Part II – The Time Scar
Day 27.
Elena’s fingers trembled as she flipped through the decrypted Chinese logs. The deeper she read, the colder she felt—despite the stale warmth of the habitat module.
Project Zhuque hadn’t been a simple exploratory mission. It was a containment effort.
The logs were fragmented, corrupted by radiation and strange time drift timestamps, but one phrase kept repeating like a warning passed down in a fevered whisper:
“Time fractured—Zhuque compromised.”
The logs referenced Jezero Crater—far north of their landing site. A place once filled with hope for discovering signs of ancient microbial life. But Zhuque’s team had found something else.
Cracks in chronology.
They weren’t metaphorical.
The logs described events happening out of order. Dust storms appearing before the sensors registered wind. Drones flying perfect loops only to return with footage from days ahead. Astronauts who recorded video logs and then forgot ever making them.
One entry chilled her blood:
“Liu recorded her own death three days before it happened. Same crater. Same suit. Same position.”
Tariq, now back from the cave and visibly shaken, leaned over her shoulder as she translated aloud. “You think these people… got stuck in a time loop?”
“No,” Elena whispered. “Worse. I think they escaped it—only to bring pieces of it with them.”
Day 29.
They ventured to the crater near their own site—unmapped terrain previously ignored due to lack of surface anomalies. But now, the pattern made sense. The Chinese mission hadn’t landed by chance. They’d targeted this area because it moved.
Jin-Soo called it a “temporal scar.” A region of spacetime that had been torn and restitched—badly.
The ground bore faint circular burn marks, layered over dust patterns inconsistent with known wind behavior. There were footprints. Dozens. And not all matched their own boots.
Some were deeper.
Some were gone by the next morning.
Day 31.
At the heart of the scar, they found it.
A stone formation that looked like a collapsed well, but deeper than it had any right to be. Far deeper. Impossible to scan. At its edges, metal fragments. Pieces of a lander—but not theirs. Not Chinese. Something older.
Elena lowered a probe.
It didn’t return.
Ravi reran the footage.
The probe did return.
On video.
But not physically.
Day 33.
Time anomalies increased.
Lights flickered out of sync with solar power surges.
Jin-Soo collapsed in the medical bay after reporting “seeing himself asleep in bed.” The cam logs confirmed it—two Jin-Soos, overlapping for 3.2 seconds before one vanished.
“We’re slipping,” Ravi said. “The crater isn’t a site. It’s a faultline. A rupture.”
Tariq had stopped talking. He just stared out at the horizon where the cave lay—where the messages had first warned them.
They were already here.
Elena now wondered if it had ever referred to the Chinese.
Or to them.
Day 36.
The night sky shimmered with strange pulses, almost like a second aurora—except Mars had no magnetic field strong enough to generate them.
And then the shadow returned.
On radar.
A duplicate Odyssey One—perfect in shape, motionless. No transponder. No reply. Just hanging in orbit like a tombstone.
Ravi paled. “It’s us. From another thread.”
“No,” Elena said. “It’s what’s left of us.”
Final Log Entry (Encrypted):
Commander Elena Ruiz
“We are not alone. Not in space. Not even in time.
We stepped onto a dead planet and woke it.
Not because it sleeps…
But because it waits.”
NEXT – Are you ready for Part V – The Awakening—where the trap isn’t just time… it’s memory. And Mars remembers everything.
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