by Ian Douglas
“Yeah,” Garroway said. “Ah! There’s the signal.”
A flare burst silently overhead, accompanied by a mental alert downloaded to every person in the open. Thirty seconds to launch.
The two Marines were several kilometers from the launch rail at its closest. Plenty of room.
For the moment, the vehicles in the pit ceased operation, giving the dust cloud they’d raised time to drift slowly downwind, dispersing. Their operators, in the dome at Cydonia City, had unlinked for the moment—ostensibly to let the dust clear from the air, but actually to watch the pod launch.
A Marine A-40 Gyrfalcon flier streaked south ten meters above the rail, the wan sun glinting from its cockpit canopy. The Marine at the controls would be checking the length of the rail to make sure no human or machine had missed getting the word and strayed into the danger zone. In the almost-vacuum of the Martian atmosphere, there would be no warning sound when the pod began to accelerate.
The seconds trickled past as the Gyrfalcon, now far down near the southern horizon beyond the pyramidal loom of D&M Mountain, suddenly swung left and circled back, gaining altitude. Ten seconds’ warning, the mental voice announced. Five seconds. Four…three…two…one…launch.
Down on the monorail, immensely powerful magnetic fields gathered, then started moving. The hovering white cargo pod moved with them, slowly at first, then faster…then still faster, until it was hurtling silently down the track at over five hundred kilometers per hour, and still accelerating. Garroway heard a sharp click moments later—the equivalent here of a sonic boom in the painfully thin Martian atmosphere, the shock wave moving more slowly than it would with an air pressure of one atmosphere.
They turned as it silently hurtled past, watching it flash through the long shadow cast by D&M Mountain, its red and green acquisition lights pulsing brightly. Somewhere over the horizon to the south, the rail began climbing into the increasingly rugged and jumbled uplands of the Deuteronillus Mensa. In the vicinity of the crater Curie, the rail began curving gently but steadily upward, gently bending the pod’s trajectory toward the sky, and space. When it reached three kilometers per second—orbital velocity for Mars, the pod’s sustaining fields switched off and it truly took flight, arrowing into the southern sky…and polar orbit.
But by then it was well out of sight of the workers at Cydonia. The machines had already returned to their grubbing in the sands that once had been an ancient Martian beach. Nearby, several dozen more white canisters waited in silent ranks to be filled in turn. So far, five of the canisters, each massing fifty tons, had been slammed into polar orbit, where tugs and transport vessels were gathering them in at a single orbital complex and loading them on board an interstellar cargo vessel recently renamed Intrepid.
The project was moving ahead well. Two days ago, one container launch had failed when an electrical fault had resulted in the container not reaching orbital velocity. The canister had gone suborbital, leaving the atmosphere but bursting as it started back down, treating the inhabitants of a small research outpost at Argyre Planitia, in the Southern Hemisphere, to a spectacular fireworks display as fifty tons of sand burned up on re-entry.
But five for six was not a bad score, and the work was continuing, with the Marine teleoperators relieving one another in six-hour shifts.
“We’d better get back,” Chrome warned. “Another load of FNGs is coming in at sunset.”
“Yeah. Just a sec, though.”
Turning about again, he stared across red-ocher sands toward the northeast.
The Face was just visible from here.
Even yet, xenoarcheologists disagreed as to whether or not the Face on Mars actually represented a face, meaning that it was, in fact, artificial, and not an accident of nature. The original photographs, taken by the Viking Orbiter spacecraft in 1976, seemed to show an eerily human, Sphinx-like face a mile across peering up out of the Martian desert toward the sky. Planetary scientists studying the photos as they were transmitted back to Earth had dismissed the object as an amusing but natural accident, a yardang, as it was known in the Sahara of Earth, an isolated mesa carved by wind and sand over millions of years. Any similarity to a deliberately carved face was due solely to the peculiarities of the human brain, hardwired to recognize faces in otherwise random patterns of light and dark.
