AMERICA ONE - Return To Earth (Book 4) Read online

  By the time Boris deactivated the spider, leaving it dormant on the surface of the planet, it was nearly time to leave. But, not before VIN took Jonesy and Allen Saunders down the ladders to show them what he and Boris had seen. Inside the large spotlessly clean alien cavern, the intercom between the men worked perfectly. However, they could not communicate with the outside universe until two of the build crew entered the first cavern; VIN asked one to thrust his head into the hole, as Boris had done, and the second to climb in and relay messages, as well as stand ready for trouble with a shovel at the 90 degree corner.

  “It really looks like the inside of an aircraft hangar bay,” Jonesy responded, getting his first glimpse of what VIN had found. “The walls look bluish in the light, and that walkway is something else. I wonder what it is made of.” Boris, hit it gently with the shovel he was carrying.

  The scientist felt it clang like metal, but the men couldn’t hear anything.

  “We are a fine group of well-armed soldiers in an enemy camp,” suggested VIN, as he watched Boris hit the railing. The metal was stronger than the shovel, and the shovel bounced off it. “Let’s look for a door.”

  For nearly half an hour they searched the smooth metal walls for a door. There were no controls or breaks in the walls to show the outline of a door on the ground floor or around the walkway above. It was as if the walkway had no use at all. Boris gently hit the shovel on the wall every now and again to see if he could hear or at least feel a difference. He couldn’t hear anything, and the shovel bounced off the wall the same way wherever he tried.

  After taking several pictures their spacewalk time running out, so they left the mysterious cavern for the shorter journey back to Mars. It was time to check out what was underneath the entrance in Endeavor Crater.

  Chapter 2

  What is buried under the cliff on Mars?

  Both shuttles flew back to America One which was orbiting Mars 75 miles above the surface.

  Ryan, fully suited up with the rest of the crew, was on the Martian surface supervising the placement of docking ports on the ledge in the two open vertical shafts outside the new safety room. The build team had already started to work on the second outer chamber, bigger than the first one. When complete, the structure would cover the two vertically mined holes the spiders dug.

  Ryan was relieved when all four spiders exited their holes as they were programed to do at the end of the shift. The two more narrow horizontal tunnels into the cliff wall were just inside the inner glass walls of the safety chamber, and Ryan wanted VIN to return before more digging was done.

  “What programs have the spiders completed?” he asked the man in charge of the four spiders. Hans the German, as he was known, second-in-command on Fritz Warner’s team, replied that 30 feet of vertical shafts had been completed by the spiders on the ledge. The two spiders had also excavated 40 feet horizontally towards and underneath the cliff, and then started to dig out larger caverns. Each spider dug out one cavern that was eight feet high, six feet wide and six feet deep. Digging towards each other, they needed another eight feet to join up and make one larger cavern.

  The two spiders digging into the cliff wall inside the safety chamber had dug 30 feet horizontally into the cliff, gone down 32 feet and were within 20 feet of the first two spiders at the same level. These two also began caverns and it seemed that the entrance VIN had seen from the cliff top was now right in the middle of the four spiders. If Ryan hadn’t stopped them, they would soon have dug into the area from where the shaft descended.

  Fritz Warner had voluntarily isolated himself from his crew of robotic specialists since the tragic events in China and his return to the airfield in Nevada only days before they left Earth for good. His left arm and left leg were missing as a result of the attack on his and his wife’s lives in Beijing and, he was in a bad way both mentally and physically. The doctors and mechanical teams worked hard to put his body back together again, but, like VIN, adding robotics to his missing limbs was the easy part. Healing him mentally and emotionally was not so easy.

  Mentally he was a mess. Although he didn’t want to see anybody, VIN tried his best to get visitation rights, often just sitting with his old friend who did not acknowledge his presence. Whether by decision or happenstance, it was as if the man’s brain just wasn’t functioning.

