by: Laura Browne-Lambert
The Martian planet is not all that it seems...
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Landing on Mars had been the worst idea. Shonda knew that now. NASA had promised so much – bigger rations, a shorter stay, and a quiet, empty planet upon which she and her team could set up a small, scientific colony with the express purpose of studying the planet’s surface and determining whether it could support human life.
That discovery did not take long. Shonda had met her first Stone Person seven days after she and her lab partners had gotten the base camp built.
CW: death, violence, language
Image Description: A faded red planet is in the upper right foreground. A black sky separates the planet from a reddish haze. A sprinkling of stars are scattered across the sky. The image is painted using acrylic paint and sponges.
Credit: Laura Browne-Lambert
Shonda pulled the door of the air lock tight and pulled the lever to initiate lockdown. Her night had been far from restful, but she still felt energized by the thought of standing on a whole other planet. How had her life gone from theorizing about intergalactic geological origins from a laptop in her kitchen to constructing an onsite laboratory one hundred forty million miles away? She punched in her authorization code and waited, blowing a dark, springy curl out of her eyes -- too late to stick it under tight hood covering her head. At least they had finally gotten the environment working inside the lab. She would be able to take off the clunky spacesuit once she passed through the air lock.
Jake would be running late, as always. She could almost hear him calling her from outside the air lock as he jogged over from the living pod. Marta was always in first. Most likely, she had started inventorying the equipment they had unpacked the night before.
A gaseous puff of air flowed through the vents and Shonda withstood the urge to hurry along and pull the helmet off her head prematurely. Her comm flared to life, sounds of static cutting straight to her eardrums. She jumped. A sharp voice barely recognizable as Jake’s melded with the feedback.
“I—run—late,” Shonda heard the voice say.
Shonda pressed her comm button to answer. “Yeah, Jake. We all know you’re running late. You don’t have to tell us if you’re only a few minutes behind.”
“No—coming.”
Shonda rolled her eyes. “I get it. You’re coming. Just brush your teeth this time, would y—” A muffled sound like the rolling of old tires on a dusty road came through the walls first, then the comm. What the hell? “Jake? What is that?” She paused and that same sound cut through the comm again. A shriek followed. “Jake! What is that?” A shudder ran through the ground under her feet, and she stumbled. A crash came from inside the greenhouse. “Marta!” Shonda cried. “Marta, are you alright in there?”
The door to the laboratory opened just in time for Shonda to see a giant boulder crash through the high temperature quartz glass walls. It shattered the glass, tore through the fallen shelves, and took Marta with it. In a moment, Shonda’s friend was gone. Without her helmet, she would die of an embolism if the rock did not kill her first. Shonda screamed, reflexively pulling her arms over her face to protect her head.
For a moment, the rumbling paused, and Shonda shakily lowered her arms to press a button on her comm.
“Control?” Shonda’s voice warbled with emotion. “Control, this is Geology. Control, do you read?” In the silence, Shonda prayed for a response. At last, she heard another voice.
“Geology, this is Control—”
“Oh, thank God,” Shonda rolled her eyes to heaven even as the rolling and tumbling sounds resumed.
“We are aware of an environmental event happening in your quadrant. Your orders are to shelter-in-place until otherwise indicated.”
In place? Shonda peered around the edge of the air lock. Somehow, a stone just beyond the lab appeared to lever itself up and roll straight through a chunk of wall that the last stone had left standing. Fuck no. She spoke into her comm. “I’m not so sure that’s going to be an option much longer, Control. At least let me get to the next living pod.”
“Negative, Geology,” the voice on the other side sounded stiff. “We are evacuating all living pods directly to control and shutting down all air locks and life support outside the Control Center and redirecting power to defense until the end of the attack.”
Shonda risked another look outside, grateful that she still had her helmet and spacesuit intact. This time, she keyed in her helmet’s binocular setting and zoomed in on a pair of rocks that had begun to wiggle. Bulbous, stone appendages grew out each side of the red boulders and planted themselves on the ground. Shonda felt the blood leave her face as her cheeks tingled.
“Seriously, Control?” she said, her patience gone. “You’re just gonna leave me here? They’ve already killed Marta, and Jake stopped answering me a while ago, so he’s probably gone, too. What about me?”
