Sargasso of Souls – Session 16
With the base construction almost complete, my main concern over the next couple of days was the alien complex. Firstly, we needed to ensure that no more of the ‘tumbleweed’ creatures got into the power room; or at least that if they did we dealt with them before they grew to unmanageable proportions. Secondly, we needed to monitor any changes that might result from the removal of the giant energy-leech. Phipps and Santino had suggested that without the creature draining its power the complex was likely to undergo a status change of some kind. I wondered what that might be.
As far as the fracture in the ceiling was concerned I would have preferred to simply seal it but unfortunately, for the time being, that option wasn’t open to me. The only person on the planet with sufficient climbing expertise to make the attempt was Santino and he was still banged up from our encounter with the creature. It would have to wait.
My only real option was to send patrols in at regular intervals to sweep the room for unwanted visitors. Though, given the unusual phenomenon we had already experienced inside the complex, I felt a certain reluctance to expose my people to an as yet unknown risk. Nevertheless its what I did.
I put together three teams: myself, Phipps and Nadya Voronova; Randall Locke, John Pietersen and Zofia Jankowska; and Katalina Johansson, Chad Butler and Pavel Hasek. I wanted to ensure that there was both someone I could trust and someone with experience of the complex on every team. Then we began checking the power room on a four-hourly rotation. Each team did two patrols before handing over. Twenty-four hours later the process started again.
Phipps, Voronova and I did the first patrols, completing a more comprehensive sweep of the complex to gauge how much difference the restoration of power had made. Much to my relief however, things seemed largely unchanged, right down to the unexplained phenomena that continued to plague us.
Phipps observed that this might be because our firefight in the power room had caused additional damage to the energy columns and controls and that the overall power levels were still well down on what the fully functioning system would be expected to yield.
My concerns that the damage might cause some kind of catastrophic failure were assuaged as Phipp’s readings suggested the system was largely stable. Perhaps instead it would give us more time to unravel the secrets of whatever was going on there.
The patrols continued.
By the 1st August the base was fully assembled, though there remained a number of annoying glitches that continued to frustrate the technicians. Lights inexplicably flickered on and off and two or three of the habitation modules remained a couple of degrees too hot despite all attempts to rectify the situation.
The planet gnawed at us in its own distinctive fashion but after a while, like a background hum, you got kind of used to it. Regular doses of a cocktail of pharmacuticals that Heather McKay and Peter Colt had come up with kept our body chemistry in check and, as the base developed, the security team had been having a progressively easier time of it. We were all in much better shape than we had been, though edginess still led to fatigue and there was always the chance that someone could lose concentration at a critical moment. In the hostile environment it was something we all had to guard against.
Also on the 1st the Salvation departed once again. This time however it would be gone for at least a couple of days. From the outset we had planned that when the base was completed the shuttle would return to Bharat station for a rapid overhaul rather than meeting the Liberation in orbit. I had chosen to do this because I felt that from time to time the Salvation needed to be checked to see if it had sustained damage from repeatedly entering the atmosphere. It was our lifeline after all. We should not risk losing it.
Aboard were a number of personnel who were rotating off planet. Among them was Veldin. He was departing to collect some scientific equipment that he required.
Twenty-one of us remained on the surface: myself, Randall Locke, Katalina Johansson, Pavel Hasek, Zofia Jankowska, Nadya Voronova, Miguel Santino, the medic Mickie Hendrie, Lindsey Walsh, three base technicians, the two-man Certified Bio team (Heather McKay and Peter Colt), the five-man geo-survey team and the two cartographers. Those of us that had not been residents already, moved into the base and made ourselves comfortable.
As a consequence of the reduction in numbers, I was forced to drop the patrols of the Ancient complex down to two-man teams in order to maintain them: myself and Voronova, Locke and Jankowska, Johansson and Hasek. Fortunately these combinations allowed me to retain the experience and reliability I sought in each pairing.
While the Salvation was away things were largely uneventful. There was a degree of added tension on the two-man patrols but, other than the unsettling tricks that were played on us, nothing untoward occurred.