The Face had captured the public imagination, however, when the photos were released in the early 1980s, and speculation had run wild over the idea of a titanic, obviously artificial sculpture on the Martian surface—and on the question of what the government might be trying to cover up by claiming otherwise. Other oddly shaped and positioned geoforms were identified nearby, and many discussed the possibility of an ancient, lost Martian city.
In 1998, another orbiting robot spacecraft had taken more photos of the Face with a resolution ten times better than that possible for Viking, and the scientists had reveled in a brief bit of I-told-you-so pride; the new photographs showed very little on the top of the mesa that was facelike. It was just what we said all along, the scientists said with self-satisfied aplomb: a trick of nature, an accident of light, shadow, and human suggestibility.
And yet…
When human explorers finally arrived at Cydonia in the first half of the twenty-first century, they did find evidence of ancient civilization and of large-scale planetary engineering. The City Complex included mountains partially hollowed out by artificial means, though all had been smashed and damaged in what looked like a large-scale attack. The empty, blast-savaged and sand-worn shell of a spacecraft had been found, together with a great deal of other wreckage. The Face—whether it was a face or not—had been artificially shaped; those sloping sides at the base were too geometrically perfect to be otherwise. Eventually, a door had been found, and deep beneath the Face had been discovered the Cave of Wonders.
Slowly, xenoarcheologists began piecing together the whole story.
It was true. Intelligent beings from somewhere else, beings perhaps inevitably called “the Ancients,” had come to Mars half a million years before. They’d hollowed out habitats inside pyramidal mountains. They’d built an underground chamber filled with what seemed to be viewscreens, most inoperative, but a few showing realtime images of other worlds—images that apparently bypassed the usual rules concerning the speed of light. They’d tinkered with the Martian climate, making it warmer and wetter until a sea that had vanished perhaps a billion years before again filled the Northern Hemisphere basin, transforming the Red Planet into blue and green. More interesting still, they’d brought hominids from the third planet in the system, members of a tool-using, fire-building species men would one day call Homo erectus.
Skeletons of both Homo erectus and of early Homo sapiens had been found at Cydonia and elsewhere on the planet in considerable numbers, wearing tailored uniforms and often holding high-tech gadgets in mummified hands. Studies of the remains, including exhaustive DNA testing, proved beyond any reasonable doubt an old and often hotly debated hypothesis. Someone from elsewhere in the Galaxy had not only reworked the Martian climate, but they’d tinkered with the genetic structure of Homo erectus, a creature that previously had been evolving on Earth slowly and steadily over the course of one to two million years. Virtually overnight, two new species had appeared on the scene—the hominids that one day would be called Neanderthal, and the Neanderthals’ close cousins, an archaic version of Homo sapiens.
Modern man, in other words, was a product of genetic engineering.
Then, a few thousand years later, perhaps, disaster had struck. The spacecraft of yet another starfaring species—the Hunters of the Dawn—had found the Ancients’ colony on Mars. Judging from the skeletal remains, the end had come with horrific suddenness. An asteroid strike had stripped much of the newly generated atmosphere away from the planet. The reborn sea had evaporated once more, and all life on the planet had died. The Ancients had managed to cripple one of the intruders—the Singer—trapping it beneath the ice of Europa.
>
Curiously, no skeletal remains had been found of the Ancients themselves, either on Mars, or on any of several other worlds of a half-dozen nearby stars, including Chiron, at Alpha Centauri A. Tens of thousands of crumbling shells of ceramic and metal that might once have been robotic machines had been discovered among the ruins of several dead but once-inhabited worlds, and one theory held that the Ancients had actually been highly advanced AIs, machine intelligences that had outlived their original creators.
But no one knew for sure. The Ancients, whoever or whatever they might have been, appeared to have vanished forever.
Garroway wondered if Humanity was destined to follow them.
“Not on my watch,” he murmured.
“What’d you say?” Chrome asked.
“Nothing,” Garroway said. “Let’s get back inside.”
A long time later, he lay in bed with Chrome, holding her. The base at Cydonia was large and fairly luxurious by Martian standards—the better to house the small army of xenoarcheologists who rotated in and out of assignments at the site. Nano construction techniques had grown hundreds of interconnected pressurized domes, complete with interior furnishings, and it was standard practice here for senior NCOs to have individual quarters. The rooms were small and Spartan, but they were private.
