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SATURDAY, 12 MAY

Earth-Mars Cycler Polyakov

1417 hours GMT

“All right, people!” Colonel Lloyd bellowed. “Listen up! We got us a major change of plans, here.”

Lloyd waited as the buzz of speculation and grumbling died away. Most of the MMEF’s Marines had been gathered in Polyakov’s storm cellar, in full Class-One armor, with weapons and HUD helmets. Those not mustered in were watching through the unwinking eye of the television camera mounted on the bulkhead.

“What kind of change, Colonel?” Sergeant Ken Jacob called out.

“Yeah,” Corporal John Donatelli added. “We gonna get to go kick ugly space-alien butt or not?”

The others chuckled, and several gave one another gloved high-fives.

“No, but I’m gonna kick some ugly Marine butt if you assholes don’t simmer down.”

James Andrew Lloyd knew he had a reputation for being hard on the men and women under his command. In fact, he gloried in that rep, cultivating the image of a hard-as-nails badass the way other men cultivated wealth or success. It had been that way for as long as he could remember. The United States, nearly a century after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, guaranteed equality for all…but there was still that unspoken assumption, strongest in the black, middle-class families like the one James—never “Jim”—had grown up in, that blacks and women had to work extra hard, had to go that extra kilometer, just to prove that they really had what it took.

James Lloyd had been taking that extra kilometer for a long time, now. Hard work and a no-nonsense attitude had led to his graduation cum laude from the University of Michigan, followed by both OCS and Marine Aviation Flight School. He’d flown a Harrier IV in Cuba in ’24, led a platoon by airdrop into Colombia in ’27, and seen combat since in Panama, Greece, and Andhra Pradesh.

While the fact that he was black had helped define his career, he rarely thought about it now. The Marine DI who’d run his OCS class had been black; an oft-quoted motivational expression of his was an old Corps theme: “There are no black Marines. There are no white Marines. There are only amphibious green Marines…and right now I want to see nothing but amphibious green blurs!…”

Colonel Lloyd thought of himself as amphibious green.

“Our original mission profile,” he told them as the noise died away, “called for off-loading to a Mars Shuttle-Lander, followed by a descent to the primary base at Candor Chasma. Those of you who’ve read your mission profiles—maybe I should say those of you who can read—know that Candor Chasma is on the Martian equator…about five thousand kilometers from Cydonia, which is where we’re ultimately supposed to be deployed.

“A new set of orders has come through from Earth, however. The MSL pilot has been ordered to take us directly to Cydonia. The bulk of our supplies and matériel will be sent to Candor Base, as originally planned. We will take with us what we can ferry along in the one MSL.”

“Aw, shit, Colonel!”

Lloyd turned a hard gaze on the Marine who’d spoken. “You have a problem with that, Corporal Slidell?”

“Sorry, sir…but damn it, what about all our supplies and shit?”

“There is no effective difference in the new deployment,” Lloyd said patiently, “at least insofar as our equipment is concerned. We would have had to off-load our gear at Candor, then repack what we needed to carry along aboard another MSL and redeploy by suborbital hop to Cydonia. As we needed spares or whatever, they would have been sent to us on the regular supply runs. We’re just cutting out one extra hop for us.” He studied Slidell’s stricken face, wondering what was going through the man’s head. “Be happy, Slider. The lot of you would’ve spent a day or two unloading shipping containers at Candor. Instead, you all get to sit on your fat, happy asses, guarding sand dunes at Cydonia.”

“Yeah, but it ain’t fair, jerkin’ us around like that,” Slidell said.

“Easy, man,” Lance Corporal Ben Fulbert told Slidell. “Ice down.”

“The Corps never promised you fair, Slider.” Lloyd decided that he would have to keep an eye on the man. He seemed just a little too upset by the change in plans.

“Why the change, Colonel?” Staff Sergeant Ostrowsky wanted to know. “I thought everything had to channel through Mars Prime.”

“When they tell me, Ostrowsky, I’ll tell you. In the meantime, we follow orders.” He hesitated before adding, “Let’s just say that HQ is concerned about the friendliness of our reception. So we go in sharp, and we go in with Class-Ones. Questions?”

There were plenty of questions—there had to be with this crowd—but no one spoke up. Hell, he had questions, and none of them could be answered yet.

