Myra ran her finger along the record. “And you can interpret this, the way they read ice cores from Earth?”
“Surely. The cap is built up layer by layer, year on year. And each year it captures a snapshot of the conditions at the time—climate, dust, cosmic, whatever. Just as on Earth. Of course the detail is different here. In Greenland, say, you get an annual snowfall tens of centimeters thick. Here the residual water-ice layer is less than a seventh of a millimeter, annually.
“Look here.” He stood by the wall, where the long winding strip came to an end. “This is the top of the strip; the most recent layers are at the top, the last deposited, yes? This upper bit of the record was collected by the Aurora crew before the sunstorm. A few centimeters corresponds to decades in time. These fine brown stripes—” He marked them with his thumbnail. “They correspond to global dust storms. And that band corresponds to the washout Mariner 9 found when it arrived in orbit in 1971, the whole planet swathed in dust…”
On Mars, events occurring on different timescales were marked by different levels in the ice core. Ten centimeters down was to be found the trace of radiation washed over the planet by the Crab supernova a thousand years earlier. Every meter or so was a significant layer of micrometeorites, droplets of once-molten rock; every ten or a hundred thousand years Mars was hit by an object massive enough to spread debris even to the poles. And the big meter-scale striping corresponded to the most dramatic event in Mars’s current astronomical cycling, a nodding of its polar tilt that occurred every hundred thousand years.
Yuri said, “You can even find traces of Earth in this Martian ice—meteorites blasted off the home world, just as Mars meteorites find their way to the Earth.” He grinned. “I’m still looking for traces of the dinosaur killer.”
Myra studied him. “You love your work, don’t you?” She sounded envious, Bisesa thought. She always had been drawn to people with missions, like Eugene Mangles.
“I wouldn’t be stuck in this ice coffin otherwise. But we’re not concentrating any more. After what we found under the ice, nobody cares about all this stuff. The ice cap, the cores. It’s all just in the way.”
Bisesa thought that over. “I’m sorry.”
He laughed shortly. “It’s not your fault.”
Myra asked, “So what did you find?”
“You’re about to find out. If you’re done, I’m supposed to take you in to a council of war.” He stood up.
22: APPROACH
The Liberator sailed toward the Q-bomb, a spear of ice and fire. On the flight deck, Edna Fingal and John Metternes were in their pressure suits, helmets on, visors open.
Though it was still invisible to the naked eye, they were already “seeing” the Q-bomb through its tug of gravity, its knot of magnetic energy, and the mist of exotic particles it emitted as it cruised through the solar system.
“It’s just as Professor Carel predicted,” John reported, scrolling through softscreen summaries. “Exactly like the spectrum you get from the evaporation of a mini black hole. Clearly a cosmological artifact—”
“There,” Edna whispered. She pointed at the window.
The Q-bomb was a blister of distorted starlight, a droplet of water rolling down the face of the heavens. Edna felt chilled to the bone actually to see this thing.
“That’s an Eye,” John reported. “A perfectly reflective sphere, a ball bearing a hundred meters across. All the classic signs: the distorted geometry, the anomalous Doppler shifts from the surface. The radiation spectrum isn’t quite what was recorded of the Eyes found in the Trojans during the sunstorm, however.”
“So this thing isn’t just an observer. I guess we knew that already.”
“Five kilometers out and closing,” Libby said softly.
Edna glanced at John. She knew he had showered only an hour ago, but even so sweat stood out on his brow and pooled at his neck. “Ready?”
“As I’ll ever be, cobber.”
“We’ll follow the agreed strategy. Libby, you got that? Four passes. And if anything changes—”
“We gun for home,” Libby said. “It will be just as we rehearsed. Three kilometers to closest approach. Edna?”
“Yes, Libby?”
“History is watching.”
“Oh, Jesus,” John muttered.
23: THE PIT
The four base crew, plus Bisesa, Myra, and Alexei, sat in a circle on chairs and upturned boxes in Can Two, the Hotel Mars-Astoria. Paula, it seemed, was sleeping off the journey.
