Mists of the Miskatonic (Mist of the Miskatonic Book 1) (21 page)

“It’s like this, Frank. You’re up there…”

Frank tapped the screen and stopped the playback of the DPack from Mike. “Darwin, what the hell are they doing?” he whispered into the com.

The Mission Specialist’s voice came on the intercom. “You had better get down here and see this, Frank.”

The Commander double timed down the corridor and around the corner, then went through the door to where Darwin was watching a screen.

“What is it?” he said, exasperatedly.

“Watch this,” Darwin said. He recalled the playback to where Connor’s hand pointed to impressions in the sand. The Specialist looked up. “Looks like tracks. Not robot tracks. Something walked out there. Foot prints. Claw marks.”

Frank looked at the screen. He saw some type of marks that vaguely resembled the tracks of a giant crab, a single circular imprint with two claw-like toe marks that stuck out.

Tina slept fitfully. Heather’s suicide and the recovery of her mangled corpse, all twisted and bloated from the pressure differences of Mars weighed heavily on her. As she dreamt, a vaguely human voice whispered in the darkness of her dreams.

Even before they landed, the nightmares crept and crawled from somewhere primordial. She ignored them, and prayed it was just the stress, the periods of weightlessness, the recycled air, no ocean. It was more.

Yet the odd voice…it buzzed, but was unmistakable: the words like a distant invasion of something old, odd and cold. It tried to sound so human, but could not quite get the resonance and pitch right. “La Shub-Niggurath! In the ruins, the eye of the Great Race of Yith! The wards prevent us. But you retrieve it. Be rewarded…”

Tina awoke with a start, soaked with sweat, the blanket on the floor. She sat up she held her face in her hands and cried. These nightmares were going to kill her.

Tina could hear her crewmates argue somewhere distant. She stood: now used to it, the light gravity was hardly noticeable. Slowly she padded to the small sink affixed to the back of a plastic toilet and splashed some cool water on her face. Drying with a synthetic towel, she brushed her dark hair with her fingers and walked towards the argument.

“I don’t care,” Darwin yelled. “On top of everything else. They can go to hell.”

“Orders are orders,” Connor retorted loudly. “We don’t pick the time or the place. We do what we are told.”

“Dammit!” Frank shouted. Something plastic shattered. Tina guessed a thrown coffee mug.

“We do what we’re told. It’s what we do!”

Tina crept into the room and sat against the wall, then slid her back down it and sat on the smooth floor. “What about those tracks? We’re not alone here,” she whispered.

Frank turned on Tina in a rage, then slammed down some hard copy pictures of a Martian hill.

“Not tracks. There’s nothing, I repeat, nothing alive up here. Just us. And some very overactive imaginations. When Heather popped that lock, the air pressure stirred and kicked up sand. It’s a coincidence. That’s all. Random movement of sand,” Frank shouted.

“They were tracks,” she whimpered. “I can’t take this anymore.”

“We have our new orders. You and Connor are going to suit up and take one of the MRV’s out to this rock pile, 29 kilometers that direction. Some egghead back home thinks he has found a brick wall sticking out of a pile of rock. Take some photos, prove how stupid they are, and get back here,” he said angrily and pointed east.

“I won’t,” she said. Tina held her face in her hands. “Not going out there.
They’re
out there. There’s no hope.
They’re
watching.”

Frank knelt beside her, and then shoved his palm hard against her chest. Compressed against the bulkhead she gasped for breath.

“You’re going to. Or else. Understand? We are astronauts. This isn’t a Girl Scout camp out. Now saddle up and get moving. We will monitor you the whole way; stay in communication,” the Commander ordered.

“Or what?” she snapped, as the tears cascaded down her cheeks. “What will you do?”

He tensed, his fingers tensed near her throat as his teeth clenched. “I will…kill you. I won’t tolerate mutiny. Insubordination. Just do your god damned job. Control the fear.”

Mike’s voice came across strongly in the bud. “We got round one of the telemetry data from the MRV. Five by five, Commander. However, I’m a little concerned about you asking questions about mutiny. I’ll run it across our JAG team, see what they say. Don’t do anything crazy, ok? This will work out.”

