What Happens on Mars Stays on Mars

This week's prompt, -An Astronaut – Mars

The starship touched down for exactly thirty minutes. A frantic pitstop to harvest data from the local weather station at Tempe Terra, which is found between the topographically high Tharsis Region and the Acidalia Planitia region in the Martian northern hemisphere. The Intel they had received was that a Luna storm was heading their way. On Mars, these storms weren't just wind; they were towering walls of static-charged hematite dust that turned the thin atmosphere into a churning sea of rust. 

A flash of violet lightning tore through the ochre clouds, a few miles away, momentarily turning the twilight sky into a bruised, electric landscape. Jason watched the flash as he took his first steps on another planet, his lips moving. “One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three…” He didn't reach four. A bone-shaking roar of thunder slammed into the hull. The shock wave kicked up a fresh veil of grit, masking the starship in a swirling, violent shroud of Martian red. 

A few steps further along. "What is that?" Jason, the first officer, whispered, nervously nudging it with his boot. 

The USS Salford's Captain remained silent. Raising his head, he gently shook his hollow face visible behind the visor. A chill of fear took hold inside him. Pressing his comms link with his index finger, he made contact. 

“Jane, tell me you are seeing this. We have found something... wrong. It is a cube, but it is breathing. One face has veins that seem to be pulsating. The other is carved with symbols that seem to writhe when you look at them. Talk to me.” 

“I have it, Boss,” Jane’s voice crackled. “I need more. Move to the left—give me a better view so I can scan it.” 

The captain stepped sideways, his boots crunching on the red dust. His helmet-mounted camera whirred, zooming into the object as Jane, huddled in the security of the ship, two hundred meters away, frantically adjusting her dials. 

“Scanning now,” Jane breathed. Her voice suddenly dropped an octave, turning brittle. “Boss... get away from it. There is a biological signature inside. It... It has a heartbeat.” 

The captain bolted upright, his blood turning to ice. “Fall back!” 

But the First Officer—green, arrogant, and desperate for a hero’s story—ignored the command. A reckless grin split his face as he reached down. 

“What are you doing? Step back!” The captain roared. 

Too late. 

Jason, the idiot’s fingers closed around the pulsing object. Instantly, the cube let out a piercing, ultrasonic shriek—a sound like grinding glass that tore through their helmets and drilled into their brain matter. Both men buckled, clutching their heads as the world dissolved into white noise. With a cry of agony, the First Officer scrambled to his feet and let the thing fall. 

The cube struck the red dust. 

The cube twitched, then six multi-jointed legs snapped out of the casing. A wet, glistening head tore through the top of the cube, unfurling like a nightmare. 

“Boss? Boss, answer me!” Jane’s voice was a frantic scream over the comms. “The signature is spiking! It’s—it’s alive, whatever it is—” 

Static. Violent and absolute. The channel went dead. 

Jane froze, the blood draining from her lips. She lunged forward, slamming her fist onto the emergency override. 

“Security detail to the captain’s coordinates!” She screamed. “STAT!” 

“Roger that. Alpha team, two minutes out,” the wall speaker barked. Skip, the group leader, dropped the microphone and ran to the armoury. 

Jane did not hear them. She was already hunched over the console, screaming the captain’s name into a void that offered no reply. 

Reaching the summit, the guards swept the area with plasma fire and high-intensity lights. "Contact! Ten o'clock!" Alpha Two yelled, but his grip failed, and his gun hit the dirt. 

The beam of his light hit the First Officer first. The man was sprawled in the void, his suit coated in a fine layer of rusted luna dust. From the waist down, the pressurised suit had been shredded like wet paper. With minimal gravity to pull the carnage down, some of his skin, flesh, and bone floated; what surprised the Alpha team was the blood. It drifted in a thick, suspended nebula. Thousands of perfect, shimmering crimson spheres pulsed in the torchlight, floating like heavy, viscous bubbles. 

The captain lay five meters away; his gloved hand still around his combat knife that had snapped off at the hilt. His helmet visor was a jagged ruin of imploded glass—a clear sign that whatever had forced its way in was still inside. 

“Command, this is Team Alpha,” Skip, the group leader, whispered. His voice cracked as he stared into the helmet's dark cavity. “We have... we have biological remains. Both officers are down. They are gone, Jane. Send out two Cyro pods, over.” 

Alphas 3 and 4 drifted toward the scene, guiding two Cyro Pods. The pods’ directional thrusters hummed, keeping them horizontal and steady in the low gravity. Alpha 5 followed; an anti-gravity vacuum strapped to his back that hissed with the mechanical hunger of an old-world plane lavatory. Alphas 3 and 4 began the grim work of collecting the larger fragments of the First Officer, leaving the smaller slurry for Alpha 5 and his anti-gravity vac. 

Once the First Officer had been fully processed—either sealed in a pod or siphoned into the vacuum—the team gathered around the captain. A sudden, violent twitch racked his torso. Something was still in there, rummaging through the meat of his neck and chest. 

“What do we do with this one, Skip?” Alpha 2 asked; his plasma rifle levelled at the captain’s chest. 

The captain’s chest did not just move; it buckled from the inside. His legs started to shake; then, the sound of bone being forced apart. “Back up,” Skip hissed, his hand hovering over his sidearm. 

The twitching intensified into a violent, rhythmic heaving. Shards of the captain’s ribcage punched through the fabric of his flight suit, followed by a spray of darkened, pressurised blood that drifted in the low gravity like an old-fashioned lava lamp. Then, something slick and pale nudged the gap open. 

It did not have a face, only a translucent, needle-thin snout that quivered as though it was sniffing out its next meal. It pushed further, using the captain’s collarbones as leverage. A pulsating head appeared from the cavity of his chest. It turned slowly, its neck a corded mass of raw muscle, until its blind, weeping eyes settled directly on Skip. 

“Skip... “It’s looking at us.” 

The creature emitted a piercing metallic trill, causing all Alpha teams to drop to their knees.  

Alpha 6, standing near the airlock, was the only one spared the full force of the sonic assault. Through her own ringing ears, she saw the captain’s chest cavity yawning open. She did not wait for an order. She hoisted his plasma rifle, flipped the safety to cycle-auto, and held the trigger down. 

One hundred superheated plasma bolts slammed into the captain’s body in a matter of seconds. The kinetic force of the plasma shredded what was left of the captain’s torso, and the translucent creature before it could escape. When the rifle stopped and needed to recharge, the silence that followed was heavier than the scream. 

In low gravity, the scene had dissolved into a weightless slurry of scorched carbon. The captain was no longer a person, but a collection of unidentifiable, blackened body parts drifting through the gloom. Alpha 6 adjusted her breathing mask, the rhythmic hiss of recycled oxygen filling her ears. 

“Clear,” Alpha 6 rasped, her barrel glowing cherry-red. 

Skip remained on one knee, his breath hitching in his throat as he watched a piece of the captain’s rank insignia drift past his visor. There was nothing left to put in a Cyro pod. There was nothing left to be buried. 

“Command,” Skip said, his voice hollow and cold. “The captain is gone. The threat is neutralised. Requesting immediate exfil before the rest of them wake up.” 

He did not look back as he stood up. This mission was over, but as he stared at the scorched particles dancing in the air, he knew this was not the end.