by Ian Douglas
“We’re close to the equator,” Alexander put in. “That ought to narrow our selection down a bit, too.”
“At the equator, huh?” King said. “Can you be sure about that?”
“I happened to look up,” Alexander replied. “One of the moons—Deimos, the one like a bright star—was almost directly overhead.”
“Good point,” Garroway said. “That tallies with how long our flight took, and the fact that I’m pretty sure we were going southwest. And those cliffs we saw outside suggest the Valles Marineris, too. That runs right along the equator. We could be inside the canyon chain, somewhere.”
“Hell, Valles Marineris is, what?” Caswell said. “Three thousand miles long? That’s only as long as the United States is wide! We could be as far from Mars Prime as San Diego is from Washington!”
“No, we’re close enough to Candor Chasma that the Mars cat could drive out here inside of a couple of days,” Ostrowsky pointed out. “They couldn’t have had more warning than that. That rules out the distant stations, like the one at Noctis Labyrinthus.”
“That one’s Bradbury Station,” Alexander put in. “You know, I’d need a survey map to be certain, but I’d be willing to bet we’re at Heinlein Station.”
“Yeah?” Knox asked. “So where’s that?”
“Damn, I don’t have my wrist-top or PAD,” Alexander said. “I really need something to draw on.”
“Will this do?” Ostrowsky asked. She slid a pad of paper and a pen across the tabletop. “Found ’em in the stores.”
“Good enough.” Alexander began sketching quickly. “Okay, here’s the widest part of the whole Valles Marineris. We’ve got three big, oval-shaped, east-west canyons stacked north to south, small to large, like this. Ophir Chasma up here. Candor in the middle. Melas to the south.
“To the west, we have two long, skinny canyons running in straight, east-west lines, like this. Ius Chasma comes into Melas Chasma, here. And Tithonium Chasma comes into Candor Chasma, so. Mars Prime is located on the Candor Mensa—a mensa is a kind of a plateau, flat-topped—smack in the middle of Candor Chasma, about here.
“Now, we’ve got several stations and outposts scattered around here, but the fact that we’re on a canyon floor, and the canyon isn’t all that wide—less than fifty kilometers is my guess—makes me think we’re in Tithonium.” He marked a spot in the northern of the two slender canyons west of Candor on the map. “Heinlein Station. I don’t know much about it, except that it’s supposed to be a single hab, and it was used by an areological team five years ago when they were surveying this part of the Valles. It’s about 650 kilometers west of Candor Chasma.”
King gave a low whistle. “That’s almost four hundred miles. We can’t do that on foot, that’s for sure.”
“No,” Garroway agreed. “We’re going to have to borrow that UN cat out there.”
“You know, if we’re that close,” Knox said, “then we can probably figure our friends outside aren’t going to stay there for the next three months, y’know? They wouldn’t have enough supplies in that cat to last ’em that long.”
“Shit,” Ostrowsky put in. “Can you imagine sitting in a cat for that long, just watching POWs? Talk about the cat watching the mousehole. Not my idea of soft duty!”
“Right,” Garroway said. “Their orders are probably to stay put and keep an eye on us until they know we’re not going to cause any trouble. If we haven’t tried anything in, oh, a week or so, they’ll likely pull out and make tracks for Mars Prime.”
“They might pop back in every once in a while to check up on us,” Knox added. “Or maybe Bergerac has arranged to have another cat come out here every few days or so and change the guard.”
“That would make sense. If it wasn’t tying up too many of their assets.”
“So what are we gonna do about it, Major?” Ostrowsky asked. “Sit here like good little POWs until they decide to let us go?”
Garroway had already given the problem considerable thought. “Our mission orders don’t quite cover this situation,” he said slowly. “But I do know that we still answer to the people who cut our orders Earthside…and we’re not fulfilling our part of the bargain by sitting here on our duffs doing what the UN tells us to do.” He looked at each of the others at the table in turn, measuring them. “We’re supposed to be safeguarding American interests here. Well, it seems to me those interests are under attack, and it’s our duty to fight back.”
