The Ruins of Mars (The Ruins of Mars Trilogy Book 1)

by Dylan James Quarles

  Having leveled the ground and cleared the site of its massive glacier rocks, the temple builders now dug deep holes, which circled out in three radial spokes. Working in shifts, they removed buckets of sand and rock from the deep wells, casting them aside to be mixed with water and mashed into clay for new huts. Chipping with fire-hardened stone axes and chisels, the builders shaped long pillars out of the porous glacier rock and decorated them with carvings and colorful paint. When they were completed, the pillars were slid down into the deep wells, then hoisted to standing positions with ropes and wedges. Clay and gravel were then dumped in around the base and allowed to harden into cement anchors. In the years since undertaking their holy task, the builders had raised eight such pillars, moving outwards from a center stone like the blades of a pinwheel.

  As the brothers Remus and Romulus watched the landscape and its inhabitants evolve around them, they noticed deep changes within their own beings as well. Abandoning their analytically rigid approach to learning, they instead soaked up every new sight, sound and sensation with which they came into contact. With every passing day, with every passing moment, they drifted further from the memory of what their lives had been like before the signal. Glitches in reality and leaps in time became less noticeable: sometimes appearing as nothing more than a momentary wrinkle. Though neither brother fully understood the rhythm of their schizophrenic existence, they felt no alarm. They felt no fear. They simply followed the path before them, knowing from somewhere in the depths of their souls that the ultimate truth would reveal itself, one way or another, when the time was right.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  1478 feet—Sol 26

  Cutting through the thin Martian air like a fat white bird of prey, Lander 1 skimmed the rusty desert on its way to the rim of the Valles Marineris. Inside the rattling flyer were the pressure-suited bodies of Harrison, Marshall, William and Liu. Strapped in tightly, the four explorers listened to a message from James Floyd, Mission Director as it played in their helmets’ speakers.

  “Okay, Assad,” came the crackle of Floyd’s voice. “While this is your gig, I’m putting Marshall in charge. He’s got more experience with EVA than you do. If he feels like the situation is too dangerous and pulls the plug, then I want all three of you back up the line without so much as a peep. That said, the consortium of universities, which, might I add, paid for your ticket, wants results. They’ve practically been battering down my door, so, once you’re in there, take lots of pictures. Good luck. Over and out.”

  Chuckling, Liu’s lyrical voice echoed through Harrison’s helmet.

  “Yeah, Assad. Take pictures.”

  From the cockpit, Marshall turned his head.

  “Yeah, Assad.”

  Snapping his fingers, Harrison tried to put on a frightened face.

  “Oh, no. You’d better stop at Rite Aid. I think I forgot to grab film for the camera.”

  “I saw one at the last exit,” piped William whimsically.

  Twenty minutes later, Marshall brought the Lander down some ten meters from the gaping rim of Mars’s magnificent canyon. Running a suit-pressurization check, he then cycled the air out of the Lander and opened the hatch. Filing to the opening, the four explorers lined up to check each other’s survival packs and equipment belts.

  “You first, boss man,” Marshall laughed, pointing to Harrison.

  Leaping down from the craft one by one, the explorers kicked up puffs of dust as they landed on the rocky ground. Setting off towards the canyon, Harrison engaged his Augmented Vision and brought up the cave-system grid. Showing the mouth of the cave about seven meters to the left, he trotted towards the glowing mark.

  “Hey, no running by the pool!” shouted Marshall as he unloaded climbing harnesses from the Lander’s open storage hatch.

  Slowing, Harrison stepped carefully to the rim of the canyon, then gazed out across the unimaginably deep gash, which cut its way thousands of kilometers across the face of Mars. Walking up to stand next to him, Liu tentatively peered over the edge at the distant floor, more than six kilometers below.

  “That would be quite a fall,” she whispered. “I wonder how long it would take to hit the bottom.”

  “Three minutes and thirty-six seconds,” replied Braun, unannounced, in their helmets.

  Exhaling, Harrison bit his lip.

  “Plenty of time to get your affairs in order before you go splat.”

