Martian Meltdown, Part 2
The emergency broadcast arrived at Virgo Headquarters in Miami ten minutes later. Christover rubbed his temples, trying to deal with the growing onslaught of telemetry, frantic communications, and unfavorable news tickers. Systems were failing and he was over 100 million miles away.
“Virgo Statin is currently going through a ‘significant technical malfunction’ in their power system,” he enunciated to his head of PR. “To be clear, this is our auxiliary power. A small coolant discharge. Containment was enacted immediately and all personnel are safe and accounted for. Understand?”
Gerard, the head of PR, rubbed his eyes and nodded solemnly. He knew better than to ask too many questions whenever Christover gave him some sort of press release.
“I just want to bring up that... well the science bloggers have already started to speculate on what is happening. They think there was a reactor incident.”
“Speculation is not the same thing as facts. We are on the ground. Or at least, my brother is. That means we control the facts.”
“What is the status of your brother?”
“I just got a new video message from him.”
The video showed Dario in a cramped command post within Virgo Prime. There was a strange crackling in the background and it took Christover a few seconds before realizing that was a Geiger counter. His face was covered in red dust and grime. His clothes looked just as bad.
“Christover...” Dario rasped. “The dispersal is extensive. The Martian winds are carrying the radioactive plume east-northeast.”
“Sir, isn’t that over the proposed Ares Valley colony?” Gerard asked.
“...no perimeter,” Dario continued in the pre-recorded video. “Radiation readings are off the charts. The spread is probably hundreds of kilometers. We tried to seal off the modules to reduce exposure.”
“Sir...”
“Those are preliminary readings, Gerard,” Christover argued. “It might be sensor interference. Stick to the official report. It was an auxiliary unit, a localized problem, and already contained.”
He lowered his voice.
“Minister Mathis is on a secure line. I need to take this. You should leave and work on tampering down on online speculation.”
He waited until Gerard left before he took the call. The minister’s face appeared on the screen, smooth and composed as usual.
“Mr. Barbet, I have heard you are experiencing some troubles on your off-world colony and I want to offer my apologies. I am hearing the trouble is with an auxiliary power unit. I trust that you this malfunction will not be misrepresented as a failure of the Olympus reactor, or any Crimean-supplied component.”
“Absolutely not,” Christover agreed. “It was a localized issue, entirely due to unexpected Martian factors. Geological stresses perhaps. Your technology has performed admirably until that point. Everything is under control.”
“Excellent,” Mathis nodded slowly, though there was a certain skepticism in his eyes. “For all of our sakes, let us hope your swift management will contain the problem, and contain the narrative.”
Not too far away, Sakura sat at her desk at Kennedy Space Center with the latest satellite data. She was supposed to be calibrating the spectral sensors on the new Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter’s CRISM instrument. The goal was to use the new, more powerful sensors to look for potential methane hotspots on the planet. Yet this new data seemed to be showing a strange hotspot anomaly that wasn’t there the day before. It was stronger than any potentially natural geothermal activity.
She cross-referenced the sensor data with several prior dumps. It didn’t seem to be a sensor glitch. Every previous day had the same results, and the new thermal bloom was localized.
“That’s so odd,” she murmured.
She decided to pull in data from the newest rover’s radiation detector. Although it was two thousand kilometers away, it was now reporting a faint but significant uptick in the background radiation. It wasn’t enough to raise a big alarm, but the correlations were intriguing.
Sakura needed more data. She decided to query the live datastream from the ESA’s Trace Gas Orbiter. From there, she grabbed the FREND instrumentation data. Although it was meant only to map neutrons, it was confirming a large spike from the same Eos Chasma region.
“What Barbet is saying can’t be true. This is not an auxiliary power unit,” she said.
She started typing faster, pulling up high-res images from HiRISE from the past five hours. As the images appeared on her screen, her hand went to her mouth. Her breath stopped. The main reactor on Virgo Station had completely blackened, looking like a mole on the face of Mars. There weren’t any obvious dark plumes, but the other sensors were showing the crisis was spreading.
“Dr. Acosta!” she waved him down as he was buried in reading reports on his phone.
“Did you find something interesting?”
“Maybe sir,” she said slowly, opening up all the charts to show him. “There is a high amount of thermal energy and radiation from Virgo Station. They said there was a minor malfunction, but the data here shows something way, far beyond that.”