The voice that came back this time was softer, sadder. “So, it’s Shonda that I’m speaking to. Sorry, Shonda. All our detached science pods are dealing with the same thing. We have to save who we can.” The voice cut out for a moment as if their conversation was finished, but a tiny kernel of hope settled into Shonda’s chest when she heard the telltale static. “I could get the main air lock open for you if you can get to Control. We need to leave one open for the security officers.”
Shonda nodded. She would have to take those odds. “Control, who am I talking to?”
“Lin.”
“Thanks for the bone, Lin. I’ll see you when I see you.”
Shonda ducked low and awkwardly shuffled sideways into the former lab, moving from one pile of rubble to another. As she crouched behind a bench lying on its side, the full meaning of her conversation with Lin reached her. Attack. The word weighed heavy in Shonda’s mind. We’re under attack. Completely different from the first phrase he had used – environmental event. Shonda studied the foreign appendages that had formed from the boulders ahead of her. They were so lifelike. How had NASA missed this new technology? Of course, it was a research program, not a defense program, but surely, if the CIA had heard any whispers that a cold war would turn hot on Martian soil, they would have communicated with Headquarters. An icier thought reached Shonda. Maybe HQ did get a message but had decided to play with fire.
Her gut roiled until she caught movement through her binoculars. One of the appendages stamped the ground in a complicated pattern, then stopped. The leg of the other boulder responded with a different, equally complex series of movements.
“My God,” Shonda whispered. “They’re talking.” They told us no one was here. Horror, anger, and terror rolled through her simultaneously. Horror at the thought that she and the other scientists had landed on someone else’s home and set up a colony without permission. Anger that HQ had promised this sort of thing could not possibly happen. Terror over the realization that they were under attack.
She snapped her eyes back toward the creatures formed of red stone. One pitched forward. The other followed, veering off in another direction. Shonda followed the track of the nearer boulder. It grew rapidly larger in her field of vision until she had to knock her binocular setting back to normal. With a jump backward, she realized she had become the being’s target.
Shonda dodged the attack, and the living boulder swept the bench away. She twisted to avoid the being’s counterpart as it tore through piles of debris to her right. From her new vantagepoint, she saw the magnitude of the so-called environmental event. Fresh boulders poured toward the colony despite the many that had already begun their demolition. The detached pods for botany, hydrology, and climatology had turned to rubble. The main Atmospheric Sciences pod still stood, but big chunks were missing from its walls. Triage had lost its roof, but the biology lab and medical facility looked mostly untouched. Plus, it had a direct line to Control.
Movement caught her eye. She had better get a move on. One of her attackers had ceased progress in the other direction and was maneuvering itself back toward her by pushing off with a leg that, up close, loosely resembled an elephant’s trunk. Almost without thought, she mimicked the zig-zagging run of a gazelle chased by a large cat. Shonda fought to avoid taking in the grisly scene around her as she passed bodies, rubble, and debris, but skidded to a stop and dropped to her knees when she saw the pinkish tint of Jake’s wrist. Glove missing and visor heavily cracked, his hand had, swelled and his mouth gaped as if he had died of asphyxiation.
The muffled sound of rolling boulders came from behind and to her right. Shonda sprang to her feet and threw herself into a sprint. In her haste, she failed to account for the planet’s sandy surface and slipped. If not for her helmet, she would have gotten a face full of dirt. Instead, she earned whiplash and a hairline crack in her visor. No time to think about the changing pressure inside her helmet, she dodged another attacker with a roll before scrambling to her feet to escape the Stone Person charging her from behind.
Shonda tried faking left, but the living boulder clipped her ankle and barreled into the side of the biology lab. This time, the wall of the lab held. Shonda sprinted to the air lock and punched in her code. It sprung open, and she rejoiced until she realized that the other side of the air lock had open, too. Whether by this latest hit or by another, the building’s air pressure had clearly been compromised. Any part of the building still intact would have gone into lockdown to preserve air pressure and oxygen levels.
Although she craved the protection of walls, she knew that entering a building with no exit would be like stepping on a bear trap on purpose. Instead, she grabbed the glue bottle from the shelf of emergency tools, hid behind the outside of the air lock, and ran it along the crack in her visor to seal it. Within a few moments, she was breathing easier. Distantly, she thought it curious that she had not realized how much she had already been struggling to breath.
