Semper Mars: Book One of the Heritage Trilogy

by Ian Douglas

  “I see.” That put Lloyd in an uncomfortable position. He didn’t want to have civilians kicking around on his assault boat, especially if things turned nasty when they hit ground. On the other hand, it wasn’t his assault boat, not in the formal sense. Elliott was ship’s captain, and he didn’t want to end up second-guessing the Bizarre’s CO.

  Alexander seemed to sense Lloyd’s dilemma and gave him a lopsided grin. “I’ll promise to be good.”

  He sighed. “Very well, Dr. Alexander,” Lloyd told the man. There ought to be room enough. “Find yourself a seat. But…if things are hot when we touch down, you get the hell out of the way, understand?”

  “You expect things to be, uh, ‘hot,’ as you put it?”

  “I don’t expect anything, sir. But it’s best to be prepared.”

  “Don’t worry,” Alexander said. “If anybody starts shooting, I’ll be sure to keep my head down.” The man spoke with a sardonic edge to his voice that told Lloyd he was being humored.

  Colonel Lloyd did not like being humored, and he did not like the archaeologist’s attitude, at once bantering and condescending. He almost—almost—wished that something would happen when they landed, just to teach the arrogant civilian some manners.

  Not, he realized, a professional response at all.

  1556 GMT

  Mars Shuttle-Lander Harper’s

  Bizarre

  Sol 5621: 1210 hours MMT

  David Alexander had fought to get himself a window seat.

  Not that there was terribly much to see through the narrow, thick-cut piece of grit-scoured transplas set in the circular port, but he felt he deserved a chance to see the Cydonian site from the air. The Marines, after all, didn’t need to see the area they’d be guarding. It was just another deployment to them.

  And besides, he wanted to see the Face.

  He chuckled to himself. If Hoist or that bureaucratic idiot Bahir at the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities could just see him now….

  For a time, all he’d seen through the tiny port was the slowly revolving arms of the cycler as Marines continued to load their gear aboard Harper’s Bizarre. Finally, though, with a short, hard shock, the MSL had cut free from the cycler, falling tail first away from the far larger spacecraft-station until Alexander, by pressing his face hard against the transplas and shielding it from the interior light with his hands, could see the cycler in its entirety. Two more MSLs were in the process of docking with the cycler as the Bizarre cleared the sweep of Polyakov’s arms. Then, with a gut-wrenching burst of acceleration, Bizarre spun to a new attitude that swept the other spacecraft from view.

  Acceleration pressed him back against his thinly padded couch…building and building far beyond the meager three-tenths G he’d gotten used to over the past few weeks. He wasn’t sure how long they were under boost; he’d forgotten to check his wrist-top when the Bizarre’s nukes cut in. He only knew that the weight pressing down on his body, on his chest and lungs, was unendurable…and that it went on and on and on, forcing him to endure, whatever he thought about the matter.

  Eventually, they were in free fall again, but by that time he felt too tired to note the time…or even to look out the window.

  After a while, acceleration resumed, and the sky beyond his tiny porthole began to glow.

  The point of cycler spacecraft like Polyakov was that they occupied solar orbits that touched Earth’s orbit on their inward swing and Mars’s orbit on their outer. With some judicious use of gravity wells during each planetary swing-by and occasional kicks from their ion-electric drives, they could arrange to meet the planetary orbits when the planets themselves were there. It was necessary, however, to ferry the personnel and equipment brought out from Earth down to the Martian surface…and that meant a hefty delta-v burn, followed by aerobraking in the Martian atmosphere. The ride down was long, rough, and excruciatingly uncomfortable.

  Alexander spent much of reentry trying hard not to be sick.

  “Hey, uh…sir?” the Marine seated next to him said after a long time. “You see anything out there?”

  Vaguely, Alexander realized that the man talking to him was the Marine he’d shouldered aside earlier in order to get the spot by the window. The name FULBERT was stenciled in black on the gray-and-white mottling of his chest armor. “Not a lot,” he said.

