The thrusters turned on and the parachutes launched as we approached Mars's surface. 

“Jake!” Rob called out to me over the speaker in our space helmet, “Can we get confirmation that the landing gears are out?”

“They are,” I responded. Rob is my best friend who I met during astronaut training camp. I took a deep breath in and prepared for the moment my whole life had been leading up to. Our mission is a five-month-long trip to Mars to start building habitats that humans will eventually be able to move to to clear up some space on Earth.

As we broke through the atmosphere on Mars you could see fire through the window due to all of the friction. 

Over the loudspeaker on the ship, the AI voice counted down how many feet away we were from the surface, “30,000, 20,000, 10,000, 5,000.” The ship started shaking and a loud beeping noise started. 

“Prepare for landing!” Rob shouted. 

“500, 300, 100, 50, 10,” blared the speaker. There was a loud thud and I could feel the ship land. It was so silent for a couple of seconds you could hear a pin drop.

“Touchdown,” another crew member Maria said to break the silence. All eight of us erupted into clapping, cheers, and even some tears. We left our home planet about nine months ago and have been surviving on dried food and potatoes with limited water and we are finally here. Everybody stood up and gave hugs to each other. 

We took off the gear we used for the landing and changed into pajamas to get ready to sleep. We hadn't slept in a full twenty-four hours because of the preparation that had to be done for the landing. Everybody went to their bunk beds and went to sleep ready to explore the Martian surface of Mars the next day.

We all woke up feeling great. In no time everybody had their space suits on to explore what the red planet had to offer. The suits looked more like scuba gear because of the big oxygen tanks on the back. The air on Mars is made up of mostly carbon dioxide which humans can’t breathe. The rest of the suit was dark blue so we stood out from the red and rocky landscape.

After everybody did the final checks on their gear to make sure there were no holes or rips we were ready to go. The eight of us gathered in the chamber that we used to exit the ship. 

“Is everybody ready?” I asked. 

“Ready,” everybody said together. I pushed the button to open the doors and they slowly slid open. We departed what had been our home for nine months onto what was going to be our new home. The gravity was only about one-third the gravity on Earth so everything felt super light and bouncy. 

After minutes of taking in the sights and getting a feel for the planet, I noticed something strange that I had never seen before. Holes. Big cave-like holes in the sides of mountains. In all of the pictures I had seen of Mars, there was never anything that looked like what I was seeing. The more I looked around the more I noticed that there were several holes in every mountain. I told everybody and alerted the base on Earth that we were going to see what was inside. The closest one was only about three hundred feet away so we started our walk over. 

The entrance to the cave was about eight feet tall. As we approached the opening Nina, another crew member pointed out something concerning. 

“Guys,” she said with a trembling voice, “the opening doesn’t look natural,” she hesitated, “it looks, uh, man-made.” The thought set in. 

“I don’t know if we should go in just yet,” said Rob.

“It’ll be fine,” I assured everybody as I started in, but I wasn’t sure if it was. 

After five minutes of exploring, there was absolutely nothing. It was quite underwhelming. I was kind of expecting aliens but those obviously aren’t real. We would have found them already, right? I asked myself. The eight of us headed back to the ship to let Earth know there was nothing in the holes besides some dust and rocks, just like the rest of the planet's floor. I was looking at the ship as we were walking back and noticed something that couldn’t be real. The door to the ship was open. I looked around to make sure all eight of us were there and we were, nobody else went back to the ship. 

“Who did that?” I said pointing to the ship trying not to scare anybody. Everybody gasped together at the sight. As I got closer to the ship I saw not only the door was open, but it looked like it was pried open. I was trying to come up with explanations for what that could have been but I was blanking, there was no explanation. 

“You guys don’t think it could be what I think it is,” Nina said to us as we came up to the ship’s entrance. I knew she was referencing aliens but it couldn’t be. That’s what I thought until I saw footprints in the sand shaped like a large chicken foot. It looked about six inches long and there were multiple. 

“We’re not alone,” Rob said to me laughing. I think he was so surprised he didn’t know what else to do but laugh. The tracks led into another hole across from the one we explored. Everybody was thinking the same thing, we needed to follow those tracks.