Her pursuer rolled through the air lock and into the biology lab, cueing a sigh of relief from Shonda. A sharp pain shot through her ankle when she rose again. Not much she could do about that. She decided to aim for the climatology lab. Already destroyed, it would at least be a little bit of cover between her and the Control Center. She limped forward, one hand on the side of the building to take some of the weight off her missing leg.
Halfway to climatology, the wall behind her blew out and the dusty, red boulder that Shonda had come to know as her attacker burst through the gap. She screamed as the impact knocked her off her feet. The Stone Person swiveled on its axis and rolled back in her direction. Others that had cut through the colony and landed on Shonda’s side seemed to notice and joined the chase. Shonda clamored over a pile of broken lab equipment and raced toward the lab. Where else could she go?
The climatology lab was in even more pieces than Shonda had expected. Darting from one pile of junk to another, she settled on a fallen cabinet and tucked herself inside. Even though she had no idea how the native species sensed its surroundings, Shonda held her breath. Could it smell her? See her? Could it taste something on the air? Were its senses even comparable to those on earth? Shonda doubted she would ever know the answer.
__________
Laying in the overturned cabinet, Shonda considered the things that had brought her here. The excitement of adventure and scientific discovery. The idea that she would go down in history as a pioneer, not just in her field, but on behalf of her whole planet. That a mission like this promised a pension for her family even after she died. Most of all, wonder. The wonder of planting her feet on a planet almost no one had ever or would ever touch. The wonder of waking up to see the sun in a different sky. The wonder of surviving in seemingly impossible conditions.
Her wonder had turned to fear and disgust. More than fear. Terror. Terrified that the beings hunting her would find her and kill her. Like Jake. Like Marta. Which—fair enough. This was their home, and she was the colonizer who had come to take it from them. Was she and her team even the first? She would probably never know that either.
A crackling sound announced the Stone People rolling into the lab after her. Shonda pulled her arms in tighter. One stopped directly beside her, paused for a moment, then rolled onward. Relief pooled in her stomach, until—
Light flooded in as the cabinet rose into the air on four stone limbs. With a shriek, Shonda crawled out from under the cabinet and scurried backwards. Stone People surrounded her on all sides. The cabinet flew to the side. Her captors rolled forward, new stone appendages growing from each boulder and planting themselves into the ground like a fence.
Just as Shonda raised her arms in surrender, the nearest Stone Person exploded in a spray of smaller rocks. Shonda spun around. A security officer nodded her way, redirected their gun, and pulled the trigger. The horror she felt watching these beings shatter was matched by her desire to survive. When an opening appeared, she waved a hand at the security officer, hoping that they would understand, and ran.
In another blast, the Stone Person on her tail erupted in another spray of pebbles. The officer met her in the open space between pods and grabbed Shonda’s arm. Stone People formed a horseshoe around the pair, but the way to the Control Center was clear. In a wild sprint, Shonda and the officer raced for the opening in the horseshoe.
The well of hope that had formed inside of Shonda fluttered and drained as flames shot out from under the ship the Control Center had been formed around. What the hell? Shonda threw up her arms to protect her face from the flames and backed away, stumbling into the security officer who had a similar reaction. Shonda pressed her comm button.
“Lin!” Shonda shouted even though she knew shouting distorted the sound. “What the hell, Lin? Where are you going? You’re just going to leave us here?”
A tinny voice came through the speaker. “Sorry Shonda. I don’t call the shots.”
“Come on. You can’t just—we’re still alive down here,” Shonda said hopelessly.
“I’ll try to convince them to send someone back for you,” Lin said. “I really am sorry.”
Yeah, right, Shonda thought. As if NASA had any intention of sending a rescue team. As if Shonda would make it through the months it would take for that team to arrive. Shonda looked at the security officer for support, but they were too busy defending their position.
Shonda turned around to face the Stone People, her chest filled with a confusing blend of guilt, betrayal, fear and acceptance –
—and waited.
Image Description: Orange directional signs painted on the side of a stucco wall. The signs say "to be continued."
Credit: Reuben Juarez / Unsplash via Webador
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