“What is your alternative hypothesis?”
“Like it’s an unshielded fission event, sir,” she offered. “A big one.”
“An unshielded fission event?” his skepticism was clear. “Barbet would be screaming from the rooftops if they needed help on that scale. They say it’s just a minor coolant leak.”
“With respect, sir, their official statement doesn’t match the terabytes of data coming from three of our assets. If it was just one of our satellites, we could consider it a sensor glitch. But for all three to show the same data? This is far more than a minor leak. The thermal signature alone suggests uncontrolled meltdown,” she said firmly.
The next week was spent going through internal reviews, second opinions, and bureaucratic friction. Each time, Sakura presented her findings. With each passing day, she collected new data which only reinforced her conclusions. And with each passing day, the crisis only seemed to be growing worse.
Back on Mars, Dario stood in front of a sealed airlock. The western modules were now closed permanently. It was far too radioactive even to go back for a moment to collect personal belongings. Even if they could get them now, they might be damaged beyond repair. Vic and other colonists lay in sleeping bags on the floor, their new beds, while they waited for news.
Dario didn’t know what to tell them. He couldn’t contradict Christover’s careful lies, but that meant their lives were potentially at risk. He didn’t dare let them see the chief medical officer either, because if any news leaked they would all be in trouble. The Geiger counter on his belt gave another angry chirp, disrupting his thoughts.
In the end, the leak came from NASA instead. Sakura realized that the official channels would be too slow, more concerned with protecting the reputation of the Barbets than present the truth. So she compiled the data: the damning graphs, satellite images, and digital twin simulations, into a single, encrypted file she could send off to an independent journalist’s digital drop box.
EXCLUSIVE: Leaked NASA Data Reveals Catastrophic Nuclear Meltdown at Mars’ Virgo Station
The headlines shocked the world. All the data and analyses painted a devastating picture of the crisis unfolding, directly addressing the lies Barbet made about everything being well-managed. The science bloggers quickly digested the data and shared it with their own audiences. Barbet was exposed as a liar. More than that, he was seen as a villain.
Governments demanded answers, burying Christover in oversight committees and inquiries. The corporate stock plummeted each day. Investors saw their billions turned into radioactive ash. Even though people demanded to hear from Dario, none of his messages were released to the public.
Minister Mathis went on international news interviews expressing his “profound shock and deep sympathy” while emphasizing the blame could not be placed on his “state-of-the-art” reactor and that it was a matter of “improper installation” and “negligence”. He was abandoning his partner when it was most needed.
Every morning, as the sun rose over the horizon, casting the planet in a sea of deep red, Dario managed to run the transceiver on emergency power. They watched the Earth-based news report with a growing apprehension. Everyone was talking about how doomed they were, and all they could do was keep surviving. The western habitat modules remained sealed and nobody was allowed to leave.
Dario felt responsible for his fellow colonists. They had been left behind by everyone, including his brother. He decided to send an encrypted broadcast to a backchannel he had established long before. The same independent journalist Sakura had contacted received a bulk download of internal logs showing the final moments of the reactor and Vic’s EVA suit which showed the glowing remnants.
“The dream of Mars has not died, but it has been gravely wounded,” Dario said in a short transmission. “We cut corners. We prioritized the speed of a black box over something far safer. And now our new home, and a significant portion of the planet, is poisoned for the foreseeable future. Virgo Station will likely never be inhabitable again. But we are still here, and we still need help.”
Dario had to break with Christover. He had bigger problems than satiating his brother. He arranged a rescue mission with NASA while Christover became buried in lawsuits and tribunals. After several months, after the colonists had developed acute radiation sickness, they were finally evacuated.
As Vic stood in the observation dome of the NASA Artemis rocket, looking down at the planet, he felt a deep sorrow. They were pioneers. They were supposed to be exploring the unknown. Now, all they had was pain and disease. He watched as rovers placed large warning beacons around the “Olympus Exclusion Zone”. Their faint blinking lights served as a reminder of the lethality that now defined a large region of that world.
While the rocket took them home, Dario remained in orbit to help organize international efforts at monitoring and containment. It was the least he could do to try making things right. His people were not safe, but at least they were going home to get necessary medical care. He knew he had to stay, in order to pass along his wisdom and his story of hubris to whatever explorers were to come here next.