THE SENTINEL Read online

  Docked at the charging station, the drones uploaded their data, where it was relayed on to Mars Space Station. The information was then forwarded to Earth, and onto its final destination, ADESA—short for Adaptive Deep Earth Scanning and Analysis technology. The thinking machine processed its queue of jobs in a FIFO order—first in, first out. Its purpose was to recognize patterns in data, like identifying human faces in a picture, to identify natural resources and signs of underground deposits that could be mined and used to help achieve self-sustainment, and, eventually, profit. Each job’s data was pumped through complex algorithms, transforming it, massaging it into useful forms. These visual images showed what dense materials lay beneath a surface; graphs and concentrations of potential elements, sizing estimates of potential veins of raw metal. At the conclusion of the analysis for each job, ADESA compiled reports, detailing what it believed might be present under the surface.

  * * *

  Heading eastward from Station Athena along the Mars equator, Gabriele Rousseau, senior section leader for IMTEC—the International Mars Terraforming and Exploration Corporation—walked a brisk pace along the well-worn path that meandered out, around an outcropping, and then back to the station. Over decades, many engineers, scientists, and workers based at Athena formed the trails around the station from their outdoor excursions to help clear their heads during the typical year-long rotations.

  "Gabriele.” The virtual assistant in her helmet suddenly crackled to life, jolting Gabriele from her focus on the trail. “A message has come in from Michael. Shall I play it?"

  Winded from the walk she breathed out and replied, “yes… play it.” The assistant retrieved the message from Station Athena where it had just arrived from Earth.

  She started walking again, but slower. In the center of her face shield, a transparent video message played, overlaying the Mars terrain in front of her. Michael was on his sailboat. Against the white of the cockpit, he looked more tanned than usual. She smiled as she thought about the many adventures they had on that boat since they had started dating.

  "Look at that sunset," he said, pointing towards the bow of the cruiser. The drone videoing the scene rotated ninety degrees. A brush of orange painted the horizon. Gabriele caught a glimpse of Mount Olympus and knew exactly where Michael was when he recorded the message. "Can't wait for you to get back, sweetheart. I want to go south. I was thinking, after this lengthy stay on Mars, you would be ready for more sunshine and warm weather. I know it will be a short stay this time, but we’ll make the best of it."

  You’re reading my mind, Michael, she thought as she picked up her pace while watching the footpath.

  “How are things? I know you’re loving it there, with the expansion work and everything, but I can imagine you’re also getting tired.” He took a drink from his glass. She could see he was steering with his foot and smiled. “I loved the video you sent of the greenhouse and the range of plants being grown there. I showed it around the lab. Everyone thought it was cool.”

  After the video finished, Gabriele gazed around and grinned, knowing what Michael would be thinking if he were there looking at that scene. No trees? No ocean? No animals? Just kill me now. She knew he loved his research at IMTEC—countering effects of space travel on humans—but at the same time he was clear, he had zero interest in leaving Earth. She missed him. Over the long stretches of time away, she had learned to turn off the missing everyone emotion. But with Michael, turning it off wasn’t easy.

  “Gabriele,” came the assistant’s voice over her helmet’s audio. “Enrico is calling.”

  “Okay, put him through.”

  Enrico fizzled in on her face shield. “Hey, are we still on for the team meeting?” he asked in his thick Italian accent. “We have a few ADESA reports to work on.”

  She glanced at the time in the upper right corner of her shield. “I’ll be back in time,” she panted. “Just out for a walk. I needed a little outside time.”

  “Okay. I’ll keep to the schedule and see you in a while.”

  Enrico faded out. Gabriele picked up her pace again. Her breathing increased in lockstep as the weighted suit—to simulate more gravity—created more of a workout. Ahead, the path turned around the cliff outcropping and from there she knew it was just forty-five minutes back to the station.

  * * *

  Gabriele walked into her section and looked at Enrico—feet propped up on the desk, tablet in hand. “Team meeting?”

