Testament within the womb of Mars

Rodriguez lost all sense of time, as both he and O’Hara made their way through the ever narrowing and dingy sub levels of New Paris   towards gods only  knew where. Inside Rodriguez was rolling  with rage and grief while nursing his bloody knuckles,  while O’Hara kept promising , it’s a little further, just a little further,  I promise.’  Forcing Rodriguez to bite his tongue on every turn or every sudden drop, to avoid the thermo cams every several fifty  meter’s or so.
       After a very long walk along dimly lit, green walled and damp corridor, O’Hara opened a narrow sliding door with a mag key and they entered into an air lock. The lights came on immediately.
      ‘We’ve a hell of a climb down ahead of us…’ He began as he started to put on the atmosphere suit ‘…but once we are at the bottom, there is a glider that can get us the hell ouuta here.’
       With a sense of numbness, Rodriguez climbed into one of the pressure suits.
       ‘We, we  have to get off Mars, I know this has been a rough ride, but believe  they will kill us. They will!’
      ‘Perhap-‘
       Don’t say that!’ O’Hara croaked passionately.  His forest green eyes glistened in the reflected light of the air lock. ‘Make their death’s count!  This, this story will never get out! We, we  have to tell it. Who else will?  I-I  have a friend on the farside Lunar colony-‘
     ‘Ha that’s Sloat’s Dom-om-‘
      ‘CAN YOU THINK OF ANYONE?’
      ‘Its-‘
      ‘Look son, I know, your grieving… there are thousands who’ve died today.’
      ‘its not-‘
      ‘-Look, son,  we have to survive.’  He took his hand gently ‘For them! we have to survive for them.’ Cough ‘Besides…there’s something I want you to see. ‘
        Rodriguez sighed and slipped on the pressure suit helmet and twisted into the lock position.  There was a rush of air and a wirr as the suit slowly started to cling to his body size.
        The the world he entered became a cocoon, soundless and numb  other than that of the pressure suit and his breathing that he knew was far too fast. He stared at O’Hara, who motioned to his wrist. Rodriguez looked down. He saw the communicator switch; he flicked it and a rough radio signal came into his helmet.
       ‘Okay, now once the doors open, it will be dark. We have a steep climb down, as you know Mars gravity is less than that on earth.  38% right? So though a fall from this height might not kill you, but it will…ahh, but you know this already.’
    'Where the hell are we?’
    ‘The reason why Kirkbride and particularly that fat fuck  Sloat want to end any free or independent Mars.’
     ‘-But I thought-‘
      ‘-War is politics by other means and politics is the means to gain more power. More money equals more power, because as long as the people are in debt the greater the control over the populace those in charge are. ’
       ‘-yeah…’  Rodriguez  heard his  breathing come is rasps through his helmet. The light from their torches  lit up the narrow rocky  path and the rusted rock coloured wall that ran along their left. To the right the ground gave away to unfathomable depths that the torch couldn’t penetrate.  ‘I I know that. ‘

The descent was an arduous one. More than once Rodriguez  felt the ground beneath his feet slip away. His breathing heaved in his helmet while he steadied himself. 
      ‘Easy son.’  O’Hara grated, his own voice a guttural crawl over the communicator. ‘we’re almost there.’
       And they were, for  a moment later Rodriguez found himself on a large flat bed of rock, the side of the rock was shored up with  a gantry that dissolved  into darkness.Depsite that In the middle distance he could see with his torch that there  rested sleek a four-winged sky speeder. He looked above. He could just make out a single dim point of light, that looked like a solitary star.
       ‘Where the f-‘
       ‘Half way to the centre of Mars son.’ O’Hara’s words rolled out  matter of fact.
       ‘Wht?’ He could see O’Hara’s wide lips grinning. His forest green eyes shone with mirth.’ This is why I ran for office and why I wanted to protect the Marisians from Sloat and Terran control.  
       ‘This is the secret that the Terran fuckers want kept  to themselves.’
        O’Hara pressed a small metallic console to his left by the gantry steps. And an  array of bright lights shone ten foot off the ground revealing the width of the bedrock and a wall of what looked like ice that glittered back. he walked to the edge and looked down. A glimmering frozen floor shone up.

‘what’s  that?’

