Semper Mars (36 page)

“Damned if I know what it was all about,” Warhurst had told him. “I do know that she was in Japan in May, just before the war started… and I also know that four days after the ITI Minister called, we got the first overtures from Tokyo that they might be willing to come over to our side if we guaranteed them a piece of what we find at Cydonia. You’ve got one hell of a special girl there, Mark.”

A special girl? Yeah, she was all of that. He still wanted to talk to her, though, about what the hell she’d been doing in Japan of all places. Why was it that fathers were always the last to know?…

Thirteen more months on Mars… and seven more after that for the cycler ride home. He missed Kaitlin so badly he could taste it. Twenty more months before he could be with his little girl… who’d somehow and disconcertingly been transformed into a not-so-little young woman.

He thought he could wait that long.

The fighting on Mars was over, and for that, Garroway was grateful. While civilians might bemoan the idiocy of war, only someone in the military, someone who’d actually faced that vilest of the Four Horsemen, could truly appreciate war’s ugliness, its terror, its sheer, blind stupidity, its colossal waste.

The war, he knew from Triple-N and regular comm reports, was continuing on Earth… but with the abrupt defection of Japan from the UN, it appeared that the balance of power had subtly shifted in favor of the US-Russian Alliance. The cruise missile assault had dropped to nearly nothing with the sinking of three UN arsenal ships—two of them by the Shepard Station HEL, newly repaired and recrewed. Fierce fighting continued in the northern Mexican desert, and Monterey had fallen to troops of the 2nd Armored Division on the twenty-fifth. In the north, Army forces had entered Longneuil, just across the St.

Lawrence from the québecois capital of Montreal, and there were fairly substantial rumors that secret negotiations were under way that would result in Quebec’s withdrawal from the UN and the war. With Japan out of the war, US forces had been able to transit the La Perouse Strait, cross the Sea of Japan, and land reinforcements for the beleaguered Russians near Vladivostok. Only hours ago, according to the last Triple-N download, US Marines of the 2nd Marine Division had landed at Matanzas, Cuba.

After that grim initial period of the UN bombardment, it was turning out to be one hell of a glorious Fourth.

The war showed no signs of ending yet, but the tide had definitely turned. That, at least, was the assessment of the Marines at Cydonia. They appeared confident and had greeted the word that French troops were on the way aboard the Faucon spacecraft with wry and optimistic good humor. The Marines now controlled every Mars shuttle on the planet; when the Faucon swept past the orbit of Mars a few months from now, how were the UN troops supposed to disembark? They would do so on the Marines’ terms… or not at all.

Even so, Garroway was making preparations, just in case the UN had allowed for that contingency by including a shuttle in the Faucon’s payload—unlikely, given the high fuel-to-mass ratio of a Mars Direct flight.

A century before, when Japanese forces had invaded tiny Wake Island shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the story had circulated that the Marine commander on the doomed island had been asked if he needed anything else. “You can send us more Japs” was his apocryphal rejoinder. The incident almost certainly had never happened, but the Marines at Cydonia had dusted it off and begun circulating it among themselves. “The major e-mailed the Pentagon for recreational supplies,” the current story ran. “They’re sending us more French.”

Outside the main hab, between the living facilities and the landing pad, the American flag still flew from a length of microwave tower support tubing driven deep into the sand. As on the Moon, a piece of wire kept the flag extended, though often there was wind enough here to unfurl the lightweight fabric.

As it turned out, the photograph David Alexander had taken of the flag’s raising during the closing moments of the battle at Cydonia Prime had been uploaded to Spacenet. The shot of five Marines in their Class-One armor erecting the five-meter pole in the Martian sand had been so spectacularly reminiscent of the flag-raising on Iwo Jima that, at last report, the Marine Public Affairs Office back home was being swamped with requests for the picture, even though it was freely available on the net.

Garroway grinned. Not long ago, the very continued existence of the US Marines, perceived as an anachronism in this modern age of spacecraft, orbital lasers, and electronic warfare, was in serious doubt. He, himself, had been questioning his own contented service in a military arm with little real future.

