Lost in the Stars

by Stevenspielbergwriter3

When faced with losing their careers, the Chipmunks and Chipettes agree to a wild publicity stunt funded by NASA. But things go horribly wrong as they are stranded in the depths of space with virtually no hope of ever making it back to Earth. In situations like this, they realize you must fight with every breath in your body just to survive.

9. Remnants of the Omortson Mission

I'm not gonna say much, except that I think you guys will really enjoy this chapter. Hopefully, I'm right.

Chapter 9: Remnants of the Omortson Mission

Alvin's POV

Simon dropped the flashlight on the floor from shock. I backed up, holding my motion tracker up in front of me in the direction of the lifeless pile of bones. "I'm still not reading anything," I called into the darkness, which echoed in the massiveness of the garage we were standing on.

Calming himself down, Simon picked his light back up and shone it back into the opening in the side of the rover. "Oh God," he whispered.

The fingers of the skeleton still clutched the handgun as if it would save him. His eye sockets seemed to be gazing right at me.

"What in hell could have happened?" Jeanette's voice squeaked over the radio.

"I dunno," I said, shuddering.

"Perhaps a mutiny," Simon suggested, moving slowly towards the lifeless skeleton.

"But if that's the case," Jeanette said, "then where's the last man standing? There had to have been one."

I hopped onto the steps and through the opening on the side of the rover, making sure to avoid the bones. Simon followed close behind me. As soon as we were in the belly of the vehicle, Simon shone the light back down on the poor bastard's remains.

"Looks like he's been here a while," Simon commented. "At least a year or two, I'd say."

My eyes automatically followed the light, as my brother turned around to illuminate other parts of the rover. I'm pretty sure my heart jumped into my throat at what we saw next. The whole floor of the rover, including the cockpit, was littered with even more skeletons. All of them were mangled, disfigured, bent in weird shapes. And all of them were armed to the teeth.

Simon shone the light on all twenty or so of them at least twice, as if to double check that they were dead. One thing was for sure, which was that they all died fighting. The inside of the rover was decorated with weird scratch marks and torn up seat cushions.

I checked my motion tracker. "No life," I said.

Instead of answering me, Simon walked around some of the remains and studied them as if searching for something.

"You guys should move on and check inside the building," Jeanette said.

"Yeah right," I scoffed. "I've seen enough of this place. You can count me out."

"You just said so yourself, there's no life around," Jeanette retorted.

"Oh yeah, sure. That's easy for you to say back on the ship, Jeannie."

Simon butted in, defending his girl. "Look, if we don't get to the bottom of why these guys were here, then there really wasn't even a point of us coming here in the first place."

"Fine by me," I snorted. "I say we dip out and never come back again."

He looked at me slyly. "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm trying to reach Alvin Seville. Ya know? The brave one. Have you seen him around."

"You're one corny son of a bitch, Simon," I said, rolling my eyes. "Fine, we'll keep going. But I'm just tagging along to protect you."

My little brother chuckled. "Of course."

Simon led us out through the open hatch door and down the steps to the floor of the garage. As we made our way towards the door at the other end, I was checking my motion sensor religiously. One small reading (that wasn't Simon), and I was secretly ready to bail.

Opening the door was as easy as jumping and hanging off of the handle until it swung gently ajar. Well, at least it was easy for me. Simon was the one who actually had to do it. I crawled inside, which was not easy to force myself to do with no light, held it open for him, and then closed it behind him.

Simon looked around. We were in a depressurization chamber, a room that was designed to convert the air from that of Mars to give it oxygen and make it breathable. Suddenly, the chamber began to hiss as it filled with fog. This was nothing new to us, of course. We were just surprised that it was working.

When the fog finally lifted, Simon said, "Check the conditions."

I did and reported, "oxygen and humidity levels normal, but temperature's just above zero fahrenheit."

"Well you're welcome to take your helmet off, if you wish," Simon chuckled.

"Pass," I said, approaching the other end of the chamber. "Come on, let's get this over with."

Using the same methods as before, we exited the chamber and entered a long dark hallway with tall lockers lined up all the way down on both walls. Each of the green lockers had a first initial and a last name on them. Some of them were wide open, some of them just a crack.

Out of curiosity, I picked the partially opened locker of a "T. Vasquez" and opened it fully.

"Alvin, what are you doing?" Jeanette scolded me.

Noticing right away that this locker belonged to a woman, I joked, "I don't think she'll mind too much if I take a look."

"You're so messed up," she said in disgust.