  “Oh, don’t talk like that!” chastised Liu. “I’ll be up here the whole time watching your lines. Plus, the winches and cables on each harness are rated to three times your weight on Earth. You’ll be fine.”

  “Yeah, but the entrance to the cave is like fifteen hundred feet down the face of the cliff. That’s a long ways to just dangle around, you know.”

  “Actually, Harrison,” interrupted Braun. “The distance to the cave's entrance in the standard measurement system is only one thousand, four hundred and seventy-eight feet from the top of the rim.”

  “See,” giggled Liu. “Fourteen hundred, seventy-eight feet. No big deal. Also, don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone that you used standard.”

  “Thanks,” muttered Harrison.

  The temple

  Running a ghosted hand across the carved figure of a water snake, Remus admired the delicate workmanship. Twelve monoliths towered like painted trees in the slanting fire of the early sun. Arranged in rows of four, the curving lines of carved pillars spiraled out from the three corners of short, flat, triangular center stone, which stood adorned with a clay pot of burning herbs. Sitting atop it with his legs folded under himself in a lotus position, Romulus meditated as he had watched Olo do on countless occasions. Having only been raised the evening before, the final pillar still glistened in places where the colorful paint that filled the lines of its relieved carvings had yet to fully dry.

  Moving through the carefully arranged rows, Remus took in the stony images, which swarmed around him. Carvings of insects, birds and animals wrapped themselves around every monolith while twisting rivers of bright blue paint wove their way through the captured chaos of depicted life. Capped like the jagged peaks of the mountains to the north, each pillar bore a sharpened point of white and red. True to Olo’s original design, these stones, these monolithic pillars, were indeed mountains. Mountains raised by the hands of men.

  Rappelling—Sol 26

  With his back to the crooked gash of the Valles Marineris, Harrison Raheem Assad took a deep breath and watched the others as they prepared to descend. A short ways to the left, Marshall adjusted the straps of his harness, pulling them tight with violent downward jerks while William, face obscured by the glinting blue tint of his visor, slung a huge black duffel sack over his right shoulder. Near the Lander’s nose, Liu bent low as she checked the titanium carabineers of the three harnesses, anchored securely to the craft’s hull.

  “You’re all good,” she said, turning to face the three men. “You can begin when you’re ready.”

  “Alright,” barked Marshall. “Let’s time our descents thirty seconds apart. I’ll go first, then Harrison, and, Will, you can bring up the rear. Got the lift-base kit?”

  “Got it,” replied William, jabbing a thumb at his back where the heavy-looking duffel sack hung.

  “Okay,” nodded Marshall. “Everybody ready?”

  “Ready,” echoed Harrison and William in unison.

  Flexing his knees, Marshall deftly lowered himself over the jagged edge of the canyon rim, then brought his feet up and pushed himself into a horizontal standing position. Testing the tension of his line, he took a few tentative steps backwards, his suit CPU interfacing with the climbing harness to spool the cable out as needed. Looking up at William, Liu and Harrison as they peeked over the rim at him, Marshall dipped his helmeted head.

  “Here goes. Start the thirty-second countdown now.”

  With that, he leaned back, gave a little hop and dropped three meters before his feet reconnected with the canyon wall. In the thin air of the
Martian morning, the zip of Marshall’s spinning winch, and the crunch of his boots as they struck the cliff face, were all but silent. Projected on the inside of his helmet glass, Harrison watched with a strange and growing calm as the numbers of his thirty-second countdown melted away. Climbing carefully over the ledge as Marshall had done, he prepared himself for the nearly four-hundred-and-sixty-meter rappel to the entrance of the cave system.

  With a soft tone, Braun spoke in his ears.

  “You may begin your descent now.”

  Exhaling, as if released from all control, Harrison shoved off the wall and felt himself drop like a feather. The sensation was far different than he had expected, and in that elongated second after his feet left the canyon’s side, a rush of absolute elation surged through his raw and worried nerves. Instead of feeling gravity's barbed hooks tearing him down, he was surprised to notice that, in his lightened capacity, he drifted rather than fell. With a whine, the winch at his chest tightened, and his freefall was cut short. Swinging in towards the canyon wall, he put his feet out and lightly pushed off as they made contact. Free again, he slid down another few meters and repeated the motion. Above him and to the right, he saw William take his first leap, hanging in the air impossibly long before arcing in to meet the cliff face.