  Several more jolts slammed him in the back as Bizarre’s nuclear engines came up to full thrust. The shuttle was balancing down on its tail now. “Down” was aft, toward the rear of the ship, and Alexander was lying flat on his back with his knees braced above his chest.

  “You’re the new head archeologist gonna see the Face, right?” Fulbert said.

  Alexander shook his head. He’d not associated much with the Marines for the past months, understandably enough, and his official mission had not been widely advertised, but it was impossible to live that long inside a couple of large, sealed tin cans without everyone learning something about everyone else.

  “I’m just going with some new sonic imaging gear,” he said, correcting the Marine. “Dr. Graves is head of the American team, and he’s already at Cydonia. Dr. Joubert is going as head of the UN team, though.”

  Fulbert’s face split into a broad and knowing grin inside the confines of his open helmet. “Man, there’s a high-voltage outlet! I guess you two don’t let the international shit get in the way of your workin’ together, huh?”

  Clearly, Fulbert was more interested in the salacious details of his relationship with Joubert than in the international situation. “She’s a good archeologist,” he replied, keeping his voice noncommittal. “She did some fine fieldwork in the Yucatán.”

  “Ha! I wouldn’t mind doin’ some fieldwork with her. Is that where you met her? Down in Yucatán?”

  Alexander shook his head. “My specialty is…my specialty was Egypt.” He found that the unfairness still hurt, even after three years. “In a way, I guess, we’re enemies.” He gave a wan smile. “Some folks with the UN don’t care much for me or my ideas.”

  The Marine’s eyes widened. “Egypt? You mean like, the pyramids and the Sphinx and all that?”

  “That’s right.”

  “So…you think there’s some kind of connection? Between the Sphinx and the Face? Is that why you’re on the UN’s shit list?”

  Alexander grimaced. The question always came up with the uninitiated. “The Sphinx at Giza and the Face at Cydonia have nothing, nothing whatsoever to do with one another.” He’d long since lost count of how many times he’d gone through this. “The Face, as near as we can tell, is something like five hundred thousand years old. That’s half a million years, okay? The Sphinx, I am convinced, is much, much older than the date traditionally assigned to it, but it is nowhere near that old. The idea that the same culture who made the Face also made the pyramids and the Sphinx is garbage…worse than trying to link the pyramids of Egypt with the pyramids of Mexico. Can’t be done.”

  “Yeah? But I read that the UN was havin’ to call out troops to break up demonstrations…and lots of those demonstrations were over the idea of aliens colonizing the Earth thousands of years ago. Things like the Sphinx are supposed to be proof the aliens were here, but the UN government doesn’t like that.”

  Alexander sighed. As was often the case, the layman’s view mingled a little fact with a great deal of fancy. “There were definitely aliens in the solar system half a million years ago,” he explained. “They left traces at Cydonia…though you might be surprised to hear that there are still quite a few scientists who argue that the Face and the so-called pyramids on Mars are natural features.”

  “No shit?”

  “Most of us think the Face, at least, was carved by someone…something, and the Fortress-Ship complex is obviously artificial, though after half a million years of dust storms and weathering, there’s not much left of it. But there is room for debate. That’s what science is all about, after all, testing hypotheses.”

  “How come some scientists still
think that Face-thing is natural? I’ve seen three-vids of that thing, and it gives me the crawlies.”

  “Well, we still can’t find a decent reason for a sculpture of an essentially human face to be carved into a mesa on Mars at a time when Homo sapiens was just appearing on Earth. The aliens, whoever or whatever they were, were not human. I guess it’s easier to believe that the Face is a wind-carved freak of nature than it is to believe it could be a deliberately sculpted likeness of us.”

  “Well, that’s what all the nutcase new religions and shit are all about, ain’t it? That the aliens tinkered with apes and turned ’em into people? Like in that old movie that everybody’s talkin’ about now, 2000.”

  “2001: A Space Odyssey,” he said, correcting the Marine again. “And it wouldn’t have been apes, not unless you count humans as a kind of ape. Homo erectus was the dominant hominid line on Earth half a million years ago.”