The change had come through only a few hours before, coded, and marked Secret and Eyes Only. INTEL BELIEVES UNFMC TROOPS SHIFTED TO MARS PRIME REGION LAST 72 HOURS, the report had stated. The United Nations Force, Mars Contingent, numbered fifty men, almost twice the number in Lloyd’s Marine platoon. If they’d shifted south from Cydonia to the Mars Prime base at Candor Chasma, it could be because they planned to confront the Marines when they landed.

Or possibly not. Bergerac, the UNF’s new CO, was aboard the Polyakov. Maybe they were just getting ready to throw him a welcome-to-Mars party.

But Lloyd firmly believed that a little healthy paranoia was good for a man…and especially for Marines who planned to die in bed. That was why he’d ordered the platoon to assemble here in full armor, complete with weapons, HUD helmets, and full field gear. It made the storm cellar a bit crowded, and the deorbit was gonna be hell, but at least they would be ready, no matter what was waiting for them on the ground.

“Okay, people,” he said at last. “We got thirty mikes before the shuttle docks. Time for weapons drill.” He looked at his wrist-top, which had been attached to the outer sleeve of his gauntlet. “Ready…begin!”

Half an hour later, on schedule as dictated by the dead hand of Sir Isaac Newton, the first of a small fleet of approaching Mars Shuttle-Landers docked with Polyakov’s nonrotating hub. Though there were no windows in the storm cellar, there was a small television monitor with a feed from the control deck, and Lloyd was able to open a channel from one of Polyakov’s docking-bay approach cameras.

Harper’s Bizarre—painted in grit-scoured red letters on the stubby craft’s bare-metal prow—was the unofficial name of the first of the MSLs that slowly eased in to a capture and hard dock. The upper half of the forty-meter craft was a biconic hull, an off-center cone designed for atmospheric reentries, while the lower half consisted of two, stacked doughnut-clusters of spherical methane tanks and the close-folded complexity of a trio of spidery landing legs. The Bizarre, like the other MSLs on Mars, was a nuke, using a Westinghouse-Lockheed NTR, a Nuclear Thermal Rocket similar to the old Nerva designs, to heat the tanked reaction mass. The propellant of choice was methane, a liquid produced in quantity on Mars from atmospheric CO₂ and permafrost-melted water; the concept was known as NIMF, an unlikely acronym standing for Nuclear rocket using Indigenous Martian Fuel.

Once the green light showed for docking lock one, pressures were equalized and the MSL opened to Polyakov’s interior. As befitted one of the burgeoning Martian colony’s workhorses, the Bizarre had a large and utilitarian cargo section, which for this trip had been fitted with a plug-in deck-chair module. Nothing fancy, but it had padding and straps enough to get human cargo from the cycler’s orbit to the Martian surface in, if not comfort, then at least relative safety.

Lloyd’s path through the docking collar and forward pressure lock brought him to a point where he passed beneath the feet of the MSL’s pilot. “Marine Mars Expeditionary Force,” he rasped out. “Request permission to come aboard.”

“Granted, Colonel,” the pilot called back. She was a slender redhead in a trim, lightweight pressure suit. “Find yourselves seats and get strapped in.”

The rest of the Marines were already clambering in after him, muttering curses or sharp imprecations as their clumsy Class-Ones scraped or bumped against equipment, bulkheads, or the armor of other Marines. Class-One armor was almost as bulky as a full-fledged space suit, and with good reason. It was self-contained, pressurized, and—with a full-charged life-support pack and rebreather assembly—could keep a man alive in hard vacuum almost indefinitely…or at least until his food ran out.

All of the MMEF’s armor had active chameleonic surfaces—coatings of a specially formulated plastic that “remembered” incident light and was able to adapt its color and texture within minutes to match the surroundings. The only parts of the suits that did not sport this constantly shifting surface were the helmet visors—normally dark to block ultraviolet radiation—and the traditionally camouflaged helmet covers. Those last were something of an old Marine tradition, a holdover from the second half of the twentieth century. Marine aviators, though they’d worn flight suits and standard helmets when they’d gone aloft in their old Harrier IIs or F/A-18s or, later, in their F/A-22s and AV-32s—always wore the US Marines’ standard tan, brown, and green fabric helmet cover…not for camouflage, but to show solidarity with their fellow Marines on the ground. It was a tradition that went back at least as far as Vietnam, and probably farther; Marines took extraordinary pride in the close relationship between Marines in the mud and the Marine aviators flying close support.