  Startled, he looked up. “Hey, Chief. Right on time.”

  The two walked along Station Athena’s main corridor to their section’s planning room. At around 4 o’clock, the Sun shone through the glass dome ceiling of the passageway, illuminating the changing scenes from Earth which lined the walls. Gabriele felt her arms swaying more than usual while walking along. Simulated gravity and her weighted clothes were less of a restriction than the space suit she had been in for the past two hours. She thought about the upcoming departure and dreaded the first weeks back on Earth—when real gravity would kick in.

  “Looks like everyone is here,” said Gabriele, rolling her chair up to the table.

  “I’m hurt,” announced Jordan—one of Gabriele’s machine engineers—walking through the entry, cup of something in her hand.

  The team chuckled.

  Gabriele cracked a smile while continuing to review the agenda items on her tablet. A moment later, she looked up at her team—those in charge of the terrestrial scanning and analysis program. “We have quite a laundry list to knock out before we return home next week. Jordan? How’s that pack progressing that’s returning from section Whiskey-16?”

  “The recharging rover reported back just a few minutes ago,” replied Jordan. “The drones are docked and almost fully recharged. They’ll have enough juice to complete half of the last grid block and get back to base. Then they’ll need to come in for maintenance.”

  “We need to get those guys back out as soon as we can.”

  “I know, Boss,” replied Jordan. “You know I’m the best mech here.”

  Enrico cleared his throat without looking up from his tablet.

  “Okay team, next item. New scanners and drones,” said Gabriele.

  “Given our procurement cycle, we should order those soon,” responded Enrico. “These will be the next gen models. We’ll need ample time to harden them for Mars and get all the gear tested properly before the next rotation.”

  “Send the request to HQ,” ordered Gabriele. “I’ll sign the order and get it moving.” She then looked up as if she were looking over the top of reading glasses.

  “Anyone not returning that I don’t know about?” She paused. No one said anything. “No one wants to earn any OT?”

  “We’ve all been here too long already,” retorted an engineer. “And we only have six months of shore leave this time.”

  “Just asking,” replied Gabriele calmly. “Alright. Let’s press on with these reports.”

  Enrico slid the control pad towards him, powered up the main display in the room, and navigated to the team’s data. He opened the top report from the previous day’s surface scans. One by one, they reviewed the details from ADESA. When signs of potential natural resources looked strong enough, they created new work orders—directions for land rovers with deep scanners to visit the sites and probe under the surface to verify and quantify the findings. Once their confidence level reached a certain point, they sent engineering teams to take boring samples. Positive samples led to excavation plans.

  As the team worked through the list of reports, Jordan suddenly sat up straighter.

  “Hey, stop there,” she exclaimed. She scanned the flight details section in the next report. “Looks like two…no, three drones malfunctioned.”

  “Three? Must have been some bad weather,” said an engineer.

  “Let’s see the details on that line item,” said Jordan.

  Enrico navigated deeper into the report.

  “None of them reported anything,
” said Jordan, scanning the data.

  “Let’s check the weather for that quadrant and time stamp,” said Gabriele. “Just to be sure.”

  Enrico pulled up the weather map of the planet and input the coordinates where the drones malfunctioned. He slid the time meter backwards and stopped a half-hour before the event, then slowly moved the meter forward over a one-hour window. “Looks like a clear sunny day on Mars, guys.”

  “Should we bring that pack in?” asked Gabriele.

  Puzzled, Jordan replied, “Maybe. I’ll get a dump of their internal logs today. If I don’t find anything I suggest letting them complete their run. I’ll schedule full ‘rectal-oscopies’ for next time they’re in for maintenance.”

  Gabriele smiled with a shake of her head.

  Others laughed.

  Enrico pressed on to the next section—scanning results for the quadrant. Near the end of the section, he stopped. A block within the quadrant was flagged. The descriptor read Anomaly.

  “Interesting,” said Gabriele. “What’s that time marker?”

