Semper Mars(120)
“I disagree,” Kettering said. “Mireille disagrees.”
“How long have you two—”
“That’s none of your damned business!”
“Sorry. But I understand. She can be…persuasive in her arguments.” He shrugged. “Excuse me, Craig. As I said, I’ve already published on Usenet. I’ve been asked to follow up with a piece for Archeology International.”
“And are you willing to accept the deaths the premature release of this information will most certainly cause?”
Alexander raised his eyebrows. “Deaths?”
“The bloodiest wars of history, the most savage butcheries and massacres, the worst bloodshed have always been wrapped up with religious differences, one way or another. We are looking at a century or more of religious warfare, Dr. Alexander. Religious warfare that will make the Hundred Years’ War and Ireland and the Jewish pogroms all look like Sunday teas. And you are contributing to the bloodshed by giving these fanatics and crackpots the ammunition they need. It’ll all be on your head!”
“The bloodiest wars,” Alexander replied quietly, “are the ones brought on by ignorance, Dr. Kettering. That is the enemy we should be fighting. And I’m damned if I’m going to be guilty of aiding and abetting that enemy.”
Angry, he turned and strode off toward the comm shack.
TUESDAY, 19 JUNE: 1500 HOURS GMT
Cydonia One aboard MSL
Rocky Road
South of Cydonia Prime
Sol 5658: 1215 hours MMT
Garroway caught hold of an overhead grabstrap and leaned across the seated, armored forms of Sergeants Jacob and Caswell so that he could see out the tiny porthole in the ship’s bulkhead. The shuttle Rocky Road, piloted by a former NASA astronaut named Susan Christie, had been put into its lobber configuration the night before, then launched in a high-trajectory suborbital jump that was bringing the bulk of the MMEF down on the Cydonian plain just a few miles south of the archeological base there. They’d been in free fall for nearly ten minutes, and only a few moments ago Christie had cut in the main engines to gentle them in toward their landing site. There was very little sound, nothing much at all save a far-off whisper from the engines. They were making the suborbital hop “hollow,” meaning depressurized. It was easier to have everyone suited up and ready to bounce from the moment they touched down. Besides, if the bad guys were waiting for them with a surface-to-air missile, or even a decent heavy machine gun…
They were descending fast and passing now, he saw, their primary navigational checkpoint, the imposing bulk of the D&M Pyramid.
From this vantage point, the thing was enormous…a titanic structure that dwarfed the tiny lobber to an in-significant mote. It was a mountain, just over three kilometers across from north to south, two from east to west, and reaching nearly a kilometer into the sky. It wasn’t a classical pyramid in shape, of course, since it was five-sided instead of four. The term pyramid had stuck, however, because of the markedly smooth and regular sides. Even though it had almost certainly started out as a mountain, the thing had an uncannily artificial feel to it, a precision of orientation and regularity that suggested it had been reshaped by intelligence, just as the far more famous Face twelve kilometers to the northeast had started off as a mesa but been reshaped by means now unknown. Desert winds can carve natural pyramids, called vents, but those tended to have three sides only, with the sharpest angle facing into the wind; the D&M Pyramid had five sides, with gigantic buttresses at each corner. The surface was eroded so far that it was impossible to tell what it had looked like originally, but the unmistakable hand of intelligence still showed in the design and in its looming, brooding presence.
Most telling of all, though, from Garroway’s point of view, were the signs that the D&M Pyramid had been deliberately destroyed. Almost directly below the shuttle, a few hundred meters from the pyramid’s eastern face, a tunnel plunged into the depths of the Martian surface, a crater…but not a natural one. Something had struck the surface there millennia ago, tunneling deeper into the ground than a typical meteor, then detonating far below the surface. Part of the eastern face of the pyramid had bulged slightly, and a great deal of debris had cascaded down those unnaturally smooth sides.
Garroway looked up and spotted Alexander in his civilian EVA suit, pressed up against another porthole nearby. The archeologist had volunteered to serve as guide in unfamiliar terrain, and Garroway was happy to have the man along. He’d talked some with the scientist about the evidence indicating that the Monument Builders had been attacked. Archeological teams had made initial surveys of the D&M area, but outside of confirming that the structure appeared to have been destroyed by an interior explosion—and that the tunnel-crater was now blocked with fused debris—little was known either of the structure’s original purpose or of who destroyed it, and why.