“Fight back,” Alexander said. He shook his head. “Damn, Major, I don’t see how you can even think about that. We have no idea where we are, we have no weapons, and we can’t call for help. Sounds impossible.”
“No,” Garroway said. “It sounds like a challenge.”
He still wasn’t sure what they should do, what they could do, when it came to that. He was just beginning to recognize the fact that he’d had it pretty easy in the Corps for a long time. He’d been comfortable, enough so that maybe what they’d been saying about him back on Earth was true…that he’d gone ROAD.
Well, the hell with that noise. He wasn’t going to just sit by and watch people who were looking to him for leadership get slammed aside by ambitious UN glory-grabbing sons of bitches. Reaching down, he opened a plastic kit bag and began removing several small items from its depths, careful to keep them shielded beneath his hands as he laid them out on the table. Their bodies should hide the stuff well enough from any remaining spycams. They would still have to be careful about what they said.
“It’s fine to talk about fighting back,” Caswell said. She shivered and folded her arms across the armor of her cuirass. “But what can we do with…this?”
She nodded at the pitiful collection of artifacts on the table in front of them.
The inventory was actually a lot more impressive than Garroway had dared hope. The US Marines, it turned out, were an inventive bunch. Garroway first produced the wrist-top he’d smuggled out of Cydonia Prime. He didn’t have a PAD, so he couldn’t be sure it was still working after the rough handling it had taken in the shuttle, but when he strapped it on his wrist and touched the wake key, a winking point of green light showed that it was drawing power from his body heat and was ready to link. All he needed now was a display screen of some sort.
A surprising number of other Marines had smuggled various small objects out of their barracks. Sergeant Jacob had also managed to bring a wrist-top, though it was only an old, one-gig model, while Marchewka, Lazenby, Foster, and Donatelli all had pocketknives smuggled out in their shoes or hidden in unlikely parts of their clothing or anatomy. Doc Casey had walked right past the UN soldiers and climbed into his suit with a Mark I first-aid kit in his hand. Besides the usual pain meds, bandages, and other medical paraphernalia, Casey had squeezed a Marine combat knife inside. Lance Corporal Nolan contributed a length of number 4 steel wire, useful if they needed a garrote. Sergeant Radley had slipped some needle-nosed pliers into his shoe, while Corporal Hayes had palmed a five-gig memclip from the comm console. Kaminski’s contribution was less practical but perfectly in keeping with Corps tradition. He’d somehow managed to wrap an American flag tightly around his body beneath his T-shirt.
The real prize, however, was contributed by Staff Sergeant Ostrowsky. When the UN troops had broken into the women’s quarters, she’d managed to slip a Ruger-K Defender, a 2mm fléchette pistol, up inside her T-shirt. The Ruger was a tiny weapon—the sort of personal defense holdout weapon known as a pocket pistol—and could be concealed in a woman’s hand; throughout the ordeal at Cydonia, even when she’d been forced to keep her hands behind her head, she’d managed to hold her elbows in such a way that she’d kept the weapon held snugly in place between her rather generous breasts.
The Ruger wasn’t much of a weapon. Each of the five caseless sabot rounds in its magazine housed three 2mm fléchettes, deadly enough against an unprotected human if fired into throat or face at point-blank range, but useless against armor or even the protection afforded by a leather
jacket, and next to useless at a range of more than a few meters. But it was something, at least. A beginning.
“Okay,” Garroway said, dropping his voice to a whisper barely audible above the racket. “We have one ranged weapon, and that’s close-up only. We’ve got to figure out a plan. How can we get in close enough to use it?”
“Make them come in here?” Jacob asked.
“Ah, they’d be stupid to do that,” Knox replied. “At least, all at once. And we’re gonna have to surprise all of ’em quick, so they can’t radio for help.”
“We’re gonna need to sneak up on the sons of bitches,” Ostrowsky pointed out quietly. “That could be tough. They’ll have heat sensors in the cat.”
“Yeah,” Knox said, nodding. “Especially since we’ll have to make our move at night. Our Class-Ones are pretty good at scattering heat plumes, but we’re still gonna show up like torches if we go out there in the middle of the night, when the ambient temp’s down to something like 150 below.”