Vasquez turned out to be a Mrs. with two daughters, which I learned from the picture she kept on a shelf next to a loaded handgun. An assault rifle hung from a hook, over a pile of letters. I picked up the top one and read it. It was a typed and printed message from her husband, received on the date of January of last year. It talked about how he was glad that the mission in Afghanistan was going smoothly, and that he and the kids were going to be happy to see her in a couple weeks.

A couple weeks. And by the looks of things, she had never made it home.

"All of these lockers have guns in them," Simon noted.

"Were these people… soldiers?" I asked.

"Look!" Simon said.

I turned to look in the direction he was pointing his flashlight. Above the hatch to the depressurization chamber from which we came, was a motto written with sticker letters that read, "ARMY CADETS ARE LUCKY… TO HOLD MARINES' JOCK STRAPS".

And at that moment all three of us knew. These things had belonged to Marines. And something had taken them out.

Simon began to walk on, meaning I had to follow him. Just as Simon rounded the corner past the hallway, my motion tracker picked up two signals only about 25 yards away from him. "Woah!" Simon gasped, diving for cover back in the hallway.

I was ready to run, but Simon got ahold of himself and took a peek back around the corner. He eased up and came out from hiding, standing tall in the middle of the intersection. Out of vague curiosity, I joined him to see what he was looking at.

Two automatic sentry machine guns locked onto me the second I popped out from around the corner and followed me until I stood right next to Simon, where they stayed aiming directly at us menacingly.

"They're out of bullets," Simon said. "Otherwise we'd be dead already."

"How are they still going?" I said, locked in a staring contest with the guns.

Simon shrugged. "Solar power, I'd assume. Come on, let's move on."

I followed Simon cautiously as he walked in the direction of the sentry guns. He was confident, I was not. Those guns remained locked onto us until we had passed them at which point they turned back the way we had come.

As we walked, Simon in front with the flashlight and me tagging behind him with the motion tracker, we came across another human skeleton. But this one was in several pieces and certain bones were cracked. The hand had been ripped clean off, and there were several holes in its skull. The area around the remains were burnt, with shreds of shrapnel stuck in the floor, walls and ceiling.

We rounded another corner, only to be startled by a second pair of sentry guns which activated and locked onto our heat signal the second we came within range. To our relief, they too were out of bullets.

"These sentry guns hold a lot of bullets," Jeannie said. "Imagine what it took in order for them to run out."

We chose to ignore her as we walked past the intimidating machine guns just as we had gone past the last pair. But it wasn't long before we had to come to a stop.

Just ahead of us was a massive blockade, made from welded chairs, tables, polls, and a bunch of of random metal objects. It was at least a couple yards thick and stretched almost all the way to the ceiling, just barely leaving the sign above what was probably a doorway unblocked. It read, "Control Room".

Simon shined his light up and down the makeshift blockade, which reflected much of that light and illuminated random fragments of the hallway. We found a small opening up near the top of the blockade, not big enough for any human to fit through but just wide enough so that Simon and I could crawl through one at a time.

My brother and I exchanged glances, in which apparently we decided that we were gonna try to see what was on the other side.

"Jeanette, we're going in," Simon said as he began to climb.

"Be careful," she said in a worried tone. "Both of you."

"I appreciate the concern, Jeannie," I said as I began to climb up after my younger brother.

It wasn't that hard a climb, as there were plenty of miscellaneous piece of metal for us to grab onto and pull ourselves up. In no time we were both near the top, peering nervously through the strange hole that existed in the middle of this heavy duty blockade. Simon used the flashlight to try to see where it led. The other side was still black, but you could see that the tunnel was carved through this blockade in a rush, judging by the jagged points of metal sticking out from everywhere.

This time, I volunteered to go first. With my tracker still in hand, it was all I could do to make it through this dangerous tunnel without tearing even the smallest hole in my Mars suit. Simon did his best to light up the path ahead of me as he followed. I was panting heavily as we neared the end of the tunnel, as holding myself away from the deadly points coming from all directions was very exhausting.

I finally made it through, followed not too shortly by Simon. "You good?" I asked him.

"Yeah," he replied graciously as I helped him out.

After adjusting himself, Simon flashed the beam down at the floor below us.

More dead skeletons were literally piled up, at least a couple feet high. It was a big room, with a large glass table at the center and several screens all around, both on the walls and on desks. Most of those screens were now either completely destroyed or at least cracked.

We climbed down with relative ease, having no choice but to step on human bones with a sickening crunch once we had reached the floor. The room had one way in and out, which was effectively blocked by the huge wall of welded chairs and tables.

