Europa Strike(49)

Scholars and researchers were still arguing the details, of course. What was certain was that the Builders, the intelligence that had uplifted primitive man, genetically engineering Homo erectus into the more capable, more voluble, more intelligent twin lines of Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalensis had been dead and gone for half a million years before the imperialistic An had come along and made Earth and man their own.

But the ruins on Mars showed unmistakable signs of having been bombarded from space; the D&M Pyramid, believed to have been part of the Builders’ terraforming complex, had been punctured on the east side by a small but extremely fast projectile. Most of the ruins at Cydonia showed blast damage.

And here was evidence of a bombardment from space used to annihilate the civilization on Chiron as well.

Had two different sets of attackers, two different “Hunters of the Dawn,” destroyed the cities on Chiron and Mars, and the An colonies on Earth half a million years later, using similar weapons and tactics? Or were the Hunters one race, an incredibly old race, spacefaring and world-wrecking across five hundred millennia?

Either way, the constancy of the destruction gave a clear answer to the Fermi Paradox.

As the information download continued, Jack asked, “Just how much longer is this going to take, Sam?”

“We are limited by this rather primitive technique to approximately one megabyte per second,” Sam replied. “I have amassed, so far, some twenty-four gigabytes of data on the planet alone. I assume you are not referring to the data acquired en route, or to data about other planets of the Alpha Centauri system. Transfer should be complete in another six hours.”

Primitive technique! Well, compared to the Builders’ technology, perhaps it was.

Jack was still having trouble adjusting to the wonder of the situation. There was a strange, even eerie sense of parallelism here. On Chiron, a sophisticated AI was orbiting the planet, teleoperating a robot in the ruins to access the alien FTL communications link; here on Mars, the four of them were in a hab on the Martian surface, using a teleoperated robot to access the other end of that magical-seeming comm link in a different set of alien ruins several kilometers away, deep beneath the rugged mystery of the Cydonian face.

“Look at this, Jack,” David said. He was using his PAD to tap into some of the information coming across the light years. “Teri? Paul? Just look at this!”

Jack leaned over to see the unfolded screen. The display showed the smooth curves of a floater, carved from blue crystal, shining in the sun.

“Sam’s right,” Jack said. “It does look like a floater.”

“There can’t have been many of them,” Paul said. “You guys’ve only found—what?—five of them here?”

“Six, I believe,” David replied. “And some that are in such bad condition they’re little more than rust stains on the rock.”

“And there’s the Ship,” Jack added. Insight, full-blown and startlingly sharp, exploded within him. “It has the same overall shape.”

“My God,” David said. “You’re right! But you don’t think—”

Jack shrugged. “I don’t think anything. But the similarity is worth another look.”

“The Ship” was one of the myriad enigmatic artifacts that littered the Cydonian desert floor, a cigar shape almost two kilometers long that had toppled across the slashed-open ruins of the Fortress, one of the megapyramid atmosphere-generating structures west of the Face and just east of the complex called the City. The shell was in such bad shape little could be gleaned from the wreckage. The thing’s size alone had suggested that it was some sort of enormous starship…obviously one that operated without such primitive embellishments as reaction mass or rocket engines.

“So, what are you saying?” Paul asked him. “That the Ship was really one of the Builders, only two kilometers tall?”

“I’m wondering—and this is all pure speculation at this point—if a few Builders didn’t come to Mars in a single ship…and if they were, indeed, AIs, the size or shape of their body didn’t really matter, did it? But I think there weren’t very many of them, and I think now they might have been fleeing…something.”

“The Hunters,” Teri put in.

“That’s certainly the simplest explanation. Maybe they were even from Alpha Centauri, right next door. Or maybe they were from farther off. Those statues in the Plaza suggest a pretty far-flung association, many civilizations united in an empire or union   or whatever.

“Anyway, they started building a colony or outpost on Mars. Why? Earth was right next door.”