And if anyone else knew that Garroway and Chrome were sleeping together…well, there was a lot of that going on now, a lot of pairing off, a lot of sexual liaisons that would not have been condoned before the arrival of the Xul ship. Everyone was aware of it. Armageddonfall had brought every human here, Marines, Navy, Army, and civilians alike, face to face with the mortality of the species, and that tended to bring people together.
“Suppose the Xul come back before we can get to the objective?” she asked him, her voice much smaller than was usual for her.
“Then we carry out the mission, and then we see if there’s anything we can do back here.” He shrugged. “One problem at a time.”
“They say they’re building a fleet of asteroid starships, anyway. Arks.”
“I wish them well. But our duty lies here. And at Night’s Edge.”
“I wonder what they’ll find at Andromeda?”
“Why? You want to go with them?”
“We still could. Seafire is volunteers only. You heard the general’s order yesterday. If we want to back out, we can. And they need Marines for the arks.”
Garroway pulled back from her. “What the hell are you saying? You want to run to M-31?”
“I…I don’t know if we can do any good. Maybe they’re right. The Terns, I mean.” As the debate had raged across Earth and through space, the two factions had taken on distinct names and personalities. Those advocating flying off to M-31 in Andromeda were the Terns—a reference to that bird’s astonishing long-range migrations. Those urging a military strike against the Xul were the Hawks, that bird having a very old association with militarism.
“We’ve been over all of this, Chrome,” Garroway said. Damn it, her change of heart and mind was scaring him. He’d thought he knew her better than this. “It’s the surviving population on Earth we need to protect, not a few hundred thousand bureaucrats and politicians.”
That startled her. “They’re talking about a selection process for choosing a cross-section of Humankind, Trigger. To make sure they have representatives of all the arts, all the sciences….”
“Sure they are. But everyone is going to want a cybe-hibe pod for the trip out. And the ones controlling the selection process will be—”
“The political leaders,” she said, completing the thought.
“Affirmative. Chrome, if Humankind is going to be saved, we have to save all of it. Otherwise, we’re facing the Edelstein theory. Fringies. Remember Eostre?”
She nodded slowly, thoughtful.
For the better part of three hundred years, Humankind had been migrating to the stars. But that migration had not been taking place in the way most visionaries of the past had predicted. And forty years ago, Victor Edelstein had shown why.
During the mid-to late-twenty-first century, most explorations both within and beyond the Solar System had been focused on the Origins Problems. Humanity had been created—or, at least, tailored—from Homo erectus half a million years ago. Later extrasolar visitors had further shaped human prehistory and early history. The An had colonized parts of Earth, built titanic stone structures in places as far removed from one another as Lake Titicaca, on coastlines now submerged off the coasts of Okinawa and India, in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, and on the surface of the Moon, and they had created about themselves a god cult to control their human slaves. The Xul had destroyed the An colonies and much of humanity at the end of the last Ice Age. Then the N’mah had arrived, helping the survivors rebuild with the basic underpinnings of science and technology—agriculture, math, literacy, and medicine. Yet another Xul incursion had destroyed the promise of the N’mah Renaissance, and planted the legends of lost Atlantis.
Human colonies had been founded offworld first and foremost to support the archeological missions and research outposts. When a surviving colony of the An had been discovered at Ishtar, human outposts had been planted there to further trade and peaceful contact; other colonies had been planted on a number of Earthlike worlds at nearby stars—at Chiron, at Tau Ceti, at Epsilon Eridani, even at the hell that was Wolf 359, and elsewhere.
But the social order on Earth was changing. The World Bank Crisis of 2145 had brought about a new centralization of control, and a call to end “interstellar adventurism,” as the out-system colonization effort was known. Several colony worlds had been abandoned, when Earth no longer was willing to foot the high cost of keeping them supplied. A few colonies remained to support the xenotechnoarcheologists, but those were pared back to outpost status. There would be no growing interstellar colonial empire centered on Earth.
