Luna Marine (10 page)

“Eh? Why didn't you say so!”

“You didn't give us the chance!” Roger replied.

Sarah gave her comrade a sharp look, then smiled at David. “Actually, we do want you to go on a trip for us. A rather long trip. But I think you'll agree that it qualifies as fieldwork. And…I can promise you, no bad chicken dinners!”

“Where do you want me to go?”

“To the Moon, Dr. Alexander. We need you to go to the Moon as quickly as we can get you there.”

“The…the Moon!”

“We have transport waiting for you to take you to O'Hare. We can have you in orbit in two hours, and by tonight you'll be on your way!”

“That…is quite impossible!”

“You have another appointment?” Roger asked.

He thought about his date with Teri—obviously
that
wouldn't be a valid excuse. Besides, he was intrigued now.

“Why would you want me on the Moon?”

“Dr. Alexander,” Sarah told him, “what we have to say to you now is classified. Classified, do you understand? You are not to discuss it with anyone, including the people working for you in this building.”

“I understand.”

“Several hours ago, US Marines captured a small UN base on the Moon. They were looking for a Professor Marc Billaud. You know him?”

David nodded. “I've met him several times. Last time was at a conference on ET archeology in Athens, before the war. A good man.”

“The UN Space Command had him at the Lunar site. Apparently, he and a team were in the process of doing some extensive archeological excavations.”

David's eyes widened. He felt his heart pound. Excavations? On the Moon? “The Builders?…”

“That's part of what we want you to tell us. Billaud's notes suggest that there was an ET presence on the Moon, a fairly extensive one…but that it occurred during historical times.”

“How recent?”

“He thinks a few thousand years,” Sarah told him. “There are…artifacts.”

“What was he excavating? A building? A city?”

“Actually,” Sarah told him, “the evidence suggests that it was a spaceship of some kind. A ship that crashed on the Lunar surface something like eight or ten thousand years ago. And that is what makes this investigation so vitally important….”

As she talked, David thought about Mars…and the Ship.

The Face on Mars had been carved by someone half a million years ago, someone who'd built a number of cyclopean structures in the area and apparently used humans imported from Earth to help with the construction. There was even evidence that some sort of massive terraforming project had been under way at the time; most surface features had been damaged or destroyed by a savage flood of liquid water. Many of the human bodies found so far showed evidence of having suffocated as their atmosphere—possibly contained in some sort of field or bubble—bled suddenly away. There was also evidence—lots of it—of a battle, an attack that had ripped open milewide pyramids and left the site in ruins. The Face itself was almost unrecognizable as an artifact carved by intel
ligence, though the general form and the neatly carved geometries were still visible beneath the rubble.

One of the more enigmatic sites at Cydonia was the hill known as the Fortress. Once, probably, it had been a pyramidal structure like some of the others in the area, but something more powerful than a thermonuclear bomb had sheared off the top, wrecked the inside, and reduced much of it to rubble. Later, a ship of some kind, a vessel over a kilometer long, had toppled onto the ruins, wracked by internal explosions. The wreckage, exposed to the sand-blasting of half a million years of Martian weather, was so poorly preserved it was impossible to learn much.

But the ruins—and especially the promise of the wrecked ship—had been responsible for the revitalization of the on-again, off-again vagaries of the US space program, and of the Russian Space Agency as well. Whoever had built the Cydonian complex had possessed the secret of traveling among the
stars
; a careful study of the ruins might bring that secret home to Earth.

And more than that. The Builders had been engaged in terraforming on a planetary scale; the ongoing deterioration of Earth's environment, the coastal flooding and rising global temperatures, had been growing slowly but steadily worse for the past fifty years. The secret of planetary climate control might well prove to be more important, at least insofar as Earth's continued habitability was concerned, than the secret of traveling to the stars.

And so the infant science of exoarcheology, and its bastard half brother, exotecharcheology, had been born.