When the flag had been raised on Mount Suribachi, on the embattled island of Iwo Jima in 1945, then-Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal had been watching from the deck of an amphibious command ship offshore. He was reported to have turned to Marine Major General Holland “Howlin Mad” Smith and said, “Holland, the raising of that flag on Suribachi means a Marine Corps for the next five hundred years.”

It had only been ninety-six years since Suribachi. Maybe they needed a flag-raising like this one every century or so, just so that people would remember…

0343 Hours GMT

The Face

Cydonia, Mars

1510 hours MMT

David Alexander stood at last on the top of the mesa, the broad, red and brown expanse of the Cydonian plain spreading out beneath his feet like a map. West lay the pyramids of the City, the Fortress, the enigmatic strangeness of the Ship, and the tiny cluster of life and light that was Cydonia Prime. Southwest, the D&M Pyramid bulked huge against the pink sky, as protective of its mysteries as ever.

He was standing atop the Face, symbol of all that was still unknown about Mars, about the beings who’d lived here half a million years ago, about Man himself, and how he’d come to be…

It seemed odd, but the features of the Face, so obviously artificial, so obviously artistic, so obviously the product of conscious and intelligent design when seen from high overhead, flattened into an expanse of ordinary sand-smoothed rock from this vantage point, from the surface of the Face itself. After an hour’s climb, he’d reached this highest part of the mesa, the center of the chin just south of the enormous crevasse that formed the image’s mouth.

Below, at his feet, were the quadrangular plates that so resembled teeth; farther off, just visible half a mile to the north, were the vast, bare, flattened mounds of windswept rock that, from the sky, at any rate, looked like eyes.

From where he stood now, it didn’t look as though the landform could possibly be artificial. Only from the air did the overall cumulative effect of thousands of separate aspects, the convex smoothness of the eyeballs, the planes of cheeks and jaw and ridged brow, even the striations in the carving’s headdress or helmet that gave it such an eerie resemblance to the nemes of some pharaoh out of ancient Egypt, all come together, directly challenging any assertion that this was the mindless accidental product of eons of wind, ice, and water.

Fifty-one sols on Mars, and he still felt no closer to the answers he was looking for than he’d been back on Earth. It was going to take years… no, decades, just to learn where to begin. The archeological teams continued to uncover mountains of weather-eroded equipment, enigmatic artifacts, and the ungraspable products of alien design philosophies. It was already clear that human manufacturing and materials-processing techniques were about to be revolutionized, and the teams hadn’t yet gotten properly started. No one was willing to even guess what new surprises might still be in store.

And with all of this, the biggest questions were still stark and unyielding mysteries. Who’d built the Cydonian monuments, and why? Who were the humans whose remains were now being found everywhere throughout the region? What was their relationship with their cousins left back on Earth at the very dawn of the human spirit?

He sat down on a smooth-sculpted ridge, feeling the thin wind rattle against his lightweight EVA suit.

He liked it here on Mars, liked the freedom to pursue his studies without hindrance, liked the fact that the government, even though it was sponsoring his work, was far, far away. He’d come to terms with the Marine presence here; Garroway and his MMEF were what was making all of this possible, and he was grateful for that, as well.

Alexander was being hailed as a hero of the scientific community, the scientist who’d refused to acquiesce to the UN World Cultural Bureau’s attempts at censorship. Well, he couldn’t have managed that without the Marines. This war, he thought, more and more, was a struggle between those who would disseminate the truth, and those who would try to control it.

Control was the key, so far as the governments of Earth were concerned. No wonder, he thought, the UN had been so desperate to hide the secrets uncovered beneath the Cydonian plain. In the past weeks, according to the Net News vidcasts, dozens of new religions, new alien cults, new cosmic awareness groups had blossomed around the news that mummified humans half a million years old had been discovered on Mars. There were rumors that widespread riots in France, Germany, and Mexico were threatening to undermine those nations’ war efforts. If their governments fell in the chaos of religious rioting and fanaticism, the war might well sputter to an end.