Lloyd found a convenient stanchion and hung on, floating in an out-of-the-way attitude as the rest of the Marines filed in. Overall, the evolution was an orderly one…but he noticed one bit of confusion toward the rear of the column.

Pushing off from his anchor point, he maneuvered to the scene of the problem. An unarmored civilian had infiltrated the column and had gotten tangled with the armored troops.

It was one of the archeologists, Dr. David Alexander.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Uh…I thought I would tag along on this shuttle,” Alexander replied. “I understand you’re going straight to Cydonia, instead of to Mars Prime.”

The only thing faster than light is the damned shipboard scuttlebutt, Lloyd thought. “I’m not sure that’s such a good idea,” he replied. “This is liable to be a rough ride, with a hot reception at the end of it.”

“Well, Captain Elliott said there was room.”

“Captain Elliott?”

“Harper Elliott. Bizarre’s skipper. Turns out she used to be a Navy aviator. Served on the Reagan, same ship as my dad.”

“I see.” That put Lloyd in an uncomfortable position. He didn’t want to have civilians kicking around on his assault boat, especially if things turned nasty when they hit ground. On the other hand, it wasn’t his assault boat, not in the formal sense. Elliott was ship’s captain, and he didn’t want to end up second-guessing the Bizarre’s CO.

Alexander seemed to sense Lloyd’s dilemma and gave him a lopsided grin. “I’ll promise to be good.”

He sighed. “Very well, Dr. Alexander,” Lloyd told the man. There ought to be room enough. “Find yourself a seat. But…if things are hot when we touch down, you get the hell out of the way, understand?”

“You expect things to be, uh, ‘hot,’ as you put it?”

“I don’t expect anything, sir. But it’s best to be prepared.”

“Don’t worry,” Alexander said. “If anybody starts shooting, I’ll be sure to keep my head down.” The man spoke with a sardonic edge to his voice that told Lloyd he was being humored.

Colonel Lloyd did not like being humored, and he did not like the archaeologist’s attitude, at once bantering and condescending. He almost—almost—wished that something would happen when they landed, just to teach the arrogant civilian some manners.

Not, he realized, a professional response at all.

1556 GMT

Mars Shuttle-Lander Harper’s

Bizarre

Sol 5621: 1210 hours MMT

David Alexander had fought to get himself a window seat.

Not that there was terribly much to see through the narrow, thick-cut piece of grit-scoured transplas set in the circular port, but he felt he deserved a chance to see the Cydonian site from the air. The Marines, after all, didn’t need to see the area they’d be guarding. It was just another deployment to them.

And besides, he wanted to see the Face.

He chuckled to himself. If Hoist or that bureaucratic idiot Bahir at the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities could just see him now….

For a time, all he’d seen through the tiny port was the slowly revolving arms of the cycler as Marines continued to load their gear aboard Harper’s Bizarre. Finally, though, with a short, hard shock, the MSL had cut free from the cycler, falling tail first away from the far larger spacecraft-station until Alexander, by pressing his face hard against the transplas and shielding it from the interior light with his hands, could see the cycler in its entirety. Two more MSLs were in the process of docking with the cycler as the Bizarre cleared the sweep of Polyakov’s arms. Then, with a gut-wrenching burst of acceleration, Bizarre spun to a new attitude that swept the other spacecraft from view.

Acceleration pressed him back against his thinly padded couch…building and building far beyond the meager three-tenths G he’d gotten used to over the past few weeks. He wasn’t sure how long they were under boost; he’d forgotten to check his wrist-top when the Bizarre’s nukes cut in. He only knew that the weight pressing down on his body, on his chest and lungs, was unendurable…and that it went on and on and on, forcing him to endure, whatever he thought about the matter.

Eventually, they were in free fall again, but by that time he felt too tired to note the time…or even to look out the window.

After a while, acceleration resumed, and the sky beyond his tiny porthole began to glow.

The point of cycler spacecraft like Polyakov was that they occupied solar orbits that touched Earth’s orbit on their inward swing and Mars’s orbit on their outer. With some judicious use of gravity wells during each planetary swing-by and occasional kicks from their ion-electric drives, they could arrange to meet the planetary orbits when the planets themselves were there. It was necessary, however, to ferry the personnel and equipment brought out from Earth down to the Martian surface…and that meant a hefty delta-v burn, followed by aerobraking in the Martian atmosphere. The ride down was long, rough, and excruciatingly uncomfortable.

Alexander spent much of reentry trying hard not to be sick.

