Fatal Discovery Read online

  Alyssa sat in the mess hall now finishing her ration of dried beef and three carrots from the airponics garden. She brought her comm-band closer to her face, “Anderson to Captain Fletcher.”

  Several seconds went by and Fletcher answered, “Captain Fletcher? Since when do you call me Captain?”

  She smiled, “Since I need permission from the captain for something.”

  “Oh really? And just what might you need permission to do?”

  “I’d like to go over to the drill sight and check a few things, I’ll only be there for an hour max.”

  “You can go under one condition: you have dinner with me tonight. I’m coming down to do a check on the computer core.”

  “Your on. And while your in the computer core, would you mind shutting those annoying audio notifications off, they’re really bugging me.”

  “Your not the first to say that. I’ll see what I can do.” Alyssa was about to ask him something, but Fletch interrupted her unspoken words, “I’ve got to go, someone just found something on the long range sensors.”

  “What do you mean they found something? It isn’t the Russians is it?” Alyssa dropped her fork, but didn’t even notice.

  “Don’t worry, Alyssa, it’s coming from the other direction, it’s probably just a meteor cluster or a sensor glitch. Your safe, trust me.”

  She wanted to trust him, but something inside her knew something was going to happen. She didn’t know how or why, she just knew.

  Section Five

  Martian Drill Site

  1308 Hours

  April 12th, 2167

  Alyssa arrived at the drill site a little while later, still unsettled about what Fletcher said. She knew she was probably making a bigger deal out of this than she should, but that didn’t help her feelings any.

  After entering the office section of the drill site, she found the computer lab, scanned her security card, and activated one of the five computers.

  Just as she was beginning to give the computer a command, the lights dimmed and the red emergency warning lights though out the room began flashing. An alarm started somewhere down the hall and the computer began repeating, Warning! Tunnel integrity compromised, evacuate immediately!

  Alyssa jumped to her feet and ran down the hallway. She reached the entrance to to the mining shaft and was stopped by a man that looked familiar.

  “Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask you to leave the building.”

  “I have a level five security clearance, I tell you what to do, not the other way around. Have I met you before?”

  “I’m Derek Hollister, we met on the turbo-lift back on the Excelsior.”

  “Oh, thats right. What happened here? Is anyone down there?”

  “It's nothing to worry about, the computer is just overreacting. And yes, Lieutenant Tom Nelson is in the pod.”

  “Tom! What in the name of all things holy was Tom doing in the mining pod? He's a computer programmer, not a miner.”

  “He said he needed to run some tests on the computer system and he had clearance to do so; I didn’t see anything wrong with him going. Why are you so worried about it, anyway?”

  “Oh,” her face turned red, “no reason.”

  There was another notification from the computer saying that the mining pod had returned to the surface and the doors opened.

  “Tom!” Alyssa ran and hugged him.

  Tom looked rather confused. “Alyssa?”

  She jumped back and said, "Oh, I’m sorry. I just... I’m glad your okay."

  Alyssa had finally admitted to her self that she liked Tom, but she kept forgetting that Tom already had a girl.

  The man that had come up with Tom stepped out and said, “I think you should have a look at the mapping computer mister Hollister.”

  The four of them moved across the room and Derek activated the mapping computer. The other miner, whose name tag identified him as Andrew Larson, entered several commands into a wall panel and the flashing lights stopped along with the computer’s warnings.

  “What in the world? How did we not see this before?” Derek was pointing at something on the map.

  “See what? What is it?” Alyssa looked closer at the screen.

  “It’s some kind of hollow area several feet behind one of the main tunnel walls. It hasn’t showed up any of the scans we’ve made. I can’t understand it.”

  * * *

  Four hours later, Alyssa, Tom and Derek had been authorized to go down the tunnel and try to access the hidden cavern. Of corse Captain Fletcher had put up a fight when Alyssa had asked to go, but she had finally talked him into it.

  Tom insisted on going, saying that her had "discovered" the hollow area.

  The mining pod descended the shaft and reached the area where the hollow spot had been detected. Derek activated a drill on the side of the pod and began to drill through the wall.

  “What do you think is behind there?” Asked Alyssa, excitedly.

  “Rocks,” said Derek, sounding completely uninterested.

  “Oh come on, use your imagination!”

  There was a loud crash as the wall on the other side of the mining pod collapsed and the pod itself lurched violently.

  “I guess that means we’re through,” said Derek, smiling.

  “I guess so,” replied Alyssa.

  Derek fiddled with a control panel on the wall of the pod and the pod rotated so that the door faced the hole they had just drilled.

  “Would you like to push the button Alyssa?” Derek asked in a mocking voice.

  “Why of course.” Alyssa said, grinning. She shifted over to the control panel and pressed the green button appropriately labeled, “Open”. The door slid up swiftly, as the jaws of the three passengers slid down slowly. They were staring at a city. An entire city buried under the surface of Mars. At first no one spoke. Then Alyssa pressed a button on her comm-band and called Fletcher.

