by Guy Haley
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Cylinder
HOLLAND FLOATS BEFORE a star. It can be nothing else; nothing else is so bright. It is like no star he knows of. Its light is cold. Its photons hit him with a force he can feel on his skin through the hard suit. The rays of the sun are blades of ice. His eyes shrivel. He falls blind, and yet he can still see. He sees faces, screaming. Flames lick glass. Skin blisters. An uncaring machine voices its observations as his friends die, and he is powerless to stop it.
He tears himself from the faces. He is through the crack in the rock, and it goes on into infinity. He sees a profusion of life around him – creatures, plants, animals, stars, planets, galaxies – bound to the lazy spiral of creation.
Stulynow kneels before the star, on ground Holland cannot see. His hard suit has gone, and he tears at the helmet of his undersuit. He cannot see the Russian’s face, but he knows, somehow, in his gut, that Stulynow is weeping.
Vance flickers into view. She is naked, and beautiful in the cold, cold light. She is entranced, one arm outstretched, reaching for the star.
She is going to touch it. She mustn’t, absolutely mustn’t. Of that he is sure, above all other things.
“No!” he shouts. His voice shatters into a million pieces. Only some say no. Some urge her on, others talk of other matters entirely.
She turns to him, her face puzzled. She turns back to the star, fingers straining. He is in the dark on a stony floor. There is movement. His eyes follow it. An insect-like creature that should not be regards him.
He walks through halls that are not there; a world-building constructed of knowledge and past lives. There is a woman there, and she loves him.
Night-time Mars glows below his feet with the lights of a hundred cities.
A woman with blue skin smiles hesitantly at him, but she should not be and she is aware of that.
Vance touches the star.
Stulynow laughs a wild, despairing laugh.
There is an unearthly scream that rolls round the dark places of his soul. He is not sure if the noise issues from him. It descends to a quiet, persistent moan.
The light goes out.
HOLLAND SAT UP with a gasp. His eyes had dried out again, and watered now, his face running with tears, as he slowly opened them. He went to swipe at them with a hand, but felt the tug of a needle.
He blinked. A room – the infirmary? – swam into view. He was in a bed. Someone grasped his shoulder, and eased him back onto the sheets.
“Steady on there, Holly, you’re safe now.”
Holland looked up into a face washed clear of features by the rush of tears. It was distorted and split into overlaying faces; not one person, but a dozen or more. He struggled back a little, scared of what might he might find there in the room with him.
“It’s me, Holly, it’s me. Dave Maguire. Calm down. You’re safe now.”
“Dave?” he tried to say. His lips were cracked and his tongue dry as old leather. A whisper, a puff of air as an old tomb door is forced, came out instead of the name. He tried again.
“What? Hang on a minute there, old pal.” Maguire looked behind him, reached for something out of Holland’s view. He leaned back and handed Holland a cup of water. “Drink it down, now. Careful. You were down there for a while. The hard shell kept you alive, but it does dry you out. You’re going to feel weak for a while; drugs, I’m afraid. We’ve got you on a drip. You should feel okay soon.”
Holland gulped the water down, gripping the cup between shaking hands, seeing the drip needle in the back of his hand through the blur of tears.
“Easy, now,” said Maguire. He steadied the cup, and Holland’s drinking became less frantic. At length, he pushed Maguire’s hand and the cup away.
“What the hell happened?” he managed to croak. He blinked and blinked until the watery Maguire phantoms in front of him coalesced into one. He pressed his forefingers into his closed eyelids and massaged. That seemed to help, and his vision returned to normal.
“We were rather hoping you could tell us that,” said Maguire. His habitual smile was full of worry, and he spoke more slowly and with more care than was usual.
Holland sank back onto the bed. “Could you prop me up a bit? I feel like hammered shit.” His muscles ached, his stomach was cramped and empty. His knee felt like he’d bent it the wrong way.
“Sure, hang on.” Maguire fumbled for a control unit. He pressed a button and the bed’s top end tilted up noiselessly. “Better?”