  Over the course of the first months aboard ship, Fritz began to walk and use his new metal arm, much like VIN had learned to use his two legs. Doctor Nancy Martin was astounded with what Ryan’s crew could do in the prosthesis department. Unfortunately, Fritz didn’t seem to care.

  When VIN arrived back on America One, Suzi noticed a slight change in her husband while he rested aboard ship. He seemed more serious than before. Even while he helped her tend the cubes, he remained deep in thought. As usual she floated about, little Mars Noble asleep on her back wrapped up like a papoose. Nine months old, he was growing, and he was beginning to look like his father. He was sturdy and strong, had the same eyes, and smiled a lot.

  VIN visited Fritz, finally whole again, in the special small cubicle built for him on the midlevel behind the hospital ward. He had a quarter of a supply cylinder for living space, his own bathroom, three meals a day, and was looked after as much as the crew could. There were no physiotherapists on board ship, and Nurse, or Doctor Rogers, or Doctor Martin each spent an hour a day with him, helping him learn how to work his new limbs. At other times, he read science books on a Kindle or watched movies, hundreds of them.

  What did seem to spike Fritz’s interest was when VIN told him about what he had seen on the asteroid. For the first time Fritz acknowledged that VIN was in the room with him, and that he was listening to what VIN said. The injured man hadn’t said a word since his arrival nearly a year earlier. He still didn’t, but he turned to stare at VIN, a first on this trip.

  A day after seeing the positive reaction in Fritz, a rested VIN arrived back on Mars. Jonesy, flying Astermine Two, dropped VIN off atop the cliff. VIN worked out exact coordinates down to an inch, and then climbed back up the ladder onto the roof of the mining craft. Before climbing back into the docking port he surveyed the scene around him. The day was beautiful. As far as Mars was concerned this was a hot summer day; the temperature outside his suit was a balmy 39 degrees Fahrenheit, and he imagined he could actually feel the rays of the sun through his suit. The view and light on Mars, although less than on Earth, was so much more brilliant than on the small blue planet he had just left. The vista did remind him of Nevada and the desert he had often run through, testing his new legs to the max.

  However, something was missing and he couldn’t think what. Then he saw what he had thought had gone missing. The Rover, Opportunity, was not where he had left it. It had not moved far, about seventy to eighty feet from where he had left it to charge and right up to the edge of the cliff top.

  The charging completed, the battery charger was on the ledge. The crew told him that the Rover was as dead as it had been before the charge. Since it looked like it was completely shut down, they just left it alone. But it had moved; he could see the tire tracks, new ones, and the Rover was close to the edge with its camera pivoted down, staring at the workers on the ledge below.

  The Martians weren’t the only people spying on them. NASA, on Earth, must have had a satellite launch and got communications back with the Rover. Now they were being spied on from Earth.

  “VIN to Ryan,” said a smiling VIN into his helmet intercom mike.

  “Did you find any Martians up there, Mr. Noble?” asked Ryan, 75 feet below him. He promptly told Ryan the news and his boss laughed when he heard that his old friends at NASA were spying on them. “Turn the Rover around, peer into its camera lenses and wave or something. Show them that we are a happy community up here. The movement of their Rover won’t only shock them, but it will let them know that we know that they know.”

  VIN happily climbed back off the shuttle, headed over to the Rover and carefully, since it was so close t
o the edge, pulled it back. He turned it 90 degrees to face towards where Astermine Two stood. There was a minute red light blinking on top of the camera and since the camera was now pointed at the ground, he drew “HELLO EARTH!” in the dust where it was aimed. Then he raised Rover up in front to film Jonesy and the mining craft, a nice panoramic view, 80 feet away on the side of the cliff. On Mars the Rover didn’t weigh more than 200 pounds, and although VIN couldn’t get onto the feed himself, he was able to get the small America flag on his shoulder in front of the lens by getting down on one knee.

  He left the poor, bullied Rover staring at the message and made a mental note to check up on it the next time he was there.