"My God," Simon sighed in horror. "This was damn-near genocide!"

We tried to walk over, across, and through this ocean of bones as quietly as possible, searching for any more clues.

As I strutted along, I was thinking back to what Megs told me before takeoff. I was beginning to realize that it wasn't Simon or any of the others that I was supposed to watch out for, but possibly something much more deadly.

Eventually, we made it atop the large dusty glass table. We took one more good look around what used to be the "Control Room" but what was now a giant tomb. We were surrounded by death.

"The attack must have started in or near the rover garage," Simon said. "They probably fended it off out there for a good while, giving the rest of the Marines a chance to set up the sentry guns and weld together that barricade. This was their last stand."

"Last stand against what?" Jeanette asked.

I dusted off part of the table, only to realize that the table was actually a big screen. As I jumped in surprise, the screen suddenly lit up. It was a giant version of the Caesar's Motherboard. The screen read "OMORTSON MISSION SYSTEMS", with "Solar Power 23%" at the bottom right corner.

There was no keyboard, so I tried speaking, "give me a system update!"

"Understood." It said back to me. Statistics began appearing on the screen in a list as the computer read them allowed to us: "Sentry ammunition depleted, light and camera systems shut down in emergency attempt to conserve power, remaining Marines: 0."

"Show the most recently saved surveillance feed," Simon said.

The screen suddenly turned into a grainy video playback, much like what we had back on the ship. We could see men and women in suits and in uniforms, dashing about like mad, arming up in different rooms and screaming at each other. Then we turned to the camera inside this room, which showed a tall man who looked like an officer standing at the very table we stood on at that moment. He said something, and then the whole room suddenly went dark as the lights turned off, and then the whole screen went black. Only the words "Video playback ended" appeared at the center of the computer.

"What is the Omortson Mission directive?" I asked.

"To seek out and destroy any and all life forms on Mars."

Neither Simon nor I said anything, as we needed to let all of this sink in. Suddenly, a small, quick beep sound arose from my tracker. I looked down at the motion detector and my eyes widened. "Simon, we've got movement," I said nervously.

"Where?" he gasped.

I turned in the direction the dots at the edge of my screen were at, like a compass, and pointed at the wall in that direction.

"But that's outside the building," Simon said.

"It's a real faint signal," I said. "It's not very close. But it's reading right man, look!"

Simon peered at my tracker suspiciously. "It looks like… they're just moving in place?"

There were several small dots that had appeared at the edge of my tracker, but none of them seemed to be going anywhere. "What do we do?" I asked my captain.

"I dunno. They could be survivors. First things first, we need to get out of here," he responded, hopping down from the table and landing on a human rib cage with a loud crunch.

"That's the first smart thing you've said today, Si," I snarked, following his lead.

Theodore's POV

I typed in the code and entered the cockpit, prompting a jump and a gasp from Jeanette. "Oh God, Theo! It's just you," she sighed.

I eyed her suspiciously. "What's wrong?"

"Oh nothing," she said chuckling nervously. "How's Brittany doing?"

I shrugged. "She seems to be better. She's resting now. Ellie's trying to figure out what happened to her."

"Well, that's great to here," she said.

I stepped closer to the Motherboard screen, where I could see the live feed of both Alvin's and Simon's helmet cameras. "Holy Hell," I said with wide eyes. "What happened there?"

"To be perfectly honest, Theodore, we still don't quite know."

I was way too confused to let that slip as an explanation. "What'd they find."

She sighed and sat back down. "It's gonna take a while to explain, but I'll do the best I can."

Simon's POV

We made it all the way back through the garage and back to our beloved rover with relative ease and speed. As we stepped into our little rover, which was refreshingly the perfect size for us, we allowed it to depressurize the air around us. But I stopped Alvin before he could take his helmet off. "No!" I scolded him.

"What's your problem," he growled.

"We're going to go find out what's making that movement signal," I said.

He rolled his eyes at me. "You're insane."

"Just get in there and start up the rover."

He did as I told him, neither of us bothering to buckle in. The signal on the motion tracker was coming from the opposite side of the Omortson HQ as where we had parked. Alvin begrudgingly rolled the rover forward and hugged the walls of the giant building. Without even putting his foot on the gas pedal, Alvin steered us all the way around to the far side of the haunted building we had just explored.

The signal on the detector was getting slightly stronger, but it still hadn't gone anywhere.