“Why do you say we’ll have to move at night, Gunny?” Garroway said, thoughtful.
“Well, we sure as hell can’t walk out there in broad daylight….”
“I’m wondering about that.” Garroway reached out and flicked his forefinger against Knox’s torso armor, eliciting a hollow thump.
“You’re thinking it’ll be easier to mask our heat signatures out there at high noon,” Ostrowsky whispered.
Garroway nodded. “Affirmative. We’re close to the equator. Midday temperatures here can get up to a few degrees below freezing…or even higher. Thermal sensors work by comparing the contrast between the background temperature and what’s being scanned.”
“These tin suits still give off a hell of a lot of heat,” Lieutenant King pointed out. “It’s their main weakness. Besides, even their active camouflage won’t provide a perfect blend with the environment, especially if we’re moving.”
“Well, there may be a way around that,” Garroway said. “What we need to work out is a way to take down that Mars cat…and to do it before the bad guys can radio an alarm back to Bergerac….”
2158 HOURS GMT
Heinlein Station, Mars
0935 hours MMT
“There’s no more time for discussion,” Alexander said quietly. “We’re going to do it.”
It was quieter now in the hab, though there was still an echoing murmur of people talking. Alexander had gathered the other archeologists about the plastic table at the center of the big room for a quiet, hurried discussion.
Significantly, it was the same group that had been with him yesterday when he’d discovered the vault and the mummified bodies—Dr. Craig Kettering, of Penn State; Dr. Devora Druzhininova, from the Russian Academy of Science; Edward Pohl, on extended loan from the Field Historical Research Foundation in Chicago; and Louis Vandemeer, from the Smithsonian. Everyone who’d actually seen the find had been packed off to this out-of-the-way outpost…probably on the assumption that if Graves and the rest of the US and Russian scientists could be kept out of the site, no one would be able to file a detailed report with Earth. Possibly they planned on manipulating those still at Cydonia, in order to suppress the find.
Suppress the find. His find. The knowledge that they were covering up his discovery, and the resultant frustration and anger, burned in his stomach and in his throat. It was happening again, damn it. He’d found a tiny crack in the wall that hid the past, just enough to let one slender shaft of light pass through and illuminate a piece of the Truth…and they were troweling the crack shut just as quickly as they could manage.
“We can’t, Dave,” Kettering said, “Don’t you see? This could cause a war, a shooting war, right here on Mars! Remember what happened to the Sphinx? Napoléon?” The French invasion of Egypt at the end of the eighteenth century had been both a boon and a curse to archeologists. It had uncovered the Rosetta Stone and introduced Europe to the glories of Egypt’s lost civilization.
At the same time, soldiers had shot off the nose of the Sphinx with a cannon, apparently just for fun.
“I can’t lend my support to this,” Vandemeer added, shaking his head. “It’s just damned irresponsible!”
“‘Call me…irresponsible…’” Druzhininova sang lightly, as though trying to ease the black tension hanging above the table. She had a thing for Western music, they all knew. Then she grew serious. “David is right, guys. By the time these people get done, we may never be able to figure out what the story is at Cydonia.”
“But…what would be the point?” Vandemeer wanted to know. “They just want to make sure other countries have access to the technology we find. And, as for the, uh, discovery yesterday, it sounds to me like they’re just concerned that, uh, sensitive information might be released too quick, maybe give fanatics the wrong idea. All they want is a responsible approach….”
“Responsible my ass!” Alexander snapped. “I understand their concern, but so far we haven’t found a hell of a lot we can use. Learning anything at all is going to take all of the resources of Earth for, for, I don’t know, centuries, maybe, before we can make much out of it. And as for the discovery, it seems to me that they’re not giving ordinary people credit for even a little common sense.”
“The fanatics’ll make what they want out of things,” Pohl said, “whether we provide the fuel or not.”
“That’s right,” Alexander said. “Don’t you see, Van? What we found out there says some profound things about who we are, where we came from. Things we’ve got to know! These bastards could scramble things so badly we may never get at the truth!”
