Ian Douglas - Luna Marine

“Well, I’m sorry people are such idiots! But I happen to be a firm believer in the essential freedom of science. You can’t smother newfound facts just because they’re inconvenient!”

“Nonsense,” Roger snapped. “All of history is one big session of spin control and public-relations management after another!”

“That’s an unpleasantly cynical outlook.”

“And yours is unpleasantly naive!”

“Gentlemen, please!” Sarah said. “Doctor, we appreciate your sentiment in the matter. By and large, I agree with you, and, more to the point, so does the president. We do still live in a democracy, for what that’s worth, and total censorship is incompatible with democratic principles. I’m sure you can accept, though, that where there is a danger to the country or to national security, the government has the right, has the responsibility to exercise judgment.” When David didn’t immediately reply, she shrugged and went on. “In any case, Doctor, I’m afraid you jumped the gun on us. As it happens, we don’t want to send you out to another college speech.”

“Eh? Why didn’t you say so!”

“You didn’t give us the chance!” Roger replied.

Sarah gave her comrade a sharp look, then smiled at David. “Actually, we do want you to go on a trip for us. A rather long trip. But I think you’ll agree that it qualifies as fieldwork. And…I can promise you, no bad chicken dinners!”

“Where do you want me to go?”

“To the Moon, Dr. Alexander. We need you to go to the Moon as quickly as we can get you there.”

“The…the Moon!”

“We have transport waiting for you to take you to O’Hare. We can have you in orbit in two hours, and by tonight you’ll be on your way!”

“That…is quite impossible!”

“You have another appointment?” Roger asked.

He thought about his date with Teri—obviously that wouldn’t be a valid excuse. Besides, he was intrigued now.

“Why would you want me on the Moon?”

“Dr. Alexander,” Sarah told him, “what we have to say to you now is classified. Classified, do you understand? You are not to discuss it with anyone, including the people working for you in this building.”

“I understand.”

“Several hours ago, US Marines captured a small UN base on the Moon. They were looking for a Professor Marc Billaud. You know him?”

David nodded. “I’ve met him several times. Last time was at a conference on ET archeology in Athens, before the war. A good man.”

“The UN Space Command had him at the Lunar site. Apparently, he and a team were in the process of doing some extensive archeological excavations.”

David’s eyes widened. He felt his heart pound. Excavations? On the Moon? “The Builders?…”

“That’s part of what we want you to tell us. Billaud’s notes suggest that there was an ET presence on the Moon, a fairly extensive one…but that it occurred during historical times.”

“How recent?”

“He thinks a few thousand years,” Sarah told him. “There are…artifacts.”

“What was he excavating? A building? A city?”

“Actually,” Sarah told him, “the evidence suggests that it was a spaceship of some kind. A ship that crashed on the Lunar surface something like eight or ten thousand years ago. And that is what makes this investigation so vitally important….”

As she talked, David thought about Mars…and the Ship.

The Face on Mars had been carved by someone half a million years ago, someone who’d built a number of cyclopean structures in the area and apparently used humans imported from Earth to help with the construction. There was even evidence that some sort of massive terraforming project had been under way at the time; most surface features had been damaged or destroyed by a savage flood of liquid water. Many of the human bodies found so far showed evidence of having suffocated as their atmosphere—possibly contained in some sort of field or bubble—bled suddenly away. There was also evidence—lots of it—of a battle, an attack that had ripped open milewide pyramids and left the site in ruins. The Face itself was almost unrecognizable as an artifact carved by intelligence, though the general form and the neatly carved geometries were still visible beneath the rubble.

One of the more enigmatic sites at Cydonia was the hill known as the Fortress. Once, probably, it had been a pyramidal structure like some of the others in the area, but something more powerful than a thermonuclear bomb had sheared off the top, wrecked the inside, and reduced much of it to rubble. Later, a ship of some kind, a vessel over a kilometer long, had toppled onto the ruins, wracked by internal explosions. The wreckage, exposed to the sand-blasting of half a million years of Martian weather, was so poorly preserved it was impossible to learn much.

But the ruins—and especially the promise of the wrecked ship—had been responsible for the revitalization of the on-again, off-again vagaries of the US space program, and of the Russian Space Agency as well. Whoever had built the Cydonian complex had possessed the secret of traveling among the stars; a careful study of the ruins might bring that secret home to Earth.

And more than that. The Builders had been engaged in terraforming on a planetary scale; the ongoing deterioration of Earth’s environment, the coastal flooding and rising global temperatures, had been growing slowly but steadily worse for the past fifty years. The secret of planetary climate control might well prove to be more important, at least insofar as Earth’s continued habitability was concerned, than the secret of traveling to the stars.

And so the infant science of exoarcheology, and its bastard half brother, exotecharcheology, had been born.

On Mars, the problem had been the sheer scale of things, coupled with how damnably difficult it was to get there in the first place. By using a system of space stations, called cyclers, that alternately touched the orbits of Earth and Mars, it had been possible to get a few hundred people out to the Red Planet over the past decade or so to study the site; the trouble was, it would take thousands of people, working for years, simply to carry out a decent survey of the Martian ruins. It might well be centuries, yet, before Cydonia yielded the last of its long-held secrets.

But if some of those secrets also lay hidden on the Moon, just three or four days away, instead of the six to nine months required for a cycler passage to Mars…

“We can’t tell you everything that’s going on right now,” Sarah was saying. “Suffice to say that it has become an issue of national security. We need a trained archeologist’s assessment of the wreckage, and we need to have an idea of just what the UN scientists might have learned from it.”

“But why me?”

Roger shrugged. “That should be evident. You’ve been to Cydonia. You know as much about the Builders, about exotech, as anyone, and more than most. You are probably the field authority on ET artifacts and technologies.”

And, he thought with a touch of bitterness, I’m here, in your institute, bought and paid for. The other scientists who’d been to Mars—Kettering, Pohl, Vandemeer, and the others—had returned to their old positions, to promotions, to careers made more secure by their fifteen months on Mars. But David had had no place to go but…here. The Cydonian Research Foundation, a government-sponsored organization, had funded the Exoarcheological Institute to study the finds being uncovered on Mars.

And, perhaps, on the Moon as well.

The problem was that David’s reputation as something of a maverick in established archeological circles had made him the ideal candidate for exoarcheologist-in-residence here at the institute.