“Hello, hello, hello,” said Lord Carnarvon, leaning forward in his canvas chair, “what have we here?”
The car stopped at the foot of the hill upon which they were camped, half way up. Its undulating legs became still, and two men in dark woollen suits—completely unsuitable, given the climate—got out. Having briefly exchanged words with a gaggle of the locals working in the valley, they set off up the hill, over the scree and rubble of broken statuary.
Upon reaching the tent and the two men sitting in front of it, the first of the men took off his Homburg and said, “Mr Carter, I presume?”
THE ROCKET SHIP descended amidst billowing clouds of smoke and, with a great roaring of thrusters, landed at the Olympus Mons spaceport. The extinct volcano, the largest mountain in the Solar System—or so Carter had been told—towered some fifteen miles above the Tharsis region in the northern hemisphere of the red planet, as impossible as that seemed. Gazing up at its distant, snow-clad peak, Carter felt that it was not unlike the pyramidal peak that overlooked the Valley of the Kings back on Earth.
Indeed, there was something eerily familiar about the barren hinterlands of Mars. This place was not unlike the west bank of the Nile, Carter considered as he viewed the Martian landscape through the grubby windows of the military half-track taking them to the headquarters of the Stellar Expeditionary Force at Marineris City. Apart from the fact that where the sands of the Sahara were bleached almost bone-white, the waterless deserts of Mars were rust-red—like everything else on the planet, including any vehicle that had spent any time moving about on its surface.
The transport chugged along a rough road, its front caterpillar tracks churning up the Martian dust while its rear articulated legs scuttled along, enveloped in their thick green exhaust-mist.
Lord Carnarvon seemed more interested in reading the paper than taking in the otherworldly scenery, but Carter continued to gaze out of the window in wonder. Here, far from the frontlines, it was easy to forget that Mars was currently a war zone. That was until they passed the burnt-out shells of a squadron of tanks and the tri-limbed skeletons of Martian war machines. There couldn’t have been many places left on the planet that hadn’t felt the unkind touch of war.
They entered a valley, the rock face visible from Carter’s window looming high above them. He could see towering pillars of rock and myriad recessed cave mouths. And yet there was something strangely uniform about the positioning of the caves, as well as the rising columns of stone and protruding bedrock buttresses.
It took Carter a moment to realise that he wasn’t looking at some natural, erosion-formed feature, but something, if not man-made, then made by other hands millennia—if not millions of years—before. They had arrived at Marineris City at last, and their arrival marked the end of a journey that had taken them a whole month.
From Luxor—having barely had time to pack, and only being told that they were needed urgently on Mars following the disappearance of another archaeological team working there—Carter and Carnarvon had been flown to Heathrow, along with their select team, and from there to RAM Rendlesham to commence the first leg of their flight to the battlefront in this war of the worlds. After leaving Earth, they had stopped at Copernicus Sound on the Moon, where the lunar colony’s electromagnetic accelerator had given their rocket the impetus it needed to travel the two hundred million miles or more to Mars. Twenty-eight days later, they had reached Martian orbit and from there descended to the Tharsis spaceport.
The ancient alien ruins, named Marineris City by the planet’s new occupying forces, housed the headquarters of the British Stellar Expeditionary Force, just as it had done ever since the first rockets made planetfall fifteen years ago.
The truck crossed a protruding causeway, the valley floor dropping away another thousand feet below them, passed through a pair of doors tall as a Martian war machine, and then through another set that closed behind them before it pulled up at the entrance to a vast chamber.
Exiting the transport, they were able to remove their oppressive environmental suits at last, although Carter felt like the smell of hot rubber would remain with him for some time. His vision freed from the limits of what he could see through his helmet’s visor, he took in the impressive, oppressive scale of the place.
