving off to her left. Her heart thudded, and she jerked around to look. She and her team members were the only living things on this rock, and she gasped as she focused on the movement. A suited figure bounded over a low rill of regolith - and it was headed straight for the rover! Her mind clicked, and Luisa was running before she knew she’d started.