The only reason any of them woke the following morning was the shrill beeping of the alarm that Melissa had set on her navicom. They roused themselves grumpily and had breakfast and a drink before reluctantly repacking their rucksacks and leaving the comparative warmth of the shelter.
"We're eating too much food, you know," announced Lucy as they set off away from their camp.
"We are?" Chris replied.
"Yeah, three sachets are enough for one day," she explained. "Not a day here, but a twenty-four-hour day. They are supposed to each replace an entire meal, so our food intake is probably double what it should be."
"You're right," said Chris. "But we're exerting ourselves a lot and working in sub-zero temperatures. I think we need it."
"I definitely need it," Fletcher laughed, patting his stomach appreciatively.
"We just restocked our rucksacks from the bag you brought out from the supply module. We're fine."
"You're not worried about running out before we've got an alternative food source ready?" she asked.
"No. We've got thirty tons of food in the module behind us and there should be the same amount in the next one."
"And, I hope this isn't too soon but, a lot of our team have died," added Kate. "What we've got will last longer than it was expected to anyway."
"Fair enough," Lucy shrugged. "Just don't say I didn't say anything."
"Duly noted," Chris smiled.
Over the next kilometre, the gradual upward slope in the gravel ended. After a short plateau where the ripples in the gravel seemed to be more pronounced, the terrain ahead of them began to slope very slightly downwards. Soon it was enough to improve their speed a little.
Ahead they could see huge mountains, much larger than those they had already passed through, rising on the other side of what now seemed to be a very shallow valley. A line of contrast snaked its way across the lowest point and Chris hoped it was not another crevasse; he still had the bruises from the last one.
With five hours of decent sleep behind them, a restock of their rations and gravity working a little in their favour, spirits were higher, and they made excellent progress. Chris noticed when ninety minutes had passed but, as no-one was complaining, he decided not to mention the morning break and kept them walking for longer.
It turned out that the first complaints did not begin until almost lunchtime. He pushed them onwards, telling them that he wanted to reach the bottom of the valley before they ate. They offered minor resistance, so the group kept moving for a while longer.
"There're loose rocks ahead of us," Lucy announced after a few more minutes trudging.
"I'd noticed," Chris replied. "Maybe we're nearing a change in the terrain. It would be good to get a break from this damned gravel. Why gravel anyway? Why not sand?"
"Would sand be better?!" laughed Lucy. "We'll need a geologist to explain why there's so much gravel."
"I want to see what's at the bottom of the valley," announced Kate. "It's looking like a river from here."
"It's not going to be a river on this planet," Chris replied. "Any water would have evaporated long ago."
"There's only four hundred metres to the wavy line," Melissa reported, studying the navicom.
"Okay, let's just get there, then stop for food. My legs won't take much more," said Chris. "Melissa, how far then to the next module?"
"From the wavy line? Erm...we've done just over five, so it will be about six to the module."
"This will be the furthest we've travelled in a day," said Kate.
"Which is why I want to make good progress. We need time to set up camp when we get there."
The slope steepened a little and soon the gravel showed signs of thinning out. It gradually gave way to a solid-rock surface scattered with jagged rock fragments. It was not pretty but at least it was easier to walk on. They could not work out what the wavy line was until they reached it and found it was a shallow depression, mostly smooth, winding its way in a gentle curve across the bottom of the slight valley.
"I think you were right, Kate," reported Chris after stepping down around twenty centimetres into it.
"There's no water!" she replied.
"No, but it looks like there was once. There's clearly water erosion in the shapes at the bottom and the loose stones, well some of them, look like pebbles. Nothing else we've seen has been smooth like this."
"Where did the water go?" she asked.
"I'm guessing it's floating around in the atmosphere now as vapour. Maybe the atmosphere was thicker in the past?" he suggested.
"Or something other than water flowed here," offered Fletcher.
Chris nodded at the possibility.
"We can sit on the edge of your 'river' to have lunch," Lucy suggested.
