The Complete Heritage Trilogy: Semper Mars, Luna Marine, Europa Strike. Ian Douglas

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      “It’s about damned time,” Alexander grumbled. “Let’s get this shot done, before something else happens.”

      “No more lobbers are scheduled for arrival today, anyway,” Craig Kettering said. “We should be cool there.”

      Each time a shuttle landed or took off from Cydonia, the shock caused enough of a seismic tremor in the ground to thoroughly screw any seismic readings being taken in the area for kilometers around. The Sonic Imaging Tomography display could pick up people walking within fifty meters, and when a lobber-configured shuttle lifted off, even two kilometers away, the ground could be ringing for minutes afterward. With all of the shuttling back and forth between Candor and Cydonia lately, especially with all of the UN troops coming north, it had been difficult to get solid periods of quiet for the multiple readings they needed.

      “Devora?” Alexander asked. “You have a green on all charges?”

      “Affirmative.”

      “Field team,” he said. “Check in.”

      “All set, Dr. Alexander,” Ed Pohl said.

      “Clear,” Louis Vandemeer added.

      “Ready,” Kettering said.

      “And ready,” Druzhininova said. “The console is armed and ready to fire.”

      Alexander gave a last visual check of the area. All four of the others were well clear of the blast site, a two-hundred-meter-wide region abutting the west side of the Fortress, just below the alien sprawl of the age-corroded Ship.

      “Okay. C-Prime, C-Prime, this is Field One, ready to punch it.”

      “Field One, Cydonia Prime,” replied the voice of Dr. Jason Graves. “We have you on-line, charge twenty-nine, site twelve. You may proceed.”

      Alexander took a final look to left, right, and behind, making certain that the work area was clear. “Okay,” he said, turning to Druzhininova. “Let ’er rip!”

      The Russian archeologist touched a winking green light on the field data display. There was a sharp, metallic clack, and the red-ocher ground in three distinct areas below the Fortress wall heaved upward, creating brief, miniature geysers of swirling red sand.

      Alexander shook his head inside his helmet, grinning ruefully. Even after two weeks of this, he still wasn’t used to a bang that was nothing at all like a proper bang. The three explosive charges they’d just detonated would have made an unholy racket had they set them off on Earth. On Mars, however, with an atmosphere something like one six-thousandth as thick as the air on Earth, sound traveled poorly, and only the deeper tones were preserved. The triple explosion had sounded like a clatter of garbage-can lids.

      Still, it wasn’t how the sound carried in air that mattered, but how it was transmitted through the cold, dense-packed Martian regolith and the permafrost beneath. “Let’s have a look,” he told Kettering.

      “Nothing yet,” Druzhininova said, looking at the screen.

      Alexander checked the time function on his suit’s HUD. He was tired. Maybe one more run, God and incoming lobbers willing, and then he’d be ready to call it a day…no, a sol, he reminded himself. It was 1635 hours, MMT, and sunset at Cydonia this time of year came at about 2000 hours.

      Craig Kettering looked up from the SIT panel. “So, David,” he said over the helmet radio. “What is it with you and that Joubert bi—”

      Alexander made a slashing motion with his gloved hand. Although Kettering was using a suit-to-suit comm channel, Cydonia Prime’s microwave mast was visible from here, and only about a mile away. It was more than possible that people at Cydonia Prime were listening in—or that the conversations of people in the field were being recorded for later analysis and discussion.

      “…uh…babe,” Kettering said, recovering. “She is a babe, you know….”

      “We have a good, professional working relationship,” Alexander replied, carefully neutral.

      To his credit, Kettering didn’t laugh out loud, or, if he did, he’d cut his helmet mike in time. It was no secret that he and Joubert hadn’t been speaking to one another since their arrival on Mars, just as it apparently was no secret that they’d been romantically involved aboard the Polyakov.

      At first, Alexander had thought she’d been upset by the sudden arrival of the Marines in Polyakov’s storm cellar, but since they’d reached Mars, he’d become convinced that it was something more.

      She’d been angry, of course, when Alexander and the Marines had landed directly at Cydonia. She’d come to Cydonia on the next scheduled lobber flight, along with the first contingent of UN troops returning from their brief redeployment to the equator. When she arrived, she’d come in like a whirlwind, quoting regulations, demanding daily reports, and even suggesting that her position as senior UN field director on this expedition meant that the US and Russian scientists had to answer to her. Her attitude could change with lightning suddenness, from sweet to imperiously demanding.

      He was beginning to suspect that their liaison during the long trip out had been one of two things. Either she’d been bored and found him distracting, or, worse, she was trying to use their sexual relationship to get concessions from him. When he refused to grant those concessions, their personal relationship had dwindled away as though it had never been. He wondered if he’d ever really known her.

      Alexander’s own directives were clear: treat the UN people with courtesy…but remember that this was an American operation, with UN people along as observers. Kenneth Morrow, the SECTECH himself, had talked to Alexander at length before he’d departed for Florida and the shuttle ride to orbit. Although the First Martian Archeological Survey was a civilian operation, it was funded completely by the government and came under the direct management and oversight of both the US Congress and the new Department of Technology. In other words, the UN scientists hitching a ride on the US-Russian cyclers could watch and they could conduct operations of their own—they’d purchased their seats, in effect, from NASA—but they didn’t set policy and they didn’t give the orders. Alexander was the senior archaeologist on the American team and as such answered only to Dr. Jason Graves, mission chief at Cydonia, and to Mission Control, back on Earth.

      None of this had prevented Mireille Joubert from becoming a colossal pain in the ass, however. For over a week, now as Alexander had continued his survey, she’d demanded daily reports, demanded access to the survey team’s notes, planning meetings, and communications, even listened in on their conversations.

      Politics….

      David Alexander liked politics less than he liked the military…especially when it collided with archeology. Every time you tried crossing science with politics, you got trouble. As an archeologist, Alexander was preoccupied with facts. Unfortunately, facts tended to be inconvenient to politicians, and the two didn’t play well together.

      He still couldn’t think about his last assignment in Egypt without a shudder.

      Egyptology, once the most carefully reasoned and meticulously researched of sciences, was currently a mess, had been a mess since the turn of the century. For well over a hundred years, archeologists and historians had been confident about the order and the dating of Egyptian history…and in particular the identification of the Giza Complex—three large pyramids, six small ones, СКАЧАТЬ