“It’d better,” Frank grumbled as he watched the remote monitor attached to Tina’s helmet. She and Connor drove east across the rocky Martian terrain. The large black wheels of the MRV spewed dust and pebbles into the air. It left a long, thick cloud of dust as he switched views to the camera in the cart.

“Just stay frosty, Commander. The President…” Frank clicked the screen and interrupted the DPack. He pulled the earpiece out and tossed it onto a counter. Focused on the screen, minutes turned to several hours as the MRV snaked slowly across the desolate landscape. Darwin came up behind and sat quietly where he watched the progress over Frank’s shoulder.

Frank microwaved another mug of coffee while Darwin yawned repeatedly.

“I’m gonna go clean up, catch a quick power nap,” the Mission Specialist said quietly. “Not sleeping well. Back in a few.”

“Alright then,” the Mission Commander said. He looked askance at Darwin. It felt like something was wrong. Several more minutes passed and a hill appeared on the horizon. He recognized it through the screen as the one from the photos. The screen fuzzed a bit as something disrupting the transmission.

“The destination is up ahead,” Connor’s voice crackled in the speaker.

“Connor. Tina. Can you read me?” Frank asked.

A few seconds later he heard a reply, distorted from static. “We hear you…interference of some kind…we see the hill, proceeding on foot,” Connor said.

“…shouldn’t be…watching…” Tina’s muffled voice came through the bud. “…I can feel them…watching…more tracks…”

The screen began to distort as the two moved up a small sandy rise to the round stone outcropping. Static flickered and shot across the screen as the two moved cautiously around the hill. The end of a smooth, cracked wall became evident. The static increased as the camera panned up and down, the picture fractured by bursts of static. Broken words were barely audible. “…cave in…entrance…wall…worked stone…” was all that could be made out of Connor’s voice. Then the images pieced together bright lights: head lamps and hand lights. Suddenly, the screen went black.

“Darwin, I lost the signal. Edders?” Frank called into the intercom. “Darwin?” he said, then cycled through the views on the internal cameras. Several rooms were dark. The med bay had those two body bags stored in a cold, Plexiglas locker. Then he hit a camera in the living quarters. The light in the shower stall silhouetted the Mission Specialist’s figure. Steam rose in the booth and Frank turned back to the screen. Tina’s camera showed only static. Five minutes turned to ten and ten turned to twenty as he sat: a quiet sentinel without any information.

He clicked the intercom again. “Edders. I need you up here,” he ordered, and waited for a reply. Static flashed and Tina’s camera began to transmit images as she ran toward the MRV.

“Oh...god…” she shouted, her voice cracked through the distortion. “Connor’s down…He’s gone…”

“Tina, repeat,” Frank commanded as her camera became clearer. The MRV was in motion. It turned around and retreated back across the large wheel tracks left earlier. “Repeat, please.”

As she drove away from the hill, the picture began to stabilize and Frank could hear her ragged breaths.

“Not me. Not me!” she screamed.

“Tina, I need you to calm down and tell me what happened to Connor. Calm down. You’re breathing too hard. Cut your mixture,” Frank ordered. “Where is Connor?”

“He’s gone. This thing…like a…protoplasm…I don’t know, it enveloped him and I ran. It’s not gonna take me, Frank. Not going to die like that,” she cried. The camera in her helmet panned down and he recognized the silver handle of a demolition charge.

Her white glove grasped the handle and he could hear an audible breath, long and deep as she pulled the handle. “Tina! For God’s sake, don’t do it!” he screamed, as the screen flashed and went dark. “Tina! Tina!” he shouted.

A control panel buzzed. The
Spirit of St. Louis
somewhere far overhead in orbit, radars and infrared scanners warned of an explosion far below.

“God dammit,” he snarled, body tense as his eyes began to tear up.