Lunch was brief then they walked carefully across the eroded track and stepped up onto the flat rock on the other side. For almost a kilometre, the flat rock continued before it began to slope upwards again and gain an increasingly dense scattering of loose rocks.
"Can I see the module?!" asked Lucy excitedly as they passed the seven kilometres mark.
Chris moved closer to her and attempted to follow where her finger was pointed. Sure enough, something metallic was catching the sunlight just below the mountains ahead, but it did not appear to be quite on their current heading.
"Looks like it," he agreed.
"That's not right," said Melissa, catching up and stopping between them.
"What's not right?"
"I don't know what that is, but the supply module is in the mountains, not this side of them. We definitely shouldn't be able to see it from here."
"So, what is that?" he asked.
"It could be part of the module or some of the Elysian, I guess," said Lucy.
"Why don't we have any binoculars with us?" asked Kate.
"Nobody thought of them, I guess," said Chris. "Look, we can't see what that is from here. For all we know, it's something tiny, some heat shielding or something shiny, catching the sun. How far off our route is it?"
"Not much," Melissa replied. "Well, not really. If I adjust our route by just under two degrees, we can walk right by it and only add a couple of hundred metres to our route."
"Good," he replied. "I think it's worth getting close enough to find out what it is, especially if there's a chance that the beacon is somehow giving us the wrong position or the mountains are maybe bouncing the signal to make it appear somewhere it's not."
"It doesn't work like that," Melissa replied. "And the position has remained completely stable since the satellite first acquired it. What we're looking at there, is something else."
"I think the only way we're going to find out what that is, is by paying it a visit," he said.
"It's not mapped on the navicom," said Melissa. "But if it's where it seems to be on the map, we've got about three kilometres to go."
"We can be there in less than an hour, if we keep going," he pushed.
For a while, the rocky surface showed what looked like stress fractures, but soon they were stepping over cracks and fissures in the rock and they kept getting bigger. Loose rocks of various sizes were an increasing problem too, threatening to trip them or throw them off balance at any moment. Keen to keep up their previous decent pace, they picked their way as best they could around and over the increasing density of obstacles.
What made their task even harder was the slowly increasing incline as the rocky ground tilted upwards towards the base of the daunting-looking mountain range ahead of them. Soon, instead of concentrating on the shiny object, they were mostly focussing on the tricky terrain beneath their boots.
"It definitely looks metallic," said Lucy when they were within a kilometre of the mystery reflection.
"It's got to be artificial," Chris added. "But I don't know what part of our ship that could be."
"Could it be a probe, or one of the satellites?" asked Kate.
"All the satellites are accounted for," said Melissa. "They're all still in orbit and functioning perfectly."
"Whatever it is, it's just as shiny as the stainless steel on the module hulls," said Chris. "We're getting very close. Just how big are those mountains?"
"Not big in Earth terms, but amongst the biggest on this planet," Melissa replied, again studying the screen of the navicom. "The two tallest peaks, are more than two kilometres high and the whole range is nearly eight kilometres deep and something like forty kilometres long."
"Are those the two tallest, at the left-hand end?" asked Kate.
"That's them," Melissa replied.
"They're like twins," Kate continued. "They're almost the same shape."
"And very close to the same height," Melissa added.
"One day, we'll have to name all these mountains," said Calvin.
"Well, how about the 'Twin Sisters' for those two?" Kate suggested.
"I'd vote for that," replied Melissa.
"Getting back to the point," Chris interrupted. "Whatever that metallic thing is, it looks like a ball to me. What parts of the Elysian are that size and shape?"
"It might be part of the fusion reactors or the propulsion system," Fletcher suggested.
"Possible," Chris replied. "The whole propulsion module must have come down somewhere, but none of it was that shiny before we left Earth. There's a blackened area around it too."
"That'd fit with part of the ship crashing down from orbit," Fletcher replied.
"Come on, let's get closer," said Chris, waving everyone forward.
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