The chamber appeared to be some kind of spinal passageway that, as far as Carter could tell, might well connect one end of the impossibly vast city to the other. Its supporting arches rose above them like the ribs of some ancient beached leviathan. Doorways and other access points that had clearly been designed for a race of beings far taller than humankind dwarfed the personnel that busily milled about the place, going about their military business.
Metal staircases and spanning girder walkways had been fixed to the existing structures, enabling the soldiers and non-combatants alike to access the different levels, while miles of vulcanised-rubber-coated cabling trailed from junction boxes, great arc lights and the tatty speakers of a public address system. Bold white arrows had been painted on the ground; traffic markings for the military vehicles that moved about the place.
A smartly dressed officer as stiff and straight as a pole, whose uniform bore the rank insignia of major, emerged from one of the gaping portals and greeted them with a particularly firm handshake each.
“Lord Carnarvon. Mr Carter. I am Major Gordon,” he introduced himself. “I am to be your guide while you are here on Mars.”
“Is this where we’re to be billeted?” Carnarvon asked, taking in the vast spinal corridor with a sweep of his hand.
“Oh no, my lord,” the major was quick to correct him. “Marineris City is only the first stop on your Grand Tour, as it were.”
“So where are we headed?” Carter asked. “It looks like we could spend a lifetime examining and cataloguing the secrets of this site alone.”
“I’m sure you could, sir,” Major Gordon replied, “but before we travel to your final destination, there is something you must see here.”
Carnarvon barked at the crew of Egyptian diggers not to unload their equipment but remain with the truck, as the Major led them up a ramp and through a circular doorway, above which the words ‘Whitehall Forward Command & Control’ had been stencilled in big black letters.
They passed through rooms where all manner of military personnel worked at green-glowing terminals and map projection screens, monitoring the progress of the war across half a dozen battlefronts right across the planet.
Carter’s head was in a spin. It was still less than twelve hours since they had set down on Mars and been roused from their month-long sojourn aboard the rocket ship Scott. Since then he had barely had more than a cup of tea to drink and a round of fish paste sandwiches to eat and he was both hungry and disoriented. Every turn they made revealed new marvels, which only added to his sense of dislocation.
They eventually entered a cramped corridor which led to a solid steel door surrounded by more stencilled signs that read ‘No Unauthorised Admittance’ and ‘Red Book Only’. Ignoring the signs, Major Gordon turned the wheel-lock, opened the door and stepped through. Carter stepped through after him, and found himself in a chamber that appeared to have been turned into some sort of lab. And then he saw what was spread across the domed roof above him.
He gawped, like some idiot schoolboy seeing his first pair of breasts.
It was a frieze. In places the plaster had been lost, exposing the hexagonal blocks from which the dome had been constructed. But what remained was more than enough to leave Howard Carter staring open-mouthed at the alien fresco, and the deeper truths than one simple find contained.
It was clearly a map of the solar system, although not the solar system as it was currently known to man. At the apex of the dome had been painted the fiery orb of the sun. Heading outwards from the centre, the planets had been painted and their elliptical orbits demarcated too. Not only that, but strange beings, the likes of which Carter had never seen, had been painted next to the different planets, which Ca
rter could only surmise were supposed to be representations of the species that lived on each of the worlds.
Third from the Sun was a blue-green sphere that Carter was certain had to be the Earth, polar icecaps included, although the continents were all bunched together in one vast primordial landmass. And it wasn’t only the arrangement of the continents that was wrong; rather than representations of Mankind being painted beside it, the inhabitants of the Earth were shown as ungodly reptilian monsters, more akin to dinosaurs than men.
The Moon was also shown in its orbit around the Earth and was home to yet more unearthly creatures.
Next came Mars itself, but despite there being four different races depicted around the red planet, none of them looked like the Martians Carter knew of. Instead, the creatures that had attempted to invade Earth not twenty-five years before were shown next to a small white-grey sphere, which circled the sun between Mars and Jupiter.
“Where’s the asteroid belt?” Carnarvon said at Carter’s shoulder.
