Humankind was not alone in the universe.
Those discoveries had spurred a long-awaited renaissance in space exploration. The first manned landing on Mars, a joint US-Russian venture, had taken place in 2019 at Candor Chasma; it wasn’t until the second landing five years later that Geoffrey Cox, Anatol Kryukov, and Roberta Anders had stood at last in the shadow of that alien-carved enigma and wondered….
Bizarre was lower now and starting to swing slightly in a clockwise turn. The Face drifted off toward the left; the “City” and the pyramids came into view to the right.
Alexander’s heart was beating faster. There were mysteries enough here to keep ten thousand archeologists busy for millennia, mysteries still unopened, untapped, unknown. The beings who’d built this place were known variously as the Ancients or the Builders…but who they’d been, where they’d come from, what they’d looked like, all was still a frustrating puzzle. All that could be said with certainty was that they’d wielded powers that seemed like magic to the humans who’d investigated the ruins…and that they’d not been human.
When the Face was being built, humankind was in the process of evolving from Homo erectus into a primitive form of Homo sapiens. The knowledge of any power source more potent than fire was still half a million years in the future.
The “City”—its true purpose was yet unknown—consisted of four pyramids each the size of the Great Pyramid of Giza arranged in a perfect diamond pattern, surrounded by five titanic, mile-wide pyramids apparently carved from basaltic mountains. Six miles to the southeast, another pyramid, known as the D&M Pyramid after the initials of its twentieth-century discoverers, rose a full mile into the sky, almost two miles across, five-sided, buttressed…and apparently shattered on its eastern face by what might have been a meteorite impact…but which many now thought had been hostile action.
He glanced at Fulbert, squeezed into the seat to his left, and smiled. Hostile action? Human Marines would be no match for whatever had smashed a mile-high pyramid carved from solid rock. Their assault rifles seemed pathetically toylike in the face of a weapon like that.
Of course, the Marines weren’t here to fight aliens….
“All right, Marines!” Lloyd’s voice snapped. “Stand by for grounding! Helmet visors down and locked! Weapons ready!”
A clatter of snaps and clicks sounded through the passenger compartment, as the Marines locked their visors down and worked the actions on their rifles. If someone started shooting from the surface, the shuttle’s hull might be breached and pressure lost, but the Marines might still survive the landing. Briefly, Alexander wondered what might be happening at the Cydonia base. Would the UN be stupid enough to try shooting them down? It seemed ridiculous.
Even so, he was glad he was wearing a pressure suit, just in case. Involuntarily, he glanced up at the overhead compartment where his emergency helmet was stored.
They continued their descent. Alexander could see nothing of the Ancients’ complex now. Nearby mountaintops and mesas were rising swiftly, and the ground below was taking on a rocky, pocked-looking texture. His seat kicked him hard from below as the Bizarre’s main engines switched on. For several minutes more, he was aware only of the pounding of those nuclear thermal rockets as the MSL lowered itself toward the Martian surface. Dust, brick red except where the touch of low-slanting sunlight kissed it golden, swirled up past the window. There was the slightest of jars…
…and then the engine thunder was dwindling away.
“Okay, jarheads,” Captain Elliott, the MSL’s skipper, announced happily, “welcome to Mars!”
Throughout the compartment, armored Marines unbuckled harnesses and struggled to their feet. A ladder set into what on an airliner would have been the floor was now a series of steps going down the wall to the cargo lock below, and the Marines were swinging out of their seats and clambering down the ladder in surprisingly good order. Alexander stayed where he was, safely out of the way. He imagined that Lloyd must be shouting orders at them or counting them off by the numbers, but the Marines were all sealed up and their conversations restricted to their suit radios.
In seconds, the last of them had vanished down the ladder into the cargo hold and the hatch sealed shut with a bang. Alexander turned to try to see out the port, but little was visible except for dust, sand, and rock beneath an eerie pink sky. He could hear the throb of compressors as the cargo hold’s atmosphere was tanked for later use and the compartment brought down to the near vacuum of the Martian surface. If somebody wanted to attack them, this would be a hell of a good time….