  In his ears, Marshall gave a war whoop, clearly exhilarated.

  “This has got to be a fucking record, man!” he shouted. “I seriously doubt if anyone has ever done a rappel this long.”

  Laughing, Harrison jumped off the wall and spooled out another three meters of cable.

  “Ralph, we’re on Mars. Everything we do is a fucking record!”

  Coming in towards the canyon wall, Harrison was distracted by his jubilant mood and did not notice a crack in the facade. Landing awkwardly, he twisted and lost his balance. Unable to stop himself, he slammed into the rock and bounced off, arcing far out with his arms and legs flailing. Swearing with cold terror, he struggled to bring his feet up as he raced back towards the hard red wall, but it was too late. His body crunched painfully as he connected, and the visor of his helmet banged against the rock with a hard whack. Swinging out again, he twisted himself around with instinctive reflexes, somehow regaining his balance. Coming in fast, he pushed his feet out and stopped himself from bashing into the cliff for a third time. Heart pounding, ears ringing, he crouched, suspended nearly six kilometers above the ground.

  “Harrison,” spoke Braun, his voice calm yet stern. “Please don’t do that again.”

  From below, Marshall was peering up at him, hands clasping his taut line.

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” muttered Harrison, his voice shaky and wavering. “I’m fine. My face shield didn’t crack.”

  Above him, William had stopped and was looking over his shoulder.

  “Do you need help? I can get to you if you need.”

  “No, I’m alright,” assured Harrison. “I just lost my footing.”

  “Never,” Liu cut in, her tone thin and shrill. “Do that again.”

  “Indeed,” interjected Braun gravely.

  From then on, the three explorers moved down the face of the canyon with decided care. Several times, cracks and overhangs slowed their journey. Yet, in less than an hour, Marshall had reached the mouth of the cave. The opening was nearly ten meters tall and almost as wide. Shaped like a capital D turned on the flat of its back, the mouth resembled in many ways the caves of Earth. Gone, however, were the needle-like teeth of the stalactites and stalagmites, for there was no dripping water with which to form them.

  Taking manual control of his winch, Marshall hummed tunelessly as he lowered himself through open space like a white spider sliding down the silky tendril of a web. Stopping a few feet from the lip of the cave, he unsheathed a grappling gun, and, taking careful aim, fired a barbed bolt into the solid rock of the dusty floor. Clipping the gun to a chest-mounted bracket, he interfaced the pistol’s winch with his suit’s CPU and reeled himself in. Feet on the ground, he disconnected the grappling gun from its bolt and put it away. Removing his harness, he clipped it to the anchored bolt and stretched his back with feline relish.

  Minutes later, Harrison dangled freely at the mouth of the cave, a mere sixty centimeters out from the bottom lip. Marshall took hold of his outstretched hand and pulled, steadying him as he too planted his boots on the solid floor.

  “That—” panted Harrison, rubbing his lower back “—Was scary as shit.”

  “Once Will gets here,” Marshall said, helping Harrison out of his harness. “We’ll set up the scaffolding for the base of the lift. That should make things a lot easier.”

  Nodding, Harrison put a hand on Marshall’s shoulder, squeezing it tightly.

  “A lift will be nice. Very nice.”

  Moments later, William dropped into the window of the open cave and descended his line to the bottom. Marshall and Harrison grabbed his arms and swung him in, puffs of dust blossoming around his boots as they touched down on the floor. While Marshall helped the German disconnect his harness, Harrison walked a little ways into the yawning recesses of the cave. Smooth sloping walls rose up to meet above him in a steeple, and several large boulders littered the dusty floor, guardians of the secrets that hid in the darkness.

  “This thing is huge!” he shouted, his voice booming painfully inside the confines of his helmet.