  “Anderson to Captain Fletcher, I think you should come to the main mine shaft ASAP.”

  There was a slight delay and then Fletch replied, “Is everyone alright?”

  “Yes, we’re fine, but we’ve found something.” Alyssa almost didn’t believe what she was seeing. “Fletch, there’s a city down her. An abandoned city in ruin.”

  “Very funny Alyssa.”

  She change her tone, “Do I sound like I’m kidding, Captain.” She put emphasis on the last word, perhaps a little too much.

  “What do you mean a ruin city, that’s impossible. Aliens don't exist.”

  “I think the builders of this city would have to disagree.”

  “I’m sending a team over there right away and I’ll be down as soon as I can.”

  “Right. See you then.”

  The comm beeped as she ended the transmission.

  “What should we do?” Tom looked terrified.

  Alyssa pulled a flashlight from a compartment under her seat and strapped it to her wrist. “We explore!” She had a crazy look in her eye. “Just think, we are the first humans to examine an alien culture.”

  Derek was staring out the door and the roof of the cavern. “Where do you suppose the light is coming from? It can’t be the surface or we’d have noticed this place.”

  “Let’s find out. Is there a scanner on board?”

  “Yeah,” Derek detached a scanner from the wall of the pod and handed it to Alyssa, “I guess your the leader for now.”

  “Well then, let’s get a move on.” They filed out of the pod an into the cavern. Alyssa began conducting scans of the surrounding area.

  “The light is coming from some sort of halogen gas emitter on the ceiling. The halogen is being mixed with some type of element I’ve never seen before to produce light,” she paused as the scanner finished its analysis, “five times brighter than traditional halogen lights.”

  “What do you mean, an element you’ve never seen before?” Derek asked.

  “I mean, what ever it is, it isn’t in our database, but the scanner registers is as an element.” She looked at him excitedly, “We’ve only been in here a few seconds, and we’ve already discovered alien elements! This is a huge discovery Derek, why don’t you looked excited?”

  “I don’t like this. I’ve grown up my whole life being told that aliens don’t exist and now...” He looked around, “This. I'm not convinced this is real.”

  “You have to have an open mind. This is the reason that I support the space program, the search for other intelligent life out there... here.”

  There was a loud crash several meters to the right and Alyssa instinctively grabbed Derek’s hand.

  “Well that’s more like it.” He smiled at her.

  “Oh shut up. Tom? Was that you?”

  “Over here, I found something.”

  Alyssa and Derek cautiously walked in the direction of the sound.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m not sure. It looks like some type of breaker. I think if I...” He was cut of as the entire room suddenly exploded with light. There was a loud hum as systems came online all over the room.

  Now that they could see the entire room clearly, they saw that they had come in right next to some type of engine room. The wall closest to Tom was covered in circuits and power relays.

  They looked out at the rest of the room and saw hundreds of desks with what looked to be computer monitors sitting on them.

  Wow was all Alyssa could think.

  “Where did all of the aliens go, I wonder,” Tom stated.

  “Let's see if we can get one of those computers working.”

  “But how will we know what anything means. This isn’t like in Old Earth movies, I’m sure they didn’t speak English.”

/>   “Well we can at least give it a try. Besides, computer programing is all math at heart and math is a truly universal language.”

  Tom spoke up, “That may be true, but it doesn’t mean that they depicted their numbers the same way we did. It could take a while to decipher the numbers.”

  “Don’t be such a wet blanket.”

  The three of them walked to the desks and began looking for a way to switch the computers on.

  About ten minutes later, Tom found a button on the underside of the monitors that activated them. A series of strange looking symbols flashed across the screen is a way that made it look like some type of warning.

  “Hey, I got one to work!”

  Alyssa and Derek ran over to the console Tom was standing behind.

  “That looks like some kind of warning,” Alyssa said as soon as she saw it.

  “That’s what I thought too. I wish we had some way of translating it.”

  “You to keep working on this, I’m going to see if I can get that working.” Derek pointed to a large monitor at the front of the room.

  “Be carful,” Alyssa said.

  “What’s the fun in that,” Derek replied, with a wink.

  Alyssa and Tom sat at the console tapping buttons on the keyboard in front of the monitor. Every once in a while the screen would change, but they had no idea what it meant.

  After about an fifteen minutes, Alyssa looked up to see where Derek had gone, but he was’t anywhere in sight.

  “Tom, don’t you think that team should have been here by now?”

  He looked at her with a worried expression.

  Alyssa pressed a button on her comm-band and said, “Anderson to Fletcher.” There was silence for several seconds and then the comm-band beeped. She looked at the screen which read “out of range”.

  “These strange elements must be interfering with the comm system. Derek!”

  She looked around again but didn’t see him anywhere. Tom go back to the pod and see if you can use it’s comm-panel to find out where that team is.”

  “Right.” He ran back in the direction that had originally come and she walked toward the main console that Derek had gone to check out.

  “Derek are you,” she inhaled quickly and then yelled, “Tom come here!” Derek lay, unconscious, on the floor in front of the main console.