“There.” He pointed at the ‘Martian’ origin-world. “Some catastrophe must have befallen it, destroying the planet and creating the asteroid belt, while its denizens were forced to find somewhere else to live. Clearly they chose Mars.”
“It’s quite beautiful, isn’t it?” said Major Gordon.
“It certainly changes our understanding of the solar system.”
Staring at the ancient map, Carter felt like he was gazing upon the wall paintings of Tutankhamun’s tomb again for the first time.
“This, I take it, is the reason you brought us to Mars.”
“Oh no,” said Major Gordon with a smile. “This is just to give you some context. You might say this is just the tip of the iceberg.”
THEY BARELY HAD time to freshen up, after a month locked inside a rocket ship, and have something to eat at the nearby mess hall before they had to don their environmental suits again and re-join the diggers aboard the transport. And so they set off once more, but with Major Gordon in tow this time.
They were three hours into their transfer flight from Marineris City, their stratocraft chasing the solar terminator over mountains the colour of iron oxide, when Carter asked Major Gordon, “Where precisely are you taking us, Major?”
“There,” the officer said and pointed through a porthole. He didn’t need to say anything else.
The Head dominated the landscape. Over a mile in length, the mesa rose from the near featureless plain that surrounded it to a height of almost half a mile. This close to the structure, there could be no doubting that, in millennia long past, some ancient race had—by means as yet unknown—reordered the mountainous peak to resemble a colossal face.
“Good God!” Carnarvon exclaimed as he too set eyes on the astonishing edifice.
“Until only recently, it was one of the Martian hives,” Gordon said.
“Why, what happened recently?” asked Carter.
“It was cleared out following a push by our own forces.”
Carter considered once more the frieze they had been shown at Marineris City. “But you don’t believe it was created by them. The invaders, I mean.”
“No, we don’t,” Gordon confirmed. “And that is why you are here.”
UPON THEIR ARRIVAL at Cydonia, Carter and Carnarvon—along with their limited team of excavators—disembarked from the stratocraft, the Egyptians quickly unloading what little equipment that had been able to bring with them from the Valley of the Kings dig-site.
Carter stared up at the near sheer sides of the mesa before them. Despite clearly having been created from a pre-existing topographical feature on the planet’s surface, a great doorway had been cut into its southern side, flanked by inhuman colossi that reminded Carter of the temples of Ramses the Second and Nefertari at Abu Simbel. In other places, the Martian bedrock had been sculpted into immense, awe-inspiring, geometric forms.
Major Gordon led them along what looked like the remains of a processional avenue and through an airlock that had clearly been placed there by the British Army so that an atmosphere breathable to humans might be maintained inside the Head, just as at Marineris City.
On the other side, they found themselves in a vast, high-ceilinged gallery where they were able to remove their hazard suits once more. A group of temporary huts had been put together against one wall, and so vast was the space that they were dwarfed by the soaring walls.
This, they learned, was to be their base for the duration of their stay. Having had a chance to choose their bunks, wash, and change, the two adventurers enjoyed a sit down meal in the mess tent next door. But they weren’t permitted to rest for long.
“Gentlemen,” Major Gordon said, a nervous tic having taken hold of one eyebrow as he watched Carter and Carnarvon polish off a plate of corned beef hash, “time is pressing. Every minute we delay here might prolong the war by another day. There is work to be done.”
“So you keep telling us,” Lord Carnarvon said, mopping up the last of the grease congealing on his salver with a hunk of bread, “but you still haven’t told us precisely why the powers that be have seen fit to drag our arses to Mars.”
“If you come with me, I will show you,” the officer said, with just the slightest hint of impatient irritation in his voice.
“Very well then,” Lord Carnarvon huffed. “Come on, Carter, it’s time we were up and at it.”
“At last,” muttered Carter, rising from the bench and wiping the gravy from his moustache with a napkin.
Emerging from the mess tent, he became aware of a figure bumbling towards them from further along the gallery.
