Semper Mars (32 page)
They were descending fast and passing now, he saw, their primary navigational checkpoint, the imposing bulk of the D&M Pyramid.
From this vantage point, the thing was enormous… a titanic structure that dwarfed the tiny lobber to an in-significant mote. It was a mountain, just over three kilometers across from north to south, two from east to west, and reaching nearly a kilometer into the sky. It wasn’t a classical pyramid in shape, of course, since it was five-sided instead of four. The term pyramid had stuck, however, because of the markedly smooth and regular sides. Even though it had almost certainly started out as a mountain, the thing had an uncannily artificial feel to it, a precision of orientation and regularity that suggested it had been reshaped by intelligence, just as the far more famous Face twelve kilometers to the northeast had started off as a mesa but been reshaped by means now unknown. Desert winds can carve natural pyramids, called vents, but those tended to have three sides only, with the sharpest angle facing into the wind; the D&M Pyramid had five sides, with gigantic buttresses at each corner. The surface was eroded so far that it was impossible to tell what it had looked like originally, but the unmistakable hand of intelligence still showed in the design and in its looming, brooding presence.
Most telling of all, though, from Garroway’s point of view, were the signs that the D&M Pyramid had been deliberately destroyed. Almost directly below the shuttle, a few hundred meters from the pyramid’s eastern face, a tunnel plunged into the depths of the Martian surface, a crater… but not a natural one. Something had struck the surface there millennia ago, tunneling deeper into the ground than a typical meteor, then detonating far below the surface. Part of the eastern face of the pyramid had bulged slightly, and a great deal of debris had cascaded down those unnaturally smooth sides.
Garroway looked up and spotted Alexander in his civilian EVA suit, pressed up against another porthole nearby. The archeologist had volunteered to serve as guide in unfamiliar terrain, and Garroway was happy to have the man along. He’d talked some with the scientist about the evidence indicating that the Monument Builders had been attacked. Archeological teams had made initial surveys of the D&M area, but outside of confirming that the structure appeared to have been destroyed by an interior explosion—and that the tunnel-crater was now blocked with fused debris—little was known either of the structure’s original purpose or of who destroyed it, and why.
Alexander, Garroway thought, was a man with a crusade, determined to seek out and publish the truth, no matter what the cost to himself… or to others. That was fine with Garroway, who’d always stood by the principle that the truth was better than a lie. I wonder, though, he thought, what we’ve unleashed back on Earth. The UN was damned sure they wanted Alexander’s discoveries buried, and they must have their reasons.
The hell with it. If this is a fight between suppressing free speech and free scientific inquiry, and shouting the truth to the world, I know which side I’m on.
With a savage jolt, Rocky Road’s pilot increased thrust on the lobber’s engine, slowing their rapid descent toward the desert. Garroway had to straighten up away from the porthole to keep his balance. Outside, red dust exploded upward past the window, sharply cutting the golden sunlight streaming in from the west.
Then there was a bump, and they were down.
“All right, Marines!” Lieutenant King called out. “Hit the beach!”
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” Sergeant Jacob added. “Haul ass, Marines!”
They swung out into the central corridor, awkwardly grabbing the ladder rungs and clambering down toward the cargo deck. Garroway allowed himself to be caught up in the rush, descending rapidly, threading his way through the cargo bay, then down the ramp and onto the Martian surface.
Garroway trotted onto the sand, his ATAR—freshly drawn from the recaptured stores at Candor—at port arms, and took a wondering look around. He’d thought his weeks in the Valles Marineris had cured him of any awe over something so commonplace as scenery. The Cydonian landscape was, in a way, the opposite of the canyons and rilles on the equator, however. There, you felt hemmed in by four-kilometer vertical walls of red rock; here, the horizon was flat and far, but the various mesas, mountains, and, above all, the black-gray bulk of the D&M Pyramid thrust up into the pink-red sky like giant’s teeth, monuments to human insignificance.
The Marines spread out into a broad, defensive perimeter as soon as they hit the beach. After a moment’s careful check with various sensors, both in their suits and aboard the Rocky Road, Lieutenant King trotted up to Garroway. “The area looks clear, sir. Maybe we caught ’em napping.”
