America One: War of the Worlds (44 page)

“
I’ve given Jonesy morphine and a sleeper to slow his heart beat,”
added Gary Darwin behind Saturn in the tiny Captain’s apartment.
“The three Matt kids are sitting together with him. I’m doing the same for Maggie just in case she has internal suit bleeding. I will then unscrew her helmet. Jonesy is breathing shallow, but on his own and breathing the cabin’s air, over.”

Gary Darwin, like every astronaut and crewmember had multiple hours of medical training. Thanks to the hundreds of hours of space travel time, and each of them knew how to react in an emergency.

“Copy that, medics here have no suggestions for you, well done Gary. Mars your sitrep please, over”
asked VIN from orbit.

“SB-III is a total mess, a complete write-off, luckily empty of fuel. We are going to collect any supplies from her and suggest Lunar enter in an hour to pick us up. We will get all the black boxes aboard. We have three full hours of suit time left, so we should do a final check of the base before we close it down. Lunar, Max and crew would like a ride back to Mattville. It will save them an hour of tunnel walking, over.”

“SB-V to Mars, we still have good fuel reserves. There are no new bogeys on radar, so I will put her down and wait for you,”
added Lunar.

It didn’t take long to empty what was left of
SB-III
. There were two reserve spacesuits, one black box, a couple of emergency tanks of oxygen, and as Mars found, a third of a bottle of what looked like a forbidden liquid in Jonesy’s left-side wall flight pocket. The rest of the ship was crumpled, except for the area around the docking hatch, which still looked operational.

The ground crew then returned to the other tunnel to complete the check of the base before they were flown out. Lunar had landed by the broken tunnel to await orders to pick them up.
America Two
headed over the horizon with
SB-IV
heading rapidly up to join them. Both of the casualties were stable, Gary reported.

The tunnel on the other side, as the ground crew found out was blackened and badly scared from the explosion of the blue shield and the maser attack. The atmosphere was gone, and since they had an extra helmet, they did the usual helmet trick, and Mars and Max slipped through the door into the Globe room before it slammed shut again.

The first shock was when the two men bent down to look at the lights in the globe room. The red planet had gone dark, there were no lights left on the planet they were on, and it seemed that the dozens of tiny lights between the two globes had stopped. There were no more of the tiny blue streaks behind the hundred or so lights that showed them the direction they were traveling in.

The command center was as it had been before except that there were a few lights flashing on it. Neither of the men knew what these lights meant, and it didn’t matter anyway they were fully suited up.

There was nothing else to do, so they left it as it was until their next visit, and told Vitalily to “helmet” the door again.

The rest of the base was as it had been, but the second shock was waiting for them down in the mining cave, once they had held a helmet to the door panel. It hadn’t been like this on the first visit.

Nothing had changed in the massive cavern, except that there were three new bodies on the floor, three
Matt
bodies in blue suits, and they looked dead. Mars immediately looked at his suit’s external readouts. The air pressure was down, and the amounts of pressure at minimum.

“Guys let’s get these guys into the blue shield!”
shouted Mars, Max jammed the door from closing with his suit’s hammer, while Vitalily, Joey and Pete wobbled forward, picked up a light body each and hurried back through the vacuum of the tunnel and cavern to the safety of the blue shield. Mars and Max stayed.

The two men were shocked to see the outline of what looked like a gold tunnel hatch in the middle of the yellow vein of gold. The hatch was closed, or as closed as the men had managed to close it, but not closed enough to blend perfectly into the wall as it was slightly bent, or damaged.

“Tunnel to the rest of the base?”
suggested Mars to Max, who said nothing, nodded and readied his hand laser. Mars walked over, opened the hatch an inch and peered inside. It was dark in there. He readied his laser, turned on his helmet light, and pulled the handheld flashlight from its suit’s pocket.

Then both Max and Mars swung the three-foot wide round hatch open and the atmosphere from the large cavern diluted itself even more, began to flow into the hatch and along the roof of the solid gold tunnel.

“Joey, we need a guard down here,” ordered Max over the intercom as Mars stepped through the hatch. Joey returned within a minute and Max followed. Joey closed the gold hatch to stop the atmosphere from diluting any further.

It was beautiful in there, pure gold around them apart for blue-suited bodies lying at intervals along the floor of the tunnel. Mars turned each one over, and their faces showed the death of asphyxiation in the vacuum of space. He checked his readouts at the first person—there was no air for these guys to survive.

As he progressed down the long tunnel, the suits became blacker, and dirtier from what looked like the explosion. The last three of the 31 bodies they counted were totally burned and their suits black, when they arrived at the end of the tunnel. They had reached the entrance of another base.

“What do you think, Mars?”
Max asked catching up to the younger man who had halted from going into the cavern.

“It looks like only three made it before they ran out of air in the tunnel,”
Mars replied.
“I didn’t see any black boxes in the tunnel, so this part of the base’s air was controlled from the command center, and completely separate from the mining cavern. Two complete separate air and heat systems, I reckon,”
Max agreed.

They headed into the base itself. Another dozen more bodies were blackened and burned inside the first area. It wasn’t the cavern where the spaceships had exited, but the normal area of the base, and there was the usual door to another globe room and command center.

“There could be people alive in there,”
Mars suggested, hit the blue-lit panel this time, and the door opened.
“No air both sides, air on either side it would be red, and it opened. Wow!”

The globes were destroyed and the door to the command center was closed. It also had a blue panel, and it opened like the first door.

The command center had been trashed quickly, and Mars looked for the door he thought he might see. This time the door to the base’s cryogenic chambers was there, and this one was red.

“I think it is better that whoever is in there should stay asleep for a while?”
suggested Mars to Max.