It was a portly gentleman, with thinning brown hair, and a neatly trimmed goatee upon his wobbling chins, wearing a Harris Tweed three-piece suit and a garish, mustard-coloured bowtie.
Beaming from ear to ear, the man marched up to Carter, hand outstretched.
“Allow me to introduce Professor Stephen Langford,” Major Gordon said.
“A pleasure, Mr Carter, an absolute pleasure,” the academic gushed, pumping his hand furiously. “Your work in Egypt? Quite incredible!”
“Thank you, Professor.”
“But I would hazard to say that what we have to show you here will rival even those wonderful things you found in Tutankhamun’s tomb,” the other man said, suppressing a giggle. He glanced at Major Gordon. “I take it you’ve seen the Marineris mural?”
“Indeed we have,” chipped in Lord Carnarvon. “Quite astonishing.”
“And yet, only the tip of the iceberg, or so we’re told,” Carter added.
“Quite. Quite!” chuckled Langford.
“We tried to get Professor Henry Jones from Princeton University to join us, but the Powers That Be wouldn’t hear of it,” Carter went on. “And besides, he would probably have said he was too busy looking for the Holy Grail to get involved.”
“But the Holy Grail is here!” laughed Langford. “Come with me. Come with me, and I’ll show you.”
PROFESSOR LANGFORD LED the way along the length of the arterial hallway. They passed archway after archway, and while Carter tried to catch a glimpse of what lay beyond each one, Major Gordon made sure he and Carnarvon stayed on track.
Reaching an archway ten times the height of a man, Langford led them through into a chamber lit by arc lights. The artificial light reflected from myriad tiles that seemed to have a finish similar to mother-of-pearl. Passing through this angular chamber, bathed in opalescent light, they entered another vaulted space, this one almost organic in shape. The undulating floor was dotted with a host of other organic forms, and yet each one—from those that looked like tree-tall mushrooms to others that looked like branching undersea corals—appeared to make been cast in some sort of ceramic.
Langford led them deeper still, into a dark connecting passageway littered with shattered pots, and from there into the grandest chamber yet. Its towering walls curved towards the apex of the roof. The floor was covered with mounds of rubble and other things that reminded Carter of
the rubbish-strewn abandoned battlefields they had passed on the way to this place, as well as some of the things he had seen in the newsreels reporting on the Martian war effort. But what was most astonishing of all, the thing that took his breath away merely to gaze upon it, was the vast mural that appeared to cover every inch of wall space.
Gordon and Langford had been right—the mural map of the solar system he had seen in the Red Book room was nothing compared to this breath-taking work of art. Just to look upon it caused him to burst into unmanly tears, and that was without yet fully understanding what it showed. Outlandish figures, some in profile like the kings and gods of Ancient Egyptian wall paintings, stood amidst shell-like structures that could have been either natural forms or examples of alien architecture. Stylised streamers tumbled from coral-pink skies while a distant horizon burned with frozen flames and the impossibly perfect waves of a long-gone ocean rippled across one entire wall.
And everywhere Carter looked, he saw golden curls and spirals arranged in regimented columns and isolated roundels.
“Hieroglyphs!” he gasped, blinking back the tears. “Well, some form of writing, at least.”
“Quite, Mr Carter,” Langford chuckled. “Quite.”
“If only we had some kind of key to help us decode their meaning,” Carter mused, gazing at the columns of curving script. “Our own Rosetta st—”
“Miss Stone,” Langford suddenly said, interposing upon his ponderings.
Hearing trotting footsteps behind him, Carter turned.
She was svelte, with pale skin and auburn hair tumbling about her shoulders. She was wearing a light cotton blouse and a pair of highly fashionable—not to say practical—cream linen trousers. In fact, she was everything Howard Carter would have looked for in a woman, had he been looking. And there was something about the glint in her sapphire eyes that suggested she had the wits to rival her beauty.
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