“Hey, uh…sir?” the Marine seated next to him said after a long time. “You see anything out there?”

Vaguely, Alexander realized that the man talking to him was the Marine he’d shouldered aside earlier in order to get the spot by the window. The name FULBERT was stenciled in black on the gray-and-white mottling of his chest armor. “Not a lot,” he said.

Several more jolts slammed him in the back as Bizarre’s nuclear engines came up to full thrust. The shuttle was balancing down on its tail now. “Down” was aft, toward the rear of the ship, and Alexander was lying flat on his back with his knees braced above his chest.

“You’re the new head archeologist gonna see the Face, right?” Fulbert said.

Alexander shook his head. He’d not associated much with the Marines for the past months, understandably enough, and his official mission had not been widely advertised, but it was impossible to live that long inside a couple of large, sealed tin cans without everyone learning something about everyone else.

“I’m just going with some new sonic imaging gear,” he said, correcting the Marine. “Dr. Graves is head of the American team, and he’s already at Cydonia. Dr. Joubert is going as head of the UN team, though.”

Fulbert’s face split into a broad and knowing grin inside the confines of his open helmet. “Man, there’s a high-voltage outlet! I guess you two don’t let the international shit get in the way of your workin’ together, huh?”

Clearly, Fulbert was more interested in the salacious details of his relationship with Joubert than in the international situation. “She’s a good archeologist,” he replied, keeping his voice noncommittal. “She did some fine fieldwork in the Yucatán.”

“Ha! I wouldn’t mind doin’ some fieldwork with her. Is that where you met her? Down in Yucatán?”

Alexander shook his head. “My specialty is…my specialty was Egypt.” He found that the unfairness still hurt, even after three years. “In a way, I guess, we’re enemies.” He gave a wan smile. “Some folks with the UN don’t care much for me or my ideas.”

The Marine’s eyes widened. “Egypt? You mean like, the pyramids and the Sphinx and all that?”

“That’s right.”

“So…you think there’s some kind of connection? Between the Sphinx and the Face? Is that why you’re on the UN’s shit list?”

Alexander grimaced. The question always came up with the uninitiated. “The Sphinx at Giza and the Face at Cydonia have nothing, nothing whatsoever to do with one another.” He’d long since lost count of how many times he’d gone through this. “The Face, as near as we can tell, is something like five hundred thousand years old. That’s half a million years, okay? The Sphinx, I am convinced, is much, much older than the date traditionally assigned to it, but it is nowhere near that old. The idea that the same culture who made the Face also made the pyramids and the Sphinx is garbage…worse than trying to link the pyramids of Egypt with the pyramids of Mexico. Can’t be done.”

“Yeah? But I read that the UN was havin’ to call out troops to break up demonstrations…and lots of those demonstrations were over the idea of aliens colonizing the Earth thousands of years ago. Things like the Sphinx are supposed to be proof the aliens were here, but the UN government doesn’t like that.”

Alexander sighed. As was often the case, the layman’s view mingled a little fact with a great deal of fancy. “There were definitely aliens in the solar system half a million years ago,” he explained. “They left traces at Cydonia…though you might be surprised to hear that there are still quite a few scientists who argue that the Face and the so-called pyramids on Mars are natural features.”

“No shit?”

“Most of us think the Face, at least, was carved by someone…something, and the Fortress-Ship complex is obviously artificial, though after half a million years of dust storms and weathering, there’s not much left of it. But there is room for debate. That’s what science is all about, after all, testing hypotheses.”

“How come some scientists still think that Face-thing is natural? I’ve seen three-vids of that thing, and it gives me the crawlies.”

“Well, we still can’t find a decent reason for a sculpture of an essentially human face to be carved into a mesa on Mars at a time when Homo sapiens was just appearing on Earth. The aliens, whoever or whatever they were, were not human. I guess it’s easier to believe that the Face is a wind-carved freak of nature than it is to believe it could be a deliberately sculpted likeness of us.”

“Well, that’s what all the nutcase new religions and shit are all about, ain’t it? That the aliens tinkered with apes and turned ’em into people? Like in that old movie that everybody’s talkin’ about now, 2000.”

“2001: A Space Odyssey,” he said, correcting the Marine again. “And it wouldn’t have been apes, not unless you count humans as a kind of ape. Homo erectus was the dominant hominid line on Earth half a million years ago.”

