Torq felt hot metal on his carapace, brushed it absently off of his first arms with his second. He felt no pain.
The Cwrth ceased her... incantations... for a brief moment, long enough to raise both of her hands high above her head and repeat one phrase over and over: Yog-Sothoth! Yog-Sothoth! Yog-Sothoth!
With a muffled thud, the drapes that had curtained most of the great chamber fell from their fastenings and lay in muddled heaps on the floor.
The Crwth seemed transformed, glowing even more brightly as the hidden walls were revealed as windows, wider, larger, infinitely more imposing than those that had before been visible.
Seven impossibly large windows... onto nothingness!
Each held within its crystal plane a blackness that exceeded blackness. It seemed palpable; it seemed to shout emptiness and abomination and monstrosity.
Torq felt his dorsal tissues struggling to curl.
In the deep blackness, he saw... movement.
The blackness roiled and writhed and agitated, until from the depths of each window into reaches beyond space and time, infinitesimally tiny tendrils began to form.
The Cwrth spoke, and even without the now-defunct trans-comm Torq understood that she was speaking his name as it would be pronounced in that ancient, archaic tongue.
He tore his eyen from the nothingness around him to stare at her.
She touched the carven image lightly with her appendages... and this time, Torq knew that the hideous thing had in fact moved.
From beneath its stony body, thin tentacles began to emerge.
One.
Two.
Many.
Then she directed his eyen upward and outward, toward the distant sky where his ship hung motionless, the sole remaining star in a nighttime of blackness. There were no other lights; no stars. Sunfall was complete but there were no stars.
And something formed out of the blackness.
Torq knew without knowing what he was seeing.
More tentacles, an infinity of tentacles stretching upward and outward until they seemed more elements of sky than of earth, until they twined and twisted and formed an almost impervious net over the world.
Then, in an instant, one of them dropped slightly, looped itself several times around the single source of light in the eternal calignosity that lay beyond Torq’s universe, tightened, and the ship—and everything within it—disappeared.
“My God!” he screamed.
He had no time to notice that equally spaced around the chamber, some half-hidden by the fallen drapes, lay dark spheres, oozing black distillations that the shimmering drapes seemed to absorb without any change in their own coloration.
He had no time to notice that as the Cwrth stood there in her triumph, her features twisted in pain, the grotesque swelling abruptly grew even larger, her covering more stretched, now burnished with a red deep beyond belief—that even as she stood there, a thin line formed from the jointure of her supports, questing upward with all of the determination of the universe of tentacles that now surrounded her world; questing upward and thickening until her covering split and... some thing... reached out with its own tentacles and wrapped itself around one of her supports and, still sticky and putrid with her scarlet ichor, lowered itself slowly, almost painfully, to the floor.
He had no time to notice it draw nearer and nearer where he stood, gaining in speed and power with each passing instant.
He had no time to notice any of these, because he was already galaxies away, wrapping himself in impossible memories that flooded and ebbed leaving nothing but darkness as his carapace cracked and his ventral plates folded in upon themselves.
And he curled.
The last thing he knew was the feathery touch of things icy and leathery and altogether evil invading his body through every fracture in his chitin, sucking , almost inhaling the very ichor of his being.
He did not hear the Cwrth’s words as she lowered her arms, as the long gash in her ventral plane—now flat and sagging—closed itself seamlessly, as the monstrous carving became again a moveless bit of stone ... as she shut herself off to all but the ethereal music that she alone in the chamber could hear.
“No,” she said, her voice full of pity, almost mournful. “My God!”
The Menace Under Mars
Nathan Shumate
Saxon didn’t want to look at the half-dozen oversized sheets of thin printout paper that Caldwell had laid out on his desk. He wanted to stare out the plasteel window punctuating the blocks of Martian stone that formed the wall of his work area, out to the dry orange Martian landscape beyond, watch the eddies of the thin, dry atmosphere half-heartedly stir the dust of this planet—this lifeless planet—and ignore Caldwell until the man decided to leave. But Caldwell would never decide to leave. He had Martians on the brain.