Alexander’s published papers, both on the net and in Archeology International, were being hailed in the States as one man’s bid for academic freedom, an end to scientific censorship, and a victory for truth.

Maybe. He’d gotten credit for the discovery, at any rate. And most of Mireille Joubert’s team was working for him now, part of a genuinely international research project that had as its goal the discovery of the truth about the Martian ruins. Joubert herself was still sulking, but he thought she would come around.

He looked around at the bleak and rocky landscape of the Face and laughed. This Martian Sphinx was good at keeping its secrets… better, perhaps, than its far smaller cousin on Earth. The ancient humans discovered here remained the biggest mystery of all.

His original guess that the bodies he’d found were representatives of Homo erectus had been mistaken, it turned out. Several papers had already emerged in various journals and net professional posts discussing the images of the bodies uncovered so far, pointing out that their facial features almost certainly placed them in the group generally referred to as “archaic Homo sapiens.” These were essentially modern humans with hang-on traits of their Homo erectus ancestors, like brow ridges and heavy musculature. Their brains were as large and as complex as those of fully modern humans; perhaps even more telling, the structure and placement of their larynxes were the same as modern humans, riding lower in their throats, and with larger pharyngeal cavities than the earlier erectus.

These people could talk. They could dream. They could imagine. They could create.

As with all good science, each new Cydonian discovery only increased the number of questions until it seemed there would never be an end to them. Who were these people? Who or what had brought them to Mars, and why? Had that agency, as some scientists were now suggesting, been responsible for creating Homo sapiens by genetically manipulating populations of Homo erectus… and if so, why? The humans—had they carved their own image into the titanic monument known as the Face? Or was the agency that had brought them to Mars the artist and, again, why?

And the dark question that more and more people on Earth were asking lately—who or what had destroyed the young colony on the Cydonian plain? Everywhere across this part of Mars, now, excavations were turning up more and more artifacts, shattered remnants of a vast city that had covered an ancient, once-subtropical coastline on the Boreal Sea, a city that had flourished for decades at least, and possibly for centuries, until some devastating force had struck from the sky and destroyed it all, probably within the space of hours. The D&M Pyramid was now believed to have been some sort of titanic apparatus for creating a warm and breathable atmosphere over a large portion of the northern hemisphere; its destruction had resulted in the rapid and inevitable bleed-off of the artificial atmosphere into space, the freezing of the ocean, the suffocation, freezing, and mummification of humans suddenly faced with Armageddon.

Who had attacked the Martian colony? Were they still out there, somewhere among the stars… and were they a threat to Earth and Humankind now?

Interesting. During the past weeks, more and more of the net’s resources had been focused here, on Cydonia, instead of on the war. Was that, he wondered, the way to end war? Could it be as simple as that… providing the world with new frontiers, new horizons… and new sources of wonder?

Of course not. It was not, he realized now, the military that divided peoples and created wars, but governments, governments that lived only to serve themselves, no matter how democratic they might seem outwardly, governments that for survival needed to control the populations from which they’d emerged.

For Alexander, that was an astonishing revelation, as significant, perhaps, as the mummified bodies beneath the sands of Cydonia. So much human misery could be laid at the doorstep of human government and greed and monkey-band fear and the appalling ignorance that separated humans into mutually suspicious tribes.

Earth, Alexander suspected, was in the long run a lost cause. If there was a future for humanity, it was out here. Man’s heritage, it seemed, lay somewhere among the stars.

He was going to have to go there to find out who he was, and why he’d come to be that way.

The sun had nearly reached the western horizon, and it grew dark swiftly on Mars. It was time for him to start back. A kind of rock-carved ramp ran down the left side of the Face, providing relatively easy access if you didn’t mind the three-hundred-meter climb. Fortunately, it was all downhill from here. He could see the others waiting for him by the Mars cat below, almost lost in the east-reaching shadow of the Face.