  “Sure, whatever. But, like I was sayin’, everybody on Earth, it seems like, either thinks the aliens were gods or thinks that we’re tryin’ to slip one over on ’em to take away their religion, or whatever, and the UN johnnies all seem dead sure that all the stuff about aliens visiting Earth back then is crap. Like it couldn’t possibly happen, y’know?”

  Alexander smiled. “I know.” He’d been in the eye of that particular storm for a long time. In fact, he had his own opinions about some of the more improbable sites on Earth…not that aliens had built them, necessarily, but the possibility of alien inspiration and technical help was not unthinkable.

  Still, it was dangerous territory to tread upon. The discoveries of the past few decades had transformed traditional science…but they’d also caused an explosion in the pseudosciences. The old “ancient astronaut” theories had come back with a vengeance, spawning volume upon volume of crackpot ramblings, pop-science gibberish, and even a horde of new religions.

  Hoping to end the conversation, he deliberately checked his wrist-top, calling up the time. Before the MSL rendezvous, everyone’s personal computers had been updated to Mars time. The planet’s rotation was slightly longer than Earth’s and, therefore, could not be brought into synch with the GMT used aboard all spacecraft. A Martian day was called a sol; it was divided into traditional hours and minutes, as on Earth, but had an extra thirty-seven-minute catch-up period, called soltime, added after local midnight. The young Mars colony counted sols instead of days, beginning with the official establishment of the first permanently manned settlement—the base at Candor Chasma, now known as Mars Prime. Sol 1 was July 20, 2024, fifty-five years to the day after Armstrong had set foot on the moon. The current sol was 5621.

  All of which meant that Mars Mean Time, or MMT, had nothing whatsoever in common with GMT. It was now, he saw, 1740 hours at Cydonia—late afternoon—and 2126 hours in Greenwich. Of course, for the next fifteen months or so, his only interest in what time…or day…it was on Earth would be when he had to calculate the arrival or departure time of another report.

  “So,” Fulbert said, still clinging to the conversation thread, “you don’t think aliens did stuff on Earth? You know, the pyramids? Easter Island? All that shit?”

  He decided not to mention his own reservations about the Giza pyramids, at least. “Easter Island? Certainly not! We know how the local population built and raised those great stone heads, because they showed us. No mystery there at all.”

  Turning away in another attempt to end the conversation, he pressed his face against the tiny port. He could see sky above—still a dark, purplish color at the horizon turning to jet-black overhead. Below, the Martian surface spread out beneath a curved horizon, a dusty, dusky ocher color tinted with streaks of rust and gray-brown. They were still too high up for the smaller details of the surface to be visible, but he could see scattered, shadow-edged shapes that must be mountains or the jumble of chaotic terrain. He tried to orient himself. If it was late afternoon here, then north would be that way…but he didn’t know if they were even descending in an attitude that would let him see the Face or the attendant structures. It was frustratingly like trying to recognize buildings or landmarks from the air while approaching a city’s airport on Earth. For all he knew, the Cydonian ruins were on the other side of the—

  He saw it.

  My God! It’s just like they all said…but so…so unexpected….

  It was smaller than he’d thought it would be, which was why he’d overlooked it at first. Bizarre must still be twenty or thirty kilometers up. He looked down on the Cydonian Face, and it returned his wondering stare with the same enigmatic and Sphinx-like skyward gaze it had worn for half a million years.

  First captured by chance on two frames shot by the Viking 1 orbiter spacecraft in 1976, the Face hadn’t even been noticed until the early 1980s…and then the image had been dismissed as a trick of the light and of the remarkable persistence of the human mind in imposing order and facial features on random shapes, be they ink-blots on a paper, or a mile-long landform in the desert. By the turn of the century, space probes had returned better images, and NASA had—with some reluctance—acknowledged at last that there might be something there worth investigating after all. That revelation, that intelligence had carved a mile-long face into a mesa in the Cydonian region of Mars, was the last in a rapid-fire barrage of discoveries that had completed at last the long-fought Copernican Revolution. Since the 1990s, it had been known that planet-bearing stars were common, and evidence of fossilized bacteria had been discovered on a meteorite gouged from the Martian surface eons before.

