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

Alexander took a final look to left, right, and behind, making certain that the work area was clear. “Okay,” he said, turning to Druzhininova. “Let ’er rip!”

The Russian archeologist touched a winking green light on the field data display. There was a sharp, metallic clack, and the red-ocher ground in three distinct areas below the Fortress wall heaved upward, creating brief, miniature geysers of swirling red sand.

Alexander shook his head inside his helmet, grinning ruefully. Even after two weeks of this, he still wasn’t used to a bang that was nothing at all like a proper bang. The three explosive charges they’d just detonated would have made an unholy racket had they set them off on Earth. On Mars, however, with an atmosphere something like one six-thousandth as thick as the air on Earth, sound traveled poorly, and only the deeper tones were preserved. The triple explosion had sounded like a clatter of garbage-can lids.

Still, it wasn’t how the sound carried in air that mattered, but how it was transmitted through the cold, dense-packed Martian regolith and the permafrost beneath. “Let’s have a look,” he told Kettering.

“Nothing yet,” Druzhininova said, looking at the screen.

Alexander checked the time function on his suit’s HUD. He was tired. Maybe one more run, God and incoming lobbers willing, and then he’d be ready to call it a day…no, a sol, he reminded himself. It was 1635 hours, MMT, and sunset at Cydonia this time of year came at about 2000 hours.

Craig Kettering looked up from the SIT panel. “So, David,” he said over the helmet radio. “What is it with you and that Joubert bi—”

Alexander made a slashing motion with his gloved hand. Although Kettering was using a suit-to-suit comm channel, Cydonia Prime’s microwave mast was visible from here, and only about a mile away. It was more than possible that people at Cydonia Prime were listening in—or that the conversations of people in the field were being recorded for later analysis and discussion.

“…uh…babe,” Kettering said, recovering. “She is a babe, you know….”

“We have a good, professional working relationship,” Alexander replied, carefully neutral.

To his credit, Kettering didn’t laugh out loud, or, if he did, he’d cut his helmet mike in time. It was no secret that he and Joubert hadn’t been speaking to one another since their arrival on Mars, just as it apparently was no secret that they’d been romantically involved aboard the Polyakov.

At first, Alexander had thought she’d been upset by the sudden arrival of the Marines in Polyakov’s storm cellar, but since they’d reached Mars, he’d become convinced that it was something more.

She’d been angry, of course, when Alexander and the Marines had landed directly at Cydonia. She’d come to Cydonia on the next scheduled lobber flight, along with the first contingent of UN troops returning from their brief redeployment to the equator. When she arrived, she’d come in like a whirlwind, quoting regulations, demanding daily reports, and even suggesting that her position as senior UN field director on this expedition meant that the US and Russian scientists had to answer to her. Her attitude could change with lightning suddenness, from sweet to imperiously demanding.

He was beginning to suspect that their liaison during the long trip out had been one of two things. Either she’d been bored and found him distracting, or, worse, she was trying to use their sexual relationship to get concessions from him. When he refused to grant those concessions, their personal relationship had dwindled away as though it had never been. He wondered if he’d ever really known her.

Alexander’s own directives were clear: treat the UN people with courtesy…but remember that this was an American operation, with UN people along as observers. Kenneth Morrow, the SECTECH himself, had talked to Alexander at length before he’d departed for Florida and the shuttle ride to orbit. Although the First Martian Archeological Survey was a civilian operation, it was funded completely by the government and came under the direct management and oversight of both the US Congress and the new Department of Technology. In other words, the UN scientists hitching a ride on the US-Russian cyclers could watch and they could conduct operations of their own—they’d purchased their seats, in effect, from NASA—but they didn’t set policy and they didn’t give the orders. Alexander was the senior archaeologist on the American team and as such answered only to Dr. Jason Graves, mission chief at Cydonia, and to Mission Control, back on Earth.

None of this had prevented Mireille Joubert from becoming a colossal pain in the ass, however. For over a week, now as Alexander had continued his survey, she’d demanded daily reports, demanded access to the survey team’s notes, planning meetings, and communications, even listened in on their conversations.

Politics….

David Alexander liked politics less than he liked the military…especially when it collided with archeology. Every time you tried crossing science with politics, you got trouble. As an archeologist, Alexander was preoccupied with facts. Unfortunately, facts tended to be inconvenient to politicians, and the two didn’t play well together.

He still couldn’t think about his last assignment in Egypt without a shudder.

Egyptology, once the most carefully reasoned and meticulously researched of sciences, was currently a mess, had been a mess since the turn of the century. For well over a hundred years, archeologists and historians had been confident about the order and the dating of Egyptian history…and in particular the identification of the Giza Complex—three large pyramids, six small ones, the Sphinx, and a number of associated ramps, roadways, temples, and tombs—with the Fourth Dynasty. In particular, the Great Pyramid, largest of the main three, had been known to have been built by the Pharaoh Khufu, who’d ruled Egypt from 2590 to 2567 B.C., while the Sphinx was believed to have been carved by Khafre, his brother, successor, and builder of the second tallest of the main pyramids.

All of that had been overturned during the past forty years or so. The Great Pyramid’s association with Khufu depended on the writings of Herodotus—who had been known to be wrong before—and some quarry markings that were almost certainly recent fabrications, an attempt by their nineteenth-century soldier-of-fortune discoverer to have something of substance to show his investors. The Sphinx, it had been discovered as far back as 1990, showed geological evidence of dating to a time long before Khafre; the carving showed the unmistakable scalloping of rainwater erosion…and it had not rained that much on the Giza Plateau since eight thousand years before Khafre’s day.

David Alexander’s principal expertise wasn’t Egyptology, but what he was expert at—Sonic Imaging Tomography—had a direct bearing on that highly specialized and bureaucratic subset of archeology.

The basic technique had been around for well over half a century. You set off an explosion underground, captured the sound waves scattered by buried structures, and used a computer to paint a kind of sonar picture of what lay hidden beneath sand, mud, soil, or water. Alexander’s equipment differed from older models principally in the sophistication of the AI software that did the actual imaging. From three separate but simultaneous blasts, the Honeywell Talus 8000 computer at Cydonia Prime could create a three-dimensional hologram in the same way that separate light sources could be used to compose a 3-D holopic. Anything less dense than solid rock became transparent on the SIT display screen, revealing buried rooms, walls, even individual skeletons and artifacts, all in astonishing detail.