“Definitely, a few thousand years won’t be a problem, I’m sure,”
replied Max.
“I wonder how many sleep chambers they have in this base. The walls are still glowing with light, and it seems air is returning to these rooms. My readouts are showing a positive climb in pressure, helium and oxygen.”

They exited the still open doors and closed the first one from the cavern to the globe room. Mars knew from the other
Matt
bases, that there was a good chance, 12, 24, or even 36
Matts
could be going to sleep inside this cryogenic chamber, and wouldn’t be a threat to them at the moment.

They continued their search and headed past the toilet, which was always in the same place, and into the rear of the base. Again there were a dozen or so bodies, not burned like in the forward area, but were as asphyxiated.

The storage rooms in the center were full of supplies, in the three storage rooms, and they were empty of bodies. They checked every door they could find, and there was nothing of interest.

“Didn’t some of the bases have an electrical store room off from the globe room?”
asked Max. Mars nodded and they headed back.

There was a panel they had forgotten, and it was red, which meant it wouldn’t open for a while due to the bad air quality in the globe room, they closed the connection door again and headed for the furthest area of the base through the forward section: the hangar area.

This spacecraft cavern was as large as the previous one, and was as blackened and dirty with scraps of spacecraft everywhere. The door was closed.

“I wonder if they had those garage openers, like they had on houses in those old movies?”
Mars replied.
“It would certainly be handy here. Max do you know how much space we have in this base? It is massive!”

“Certainly exciting,”
replied Max still looking in awe at the size of the cavern.
“About a hundred times bigger than the Martian Club Retreat, enough room here for at least a thousand people to live. Gee, we could play space ball, or even soccer in these massive caverns. I bet they have so much survival equipment and power plants down below, this place has been here for centuries, and was surely meant to survive for centuries more.”

“And a fancy metro or subway train to travel in-between,”
added Mars.
“I don’t think soccer would work with the low gravity, maybe American football or English rugby? I certainly do not want to check the lower levels without re-enforcements, and nobody is walking around here except us with real spacesuits on.”

“And if we one day manage to get all those ingots out of here, there will be room for maybe another three thousand people,”
continued Max.
“I could be the first Mayor of Mattville, but first what are we going to do with these bodies. I count six piles of spaceship junk in here. That flattened piece of metal on the rear wall is all that’s left of Asterspace Three. She certainly went up with a bang, I can’t see another part of her bigger than a quarter. So they had six more spaceships, and there are a couple of dozen more pieces of suits in here, and six still with body parts in them.”

“With what we got out of Commander Fob, I don’t believe there could be a group of Matts hiding somewhere. Many were shot down in their spacecraft. I’m sure they sent the women and children into the sleep room while the rest of the men, the builders and ground crew readied to fight. There can’t be more than 20 or 30 going to sleep,”
replied Mars.

“The three survivors will tell us,”
added Max
“but let’s see if we can get that storage room door open.”

This time it opened, and the two men lifted up the only contents of the room and placed seven black boxes, and several other pieces of electrical looking “I don’t know what it is, but it looks important” stuff into a wooden case.

It wasn’t too heavy in the Martian gravity and Mars and Max struggled with it back down the tunnel to the bigger mining cavern. To them this could hold a whole football field it was so big, and the two ingot caverns were nearly as big.

“I measured the square footage in here, we could make this into a football stadium,”
stated Joey as they passed him the case.

“We were just saying the same thing,”
replied Mars being helped through the hatch.

The three of them headed through the second section and entered the blue shield to find the three
Matts
, who were being given water and food by Vitalily, while Pete held a laser on them. Vitalily had his helmet off, and spoke into the handheld.

“These are three of the base builders, stated Vitalily looking up at the helmeted figures. All the Astermine crew spoke fluent
Matt
. “They were the closest to the mining cavern when the explosion happened. They had to close the door as the tunnel’s oxygen exploded and just managed to get it shut. They were the builders for the tunnels, all the way from Mattville, so they will be handy to fix our holes.”

“Then we could get our subway operational,”
stated Max.

“What are your names?”
Mars thought in Matt, and got absolutely no response from any of the three small brown men sitting in front of him.
“I must have lost my telepathy,”
stated Mars verbally to the others.

“I heard you,”
stated Ruler Roo clearly in his mind from Mattville three miles away, and which made Mars jump.
“I think they have all cut off our frequency. I didn’t know it was possible, but there is something new I must learn. It sounds like you have some new friends for our tribe?”

“Three builders”
thought Mars
“and dozens more going to sleep in the cryogenic sleep chambers”…
and he was interrupted by Max’s voice, and who didn’t know he was talking to Roo.

“I think we should get Lunar in, Mars.”

It was time to leave. There was so much work to do, and so much to see, the lower parts of the bases they hadn’t yet inspected. It was a shame to have to leave. Lunar was called in as it was dangerous for her to be alone out there.

“Yes, of course, Vitalily, get the two suits on these guys, Lunar will have a third. They will have to go down the tunnel with you, but I think we should drug them first,”
stated Mars. “
These guys will have to wear them on the train to Mattville. There is no other way. The rest of you, we have ten minutes, let us get as many of those ingots as we can.”

The others, all wearing helmets headed back through the hangar cavern, into the mining cavern and made for the ingots.

“Any ingots,”
ordered Mars and they headed into the second cavern where the high 15 foot-high blocks were not yet complete and each person grabbed one from a different pile. They were heavy and they carried two of them at a time to the door forced to stay ajar with Max’s hammer.
“Leave them just outside the door, we can carry them from there to the shuttle. They wouldn’t be back for a while, and the air would replenish itself before thy returned.”

They managed three trips before Lunar asked somebody to open the door, and minutes later and a fourth load of ingots,
SB-V
edged gently into the cavern.