Holland nodded. He began to talk, but the words caught and he coughed.
“Holly, this can wait. Get better now, man.”
Holland batted his concerns away with his left hand, and stabbing pain from the drip needle grounded him further. “It’s okay, I want to talk,” he croaked. “There was a crack, in the rock. A fissure. I saw something, like an insect...”
“What, like a hallucination?”
Holland shook his head. “I don’t think so. It looked real, and I’d never seen its type before. Entirely alien.” He had to stop. His eyes hurt and his throat felt like he’d been eating sawdust and glass for a week.
Maguire noticed him wincing and stood. “Look, Holly, you rest, okay? Get your strength up, and we can get to the bottom of this.”
Holland waved a weak hand. He swallowed a few times, drawing saliva from nearly dry glands. “Dave, I saw it, just after we lost contact with Deep Two. It scuttled into the crack. I took a look, then all hell broke loose. I...”
“Seriously Holly, just rest, eh?”
“Dave, what happened?”
Maguire pulled a face; he was considering leaving, debating how much to say. Holland recognised the signs. The news would be bad. “This can wait,” he eventually said.
“It can’t.”
Maguire dithered a moment, then pulled up a chair and sat close to the head of the bed, elbows on knees, fingers steepled, voice low. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. We lost contact with your team. We tried to raise you, and then we realised that something had knocked Cybele offline. Now, that’s the thing. It’s not too unusual for us to experience informational blackouts, but when we do and the AI is down there, she’s okay, you know? She’s still up here with us too, she just loses connection with her remote carriage. Well, this time she wasn’t okay. She went down, John. We had to perform an emergency reboot; that just is not supposed to happen with these AIs. When Jensen realised that, he went into overdrive. We had a team down there quicker than I’ve ever seen, I swear he skipped at least half his safety drills. Cybele came back online when they were halfway down, but she didn’t remember anything, and that spooked Jensen real hard.”
Maguire spoke quickly, his voice hushed, excited and nervous. This was not the Maguire Holland knew. The good-natured mockery that lurked at the back of his eyes, as if all the world were an amusing play, had gone. His face was closed and perplexed, like that of a child who has seen something marvellous that it does not understand. “They got down there, they found multiple collapses of the lava tube you were exploring. It took us a while to make sure the area was safe and to dig you out. You were down there for forty-eight hours before we could get to you, and you were not in a good way. None of you were. You’ve been here for a couple of days now, sleeping it off.”
A hungry moan troubled the room, the scream from his dreams returning. Holland started. “What the...?”
Something in Holland’s face spooked Maguire. “What?” he said. Then he laughed with relief, a little bit of the old Maguire lighting up his face. “Oh, that, whew! Made me jump, there. Sorry, I should have said. I don’t notice it any more. It’s the wind. There’s a massive dust storm on outside, been building for a couple of days. Nothing to worry about. Just as soon as it’s done, we can get in touch with Canyon City and ask them what we’re supposed to do with your discovery. You’re going to be a very famous man, Dr John Holland.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t you remember? Man!” He sat back.
“You’ve found more than some kind of improbable insect, my friend.”
“How do you mean?”
Maguire leaned in close, and his excitement revealed itself. “Shit, Holly, you found an artefact! A made thing, buried in lava two billion years old! This is bigger than snottites, way bigger. Looks like it’s been down there forever.”
“Alien?”
Maguire shrugged, trying to look uncommitted. “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” he said. He clearly already had.
“What about the others?”
“Stulynow is okay, shook that Russian smirk right off his face. He’s gone into full on brooding, but he’ll mend.”
“Vance?”
Maguire’s face shut down again. “Touch and go, man, touch and go. There’s no real physical damage – frostbite to her right hand – but something’s not right. Damn typical that our chief MO is knocked out. Suzanne’s trying her best to get to the bottom of what’s wrong with her, but she’s not a doctor and with this storm we’ve only got a limited medical database, so Cybele can only do so much to help her.” He stood. “We’ll just have to see.” He smiled again, a complex expression, equal parts wonder, relief and sorrow. “Hell of a first week. I’ll let the others know you’re awake. Try and rest, eh? I’m due down in Deep Two, to take over from Mr Dr Van Houdt and Jensen.”
