Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever by Phoenix Sullivan (easy readers txt) 📕

protocols to handle this sort of thing,” said West. “I’ll not have bullying in my command. I’ll talk to the two of them, but you should do better than some Earth manager covering his own ass.”

“Ellison will take it out on you.”

“Then she wears a suit and walks to the next site,” said West.

“Can I do something wrong? I could use the alone time.”

“Shut up, Reesman. You and Yorkston shouldn’t even be here; active duty isn’t time for socializing.”

The two left sheepishly.

“I need a console,” West told Laurer. “Why don’t you go relax or sleep.”

Laurer slid out of his seat and West slid in. Face recognition let him log on.

He accessed Casey’s core samples, overriding her lock and no doubt triggering any number of warnings for her that someone hacked into the system. This time he didn’t want to just look at slides, he wanted to know how she’d generated the samples in the first place.

The slides did indeed all come from one core sample because she drilled only once. But if it had been ground, as protocol required, the quantities of elements would still have been an anomaly.

West double-checked the figures. The anomaly was present in both the core sample and the surrounding sand. But it was more extreme in the core. West checked weather patterns, which on Mars were still not well understood. What readings had been taken could be interpreted to mean the south polar winds were isolated. Sands made here largely stayed here. Of course, there would be some mixture of sand from elsewhere — that couldn’t be stopped entirely. So if contamination reduced the amount of anomaly in the sand, then finding more of it in intact stone meant one thing. They had found some kind of singular deposit.

West hadn’t realized how long he had been working until the console pinged him that Earth Headquarters had sent him a message. It was plain text, which was always a bad sign. If the news were good, or at least exciting, someone would want their face on camera in case the media picked up on it. West read the file:

The following names are unsuitable for features of Mars.

These names will be deleted.

Please amend and reply immediately.

Commander West replied that he confirmed all fourteen names and reminded Earth Headquarters he had the unilateral authority to name all features. He had to compose a hack on the fly, but he managed to contact several news sites for whom the text would confirm prejudices one way or the other. If they made a meal of it, they’d use up all their space exploration news on names and not anomalies in sand and core samples — at least for a few days.

West turned around to find Schmidt standing behind him. He wondered how long he’d been there.

“Buggy A is not restored, but we have enough extra power that we can run scrubbers and sustain two, maybe three, people who don’t mind being alternately sweaty and freezing cold.”

“Is that during travel or when stationary?”

Schmidt thought. “Keep it two and it can handle both without problem.”

“Is it going to stink as much as this place?”

“No.”

And that concluded all the important details.

“OK, give me the calculations and I’ll send them to Earth.”

“You don’t trust my calculations?”

“Even if we don’t like protocols, we have to obey them for now.”

Technically, West knew he should put Schmidt over on Buggy A; he’d repaired it, after all. But Schmidt tended to run his own agenda and needed outside direction to keep him focused.

Schmidt left, perhaps sensing West’s thoughts. West looked at the console. Pings were still coming through. Once, the only indication of an incoming message was a little icon of an envelope, but that wasn’t annoying enough for Earth Headquarters, which wanted immediate replies to messages that would take over half an hour to travel between Earth and Mars.

West relented and called up the screens required. Earth Headquarters was having serious objections to his vivid names. Strange, since his last message could not have gotten to Earth, yet. Clearly somebody had seen the original list and was picking up on it.

He looked at the clock. Without realizing, it he had been awake for more than a Martian sol. It was only about forty minutes longer than an Earth day, but it could suddenly be a long time to stay awake. He put his elbow on the console and his head in his hand. When West finally woke up it was better than twenty minutes later and, if anything, he felt worse.

West looked at his wrist before he remembered he had not worn a watch since before launch. Weight limits really were that tight. And so, he realized, were the limits to his patience. He logged out and marched to his office. Before he could yell, he realized Green had already gone. Indoors all the time, it was easy to lose track of how much time was passing.

He unfolded his bed from the wall and easily jumped the four feet to land among the rumple of sheets he should have already changed. He was asleep almost instantly.

Awake took longer. There were images to explore and dreams to remember. He did not feel energized, so he guessed his dreams hadn’t presented him with a solution to anything. He got the local time from the computer. He’d slept for over nine hours. Despite his talk that everyone would crash eventually, it was his first breach in the months since the Buggy A disaster.

West breathed deeply. He didn’t know why they put an extra scrubber on his vented air, but he was grateful. It cut most of the smell of other human bodies. Buggy A would probably smell bad, but at least it would smell bad different. The smell there, though, wasn’t his main concern. Why were the estimations of how many it could hold so different? Somewhere between two and five people?A lot of rubber in those figures.

He jumped down and pushed the bunk up against the wall. It would