Semper Mars: Book One of the Heritage Trilogy

by Ian Douglas

  It had been a blow to his career, though the increasing tensions between the United States and the UN had actually served to make him something of a popular hero at home. Politics, again. When the decision was made to send a tomographic imager to Mars, he’d been the obvious choice.

  Cydonia presented tomographic scanners with a special problem: much of the complex was at least partly buried in the permafrost layer, which lay some two to three meters beneath the surface in this area. Permafrost is essentially frozen mud; at Martian temperatures, ice is an extremely hard material. Indeed, there were plans to begin constructing buildings made from permafrost bricks. The stuff was so hard it was difficult to distinguish between it and the materials the long-vanished Builders at Cydonia had used—mostly native bedrock, at a time when Mars had enjoyed an ocean of liquid water—the Boreal Sea.

  “Hey! I think we’ve got something here,” Kettering said. He pointed at the screen. “Is that an open space?”

  “Too soon to tell yet,” Alexander replied, studying the screen. “Wait it out….” The features Kettering had pointed out were still little more than fuzzy gray shadows that suggested structures made of denser material than sand or ice, but they could be buried walls or buildings, or they might be sand-covered boulders. They did suggest an unusually orderly arrangement…a geometry of right angles, circles, and straight lines, and Alexander could feel his pulse quickening with excitement. It certainly looked artificial….

  “Look here,” Kettering said, pointing at the SIT screen. “That’s got to be a passageway, a tunnel or something, right up against the wall of the Fortress. And with an airlock at the surface.”

  “Or a ventilation duct,” Alexander replied, “with air-conditioning or pressurization equipment at the top.” He knew more than most the problems inherent in leaping to conclusions at the first encounter with new data.

  Druzhininova was already using the display’s keyboard to take a set of bearings. The Martian magnetic field was weak, about two-one-thousandths as strong as Earth’s, making traditional compass navigation difficult to impossible, but navigation satellites in areosynchronous orbit let them pinpoint themselves, or visible landmarks, to within a few centimeters. All of the shapes and structures visible on the sonic display were now located on the computer’s master navigational grid.

  “There,” she said, pointing. “Airlock or air conditioner, that’s where it is.”

  Alexander looked at the spot where she was pointing—an otherwise unremarkable swelling in the ground where sand had piled up against the Fortress’s western wall. There was something there.

  In the sixteen years since humans had first stood at this site, literally hundreds of artificial structures had been found, and most seemed to suggest that there was a truly vast and labyrinthine complex of tunnels and interconnected chambers beneath the Martian surface. That was why they’d brought him here, after all.

  “Whaddya say, Dave?” Kettering said. Alexander could hear the grin in his voice as he reached for one of the shovels resting in an equipment rack on the Mars cat. “What could it hurt? At least we can have a look.”

  Proper procedure called for flagging all new surface discoveries and bringing them up for review in the group research meeting held each morning. But as Kettering said…what could it hurt?

  He hesitated a moment longer, then grabbed another shovel for himself. “Let’s go check it out.”

  “Field Team, this is C-Prime,” a woman’s voice said in his helmet phones. “David? What are you doing?” It sounded like Mireille.

  “Just checking something, C-Prime,” he said. “Wait one.”

  “May I remind you that you are not to begin excavations until the site has been properly surveyed and mapped.”

  “Yes, you may. We just want to check something here.”

  Cydonia Prime was two kilometers distant. There was absolutely nothing they could do to stop the team from an act of what was certainly a breach of proper procedure…an act that Alexander knew he simply could not resist.

  The hummock was perhaps a meter tall and four or five meters on a side, a mound of crusty soil against the Fortress wall that looked perfectly natural. Only the subsurface sonogram proved that a passageway ended right…here.

  Gently, he scraped at the dirt with the blade of his shovel. The surface resisted at first, then crumbled away in great, frozen clots of earth, revealing…

  …a hole. A hole leading down into blackness beneath the Fortress.

  “Christ!” Pohl said, standing just behind Kettering and Druzhininova. “It’s open!”

  “Field Team, this is CP! What’s open? What’s happening? Answer!”

  Gently, Alexander touched his gloved finger to his visor, indicating silence, then tapped the side of his helmet. Keep down the chatter. They’re listening. He didn’t want to debate each move with the UN archeologists.

  It took only a few moments to clear away the opening. Steps were visible. Apparently, some gray-colored, extremely hard material had been used to construct the walls of the structure, and the floor had been cast with steps. The tunnel was circular and about two meters across.

  A burning curiosity drove Alexander onward. He’d expected a door, a sealed entrance, an airlock hatch. Apparently, the tunnel mouth had been open once, covered over with…with mud, perhaps? Yes, almost certainly. The mud had frozen, then dried, forming a crusty, easily broken covering of regolith and packed sand.

  “Field Team One! Field Team One! Respond, please!”

  Alexander reached up and switched on his helmet light, the white beam showing plainly in the dust still floating in the thin air of the descending tunnel. Carefully, testing each step, he started down the stairs.