“Sure, whatever. But, like I was sayin’, everybody on Earth, it seems like, either thinks the aliens were gods or thinks that we’re tryin’ to slip one over on ’em to take away their religion, or whatever, and the UN johnnies all seem dead sure that all the stuff about aliens visiting Earth back then is crap. Like it couldn’t possibly happen, y’know?”

Alexander smiled. “I know.” He’d been in the eye of that particular storm for a long time. In fact, he had his own opinions about some of the more improbable sites on Earth…not that aliens had built them, necessarily, but the possibility of alien inspiration and technical help was not unthinkable.

Still, it was dangerous territory to tread upon. The discoveries of the past few decades had transformed traditional science…but they’d also caused an explosion in the pseudosciences. The old “ancient astronaut” theories had come back with a vengeance, spawning volume upon volume of crackpot ramblings, pop-science gibberish, and even a horde of new religions.

Hoping to end the conversation, he deliberately checked his wrist-top, calling up the time. Before the MSL rendezvous, everyone’s personal computers had been updated to Mars time. The planet’s rotation was slightly longer than Earth’s and, therefore, could not be brought into synch with the GMT used aboard all spacecraft. A Martian day was called a sol; it was divided into traditional hours and minutes, as on Earth, but had an extra thirty-seven-minute catch-up period, called soltime, added after local midnight. The young Mars colony counted sols instead of days, beginning with the official establishment of the first permanently manned settlement—the base at Candor Chasma, now known as Mars Prime. Sol 1 was July 20, 2024, fifty-five years to the day after Armstrong had set foot on the moon. The current sol was 5621.

All of which meant that Mars Mean Time, or MMT, had nothing whatsoever in common with GMT. It was now, he saw, 1740 hours at Cydonia—late afternoon—and 2126 hours in Greenwich. Of course, for the next fifteen months or so, his only interest in what time…or day…it was on Earth would be when he had to calculate the arrival or departure time of another report.

“So,” Fulbert said, still clinging to the conversation thread, “you don’t think aliens did stuff on Earth? You know, the pyramids? Easter Island? All that shit?”

He decided not to mention his own reservations about the Giza pyramids, at least. “Easter Island? Certainly not! We know how the local population built and raised those great stone heads, because they showed us. No mystery there at all.”

Turning away in another attempt to end the conversation, he pressed his face against the tiny port. He could see sky above—still a dark, purplish color at the horizon turning to jet-black overhead. Below, the Martian surface spread out beneath a curved horizon, a dusty, dusky ocher color tinted with streaks of rust and gray-brown. They were still too high up for the smaller details of the surface to be visible, but he could see scattered, shadow-edged shapes that must be mountains or the jumble of chaotic terrain. He tried to orient himself. If it was late afternoon here, then north would be that way…but he didn’t know if they were even descending in an attitude that would let him see the Face or the attendant structures. It was frustratingly like trying to recognize buildings or landmarks from the air while approaching a city’s airport on Earth. For all he knew, the Cydonian ruins were on the other side of the—

He saw it.

My God! It’s just like they all said…but so…so unexpected….

It was smaller than he’d thought it would be, which was why he’d overlooked it at first. Bizarre must still be twenty or thirty kilometers up. He looked down on the Cydonian Face, and it returned his wondering stare with the same enigmatic and Sphinx-like skyward gaze it had worn for half a million years.

First captured by chance on two frames shot by the Viking 1 orbiter spacecraft in 1976, the Face hadn’t even been noticed until the early 1980s…and then the image had been dismissed as a trick of the light and of the remarkable persistence of the human mind in imposing order and facial features on random shapes, be they ink-blots on a paper, or a mile-long landform in the desert. By the turn of the century, space probes had returned better images, and NASA had—with some reluctance—acknowledged at last that there might be something there worth investigating after all. That revelation, that intelligence had carved a mile-long face into a mesa in the Cydonian region of Mars, was the last in a rapid-fire barrage of discoveries that had completed at last the long-fought Copernican Revolution. Since the 1990s, it had been known that planet-bearing stars were common, and evidence of fossilized bacteria had been discovered on a meteorite gouged from the Martian surface eons before.

Humankind was not alone in the universe.

Those discoveries had spurred a long-awaited renaissance in space exploration. The first manned landing on Mars, a joint US-Russian venture, had taken place in 2019 at Candor Chasma; it wasn’t until the second landing five years later that Geoffrey Cox, Anatol Kryukov, and Roberta Anders had stood at last in the shadow of that alien-carved enigma and wondered….