The Lake of the Sun The vis-screen in Nichelle's Diner had been stuck on ABC3D for more than a decade, after the brawl that had erupted during half-time at Super Bowl XCV. Randall remembered the fight, but not what had caused it. Besides, he didn't really care what channel he watched; at least the ABC3D news anchor hologram had a nice rack, he thought. Sometimes - just sometimes - he even listened to the news. He managed to perch most of his buttocks on his usual stool at the counter and tucked into his regular order of buttermilk pancakes with blueberry syrup and a strong black coffee and tried to catch up with the headlines. The pneumatic news hologram smiled a gleaming white CGI smile at her largely disinterested audience. "Our top story this hour; the Chinese Imperial Space Program announce a successful landing on Mars as they prepare to take possession of the disused Solis Lacus Penal Colony. It has been over twenty five years since the prison was devastated by an infamous series of explosions in its power unit leaving no survivors. President Esteban Hernandez announced the sale of the notorious facility to the Chinese in his final State of the Union address some seven years ago, but the sale of the heavily irradiated Solis Lacus installation has always been controversial with the American public, since the bodies have never been recovered. In the subsequent Congressional hearings, it emerged that the experimental Einstrontium reactors had been deployed to the Red Planet before completing mandatory safety checks." Randall gave a small involuntary shudder at the mention of the name of the prison; its destruction had become emblematic of the decline of the American space program. With a bit of effort, he could recite the names of all sixty seven prison staff - a group of all-American heroes who gave their lives in the service of their nation, the deaths viewed by an angry public as a callous betrayal by an increasingly corrupt space administration, desperate to maintain its fragile lead over the burgeoning Chinese space program at any cost. The Solis Lacus disaster hadn't only been the death knell for NASA, it remained a scar on the American psyche; a painful reminder that the national dream to reach out into the solar system wasn't the prerogative of the United States. It was a dream far more fragile than any patriotic citizen wished to believe. Nichelle was griddling pancakes when Randall's little shiver caught her eye. She could see that this news item had him unusually rapt. "You OK, Hon?" she called over. "Yeah. Just thinking 'bout what those poor Solis bastards had to go through. We learnt about it at school." "We all did, Hon. We all did." Randall turned his attention back to the vis-screen. Pictures of taikonauts loping across the rusty Martian surface played on the screen. He speared another piece of pancake on the end of his fork and mopped up the blueberry syrup. "I just hope those Han motherfuckers know what they're letting themselves in for." **** Fifty two million miles away, Major Keung Bai's booted foot scuffed up a little gravel and a thin powdery cloud of pinkish-grey regolith. He stepped down slowly, cautiously onto the surface of the fourth planet. Apart from his engineering team, the nearest human life was a little over 1000 miles away, where the crew of the remote Candor Chasma research station would've been very surprised to receive visitors. Just ahead of the landing pod, Major Bai could see the ruin of the Solis Lacus prison; the charred and shredded metal of the damaged quantum reactor vats bit a jagged silhouette into the rusty horizon, brave pioneering structures torn apart by epic explosive force nearly 26 years earlier. The walls of the base closest to the reactors had been blown clean away; steel girders and thick titanium skin atomised by the raw power and proximity of the blast. Despite the erosive dust storms, the rock still bore the scars of the catastrophe; splatters and streams of erosive liquid spewing out of the ruptured fuel tanks. What remained of the pre-fabricated structures was coated in a thick crust of ochre dust, blasted against the remains of the facility by a quarter of a century of Martian tornadoes. Somewhere inside were the engineers of the advance team, testing the surviving systems, finding out exactly what could be salvaged or restored to some semblance of function. A faint click in his ear reminded Bai to check the Geiger counter in the top left corner of his visor's heads-up-display; the needle flickered away nervously at the upper-end of the safety zone. He had about two hours before the exposure to the residual radiation would become dangerous. The Major flicked a small switch at his right temple to illuminate the integrated lights in his helmet and headed towards the wrecked facility. Traversing the few hundred yards across the high Solis plain afforded him the opportunity to acclimatise to the Martian gravity. It'd been four months since the eight man team had left the Lunar Base, and - even though he'd performed the requisite series of zero-gravity training exercises to the letter - he found that he still needed some time to adjust to being back on a body with it's own gravity. He adopted the half-bounding, half-shuffling lope that had proved to be the most effective form of gait in the low-gravity environment and headed out towards the prison. A little more than halfway there, his radio earpiece crackled into life - it was his chief engineer. "Xue here, Major. We have successfully attached our battery to the outposts' power grid. Very few of the computer systems are immediately operational, and I regret that they are unlikely to be repairable. The whole base has been at minus 70 Celsius, and the dust has got everywhere, into nearly all the electronics. There are a handful of non-integrated servers that we think we'll be able to reactivate; although the data will likely be fragmented and patchy at best, I think we can retrieve something." "Begin work, Captain Xue. I'm entering the building now." The headlight from Major Bai's helmet spilled in limpid pools over the darkened innards of the prison complex. Xue had been quite correct - the fine pink dust had covered everything like a shroud. After the Einstrontium liquid had eaten away at the walls of the prison, the sands of Solis Lacus - the Lake of the Sun - had flooded in to wash away the almost imperceptible ripples made by the human race on the implacable face of Mars. Inside the darkened corridors, mounds of coarse sand lay strewn throughout - hundreds of them, as far as he could see. Bai's thick soled boot knocked against something hard, the sudden impact causing the dusty carapace to crack and fall away. A gleaming white human skull stared sightlessly out from its sandy grave. Bai's military training prevented him from panicking, but his pulse quickened and - steeling his nerves - he made his way through the dim and eerie corridors towards Xue in the staff quarters. The sound of his footsteps crunching through the sand particles sounded shallow & shrill in the thin carbon dioxide atmosphere. Despite himself, Bai let out a tiny shudder; what he'd walked into was a tomb - a mass grave for the humans who had dared to try. He picked up the pace and found Xue and his crew trying to access a small remote console in what appeared to be the facilities' medical unit. Near to the computer was yet another sandy mound; the Major took care not to disturb it as he had inadvertently done to the pile in the corridor outside. "I cannot get the drive to boot up," the engineer reported. Bai reached for a thin packet of jeweller’s screwdrivers from a pocket on his spacesuit's right thigh. With practiced skill, he carefully unscrewed the four Phillips screws that held in place a plate on the front of the server, shone his headlight into the exposed cavity and - using the tip of the screwdriver - depressed a small button on the motherboard. A long-since forgotten backup cell flickered into a last vestige of life and characters glowed on the screen - some text jumbled up in a mess of nonsense. "Any power in that cell has been there for twenty five years - it won't last long, so work fast," ordered Bai. "Download everything you can." As Xue placed a small bronzed memory disc onto the touchpad to transfer the data, Bai started to read from the screen. What spilled across the view screen from the depths of a disused hard-drive were the last shreds of the journal of the Solis Lacus penal colony duty medical officer. Dr. Helena Cruz MD. **** Personal Journal: Cruz, Helena M. Colony Medical Officer Personal Journal: Day 5 Five days into the mission - already over four million miles from Swigert - I think we're starting to find the rhythm of our daily routine aboard "The Stygian", and boy is it monotonous. I could kill Auschlander right about now. At 7am, I take hand-over from the night shift nurse (this week it's my senior nurse - a woman called Hamilton who previously worked in the treatment centre at Louisiana State Pen.), then check the drug stock under her supervision before she goes off shift. I set the day nurses to work on the decontamination protocols before attending the morning briefing in the mess at 9am.