America One: War of the Worlds (18 page)

“Why are you doing that? Why is it so cold in here? Who is controlling the command center?” clicked somebody rapidly in
Matt
from directly behind him. He couldn’t freeze, he already was semi-frozen, and he knew that whoever had said that was in the same position.

“Who are you?’ clicked Mars in perfect
Matt
. Mars couldn’t see anybody through the fog. He couldn’t even see his readout, or even his feet on the floor below him. The command center was a perfect white cloud of nothing.

“Commander Fob, Commander of this base. Why was I woken up?”

“We are here to rescue you,” replied Mars blindly. “It has been many years since the explosion. How many are there of you to rescue?”

“Just me and three of the young. My chamber was setup to open early, the others are warming and still asleep. Why can I not see you?”

“Because the outer tunnel is destroyed and I needed to enter from the destroyed area,” Mars replied trying to win some time. He wasn’t armed, and he hoped this
Matt
wasn’t either.

“How can you do that? Our suits are not designed for the vacuum. Do you have a better suit? I hope so. It is about time the home base came up with a suit like those vermin on the blue planet,” was the reply.

“We have, but it was damaged when I had to force the door open,” Mars replied. He moved carefully and sat down in the corner of the command center to make himself as small a target as possible.

“You are speaking badly. You do not speak like we used to. Have times changed? How long have I been asleep? I had to activate sleep with the three survivors two days after the explosion. We had run out of food and water in the command center.”

“Times have changed,” replied Mars. He could just see his readouts again. The temperature had risen several degrees, it was getting easier to breathe, and he thought that the cloud was thinning. It wouldn’t be long before they would be able to see each other, and he grabbed his hammer on the suit of his leg.

He sensed the other person in the room head over to the console. Mars wasn’t an expert on how the command center operated, and he heard the Matt’s hand feel around the console.

“I am turning on the power to maximum,” and as the Matt said that, the walls in the room brightened, Mars felt a movement of air in the room, and the dense fog began to swirl towards the roof. Suddenly they could see each other.

“You are a new person from the blue planet…from that base we tried to destroy,” stated the short
Matt
in the usual blue suit. “You are not one of us, but you speak the language of our people from the blue planet. I should have realized the difference in the language, but my head is still spinning from the sleep.”

Mars looked at the small man. He looked just like Commander Joot, the
Matt
these people had killed on the attack on the retreat. He wore the broach of a “Commander” and the man’s face as still very white and pale, just like his father VIN had looked when he had revived him on DX2017.

“I come in peace to save you,” was all Mars got out before the man simply folded onto the floor next to the console. Suddenly there was a rapid tapping on the door, and it slid open, Mars saw four crew in full spacesuits.

VIN stared at his son. The poor boy looked frozen, and he immediately checked his readouts. The temperature in this room was far below freezing, but the air entering with them should heat it up a bit.

Ryan immediately opened the canister he had just rolled in, turned it upright and pulled out a complete spacesuit and helmet.

Mars didn’t need a second suggestion. His teeth were beginning to do a drum solo in his head and the two medics immediately began helping him to take off his dead suit.

He didn’t complain about the cold when the suit was slipped off his shivering body. He knew how to get into a suit without looking, and his eyes did not stray from the small
Matt
his father was lifting onto a solar blanket one of the crew had stretched out on the floor. Once the
Matt
was on it, VIN took another blanket out of the other canister, and placed it over the sleeping form.

VIN must have said something over the intercom inside their helmets, as one of the medics moved towards the small person. The suited person grabbed an IV fluid system from the cavern, placed it next to the blanketed
Matt
, cut away the suit around the man’s small arm, and injected the lifesaving vitamins, minerals and fluid from the IV pouch into the inert body.

Mars was dressed in the new suit. He was too cold to help much and Ryan placed the helmet on his head and began screwing.

“Can you hear me?”
Mars heard Ryan ask a couple of minutes later as the warmth from the suits heating system gave him a bath of beautiful hot air.

“Yes, boss. I have intercom connection. God! It was cold out there,”
replied Mars as his new helmet was screwed on so everybody could hear him.
“I spoke to the Commander before he keeled over. He is Commander Fob, there are I think he said, three others in the chambers, all kids.”

“Max, you back in the shuttle?”
Mars heard his father ask
.

“Yep! Been here thirty minutes,”
was the reply.

“Is there anybody else who can sort out that train thing?”

“Negative VIN, not on this shuttle, or SB-IV,”
Max replied.

“I think you being in the tunnel for most of your last spacewalk spared you the usual cosmic radiation loads. I need more suits down here. We have one suit for this guy Mars found, and one other. We need the kid suits. Can you get two kid suits into one canister?”

“Easy, we have tried it before”
Max responded.
“But we have only two kid suits. The tallest kid will have to be fitted into one of the teenage suits you have down there already. I can be ready in an hour, but need your permission to exit before my three-hour rest limit, and its dark and minus 100 Celsius out there, over.”

“What do you think Mr. Noble?”
Ryan asked the most experienced man in the room.

“I know the tunnel is hiding us from direct Cosmic rays. I would do it if it was necessary,”
VIN replied looking at Ryan.
“We only have about an hour before those sleep chambers open, and even if the rooms are back at normal temperature, the kids’ real small bodies waking up will shiver themselves to death, like you and I did when we woke up on DX2017. Remember boss, we’ve been there and done that.

“Joanne how many space blankets do we have?”
Ryan asked.

“Three plus the two on the commander guy,”
she replied.

“I saw the guy turn up the support systems to full power. I didn’t even know there was a switch for that,”
added Mars.

“I had found it while on Titan or Enceladus,”
responded VIN.
“I should have thought about increasing the systems to full power, but forgot. This age thing is getting to me.”

