People of Mars (21 page)

Jan’s stomach
contracted again. Continuing to wait was a nerve-wracking prospect.
He would’ve liked to shout, given that he still had the
strength.

“Wait a moment …”
Sasaki tilted his head to one side, staring at the screen. “Do you
see it too?” Moving a hand in the air, he delineated a square on
the picture and centred it. A tiny bright spot within it shifted as
well.

“What the …?” Nichols
murmured, but then stopped.

Sasaki joined two
fingers and as he separated them the square enlarged, occupying the
entire height of the screen. And the tiny bright spot expanded in a
diffused glow, with lighter and darker zones.

“Show me the matching
topography,” the mission director ordered, but couldn’t complete
the sentence when a map appeared superimposed. The bright area was
precisely in the middle of the canyon. “Well, I’ll be damned …
that’s artificial illumination.”

“
Holy shit.” Gray’s voice emerged from the general
chatter, shutting up everybody again. “It’ll turn out that those
from the
Hera
are still
alive.”

“It’s impossible!”
Nichols thundered.

“But it’s the only
explanation occurring to me,” Sasaki commented. A drop of sweat
trickled down his temple. So, in the end, even he had emotions. Jan
couldn’t hold back a half laugh.

“We have plenty of
images from that area,” the mission director insisted. “How can
that have escaped us?”

“Because they are
diurnal footage, Sir.” The Japanese wasn’t frightened by that
authoritarian tone. “Being able to distinguish something so small
in the bottom of a canyon under the sunlight is like distinguishing
a single drop in the sea. All the more so as we weren’t looking for
it at all.” He stopped briefly and shot a reproaching glance toward
Gray’s workspace, where he was now busy in an intense and noisy
discussion with another colleague. “But in the dark, it’s a quite
different matter. Usually we don’t do night filming of Mars.” He
took another pause before clarifying the concept. “Because there is
nothing to see.”

“That’s a good one,”
Jan exclaimed, giggling. “You wanted to colonise Mars and, instead,
it turns out that you’ve already done that for thirty years!”

Nichols didn’t appear
to appreciate his witty remark. He was about to say something.

“Sir.” Gray stopped
him, drawing his superior’s attention onto him. Now, he looked just
a little more nervous than usual. He had even abandoned his
sandwich halfway through, which wasn’t like him, given that he had
spent the day fully relaxed, drinking and eating while working.
“I’ve just being informed about a problem at Station Alpha.”

“What the hell is up
now?”

The man beside Gray
intervened. “Qabbani skipped the report at twenty zero zero.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, Sir. It’s the
first time something like this has happened, and therefore we got
worried.” He took the control of the screen, and a room with
various equipment and a few seats appeared on it, an empty one.
“These images are coming in, in real time, so they are about
sixteen minutes old. If you rewind the recording, the room remains
empty until the previous transmission, the one at eight a.m. Then
we lose track of Qabbani, after he exits the room.”

“Access the real-time
footage from the other environments of the station and play the
recordings,” Nichols ordered.

“That’s exactly the
problem,” Gray said. “We can’t access the main server. We can only
see the communications room and the greenhouse, which are also
connected to the emergency system, also controlling the life
support. As for the rest, we are blind and deaf. I can only tell
you that Qabbani and Green haven’t been in one of those places or
in the rover in the latest twelve hours.”

“Aren’t we able to
find out what they are doing in any way?”

The other technician
took the floor. “Since we could rely only on the life support
sensors, we tried to locate them based on carbon dioxide’s peaks in
each room.” He reached out to access Gray’s workspace again; his
colleague moved out of the way to let him. A floor map of the
building appeared on the screen. Some areas were blue-coloured,
with different shades. “Here’s where we have detected the peaks in
the hour after Qabbani’s last communication. It’s difficult to
define their movements exactly, because the anomalies in the
chemical composition of air depend on the kind of activity
performed, for instance, if you speak or walk or do some work,
you’ll use more oxygen than that of someone who is still, seated.
Do you follow?”

Nichols nodded.

“Moreover, the peaks
persist even thirty seconds before the life support cancels them,
therefore I cannot say who was in these environments and for how
long. I can just suppose that at a certain point both were here.”
The bright spot with the darker blue shade occupied a small area in
the room with the label ‘Laboratory’. “Because this is where we’ve
detected the highest peaks.”

“And where do you
detect them now?”

“We don’t detect any,
Sir.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Any anomaly
disappeared over eleven hours ago.”

“There must be a
problem with the sensors. They can’t be evaporated.”

“That’s what I’ve
thought as well, Sir. So I’ve tried to alter on purpose the gas
concentrations in an area where we have never detected anomalies,
to see whether the sensors would report these changes. And they did
it punctually after sixteen minutes, so the sensors are working to
perfection.”

“I guess Bradley’s
analysis is correct,” Gray confirmed, laconic; a moment earlier, he
had been very busy messing about with his touch-screen.

“Where the hell have
they gone? They haven’t taken the rover!”

“
I don’t know, Sir,” Bradley replied. “I’m just
telling you what I see, or better I
don’t
see.”

“Are you telling me
they exited Station Alpha over eleven hours ago? They wouldn’t have
enough air in their suits!”

“
No, Sir, I’m telling you that,
if
they are still in there, they haven’t been
breathing for at least eleven hours.”

###

Do you want to know what happens
next?

The third book, “
Red Desert – Invisible
Enemy
”, will be
published in February 2015. Join the mailing list
(
www.anakina.eu
) to be notified every time a new book is
published.