On Mars, the problem had been the sheer scale of things, coupled with how damnably difficult it was to get there in the first place. By using a system of space stations, called cyclers, that alternately touched the orbits of Earth and Mars, it had been possible to get a few hundred people out to the Red Planet over the past decade or so to study the site; the trouble was, it would take thousands of people, working for years, simply to carry out a decent survey of the Martian ruins. It might well be centuries, yet, before Cydonia yielded the last of its long-held secrets.

But if some of those secrets also lay hidden on the
Moon, just three or four days away, instead of the six to nine months required for a cycler passage to Mars…

“We can't tell you everything that's going on right now,” Sarah was saying. “Suffice to say that it has become an issue of national security. We need a trained archeologist's assessment of the wreckage, and we need to have an idea of just what the UN scientists might have learned from it.”

“But why me?”

Roger shrugged. “That should be evident. You've been to Cydonia. You know as much about the Builders, about exotech, as anyone, and more than most. You are probably the field authority on ET artifacts and technologies.”

And
, he thought with a touch of bitterness,
I'm
here,
in your institute, bought and paid for
. The other scientists who'd been to Mars—Kettering, Pohl, Vandemeer, and the others—had returned to their old positions, to promotions, to careers made more secure by their fifteen months on Mars. But David had had no place to go but…here. The Cydonian Research Foundation, a government-sponsored organization, had funded the Exoarcheological Institute to study the finds being uncovered on Mars.

And, perhaps, on the Moon as well.

The problem was that David's reputation as something of a maverick in established archeological circles had made him the ideal candidate for exoarcheologist-in-residence here at the institute.

And it was damned hard to say no to a government-backed request.

“You're also already rated for a pressure suit and pliss,” Sarah told him.

True enough. In fact, he'd already been to the Moon, briefly, as part of his astronautics training in preparation for his flight to Mars. He'd spent three days at Fra Mauro and been bored most of the time, even with a crowded training schedule.

“Can I take anyone along? Dr. Sullivan has been working with me on…”

“I'm sorry, Doctor. Space is limited, and there's no time for training.”

Teri was going to be disappointed. Hell,
he
was disappointed…but the thought of getting into the field again—and on the Moon!—was too much to resist.

Besides, he knew what LEO-Lunar transports were like. There'd have been no privacy, no opportunity to give Teri a chance to join the Three Dolphin Club.

Later, after his visitors had left, David stood at the window looking down at the demonstrators outside, thoughtful. There was someone he needed to talk to just now.

Someone he wasn't supposed to talk to at all….

EU Science Research Vessel
Pierre-Simon Laplace
Co-orbit with Asteroid 2034L
2235 hours GMT

Dr. Jean-Etienne Cheseaux floated alongside the
Laplace
's tiny observation port, slipping his dark glasses into place as sunlight flooded into the compartment. Outside, the sun was just clearing the edge of the Rock as the ship's slow drift brought her clear of the small planetoid's shadow. He still wondered why the Académie des Sciences had insisted that he come here.

Cheseaux was an astronomer; his primary specialization was selenology, the geology of the Moon, but the Academy had asked him to serve as payload specialist aboard the
Laplace
. Not that he was complaining, necessarily—he liked it in space, enjoyed the sensations of free fall and the spectacular purity of the sunlight—but the measurements he was taking of 2034L's mass and spin and precise orbit could have been made by any competent technician. It was, he supposed, an indication of the importance the Academy attached to this mission. The knowledge stirred his professional pride, and his ego; there was talk, he'd heard, of naming this particular rock Cheseaux. Of course, the astronomical society frowned on using the names of living people, but there were precedents.

Asteroid 2034L had been discovered eight years ago, one of the fast-growing number of near-Earth asteroids
whose orbits carried them periodically inside the orbit of Earth. This one was particularly disturbing; as carbonaceous chondrite, like the majority of asteroids, it had an extremely low albedo, rendering its surface as black as the blackest coal. It was also small, less than a hundred meters across.

