Z considered her plan for exiting NASA while she pulled on her EVA suit. Why was she now so determined to get out? She had made all the right steps along the O-L-P—orbital-lunar-planetary—career path. Now she was on Mars, and Mars was beautiful in the raw, exposed way that deserts are beautiful; the mission was more interesting than most exploratory missions; the crew was capable and easygoing. No, she had not been given a bad assignment; it just wasn’t the one she felt she merited and she hated the way this mission demarcated her career. This was to be its culmination: the survey party laying the groundwork for the main mission. There wouldn’t be another trip to Mars for her; she’d be too old by the time she got back into rotation. She’d end-up doing service on the Moon, probably managing a base—by no means a penalty assignment, but tourists could fly to the Moon and she would rather be a rich tourist visiting the base than the manager making sure the rooms were clean for the VIPs.
Z opened the airlock and stepped into the rosy, dusty light of day. She stopped to take in the view of the base, which now consisted of two cooking pot-shaped structures repurposed from rocket stages, a long, clear-skinned greenhouse, and a shed. The shed stored the large exploratory equipment: a substantial-sized transport, an excavator, ATVs, trailers, portable structures, and cases filled with scanners and sensors. One large case had been pulled twenty yards from the shed and opened flat to expose a silver and gold tangle of gossamer and folded tubing.
Colin Walsh, the Mission Geologist and the youngest of the crew, knelt next to the mechanical origami, checking the instrument readings on the control panel. When he was satisfied with the readings, he stepped back and called-in to Ellis Kani, the Mission Pilot, inside the Habitat. “Cupid's in place. All the systems are up and running. I say let's open it up and check out the wings. I'm clear. You're okay to deploy.”
Ellis touched a button on the screen in front of him. In a second, the tumble of foil and tubing lifted, then slowly reached out with solar paneled wings, unfolding to a length of twenty feet on either side of a glistening, silver and gold four-rotor carapace.
“Colin? I have a visual of the wings. Do you confirm they are locked in place?”
Colin walked around Cupid, eyeing the joints of the wings. “Confirmed, Ellis.”
“Okay, let's see if Cupid can fly,” Ellis responded. Four large rotors at the base of the wings spun-up to a ferocious speed. To witness the mechanics, one would have expected the craft to shoot up into the sky, but instead it rose slowly from the sled to an altitude of about thirty feet, then glided away. Like a mission communicator, Ellis announced “Cupid is on its way. All readings are nominal. Next stop, Arsia Mons, three hours from now.”
Cupid’s expansive wings caught the thin atmosphere and it began its ascent of the gentle eastern slope to a large lava tube skirting the base of the mountain. Z watched the drone recede against the pink sky. In three hours, it would land and recharge for a day; then it would take-off and begin its regimented scan of the site. This aerial mapping flight would hopefully give them a candidate for exploration. If it did, they would soon be heading out in the rover to perform ground scans and surveys of the tunnel. Z was impatient with this process of aerials. She wanted to get on to the next stage: human descent into the tube; only then would they have any idea if they had found a second potential location for a colony.
...
In a room that looked like a college computer science lab, the GEOPAC technician peered at her giant desktop monitor. Around her were rows of neatly organized workstations with placecards scribbled in Sharpie denoting each station—Engineering Ops, Mission Lead, Instruments. Behind her stood a few more members of the team. It would be another long night at the MCC—Mission Control Center—downloading data from the Mars Habitat; this night would be different only in that they would be receiving data from a new quadrangle, A-5.
Tile by tile, the images appeared on the screen in a neat progression. Two members of the instrument team watched over her shoulder as she explained, “This series of transects is from a little more than 100 km northwest of Habitat 3.” Moving her fingers around on her desktop, the technician played with the orientation of the map. Then a photographic image began to take shape. “Now we layer on the LiDAR/AGPR scan from GEOPAC to see some definition on the lava tubes...” She squinted for a second and furrowed her eyebrows. “Hang on, here,” she called over her shoulder, then she leaned forward to focus harder on the image that had appeared on the screen.