       ‘Its water. Thousands probably millions of tonnes of it. Probably one quarter of the entire atmosphere of what was once  this planet. Not enough  to free Mars and Earth from the stinking domes of Sloat, but enough to help set up a processor  for… well… a few hundred years. Enough to get the planet working again. ‘ 
       ‘feck.’
       ‘yeah....More air than anyone can imagine. Sloat wants it for himself, he an his greedy fuckers have been down here making plans for months.  I was part of the first expedition to the Volcano that was when we found…’ he coughed ‘…other things.’
        ‘what do you mean?’
       ‘Son… there was a tragedy here several million years ago.  That tragedy had an impact upon not only Mars but Earth too.  You ever wonder why Mars is red? why its smaller than say Venus? Why they found no life here despite having all the signs for it? Remember all those stories we were told as kids about Martians and aliens?  Well, life did exist here. Life in abundance.   I have some things to show you. Things that will re-evaluate everything. ‘
      Next to the sky speeder stood a black fold up table where rested poly bag.  O’ Hara put his hand inside the bag and pulled out the most intricate  and ornate and fragile piece of near translucent Jade he had ever seen.  He handed it tenderly to Rodriguez who carefully turned it over in his hands.  It had been carved by someone there were strange markings and  faces that looked almost human, but not quite.
      ‘Ive never seen anything quite like this-’
      'We carbon dated it…its over  two hundred and twenty one million years old…’ then he handed him a small metal book.  Rodriguez  slowly opened it, and touched the  tiny strange shapes on the page, a beautiful yet strange sound seemed to fill his helmet, but then he realised, it wasn’t the helmet at all, it was actually  coming from inside his head. Whoever these  people were, he concluded they were more advanced than us.  Then something rang in his mind about the date. 
       ‘-But that, that means-‘
        ‘Yep dinosaurs on earth.’  Cough. ‘Look we better get going. I’ll tell you more on the flight. ‘

 Within moment’s they were locked into the seats of the sky speeder.  The air pressure equalised, with a hiss. A moment later, both helmets were thrown behind them.  Buttons engaged. The small craft tilted back on its forward secondary thrusters, then the main engines thrusted  the craft at incredible speed towards the tiny star of light that as getting  bigger and bigger by the second. As it  rose and sped through the cavern O’Hara began to talk.
        ‘The problem with Mars is Mars itself. From my earliest days, as a child, I looked with wonder at it, thinking about the life that could live here. From Bradbury to PkD I read them all. Then I started reading real science journals; and later the planetary exobiology journals based upon theory about what Mars was, you know, actually like.  I found that Mars had its rusted appearance because of high contents of Iron oxide on its surface. Now we have iron oxide on Earth, but not scattered on the surface  all over like dust… In fact the amounts of iron oxide are incredibly high on here and not buried, This seemed odd. Then there were the two other oddities, The weak magnetic field of the planet, the ice at the planets equator; the large amount of methane and sulphur… finally there is, well this:- Olympus Mons, the largest  extinct  volcano found at present in our solar system.  Add to this, to the size of Mars, which is smaller than the earth and Venus; and you get an idea, that  the size of the volcano does not fit in proportions to the planet.’
        ‘Inferring…’
        '-Inferring that at one time or another, Mars must have been proportionately larger than it is right now. You have seen the cliff edges around it’
        ‘I don’t see where this is going.’
        ‘Ok Geology 101, our earth has a large iron core, around this is a thick blanket of magma, that in turn push up on the tectonic plates that go under or reach over each other at specific points upon the planet.  This  basically functions like a pressure cooker. It’s the heat which expands the planet out, and maintains the magnetic field, it also causes earth quakes and tremors and through that releases gases into and the atmosphere. But it’s not stable.  We have experienced pole shifts in recent years, but none that existed around what they call a super volcano. Which is what Olympus mons was.’
       Rodriquez felt that O’Hara was dodging the subject, finding it hard to explain what he had found out. Yet still he listened.  
         'I have good evidence to support the possibility that what occurred here was in fact a planetary exsanguination. The super volcano violently erupted during a pole shift, decreasing the pressure around the tectonic plates and this caused the planet to both boil off its atmosphere and as it did so shrink it down… As the plates crunched in on themselves…the seas here either burst off or fell into the gaps that, in turn super cooled what was left of the Iron core that exploded into space.  One of which hit Earth with the speed of a bullet, killing off the dinosaurs in a single hit. ‘
      'So it was natural causes?’
      ‘No.’
      ‘What?’
      ‘We found something at one of the digs.’
       The craft punched though the crater of  Olympus mons, its four wings arched as it sped to the left away from the gaping crater.  It was then that They could see the devastation. Mushroom clouds sprouted winds of death  along a line.
       ‘The fuckers hit New Paris… I hope I’m not too late.’
        ‘Too late for what?’
       O’Hara gave a gritty stare from his forest eyes to Rodriquez, he wet his large wet lips with the flat of his pale tongue.  
        ‘They might have the evidence.’
        ‘What the fuck of?’
         ‘Planet seeder’s. Aliens, beings that create life. I don’t know wat you would call them. They leave a calling card.'
        ‘Which is?’ Rodriguez was now both perplexed and baffled by O’Hara, who was, as far as he was concerned, sounding increasingly insane. Who would want to blow an entire planet up? What sort of creature would? His words were cut short as O’Hara continued ‘ A square with a line cut into it from the top right hand corner to the bottom left.  
       ‘Ok were nearly there.’
        The four-winged craft spiralled down to a halt by a small gathering of metal domes and square corrugated structures.  They jumped out of the craft and made their way to the door or the nearest down when four black suited elite guards faced them, their pulse weapons pointed directly at their heads.