  “The hole we drilled has been sealed somehow,” He stopped when he saw Derek. “What happened to him?”

  “I don’t know, I just found him like this.” She pulled her scanner from it’s holster and changed the setting to medical scan. She passed it over his body several times and then said, “His vitals are fine. The scanner doesn't show any reason for him being unconscious.”

  “It must be some kind of alien poison or something.”

  “Don’t go getting yourself worked up Tom, we need to get him to the medical lab back at the base. What where you saying about the pod?”

  “The hole we drilled had been sealed somehow. Some type of alloy just filled in the part we drilled through. What ever it is, it don’t register in the database.”

  “So someone sealed us in here and cut our comm link with the outside, but why?”

  “It was probably the aliens! Maybe we’ve defiled there sacred temple or something.” Tom looked around, wide eyed.

  “Does this look like a temple to you Tom? Pull yourself together.”

  As she said this, there was a loud explosion from the other side of the room.

  “That came from the entrance,” said Alyssa. “Stay here.” She ran off leaving Tom looking absolutely terrified.

  Section Six

  Martian Ruins

  1701 Hours

  April 12th, 2167

  Alyssa came around the corner just as Fletcher jumped through the hole that had been blasted in the wall.

  “Alyssa!” He ran and wrapped is arms around her. “Why didn’t you answer your comm-band? We’ve been trying to reach you.”

  “My comm-band said I was out of range. I think it’s the metal alloy in the walls. Fletch, we’ve got a man down. I found him unconscious by the main computer console.”

  “What was he doing?”

  “We were trying to get these computers running. We got one going it started displaying something that looked like a warning message. Derek went to look at the main computer and I found him laying there just a minute ago.”

  Fletcher pointed at two men who had just come through the hole and said, “You two, follow Doctor Anderson and get Mr. Derek to the medical center.”

  The two men nodded and said, “Yes sir.”

  Alyssa, I know you are going to hate me for this but I need you to come back up with us as well. You can take that as an order.”

  “I figured you’d say that. But I’m coming back down here later.”

  “We’ll see about that. I’m going to have a security team check it out first.”

  * * *

  An hour later, Alyssa, Fletcher and Tom stood behind a glass wall looking at Derek, who was still unconscious. A medical doctor stood beside him wearing a clean suit. Derek had been isolated just incase his condition had been caused by some type of alien virus.

  The doctor stepped into a small room and a door sealed him into it. A red light flashed three times and then turned green signaling that he was free of any micro-contaminates.

  He then made his way into the room were Tom, Fletcher and Alyssa waited.

  “How is he doctor?” Alyssa asked.

  The doctor pulled his mask from his face and spoke, “Medically, he’s fine. There doesn’t appear to be any type of virus anywhere in his system. He has just gone into some type of deep sleep. The only thing I have found out of the ordinary is that his brainwave frequency had slightly increased. But only by about half of a percent.”

  “What do you think that means?”

  “I’m not sure that it means anything. I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

  “Keep us updated on his condition doctor,” said Fletcher.

  “Yes sir, I’ll let you know the second he wakes up.”

  The doctor walked to a group of computer monitors and the other three made their way to the hallway.

  “You two need to eat something.”

  “I can’t even thing about eating after all of that. I mean we just discovered an extinct alien race and you think about food?” Alyssa through her hands in the air.

  “I’m just saying that you’re going to need your strength if you’re going back down there.”

  Alyssa looked at him excitedly, “You’re letting us go back down?”

  “Well you were the discoverers, I think you have the right.”

  “If you don’t mind sir, I’d like to stay up here. I don’t like the feeling that place gave me.” Tom shuttered.

  “Well, that’s up to you; if you don’t want to go back down, I’m not going to make you.”

  They reached a turbo-lift and entered, doors hissing closed behind them.

  “Just think of all we could learn if only we could translate that language.”

  “Well, as soon as the security team clears that room, I want a team to take that computer apart and see if it had anything to do with what happened to Derek.”

  The turbo-lift delivered the threesome to the mess hall were they had a quick meal. Fletcher was called to the ship for an urgent matter and promised to contact Alyssa as soon as the team cleared the room.

  The captain gave Tom the rest of the day off to recover and he went straight to his quarters after he had finished his meal.

  About ten minutes later, Alyssa headed back to the drill site to have a look at the mapping computer.

  When she got off of the transport, an armed guard stood in front of the entrance to the main lab, which housed the mine shaft.

  “Hello doctor Anderson, can I see your security card please?”

  She handed the guard her card and he tapped it to a small black pad on a table next to the door.

  Entrance granted to Doctor Alyssa Anderson.

  “Thank you.” He handed her card back and she walked through the open door.

  She had to used her security card once more to gain access to the mapping computer. She didn’t know wether or not she had a high enough security clearance to begin with or if Fletcher had just made an exception for her, she was leaning toward the latter.

  Alyssa pulled up the map for the mining shaft and was surprised to find that the entire cavern they had just found did not show up on the map.