  An hour later he mapped out the exact position of the descending shaft on the ledge; the spiders must have been really close and he decided that he had no option but to get into one of the shafts himself to check out its convergence with the older tunnel, if there was one still existing. He asked Boris if he could program one of the spiders to work on exact coordinates and, twenty minutes of programing later, the spider disappeared from the safety room to resume work along the tunnel. It was programmed to deposit rubble into the safety room where it would be analyzed for any metal particles. Boris determined that it would take two days before the spider would reach the walls of any shaft.

  Ryan had to get back to America One. The build crew had plenty to do to join the glass panels together, and there were enough of them to do the job, but they needed a fresh supply of glass panels from the mother ship. VIN joined Ryan and Jonesy flew the two men to America One. The Rover was still in the exact position VIN had left it, staring down at the written letters in the sand.

  “Okay, Martha, your latest findings, please,” Ryan began, 20 hours after they had docked with America One. It had been a few weeks since a complete Heads of Departments meeting had been called and, as usual, the meeting started with fresh coffee in the cafeteria.

  “Usable water saved from the Martian surface: 2,197 gallons; nitrogen gas collected from the dry ice and turned into liquid: 97 gallons; liquid hydrogen drawn off the ice: 190 gallons. We also found traces of osmium, neodymium and the other platinum metals in the ice, less than a kilo of each, but welcome nevertheless. You already have the metal analysis from the first asteroid Herr Jones destroyed, and I now have the analysis from the rocks collected from the blue, round planet that Herr Noble thinks has signs of life forms. It is mostly ore mixed with cobalt, and nickel. We also found interesting amounts of molybdenum, mendelevium and platinum and several other Rare Earth metals and we are still determining their amounts.”

  “Yes, exactly what I thought,” Boris commented. A piece of a puzzle he was working on fit into place.

  Not pleased by the interruption, Martha continued, “The surface of Mars where we are currently working has very little of anything we need at the moment, but we did find traces of gypsum. To end my report, and before the pilots fall asleep, I would suggest we harvest as much of the Martian water as possible to extract the hydrogen and nitrogen in the ice before we continue on our distant solar journeys to Jupiter and Saturn. Also, we are now communicating with Herr Fritz, and he seems interested in our results.”

  “Thank you Martha. Boris, you have something to add to what Frau Von Zimmer was saying?” Ryan asked.

  “Yes. I was with VIN when he showed me the lack of deflection of light on the metal walls. I bet Martha’s team will find titanium, osmium—which doesn’t like light—and also large amounts of several other Rare Earth metals. What I find exciting is that we all use the same materials in the universe, just in different ways and amounts. I think we are going to learn something new about life.”

  “What about your report on this circular defense system or wire you and Mr. Noble found?” Ryan continued.

  “It resembles a defense perimeter, but I think it is more likely a landing pad; another possibility is that a protective dome stood on that spot. I believe that a lot of time has passed since the chambers were built. If there were any above surface buildings, they have long since eroded to nothing. I believe the metal below ground is made of long-life Rare Earth metals, as is the circular system we dug out. And, as Frau Von Zimmer would agree, the half-lives of these products are sometimes longer than the very existence of the universe itself.” Martha nodded at that remark. She was finding the Russian’s train of thought very interesting.

  “So you believe that this base, or civilization, could be hundreds of years old, Herr Boris?” Martha asked. “It would certainly take a long time for buildings to erode on the surface of an asteroid, even thousands of years, or never at all. Besides, these small metal tips you found have not eroded. I think that your ideas are sound, but your idea of possible buildings on the surface is not accurate. Very little erodes up in deep space.”

  Boris listened intently, and then agreed with the clever German.

  “We will certainly find out more once we unearth, or shall I say, un-mars whatever lies beneath Mr. Noble’s tunnel,” added Ryan, smiling happily. All his life-long dreams were coming true, and he knew that there was no way the current human race on Earth had anything to do with these findings. They, as a crew and a scientific team, were in totally and wonderfully new territory.

  Eighteen hours later the crew returned to the Martian surface with 900 newly-made glass panels. They would need a total of 7,000 in all to complete the above ground space base.