And here at the Martian north pole, under a hood of carbon dioxide snow, about as remote and secure a place as you could find in the solar system, Bisesa was told the truth at last.
It seemed a relief to Alexei as he finally revealed what various Spacer factions had discovered through various routes: that something unknown and menacing was sliding through the inner solar system. “They’re calling it a Q-bomb. Best guess remains that it is a Firstborn artifact, here to do us harm. The navy have launched some kind of mission to take it out. They may even succeed. But if not—”
“You have a plan of your own.”
“That’s right.”
Bisesa looked around the ring of faces, all of them so much younger than her and Myra—but then, Spacers were young by definition. “This is covert. You’re obviously some kind of faction. Running around, hiding from the Earth cops. Having fun, are you? Do you have a leader?”
“Yes,” Alexei said.
“Who?”
“We can’t tell you that. Not yet. Nobody here.”
“And you brought me here because of something you found under the ice.”
“That’s right.”
“Then show me.”
Grendel Speth, astrobiologist and doctor, faced Bisesa. “You only just arrived. You’re sure you don’t need to rest?”
Bisesa stood. “I’ve been resting for nineteen years, and traveling for weeks. Let’s go.”
One by one the others stood, following her lead.
To reach the Pit, they would have to suit up.
They went back to Can Six, and then down another flight of steps to a small dome on the ice. Here Bisesa, Myra, and Alexei had to strip out of their coveralls. Knowing the Martian night-winter was only meters away, Bisesa felt illogically cold in her bare skin.
Doctor Grendel gave her a brisk physical check. “Aside from having your system systematically ruined in a Hibernaculum for two decades, you’re doing fine.”
“Thanks.”
Bisesa’s skin was briskly oiled. She had to don a “bio-vest,” a rather prickly waistcoat that clung to her bare skin, providing an interface to the biometric systems that would monitor her body’s performance during this jaunt. Then she put on an undersuit, bright green and clinging, with a helmet, boots, and gloves and a small backpack. This was a complete spacesuit in itself, Grendel told her, effectively pressurized by the tension of its elastic fabric, and would keep her alive for minutes, maybe an hour if there were an emergency, like a module breach.
But this undersuit was only the innermost layer in a double spacesuit design. She was going to have to climb into one of those Captain Ahab external suits.
She was walked to a small hatchway in the dome wall, which led to her outer suit, fixed to the exterior of the dome. She was helped into the suit legs first, then her arms into the sleeves, then her torso and head. Her visor was opaque. The suit was made of rigid sections; it was like climbing into a suit of armor. But the suit seemed to help her by adjusting itself this way and that as she wriggled into it; she heard the hum of servo motors. The trickiest part was getting her helmeted head through the hatch without banging it, and then interfacing it with the larger helmet structure of the oversuit.
Grendel called, “How are you feeling? These things aren’t custom-made.”
“Fine. How do I get out of it?”
“The suit will tell you when you need to know.”
At last Grendel snapped closed the panel at the back. The suit
popped off the dome wall, and Bisesa staggered a little.
Her visor cleared. Framed by Martian winter dark, all she could see was the round, helmeted face of the support engineer, whose name was—
“Hanse,” he said, smiling. “Just checking your suit’s functioning properly. When you get into the rhythm of this you’ll learn to check mine; we work on a buddy system…Suit Five? What’s your status?”
A soft male voice spoke in Bisesa’s ear. “Nominal, Hanse, as you can see from my output. Bisesa?”
“Go ahead.”
“I’m here to assist you during your extravehicular activity in any way I can.”
Hanse said, “I know the suit design must seem a little odd, Bisesa. It’s all about PPP.”
“PPP?”
“Planetary protection protocols. We never bring our suits inside the terrestrial hab modules; we never mix environments. Protecting Mars and Earth life from each other.”
“Even though they are kissing cousins.”