Saxon stifled his sigh and focused on the the tissue-like printouts of satellite data that Caldwell had spread across his desk. He watched as Caldwell’s finger traced a smudge in the center of one sheet.
“At first it was just some odd thermal readings,” Caldwell said, “and that doesn’t mean anything by itself, especially in the Martian summer, this close to the equator. But I was curious, and there was room on the satellite schedule—”
Saxon doubted that was strictly true. More likely, Caldwell had suborned Chatterjee, who was directly responsible for control of the monitor satellite, into bumping some other scheduled scans in favor of his quest for the fabulous Martians.
“—So I checked the thermals against density fluctuation readings,” Caldwell continued, “and then against the archived penetrative radar data from the last full survey.” His finger bounced from the first printout to the second and then the third, each time indicating a smudge or other blurry-edged area standing out in the center of the printed grid. Saxon could see nothing noteworthy in the smudges; they were all smudge-shaped.
“How is this different from the time you found the Martians on the far side of Mareotis Fossae?” Saxon asked.
Caldwell’s face fell. “You don’t have to keep throwing that back in my face. I was hasty on that one, I’ve admitted that. But look.” He shuffled a fourth printout to the top of the other three. “All three data sets, superimposed.” He spread his hand over the now-multiplied smudge, which stood out as the darkest area of the paper. There was a certain angular character to the overlapping smudges, as if a warren of rabbits who adored straight lines had dug out a cubist burrow.
This time Saxon couldn’t keep his sigh inaudible. “Joe, you have to expect readings to be out of the ordinary here and there,” he said, conscious of the need to keep condescension out of his voice. “Mars is a big enough planet to account for all kinds of natural—natural—variations.”
Caldwell said, “If I showed you an imaging scan done on Earth in which thermal, density and radar all showed a bunch of hollow chambers linked together at regular angles underground, you’d assume it to be man-made, right?”
There was a flaw in Caldwell’s logic, Saxon knew, he couldn’t put a label on it.
“So, we’re on Mars,” Caldwell continued, “and we see that kind of data, the most reasonable conclusion, really, is Martians!”
“Joe,” Saxon said, jerking a thumb toward his window, “take a look out there. We’re looking at a planet with thin atmosphere, intense cosmic radiation bombardment, few hydrocarbons, and no free liquid water since the dinosaurs were stomping all over Earth. Has it occurred to you that there don’t have to be Martians—that in fact it’s damned unlikely that there could be?”
Caldwell’s smile didn’t diminish. He looked like a man who’d just received what he took to be a social nicety in a language he didn’t understand, and presumed that simply continuing to smile was a a sufficient response.
“I’m not getting through to you, am I?” Saxon said.
“I’d like permission to requisition a skimmer and the necessary equipment for an expedition,” Caldwell said brightly. “Ishida has agree
d to go with me. And I think I could persuade Cooper without too much trouble.”
“Let me get back to you in two or three weeks,” Saxon said. “I want everyone’s head—including yours, Ishida’s and Cooper’s—to be focused on the melt migration.”
“But that’s just it—we can’t wait! You didn’t look close enough!” Caldwell jabbed at the borders of the topmost printout, where coordinates and other numerals occupied the margin in blocky type. Saxon picked it up to look at the coordinates, and his heart fell; they were the numbers that put him to bed at night and shook him awake in the morning.
“Right in the middle of Isidis Planitia,” he muttered.
“Exactly,” Caldwell said. “Wait three weeks, and the place’ll be under water, with raging currents and soil debris. Another month, and it’ll be deeper than we could get to without a top-notch bathysphere.”
Saxon examined the printout again, his brain putting the square smudges into the context of his mental map of the thousand-mile-wide Isidis Planitia crater.