  Humankind was not alone in the universe.

  Those discoveries had spurred a long-awaited renaissance in space exploration. The first manned landing on Mars, a joint US-Russian venture, had taken place in 2019 at Candor Chasma; it wasn’t until the second landing five years later that Geoffrey Cox, Anatol Kryukov, and Roberta Anders had stood at last in the shadow of that alien-carved enigma and wondered….

  Bizarre was lower now and starting to swing slightly in a clockwise turn. The Face drifted off toward the left; the “City” and the pyramids came into view to the right.

  Alexander’s heart was beating faster. There were mysteries enough here to keep ten thousand archeologists busy for millennia, mysteries still unopened, untapped, unknown. The beings who’d built this place were known variously as the Ancients or the Builders…but who they’d been, where they’d come from, what they’d looked like, all was still a frustrating puzzle. All that could be said with certainty was that they’d wielded powers that seemed like magic to the humans who’d investigated the ruins…and that they’d not been human.

  When the Face was being built, humankind was in the process of evolving from Homo erectus into a primitive form of Homo sapiens. The knowledge of any power source more potent than fire was still half a million years in the future.

  The “City”—its true purpose was yet unknown—consisted of four pyramids each the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza arranged in a perfect diamond pattern, surrounded by five titanic, mile-wide pyramids apparently carved from basaltic mountains. Six miles to the southeast, another pyramid, known as the D&M Pyramid after the initials of its twentieth-century discoverers, rose a full mile into the sky, almost two miles across, five-sided, buttressed…and apparently shattered on its eastern face by what might have been a meteorite impact…but which many now thought had been hostile action.

  He glanced at Fulbert, squeezed into the seat to his left, and smiled. Hostile action? Human Marines would be no match for whatever had smashed a mile-high pyramid carved from solid rock. Their assault rifles seemed pathetically toylike in the face of a weapon like that.

  Of course, the Marines weren’t here to fight aliens….

  “All right, Marines!” Lloyd’s voice snapped. “Stand by for grounding! Helmet visors down and locked! Weapons ready!”

  A clatter of snaps and clicks sounded through the passenger compartment, as the Marines locked their visors down and worked the actions on their rifles. If
someone started shooting from the surface, the shuttle’s hull might be breached and pressure lost, but the Marines might still survive the landing. Briefly, Alexander wondered what might be happening at the Cydonia base. Would the UN be stupid enough to try shooting them down? It seemed ridiculous.

  Even so, he was glad he was wearing a pressure suit, just in case. Involuntarily, he glanced up at the overhead compartment where his emergency helmet was stored.

  They continued their descent. Alexander could see nothing of the Ancients’ complex now. Nearby mountaintops and mesas were rising swiftly, and the ground below was taking on a rocky, pocked-looking texture. His seat kicked him hard from below as the Bizarre’s main engines switched on. For several minutes more, he was aware only of the pounding of those nuclear thermal rockets as the MSL lowered itself toward the Martian surface. Dust, brick red except where the touch of low-slanting sunlight kissed it golden, swirled up past the window. There was the slightest of jars…

  …and then the engine thunder was dwindling away.

  “Okay, jarheads,” Captain Elliott, the MSL’s skipper, announced happily, “welcome to Mars!”

  Throughout the compartment, armored Marines unbuckled harnesses and struggled to their feet. A ladder set into what on an airliner would have been the floor was now a series of steps going down the wall to the cargo lock below, and the Marines were swinging out of their seats and clambering down the ladder in surprisingly good order. Alexander stayed where he was, safely out of the way. He imagined that Lloyd must be shouting orders at them or counting them off by the numbers, but the Marines were all sealed up and their conversations restricted to their suit radios.

  In seconds, the last of them had vanished down the ladder into the cargo hold and the hatch sealed shut with a bang. Alexander turned to try to see out the port, but little was visible except for dust, sand, and rock beneath an eerie pink sky. He could hear the throb of compressors as the cargo hold’s atmosphere was tanked for later use and the compartment brought down to the near vacuum of the Martian surface. If somebody wanted to attack them, this would be a hell of a good time….