The majority of Earth’s population supported this notion with surprising enthusiasm. Earth was overcrowded, resources were scarce, and wars frequent…but it was home, and the vast majority of people preferred struggling to survive or prosper in the known, to braving eldritch biohorrors beyond the grasp of any human imagination, atmospheres that ranged anywhere from marginal to deadly, and extremes of environment unimaginable to the typical urban citizen of an Earth-born human.
Always, however, in every culture, in every social milieu, there were exceptions, the people who didn’t fit in, the people who were different, who wouldn’t go along with the crowd, who insisted on being individuals in a global culture that increasingly dictated what was normal, and what was not. They were the rugged individualists, the outcasts, the rebels and, as in every period of history before, they were the ones who dared face the dangers at whatever the price in order to create new societies and explore new means of building new social systems.
Though the governments of Earth couldn’t afford to support such colonies, they encouraged the exodus of their founders. It was safer that way, having the rebels and the malcontents conducting their social experiments five or ten or twenty light-years away, unable to contaminate the population that accepted things as they were and supported the government’s ideas of order and stability. With sixteen billion people on Earth, the planet increasingly needed a safety valve, a means of bleeding off the extremist elements that might threaten a delicate status quo.
In 2158, the first Free Colony had departed for Poseidon, a marginally Earthlike world once the site of an archeological outpost, but now long abandoned. Their ship was the New Hope, a former military interstellar transport purchased by the underwriting efforts of Green Party activists in California. The settlers in the New Hope’s cybe-hibe tubes—over a thousand of them—had been dedicated to the principles of Green Ecofundamentalism, and intended to found a new society based on living in harmony with nature.
The colony had thrived for thirty-seven years before being obliterated by one of Poseidon’s mammoth coriolis storms, a hurricane which, in a world
with a global ocean and higher temperatures than Earth, had been nearly as powerful as the superstorm still centered over the eastern Atlantic on Earth.
But other Free Colonies had continued to depart from Earth, determined to find better homes and better futures elsewhere. As it happened, most were religious colonies, or colonies founded with experimental social or philosophical doctrines. A Neocommunist collective headed for Rhiannon, at Epsilon Eridani, in 2175. The Reformed Catholics were trying to make a go of Janus, out at Chi Draconis, while the First Church of the Gray Redeemer had set its sights on Dagda, the third world of Eta Cassiopeiae A. Islamic fundamentalists, still seething after the disaster of the Jihad War of the 2140s, had purchased a transport and departed for Idun—now renamed Janni—at DM+6 398.
And the Foundation of Reason had departed for Eostre in 2250, determined to build a new society along strict principles of scientific rationality and eugenics.
What Edelstein, a psychosociologist at the Institute for the Advancement of Humankind at Bern, had demonstrated was that Earth’s colonies, her new frontier, tended to be populated by small and relatively homogenous groups dedicated to ideologies, philosophies, and religious practice far removed from those crammed into the hodgepodge of belief and culture still occupying the Earth. In most cases, they represented fringe elements of belief—“the Fringies,” as those who stayed on Earth liked to call them—and they tended to be extremist in those beliefs. Isolated and isolationist, maintaining little or no contact with a mother world light-years distant, they tended to develop in unexpected and unpredictable ways, in accordance with Edelstein’s Chaos Mathematics of Social Dynamics.
That, at least, was the best explanation going for what had happened on Eostre.
Both Garroway and Chrome had been on Eostre fourteen objective years ago, in 2300, their last deployment before the IMAC training session on Mars. The expeditionary unit had been deployed to Epsilon Indi IV to deal with the Foundation of Reason and their eugenically pure Elect. Normally, a Free Colony was expected to make it or not on its own, but in this case, the Eostrean government had begun slaughtering the inhabitants of Kuei-Hui, the Cantonese colony on Eostre’s southern continent, in the name of racial purity. Since a PanTerran trade delegation was also involved, the Marines had been dispatched to restore order. By the time they got there, thirteen years later, most of the Cantonese colonists were dead…but order had been restored.
