The Alien Artifact 8 by V Bertolaccini Page A

area looked unchanged to him,
and the sand was not as deep as it seemed, and he proved that they
could not be properly hidden away.
    Eventually he returned to finish the last of
his research in the library, and searching through the last of the
documents.
    What was peculiar was he somehow sensed that
there was something missed out in the documents! So he was not
surprised when he found it, and it was hidden away in the last of
the documents, and it was a document about security services
watching Anders’s wife and he was sure they believed he intended to
meet her at some point, and it never happened, and he found a
photographed letter from her to him, which was her last letter to
him from the Earth to him on Mars, which mentioned his search for
something, which he was sure was the diamonds, and that he intended
to return to the Earth for good, and it mentioned the map and
Anders’s belief that the scientist, who actually was the astronaut
with him, had recorded the location wrongly.
    Cronenberg discovered suggestions that the
map, which had been made by the scientist, had more information
hidden on it, and Anders thought he was up to something!
     

Chapter 13
     
    The New Mission
     
    For an instant Cronenberg thought he could
die a hideous death, and he even considered what it would be like
being a ghost trapped out there on the desolate world.
    They had to land! Soon! Surely they should
not take the risk continuing to fly to their destination at night!
The shuttles were still new and the repairs on theirs was only
recently completed and they were trying it out for the first time,
and testing it for the first time over Mars, and he was sure they
had hardly even tested the thing out before they had given them it
back!
    Loud explosions and flashes had suddenly
appeared from somewhere out in the dark Martian night sky, and had
sent the whole shuttle shaking about, and he realized it had to be
some form of storm, created by the weak Martian atmosphere, and he
heard the other astronauts talking about it and announce it was,
from the information from their equipment.
    The entire crew was the same except for
Campbell who was replaced by Deputy Commander James Mitchell as the
new head flight engineer, and who incredibly resembled Campbell,
and had the same experience and was an astrophysicist/planetary
geologist, and was being helped by Rosenberg the other flight
engineer, and they were all basically checking the performance of
the shuttle and findings the new detection equipment aboard
gathered, especially in the unexplored regions they were
entering.
    He realized the shuttle might not be designed
for the storm and it could be far different from Earth storms, and
have incredible wind speeds, and he realized the shuttle could go
down and again crash on the surface of Mars.
    Though he could not imagine the empty
atmosphere coming out with a powerful wind, even though a high
speed wind could be generated, and he considered what had actually
taken them down the last time.
    The sky outside, over the space vehicle, was
so peculiar and strangely colored that he was sure that it was no
longer in the universe, and at the outer limits of the universe,
floating outside it somewhere.
    The problem with the mission was that they
were ordered to stick to the route they were given no matter what,
and he realized that if they were confronted by a storm ahead that
they would go straight through it.
    He recalled the shuttles were now shielded to
stop anything, after being taken down at the Antarctica the last
time, and they thought it would stop anything taking control of the
shuttles, and he thought it might help protect them from the
powerful energy disturbances in the outer storm.
    He switched on a small powerful light over
him, to properly see the booklet he was given with his orders and
the mission described on it, and he stared out one of the windows
at the surrounding darkness, and into visible stars there, and
started properly examining the