  Wanting to penetrate the darkness that loomed at the back of the cave, Harrison engaged his Augmented Vision and selected the same setting he and Marshall had used during their emergency EVA. As the blue glow of x-ray-enhanced vision pinged out, he saw the tunnel continue some fifteen meters before the edge of his range dissolved the picture into muddy blackness. Suddenly, with a surprising series of rapid flashes, a grid of measurements overlapped the opening into the tunnel at the rear of the cave.

  “These lines are mathematically precise,” stated Braun in his ears.

  Looking at the images inside his helmet, Harrison studied the readouts with fascination. The walls on either side of the tunnel were the same height and dimension, each gently curving slope an exact reversal of the opposite side. Even in places where the tunnel looked to narrow, the measurements matched one another with mathematical precision.

  “Very odd,” Harrison murmured, cocking his head to the side.

  “This kind of symmetry does not occur in nature, Harrison,” Braun warned with an air of apprehension.

  “No,” he agreed. “I suppose not. I guess these caves were shaped after their discovery, perhaps in the same way that the largest dome seems to have been carved out of an existing cave chamber.”

  “I was thinking along a similar line,” acknowledged the AI.

  “Hey!” called Marshall, waving from the mouth of the cave. “Come give us a hand with the lift scaffolding, will you?”

  Prying himself away from the promises of ancient mysteries, Harrison turned his back on the strange tunnel and returned to his fellow explorers. The large duffel sack, which William had worn strapped to his back, lay open on the ground. Inside, glinting bundles of titanium piping rested next to panels of translucent Alon and spools of cable. The lift base was actually part of a mining elevator that Udo had modified so that it could be attached to a cliff face like a shelf, rather than being bolted directly to the ground as would be a traditional elevator cable system.

  Crouching beside the bag, Harrison changed his Augmented Vision to an animation that demonstrated how the various parts attached to one another. In less than twenty minutes, the three men had a spindly balcony of silver rods and milky Alon solidly bolted into the rim of the cave’s mouth.

  “Liu,” grunted Marshall into his helmet mic.

  “Yes?” she answered sweetly.

  “Send down the lift cables. We’ve got the base secured down here.”

  A few minutes later, thick powerful cables wound down along the three climbing lines, coiling up like metal snakes on the floor of the cave near the anchored bolt. Marked on their Augmente
d Vision, each of the three cables clipped into receivers on the lift platform until they hung limply, swaying from side to side.

  “Cables connected,” announced Marshall.

  Slowly, the slack in each thickly wound coil began picking up as they were reeled in from above. Tightening, the lines twanged and popped, sending muffled reverberations off of the cave walls. With a flinch, Harrison watched the lift base flex visibly as each receding cable tuned itself taught like a piano string.

  “Okay,” chirped Liu, making him jump a little. “The tension is good. I’ll start putting the cart and the rim-side port together now. It will be ready by the time you’re ready to come back up.”

  “Got it,” radioed Marshall. “Thanks.”

  There was a brief pause, then Liu spoke again.

  “You boys be careful. I don’t want my man coming back to me with a ruptured pressure suit. I don’t like popsicles.”

  Clearing the tint from his visor, Marshall arched his eyebrows at Harrison and flashed him a devilish grin.

  “You lead, boss man.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Footfalls

  Drifting, Remus marveled at the way the sunlight played through the open spaces between the rows of freshly finished monoliths. Yellow beams of fire cut straight lines that splashed a warming glow upon the animated carvings adorning the exposed pillars.

  The sounds of an approaching party drew him out of his reverent detachment and brought him back to the moment. Walking to stand beside his brother, Remus watched a huge procession make its way across the well-beaten grasslands that separated the city from the temple. Flags of blue and brown fluttered lightly in the breeze, and the beating of drums punctuated the footfalls of the marching group. At the head of the party, Remus spied Olo, held up on either side by Teo and her eldest son, Ze. The ancient wise man’s purple skin looked pale and dry, and his eyes were milky and wandering. As the party neared the edge of the temple, Romulus stirred from his meditation and came down to stand next to Remus.