“They’re the worst. And also there is the question of dust. Mars dust is rusty and toxic and full of peroxides, very corrosive. Best to keep it out of the habs, and our lungs. We must keep the suit seals brushed free of dust, in fact, or it becomes harder to make them, and you don’t want to be stuck out here. I’ll show you how later.”
The doctor’s face came swimming into view behind her own visor. “You’re doing good, Bisesa. Try moving around.”
Bisesa raised her arms and lowered them; there was a whir of servos, and the suit felt as light as a feather. “It feels odd not to be able to lower my arms all the way. Or to be able to scratch my face. That’ll pass, I guess.”
“I can scratch your face for you if—”
“I’ll let you know, Suit Five.” She looked around. The ground was flat and white, the sky a smoggy dark. The station modules were somber masses looming over her, with equipment and stores heaped up against their stilts, and vehicles parked up: those two rovers with snowplow blades, even what looked like snowmobiles. Discovery was long gone, driving itself back to Lowell.
Alexei, Myra, the whole station crew, everybody at Wells but Paula was here, in their green spacesuits and with illuminated faces, all looking at her. The snow kept falling, big fat flakes, from a lid of gray cloud. “I’m at the pole of Mars. Good God.” She raised her hand and flexed her gloved fingers.
Yuri approached Bisesa. “We have a short walk to make. Just a few hundred meters. The drilling rig is positioned away from the habs for safety, and for planetary protection. Just walk normally, and you’ll be fine. Please. Walk with me. Myra, you too.”
Bisesa tried it. One step after another, she walked as easily as she had since she was three years old. The suit was obviously helping her. Yuri walked between Myra and Bisesa. The others went ahead. Drilling engineer Hanse Critchfield had ROUGHNECK printed on the back of his life support pack, with a cartoon of a gushing oil well. His suit looked heftier than the others. Perhaps it was a super-powered version, designed for the heavy work of the drilling rig.
The Martian snowflakes pattered against Bisesa’s visor, but sublimated immediately, leaving the faintest of stains.
“I can assist you any way you require, by the way,” said Suit Five.
“I’m sure you can.”
“I am managing your data transfer and your consumables. Also I have sophisticated processing functions. For instance if you are interested in the geology I can process your field of view and highlight exceptions of interest: unusual rock or ice types, unconformities.”
“I don’t think that will be necessary today.”
“I wish you would explore my physical functions. You may know that under Martian gravity walking is actually more energy-efficient than running. If you like I can stress selected muscle groups as you walk, thus providing an overall workout—”
“Oh, shut up, Suit Five, you bore,” Yuri snapped. “Bisesa, I apologize. Our electronic companions are marvels. But they can get in the way, can’t they? Especially when one is surrounded by such wonder.”
Myra looked around at the dismal plain of rock-hard ice, the scattered snowflakes falling through the beams of her helmet lights. She said skeptically, “Wonder?”
“Yes, wonder—for a glaciologist anyhow. I just wish I lived in a universe peaceful enough to indulge my passion without distraction.”
They approached the largest structure on the ice. It was a hemispherical dome more than twenty meters tall, Bisesa guessed. She could see a ribbed structure under flaccid panels; it was a tent, supported by the ribs, not inflated. Yet it had airlocks of fabric, through which they had to pass in turn.
This was the drilling rig, Hanse Critchfield’s baby, and he helped Bisesa bend to get through the lock. “These are PPP barriers, not really airlocks. In fact we keep a slight negative pressure in here; if we get a leak the air is sucked in, not blown out. We have to protect any deep life we dig out of our boreholes—even from other sorts of life we might find at other layers. And we have to protect it from us, and vice versa.” He spoke with a comical mix of what sounded like a Dutch accent with southern United States, maybe Texan. Maybe he had been watching too many old movies.
Inside the dome, the seven of them stood in bright fluorescent light under sagging fabric walls. The derrick, even inert, was an impressive piece of gear, a scaffolding tower set on a massive base of Mars glass. Hanse ran through the mass and power: thirty tonnes, five hundred kilowatts. The coiled drill string was four kilometers long, more than enough to reach the base of the ice cap. A grimy plant stood by to pump a fluid into the borehole, to keep it from collapsing as the ice flowed under its own sheer weight: the drilling teams used liquid carbon dioxide, condensed by this plant from the Martian air.
