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

A burning curiosity drove Alexander onward. He’d expected a door, a sealed entrance, an airlock hatch. Apparently, the tunnel mouth had been open once, covered over with…with mud, perhaps? Yes, almost certainly. The mud had frozen, then dried, forming a crusty, easily broken covering of regolith and packed sand.

“Field Team One! Field Team One! Respond, please!”

Alexander reached up and switched on his helmet light, the white beam showing plainly in the dust still floating in the thin air of the descending tunnel. Carefully, testing each step, he started down the stairs.

According to the sonogram, this descending tunnel should only extend down for about seven or eight meters, before entering a larger chamber of some sort. From there the main passageway ran east five meters beneath the surface.

The stairs were barely visible. The mud or whatever it was that had covered over the surface structure evidently had spilled down the stairway without blocking it completely. He had to bend nearly double, though, to get through to the bottom. Kettering and the others followed closely behind.

Carter must have felt this way at the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb. For the first time in how many millennia, a living being stood in this vault beneath the surface of Mars. He stood at the foot of the stairs, turning slowly, playing his helmet lamp across walls caked with the dust of uncounted ages. There was nothing distinctive about the architecture, no wall carvings, no decorations. The place was stark and utilitarian. He smiled. It might have been the interior of a military base, painted a bland conformist gray.

And then he saw the bodies.

There were four of them, and they all were huddled against a door to what Alexander knew was the southern passageway, the one leading to the nearby pyramid. The startling thing about them was that they looked human…a totally unexpected development.

“My God,” Kettering said, awed. “Humans!…”

“They can’t be,” Vandemeer said. “Everything we’ve found indicates that the Ancients were nonhuman.”

Alexander knelt carefully beside one of the bodies. It was still a body and not a skeleton, as he might have expected. The face was iron gray and hardened, the lips pulled back from clenched teeth in a death’s-head rictus. The hair, long and braided, was the same color, matted with dust. He was wearing something that might have been a uniform, or worker’s garb…without a proper context there was no way to tell. The device on one shoulder appeared to be a mission patch of some sort, though the colors were so faded it was impossible to make out what it might have represented.

Most disturbing, though, was the position the four had been in when they’d died. They were huddled together, some with arms still locked around their comrades. Two were reaching up with clawed, skeletal hands, resting against the sealed door, as though their last moments had been spent pounding or scratching at that barrier for admittance. One was partly turned, his blind face staring back toward the steps leading to the surface, as though watching for the arrival of whatever fate had overtaken them.

Careful not to touch any of the bodies—Alexander had the feeling that a touch, a whisper of breeze, even, would cause them to crumble—he searched for further clues. These people were technological, certainly. Each wore a metallic device of some sort on his right shoulder…a communicator, possibly. The more he looked, the more convinced he was that they were…not human, exactly, but very close. Their chins were less prominent than a human’s, the jaw muscles more pronounced, the ridges above the vacantly staring eye sockets thicker, the eyebrows bushier. The eyes, unfortunately, were gone, freeze-dried into dust by millennia of near vacuum. He wished he could have seen the eyes. He had a feeling they would have been disturbingly like his own.

The problem with the Face, of course, had always been that it was so human-looking, even though, clearly, no human could possibly have carved it.

It might, in fact, have been a portrait of one of these dead men.

It would take more and careful study to be certain, but Alexander was virtually certain that he was looking at four members of genus Homo, species erectus…the hominids from which modern humans had evolved.

And the question, of course, was what the hell had they been doing on Mars?

He realized the increasingly frantic calls from Cydonia Prime had been cut off when he’d descended the stairs. These walls, evidently, blocked radio. “Pohl?” he said. “Go back up to the surface. Raise the base. Tell them…tell them they’d better get some people over here, that we’ve found something that’s going to stand their hair on end.”

It was, Alexander was convinced, a discovery in the same class as those made by Copernicus and Darwin, a find to revolutionize humankind’s understanding of itself.

Human evolution/Brain size: The evolutionary tree of genus Homo is now well understood. Homo habilis gave rise, roughly 1.7 million years ago, to Homo erectus, who in turn gave rise to archaic populations of Homo sapiens 400,000 to 500,000 years ago. Besides the ongoing increase in average cranial capacity, principal changes included a general enlargement of the spinal cord, permitting better manual coordination. Tool manufacture began with H. habilis at least two million years ago, but tools remained primitive and coarse, little more than a few flakes struck from a pebble to create a sharp edge, until the greatly increased dexterity of H. sapiens permitted refinement and creative development. Speech was also a relatively late development.

It should be remembered that late H. erectus shared most of the traits of primitive or “archaic” H. sapiens, including brain size. Still, the transition appears to have been abrupt and is still poorly understood. Further study of the Martian data may…

—Download from Networld Encyclopedia vrtp://earthnet.public.dataccess

SATURDAY, 26 MAY: 0831 HOURS GMT

Cydonia Base, Mars

Sol 5634: 2045 hours MMT

The last pale glow of the sunset had long since faded from the sky outside, surrendering the desert below to the star-dusted black of the Martian night. Inside the common room, where Mark Garroway was sitting at the table along with Colonel Lloyd, David Alexander, and a dozen or so of the expedition’s senior people, the harsh and unrelenting glare of fluorescents gave scant warmth to air swiftly turning chilly and damp. It was always like this in these large habs, once the sun had set. Cydonia Prime’s environmental systems were being stretched to their operational limits with the demands being made on them just now. During the two weeks after Harper’s Bizarre had touched down, all fifty-four of the UN troops had ferried back from Candor Chasma, along with the new members of the UN science team, bringing the complement on-station at Cydonia Prime to 138.

Both Colonel Bergerac and the UN archeological team leader, Mireille Joubert, were present in the room now. Joubert had called the emergency meeting, in fact, apparently for the purpose of reading the riot act to Alexander.

“What do you mean,” Alexander was saying slowly, “we can’t tell anyone on Earth yet? This…this is the most incredible discovery in the history of—”

“Please, David, I know the importance, the possible significance of this discovery. And that’s precisely why we shouldn’t release it until we know more.”

Dr. Graves laughed. “Until we know more? My God! We’ve found four naturally mummified humans on Mars! Isn’t that worth at least the cost of an e-mail to Earth?”

Garroway looked away as the argument continued, distractedly studying the vaulting, strut-lined interior of the building. Most of the habitats on Mars looked like the interior of a Shuttle II’s main fuel tank…probably because most of them were Shuttle II fuel tanks, hauled out to Mars orbit by one or another of the cyclers, fitted with small, methane-fueled deorbit boosters, and lowered the last few kilometers to the Martian surface by parachute…a process far cheaper than hauling the building materials all the way out to Mars and then assembling them in place. This habitat possessed an upper and a lower deck—the lower given over to stores and a reserve of liquid water, the upper divided between living quarters, a rec facility, and the common room. Pressurized tunnels led to other habs nearby, including Ops, the big, pressurized ex-fuel tank next door that housed the communications center, the Central Operational Node or CON—essentially the facility’s main AI computer—and the control center. The main tanks-turned-habitats were far more spacious than were needed yet within the growing colony, but they still lacked a few of the basic amenities…such as windows.