  Enrico opened the details.

  “Anyone recall the time those drones malfunctioned?” asked Gabriele, looking around at her team.

  Enrico navigated back through the report to the flight details. “Close,” he noted. “Looks like they were near the block when it happened.”

  Gabriele rocked back in her chair. “Their malfunctioning must have thrown off ADESA. That’s what caused it to report an anomaly.”

  “Maybe,” replied Enrico.

  “You’re not buying it?”

  “Maybe there’s something there and the malfunction was just a coincidence,” said Enrico.

  Gabriele nodded. “A possibility. Put it in the research queue with all the other anomalies. We’ll get to it. Next report.”

  “There’s a third possibility we’re all forgetting,” said Jordan with a frown.

  “What? That there’s something there and that something caused the drones to malfunction?” asked an engineer.

  “Exactly,” replied Jordan.

  “Like what?” asked Enrico.

  “I don’t know,” replied Jordan, raising her hands. “An alien ship buried out there waiting to gut us all.”

  The group laughed.

  “Three drones flipped out in the same area. I think we should look into it; sooner, rather than later.”

  Gabriele leaned back slightly, tapping her finger on the armrest of her chair. This was an economic versus curiosity decision. She knew IMTEC’s objectives backwards and forwards; self-sustainment, yield, production, in situ resource utilization. She also knew they were way behind on all fronts. A few changes in the project queues added up to schedule impacts. Her job at these points was crystal clear; align the decision with IMTEC’s plans. But, like most everyone on Mars, Gabriele was part explorer. At heart, she was really there for another, more personal aim—answers to burning questions, discovery, hunting for signs of life.

  She stopped tapping her fingers and nodded. “Okay. Put it in the priority queue to re-scan that part of the quadrant. Next report.”

  Three

  Year 2126, Endurance Compound, Northern Antarctica

  Eight hours after leaving JDC facilities at the private airport in Melbourne, and the last hour spent pushing through a powerful storm, the aircraft approached the Endurance site. It was a heavy cargo transporter, but no match for the powerful arctic winds that had tossed it up and down for the past hour.

  You’re just grinning at this old plunderer, aren’t you? thought Jonathan, gazing out of his window at the endless, undulating sheet of white. He loved coming back to this site—Antarctica, a massive block of ice bigger than the United States and Mexico combined, tucked away on the bottom of the planet, quietly keeping vast reserves of natural resources hidden away.

  Through the bands of snow, Jonathan spotted the Endurance main station in the distance, resting above the ice on top of a grid of hefty metal legs. Occasional rays of Sun broke through the clouds and flashed off the round metallic structure, and the clear domes covering the subterranean passageways connecting it to the rest of the compound. The subway station—as the team called the thick-walled building that housed the lifts servicing the tunneling work twenty-six hundred meters below the surface of the glacier—stood taller than the other structures. A big snow cat was just pulling back into the warehouse after clearing the landing pad for the approaching plane.

  Three-and-a-half years had passed since the Endurance venture began. It took one year to set up the site, another to dig the elevator shaft, and the rest to build out the bedrock level and begin tunneling. After so much time without any financial returns, Jonathan’s short-sighted investors were beginning to lose interest. Their expectations never aligned with the long-term nature of resource extraction, so he had to resell them on it—a soft-skill he had long mastered.

  The machine tossed in the high winds as it approached, rotating its engines into a hovering pattern, then beginning a slow vertical descent to the landing pad. Resting firmly on the ground, everyone took a few deep breaths before suiting up in thermal gear.

  Peering out the side portal, Jonathan saw the main station’s cargo lift gate lower from underneath its belly onto the ice sheet. Nick stepped off the platform and leaned against the wind as he pressed towards the craft. Jonathan rotated the side door latch and rocked it open, allowing a wave of frigid air to wash through the cabin.

  Nick stepped through the door into the belly of the craft, looked around for a moment at the visitors, then announced through his long beard in a thick Australian accent, “Welcome to Endurance! Let’s get inside where it’s heaps warmer.”