The geo-survey team got very excited about a deposit of pure gallium that they found and, at the base, the technicians slowly seemed to be getting on top of the persistent problems they had been encountering. Everything appeared to be under control.
It wasn’t until the 3rd August, when the Salvation returned, that we found out what had happened during their departure on the 1st.
The shuttle had clawed its way up through the atmosphere, much as it had on each previous occasion, but then as it erupted from the upper atmosphere there had been a sudden squeal of static and all the on-board systems had instantly gone dead. It was similar to the phenomenon that some of us had experienced in the Ancient complex.
With the engines off line it was rapidly apparent that the shuttle would fail to escape the planet’s gravity. Without power it would plummet uncontrollably back towards the surface and smash upon the jagged rocks far below.
Somehow Veldin and the shuttle engineer, Michael Weiss, had managed to shunt power from the charge capacitors into the control systems and shortcut the ignition sequence in order to restart the engines scant seconds before the point of no return. Then the pilot, Logan Brodie, had successfully pulled the Salvation clear and taken them home. It had been a near catastrophe but somehow, through Phipp’s and Weiss’s ingenuity, they had escaped.
The only problem was that the phenomenon could happen again at any time. We would effectively be playing Russian roulette with every flight to or from the surface. Only a handful of volunteers had risked the return journey on the Salvation, Ramsay, Weiss, Phipps and, to my surprise, Maya Zakowski were among them.
Consequently the future of the surface expedition now hung in the balance. The final decision was left up to me, though Razor had made it clear that he would prefer it to remain a going concern. He had sent me a recorded message to that effect. In it he advised me that a representative of Cochrane Industries was soon to arrive on Bharat station. This could mean trouble. He also suggested that I should consider rotating up from the planet. It had been some time since I had taken a break.
I thought carefully about my options, though to be honest the path that I must follow seemed pretty clear to me.
If we left the surface now there would be no opportunity to find out what was causing the phenomenon. So if we went it would be for good; or, at least, if we ever returned we would be no better off. Therefore the only logical conclusion was to stay and attempt to unlock the mysteries of the planet. Perhaps Razor had already come to the same conclusion, since he had provided a number of things that would facilitate the continuation of the mission. Aboard the Salvation were about three months worth of food and supplies, a small number of quad-bikes and an archaeological engineer named Harrison Vaughan. If we stayed it would be his job to help Santino and Phipps figure out the purpose of the systems within the Ancient complex. We had also been sent a half dozen escape-capable communication modules to be launched from the surface into orbit should we need to transmit a signal back to Bharat station. To that point no other means of penetrating the planet’s atmosphere had been found.
As for me taking a break, there were a number of things that stopped me from doing so at this point. Firstly, due to the risk to the shuttle, no security personnel had been rotated back down to the surface on this flight; so the six of us that remained were all the security that there was. Secondly, there were only three people on planet that I seriously considered as candidates to command in my stead; Randall Locke, Miguel Santino and Katalina Johansson; all of whom had been there nearly as long as I had. In fact Santino and I were the only two people to have been there since the start of the mission. To be honest, I would have liked to rotate Locke or Johansson back to Bharat so that they could take over from me at a later date, but now that seemed out of the question. Finally, with things as they were it would feel like I was abandoning my people while they were still in a potentially life threatening situation. I was not prepared to do that. Of anyone Razor would understand this.
And so I would be staying.
I did not believe that I had the right to make that decision for everyone else however. Ramsay had already informed me that he and the flight crew would be leaving so I assembled all the members of the expedition together and filled them in on what had happened. They could risk the shuttle or stay for the duration; it was their choice. Everyone elected to stay. Though it was not clear to me how many did so out of duty or professionalism, and how many were deterred by the risk of leaving.
I recorded a reply to Razor’s message, explaining my decision; and then Ramsay and the flight crew departed in the Salvation. I hoped they were going to make it.
Once the shuttle had gone I went in search of Maya. I wanted her to know how glad I was to see her and that it was good to have her well again.
