Semper Mars (12 page)

Still, it wasn’t how the sound carried in air that mattered, but how it was transmitted through the cold, dense-packed Martian regolith and the permafrost beneath. “Let’s have a look,” he told Kettering.

“Nothing yet,” Druzhininova said, looking at the screen.

Alexander checked the time function on his suit’s HUD. He was tired. Maybe one more run, God and incoming lobbers willing, and then he’d be ready to call it a day… no, a sol, he reminded himself. It was 1635 hours, MMT, and sunset at Cydonia this time of year came at about 2000 hours.

Craig Kettering looked up from the SIT panel. “So, David,” he said over the helmet radio. “What is it with you and that Joubert bi—”

Alexander made a slashing motion with his gloved hand. Although Kettering was using a suit-to-suit comm channel, Cydonia Prime’s microwave mast was visible from here, and only about a mile away. It was more than possible that people at Cydonia Prime were listening in—or that the conversations of people in the field were being recorded for later analysis and discussion.

“… uh… babe,” Kettering said, recovering. “She is a babe, you know…”

“We have a good, professional working relationship,” Alexander replied, carefully neutral.

To his credit, Kettering didn’t laugh out loud, or, if he did, he’d cut his helmet mike in time. It was no secret that he and Joubert hadn’t been speaking to one another since their arrival on Mars, just as it apparently was no secret that they’d been romantically involved aboard the Polyakov.

At first, Alexander had thought she’d been upset by the sudden arrival of the Marines in Polyakov’s storm cellar, but since they’d reached Mars, he’d become convinced that it was something more.

She’d been angry, of course, when Alexander and the Marines had landed directly at Cydonia. She’d come to Cydonia on the next scheduled lobber flight, along with the first contingent of UN troops returning from their brief redeployment to the equator. When she arrived, she’d come in like a whirlwind, quoting regulations, demanding daily reports, and even suggesting that her position as senior UN field director on this expedition meant that the US and Russian scientists had to answer to her. Her attitude could change with lightning suddenness, from sweet to imperiously demanding.

He was beginning to suspect that their liaison during the long trip out had been one of two things. Either she’d been bored and found him distracting, or, worse, she was trying to use their sexual relationship to get concessions from him. When he refused to grant those concessions, their personal relationship had dwindled away as though it had never been. He wondered if he’d ever really known her.

Alexander’s own directives were clear: treat the UN people with courtesy… but remember that this was an American operation, with UN people along as observers. Kenneth Morrow, the SECTECH himself, had talked to Alexander at length before he’d departed for Florida and the shuttle ride to orbit. Although the First Martian Archeological Survey was a civilian operation, it was funded completely by the government and came under the direct management and oversight of both the US Congress and the new Department of Technology. In other words, the UN scientists hitching a ride on the US-Russian cyclers could watch and they could conduct operations of their own—they’d purchased their seats, in effect, from NASA—but they didn’t set policy and they didn’t give the orders. Alexander was the senior archaeologist on the American team and as such answered only to Dr. Jason Graves, mission chief at Cydonia, and to Mission Control, back on Earth.

None of this had prevented Mireille Joubert from becoming a colossal pain in the ass, however. For over a week, now as Alexander had continued his survey, she’d demanded daily reports, demanded access to the survey team’s notes, planning meetings, and communications, even listened in on their conversations.

Politics…

David Alexander liked politics less than he liked the military… especially when it collided with archeology. Every time you tried crossing science with politics, you got trouble. As an archeologist, Alexander was preoccupied with facts. Unfortunately, facts tended to be inconvenient to politicians, and the two didn’t play well together.

He still couldn’t think about his last assignment in Egypt without a shudder.

Egyptology, once the most carefully reasoned and meticulously researched of sciences, was currently a mess, had been a mess since the turn of the century. For well over a hundred years, archeologists and historians had been confident about the order and the dating of Egyptian history… and in particular the identification of the Giza Complex—three large pyramids, six small ones, the Sphinx, and a number of associated ramps, roadways, temples, and tombs—with the Fourth Dynasty. In particular, the Great Pyramid, largest of the main three, had been known to have been built by the Pharaoh Khufu, who’d ruled Egypt from 2590 to 2567 B.C., while the Sphinx was believed to have been carved by Khafre, his brother, successor, and builder of the second tallest of the main pyramids.

