Europa Strike(48)
“Uh, actually,” Jack said, nodding at the screen, “maybe we could defer this until later? I’d kind of like to hear the latest up-to-the-minute from Alpha Centauri!”
He was always uncomfortable when this argument, or a variation of it, broke out anew. For so long he’d worshipped David Alexander as a bold, scientific pioneer. When he’d been a kid, back before he’d joined the Corps, he’d followed David’s reports and published papers on the Cydonian discoveries as avidly as other kids followed sports, bonemusic, or girls. It had been startling, even disappointing, to discover that the great Dr. Alexander had a temper…or that he had such acid contempt for ideas he considered to be patent nonsense.
“That’s right,” Teri said. “Stop being so argumentative!”
“Eh? Of course,” he said. “Of course. But I wasn’t arguing. There’s nothing here to argue about.”
“Sam!” Jack called. “Is there any sign of recent habitation?”
“Negative, Jack,” Sam replied. “There is no means of directly dating them, of course, but based on the weathering I have seen, I would estimate that these ruins are on the order of a half million years old. They do not appear to have been disturbed in all that time. Of course, I have seen very little of them as yet.”
“Any indication of what happened?” Paul asked. “I mean, was it a war? An attack?”
“That seems the likeliest explanation at this time,” Sam replied. “From orbit, I have noted the presence of a number of fairly recent craters in the one to fifty-kilometer range. All show approximately the same degree of weathering and erosion. And there is an unusually high correlation between the location of each crater and the nearby location of major ruins. In the case of this city complex, the crater actually lies in the salt flats west of the city, suggesting an ocean impact.”
“My God,” David said, looking up. “Someone was chucking asteroids at them!”
“Just like Chicago,” Teri added. She laid one hand on David’s arm, an understanding touch.
“Or Mars,” David said. “What do you want to bet that the local hunters finished off both Chiron and Mars at the same time?”
“Who’s speculating now, Dad?” Paul asked. He disarmed the jab with a grin. “But I gotta admit, it sure looks compelling.”
“There’s a decent topic for your doctoral thesis, Paul,” David said. “Our first hard evidence that Mars was one small, outpost colony in a larger interstellar empire of some sort, knocked down half a million years ago by the Hunters of the Dawn.”
That name took on more icily ominous overtones now. The term was a translation of Sumerian words and phrases pieced together from various sources, including An ruins found on Earth’s moon. Ten thousand years ago or so, the An had built a colony on Earth, near the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. They had been destroyed utterly, on Earth and on the moon, by the attack of an enemy they called, variously, Gaz-Bakar or Ur-Bakar, often with the word Shar, meaning “great or ultimate,” as a prefix. Shar-Gaz-Bakar meant the “Great Smiters” or “Great Killers of the Dawn.” Ur-Bakar could mean either “Foundations of the Dawn” or, more likely in this case, “Hunters of the Dawn.”
The human slaves of the An had referred to the utter destruction of their masters and their fabulous cities as Tar-Tar, a term almost certainly preserved in the name “Tartarus,” the “Place of Destruction,” the Greek Hell.
Exactly how the Hunters of the Dawn had destroyed the An colonies wasn’t known, but the evidence suggested that someone had dropped a small asteroid into the Indian Ocean south of the Persian Gulf. The resultant tidal wave had scoured almost every trace of advanced civilization from the face of the planet, from North Africa to the mountains of Iran and as far north as the Black Sea. Other asteroid strikes, apparently, had shattered satellite An colonies as far distant as Peru’s Lake Titicaca, where the much-later Inca had later wondered at the megalithic structures called Tiahuanaco, and in central Mexico, where the ruins at Teotihuacán had inspired the much-later rise of the Olmecs and Toltecs.
All that had remained of the An presence were the foundations of the Giza Plateau Complex in Egypt and the impossibly massive, still-enigmatic platform at Baalbek in Lebanon, both of which were built upon by human civilizations that had come along much later, a few foundational remnants in Mexico and Bolivia…and myths found worldwide of a great, all-destructive flood decreed by the gods.