“I’d like to know where these people get off setting themselves up as the arbiters of the dissemination of information,” Druzhininova said.
“It’s worse than what happened to me in Cairo,” Alexander said. All of them were familiar with his expulsion from Egypt in ’37, and the reasons behind it. “If we let them get away with this—”
“Are you sure,” Vandemeer interrupted quietly, “that you’re not just worried about your chances for publication?”
Alexander lunged to his feet, overturning his lightweight, plastic chair and nearly knocking the table aside. “You take that back!”
Druzhininova put her hand on Alexander’s shoulder. “Easy, Dave.”
Pohl stepped between him and Vandemeer. “Yeah, Dave. We’re all in this together, right?”
“I’m not so sure about that,” he said, his eyes still locked with Vandemeer’s. He shook himself as the others released him. “I’ll try to forget you said that, Vandemeer. But you hear me, and hear me good. You too, Craig.”
“David…” Druzhininova began.
“It’s okay, Devora.” He kept his voice low and level. “If you two guys want to sit here and rot for the next three months, you’re free to do so. But our military friends here are working out a way to block the UN bastards, and I’m going to help them every damned way that I can. If that means giving me a gun and charging that Mars cat out there, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m sick of being shoved around, told what I can’t dig, or told what I can’t say, and I’m not going to sit still for it any longer, understand me?”
The odd part about it all was, Alexander still wasn’t sure what he thought of this whole idea. He still hated the military…the regimentation, the spit and polish, the regulations, the dehumanization, all the aspects of military life that had grated on him when he was growing up as a Navy brat in Charleston, Pensacola, Portsmouth, Roosey Roads, and all of those other bases and stations scattered up and down the East Coast of America where he’d lived until his father had been killed. The thought that he was now voluntarily helping a bunch of US Marines was as startling personally as the find beneath the sands of Cydonia the day before…something that couldn’t be, but was.
But he was going to follow through with the one, if that was what it took to uncover the truth about the other.
“I think you’re making a mistake,” Vandemeer said, “but it’s nothing w
orth fighting over.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Louis,” Alexander told him. “The truth is always worth fighting for.”
THIRTEEN
SUNDAY, 27 MAY: 2308 HOURS GMT
Heinlein Station, Mars
Sol 5636: 1045 hours MMT
“So, you got your lines down?” Garroway asked. It was crowded in the hab’s single, small airlock, with seven Marines and several bundles of equipment. “It’s show time!”
“I’ll have ’em eating out of my hand, Major,” Staff Sergeant Ostrowsky replied.
“Just so you keep them drooling long enough for us to pull this off,” he replied.
“Hey, not a problem,” she replied, laughing.
He couldn’t share her exuberant, almost cocky enthusiasm. There was too much at stake here, and far too many things could go wrong.
Ostrowsky was wearing one of the civilian archeologist’s space suits. The name on the chest read DRUZHININOVA. It had been her idea, actually, and Devora Druzhininova had gone along with it. The Marines’ helmet visors were nearly opaque with the HUD displays up. The civilian suits were lighter, and they sported goldfish bowl helmets that were transparent save for a slight blue tint to screen out the ultraviolet.
It meant that the UN troops inside the Mars cat would be able to see that Ostrowsky was a woman. An attractive woman, buzz cut and all.
Sex, as Ostrowsky had reminded him, always sells.
The airlock’s pressure matched the air pressure outside, and a red light winked on overhead. “Okay, radio silence, everyone,” Garroway said. The hab walls would block the relatively weak UHF transmissions of their suits, but once they were outside the enemy would be listening to them. Turning, he touched the outer-hatch control. The door popped open, and they stepped out into the crisp, red-gold clarity of the Martian surface.
The scene was breathtakingly beautiful, gold sand beneath a cloudless sky that was pink on the horizon, but shaded to a deep and empty ultramarine overhead. All seven Marines—Garroway and Ostrowsky, Caswell, Donatelli, Foster, Jacob, and Kaminski—made their way in single file out of the airlock and around to the side of the hab that partly blocked the line of sight to the Mars cat, some fifty meters away.
