Ian Douglas - The Complete Heritage Trilogy - Semper Mars, Luna Marine, Europa Strike

Garroway chuckled. He’d said much the same to Kaitlin in his last vidmessage, and he was expecting to be thoroughly roasted for it. She wanted to get into space so badly she could taste it; all he wanted was to get back to Earth…and start looking at Bahamian beachfront property.

He wondered what she was doing now.

0411 HOURS GMT

Site 12

Cydonia Base, Mars

1625 hours MMT

“There she goes,” Dr. Craig Kettering said.

David Alexander turned, looking toward the south. A dazzling flare of light emerged from behind the low, Quonset-hut shapes of the base habs, rising rapidly into the afternoon sky. Seconds passed, and then faint and far off, he heard the high-pitched crackle of the rocket’s launch-thunder.

“About damned time,” he said.

“There’s the jolt,” Dr. Devora Druzhininova said as she watched the main seismic readout panel. “Force two, this time.”

“Just tell me when it’s over,” Alexander said.

Alexander, Kettering, and Druzhininova were standing next to the portable SIT console that they’d set up outside their Mars cat about two miles northwest of the Cydonian base, to the west of the enigmatic structures known as the Ship and the Fortress.

It was a place of titans. The popular press and some of the less responsible of the netnews services had christened the Cydonian Complex the Golden Plain of the Gods, and, at times, Alexander could almost sympathize. The Face, the mile-long Mt. Rushmore of Mars, as one account had called it, was not the only gigantic structure on this stretch of what once, long ago, had been a beach on a short-lived ocean. West lay the so-called City, four pyramids each easily the size of the Great Pyramid at Giza on Earth, centered on a still-buried gridwork of buildings, tunnels, and ruins. Those pyramids, in turn, were dwarfed by an encircling pentagon of much larger structures, natural mountains smoothed into pyramid shapes, each a mile across at the base.

To the east lay the Fortress, a structure believed to be the foundation of another mile-wide pyramid but with the upper two-thirds missing. The Ship, more enigmatic still, appeared to be a mile-long double-spiral tower that, millennia ago, had toppled across the Fortress and now lay half-embedded in the rubble. No one was certain what, exactly, the thing had been; the best guess was that it had been an enormous spacecraft, though either it was of extremely unusual design, or all that was left was a part of the twisted inner skeleton. So far, after sixteen years of digging and poking about the thing, nothing like engines, power plants, or living quarters had been found. It was like trying to guess the shape, color, and purpose of a long-buried automobile when all that you had to examine was a piece of rusted chassis.

That, of course, was what archeology was all about. Xenoarcheology, as it was developing on Mars, at any rate, had the singular advantage of uncovering ruins that had never been scattered, reused, or built upon by succeeding generations of inhabitants. In a way, that advantage was a disadvantage as well; excavations thus far at Cydonia had uncovered artifacts enough to fill storehouse after storehouse, far more than could possibly be shipped back to Earth, but scientists so far had been able to identify—guess at, actually, was the better phrase—perhaps one percent of everything catalogued so far.

And the real excavations hadn’t even begun, yet. Since the first visit by humans to the site in 2024, archeological teams numbering from four to twelve had managed only to survey perhaps two percent of the entire complex. It was, Alexander thought, a task similar to sending a dozen people into Manhattan with instructions to visit, map, catalogue, photograph, and explore every street, building, alley, vehicle, ship, aircraft, and park on the entire island. The survey alone could take a century or more…and only then would the actual large-scale digging begin.

And the damned military had to keep sending troops instead of more archeologists!

There were now just twenty-five scientists at Cydonia, if you didn’t count Dr. Joubert and the ten UN observers under her direction. Eighteen more were Russian or American support personnel. Now, at last count, there were more than eighty soldiers “protecting scientific and civilian interests,” as they put it, and that, so far as Alexander was concerned, was an obscenity, a colossal fraud and waste. Twenty-five scientists couldn’t begin to scratch the surface…and the UN people seemed more interested in the political ramifications of the research than in the actual fieldwork.

Hell, thirty more archeologists, geologists, and planetary scientists would have been infinitely more useful than thirty US Marines. As far as he could tell, the greatest danger on Mars at the moment was the possibility that the Marines and the Foreign Legion UN troops were going to start shooting at one another and catch the scientists in the cross fire.

It was idiocy, stark, blatant, and simple. He hated it…and the military mind set that thought in terms of balanced forces, countered threats, and military expediencies.

It hadn’t always been that way. David Alexander had been a Navy brat, the son of a Navy aviator. By the time he was fifteen, he’d lived in three different countries and seven different homes, and since he’d never known any other life, he’d thought himself privileged. Then, in 2016, his father had died when the laser landing system on the flight deck of the USS Reagan failed during a night trap. His teenager’s dream of being a naval aviator like his father had died in the same fiery crash.

It wasn’t exactly the military itself that Alexander hated now. That would have been far too simplistic a response to a tragedy that he’d come to grips with a long time ago. He did dislike the whole idea of an organization that kept families apart and devoured resources better spent on things more needful. Usually, he maintained a rather wry attitude about the military…unless, of course, it interfered with his work.

Like now.

“Okay,” Druzhininova said at last, looking up. “It’s dying away.”

“It’s about damned time,” Alexander grumbled. “Let’s get this shot done, before something else happens.”

“No more lobbers are scheduled for arrival today, anyway,” Craig Kettering said. “We should be cool there.”

Each time a shuttle landed or took off from Cydonia, the shock caused enough of a seismic tremor in the ground to thoroughly screw any seismic readings being taken in the area for kilometers around. The Sonic Imaging Tomography display could pick up people walking within fifty meters, and when a lobber-configured shuttle lifted off, even two kilometers away, the ground could be ringing for minutes afterward. With all of the shuttling back and forth between Candor and Cydonia lately, especially with all of the UN troops coming north, it had been difficult to get solid periods of quiet for the multiple readings they needed.

“Devora?” Alexander asked. “You have a green on all charges?”

“Affirmative.”

“Field team,” he said. “Check in.”

“All set, Dr. Alexander,” Ed Pohl said.

“Clear,” Louis Vandemeer added.

“Ready,” Kettering said.

“And ready,” Druzhininova said. “The console is armed and ready to fire.”

Alexander gave a last visual check of the area. All four of the others were well clear of the blast site, a two-hundred-meter-wide region abutting the west side of the Fortress, just below the alien sprawl of the age-corroded Ship.

“Okay. C-Prime, C-Prime, this is Field One, ready to punch it.”

“Field One, Cydonia Prime,” replied the voice of Dr. Jason Graves. “We have you on-line, charge twenty-nine, site twelve. You may proceed.”