All of that had been overturned during the past forty years or so. The Great Pyramid’s association with Khufu depended on the writings of Herodotus—who had been known to be wrong before—and some quarry markings that were almost certainly recent fabrications, an attempt by their nineteenth-century soldier-of-fortune discoverer to have something of substance to show his investors. The Sphinx, it had been discovered as far back as 1990, showed geological evidence of dating to a time long before Khafre; the carving showed the unmistakable scalloping of rainwater erosion… and it had not rained that much on the Giza Plateau since eight thousand years before Khafre’s day.

David Alexander’s principal expertise wasn’t Egyptology, but what he was expert at—Sonic Imaging Tomography—had a direct bearing on that highly specialized and bureaucratic subset of archeology.

The basic technique had been around for well over half a century. You set off an explosion underground, captured the sound waves scattered by buried structures, and used a computer to paint a kind of sonar picture of what lay hidden beneath sand, mud, soil, or water. Alexander’s equipment differed from older models principally in the sophistication of the AI software that did the actual imaging. From three separate but simultaneous blasts, the Honeywell Talus 8000 computer at Cydonia Prime could create a three-dimensional hologram in the same way that separate light sources could be used to compose a 3-D holopic. Anything less dense than solid rock became transparent on the SIT display screen, revealing buried rooms, walls, even individual skeletons and artifacts, all in astonishing detail.

Alexander had been part of an expedition to Egypt in 2037, sponsored by the American Museum and the Smithsonian. After three weeks of work on the Giza Plateau, he’d announced the discovery of an astonishing and heretofore unknown labyrinth of underground passageways and chambers, including what appeared to be a long-vanished waterway, fed by the Nile, which extended from nearly thirty meters beneath the Sphinx all the way to a gallery of chambers far beneath the Great Pyramid itself. The structure was so elaborate, the complex so vast, that he’d confidently asserted this was proof positive, at last, that the Giza complex predated the Fourth Dynasty.

Alexander could still remember the face of Dr. Salim Bahir, Egypt’s minister of antiquities, when he’d given the man his preliminary report. “Unacceptable!” the man had said, his fat lips pouting. “Totally and completely unacceptable!”

“I didn’t make this up,” Alexander had replied. “And it’s easily testable. Some of those subterranean structures show evidence of being made of wood.” That alone suggested that they’d been built long before this part of the world had turned dry! Trees had been in short supply in Egypt for at least nine thousand years. “Wood can be carbon-dated. And then we’ll know! Just as soon as we open up the way into—”

“Excuse me,” Bahir had replied, his manner stiff. “There will be no opening.”

“What? But these underground—”

“I repeat, no opening. The Great Pyramids, the Sphinx, these date from our Fourth Dynasty. That is established scientific fact.”

“So was the notion that the sun goes around the Earth. I think I’ve refuted the conventional dating.”

The flat of Bahir’s hand came down on his desk top with a sharp crack. “You have refuted nothing! You are a disseminator of vicious and anti-Egyptian propaganda! The Pyramids, the Sphinx, these, these antiquities are the very heart and soul of Egypt, of our culture, of who and what we are. You seek to tear these things from us, to give them to… to someone else. Someone you would claim occupied the Nile Valley long before the Egyptian people rose from savagery. This, Dr. Alexander, I will never allow. Not so long as I am head of this office.”

He’d found himself under arrest a few hours later… and by the end of the week he’d been deported “for attacking the host nation’s cultural institutions,” as the complaint lodged against him with the World Archeological Congress had asserted.

It had been a blow to his career, though the increasing tensions between the United States and the UN had actually served to make him something of a popular hero at home. Politics, again. When the decision was made to send a tomographic imager to Mars, he’d been the obvious choice.

