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

Alexander had been part of an expedition to Egypt in 2037, sponsored by the American Museum and the Smithsonian. After three weeks of work on the Giza Plateau, he’d announced the discovery of an astonishing and heretofore unknown labyrinth of underground passageways and chambers, including what appeared to be a long-vanished waterway, fed by the Nile, which extended from nearly thirty meters beneath the Sphinx all the way to a gallery of chambers far beneath the Great Pyramid itself. The structure was so elaborate, the complex so vast, that he’d confidently asserted this was proof positive, at last, that the Giza complex predated the Fourth Dynasty.

Alexander could still remember the face of Dr. Salim Bahir, Egypt’s minister of antiquities, when he’d given the man his preliminary report. “Unacceptable!” the man had said, his fat lips pouting. “Totally and completely unacceptable!”

“I didn’t make this up,” Alexander had replied. “And it’s easily testable. Some of those subterranean structures show evidence of being made of wood.” That alone suggested that they’d been built long before this part of the world had turned dry! Trees had been in short supply in Egypt for at least nine thousand years. “Wood can be carbon-dated. And then we’ll know! Just as soon as we open up the way into—”

“Excuse me,” Bahir had replied, his manner stiff. “There will be no opening.”

“What? But these underground—”

“I repeat, no opening. The Great Pyramids, the Sphinx, these date from our Fourth Dynasty. That is established scientific fact.”

“So was the notion that the sun goes around the Earth. I think I’ve refuted the conventional dating.”

The flat of Bahir’s hand came down on his desk top with a sharp crack. “You have refuted nothing! You are a disseminator of vicious and anti-Egyptian propaganda! The Pyramids, the Sphinx, these, these antiquities are the very heart and soul of Egypt, of our culture, of who and what we are. You seek to tear these things from us, to give them to…to someone else. Someone you would claim occupied the Nile Valley long before the Egyptian people rose from savagery. This, Dr. Alexander, I will never allow. Not so long as I am head of this office.”

He’d found himself under arrest a few hours later…and by the end of the week he’d been deported “for attacking the host nation’s cultural institutions,” as the complaint lodged against him with the World Archeological Congress had asserted.

It had been a blow to his career, though the increasing tensions between the United States and the UN had actually served to make him something of a popular hero at home. Politics, again. When the decision was made to send a tomographic imager to Mars, he’d been the obvious choice.

Cydonia presented tomographic scanners with a special problem: much of the complex was at least partly buried in the permafrost layer, which lay some two to three meters beneath the surface in this area. Permafrost is essentially frozen mud; at Martian temperatures, ice is an extremely hard material. Indeed, there were plans to begin constructing buildings made from permafrost bricks. The stuff was so hard it was difficult to distinguish between it and the materials the long-vanished Builders at Cydonia had used—mostly native bedrock, at a time when Mars had enjoyed an ocean of liquid water—the Boreal Sea.

“Hey! I think we’ve got something here,” Kettering said. He pointed at the screen. “Is that an open space?”

“Too soon to tell yet,” Alexander replied, studying the screen. “Wait it out….” The features Kettering had pointed out were still little more than fuzzy gray shadows that suggested structures made of denser material than sand or ice, but they could be buried walls or buildings, or they might be sand-covered boulders. They did suggest an unusually orderly arrangement…a geometry of right angles, circles, and straight lines, and Alexander could feel his pulse quickening with excitement. It certainly looked artificial….

“Look here,” Kettering said, pointing at the SIT screen. “That’s got to be a passageway, a tunnel or something, right up against the wall of the Fortress. And with an airlock at the surface.”

“Or a ventilation duct,” Alexander replied, “with air-conditioning or pressurization equipment at the top.” He knew more than most the problems inherent in leaping to conclusions at the first encounter with new data.

Druzhininova was already using the display’s keyboard to take a set of bearings. The Martian magnetic field was weak, about two-one-thousandths as strong as Earth’s, making traditional compass navigation difficult to impossible, but navigation satellites in areosynchronous orbit let them pinpoint themselves, or visible landmarks, to within a few centimeters. All of the shapes and structures visible on the sonic display were now located on the computer’s master navigational grid.

“There,” she said, pointing. “Airlock or air conditioner, that’s where it is.”

Alexander looked at the spot where she was pointing—an otherwise unremarkable swelling in the ground where sand had piled up against the Fortress’s western wall. There was something there.

In the sixteen years since humans had first stood at this site, literally hundreds of artificial structures had been found, and most seemed to suggest that there was a truly vast and labyrinthine complex of tunnels and interconnected chambers beneath the Martian surface. That was why they’d brought him here, after all.

“Whaddya say, Dave?” Kettering said. Alexander could hear the grin in his voice as he reached for one of the shovels resting in an equipment rack on the Mars cat. “What could it hurt? At least we can have a look.”

Proper procedure called for flagging all new surface discoveries and bringing them up for review in the group research meeting held each morning. But as Kettering said…what could it hurt?

He hesitated a moment longer, then grabbed another shovel for himself. “Let’s go check it out.”

“Field Team, this is C-Prime,” a woman’s voice said in his helmet phones. “David? What are you doing?” It sounded like Mireille.

“Just checking something, C-Prime,” he said. “Wait one.”

“May I remind you that you are not to begin excavations until the site has been properly surveyed and mapped.”

“Yes, you may. We just want to check something here.”

Cydonia Prime was two kilometers distant. There was absolutely nothing they could do to stop the team from an act of what was certainly a breach of proper procedure…an act that Alexander knew he simply could not resist.

The hummock was perhaps a meter tall and four or five meters on a side, a mound of crusty soil against the Fortress wall that looked perfectly natural. Only the subsurface sonogram proved that a passageway ended right…here.

Gently, he scraped at the dirt with the blade of his shovel. The surface resisted at first, then crumbled away in great, frozen clots of earth, revealing…

…a hole. A hole leading down into blackness beneath the Fortress.

“Christ!” Pohl said, standing just behind Kettering and Druzhininova. “It’s open!”

“Field Team, this is CP! What’s open? What’s happening? Answer!”

Gently, Alexander touched his gloved finger to his visor, indicating silence, then tapped the side of his helmet. Keep down the chatter. They’re listening. He didn’t want to debate each move with the UN archeologists.

It took only a few moments to clear away the opening. Steps were visible. Apparently, some gray-colored, extremely hard material had been used to construct the walls of the structure, and the floor had been cast with steps. The tunnel was circular and about two meters across.