If you can't find the truth where you are, where do you expect to find it? — Pilgrim’s Canticle, Book of the Way, 452 AFC
Elena crouched beside the corpse. The suit was bronze-colored, the fabric worn and sun-baked. A red patch on the arm had faded almost to nothing—but she recognized it.
“中国国家航天局.”
China’s space agency.
Tariq stepped back, stunned. “That’s not possible. China never landed on Mars.”
Not officially, anyway.
Back at base, Elena bypassed mission control’s firewalled archives. She found it—a buried file:
“Project Red Ghost – Classified. China, 2029.
Mission Outcome: Lost. No survivors. Public Cover: Failed Orbital Probe.”
“They were here,” she whispered. “And no one ever told the world.”
“But someone knew,” Tariq said. “We landed less than six kilometers from this cave.”
“This wasn’t exploration,” Elena replied. “It was confirmation.”
That night, Tariq couldn’t sleep. He returned alone to the cave, drawn to the message like a moth to a dying light.
He crouched beside the wall. His flashlight swept across the carvings—and stopped.
There was something new beneath the first message.
Fresh. Jagged. Uneven.
“Don’t trust the silence.”
That hadn’t been there before.
Behind him, something moved in the shadows.
Ravi described a city submerged in red light, beneath a glass dome.
Tariq saw himself stepping onto the Martian surface—but his body was already there, decayed and unmoving.
First in a series on colonizing Mars… More to come. Expect changes along the way.
