Change - ch. 5

“Mariner Six Control, this is Scavenger Bravo. Over,” Said a voice from the speaker on the space station floating miles over the red planet.

“Scavenger Bravo, go ahead,” Sounded a reply.

“Mariner Six, we have found debris that appears to be wreckage. Putting the image on camera now, prepare to receive Control.”

The control room of the space station was dark with only a single ambient red hue glowing from behind a shoddy plank of stainless steel. The artificial wall was a barrier between the crew and the miles of wires and circuits which kept them alive. There was plenty of work that still had to be done, but it was functioning to the best of its ability. The crew was in need of supplies to finish the next phase of the building process.

It takes six months to travel from Earth to Mars and the tours of duty were normally two and a half years. The crews just cycled through and this crew just landed a month ago. The astronauts were briefed by NASA regarding the current status of the station but it didn’t dawn on them the real state of emergency on the station until they landed and briefed by the exhausted crew which they were relieving.

Back in the control room a small pea-sized bulb was flashing after the last transmission. The captain of this barely functioning space station spins around in a make-shift chair built from spare parts of another seat from the Space Shuttle Voyager. He flicks a switch and a monitor blinks on reveling a blue panel and a black box in the center.

In the black box of the image on the screen there was bold red text that simply read, “Incoming transmission…”

The captain presses the screen and a download meter appears underneath the words. Within moments the images were transmitted and downloaded into the computer’s hard drive and finally the images blinked on the screen where the black box was glowing.

The landscape on the video feed was desolate and empty of life. Black was instantly filled with nothing but red colors and strange boulders with canyon walls to either side of the feed. In the bottom right of the video there was white text that blinked from time to time, “Streaming audio / video.”

The Captain was selected by the United States Air Force. He was top of his class in officer training and became a B-2 bomber pilot. He was selected to fly in one of the first sorties of the ‘Shock and Awe’ during the initial Iraqi conflict. Five years into the campaign he was promoted to Colonel where he directed the Predator program in the Middle Eastern Theater of Operations.

He was no stranger to war or the implications of making last minute decisions which would lead to the lives of his subordinates. His colleagues always congratulated his prowess military bearing and capabilities under fire. He returned home from the war with honorable mentions and several medals for his service. Then he was selected for this mission and he took it modestly.

Captain John Baker instantly gained the respect of his crew the first day of training at NASA and he knew each and every one of his men as though they were his own children. He was brawny and wary with wrinkles from the war. His hair was beginning to go grey and he just celebrated his 48th Birthday last week in the cabin of hanging wires and dim lights more than 35 million miles from Earth.

The captain presses the intercom button, “Scavenger Bravo, video received and feeding, over.”

The voice from the desolate empty below on the surface of Mars and deep within her belly replied, “Understood Control, zooming in for better picture of the identified wreckage.”

The video in the captain’s cabin zoomed in several times until he could see a black and grey mass of shredded twisted metal that had dug into the side of the canyon wall. There were no markings on the body of what might have resembled the frame of a 747 aircraft without the paint job and with several panels of the walls removed.

Captain Baker leans forward peering at the video and squints his eyes attempting to see between the wrecked frame and into the guts of the mangled mess of metal but there was only darkness. He presses the intercom button again and asks, “Scavenger Bravo, could this be part of the station?”

There was a long pause before the surface crew responded, “It’s possible Control but very unlikely. No damage reports are recorded in the crew logs on the station. Sir, Bravo requests permission to go for a closer inspection, over.”

“Negative Sierra Bravo, stand fast and await further instructions.”

Captain Baker spins in his fragile chair and presses another intercom button. He speaks into the microphone near the panel of the desk, cluttered with old coffee cups and technical manuals, “Tech Sergeant Wallace, report to control.”

The sergeant was there in mere moments. Since the crew arrived on the station he seemed pretty pointless. The captain preferred to send real men out to explore the surface rather than the crews before them which used the robotics. Sergeant Wallace was the robotics officer and instead of performing his functions in that field he was delegated to clean the hanging wires in the cargo bay. This was something he was excited about and he hoped the captain didn’t want him to clean the wires in the control room.

The captain looks to the Sergeant as he maneuvers through the hatch to the control room. He stands tall and salutes the colonel. This far out in space, Sergeant Wallace still felt it was absolutely necessary to keep military bearing.

Captain Baker nonchalantly returns the salute. Unlike the sergeant this officer didn’t really care for such formalities. He speaks to his robotics specialist, “Prepare the scout for an immediate launch to Landing Zone Romeo. There’s an artifact that we can’t identify.”

Sergeant Wallace nods to his captain, “Right away sir.” This was what he was waiting on for quite sometime and he wouldn’t let him down.

Colonel Baker presses the other intercom button and speaks to the crew on the surface of the planet, “Scavenger Bravo this is Mariner Six, standby and await Scout package drop to L-Z Romeo. Estimated drop time of package mark three zero mike, over.”

“Good copy Control, Scavenger out.”