Semper Mars(122)

Time passed. Knox tried not to think about it. Everything was riding on Harper’s Bizarre and her mission. Eventually, though, Elliott called down again from the cockpit. “Okay, guys, we’re coming up on the final leg here. I’ve got the beacon.”

“Outstanding!” Ostrowsky said. “The op’s a go, then!”

“Looks that way,” Knox said. The beacon meant that Garroway and his people were down and now walking toward Cydonia Prime. If there’d been no signal, they would have aborted and landed in the desert.

“I can promise you another few minutes without too many bumps,” Elliott said, “so you’d better get set up and ready now.”

“Roger that,” Knox replied. “Let’s go, Ostie.”

“I’m with you, Gunny.”

Carefully, he clambered down the ladder and into the lobber’s cargo bay. The main cargo doors had been removed, and he could look out through unobstructed emptiness to the desert and mountains drifting along below.

“Five minutes, Gunny,” Elliott called down to him from the cockpit. “You ought to be able to see ’em now.”

Clutching his safety line, which held him secure to a bulkhead support, Knox leaned out of the open hatch just enough to look ahead and down. They were traveling west, toward the sun; southwest, the impossible, smooth-sided shapes of the Cydonian pyramids rose black and mysterious from the crater-pocked sands. He looked straight down and suppressed a start. The Face, in all its astonishing, scale-of-giants weirdness, lay less than three hundred meters below. Eyes, each with the surface area of a football stadium, stared sightlessly up at the tiny NIMF lobber as it traveled overhead. The mouth, lips slightly parted, showed irregular plates that might have been intended to represent teeth, each the size of a city block.

The sight shook Knox. This close, the countless imperfections and irregularities in the rock conspired to make the mountain-sized artifact look more natural, less like something deliberately carved from a mesa by alien engineers. It was almost possible to imagine that the people who still insisted that the Face was of natural origin were right.

Gunnery Sergeant Knox was not a particularly imaginative person, and he didn’t tend to see faces in clouds or rocks or chance combinations of smudges on Rorschach tests or the grime on a linoleum tile floor. It still looked like a face to him, though, in a heavy-browed, blunt-muzzled way, and its stare from this range was distinctly unsettling, making him feel like a dandelion seed slowly drifting over a reclining human’s head.

Nonsense!. Hell, the damned thing probably was a freak of nature. It was strange, yeah, but he’d seen strange things on Earth, too. Not as big, maybe.

What was it about that thing that had made the UN willing, even eager, to go to war? It didn’t make sense….

Knox tore his eyes from the compelling, Sphinx-like skyward gaze of the Cydonian Face, staring instead along the shuttle’s line of flight. Eight miles ahead, he could see the oddly rectilinear walls of the Fortress and the enigmatic, DNA spiral of the fallen Ship. There was no denying the alien origin of that thing, though half a million years had reduced it to little more than a twisted, spiral-staircase skeleton half-buried in sand and rubble.

Elliott was guiding the shuttle along now with the main engines throttled way back, the lobber canted over at very nearly a forty-five-degree angle both to give it forward momentum and to keep it airborne. With the cargo-hold door open, Knox could step out onto what the NASA people called its “front porch,” a term that had come down from a similar platform built out from the hatch in the front of the lunar landing modules of seventy years ago. Carefully, he began clipping a set of web-belt harnesses to his armor, anchoring himself to the structure just outside of the hatch. The west escarpment of the Face fell away abruptly as he worked, giving him an uninhibited view straight down to the desert floor, seven hundred meters below.

“Okay, Captain,” he said. “I’m in position and ready for the run.”

“Roger that. Three minutes now.”

They were closer to the enigmatic spiral-shape of the Ship, now, where it lay half-buried in the ruin of the incomplete or blast-damaged pyramid that the scientists called the Fortress. Cydonia Prime, their objective, rested on a clear sweep of desert half a mile south of the Fortress. It looked out of place amid so many titanic monuments made ancient and smooth by windblown sand and the passing millennia, and nearly lost by the sheer, vast size of its surroundings.

“You ready for me out there?” Ostrowsky called over the intercom channel. “Or are you sight-seeing?”