James Scotson - Planets Falling

For a moment, mars, hostile and angry, had succeeded in invading one of the tiny pimples of earth that riddled its surface. Technicians in bright yellow plastic suits entered through an emergency airlock and wandered the perimeter until they found the breach. A large hole was ripped at the base of the half-meter thick dome. Adorning the frozen edges was what seemed like a crust of thick, brown ice.

“Hey Gus, this shouldn’t happen. What the hell caused that?” a maintenance specialist II named Henson asked over the transmitter.

His companion, Fres Gustonson replied, “No idea. In my 15 years here, I’ve never seen anything like it. There’s no sign of an explosion or projectile. It’s like the breach happened inside the dome. I’ll be damned. These fragments look like they were weakened and shattered out toward the open planet.”

“Well let’s get a temporary patch installed. Call medical and have them get to those poor people.” Henson was having difficulty parting his gaze from the blue, stiff bodies in the still, artificial grass.

While Henson and Gustonson busied at their task and the bodies were shuttled away on gurnies by other yellow suited personnel, Pinch and Jon waited in the dark corridor. “Where are we?” Jon asked. He wasn’t sure whether it was the coffee or the sudden decompression, but his bladder was complaining furiously.

“Maintenance tunnel.” Ferris fumbled in the dark until she found a power panel and activated the lighting. “The underbelly of the colony’s riddled with these things. We could go from one side of the colony to the other and never see the surface. They use these for maintenance now. But when the colony first started, these passages provided housing, storage, everything. People lived down here. Like trolls.” She stuck out her tongue and growled.

“When do you think it’ll be okay for us to go back out?”

“It’d probably be better for us to head over to another sector.” Ferris smiled a little, took his hand again, and led him down the dimly lit corridor. They turned corners here and there, occasionally going up or down ladders. It was clear that Ferris knew the layout well. “Before we head back to the surface, I want to show you something, if you can keep a secret.” She seemed like a little girl ready to show him a line in her diary.

Jon wondered what her intent might be. They had narrowly escaped decompression sickness or perhaps suffocation and here was Pinch leading him on some secret quest underground. God only knew what happened up there. Shouldn’t they be on the surface finding out what was the matter?

The voice in the inquisitive part of his brain faded. He noticed that Pinch’s hair had come completely undone and was hanging loosely around her neck. What shade of blue were her eyes?” He was more curious about her than the maze they were navigating. The events unfurling on the red surface seemed dim and distant.

“Well, here we are.” They were standing in what appeared to be a dead end of a tunnel, with the exception of a small panel on one wall with a blinking yellow light. Ferris again raised her card. The light turned solid blue and the wall disappeared. In its place was a swamp — a wetland — on earth. Or at least it was an approximation of one. The humidity hit him flat in chest. And then the smell of living things enveloped him — wood, grass, that indescribable smell of fresh-turned soil during planting time, flowers, rain, all the scents that he suddenly realized he missed so much from home. Even the deep, dark funk of the mold in the ground was enticing.

Yellow light, not the perpetual red that bathed everything topside, sprinkled through the vegetation. Trees, many which appeared as if they belonged in the Jurassic, rose toward what looked like a blue earthen sky. Of course, that was impossible, he thought. There must be a sophisticated light panel up there. The room before them stretched far into the distance. His ears reveled in the hum of insects and the call of birds.

“Like my terrarium? This is my special garden.” Pinch grinned. Apparently, the events above had left her as well. Or perhaps she didn’t care so much.

“My God, Pinch.” Jon stammered. “How did you pull this off?”

“Will Holst brought me down here when I first arrived. It was an empty hole then — one of several dozen storage facilities for the colonies. The first colonists kept heavy equipment, food, gas canisters, water, and other supplies as far as the eye can see. Most of this is a natural cavern. Water scoured it out billions of years ago.

The original engineers simply improved on nature. They added reactors to generate power and put in various buildings and storage sheds. When the colonies moved aboveground, this area was largely forgotten. The power generators were too large to move upstairs and were considered inefficient, so they sat unused for years. We decided to convert this to a prototype for one of the many ecosystems we plan to install in the domes. Free, unlimited energy from the generators, if a bit noisy and temperamental. The rest of the stuff was shipped in over the past few years. I’m measuring the fluxes among all the components of this ecosystem. Oxygen’s produced by the plants, the plants decay and generate methane and carbon dioxide, then you have to follow how the materials and energy cycle through the animals and microbes. My little piece of earth on mars. Helps fight the home-sickness. Do you feel that way too? I miss earth so much. Just the feel of the soil between my toes. Watching a honeybee poke around on clover?”

She gave Jon no time to answer. “Of course, my, I mean our goal is to eventually move all this beyond the boundaries of the domes. If we can find the right mix of microbes and early successional plants, we think we can kick start global warming on the planet. This is one of the places on the planet where we’re beginning to select strains and species that can get things cooking on the open surface.”

Jon was nearly speechless. He managed to ask, “Is this the only, uh, laboratory on the planet?”

Pinch answered flippantly, as if this underground system was no surprise. “No, there are twenty other facilities like this with other mixes of life scattered across mars. One of our most important issues is trying to determine how to convert martian soil to happier stuff. That’s where we’re counting on you. You work your magic and life will spring up on this sad cinder of a planet.” She smiled hopefully at him.

They explored the area for more than an hour, silent. Ferris was holding a stark white orchid. Her face tightened, betraying her first signs of concern. “Jon, the incident upstairs wasn’t an accident.”

Fuerst paused and turned to look at her. His eyes froze at the sight of her mouth.

She continued. “Think about it. The wall of the dome’s thick and nearly impenetrable. There was no sound of impact or explosion. Either the dome was intentionally opened or someone weakened the wall to allow the inside pressure to blow it out.”

“So you think someone may have used a corrosive or allowed a hatch to open?” Jon sighed loudly.

“A year ago, a couple of our microbiologists, Namis and Tashiako, discovered some corrosion around a few of the outer structures of the colony domes. They took a sample and found that the problem was caused by bacteria. They grew the corroded material under conditions similar to those in the local soil and found a strain of bug that probably came in with one of the transport vessels or maybe it was some chimera with martian bacteria — no one really knows the origin.

Whatever it was, it certainly concerned the company. If this bacteria got bad, it could threaten the integrity of the colony. So, Namis started growing the critters in culture to identify a class of anti-microbial compounds that would kill the microbes and stop the corrosion. Tash decided to isolate the more virulent strains and came up with a particularly nasty bug — figured they should plan for a worse-case scenario. Combined with martian dust, a little moisture, and the polymers used in the walls, the stuff thrived.”