“I know you want this to be artificial,” Saxon said, “but believe me, I want this to be natural twice as much.”
“Why?” said Caldwell.
Saxon’s eyebrow arched. “What do you mean, Why? Two and a half years here, all scrapped if we discover something right in the middle of our target zone?”
“Yeah, but—Martians!” Caldwell smiled broadly again, and Saxon suddenly had a vivid picture of what Caldwell would have looked like twenty-five years before, with summer freckles and missing teeth, enjoying the hell out of a tire swing. “Terraforming is a huge thing, but does it really compare to confirming the first other intelligent life in the solar system?”
Saxon looked from the blurred shapes indicated under the Martian surface to the huge blocks of Martian stone which made up his own work area and most of the Sabaea Base besides. It would be something, of course. Right now the personnel of Sabaea Base were pioneers, but if they discovered Martians—or even the traces of Martians—they’d be heroes, practically demigods to future generations of explorers and immigrants.
He dropped the pages back over his desk, watching the thin paper take its sweet time to settle to the surface in the weak gravity.
“Not Cooper,” he said finally. “She’s going to be too busy prepping for transition. You and Ishida make up a full requisition plan and schedule, and show it to me in the morning. You are going to log this as a geological examination—if I see the word ‘Martian’ anywhere, your requisition is toast.”
“Yes, sir!” If Caldwell’s smile had gotten any broader, he would have needed reparative surgery.
***
Saxon knew that he had no hope of redirecting Caldwell’s passion for Martians. The man was a proxy for the large fraction of Earth’s population who dreamed of finding aliens within the solar system.
By the time the first manned Mars mission had landed in 1953, almost everyone knew already that the “canals” and the rich biosphere that went with them were the child of poor optics and overwhelming imagination. But even those astronauts had been underwhelmed by what they found: A cold and dingy planet whose only form of life was the pseudo-lichen which changed colors with the seasons across the southern hemisphere. Earth’s centuries-long fixation on Mars as their potentially inhabited neighbor was quickly transferred to Venus, but that didn’t last; three years later, when Venus received its own expedition of curious earthlings, the only animate life found was a photosensitive slime mold which formed colonies the size of a Brussel sprout. So now they were salving humanity’s collective disappointment by putting in motion the first steps toward terraforming Mars into a habitable planet.
And that’s where the dreams of alien contact within the solar system would have ended, if not for the Artifact.
Both scientists and politicians had tried to popularize other names—the Anomaly, the Obelisk, even the Megalith—but it was “the Artifact” that stuck to the jutting shard of crystalline metal noticed from afar on Mars’s moon Deimos. This despite the fact that no manned expedition had tried to set down on the asteroid moon to determine firsthand if it was, indeed, any sort of artifact. What flybys and probes had shown was a many-surfaced pillar or spike of some heat-crystallized metal with a green shine, its surface etched with crosshatches which to the imaginative clearly indicated written language, a sign hung out to the cosmos by ancient inhabitants of the red planet, and which to skeptics were likely nothing more than evidence of micrometeorite strikes during its long tenure in orbit.
Compared to speculations about the origins and purpose of the Artifact by the legend-spinners and crowd-pleasers of Earth, the straightforward engineering of the terraforming project, thawing Mars’s own carbon dioxide from its south pole to increase the atmospheric pressure to hold in the water vapor that would shortly be liberated from its north pole, seemed like constructing a hydroelectric dam: a massive and important undertaking, of course, but not one to capture the imagination and speculation of Earth’s billions. Thankfully, clear out on Mars, Saxon didn’t have to fend off the constant sensationalism of terrestrial media. But he had Caldwell, and that was almost as bad.
***
The next morning, before Caldwell even presented his proposal to him, Saxon visited the garage to confirm with Rigby the condition of the skimmers. Rigby was the pudgiest person on the team—it was rumored he had just squeaked past the physical requirements for the mission—but he was also the best hands-on paragravity technician that the League of Nations could agree on. His smile when Saxon entered told him that Caldwell had already been there, probably the night before.