“I’m willing to help Max,”
piped in Saturn.

“I think Saturn and I are the shortest aboard the shuttles right now,”
stated Maggie.

“Both girls are shorter than me,”
added Jonesy.

“How many spare adult suits do we have aboard?”
Ryan asked.

“Three,”
replied Max.

“OK, Max rest for a 60 minute period from your shuttle entry,”
ordered Ryan.
“At least that will give you a break. Saturn, Maggie, get ready and pack two canisters. One with two of the kid suits, the other with extra food, water, and IVs. We will also need as many suit rechargers as you can fit. Also, I think a pistol or something in that department will be in order. Max when should we expect you?”

“Say 75 minutes. Who is staying, who is coming back to the shuttle?”

“We only need one in here. Maggie can stay and come through the door with the canisters, you and Saturn head back to SB-IV. We need both craft ready at all times. Saturn have your co-pilot prepared to follow Jonesy at a moment’s notice. We don’t know if this guy had telepathic contact to the other part of the base, Ruler Roo is down here, so we will get Roo questioning him once he comes around, out.”

Max was good. An hour and 20 minutes later he had picked up Maggie on the second trip, and was already heading down the tunnel with canister for the second time towards Saturn sitting in the darkness like Joanne had at the fork.

The commander was still unconscious, and he was on his second small pouch of IV fluid.

VIN and Mars had checked out the two levels of the cryogenic chambers and both had felt Déjà vu. The whole system was an exact replica of the one on DX2017, except that the units were single sleepers, not doubles like on the asteroid.

All the sleep units in the entire bottom section of the chamber were empty, except one. Scrolls that looked like reports, or daily logs on sheets of a canvas type material were found in the closest unit to the stairs.

Both VIN and Mars could pick out a few words in
Matt
here and there when they tied to read the first scroll, but they had Ruler Roo begin to go through the papers until the commander awoke.

On the upper level both men could see that the three chambers were changing. There was no way to tell how far they were through their heating process, so Patricia stood by them while Ryan and Joanne guarded the commander.

“He looks as old as any Matt I have ever met,”
stated Ryan to Joanne.

“Roo told me that their history records at the Pig’s Snout told that these Matts they met centuries ago could live a very long time,”
replied Joanne looking at the sleeping
Matt
. His face had regained the usual
Matt
coloring, and the man could awaken at any time.
“They could live far longer than Roo’s tribe, as it seemed that actuate recordings were kept on arrivals and departures, and the same visitors were described and named over half a century. Did you know that the recordings from the Pig’s Snout showed that over 1,000 female Matts, and over 600 children were taken from the Pig’s Snout?”
Ryan’s head movements showed that he didn’t.

“I wonder what happened to them?”
he replied.

“We can ask the Commander when he wakes up,”
stated Roo from across the room going through what he had just been given by VIN and Mars.

Ryan looked at his readout. “
We should see crew outside in a few minutes.”
He got up and headed into the larger cavern where he saw movement through the see-through door.

“Max is here,”
Ryan stated to VIN and Mars, and the three of them returned to cavern to ready opening the door. This time Mars would be ready for the gush of air. The door to the command room was closed, and they told Max to add air into the helmet.

Maggie was pushed in by Max. Saturn rolled in the first canister with both gloves. The rolling canister went into the cavern easier than Maggie, and then Max pushed in the second with his foot. The door closed as Max removed the helmet from the panel and the crew looked at each other. Mars had not even had time to hug his wife, but he had managed to throw out the two liquid samples VIN had collected. Once the door was shut the astronauts inside the cavern could just hear Saturn and Max stating that they were returning to the exits.

“The robots are doing a stellar job cutting up the gold, but if some of you don’t return from visiting the Matts soon, we are going to be behind in loading the precious metal into the cargo holds.”
Max relayed to Ryan before their voices disappeared.

“You OK Maggie?”
Ryan asked.

“Sort of. I like the tree and the river. Look it even has a sort of waterfall.”

“You should see the lake under here,”
added Mars.
“It is cold down next to the water but there is enough water down there for a long time.”

“I think we need to get back to Roo and the medics,”
VIN suggested, and he checked his readouts.
“This time the pressure loss was half of what we lost the last time. I think 10 minutes is enough before we open the door.”

“I want to see the lake,”
stated Ryan.

“
Me too,”
added Maggie.

“I think we can all get down and back in ten minutes, but I will have to recharge my suit pretty soon,”
replied VIN, and Mars led the way past the toilet to the stairs.

In a line and ten stairs part, the four headed down to the lake below. The tiny light was on when Mars, who was leading the group reached the two-foot wide flat area just after the last stair.

“Be careful, don’t slip, or get near the liquid. It could still be an acid or liquid methane for all we know,”
stated VIN as he squeezed onto the shelf, the opposite side of the stairs and facing his son.

“Very weird, the atmospheric levels in here,”
stated Ryan looking at his suit’s readouts. “
High amounts of helium.
Nitrogen is here in good quantities, although low. Same with oxygen, nearly deadly without a helmet on, and CO2 at very low levels. I wonder what could have caused this air down here?”

The water gushing through that hole for thousands of years, thanks to the Matt air systems,”
answered Mars.

As all four astronauts reached the bottom, the added light from four suit helmets showed more than before. Ryan has a flashlight with him, so did VIN and the six lights then lit up the cavern as never before.

It was far bigger than both Mars and VIN expected. Maggie gave a gasp at seeing the lake and Ryan was silently in shock.

“This is far more valuable than all that gold out there,”
Ryan stated looking over the view.

Even with all the lights on, the far wall couldn’t be seen. This time they could see at least 150 feet, and still the lake didn’t end.