In the meantime you can also follow
Anna Persson
(
@AnnaPerssonDR
) on Twitter!

Did you like this book?

If so, don’t forget to
click “Like” in the book’s page on Smashwords (or in the online
store you’ve bought it from) and to share it with your friends.
And, if you fancy it, write a short review.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank all
those who contributed to the creation of this book:

- Richard J. Galloway,
who carefully revised and improved the English translation;

- Martina Munzittu,
for her suggestions during the English translation;

- Julia Gibbs for the
accurate proofreading of this book;

- Fabio Delfino, who
created the book trailer;

- Dr Philip Metzger,
physicist and planetary scientist at NASA Kennedy Space Center and
Florida Space Institute, for his precious suggestions on NASA’s
terminology;

- Stephen M. Bassett
and Gary Stephenson, co-founders of Mars Initiative, for supporting
my work;

- Polydream, who gave
me permission to use their song “Catch Me If You Can” for the
promotion of the series;

- my whole publishing
team in Italy, who worked with me on the original version of the
“Red Desert” series: Veronica De Lorenzo, my aunt Gabriella
Serrenti, Alessandra Fadda, ChiaraOB1, Stefania Mattana, Diego
Luci, Luca “Adso da Melk” Cassia, Emanuele Piccolini, Marco Mark,
Giovanni Venturi, Germano Dalcielo, and all those who encouraged my
work with their comments and support;

- Omar Serafini and
the whole FantaScientificast.it crew, who supported me in
Italy;

- my parents, who on
this occasion turned into science fiction fans;

- and above all
Federico Fadda, my first reader, for his constant and loving
support.

Bibliography

“Red Desert” is a
science fiction work, so part of the scientific aspects are the
result of my imagination, but the remainder is mostly based on what
is reported in the following sources, which sometimes served just
as a hint and which I suggest you take a look at for a thorough
examination.

More sources are
listed in the bibliography of “Point of No Return”.

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
(
www.jpl.nasa.gov
). Information on Mars and in particular on NASA’s
Curiosity rover, currently working on the surface of the
planet.

NASA Johnson Space Center
(
website
). Information on the centre, where part
of the story is set.

Google Mars
(
www.google.com/mars
). Areographical information (Mars
geography).

“
Red Mars
” by Kim Stanley Robinson (novel), 1993. Edition:
Bantam, ISBN 9780553560732. Also available for Kindle. – Mars
colonisation imagined with the scientific knowledge from twenty
years ago. Still very interesting and partly suitable to the
present-day.

More books by Rita Carla Francesca
Monticelli

“
Red Desert – Point of No
Return
”,
Smashwords, 30 June 2014, ISBN 9781311628312.

If you read Italian,
you can already find the remaining books of the “Red Desert” series
and other novels by this author.

“
La morte è soltanto
il principio
”,
Smashwords, 2 March 2012, ISBN 9781465722867.

“
Deserto rosso –
Nemico invisibile
”,
Smashwords, 28 April 2013, ISBN 9781301337606.

“
Deserto rosso –
Ritorno a casa
”,
Smashwords, 28 September 2013, ISBN
9781301541867.

“
Deserto
rosso
” (La serie completa),
Smashwords, 12 December 2013, ISBN 9781310691997; also
available as paperback, CreateSpace, 6 December 2013, ISBN
9781494358693.

“
Il
mentore
”,
Smashwords, 21 May 2014, ISBN 9781310354854.

About the author

Rita Carla Francesca
Monticelli is an Italian independent author.

She lives in Cagliari
(Sardinia, Italy), where she works as a writer, technical,
scientific and literary translator, and web copywriter. She is also
a biologist and worked as researcher, tutor, and professor’s
assistant in the field of ecology at “Dipartimento di Biologia
Animale ed Ecologia” of the University of Cagliari until 2004, when
she founded Anakina Web. As part of her firm remit, she manages her
creative writing and translation activities, as well as web design
and music management.

As a cinema addict,
she started by writing screenplays and fan fictions inspired by the
movies. She is author of poems in English, published in the United
States in anthologies and audiobooks, and has written some song
lyrics.

She writes fiction
since 2009. In 2011 she completed her first original science
fiction novel, which will be published in November 2014 in Italy,
and in March 2012 she published “La morte è soltanto il principio”,
fantasy novel about ancient Egypt, inspired by the movie “The
Mummy”.

Between 2012-2013 she
wrote a science fiction series titled “Deserto rosso”, including
four books, which are having success in Italy. The whole “Deserto
rosso” series was also published as omnibus in December 2013 (ebook
and paperback). Thanks to this series, Monticelli was selected in
February 2014 as one of the best ten Italian self-published authors
by the Italian version of Wired Magazine and was invited to be a
speaker at an event during the Salone Internazionale del Libro in
Turin, the most important Italian book fair.

“
Deserto rosso” is now being published in English
with the title “Red Desert”, and this is the second book of the
series. The first one is “Red Desert – Point of No
Return”.

She also published a
crime thriller in Italian, titled “Il mentore”, in May 2014.

Since October 2012 she is part of the cast
of
FantaScientificast
, an Italian podcast about science fiction. Since
April 2013 she is an Italian Representative of
Mars Initiative
.

As a science fiction
and Star Wars fan, she is known in the Italian online community by
her nickname, Anakina.

You can find Anakina
(or just Carla, as her friends call her) on:

Anakina.blog:
ladyanakina.blogspot.com

Facebook:
www.facebook.com/RitaCarlaFMonticelli

Twitter:
twitter.com/ladyanakina