Eric Flint: Boundary

"And how do you propose they protect themselves against that?" Hathaway demanded. "I don't care if-theoretically-assuming the right position with the suits locked in rigid impact mode would shield someone well enough. Just because it worked for Madeline once doesn't mean it'll work every time."

"Don't need to," replied Baird calmly. "Ken, stop fretting for a moment and just think. Like a soldier, if you will. The ceiling of that cavern averages forty-five meters above the floor, and in no place they'd be passing through is it lower than thirty-five meters. In Martian gravity…"

"Oh." Hathaway cleared his throat. "Spotters, you're saying."

"Right. Unless a whole section of stalactites sheds at once-and that's not the way it normally works-all they have to do is pass through the cavern one at a time, with the rest keeping an eye on the ceiling to warn the person below if anything's coming loose. As slowly as any dangerous piece of ice will fall on Mars, with that much distance to travel, they can easily be out of harm's way by the time it lands."

There was silence on the radio, for a moment. Everyone listening in Thoat had their fingers figuratively crossed.

"Okay," the captain finally said. "It's a sloppier solution than I'd like, but… At least we won't be risking more than one person at a time."

"Just because we've used one low-tech solution for making the corridors safer doesn't mean we should suddenly go backwards in time, people." A.J. spoke up. "Spotting things is not a job for people. It's a job for machines. Smart sensors. I can tweak the sensors in the suits to watch for such events and display the alert, and even show you which way to go to escape. And unlike people, the sensors won't get distracted, sleepy, or fail to look the right direction at the wrong time."

Hathaway grunted assent. "Okay, that's a better solution. Go to it, people."

Three hours later, they were finally back to the second door. This time, all six members of the party were there. None of them wanted to miss this moment.

Impatiently, they waited while A.J. and Joe brought up and positioned Jack the Ripper, in case they needed the drone's services.

They didn't. The door opened almost as smoothly as if it had just been closed an hour earlier.

They passed through into the interior of the alien base on Mars.

Ten minutes of silence later, Madeline spoke the first "Oh my God" of the day. The three words would be echoed by all six beings who saw the installation for the first time in sixty-five million years, again and again, as the day passed.

Finally, their oxygen running as close to the margin as Helen dared, they returned to Thoat.

"Well?" Ken asked.

"Jackpot," was A.J.'s reply.

Helen's was more dignified. For a while.

"Captain Hathaway, we have uncovered an alien installation which, though most of it is in the state of ruin you'd expect from planetary as opposed to vacuum conditions, is still in good enough condition to be studied and investigated for… oh…

"The place is HUGE, Ken! Way way way way way bigger than the base on Phobos! We'll be digging for years! I'll be working here till I croak of old age! Ha!"

"You'll need funding," he pointed out, mildly.

"No sweat. Tell Jackie-no, ask Satya, he's the best horse-trader I know beneath that solemn exterior-to start jacking up those bids. The only condition-ha!-is that they have to send a photographer to Mars. No way I'm letting those paparazzi get near me. And whoever cosmetics companies use. Professional sniffers, whatever. Hound dogs, for all I care. I love this place!"

Eric Flint Ryk E. Spoor

Boundary

Three weeks later, Helen was as enthusiastic as ever. Except for Rich, however, the spirits of the other members of the party had dropped some.

Not much. Just the inevitable amount that would affect anyone who, unlike a field paleontologist or a linguist, didn't regard excruciatingly patient study to be the quintessence of professional pleasure.

"It's pretty run-down," A.J. grumbled one evening over their communal dinner in Thoat. "Yes, I know that's to be expected. Even as well as the Bemmies built and even with Mars' atmosphere and stable geology, sixty-five million years is sixty-five million years."

"On Earth, not one percent of this would have survived," Helen pointed out.

A.J. half-glared at her. Not because he disagreed, but simply at the insufferably cheery way she said it. "I know," Helen added, grinning at him. "What do you expect from a grubby bonedigger, o ye high tech wizard?"

A.J.'s good spirits returned, within seconds. However much the state of decay of the ruins at Melas Chasma frustrated his professional desire for the sort of things he could investigate thoroughly with his methods, as he'd been able to on Phobos, the personal side of his life was as good as he could ask for. He loved Helen, at any time. Helen in the best mood he'd ever seen her-day after day after day-was a pure delight to be with.

The dinner finished, Helen kicked off a general discussion. "I've come to the conclusion that this base isn't at all like the one on Phobos. But I'd like everyone else's assessment."

"Agreed," Madeline said. "But I don't know if you're seeing the same things I am. What are you seeing?"

"Well, the most obvious is that this base was fully intact. All the damage we're seeing is from time passing. There was no damage from bombardment or weapons of any kind, as far as we can see."

Helen took a bite of the small fruit ration bar that constituted dessert. "We've found no Bemmius corpses here-or corpses of any kind. Plenty of noteplaques, but all of them neatly stored away, not scattered like they were on Phobos. Everything here is neat, in order, and a lot of it is completely empty. Like a house someone just put up for sale. They evacuated this place at their leisure, either well before or well after the bombardment. What are you seeing?"

"Layout and design," Joe said promptly. Rich and A.J. nodded.

"The purpose of the bases was entirely different," Joe amplified. "The design of the one on Phobos, as far as I'm concerned, is clearly military. We've found firing ranges, tons of hand weapons, indications that much larger weaponry was once in place, rooms that are hard to categorize as anything other than barracks, so on and so forth."

A.J. picked up the thread. "By contrast, down here… Well, it's really hard to analyze some things, since they have-as you saystripped a lot of the equipment out. Something the Phobos residents apparently never had a chance to do. But from the wiring, pipes, layout of rooms, and other things, it looks to me-and most of the engineers up on Nike agree-that this was more of a research institution."

"What about the Vault?" Rich asked.

"That is a puzzle," Joe said. "One that we'll have to solve. If we can figure out how to get into it."

The "Vault" was located near the center of the base, from what Helen and A.J. had been able to ascertain so far about the base's layout. It was a huge structure that was made of the most stubbornly tough materials the Bemmies-or whoever had built the base-had owned, supported by massive reinforcing columns three times thicker than any support members in the rest of the base, and sealed off from it with only one connecting corridor and doorway.

The Vault was so clearly separate and massive as to be intimidating as well as mystifying. There was even some evidence around the doorway, based on slight irregularities of the nearby walls and floor, that over the past sixty-five million years the miniscule geologic activity of Mars had moved the rest of the base slightly while not affecting the Vault. The doorway in question didn't just look like a vault door, either-it appeared to actually be a vault door, in terms of thickness and toughness. In point of fact, there was considerable debate about whether to call it a door, at all. There was no sign of ordinary opening mechanisms, although the seam where it fit into the tubelike entrance hall for the Vault was clear enough.