Semper Mars(121)

Alexander, Garroway thought, was a man with a crusade, determined to seek out and publish the truth, no matter what the cost to himself…or to others. That was fine with Garroway, who’d always stood by the principle that the truth was better than a lie. I wonder, though, he thought, what we’ve unleashed back on Earth. The UN was damned sure they wanted Alexander’s discoveries buried, and they must have their reasons.

The hell with it. If this is a fight between suppressing free speech and free scientific inquiry, and shouting the truth to the world, I know which side I’m on.

With a savage jolt, Rocky Road’s pilot increased thrust on the lobber’s engine, slowing their rapid descent toward the desert. Garroway had to straighten up away from the porthole to keep his balance. Outside, red dust exploded upward past the window, sharply cutting the golden sunlight streaming in from the west.

Then there was a bump, and they were down.

“All right, Marines!” Lieutenant King called out. “Hit the beach!”

“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” Sergeant Jacob added. “Haul ass, Marines!”

They swung out into the central corridor, awkwardly grabbing the ladder rungs and clambering down toward the cargo deck. Garroway allowed himself to be caught up in the rush, descending rapidly, threading his way through the cargo bay, then down the ramp and onto the Martian surface.

Garroway trotted onto the sand, his ATAR—freshly drawn from the recaptured stores at Candor—at port arms, and took a wondering look around. He’d thought his weeks in the Valles Marineris had cured him of any awe over something so commonplace as scenery. The Cydonian landscape was, in a way, the opposite of the canyons and rilles on the equator, however. There, you felt hemmed in by four-kilometer vertical walls of red rock; here, the horizon was flat and far, but the various mesas, mountains, and, above all, the black-gray bulk of the D&M Pyramid thrust up into the pink-red sky like giant’s teeth, monuments to human insignificance.

The Marines spread out into a broad, defensive perimeter as soon as they hit the beach. After a moment’s careful check with various sensors, both in their suits and aboard the Rocky Road, Lieutenant King trotted up to Garroway. “The area looks clear, sir. Maybe we caught ’em napping.”

Garroway grinned behind his visor. “Well, if they were, they’re awake now. C-Prime has a pretty decent traffic-control radar system, as I recall. They’ll’ve seen us coming and know exactly where we touched down. Let’s get our people moving.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

“Sergeant Jacob!”

“Sir!”

“Set the beacon.”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

They’d touched down about a kilometer north of the D&M Pyramid. Cydonia Prime was seven kilometers to the north, though Garroway fully expected to be stopped long before they got that far.

That, after all, was a part of the plan. He checked his suit’s clock. 1229 hours.

He hoped Harper’s Bizarre was on sched. If she wasn’t, Bergerac’s prediction about the outcome of this little outing was going to become entirely too accurate.

1657 HOURS GMT

Cydonia Two aboard MSL

Harper’s Bizarre

Over the Face

1412 hours MMT

“You two tucked in okay, back there?” Elliott’s voice said over Knox’s headset.

“Yeah,” Knox replied wryly. He turned and checked the armor-suited form of Staff Sergeant Ostrowsky, lying in the acceleration couch next to his. She grinned and gave him a thumbs-up. “Tucked in is one word for it, I guess. I never figured I’d end up as bombardier on an air strike, though.”

Captain Harper Elliott laughed. “And I never thought I’d be flying close support for a bunch of jarheads. Hang on. This could be a bit bumpy.”

With a shrill roar, the Mars shuttle’s nuclear engines fired, converting methane to white-hot plasma and kicking the ungainly transport into the sky. Knox felt the familiar, smothering weight of high acceleration, a weight that faded away seconds later as Harper’s Bizarre entered her suborbital trajectory. Now they were skimming across the Martian desert at an altitude of about a thousand meters.

They’d left Candor Chasma just behind the Rocky Road, but they’d followed a different flight path, landing thirty minutes later inside a crater in Deuteronilus, some one hundred kilometers east of the Cydonian Complex. There, Captain Elliott had spent the last hour refueling the main reaction mass tanks from strap-on spares, which were discarded once they were empty. This gave Harper’s Bizarre a full fuel load for the final leg of the mission.

They were going to need it. Instead of making a second high-trajectory lob, they were staying closer to the Martian surface, barely clearing some of the higher mountains, and using the shuttle’s main engines to kick them a bit higher from minute to minute, to keep them airborne in a nearly flat trajectory. It took more fuel that way, but it also reduced the chances that Cydonia Prime’s radar would pick them up on the way in.