Holland jerked painfully upright. “Don’t tell me there’s another team down there.”
Maguire frowned. “Yeah, sure there is. After something like this? Look, I wouldn’t worry. The thing’s completely inert. There have been no more tremors since you set it off. We reckon you guys tripped it somehow, turns out the area you were investigating in Wonderland was pretty much directly beneath the fissure you found it in. Whatever it is, it looks like it’s dead.”
Foreboding welled up in Holland. “Dave, don’t let them bring it back up.”
“Hey, Holly, calm down, we’re not totally fucking stupid. We’re not taking any chances. They’ve got remote gear looking at it. For the time being, Orson’s leaving it right where it is. Until we can get Marsform on the blower – these bloody storms, I tell you. Planet like this, you need a hardline, but will they roll one out? Will they bollocks.”
GRAINY IMAGES, SHAKING as the small, legged robot struggled over the debris. In the seat next to Holland, Jensen peered at the screen, moving the joysticks as he guided it in. Another two screens showed other views, robots under the operation of the Class Three AI – Cybele, Holland corrected himself. It was getting easier for him to use her name. He didn’t like how quickly that had happened.
“There we go, Holland. What do you think?”
A beam of light joined with those from the other two robots, lighting upon a featureless cylinder. But for its obviously artificial curves, it would have been indistinguishable from the rocks it lay half-buried within, shards and lumps of cracked basalt laid down a billion years ago.
“Are we sure that’s not a natural formation?” said Kick Van Houdt. He stood at Holland’s shoulder, hugging himself. “Could be an odd crystal formation.”
“If you please.” Miyazaki moved up. He bobbed a polite bow. “This is not natural.” His voice was soft yet authoritative; he used it only when he had something to say, and for the main, people listened when he did. A withdrawn man, but he knew his stone. “Basalt can form in columnar patterns, yes, but the mean number of sides is six, with between three to twelve being the norm. This is not a polyhedron, but a true cylinder. Also, this rock is of the pillow form. I believe this area to have been formed undersea – direct contact with seawater. Although this could be some kind of rock from elsewhere, a glacial erratic or meteorite, again it is too regular in form, and in the case of an erratic, these rocks are billions of year older than the later limestone sea beds I have discovered on the Tharsis uplift; they were buried long before the Kovarkian ice age; they were never touched by the glaciers. These date from the earlier phase of the Mons – deep time, very, very old.” He blinked owlishly as he looked to each man, assessing their understanding. “Lastly, this object,” he sketched around it on the screen with his hands, “it is embedded in the stone. The lava here has flowed around this, it has been subjected to great temperature, and yet has maintained a uniform shape.”
Kick sucked his teeth. “I still don’t buy it, but that is not much of scientific view. I just don’t believe it should be there, yet it is. What do I know? I’m a gasses man.” He shrugged. “How long is it?”
Miyazaki spoke breathily through a polite smile. “I am sure we will know when we are authorised to touch it.”
“No samples yet, and no scanning, we have no idea what will happen if we start washing it with energy,” said Jensen sternly. He was irritable, his eyes red from lack of sleep. “Holland?”
Holland shook his head. A day on, he was feeling better, although he still had a drink to hand the whole time. He felt like a sponge left to bake in a desert; no matter how much he drank, it didn’t seem enough. “I haven’t seen this before. I saw a creature, not this. After that...” A flash in his mind, great light, a keening, Vance reaching out. He screwed his eyes shut. “I’m sorry, I blacked out. I might have seen it before, but I don’t remember.”
“How would you have seen it? It’s at the back of the fissure,” said Kick.
Jensen shook his head. “You were all outside the fissure. Stulynow was out of his hard shell and looks like he tried to climb in, but he didn’t manage it. We saw nothing out of the ordinary when we pulled you out, and the remotes have seen nothing since. There is nothing alive for thirty metres around the fissure. This part of the cave is biologically inert.”