Annoyed, Saxon instead began the conversation elsewhere. “How do the pre-check metrics look on the paragrav satellite?”
“Better than standard by an order of magnitude. Precise enough to swat a fly. If a fly could get enough lift to stay aloft outside, naturally.”
Saxon nodded and crossed the work area to the viewscreen mounted on the wall to look at the satellite displays for himself. The current and projected orbit of the paragrav satellite showed as a red line corkscrewing around the planet until it arrived above the arctic. A circle outlined in green, outside the orbit of the paragrav satellite, showed where the six solar aggregator satellites hung in formation over the north pole like synchronized swimmers, each the center point of a huge network of reflective polymer sails which focused the sun’s energy on the water-ice cap at the pole, transforming the ice into liquid water for the first time in eons. The aggregators had previously done their work for a good Martian year above the south pole, melting the solid carbon dioxide there until enough of it had entered the atmosphere that its own greenhouse effect would keep it from re-freezing before the water could be freed from the north pole. Then the paragrav satellite would make the water think that “south” was “down,” and migrate it to the massive impact crater of Isidis Planitia—a perfect reservoir that would become the Isidis Sea.
“Have you had a chance to go over the skimmer Caldwell requisitioned?” Saxon asked.
Rigby indicated the other end of the garage space, where a two-person skimmer sat on a transport rack, ready to be moved out the doors into the launch bay. “Everything checks out. Ishida is an expert pilot, and Caldwell is certified for this model, so it should be a piece of cake.”
“Maybe, but double-check it anyway,” Saxon said. “I’m not repositioning the radio satellite just for their little excursion, so they’ll be out of signal range. I want this skimmer one hundred percent guaranteed to get them back.”
“Moving the satellite wouldn’t be a hardship. If I input the orbital changes now, it can be in position just after they get there. If you want, I can—”
“No,” said Saxon.
Rigby arched an eyebrow. “Because changing the orbit would require a log entry with your approval,” he said knowingly. “And you don’t want any paper trail that contains both your name and the word ‘Martians.’ Or even its implication.”
Saxon
hoped that the heat he felt in his cheeks hadn’t become a visible flush. “The fewer resources committed to this goose chase, the better. That’s all.”
“Well, I’ll go over the skimmer again,” Rigby promised. “I guarantee that the skimmer won’t give them any problems. If they end up stranded, it won’t be its fault, or mine.”
***
If Caldwell and Ishida had hoped for an official send-off an hour later, they were disappointed, as only Rigby was there to watch them go through the pre-check in the launch bay, raising the skimmer on its paragrav pontoons and testing pitch and yaw. Saxon was hip-deep in the bureaucratic paperwork that he had known would be the mainstay of his Martian existence when he had thrown his name in for the base administrator post, and by the time he came up for air, the skimmer had retreated over the horizon. The plan Caldwell had had approved called for a day of travel out, a day of exploration and recording, and a day back.
The launch bay was prepared for Caldwell and Ishida’s return on the afternoon of the third day.
Saxon started pacing his office on the morning of the fourth day, and late that evening he recorded and filed a memo assigning responsibility and culpability to himself for approving the expedition outside the radio satellite’s range.
Before dawn on the fifth day, as Saxon lay in bed mulling the logistics of a search and rescue mission, the voice panel beside his bed buzzed.
“Got something incoming,” said Rigby without introduction. “Must be the skimmer. It’s flying erratically.”
Saxon grunted acknowledgment, threw back the blanket, and found his pants.
In ninety seconds he was at the garage, staring at the viewscreen from behind Rigby’s shoulder. Rigby looked like he hadn’t slept.
“I don’t like it,” Rigby said. “Obviously the skimmer, but the harmonics are all off. The paragrav’s about to fail—I don’t know how it’s still in the air.”
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