Hanse began to boast about the technical challenges the drillers had faced: the need for new lubricants, the way moving mechanical parts tended to stick together in the low pressure. “Thermal control is the key. We have to take it slow; you don’t want too much heat building up down there. For one thing, if the water ice melts, you get water mixing with liquid carbon dioxide—pow, the product is carbonic acid, and then you are in trouble. The Aurora crew brought along a toy rig you could load on a trailer, that could only dig down maybe a hundred meters. This baby is the first authentic drilling rig on Mars—”
Yuri cut him off. “Enough of the guided tour.”
Myra walked to the drill platform. “This borehole has no fluid in it. In fact you’ve sleeved it.”
Yuri nodded. “This was the first hole we dug, down to it. We knew there was something down there, actually, under the ice, from radar studies. When we reached it we came back out, and put in a request to Lowell for a mass budget to provide us with a sleeve sufficient to keep the borehole open permanently. Then we pumped out the drill fluid—”
Hanse said, “And we sent down another bore in parallel. At first we dropped down cameras and other sensors. But then—” He bent and lifted a hatch. It exposed a hole in the ground maybe two meters across; a platform rested just below its lip, with a small control handle mounted on a stand.
It was obvious what this was. “An elevator,” Bisesa breathed.
Yuri nodded. “Okay. Moment of truth. You and me, Bisesa. Alexei. Ellie. Myra. Hanse, you stand by up here. And you, Grendel.” Yuri went and stood on the platform, and looked back, waiting. “Bisesa, is that acceptable? I guess this is your show now.”
Her breath caught. “You want me to ride that thing? Two kilometers down into the ice to this Pit of yours?”
Myra held her hand; despite the servos she could barely feel her daughter’s grasp. “You don’t have to do this, Mum. They haven’t even told you what they’ve found down there.”
“Believe me,” Alexei said fervently. “It’s best you see for yourself.”
“Let’s get it done,” Bisesa said. She strode forward, trying not to betray her fear.
They stood together, facing inward. The round metal platform felt crowded with the fiv
e of them aboard, in their spacesuits.
The disk jolted into motion, whirring downward into the ice tunnel, supported by tracks embedded in the walls. Bisesa looked up. It was if she was descending into a deep, brightly lit well. She felt a profound dread of falling, of being trapped.
The suit murmured, “I can detect rapid breathing, an elevated pulse. I can compensate for any increase in atmospheric pressure—”
“Hush,” she whispered.
The descent was mercifully short.
Yuri said, “Brace now—”
The elevator platform jolted to a halt.
There was a metal door, a hatch set in the ice behind Yuri. He turned and hauled it open. It led to a short tunnel, lit brightly by fluorescent tubes. Bisesa glimpsed a flash of silver at the end of the passage.
Yuri stood back. “I think you should go first, Bisesa.”
She felt her heart thump.
She took a breath and stepped forward. The tunnel floor was rough-cut, not flat, treacherous. She concentrated on walking, not looking ahead, ignoring the silvery glints in the corner of her vision.
She stepped out of the tunnel into a broader chamber, cut crudely into the ice. A quick glance up showed the narrow borehole that had been drilled to get to this point. Then she looked straight ahead, to see what the Spacers had found here, buried under the ice of the Martian north pole.
She saw her own reflection looking back at her.
It was the archetypal Firstborn artifact. It was an Eye.
24: CLOSEST APPROACHES
A distorted image of the Liberator slid across the face of the Q-bomb, all lights blazing. Edna felt a stab of satisfaction. Mankind had come here with intent.
Their first pass at the Q-bomb was unpowered, a scouting run. At closest approach the ship shuddered, once, twice: the launch of two small probes, one injected into low orbit around the Q-bomb, and the other aimed squarely at its surface.
Then the smooth, mirrored landscape receded as the Liberator swept away.
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