“What about the light? The tremors?”
“If it wasn’t for the tremors, we might have you all down for some kind of joint paranoid episode. Marsform don’t want another embarrassment like the Hellas Planitia discovery, two false claims of artefacts...” He grimaced. “The press would have a field day.” Jensen sat back, relinquished the control of his robot to the AI again. “But then, strange lights, hallucinations... It’d be easier for us all if it were a geological oddity. They’re going to be grilling us all about this for weeks, you realise. We can forget about working in Wonderland, and if this is anything significant, we’re going to be in the zoo for years. But those tremors?” He grunted and rubbed at his upper teeth with his thumb. “It obviously can do something, experience shows us all that. As far as we can tell it’s just a lump of metal – there’s nothing coming off it.”
“Obviously, it isn’t just a lump of metal,” said Kick. He clasped his elbows tighter. “Anyone else get that?”
One by one, reluctantly they nodded.
“It feels wrong,” said Miyazaki.
Kick unfolded his arms and pulled at his chin, wrestling with some inner debate. He spoke abruptly. “I dreamed that...”
Orson’s voice echoed into Mission Control, breaking whatever confession Kick had been about to make. Mars’ eerie song, inaudible down in Deep Two, came with it. “Gentlemen, I managed to contact Marsform central back in the city.”
“And?” said Jensen.
“It stays where it is. You’re all to come back to base right away. We are not to proceed with any further investigation into this thing until a relief team arrives. I want you to put Deep Two to sleep, and get back up here as soon as possible. There’s a lull in the storm right now, but I’ve been told it is blowing up into a full category B. We need everyone up here on lockdown duty. That clear?”
“Yes, commander,” said Jensen. The eugene’s voice clicked off. “There we have it.” The Swede stood. “And I do not know whether I am relieved or disappointed. Cybele, prepare to shut Deep Two down.”
HOLLAND INSISTED HE help the others with the storm preparations. Jensen argued hard against it, but Orson shrugged and let him be. The eugene had enough on his plate without trying to talk one of his team out of doing his job.
Holland was weak and ran out of breath quickly, but he pushed himself on.
Being out of the claustrophobic corridors of the base, even in the confines of an environment suit, felt good.
Outside, the sky had gone the colour of turmeric. Visibility was down to a few hundred metres, the sun no more than a bright patch on the sky. The light, diffracted by the dust in the air, contrived to be both dim and dazzling, making distances hard to judge. Holland’s eyes ached with squinting against it, the reflective visor on his environment suit useless in the directionless glare.
Tarpaulins covering machines and supply dumps rattled in the wind. Holland helped Kick Van Houdt get the drones ready, clearing their wheel clamps of dust so they could park themselves and lock in. He carried a bucket of spare parts up for Jensen to repair a broken storm shutter, and that was that for him. He cried off and returned inside, exhausted. Suzanne, acting as base medical officer while Vance was out of action, made him go and lie down.
He slept uneasily, dreaming of blue skies, and awoke with a start, sweating and cold, with a sense of deep anxiety. He had a vague urge to run. Whatever dream had prompted such fear, he could not remember. He had a vague recollection of spaces whose geometries could not, and perhaps should not, be measured. Trying to remember filled him with inexplicable dread; he pushed it from his mind as best he could.
That night, the others welcomed Holland back to the dinner table with genuine warmth, but after that the base dinner was subdued. There were few conversations, oppressed as they were by the storm and by Dr Vance’s parlous condition. Suzanne Van Houdt looked like she had been crying, and Commander Orson asked a few questions about the storm lockdown and said little more. Only Ito Miyazaki appeared unaffected, eating his food and reading technical journals on his tablet as usual.
Stulynow was gaunt and hollow-faced. Holland had tried to get him on his own several times so they could talk about what had happened since the event three days ago. From the way the Russian stared resolutely at his plate, refusing to make eye contact with anyone, Holland suddenly realised that he’d been avoiding him, and he felt a pang of apprehension.
