The Long Mars

The ground, as she’d glimpsed just before the landing, was coated with life, most of it static: purple-green bacterial slime, and things like sponges, things like sprawled trees, things like banks of coral. The glider, on landing, had cut parallel tracks through all this, tracks that glistened, moist. The air was comparatively thick, the place was comparatively warm – this was indeed as welcoming an environment as she’d found on any Mars so far. And it surely had to be fed by energy supplied by mineral seeps from the deeper ground, moisture perhaps leaking from some aquifer; there could be no meaningful input of sunlight down here – and no rain, on a typically arid Mars. Unless the pit had some kind of microclimate of its own, she thought, with captive clouds and rainstorms all contained within its walls.

Walking away from the glider towards the elevator cable, she turned her head from side to side, sweeping her helmet flashlight. Aside from the cable itself, and the basic architecture of the pit, there was no sign of structure, of sentience—

Something moved, cutting across her beam from one pool of shadow to another. She whirled, alarmed.

It was a crustacean, she saw, flat to the ground like those she’d seen at some of their early stops, its chitinous armour gleaming with colours that must be, normally, entirely invisible. Indeed it had no eyes, she saw, none of the eye stalks she’d noticed on those surface creatures.

‘You poor thing,’ she said. ‘You really have been down here a long time, haven’t you? Long enough not just for your culture to have fallen apart, but for you to have evolved out your sight . . .’

The creature seemed to listen. Then it scuttled back into the dark.

Keeping a wider lookout Sally walked on, heading for the cable. Even from here she could see that there was no obvious root station, no structure; the cable just seemed to sink into the deep rock, which was covered by a tide of dark-adapted life . . . But, she saw, the cable itself was scuffed, frayed, only a few yards above the ground level.

‘Hey, Dad.’

‘Hmm?’ As ever, Willis sounded distracted, not quite paying attention to her.

‘Bad news is the root node is buried somehow. I suppose if the builders had the power to melt out this pit, they could have just sunk the node in molten rock . . . Good news is the cable is frayed here. Like something clipped it. We might be able to get your samples after all.’

‘Uh huh. And I think I’ve found what did the clipping. Come see.’

She turned, sweeping the glow of her helmet light. She saw Willis in his suit, standing straight, his back to her. He was holding something, in the shadows. And beyond him, nearer the pit wall, she saw a gleam of metal.

It was a spacecraft. A stubby nose and part of a wing poked out of the heavy clay, badly damaged. And she saw scrapings, where Willis had cleared dirt from around a hatchway.

‘What the hell?’

‘Recent,’ he said. ‘Comparatively. Given that the ship hasn’t yet eroded to dust. Maybe they came from some other world – the Earth of this universe, even. Whatever, they must have tried to land down here—’

‘They were even worse pilots than you.’

‘They actually clipped the cable. What if they’d cut it entirely? We could have lost everything.’

She walked forward for a closer look. The ship had obviously come down hard, and was ripped open, but it must have looked weird enough beforehand. There were padded things with grooves in them that could have been seats. She glimpsed what looked like bones, gleaming beneath rotted fabric.

And Willis was holding a skull; it was crested, arrow-shaped and two or three times bigger than a human head.

Again something moving overhead caught Sally’s eye. She tipped her head, angling her flashlight, trying to find it again. Something pale, flapping.

‘The ship doesn’t concern us,’ Willis said. ‘Leave it for the expeditions from the universities. We’ll take images, a few samples. Bits of bone. Maybe this skull. Then we’ll get our chunk of cable material and get out of here . . .’

The thing that was falling from above came closer now, drifting slowly in the thickening air, the low gravity, flapping gently, like a damaged bird. As it settled to the life-crowded ground, not far from Sally, she saw that it was a ceramic panel fixed to aluminium struts, painted with the corner of a Stars and Stripes, clearly visible.

It was a piece of Woden.

39

THOR BURST OUT of the hole in the Martian ground and into the light of midday.

Mars, more than half as far again as Earth was from the sun, had always struck Sally as a murky kind of world, swathed in twilight colours. After emerging from the pit, though, it seemed dazzlingly bright, the opened-out landscape huge, and it took her a few seconds to get her bearings.

Then she saw chunks of wrecked glider scattered all around the rim of the pit, bone-white fragments chopped and chewed as if by some huge jaw.

As soon as he had gained some altitude from the thermal uplift that he got from the pit, Willis immediately turned the glider’s nose westward, towards their overnight camp. He dipped low for speed; the glider whipped across the rock-strewn ground. There were tracks, Sally saw, like ski marks, cutting across the thin lines of Neil Armstrong spacesuit-boot footprints the crew had made yesterday between their camp and the pit rim.

Then she was distracted by something moving, out in the distance. It raced over the rocky ground, drawn by a mud-brown sail, riding on some kind of ivory-white ru

Back at what was left of the camp, they circled over the wreckage. The glider was so comprehensively trashed that Sally could barely make out its narrow-winged cruciform layout. Their bubble-dome shelters were still standing, amid scattered bundles of gear, food, water, blankets, clothing, bits of comms and science gear.

And, in the camp, there was Frank Wood, she saw to her relief, standing and waving at them, apparently uninjured, his pressure suit intact.

Sally called down, ‘Frank? You OK?’

‘See for yourself.’

Willis called, ‘I’m putting her down.’

Frank turned, sca

‘Noted.’ Willis dipped the nose and brought the glider down in a hasty, bumpy landing.

Sally immediately unbuckled and opened the canopy. ‘In fact, Dad, why don’t you stay on board? Stay ready to take her up and out of the way of danger.’

Again Willis hesitated, thinking it over. ‘That makes sense.’

Sally strode over towards Frank, who called back, ‘Now do you see why I insisted on fall-backs?’

‘Not the right moment for a lecture, Frank,’ Sally snapped.

‘So how was the pit?’

‘Nor for a travelogue. Frank, I get the feeling we haven’t got a lot of time here.’

‘You’re right.’ He glanced over at the dust plume again. ‘I was looking east – the way you two had gone. He came in out of nowhere, from the west. He just drove his sand-yacht straight into the glider, severed a wing in the first pass. I was near the bubble domes. I grabbed a strut from the wreck – nearest I had to a weapon – I stood by the bubbles and the rest of the gear while he tore into the glider again. Well, he smashed up the bird, and then he took chunks of it off to the pit. I saw him throwing the gear in.

He’s smart, you know; he’s modified the survival bags to give him self a lot of flexibility.’

‘He?’ Willis called. ‘Who the hell is this?’