After five minutes of walking, we were standing at the entrance staring at the prints leading into the cave. Everybody looked at each other. We nodded and headed in. We turned on the flashlights built into our suits to see ahead of us. We didn’t have to go anywhere to see where those tracks came from though. It was beautiful but scary. It was amazing but horrible. It was extraterrestrial life. There were hundreds of aliens in an underground city of life and nature. As we were all standing there we were too stunned to notice that almost all of them were staring at us. They were about four feet tall with skinny arms and legs. Their skin was orange and made up of rough scales. The eyes of all of the aliens that were staring at us were bulging out of their heads. 

“Run!” yelled Josh, who is usually the funny one, but he sounded very serious. I watched as he ran then turned my attention back to the aliens and realized why he was running. I quickly started running with Josh as I saw those creatures stampeding towards us. We had no idea if they were friendly or not but none of us wanted to stick around to find out. 

I approached the ship with most of the crew but then realized not all of us were there. I looked back to see Nina not too far behind but she was stuck on a rock. The aliens were pretty slow because of their short legs so I rushed back to Nina to help her. She tripped over a rock and fell face-first onto the carpet of dust. Her foot got stuck in between two rocks so she couldn’t pick herself up. The gravity was much less on Mars so I could just push the rock and move it to free her. I put my palms on the bumpy textured surface of the red rock and gave it a push. It moved to free her easily. She quickly stumbled onto her feet and started running to the ship. Rob looked at me with fear in his eyes while he was shaking his head. I got over there and somehow the door was now stuck shut. I went over to the screen on the ship and put in the password to open the door but nothing was working, the door was jammed. I quickly moved to the other side of the ship and tried everything. I was pulling, pushing, and banging but it was hopeless. We were trapped on Mars with a bunch of mysterious aliens and no shelter. Little did I know it would only get worse from there.

“Rip detected,” I heard the female AI voice built into my suit say. Rip detected?! I felt around the outside of my suit and ran my fingers across what it had been. Sure enough, down by my right ankle, there was a small rip. It must have happened when I was freeing Nina from the rock. This was very bad news. I knew that with a noticeable rip, you only had about five to ten minutes of extra air to breathe. We had to fix this ship fast. 

“Jake,” I heard someone call, “look!” I turned around to see that the crew and I plus our ship were surrounded by the little orange beings. A couple of them were now taking all of us by the hand to one spot on the ground. They pushed us down onto the soft red sand. It was surprisingly comfortable to sit in, but at that moment, I didn’t care how it felt. I was too worried about the rip I had. A countdown from seven minutes started on a screen by my wrist. Five of the aliens were standing in front of us making hand gestures trying to tell us something. Maybe they were going to eat us, they needed us to be their slaves, or they were telling us to give them everything we had. We had no idea. I looked past the aliens on guard to see that the other ones were somehow inside our ship rummaging around now. 

After five minutes of sitting and watching the aliens seem to destroy the inside of our ship, I had only two minutes until I would be breathing the air on Mars which wouldn’t work out too well for me. At this point I still hadn’t told anybody about the rip so I tapped Rob, who was sitting next to me, on the shoulder and showed him the bright red numbers on my wrist. It was like his soul was sucked straight out of him. His eyes widened and his jaw dropped. He knew exactly what those numbers were counting down to. Before we could speak some steam came out of the bottom of the ship near the hatch. It was just like what happens when you open the hatch. Then I realized they had opened the door. The aliens guarding us grabbed us and pulled us over to the entrance. They pushed us not so nicely a little way up the ramp. The aliens who had been on the ship walked on out past us in amazement while they examined us head to toe. They all stood outside the ship and did something I didn’t think they would. All of them just started walking back to their hole and left us alone. One of the aliens in the back of the group even turned around to look at us and waved. We awkwardly waved back. I turned my head to my wrist to see the number twenty-three change into the number twenty-two. Rob must have seen the numbers because he took me by the hand and pulled me up the ramp as fast as he could. He waved for the rest of the crew to come inside and once everybody had, he slammed the button to close the doors. I let out the biggest sigh of relief as I took off my helmet and got a whiff of the oxygen on the ship. 

“I guess they just wanted to help,” I said to everybody. 

“I’m still going in the ship and leaving them alone,” Rob said, “I want them to stay peaceful before we do something to make them mad.” Everybody laughed as we all had no idea what in the world just happened. I guess this trip is going to be a lot different than all of us expected.