“Whaddya say, Dave?” Kettering said. Alexander could hear the grin in his voice as he reached for one of the shovels resting in an equipment rack on the Mars cat. “What could it hurt? At least we can have a look.”
Proper procedure called for flagging all new surface discoveries and bringing them up for review in the group research meeting held each morning. But as Kettering said…what could it hurt?
He hesitated a moment longer, then grabbed another shovel for himself. “Let’s go check it out.”
“Field Team, this is C-Prime,” a woman’s voice said in his helmet phones. “David? What are you doing?” It sounded like Mireille.
“Just checking something, C-Prime,” he said. “Wait one.”
“May I remind you that you are not to begin excavations until the site has been properly surveyed and mapped.”
“Yes, you may. We just want to check something here.”
Cydonia Prime was two kilometers distant. There was absolutely nothing they could do to stop the team from an act of what was certainly a breach of proper procedure…an act that Alexander knew he simply could not resist.
The hummock was perhaps a meter tall and four or five meters on a side, a mound of crusty soil against the Fortress wall that looked perfectly natural. Only the subsurface sonogram proved that a passageway ended right…here.
Gently, he scraped at the dirt with the blade of his shovel. The surface resisted at first, then crumbled away in great, frozen clots of earth, revealing…
…a hole. A hole leading down into blackness beneath the Fortress.
“Christ!” Pohl said, standing just behind Kettering and Druzhininova. “It’s open!”
“Field Team, this is CP! What’s open? What’s happening? Answer!”
Gently, Alexander touched his gloved finger to his visor, indicating silence, then tapped the side of his helmet. Keep down the chatter. They’re listening. He didn’t want to debate each move with the UN archeologists.
It took only a few moments to clear away the opening. Steps were visible. Apparently, some gray-colored, extremely hard material had been used to construct the walls of the structure, and the floor had been cast with steps. The tunnel was circular and about two meters across.
A burning curiosity drove Alexander onward. He’d expected a door, a sealed entrance, an airlock hatch. Apparently, the tunnel mouth had been open once, covered over with…with mud, perhaps? Yes, almost certainly. The mud had frozen, then dried, forming a crusty, easily broken covering of regolith and packed sand.
“Field Team One! Field Team One! Respond, please!”
Alexander reached up and switched on his helmet light, the white beam showing plainly in the dust still floating in the thin air of the descending tunnel. Carefully, testing each step, he started down the stairs.
According to the sonogram, this descending tunnel should only extend down for about seven or eight meters, before entering a larger chamber of some sort. From there the main passageway ran east five meters beneath the surface.
The stairs were barely visible. The mud or whatever it was that had covered over the surface structure evidently had spilled down the stairway without blocking it completely. He had to bend nearly double, though, to get through to the bottom. Kettering and the others followed closely behind.
Carter must have felt this way at the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb. For the first time in how many millennia, a living being stood in this vault beneath the surface of Mars. He stood at the foot of the stairs, turning slowly, playing his helmet lamp across walls caked with the dust of uncounted ages. There was nothing distinctive about the architecture, no wall carvings, no decorations. The place was stark and utilitarian. He smiled. It might have been the interior of a military base, painted a bland conformist gray.
And then he saw the bodies.
There were four of them, and they all were huddled against a door to what Alexander knew was the southern passageway, the one leading to the nearby pyramid. The startling thing about them was that they looked human…a totally unexpected development.
“My God,” Kettering said, awed. “Humans!…”
“They can’t be,” Vandemeer said. “Everything we’ve found indicates that the Ancients were nonhuman.”
Alexander knelt carefully beside one of the bodies. It was still a body and not a skeleton, as he might have expected. The face was iron gray and hardened, the lips pulled back from clenched teeth in a death’s-head rictus. The hair, long and braided, was the same color, matted with dust. He was wearing something that might have been a uniform, or worker’s garb…without a proper context there was no way to tell. The device on one shoulder appeared to be a mission patch of some sort, though the colors were so faded it was impossible to make out what it might have represented.