“Self-destruction,” he said quietly. “It destroyed itself rather than be captured.”
The implications of the creature’s actions staggered her. “That level of self-sacrifice requires intelligence. Purpose. Why would it do it?”
“What if it wasn’t just trying to destroy itself? What if it was trying to take us with it?”
His words sent a chill through her. She thought of the strange energy spike right before the explosion, the way the creature had targeted them.
“You think it was trying to kill us?”
“It’s possible if it saw us as competition. And remember how it seemed to target you? Eliminating the females of a species is another way of eliminating the competition.”
“Competition,” she said slowly. “If it evolved in a time when resources were very scarce, then it would have learned the importance of defending those resources. I hope the data I managed to capture will tell us more. I have the analysis of its cellular structure, the energy signatures?—”
She picked up her scanner eagerly, then stared at the screen in disbelief. The data files were corrupted, showing nothing but garbled code and error messages.
“No,” she whispered, frantically trying to recover the files. “No, no, no. This can’t be happening. All of the data is gone.”
“What are the chances of that happening naturally?”
“Zero.” She slumped against the wall, clutching the useless scanner in her trembling hands. “Whatever that energy pulse was, it didn’t just destroy the creature. It wiped our data too.”
They stood in silence for a long moment, the realization settling over them like dust.
“So we have no proof,” he said finally. “Nothing to show anyone what we found.”
“Nothing.” The word tasted bitter in her mouth. All that remained of their momentous discovery was their memory. Without the data, it was just their word that they’d encountered something impossible.
She looked at the hole in the floor, the entrance to the tunnels where they’d first found the creature. “We should check the tunnels again, see if the monitors are still working. Maybe there’s another one.”
His eyes went silver for a moment, then he shook his head. “The monitors are all dead. I’ll go and replace them, but you stay here.”
“We go together,” she insisted, already gathering fresh equipment. “But this time, we’re better prepared.”
She quickly assembled a new set of containment field units, adjusting them based on what she’d learned from their first attempt. If they encountered another creature, they’d be ready. Roland chirped inquisitively when they headed back towards the shaft but she shook her head.
“You stay here. We’re just going to do a quick check.”
But as they descended back into the tunnels, she couldn’t shake the feeling that they wouldn’t find anything, and she was right. They searched the area, replacing all of the monitors, but found nothing. After an hour of searching, she climbed back up to the station behind Zach, exhausted and discouraged.
“What do we do now?” she asked as he sealed the shaft entrance by the simple expedient of parking the rover on top of it.
He was silent for a long moment, his eyes glinting in the dim light. “We decide who needs to know about this, and who wouldn’t believe us anyway.”
She nodded slowly, understanding the weight of their discovery—and the impossibility of proving it had ever happened. Theywere alive and unharmed, but the creature was gone, leaving no evidence of its existence except in their memories.
The greatest discovery in the history of Mars exploration, and not a shred of proof to show for it.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Zach went to check on Phantom, but the horse seemed remarkably unshaken. He scattered some more protein pellets, then turned to find Cass staring at the floor, her expression distant. The station felt oddly quiet now, the only sounds the soft hum of the life support systems and the muffled howl of the storm outside.
“You need to eat something,” he said, automatically lowering his voice as if something might be listening.
She nodded but didn’t move. “I can’t believe it’s gone. All of it. Like it never existed.”
He picked up Roland and placed him in her arms, then guided them back through the airlock. His senses were still on high alert, scanning for threats and analyzing escape routes. Old military habits, impossible to override even when the immediate danger had passed.
She checked Roland for damage, then settled him in his favorite position on the long desk beneath the windows before taking a seat at the table in the small kitchen area.