Cydonia presented tomographic scanners with a special problem: much of the complex was at least partly buried in the permafrost layer, which lay some two to three meters beneath the surface in this area. Permafrost is essentially frozen mud; at Martian temperatures, ice is an extremely hard material. Indeed, there were plans to begin constructing buildings made from permafrost bricks. The stuff was so hard it was difficult to distinguish between it and the materials the long-vanished Builders at Cydonia had used—mostly native bedrock, at a time when Mars had enjoyed an ocean of liquid water—the Boreal Sea.

“Hey! I think we’ve got something here,” Kettering said. He pointed at the screen. “Is that an open space?”

“Too soon to tell yet,” Alexander replied, studying the screen. “Wait it out…” The features Kettering had pointed out were still little more than fuzzy gray shadows that suggested structures made of denser material than sand or ice, but they could be buried walls or buildings, or they might be sand-covered boulders. They did suggest an unusually orderly arrangement… a geometry of right angles, circles, and straight lines, and Alexander could feel his pulse quickening with excitement. It certainly looked artificial…

“Look here,” Kettering said, pointing at the SIT screen. “That’s got to be a passageway, a tunnel or something, right up against the wall of the Fortress. And with an airlock at the surface.”

“Or a ventilation duct,” Alexander replied, “with air-conditioning or pressurization equipment at the top.” He knew more than most the problems inherent in leaping to conclusions at the first encounter with new data.

Druzhininova was already using the display’s keyboard to take a set of bearings. The Martian magnetic field was weak, about two-one-thousandths as strong as Earth’s, making traditional compass navigation difficult to impossible, but navigation satellites in areosynchronous orbit let them pinpoint themselves, or visible landmarks, to within a few centimeters. All of the shapes and structures visible on the sonic display were now located on the computer’s master navigational grid.

“There,” she said, pointing. “Airlock or air conditioner, that’s where it is.”

Alexander looked at the spot where she was pointing—an otherwise unremarkable swelling in the ground where sand had piled up against the Fortress’s western wall. There was something there.

In the sixteen years since humans had first stood at this site, literally hundreds of artificial structures had been found, and most seemed to suggest that there was a truly vast and labyrinthine complex of tunnels and interconnected chambers beneath the Martian surface. That was why they’d brought him here, after all.

“Whaddya say, Dave?” Kettering said. Alexander could hear the grin in his voice as he reached for one of the shovels resting in an equipment rack on the Mars cat. “What could it hurt? At least we can have a look.”

Proper procedure called for flagging all new surface discoveries and bringing them up for review in the group research meeting held each morning. But as Kettering said… what could it hurt?

He hesitated a moment longer, then grabbed another shovel for himself. “Let’s go check it out.”

“Field Team, this is C-Prime,” a woman’s voice said in his helmet phones. “David? What are you doing?” It sounded like Mireille.

“Just checking something, C-Prime,” he said. “Wait one.”

“May I remind you that you are not to begin excavations until the site has been properly surveyed and mapped.”

“Yes, you may. We just want to check something here.”

Cydonia Prime was two kilometers distant. There was absolutely nothing they could do to stop the team from an act of what was certainly a breach of proper procedure… an act that Alexander knew he simply could not resist.

The hummock was perhaps a meter tall and four or five meters on a side, a mound of crusty soil against the Fortress wall that looked perfectly natural. Only the subsurface sonogram proved that a passageway ended right… here.

Gently, he scraped at the dirt with the blade of his shovel. The surface resisted at first, then crumbled away in great, frozen clots of earth, revealing…

… a hole. A hole leading down into blackness beneath the Fortress.

“Christ!” Pohl said, standing just behind Kettering and Druzhininova. “It’s open!”

“Field Team, this is CP! What’s open? What’s happening? Answer!”

Gently, Alexander touched his gloved finger to his visor, indicating silence, then tapped the side of his helmet. Keep down the chatter. They’re listening. He didn’t want to debate each move with the UN archeologists.

It took only a few moments to clear away the opening. Steps were visible. Apparently, some gray-colored, extremely hard material had been used to construct the walls of the structure, and the floor had been cast with steps. The tunnel was circular and about two meters across.