The circular gateway chamber looked crude compared to its modern equivalents, its surfaces of raw concrete and metal more suited to handling cargo rather than people. But then Wilson suspected the people who passed through here were regarded as less than cargo anyway. A Class 5-BH transRover stood on the floor, a simple open jeep used for driving around on airless worlds, with big low-pressure wheels. Several equipment cases had been loaded on the rear rack. The gateway itself was a blank circle, three meters in diameter, projecting slightly from the concave wall. A force field shimmered over it, turning the air to a slightly grainy smoke layer.
Daniel Alster gave them a tight smile. “Good luck,” he said as he left.
Wilson looked up the wall opposite the gateway to the broad window fronting the operations center. A couple of technicians were lounging on the other side of it, regarding the travelers with a disinterested glance as they joked between themselves.
“Stand by,” the gateway controller told them. “We’re opening the wormhole now.”
A pale light began to shine through the force field. Wilson turned to face it, seeing faint shadows growing across the floor behind all of the team. The light was deepening, becoming amber, then heading down toward ginger. His heart began to pick up as the color flipped all sorts of switches in his brain. Why the hell am I putting myself through this? He hadn’t realized just how much Mars had been haunting him down the centuries.
The wormhole opened. After a break of over three centuries, Wilson was once again looking out across Arabia Terra.
“Clear to proceed,” the gateway controller said.
Wilson drew a breath, staring at the stone-littered landscape. Thin wisps of ginger dust were scurrying through the ultra-thin atmosphere.
“You want to go first?” Nigel asked.
How envious he’d been of Commander Dylan Lewis all those centuries ago, the first man to set foot on another planet. Except he wasn’t; Nigel had been there waiting. Some strange atmospheric phenomena carried Ozzie’s laugh down the ages to reverberate around the chamber. “Oh, man, don’t do that, you’re going to so piss them off.”
“Sure,” Wilson said briskly. He walked through the force field.
Martian soil under his feet. Pink-tinged atmosphere banding the horizon, fading to jet-black directly overhead. A million pockmarked, jagged rocks scattered about, with rusty dust in every crevice. He scanned around, placing himself against the geography and features he could never forget. Off to his left was the rim of giant Schiaparelli, which should mean…There, just off north. Two mounds of red soil smothering the lower third of the cargo landers. Their white titanium fuselages had been scoured by the storms of three centuries, blasting away all markings and color. Now the exposed sections were tarnished curves of dark metal, the originally sharp edges of the parachute release mechanisms abraded down to warty clusters. Holes had opened up in several places, revealing the skeleton of internal struts caging black cavities.
So if the landers were there, then…He turned slowly to see the Eagle II. Sometime down the years the undercarriage had collapsed, lowering the spaceplane’s belly to the ground. The sands of Mars had claimed the craft, creating a smooth triangular dune of soil whose upper fingers of coppery grit gripped the top of the spaceplane’s fuselage. All that was left of the tailfin was a stumpy blade of bleached and brittle composite, half its original height.
“Damnit,” Wilson muttered. There was moisture in his eyes.
YOU OKAY? Anna sent in text.
SURE. JUST GIVE ME A MOMENT. He walked a little way across the icy landscape, allowing the others to come through the wormhole. Tarlo drove the transRover out, bouncing across the rough ground.
“Whoa, this low gravity really screws up maneuverability,” Tarlo exclaimed. “And these rocks don’t help. I’ve never seen so much rock lying around in one place. Was there some kind of massive meteor shower or something? How did you drive when you were here, sir?”
“We never did,” Wilson said. They’d brought three mobile laboratories with them, the best that twenty-first-century technology and money could build. They were still inside the cargo landers; his mind could see them like dead metal fetuses, every moving part cold-welded together, their bodywork flaking away in the terrible hostile atmosphere. “We just went straight home again.”
“You could have stayed and explored,” Nigel said. He didn’t sound very contrite.
“Yeah, we could have.” Wilson was trying to work out angles against the landscape and its poignant relics. He walked over toward the Eagle II. Its dimensions were scripted perfectly in his mind, allowing him to draw its shape through the raggedy mound of soil. The profile dynamic wings had been fully retracted for the landing, shrinking back down to a squat delta; there was the smooth curvature they followed to merge with the fuselage. Both narrow sections of the windshield were buried; he was glad of that, the equivalent of closing the lids on a dead man’s eyes. He didn’t want to see inside again.
He bent down slowly, and began scraping at the fine sand. Little swirls of it puffed up as his gauntlets raked around.
“We’ve acquired the Reynolds beacon, sir,” Commander Hogan said.
“Three kilometers away, bearing forty-seven degrees.”
“Well done,” Nigel said. “You guys scoot over there and get us some answers from the science equipment, huh?”
“Yessir.”
Wilson thought he might have got the position slightly wrong. After all, the Eagle II could have shifted around, twisting as its undercarriage struts collapsed. He saw the transRover start to rock and jolt its way across the rucked sands, all six navy personnel clinging to the frame.