Garroway grinned behind his visor. “Well, if they were, they’re awake now. C-Prime has a pretty decent traffic-control radar system, as I recall. They’ll’ve seen us coming and know exactly where we touched down. Let’s get our people moving.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
“Sergeant Jacob!”
“Sir!”
“Set the beacon.”
“Aye, aye, sir!”
They’d touched down about a kilometer north of the D&M Pyramid. Cydonia Prime was seven kilometers to the north, though Garroway fully expected to be stopped long before they got that far.
That, after all, was a part of the plan. He checked his suit’s clock. 1229 hours.
He hoped Harper’s Bizarre was on sched. If she wasn’t, Bergerac’s prediction about the outcome of this little outing was going to become entirely too accurate.
1657 Hours GMT
Cydonia Two aboard MSL Harper’s Bizarre
Over the Face
1412 hours MMT
“You two tucked in okay, back there?” Elliott’s voice said over Knox’s headset.
“Yeah,” Knox replied wryly. He turned and checked the armor-suited form of Staff Sergeant Ostrowsky, lying in the acceleration couch next to his. She grinned and gave him a thumbs-up. “Tucked in is one word for it, I guess. I never figured I’d end up as bombardier on an air strike, though.”
Captain Harper Elliott laughed. “And I never thought I’d be flying close support for a bunch of jarheads. Hang on. This could be a bit bumpy.”
With a shrill roar, the Mars shuttle’s nuclear engines fired, converting methane to white-hot plasma and kicking the ungainly transport into the sky. Knox felt the familiar, smothering weight of high acceleration, a weight that faded away seconds later as Harper’s Bizarre entered her suborbital trajectory. Now they were skimming across the Martian desert at an altitude of about a thousand meters.
They’d left Candor Chasma just behind the Rocky Road, but they’d followed a different flight path, landing thirty minutes later inside a crater in Deuteronilus, some one hundred kilometers east of the Cydonian Complex. There, Captain Elliott had spent the last hour refueling the main reaction mass tanks from strap-on spares, which were discarded once they were empty. This gave Harper’s Bizarre a full fuel load for the final leg of the mission.
They were going to need it. Instead of making a second high-trajectory lob, they were staying closer to the Martian surface, barely clearing some of the higher mountains, and using the shuttle’s main engines to kick them a bit higher from minute to minute, to keep them airborne in a nearly flat trajectory. It took more fuel that way, but it also reduced the chances that Cydonia Prime’s radar would pick them up on the way in.
Time passed. Knox tried not to think about it. Everything was riding on Harper’s Bizarre and her mission. Eventually, though, Elliott called down again from the cockpit. “Okay, guys, we’re coming up on the final leg here. I’ve got the beacon.”
“Outstanding!” Ostrowsky said. “The op’s a go, then!”
“Looks that way,” Knox said. The beacon meant that Garroway and his people were down and now walking toward Cydonia Prime. If there’d been no signal, they would have aborted and landed in the desert.
“I can promise you another few minutes without too many bumps,” Elliott said, “so you’d better get set up and ready now.”
“Roger that,” Knox replied. “Let’s go, Ostie.”
“I’m with you, Gunny.”
Carefully, he clambered down the ladder and into the lobber’s cargo bay. The main cargo doors had been removed, and he could look out through unobstructed emptiness to the desert and mountains drifting along below.
“Five minutes, Gunny,” Elliott called down to him from the cockpit. “You ought to be able to see ’em now.”
Clutching his safety line, which held him secure to a bulkhead support, Knox leaned out of the open hatch just enough to look ahead and down. They were traveling west, toward the sun; southwest, the impossible, smooth-sided shapes of the Cydonian pyramids rose black and mysterious from the crater-pocked sands. He looked straight down and suppressed a start. The Face, in all its astonishing, scale-of-giants weirdness, lay less than three hundred meters below. Eyes, each with the surface area of a football stadium, stared sightlessly up at the tiny NIMF lobber as it traveled overhead. The mouth, lips slightly parted, showed irregular plates that might have been intended to represent teeth, each the size of a city block.
The sight shook Knox. This close, the countless imperfections and irregularities in the rock conspired to make the mountain-sized artifact look more natural, less like something deliberately carved from a mesa by alien engineers. It was almost possible to imagine that the people who still insisted that the Face was of natural origin were right.