That combination of orbit, albedo, and small size made 2034L particularly dangerous, a prime target for the Phaeton Project. In Greek mythology, Phaeton was the boy who'd lost control of Apollo's sun-chariot, bringing it too near the Earth and nearly destroying humanity in fire. Since the 1980s, the particular danger Earth-crossing asteroids and comets represented to the Earth had been well understood; the lesson of the dinosaurs, exterminated by the ten-mile body that had smashed into the Yucatán sixty-five million years ago, could not be ignored. By the early 2000s, several skywatch operations were in place, identifying and charting the flying mountains that might someday pose a direct threat to Earth and her inhabitants.

Phaeton, one of the most comprehensive of the sky-watch programs, had been begun in 2029, a collaboration between the European Union, Japan, and the United States. The UN had assumed financial responsibility five years later, the same year in which 2034L had been discovered. The war, of course, had interfered to the extent that neither the United States nor Japan was participating any longer, but the work was vital enough that the EU Space Agency had continued the program, war or no war.

Cheseaux was now confident that this rock, at least, posed no immediate threat to humanity. With precise measurements now complete, he could confidently report that 2034L would pass within a million kilometers of the Earth in another five months. That was twice the distance from Earth to the Moon, a cat's whisker when you looked at the sheer size of the whole solar system, but comfortable enough as a margin of safety. He would need to run his figures through the supercomputer center at the Sorbonne to be sure, but back-of-the-envelope calculations suggested that 2034L would again pass close by the Earth in another
forty-five years. That passage would be a near miss of perhaps one hundred thousand kilometers that would slingshot the body in toward the sun…which in turn would either destroy the asteroid in celestial flame or send it careening out into the thin, cold dark of the outer system.

Either way, this particular Earth-crosser posed no threat.

“Upload complete, Doctor,”
Laplace
's commander, Colonel Denis Armand, announced, drifting alongside of Cheseaux in a head-down position relative to him. “They have asked us to hold our position, however, until another vessel can rendezvous with us.”

“Another craft? What other craft?”

Armand gave a Gallic, inverted shrug, then reached out to brace himself against the bulkhead before he started turning. “They didn't say. The war, after all…”

Cheseaux gave a soft grunt of understanding. It was
always
the war. Abject foolishness! The European Union needed to be working with the Americans and the Japanese and even the Russians, now…not fighting them. The Americans had already slammed the door to Mars shut in the UN's face rather decisively; the UN risked losing access to the Moon as well, if they persisted in this insanity. It was time to end this, declare a truce, and find out how best to get all of humankind working on the problems of recovering and learning from the newly discovered alien technology.

Squinting against the sunlight, Cheseaux looked for and found a pair of tiny crescents, one silver, one gray, well beyond the horizon of 2034L and bowed away from the sun. Earth was now less than ten million kilometers away, its attendant moon somewhat farther. Both seemed transcendently delicate, ethereal, and small. The war that had wracked the world for the past two years, the burning political questions of Aztlan independence and control of ancient alien technologies all seemed so completely insignificant from this vantage point. It was true, what they said: Looking back at the Earth from space gave one an entirely new perspective, a new outlook.

Perhaps it was Earth's politicians who should be
shipped up here, the lot of them, and not her scientists and soldiers. Let them work out their differences bathed in heavenly radiance, with the Earth nothing more than a frail, silver sliver in the night.

“Well, I think I'll turn in,” he told the commander. “Let me know if there's a call from Earth.”

“Of course.”

Laplace
was neither large nor luxurious, even as space-craft went. Her hab module and laboratory together were ten meters long and five wide, small enough to have fit easily inside the living and working area of the old Skylab, and she carried twice as many people, three crew and three payload specialists. Cheseaux's cabin was a closet-sized space in the aft of the hab module with thin plastic walls and a sleeping bag attached to the bulkhead. His “desk” pulled out from one of the walls, a plastic board with Velcro surfaces, to which his laptop was attached.