Frank hit the com. “Darwin! I need you up here right now!” he hollered, then panned the internal cameras. The shower still flowed. He sprinted down several short corridors and skidded to a stop inside the washroom. The Mission Specialist’s form was clearly visible through the transparent door. He was dressed in his white jumpsuit, and stood motionless as the water ran over his body. The steam rose in clouds and fogged in the room. “Darwin? What are you doing?”

Frank approached cautiously. “Edders? Can you hear me?” No answer. He cautiously opened the shower door.

Darwin hung, a length of insulated wire tied to the shower head and wrapped around his neck. His skin was pale, lips blue, eyes rolled so only bloodshot whites showed as the water ran over him.

“No!” Frank screamed and tore at the cord around the other man’s neck. He tried to lift him up to take the pressure off his neck. He fought, yanked on the line until he pulled the fixture out of the ceiling. Water gushed, no longer governed by the shower head in a single stream. Frank reached up, fumbled for the handle, and shut it off.

“Breathe, damn you!” He screamed, then listened for breath and checked for a pulse. Neither was found. He breathed into Darwin and began futile cycles of CPR. Several sets into it, he realized that Darwin’s heart would not start without a defibrillator. He raced to medical. He unlatched the door, tripped over equipment scattered on the floor. “What the hell?” he screamed, the contents of the room a jumble.

The door to the cooler was open: the body bags gone. For a few seconds he stood, panicked. He was the only one left alive. In the last half hour, Medical had been torn apart and the two corpses had vanished. He took a couple steps backwards to the door, and ran back down the corridor to command.

“This is not happening,” he whispered, then crouched behind a console to catch his breath. “Not happening.”

He took a key from a pocket in his jumpsuit, entered it into a small lock and a panel opened. Inside was a black case. He fumbled at it and it dropped to the floor. On the side was a small digital lock. He entered a secret code known only to him. The latch popped.

Frank took the one weapon on the base in his hand along with an extra magazine. Thirty shots of subsonic 9mm. Frank jacked a round in the chamber and cautiously returned to medical. He held the gun in front of him. The chaos in the room was still as he remembered, and on the floor was a defibrillator.

He grabbed the defibrillator and advanced cautiously back to the shower. After several shocks and injections of epinephrine, he realized his crew was dead, but he was not alone.

Mike pounded the console, and watched the screens in Mission Control as the information streamed to Houston from Mars. The events he saw were 18 minutes old. He screamed in frustration.

Frank unplugged the charger for the second MRV and settled into the seat. The distant sun had begun to set. The recirculation pump hummed and he touched the throttle, then followed the tire marks left by Tina and Connor’s MRV. Under the dim light, he drove. He stopped once to inspect the strange marks that resembled tracks. They led across the wheel marks left by his crew, on top of the sandy soil. He glanced north, then south.

“Bullshit,” he cursed, then kicked and smoothed the marks with his boot before he resumed his journey.

He drove for another hour and came to a smoking crater gouged in the reddish-tinted sands. Broken and twisted equipment and pieces of the MRV were strewn across the landscape. In the middle of the basin smoke wafted upward, and made a tiny trail that disappeared into the Martian sky. A couple of the pieces on the sand were chunks of Tina, shredded from the blast of the demolition charge.

Frank shook his head angrily, tried to control his breathing, but he was panicked.

“Why?” is all he could say, and he returned to the MRV and gunned the throttle. Mind numbed, he continued, and followed the tire tracks until that familiar hill was on the horizon. He slowed the rover and could see more of the marks in the sand. The tracks were much like those of giant crabs that had danced and shuffled. Several sets ran north, then south, or simply started and stopped in the sand and appeared from nowhere. A cluster of the marks dominated the landscape, but they stopped like an invisible wall had halted their progress about fifteen meters from the stone outcrop.

The MRV skidded to a stop. Red dust flowed past the vehicle and Frank set his feet once again on Mars. The optics in his helmet closely scanned the rock wall. From this angle, he could see how smooth and uniform it was. Pistol in hand, he moved towards the wall, then discovered a small hole near the west end of it. His ear bud inside his helmet buzzed and popped. “Connor, is that you? Report.”