  The group of investors held their bags tight in the pounding wind as they made their way across the ice. After they all had stepped on the palette, Nick pressed the Up button. The electric lift rose into the station, jarring to a stop at the top as the air seal cinched tight.

  * * *

  After a late night catch-up with Nick and Sergey and just four hours of sleep, Jonathan woke, still feeling uneasy from the turbulent flight. He sat up, rubbed his face and eyes, then pushed his fingers through his hair and peered out of the tinted glass wall of his room. A silhouette of the sun was faintly visible in the sky through the opaque state of the glass—the station’s environment was still in nighttime mode—blocking the near twenty-four hours of sunlight at that time of the year.

  With a mug of coffee in his hand, Jonathan strode into the control room.

  The front wall of glass stretched from floor to ceiling, revealing a panorama of the ice world outside. Screens on the side walls displayed maps of the site, maps of the tunnels, and status of all the control systems. Nick sat in front of a screen, still wearing workout gear from what Jonathan assumed must have been an extremely early morning workout.

  Slightly startled, Nick turned around. “Hey, Jonathan.”

  “Morning. How’s everything?”

  “I’m just running through all the system checks. No issues.”

  Jonathan drifted over to the glass wall, now transitioning to a morning setting. “Weather doesn’t look bad out.”

  “It’ll be nice for the first half of the day,” replied Nick. “But then later it’s going to turn nasty again.”

  “What’s the schedule for these investors?” asked Jonathan as he walked along the wall, studying the outside.

  “We’ll start by showing them around the compound, as soon as we can, while the weather is working for us. Take them on some rides in the snow-cats, tracing over where the tunnels run.” Nick rocked back in his chair. “That will help get them better acclimated. Then in the afternoon we’ll suit up and take them down below. Show them around the tunnels. Wearing space suits and trotting around on the bedrock level under this glacier should get them excited about the project. We’ll show them all the automation, Atlas digging away, and some recent boring samples. I’ve got it all ready to roll.”

  Pleased, Jonathan cracked
a slight smile as he panned the wide-open span of ice. Yet, he felt the familiar nervousness bubble up in his gut—something that surfaced with all his risky frontier projects. And Endurance had become the riskiest. He gritted his teeth slightly and buried the feeling.

  * * *

  After two venturous days at Endurance, it was time for the scheduled update with his full investor base and board members. Jonathan’s team back in his office had planned this remote meeting for maximum effect. The tower crane, small mountain of rubble, warehouse, and white mountain peaks off in the distance all provided the perfect backdrop behind him and the visiting investors.

  Jonathan leaned forward and touched a control on the device laying on the table in the engineering room of the Endurance main station. A minute later, faces of all twenty-four investors and board members from around the world filled in the grid on the display in front of him and his on-site guests.

  With his hands crossed and resting on the table, he started the meeting. “Thanks everyone for joining this somewhat unorthodox project update.”

  “This is actually very orthodox for you, Jonathan,” opined one of his long-time investors. “Are you ever not at one of your project sites?”

  Everyone chuckled.

  “Looks like Endurance, if I’m not mistaken.”

  Jonathan cracked a smile. “Hence, why I’ve put Endurance at the top of our agenda.” He then pointed to the table with both his forefingers. “This, everyone, is our most ambitious project to date. And given the progress Nick and his team have made here, I believe it’s time to pull this project back to front and center.”

  Jonathan glanced from face to face on the screen. “Those of you who have been with me long enough know it takes years to develop assets to a profitable state. There are no shortcuts around laws, governments, treaties, militias, corruption, or wars.” He turned and pointed out the window. “Let alone Mother Nature. Operating in hostile parts of the world is simply part and parcel of this business. Look out there. Geological scientists have known for decades Antarctica is rich in resources. Possibly the biggest trove the world has ever seen. The challenge is digging up the trove without breaking the bank, so to say.”