Chapter 100: Investigation

As Jason finished his briefing, he bit his lip tightly. “If the UFO really does trigger some kind of automated environmental feedback mechanism, it means its internal power reserves haven’t been completely depleted. In that case, we need to be extremely careful! Nobody can guarantee its weapon systems are offline!”

Austin’s chest tightened. He had to admit that humanity had done everything in its power to prepare; the rest was up to fate. If things went south now, it simply meant the technological gap was insurmountable, and there was nothing they could do to fight back.

“The internal air quality telemetry from the UFO is in. It’s identical to the Martian atmosphere outside!” A scientist announced, pulling up the data on his terminal and comparing the readouts.

Jason nodded; this was clearly good news. “Keep moving forward!”

The squad of spider drones continued their advance, nimbly climbing and vaulting over metallic debris. Everyone in the command center watched the feeds, entirely on edge.

For humanity right now, “no news” was the best possible news. No reaction meant the UFO was likely a dead tomb.

The corridor was incredibly dilapidated and treacherous to navigate. In just a short time, several drones had already gotten snagged on the wreckage.

The deck plating was riddled with deep fissures. If a spider drone’s leg slipped into a crack, it lacked the mechanical leverage to pull itself free. To keep the mission moving, the operators had no choice but to remotely sever the trapped limbs, leaving the drones to limp forward on seven legs.

Furthermore, the UFO hadn’t landed flat on Mars; it had crashed at a steep 30-degree angle. Because of this, the corridor was a sharp incline. It was incredibly easy for the drones to lose traction and tumble backward into the dark.

Screech… screech… The drones’ metallic claws scraped against the hardened deck, transmitting a harsh, grating noise over the audio feed.

“Why don’t we just use aerial drones?” a council member muttered from the back of the room. “Wouldn’t flying over the debris be much easier?”

“The Martian atmosphere is far too thin to generate lift for standard rotor drones,” a technician quickly explained. “We can only use terrestrial crawlers.”

Suddenly, one of the engineers shouted in panic. “Something’s wrong! The magnetic field… I’m reading a localized fluctuation in the magnetic field!”

The room instantly tensed up. The scientific team frantically began analyzing the incoming telemetry, and the drone squad halted their advance.

Jason’s hands clenched into tight fists, and fine beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. He wasn’t as calm as he looked. He didn’t know what kind of lethal dangers lurked inside, but the technology within this ship was too vital for humanity’s future to just walk away!

After several agonizing minutes of running diagnostics, a middle-aged scientist finally let out a long sigh of relief and smiled wryly. “Jack, you misread the telemetry. That magnetic disturbance was generated by the servomotors in one of our own drones. It’s nothing else…”

The engineer named Jack chuckled awkwardly, scratching the back of his head in embarrassment.

It was just a false alarm. The collective anxiety in the room dissipated, and no one blamed him.

The drone squad quickly regrouped and pushed deeper into the ship. However, as they ventured further in, the extreme sensitivity of their own sensors became a hindrance. The drones’ own mechanical movements caused minor electromagnetic interference, making it difficult to distinguish between harmless background noise and actual alien activity. If this continued, mapping the ship would become impossible.

“This isn’t working,” Jason said, his brow furrowing. “Let’s just run the most disruptive tests first and get it over with!”

At his command, an engineer maneuvered a specific drone forward. The machine hopped a few steps ahead, and a thick, viscous liquid sprayed from a nozzle on its underbelly.

It was an incendiary compound that instantly burst into flames upon contact with the metal deck! Because the Martian atmosphere lacked oxygen, the liquid was a hypergolic mixture, combustibles mixed directly with a strong chemical oxidizer. The resulting chemical fire burned at over 1,000 degrees Celsius!

The room watched in dead silence, their eyes glued to the environmental readouts.

One minute, two minutes, three minutes… Aside from a localized spike in ambient temperature, nothing else changed. There were no alarms, no automated fire retardant foam, nothing. The defense mechanisms inside the UFO seemed completely dead.

A dozen minutes later, the chemical fire burned itself out, leaving only a scorch mark and some oily black ash. The sensors picked up zero anomalies.

No news was good news!

A ripple of excitement ran through the command center, and even Jason visibly relaxed.

“Keep going!”

The incendiary drone repeated the test in four or five different locations until its fuel reserves were completely drained, finding absolutely nothing. The UFO didn’t react to the internal fires at all. Was its power truly completely drained? Or was its sensor grid just irreparably damaged?

This absolute silence made Jason wonder if his initial sense of dread had just been paranoia.

Next, the other specialized drones unleashed their payloads, deliberately causing havoc inside the corridor. They discharged high-voltage electrical arcs, deployed thick thermal smoke, emitted strong magnetic pulses, triggered small localized explosions, and even vented concentrated bursts of nuclear radiation!

But the UFO remained a dead tomb. It ignored the drones’ reckless vandalism completely.

With no anomalous data detected, the scientific team finally let down their guard. This deathly silence was exactly the outcome they had been praying for!

Jason’s brow, however, remained slightly furrowed. He wasn’t going to completely drop his guard just because these initial tests succeeded. The silence was reassuring, but it didn’t definitively prove the entire vessel was safe, only that this specific corridor was likely inactive.

“Initiate free-search mode,” he ordered. With the hazard tests complete, the drones could now focus on salvage. They were just expendable machines anyway; if one stumbled into a trap, it was an acceptable loss.

Hearing the order, the engineering team eagerly took manual control and began scouring the area. Since the drones were small and the terrain was a jagged mess, spreading out to search individually was much more efficient.

An hour later, they actually made a breakthrough!

After painstakingly combing through the debris, one drone found a cluster of small alloy fragments, each about the size of a soybean tucked away in a corner. The corridor was filled with massive, unbreakable slabs of warped metal, so finding loose fragments small enough to transport was incredibly rare. It was a massive win.

The materials scientists in the room practically screamed in joy; they were desperate to get their hands on actual physical samples!

Nearby, another drone’s optical feed panned across a fractured bulkhead. Within the exposed mechanical housing, alien gears and circuitry were faintly visible.

“Look at this… this was originally a bulkhead door!” an engineer speculated excitedly, pointing at his screen. “Those mechanical housings are clearly designed to drive an automated door. See the track grooves and the actuator mounts?”

He highlighted a massive, warped slab of metal leaning haphazardly against the wall. If flattened out, it would perfectly match the dimensions of a heavy rectangular blast door.

“I’m going to take a look inside,” he announced, steering his drone toward the dark gap behind the fallen door. The spider drone darted through the opening.

In that exact instant, the video feed violently shuddered, and the optical sensors dissolved into heavy static!

Startled, the engineer desperately jammed the controls in reverse. The drone stumbled blindly over a raised floor plate and tumbled backward into the corridor with a loud metallic CLANG.

“Over here! Director, we have a major problem over here!” the engineer yelled.

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