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first, climbing down the ladder until he reached the last rung. The thought of setting foot on another world should have made him feel giddy, but instead he hesitated. He couldn’t stop wondering what it had been like to die here.
    Or how bad it must have been for anyone to retreat to this dark hole.
    Nathan dismissed the thought and dropped off the ladder. In the reduced gravity, he drifted in slow motion, his boots barely making contact with the ground. He had to steady himself before he dared to walk, mortally aware of the precipice at the edge of the ridge. Even from here, Nathan felt it tugging at him—that enormous, empty space capped by a granular Martian sky. Shuffling toward it, he stole a glance over the side. The deep chasm stared right back at him, accelerating the pace of his breathing, the flow of his blood pounding in his ears.
    Kellean appeared at his side before he was aware of it.
    “Better watch your step, Commander,” she cautioned. “You’d have a long time to think about it on the way down.”
    Nathan flashed her a wary smile and turned away from the ledge. Pitch made a quick visual inspection of the ship, crouching next to one of the landing struts. “Everything looks stable,” the pilot said, his tone measured. “I wouldn’t stay out here too long, though. This volcanic rock can get pretty brittle.”
    Nathan patched the audio from his scanner into his helmet receiver.
    “Here goes nothing,” he said.
    Nathan took the lead, his first steps clumsy and uneven. He quickly got the feel of it and began hopping along, allowing his momentum to do most of the work. The others followed closely behind, all of them stopping at a wide opening in the face of the rock wall. It was like the entrance to a cathedral, an almost perfect triangle tapering into a long fissure that reached toward the heavens.
    “Light ’em up,” Nathan ordered.
    They switched on their helmet lights, which split the murky darkness just inside the cavern. In the settling dust, the beams slashed back and forth with each turn of their heads. Beyond, the craggy walls of the interior space quickly gave way to smooth, unnatural formations.
    “Somebody’s been digging here,” Pitch observed.
    Nathan moved in closer for a better look. Rock had melted and remolded itself sometime in the recent past. “Looks like a v-wave excavator,” he said, running his gloved hand across the surface. “Standard equipment for a combat-engineering battalion.”
    “Solar Expeditionary Force,” Kellean said quietly. “Looks like they were here, sir.”
    Nathan grunted in agreement, motioning his crewmates to move forward. Together, they entered the cavern. The large opening soon shrunk into a maze of tunnels—each one leading off in a different direction, each identical to the others.
    “Take your pick,” Pitch said.
    Nathan ran a concentrated sweep with his scanner. As he checked the results, he noticed that the active sensor pings bounced back, reflecting off the walls to create an interference pattern.
    “Must be shielding crystals embedded in the walls,” he decided. “No wonder our scans were so garbled. This whole place was designed to be a sensor trap.”
    “Camouflage,” Kellean commented. “Draped over these caves when the SEF dug this place out. It’s classic military. They wanted to be invisible.”
    “Even after the rescue crews showed up,” Nathan said, shaking his head at the irony. “Their ships could have rolled over this bunker and never known anyone was here.”
    “Must be in an advanced state of decay,” Pitch added, digging a chunk out of the wall with his hands. The porous rock crumbled between his fingers, bright flakes of shielding crystal flickering as they drifted to the ground. “Otherwise, we would have missed those signals from orbit.”
    “Lucky us,” Nathan said, adjusting the aperture on his scanner. He tightened the sweep, focusing sensor energy and hoping to reduce the effect of the magnetic