Alvin broke us away from the walls and began navigating us through a field of giant solar panels that had gone unattended for so long that they were now completely covered in Mars dust. He carefully swerved and weaved around each solar panel that was in our path, as the beeping coming from the tracker was getting stronger.

We finally cleared the abandoned solar field, but we could see nothing ahead of us except for a fast approaching red mountain. I checked the motion tracker in confusion and came to a realization. "The signal is coming from… inside that mountain," I said in amazement.

"That's impossible!" Alvin scolded, keeping his eyes ahead of us.

Alvin slowed us to a stop and parked and shut off the engine just at the foot of the giant rock. As we exited the rover, I marvelled at just how massive it was compared to us. You could see the hues of red beginning to glow in the sky, as the sun was beginning to rise.

I brought the flashlight with me as I approached the foot of the mountain, with Alvin walking behind me staring down at the motion detector. "This can't be… what could be moving inside of a mountain?"

I reached the point where the red rock met the dusty ground, except, to my shock, it didn't! At the foot of the mountain, there was a ditch that was just wide enough for a chipmunk of our size to crawl through. But the rock didn't go all the way to the bottom of the ditch. It instead looked like it had been carved out or dug through, leaving an opening several meters long through this whole ditch. "Looks like there may be more inside this mountain than we thought, Alvin," I said as I rolled into the ditch.

I crawled underneath the wall of red rock, which was only about a foot or two thick, and stood up on the other end. I was inside the mountain, where besides the small amount of light that seeped through the ditch, it was almost completely pitch black.

As Alvin rolled in behind me, I could hear static coming through our feed. "Jeanette? Are you getting all of this?" No reply came except static, as Alvin rose to his feet beside me and brushed the dirt off of his suit. "Jeanette?"

Jeanette's POV

"What the hell?" I muttered.

Static. There was nothing on the motherboard screen except static. There was nothing coming through the headset except static.

"Simon?" I tried to reach my lover. "Are you still with me? Simon?"

"Must be getting some interference," Theodore suggested.

Obviously, but from what? I tried again, "Simon? Alvin? If anyone can hear me, sound off."

Simon's POV

Nothing. No answer. Just static.

"Must be getting some interference," Alvin said. He then checked the motion tracker, and his voice turned to a whisper. "Simon, the movement is all around us,"

I froze, as we had not heard a single noise coming from anywhere except each other. I finally got up the courage to turn on my flashlight, and shine it over the ditch which was only about waist-high. My older brother and I peered cautiously over the edge to see what we could see.

The whole place was engulfed in a hazy green fog. It was a cave about ten feet high, and a square footage of about three hundred.

We didn't see anything moving. All we did see was a cave floor that was littered with several dozen small, green-glowing rocks. "Are those… eggs?" Alvin whispered.

I pulled myself out of the ditch, with Alvin following my lead, and shined my beam of light down on the nearest rock. It looked gooey, made of gelatin, and partially see-through. Inside we could see the unmistakable light squirming of some type of strange embryo. One thing was for sure: it was an egg, and it wasn't human.

My scientific instincts kicked in immediately as my mind began racing.

"Alvin, take note of the conditions inside of this cave," I commanded, looking around to make sure there was nothing else about.

"Why?" he asked, raising an eyebrow at me.

"Just do it," I barked.

He rolled his eyes. "Fine." He looked down at the motion tracker. "Oxygen levels 0.9 percent, 99% humidity, temperature 70 degrees fahrenheit."

"Excellent," I said, picking up the nearest egg. "Let's both try to remember that."

He looked at me with wide eyes, knowing exactly what I was up to. "Woah, woah, woah! Are you crazy, Si?"

I walked past him towards the ditch, carefully cradling the egg in my arms. "This is the only Martian life-form ever recorded in Earth's history," I explained to him. "This is the opportunity that probably no one else will get for decades! I can't just pass it up."

"What if its mother misses it?" Alvin protested.

I rolled my eyes. "This cave has almost a hundred eggs. She'll probably never even notice it's gone. Now come on! We gotta get this thing back to the ship!"

Hmm. Well, first things first, I want to apologize for the fact that Alvin's POV took up most of that chapter. I know a lot of you guys like it better when I jump from chipmunk to chipmunk frequently.

Hopefully, if you're reading this now, it means you didn't mind that so much and read all the way through. For that, I thank you.

I want to remind you guys as always to please leave a review and let me know exactly what you thought. And that includes praise OR constructive criticism. Ideally a review for me contains both.

Once again, you guys are all awesome and your support means the world! Next chapter will get posted soon! Till then, PEACE!