“What are you looking for?” Anna asked.
“Not sure.” He moved a few paces and bent down again. “Okay. The flag, actually. I know we got the damn thing up. Must have been blown over.”
She put her hands on her hips, and turned a full circle. “Wilson, it could be anywhere out there. The storms here are really ferocious. They can last for weeks.”
“Months, actually, and they cover most of the planet.” He gave up grubbing through the dirt. “I’m sure I remember using a power drill to screw the pole legs in. We were supposed to secure it.”
Nigel had walked up the slope of the sand piled against the Eagle II’s fuselage. His hand touched the remnants of the tailfin. “This ain’t right, you know. She deserves better than this. We should arrange to take her home. I’ll bet the California Technological Heritage Museum would love to have her. They’d probably pay for the restoration.”
“No,” Wilson said automatically. “She’s broken. She’s a part of this planet’s history now. She belongs here.”
“She’s not so badly broken.” Nigel stroked the top of the fuselage. “They built well back then.”
“It was her heart you broke.”
“Goddamn! I knew it, man, I fucking knew it. You are still pissed at me.”
“No I’m not. We were both part of history that day, you and I. My side lost, but then we were always going to. Wormhole technology was inevitable. If you hadn’t done it, someone else would.”
“Yeah? You have no idea how tough that math was to crack, nor following up by translating it into hardware. Nobody but Ozzie could have done it. I know his wacko rep, but he’s a genius, a true one, a fucking supernova compared to Newton, Einstein, and Hawking.”
“If it can be done, it will be done. Don’t try and personalize this. We represent events, that’s all.”
“Oh, brilliant, I’m nothing but a figurehead. Well, excuse me.”
“Will you two monster egos pack this in, please,” Anna said. “Wilson, he’s right, you can’t let these old ships decay any further. They are history, just like you said, and a very important part of history.”
“Sorry,” Wilson mumbled. “It’s just…I got wrong-footed coming back here. You don’t erase half the stuff you think you have at rejuvenation.”
“Ain’t that a fact,” Nigel said. “Come on, let’s go find a souvenir that isn’t a lump of rock. There’s got to be something lying around here.”
“I never even got a lump of rock last time,” Wilson said.
“You didn’t?”
“No. We didn’t run our science program. I think Lewis picked up his first sample, but NASA kept that once we got home.”
“Damn! You know, I don’t remember picking up any rock, either.”
“Christ,” Anna said. She bent down and picked up a couple of twisted pebbles, and handed one to each man. “You two are bloody useless.”
***
Roderick Deakins strolled down Briggins as casually as anyone could, walking around the Olika district at two A.M. He was grateful there hadn’t been a patrol car driving past, though that was only a matter of time. Olika was where a lot of rich types lived. They had deep connections in Darklake’s City Hall. The police maintained a good presence here, not like the Tulosa district where Roderick lived. You rarely saw a cop there after dark, and then never singularly.
“Is this it?” Marlon Simmonds asked.
Roderick had worked with Marlon many times down the years. Nothing too serious, you couldn’t call them partners, but they’d seen their fair share of juvenile street rip-offs, followed by a string of break-ins when they’d run with the Usaros back in ’69. After that they’d done time together for a Marina Mall warehouse heist that had gone seriously wrong in ’73. When they were paroled they’d drifted into helping out Lo Kin, a small-time boss who ran a protection racket on Tulosa’s westside, where they’d been stuck ever since. All that history and the trust that went with it made them a perfect pair for this job.
“What does the fucking number read?” Roderick hissed back.
“Eighteen hundred,” Marlon said, glancing at the brass numbers screwed into the drycoral arch above the gate. That was the thing about Marlon: nothing much seemed to bother him. His biochemically boosted body weighed at least twice as much as Roderick, and moved along with the inevitable inertia of a twenty-ton truck. His general attitude was a reflection of his physical presence, allowing him to cruise through life knowing there was very little that would get in his way.
“Then that’s it, isn’t it?” Roderick said. The man who was an associate of Lo Kin, the one they were doing this for, had been very specific. The house number, the name of the man they were going to talk to, the short time in which they had to perform the job.
“Okay, man.” Marlon took a harmonic blade from his jacket pocket, and sliced through the wrought iron around the lock. The gate swung open with the tiniest of squeaks from the hinges. Roderick waited a moment to see if any alarms were triggered. But there was no sound. When he waved his left palm around the gate, his e-butler said it couldn’t detect any electronic activity. Roderick grinned to himself. It had cost a lot to get the OCtattoo sensor on his palm, but every time like this he knew it was worth it.
It was dark in the bungalow’s garden. The tall drycoral wall blocked most of the illumination from the streetlights outside, while the low building at the center remained unlit. Roderick switched his retinal insert to infrared. It produced a simple pink and gray image that was oddly flat. That lack of depth always slowed him
