Dead on Mars

Chapter 99 - Sol Hundred and Nine, the Dinghy in the Middle of the Ocean
Chapter 99: Sol Hundred and Nine, the Dinghy in the Middle of the Ocean

Tang Yue moved the solar panels onto a cart and dragged it out of the garage. Tomcat had taken away ten solar panels, so now, Tang Yue was left with only thirty which wasn’t enough to supply Kunlun Station with enough power to be fully operational. Therefore, Tang Yue had no choice but to shut down a considerable amount of power-draining equipment, leaving only the most basic life support and communications systems operational.

The Hab’s temperature stayed at about –10°C and was undoubtedly a frozen cavern. With the Radiant Armor to resist the low temperatures, Tang Yue found it warmer moving the solar panels outside than staying indoors.

The sun had already risen and was like a huge light bulb that wasn’t too hot. Tang Yue looked up at the sun and because Mars rotated in the same direction as Earth—rotating from west to east—with a similar tilt, the sun’s trajectory across the sky resembled the trajectory on Earth. The sun rose in the east and set in the west.

Tang Yue unloaded the solar panels from the cart, set them up, and tightened the electric cables. He gently swept away the dust from the solar panel’s surface as it reflected his round visor.

Tang Yue couldn’t see his face through the panel’s reflection as it looked bloated, making him resemble a big-headed extraterrestrial. Tang Yue stared at his reflection for some time before he suddenly recalled Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story.

Tang Yue sighed.

He had never imagined that anything could happen to Tomcat. The latter was the most reliable one out of the three. It had stayed on Kunlun Station for years and was extremely experienced and qualified. It was the Station Commander of Kunlun Station in all sense of the word, even though the title was never fixed. It was usually helmed by the Commander of each Mars landing mission.

Moving the Chelomey probe back was just a simple retrieval. It was completely within Tomcat’s capabilities. It was impossible for Tang Yue to drive more than a hundred kilometers, but it was nothing for Tomcat. In the past Mars missions, it had succeeded in far more tedious work. Logically speaking, nothing should have happened to Tomcat.

Tang Yue couldn’t think of a problem on Mars that would leave Tomcat in a completely non communicable state.

Once they had lost contact, the space station was unable to locate the Mars Wanderer. In the past, the Mars Wanderer’s location needed Tomcat to establish communications and report its location. In fact, it wasn’t true that there weren’t other remote sensing satellites orbiting Mars. It was possible to find the Mars Wanderer by using them, but these satellites belonged to different countries and different organizations. They used different data pathways, and permission needed to be granted to use them. With Earth suddenly vanishing, all these satellites became defunct overnight.

Setting up a Global Positioning System (GPS) was never an easy task. If one wanted to locate a particular source on the surface, one needed at least three satellites. The Americans had taken decades to place GPS satellites in orbit before they could allow for real-time tracking, but clearly, Mars didn’t have such equipment.

Without any support from Earth, it was truly difficult to take a single step on Mars.

Tang Yue raised his hand wishing to scratch his head, but his visor got in the way.

The green light on the solar panel’s edge lit up, indicating that it was operational.

Tang Yue stood up, looked around, and saw all thirty solar panels arranged neatly in the Battery Farm. A short distance away was the Eagle’s Descent Vehicle and the garage. A hundred meters away was the tiny Kunlun Station. Tang Yue’s world could be said to be extremely large, but also extremely small. It was large because he was the only person on Mars, so the entire planet was his. He could go anywhere he wished in this extensive piece of land.

It was small because Tang Yue would die no matter where he went. He could only live in a tiny region around Kunlun Station. With resources and supplies terminated, what he possessed was just a world destined to be left dilapidated.

…

After Tang Yue was done setting up the solar panels, he returned to Kunlun Station to find Mai Dong having completed the first round of photo taking. In the fifteen-minute window, Mai Dong had taken a total of 1,500 photos. On average, each photo showed 2,000 square meters, and these 1,500 photos put together covered an area of 3 square kilometers.

“Tang Yue…” Mai Dong exhaled. In that short span of fifteen minutes, the high focus required from her had made her not even dare to blink. It had thoroughly exhausted her. “The first round of scans has been completed. The images are being sent… 86%, 87%. Please take receipt.”

The girl leaned into the camera and smiled, her sweat-soaked hair sticking to her cheeks.

“How is it?” Mai Dong cocked her head.

“Excellent work. Lady, you’ve been a great help. You live up to being a beautiful genius.” Tang Yue took off the life support system from Radiant Armor. “Thank you very much!”

Mai Dong had numbered all the photos, from 1 to 1,500. They corresponded to the map, allowing her to continue her work on the next scan until the first sector’s thirty square kilometers had been snapped.

The two immediately began the identification work of the images.

However, identifying the images wasn’t a breeze. In the early days, when the resolution of reconnaissance satellites was still low, the identification work of the resulting photos needed a large number of experts. It was extremely specialized work, and Tang Yue and Mai Dong weren’t professionals in this. They didn’t know any tricks, and could only rely on the slowest and most primitive method as they did a carpet sweep of each pixel.

The optical tracking system that Mai Dong used wasn’t a specialized piece of equipment for surface observations. Its highest resolution was merely five meters, and so the resolution of the photos taken was very low. Furthermore, they were all in black and white, making it impossible for them to find the Mars Wanderer via color.

Wrapped in a blanket, Tang Yue sat down and switched on the computer.

He zoomed into every image until he could see the pixels. He began searching for the missing cat and the missing vehicle amid a sea of mosaic tiles.

“Tomcat… Where are you?” Tang Yue stared at the screen intently with widened eyes. His gaze swept across the images up and down and was just short of drilling into the screen. “Tomcat… Tomcat… Tomcat… Tomcat…”

Tang Yue clicked the mouse as photo after photo swept past his eyes.

Meanwhile, Mai Dong didn’t take a break. She took a deep breath and plunged into the endless number of photos.

With more than a thousand photos that all looked identical due to their gray plains and dunes, there was no way Mai Dong could have distinguished between them if not for their numbers.

“Tang Yue! Look at this… Is this the Mars Wanderer?”

“Hmm… No, it’s an anorthosite.”

“Tang Yue, what about this? I think it looks like it!”

“No, turn the photo and see it from another angle. It’s just a shadow of a sand dune.”

“This?”

“Sand dune.”

“This?”

“Sandpit.”

Mai Dong would ask Tang Yue with every image that could hold a possibility, leaving the latter nervous and excited. He would carefully analyze it, but his excitement would always turn into disappointment. Every item that was suspected to be Mars Wanderer would eventually be proven to be a rock or a shadow. Mai Dong and Tang Yue were unwilling to leave out any clue for they yearned to find Tomcat. They almost treated every blurred pixel as the Mars Wanderer.

In the blurry, black-and-white photos, the layered sand dunes looked like the undulating surface of the ocean. Tang Yue felt as though he was finding a tiny dinghy that was being tossed about in the ocean, but the dinghy might have capsized and sunk to the bottom of the water forever.