  According to the sonogram, this descending tunnel should only extend down for about seven or eight meters, before entering a larger chamber of some sort. From there the main passageway ran east five meters beneath the surface.

  The stairs were barely visible. The mud or whatever it was that had covered over the surface structure evidently had spilled down the stairway without blocking it completely. He had to bend nearly double, though, to get through to the bottom. Kettering and the others followed closely behind.

  Carter must have felt this way at the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb. For the first time in how many millennia, a living being stood in this vault beneath the surface of Mars. He stood at the foot of the stairs, turning slowly, playing his helmet lamp across walls caked with the dust of uncounted ages. There was nothing distinctive about the architecture, no wall carvings, no decorations. The place was stark and utilitarian. He smiled. It might have been the interior of a military base, painted a bland conformist gray.

  And then he saw the bodies.

  There were four of them, and they all were huddled against a door to what Alexander knew was the southern passageway, the one leading to the nearby pyramid. The startling thing about them was that they looked human…a totally unexpected development.

  “My God,” Kettering said, awed. “Humans!…”

  “They can’t be,” Vandemeer said. “Everything we’ve found indicates that the Ancients were nonhuman.”

  Alexander knelt carefully beside one of the bodies. It was still a body and not a skeleton, as he might have expected. The face was iron gray and hardened, the lips pulled back from clenched teeth in a death’s-head rictus. The hair, long and braided, was the same color, matted with dust. He was wearing something that might have been a uniform, or worker’s garb…without a proper context there was no way to tell. The device on one shoulder appeared to be a mission patch of some sort, though the colors were so faded it was impossible to make out what it might have represented.

  Most disturbing, though, was the position the four had been in when they’d died. They were huddled together, some with arms still locked around their comrades. Two were reaching up with clawed, skeletal hands, resting against the sealed door, as though their last moments had been spent pounding or scratching at that barri
er for admittance. One was partly turned, his blind face staring back toward the steps leading to the surface, as though watching for the arrival of whatever fate had overtaken them.

  Careful not to touch any of the bodies—Alexander had the feeling that a touch, a whisper of breeze, even, would cause them to crumble—he searched for further clues. These people were technological, certainly. Each wore a metallic device of some sort on his right shoulder…a communicator, possibly. The more he looked, the more convinced he was that they were…not human, exactly, but very close. Their chins were less prominent than a human’s, the jaw muscles more pronounced, the ridges above the vacantly staring eye sockets thicker, the eyebrows bushier. The eyes, unfortunately, were gone, freeze-dried into dust by millennia of near vacuum. He wished he could have seen the eyes. He had a feeling they would have been disturbingly like his own.

  The problem with the Face, of course, had always been that it was so human-looking, even though, clearly, no human could possibly have carved it.

  It might, in fact, have been a portrait of one of these dead men.

  It would take more and careful study to be certain, but Alexander was virtually certain that he was looking at four members of genus Homo, species erectus…the hominids from which modern humans had evolved.

  And the question, of course, was what the hell had they been doing on Mars?

  He realized the increasingly frantic calls from Cydonia Prime had been cut off when he’d descended the stairs. These walls, evidently, blocked radio. “Pohl?” he said. “Go back up to the surface. Raise the base. Tell them…tell them they’d better get some people over here, that we’ve found something that’s going to stand their hair on end.”

  It was, Alexander was convinced, a discovery in the same class as those made by Copernicus and Darwin, a find to revolutionize humankind’s understanding of itself.

  NINE

  Human evolution/Brain size : The evolutionary tree of genus Homo is now well understood. Homo habilis gave rise, roughly 1.7 million years ago, to Homo erectus , who in turn gave rise to archaic populations of Homo sapiens 400,000 to 500,000 years ago. Besides the ongoing increase in average cranial capacity, principal changes included a general enlargement of the spinal cord, permitting better manual coordination. Tool manufacture began with H. habilis at least two million years ago, but tools remained primitive and coarse, little more than a few flakes struck from a pebble to create a sharp edge, until the greatly increased dexterity of H. sapiens permitted refinement and creative development. Speech was also a relatively late development.

  It should be remembered that late H. erectus shared most of the traits of primitive or “archaic” H. sapiens, including brain size. Still, the transition appears to have been abrupt and is still poorly understood. Further study of the Martian data may…

  —Download from Networld Encyclopedia vrtp://earthnet.public.dataccess

  SATURDAY, 26 MAY: 0831 HOURS GMT

  Cydonia Base, Mars

  Sol 5634: 2045 hours MMT

  The last pale glow of the sunset had long since faded from the sky outside, surrendering the desert below to the star-dusted black of the Martian night. Inside the common room, where Mark Garroway was sitting at the table along with Colonel Lloyd, David Alexander, and a dozen or so of the expedition’s senior people, the harsh and unrelenting glare of fluorescents gave scant warmth to air swiftly turning chilly and damp. It was always like this in these large habs, once the sun had set. Cydonia Prime’s environmental systems were being stretched to their operational limits with the demands being made on them just now. During the two weeks after Harper’s Bizarre had touched down, all fifty-four of the UN troops had ferried back from Candor Chasma, along with the new members of the UN science team, bringing the complement on-station at Cydonia Prime to 138.

