StarGaze

Fear Of The Unknown

“What happened? I heard some commotion.” Greene asked, entering the room in his calm as ever look. 

“Sir, we have lost all contact with the crew. We don’t know what happened; the system just snapped.” The comms operator said. 

“Call the analyst. This is a code purple.” Greene said and looked around the room. 

All computers were offline, or at least they seemed to be. The screens were blank, but the meters showed that the servers were running at full capacity. It was a system fault; it had to be. The great concern for the people inside the room were the people about to land on MARS and undertake the most important mission in the history of humanity. They now had to do it without any support from ground stations. And most of all, they were all alone, millions of kilometers away from home. 

“Capitan, what do you want me to do?” the crew member in charge of landing the ship asked the Mexican captain. 

“Shut the f**k up, Luiz.” Captain Lopez said. 

“Sir, the systems are still offline. There is no response from the ground station. What do we do now?” the senior engineer asked. 

“We wait,” Lopez said and floated around the control room, looking out through the window into the dark void of space, hoping the signal would be arriving anytime soon. 

But as the billions around the globe witnessed, all efforts to establish contact were futile, and no help was arriving anytime soon. And so, the commander of the rocket did what any smart pilot would do. 

“Listen up, ladies and gentlemen,” he said after two hours of waiting. 

“We cannot waste any more of our resources than we have to. Every second we waste can be a fatal mistake. Luiz, can we establish contact anytime soon?” he asked. 

“Looking at the matters in hand, I would say it is almost impossible. I have checked several times; all of our equipment is intact. It can mean only one thing. The ground station is offline. And for the ground station to be offline, there has to be a pretty big reason. And making contact will take up at least a day or two.” Luiz said, pointing at the computer screen, which showed that the receivers were working perfectly fine. 

“We cannot waste a day or two. We don’t need ground control for the landing. We will land on the surface, set up camp, and THEN we will try and contact Earth. For now, we are on our own. And I think we are enough to handle ourselves.” Lopez said and took a look around the room to observe the reactions of his fellow crewmates. 

Obviously, they were all terrified, but the excitement to be back on a solid surface again outweighed the fear by a slight margin. They had spent years training for this moment, and they were confident enough that they could pull it off. 

The biologist and the geologist nodded in affirmation. It was time to show unity, and all of them knew that. It was a big deal to land a rocket of that magnitude for the first time on Mars, but it wasn’t hard for them to shine through this after all the test runs and evaluations. 

And so the descend started. As the people from Earth watched with sweat on their brows, the ship slowly pushed inside the body of the red planet, the planet of mysteries. 

“Come on, baby, show me what you got,” Luiz said and pushed the lever forward. 

“Here we go!” Commander Lopez exclaimed as they pierced through the thick clouds and finally cut through to the other side. 

“What the f**k?!” all of them said in unison as a bright light presented itself in front of them. The room was lit up with the whitewash, and all of them shaded their eyes with their hands as the ship rumbled violently. The rumbling went more and more chaotic until it suddenly stopped. 

All of the crewmates uncovered their eyes and saw the most unimaginable thing they could see coming. 

“Is this...? Are you...?” The medic said as the black corner of her eyes slowly turned into red. The RX rocket froze in midair, and the monitors back on earth flashed again. 

“Sir, we are online and in connection with the crew.” The technician said, and the whole crowd inside the room cheered, along with masses around the world. 

“There is a five-second delay in the signal continuity, but I think we can run with that,” Greene told the superiors, and they all let out a sigh of relief. 

The cameras on the rocket showed the rocky red surface of the ever-forbidden planet. It was a gloomy sight, but the accomplishment was like none other. 

The aliens had landed on the planet and started setting up camp. They were not speaking anything in the comms, but it may be because of the systems rebooting. It was a big deal, but the great filter was passed, so it was a miniature problem in the big picture.

After some marvelous pictures were taken for the first time by a human hand on Mars, the comms picked up some activity. It seemed like the crew was trying to communicate to the ground station, but something (or SOMETHING) was trying to interfere in between. After a lot of yelling by the commander and brow sweating moments from the engineers, they finally fixed the issue, and the radios were online.

"Stargaze, do you hear us?" Commander Greene said confidently and nervously at the same time.

"Affirmative. The mission is going smoothly." The voice from the other side answered after a long pause, and there was a loud cheer in the room again.

This was huge. Years ago, no one could have imagined that one-day humans would be talking to each other from two different planets, but it was now a reality. And what a marvelous reality it was.