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...
Back at the Mars Habitat, Z checked the readout on a hydroponics control panel. The hiss of electronics teased her earpiece, followed by Kani’s voice. “Commander, the data is in from yesterday's scans of the slope. Six hours. We've got forty square kilometers of geology to check. You want to take a look?”
“I'm on my way,” she replied. Z left the greenhouse, sealed the hatch behind her, and climbed a ladder leading to the control room. There, Ellis sat side-by-side with Systems Engineer Noriko Tanaka.
Noriko looked over her shoulder at Z. “I'm going to toggle between the visual and GEOPAC to give us a comparison.” Then turning back to her screen, she froze. “Wait. What's this?”
Z leaned forward, “What do you have?”
Noriko shook her head. “I'm not sure what this is. It looks almost like signal noise, or a test artifact.” She fiddled with system settings, trying to get the view they had expected.
Z pinched her eyebrows as she contemplated the patterns on the screen. “Can you make it go away?”
“No. Not so far. I'll run tests on the scanner. There may have been some damage, who knows when.”
“In the meantime, has this been uplinked to the relay?”
“Yeah. It's gone. MCC should have it.”
“Message them a screen grab of what we see on our system and confirm if they're getting the same anomaly.”
...
Two floors down from the tiny room that served as Mars Habitat 3 Mission Control Center, a small group of project scientists, engineers, and administrators sat in the raked seats of a lecture hall, facing a giant projection of the southeast slope of Arsia Mons. In the center of the front row, the Director of Planetary Science, Ting Chen Hui, sat quietly as the Project Manager, Annie Dixxon, stepped onto the stage. “The team from Habitat 3 launched the Cupid drone-glider at 1053, sol 115. The area of interest is quadrangle A-5, to the north.” She advanced to the next image. “Two days later, the GEOPAC scanner returned these visual, LiDAR and Series 9 AGPR composites. I’m going to let Paula, the GEOPAC technician who was on duty, set this up.”
A young woman, looking like she had just graduated from college, stepped up from the front row, turned and pinched her fingers together in a virtual mouse click that produced a close-up image of the site. “There. That's our visible spectrum image of the slope. Now, the exciting part: the geology beneath the surface. This is a composite of the area that has been explored by the drone.” Pinching her fingers again, “Now let's overlay the LiDAR and AGPR data.”
A complex pattern bled through the photographic images—a fingerprint of interconnected lines and geometric shapes surrounding the lava tube.
The scientists were quiet.
“Our first reaction—and the request from Commander Nasri—was to run a preliminary test on the scanner. That test has given us no indication that this is an anomaly or the result of a software glitch.”
Ting gestured toward Paula. “How many times did you run the test?”
“Just twice. We have a more detailed series of tests running now. They'll take time, but they also verify the subsystems along the Deep Space Network.”
The Director of Planetary Science stood and faced the group. “Intriguing, isn’t it?” he said as if commenting on a brain teaser. The seated investigators barely heard him, focused as they were on any possible interpretations other than the obvious one. “They’re not exactly what we expected to find. And they don’t look like natural underground formations we’ve seen on Earth. There’s a symmetry to these forms that, in itself, might give cause to wonder if there is some corruption of the signal or the sensor.”
Another scientist jumped in. “Was the system calibrated before take-off?”
Paula answered, “All the set-up procedures were executed when the crew prepared Cupid for flight.”
Ting, understanding the need to verify this signal as soon as possible, laid out the action steps. “We should first try to figure out what could possibly give us a false positive. Is there a natural formation or a computer process that could produce this kind of a reading? And we're going to have to look at those possibilities very quickly. I want everyone to spend the next five hours poking holes in this from your individual specialties. But keep it just to the people in this room. This information cannot get out, even to others within the project team.” Then, as the room quickly emptied, he turned to the Project Manager, “Better dial-in Burke, just in case.”