  Both Colonel Bergerac and the UN archeological team leader, Mireille Joubert, were present in the room now. Joubert had called the emergency meeting, in fact, apparently for the purpose of reading the riot act to Alexander.

  “What do you mean,” Alexander was saying slowly, “we can’t tell anyone on Earth yet? This…this is the most incredible discovery in the history of—”

  “Please, David, I know the importance, the possible significance of this discovery. And that’s precisely why we shouldn’t release it until we know more.”

  Dr. Graves laughed. “Until we know more? My God! We’ve found four naturally mummified humans on Mars! Isn’t that worth at least the cost of an e-mail to Earth?”

  Garroway looked away as the argument continued, distractedly studying the vaulting, strut-lined interior of the building. Most of the habitats on Mars looked like the interior of a Shuttle II’s main fuel tank…probably because most of them were Shuttle II fuel tanks, hauled out to Mars orbit by one or another of the cyclers, fitted with small, methane-fueled deorbit boosters, and lowered the last few kilometers to the Martian surface by parachute…a process far cheaper than hauling the building materials all the way out to Mars and then assembling them in place. This habitat possessed an upper and a lower deck—the lower given over to stores and a reserve of liquid water, the upper divided between living quarters, a rec facility, and the common room. Pressurized tunnels led to other habs nearby, including Ops, the big, pressurized ex-fuel tank next door that housed the communications center, the Central Operational Node or CON—essentially the facility’s main AI computer—and the control center. The main tanks-turned-habitats were far more spacious than were needed yet within the growing colony, but they still lacked a few of the basic amenities…such as windows.

  Not that Garroway was that interested in watching the sere and barren Martian landscape; he’d seen quite enough of it already during the past two weeks, as the Marines had gotten themselves settled in. But the interiors of the habitats were all the same, and, roomy or not, they forced your attention inward, to your own thoughts and to the people you were with. The idea of another year or more locked up in close quarters with Mireille Joubert was not exactly a solid inducement to emigrate to Mars. She might be nice to look at, but she’d become strident and overbearing since they’d landed. Worse, she was wielding the opinion that she was in charge of the expedition’s science team like a weapon. Garroway generally tried to arrange things so that he could be where she wasn’t.

  Sometimes though, like during these department-head meetings, that just wasn’t possible. Garroway had already decided his first day on the beach that the only way to keep his sanity over the next few months was to keep his head down and to say as little as possible. He allowed himself a private smile. The never-volunteer philosophy was generally the prerogative of enlisted men, rather than officers.

  This was the worst such meeting he’d run into yet. He hadn’t heard the whole story, but he gathered that Alexander had done something to put Joubert really out of sorts. The discovery—four beings that looked human or damned close to it—would seem to have been worth whatever risk or shortcut the man had taken, but Joubert had been raking him over the coals for it.

  The funny part was, he didn’t think she even had the authority to do so.

  “A discovery of such potential,” Joubert said, “demands extraordinary care in just how the announcement is made to the general public.”

  “We’re not suggesting a release to the public,” Alexander pointed out. “We’re talking about transmitting text and images of what we found to Mission Control. They can decide what to say, if anything.”

  She rolled her eyes toward the chamber’s ceiling. “Please, David, don’t assume that I am stupid! I know how your press works…and your politicians. Transmitting this data to Earth is the same as plastering it all over every netnews download on the Web.”

  “I don’t understand,” Graves said. “What do you want…for us to just sit on this find? To run more tests?”

  “Yes, just what more would you suggest, Doctor?” Alexander asked reasonably. “We don’t have the equipment to run sophisticated tests, and I’m afra
id that just touching those bodies will make them crumble away into dust.”

  “For one thing, we should try to establish scientifically what all of you seem to be taking for granted…that the bodies are human and that they are associated with the Builders.”

  “They’re inside that room,” Kettering said. He was leaning back in his chair, his arms folded across his chest. “The four of them looked like they were trying to claw their way right through that door. That looks pretty damned associated to me.”

  “And you can’t seriously be suggesting that those bodies are not human,” Dr. Patricia Colt said. She was Cydonia Prime’s Life Sciences Department head, a rather broad job description that included the study of Martian parabiological soil chemistry, cataloguing microfossils, and running the base med lab.

  “And why not?” Joubert replied.

  “Everything we think we understand about xenobiology,” Colt said, “suggests that when we meet extraterrestrials, they will look nothing like us.”

  “Hell, the big mystery that drew us here in the first place,” Alexander added, “was the Face…and the question of what the representation of a human face was doing here. The fact that we found humans in that room suggests some extraordinary possibilities. If nothing else, it suggests that humans were here when this place was built. And that was…when, Dr. Graves?”

  “It depends on the dating method you use. Somewhere between four and five hundred thousand years, though, is a close guess.”

  “The recordings shot by Dr. Alexander and his people,” Colt added, “suggest that these…these people are not fully modern humans. Their facial features, the brow ridges, the receding chins, they show some characteristics that I would associate with archaic Homo sapiens…or even with late Homo erectus.”