Read Online Marsquake! by Brad Strickland, THOMAS E. FULLER - Free Book Online

girders, back toward the black opening far, far overhead in the smooth arched ceiling, barely visible even with the glare of work lights coming up from the chamber floor.
    Sean watched her. Once again he felt just a flutter of the kind of panic that had seized Mickey as the lift cage vanished into its shaft.
    There went the last, the only link to the surface. What if he never saw it again?
    “Doe, Laslo, any time you two are ready!” Ellman’s sharp voice sounded in his ear.
    Jenny made a face at Sean. He gave her a grin in return and hoped it didn’t look as sickly as it felt. Then they turned their backs on their lifeline to the surface and hurried over to join the team.
    From the huge cathedral-like opening, oversized lava tubes branched off in six different directions. Team nine drew for the middle tube leading southfrom the chamber, and their assignment was to follow it, map it, and explore it as far as they could over the span of eleven days.
    The tunnel slanted downward at a steeper angle than any of the others. The first few kilometers had already been checked out by the pathfinder crew, so for the first day, the explorers made good time. Jenny kept checking her wrist data recorder as if fascinated. At one point she nudged Sean and tilted her arm so he could see the readout. At first he didn’t understand the number, but then it registered: D/S -1.202k. The “D/S” meant “distance to surface.” The default setting for all of the recorders was the elevation at the entrance to the lift shaft, the equivalent of sea level back on Earth. The -1.202k figure meant they were now more than a kilometer beneath the surface of Mars.
    Sean kept photographing the walls of the lava tube. They were fairly smooth with great stripes of color in them, sometimes horizontal, sometimes vertical. He didn’t know what kind of minerals these were, but his job was just to record as much variation as hecould, so he clicked away. At the end of several hours’ march, they were in unexplored territory. Evangeline Watts, one of Chris Wu’s apprentices, halted their progress every few hundred meters to take seismology readings. These showed strain patterns and indicated whether or not the tube was structurally sound. So far, all indications were good. They kept moving.
    They soon came to a very weird patch. The lava tube was still huge, larger by far than the one they had practiced in. The arched ceiling overhead was more than twenty meters up, and the thirty explorers could easily spread out across the rounded floor, marching along abreast of one another if they wanted to.
    In fact, they were walking in a long, straggling group, leaning back as if they were traveling down a steep hillside. Experts in rock formation were taking samples, atmospheric scientists were getting excited because the atmosphere was thicker and richer here than on the surface, and physicists were clustered in small groups animatedly arguing over the forces thatleft this huge tunnel system. Jenny and Sean were near the rear of the group, pausing to record everything in images. Sean didn’t notice how everyone ahead was clumping together until Jenny asked, “What’s up?”
    “Come and see,” someone responded.
    They hurried ahead. Sean stepped around the crowd and gawked. The tunnel ahead looked as if it had been transformed into a fairyland cavern lined with jewels.
    Or so it seemed. Sean raised his camera and began to take pictures. In the camera viewfinder a million colors sparkled back at him—reds, golds, greens, blues, all the colors of the spectrum, fragmented and glittering in the lights from the explorers’ helmets. And the floor of the tunnel had changed too. Not rock here, but … sand? A fine red sand? That’s what it looked like.
    “Over here! Quick, photographers! Over here!”
    “Where?” Jenny asked.
    A kneeling figure over on the far side waved an impatient arm, and the others made way as Sean andJenny hurried over to him. “Who is