Gunnery Sergeant Knox was not a particularly imaginative person, and he didn’t tend to see faces in clouds or rocks or chance combinations of smudges on Rorschach tests or the grime on a linoleum tile floor. It still looked like a face to him, though, in a heavy-browed, blunt-muzzled way, and its stare from this range was distinctly unsettling, making him feel like a dandelion seed slowly drifting over a reclining human’s head.
Nonsense!. Hell, the damned thing probably was a freak of nature. It was strange, yeah, but he’d seen strange things on Earth, too. Not as big, maybe.
What was it about that thing that had made the UN willing, even eager, to go to war? It didn’t make sense…
Knox tore his eyes from the compelling, Sphinx-like skyward gaze of the Cydonian Face, staring instead along the shuttle’s line of flight. Eight miles ahead, he could see the oddly rectilinear walls of the Fortress and the enigmatic, DNA spiral of the fallen Ship. There was no denying the alien origin of that thing, though half a million years had reduced it to little more than a twisted, spiral-staircase skeleton half-buried in sand and rubble.
Elliott was guiding the shuttle along now with the main engines throttled way back, the lobber canted over at very nearly a forty-five-degree angle both to give it forward momentum and to keep it airborne. With the cargo-hold door open, Knox could step out onto what the NASA people called its “front porch,” a term that had come down from a similar platform built out from the hatch in the front of the lunar landing modules of seventy years ago. Carefully, he began clipping a set of web-belt harnesses to his armor, anchoring himself to the structure just outside of the hatch. The west escarpment of the Face fell away abruptly as he worked, giving him an uninhibited view straight down to the desert floor, seven hundred meters below.
“Okay, Captain,” he said. “I’m in position and ready for the run.”
“Roger that. Three minutes now.”
They were closer to the enigmatic spiral-shape of the Ship, now, where it lay half-buried in the ruin of the incomplete or blast-damaged pyramid that the scientists called the Fortress. Cydonia Prime, their objective, rested on a clear sweep of desert half a mile south of the Fortress. It looked out of place amid so many titanic monuments made ancient and smooth by windblown sand and the passing millennia, and nearly lost by the sheer, vast size of its surroundings.
“You ready for me out there?” Ostrowsky called over the intercom channel. “Or are you sight-seeing?”
“All set, Staff Sergeant,” he replied. “Watch your step, though. It’s a long way down.”
A moment later, Ostrowsky’s bulkily armored form appeared in the open cargo hatch. Knox braced himself across the opening as she carefully attached her own harness restraints. “Well, Gunny?” she asked. “Ready to party?”
“Yup. Let’s rock and roll. Hand me your ATAR.”
She unhooked her rifle from her suit and handed it to him. He switched on the imaging system and raised it to his shoulder. The inset TV picture on his HUD showed a magnified image of the base, half-buried external tanks, microwave mast, scattered Mars cats and wellheads, fuel farm and landing pad, assembly crane and storehouses and all the rest of the clutter attending Man’s first large-scale exploration and exploitation of another world.
He touched a control, increasing magnification. He could just make out the UN troops now, tiny, red-brown figures emerging in groups of five from the Cydonian base’s main hab and scattering across the desert.
Knox shifted aim, looking south toward the black loom of the D&M Pyramid, seven miles or so south of the Fortress. He couldn’t see the other lobber, which should have touched down a couple of miles north of the pyramid over two hours ago. He scanned the desert between Pyramid and Fortress, looking for some sign of the major and the rest of the MMEF, but couldn’t spot them. Well, no surprise there. Their active camo armor would let them blend into the desert damned near as well as the sand and rocks themselves. It was pretty clear that the UN troops knew they were coming, though. He could see them deploying behind a low ridge a mile south of the base. In fact, they appeared to be using entrenching tools to dig in.
He switched off the rifle and studied the area without the electronic enhancement. “Incredible,” he said. “Almost halfway into the twenty-first century, and the UN is resorting to trench warfare.”
Ostrowsky chuckled. “The major sure as damn-all called it right, huh?”
“I guess he damn well did.” It seemed obvious now, but when they’d been planning this operation, Knox had wondered how Garroway could so confidently expect the Foreign Legion troops to do exactly what they were doing. In Knox’s experience, the enemy never did what you thought they were going to do.