  Approaching the ledge, VIN noticed that the Rover had moved. It was back on the ledge looking down at the work going on below.

  “I’m sure we are making prime-time news,” laughed Ryan when VIN pointed to the Rover. “I wonder if we are on the morning show, daily with Nora and Charlie. Maybe we are bringing back memories of space flight to my buddy Scott,” he commented to the crew as Jonesy brought the mining craft in. The Astermine craft used less hydrogen fuel than the shuttles and could haul supplies; the three shuttles were now attached to America One, waiting for the next journey to the small, round asteroid.

  The crew on the ledge ran out of glass panels and were ready to unload the new supply; but first, Ryan gave them a day off, or as it was called on Mars, “a free work cycle” in the new safety chamber which was filled with breathable air and heat.

  Warm and safe, they didn’t need to wear their suits for a whole day. Several fold-up Earth chairs had been transported with the building supplies and the men lounged in them taking in the Martian sunlight. Beer, snacks, low levels of radiation and sunshine from the sun far away was sure a good day off.

  And, too soon, it was back to work.

  Many of the crew needed to exit the safety room to begin unloading, however, the exit chambers could take only four men at a time wearing full suits. The internal door would only be opened once all the men inside the chamber were fully suited up.

  “Okay everybody, listen up,” stated Ryan once the crew had completed getting on their space suits. “We are going to open one of the tunnels from this chamber into the cliff. We will lose air pressure because the air in here will stream into the tunnel. The air tanks we brought down from the ship will be vented to see if we can rectify the pressure. We have worked out the quantities needed to fill the tunnels and caverns—about 12 tanks should equalize the pressure—but first, Mr. Noble and Boris will enter this tunnel, here,” Ryan said, pointing to the nearest tunnel, “and we will seal it behind them. They will make sure that there is no hole in the tunnel for our air to escape. The second tunnel will remain closed.”

  VIN and Boris, without shovels, but with lengths of cord, cord ladders, padding on their knees and thick pads on their gloves, got down on all fours and entered the four-foot high hole. VIN led, feeling more secure with his Bowie knife strapped to his space belt.

  This tunnel was completely different than the one on the round planet; it unsparingly reflected light, and illuminated the tunnel all the way to the corner which descended downwards.

  The first cord had been secured inside the chamber and was playe
d out by Boris. VIN tied the cord ladder structure to the first cord to descend the expected thirty feet to the half-finished chamber. The comparatively low gravity permitted him to easily turn around in the four-foot wide tunnel and step backwards onto the ladder. Rung by rung he lowered himself, while Boris watched from above. Boris shone his helmet lamp onto the walls so as not to blind VIN.

  Stepping onto the rubble littered floor, VIN peered around the half completed new cavern. The spider had done a good job. It was larger than the tunnel. He moved in two feet, and stood up. The ceiling was eight feet above his head and extended six feet in front of him and to his left. This tunnel was one of the two rear tunnels, and the cavern was to converge with the two outer tunnels to his left. Checking his suit readouts he saw that the temperature was an interesting minus 36 degrees Fahrenheit, radiation was nil, and oxygen also nil. He checked every foot of wall space and found no hole. He didn’t expect to. The wall was still three or four feet from directly below the shaft.

  VIN climbed back up and told Boris they would go back. Other than opening the shaft to allow the spider to continue, there wasn’t much else to do.

  When the two men emerged from the tunnel with their report, Ryan gave the order to allow two spiders back into the first tunnel to excavate the chamber. Hans the German, in charge of the dig, figured that 50 more hours of digging should bring them close to their intended destination underneath the shaft.

  For the next two days the spiders, on an hourly schedule, were programmed to walk through and out of the new outside room, through the pressurized side exits, and onto the ledge to deposit their rocks and soil. It took ten minutes to pass through the two sectioned-off areas of the chamber’s two exits to the outside, and space suits were again mandatory inside the chamber for the men controlling the spiders.