Ian Douglas - Luna Marine: Book Two of the Heritage Trilogy

L UNA M ARINE

B OOK T WO OF THE H ERITAGE T RILOGY

Ian Douglas

v1.0 (2011.05)

C ONTENTS

Sound did not carry well in near vacuum, but Dr.David

Okay, gorgeous. Lets get you out of those clothes, first.

Marine Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway leaned forward and bounced, easing herself

Sergeant Frank Kaminski stood in line with the other members

A lobber hop on the Moon was nowhere near as

The missile struck the LSCP from the right and from

So, David, the other archeologist said, cuddling close in his

The Moon filled the black sky, half-full from this vantage

So, anyway, Kaminksi said, I was wonderin if we could,

Jack RamseyPrivate Jack Ramsey, US Marine Corpsstood at a rigid

There were no marching crowds today, for a change, no

It is the finding of this court that Sergeant Frank

Okay, ladies, Gunnery Sergeant Knox said, grinning. He was holding

David was whistling as he entered the broad, skylight-illuminated lobby

We have a problem, the tall man said. And an

Well, Dr. Alexander, Carruthers said with a smile. Are you enjoying

The FBI special agent was different, this time, not Carruthers,

General Montgomery Warhurst took his seat next to his boss,

I just cant tell you how good it is to

The met-boys were calling for another day with a high

Jack stood at rigid attention in front of Captain Thomas

The main body of 2034L was considerably smaller than it

When the knock sounded on the door, David very nearly

They called them LAVs, but the M340A1 Armored Personnel Carrier

Communicating with Earth was a real problem for the Rim

On the floor of the crater, the LAV could make

Jack pulled his helmet down until the ring lock engaged,

Jack ducked through the aft airlock hatch and jumped, landing

Damn, Sam. I dont know how were going to pull

Lance Corporal Jack Ramsey, front and center!

P ROLOGUE

8 August 2040

Cave of Wonders, Cydonia, Mars

1445 hours MMT

Sound did not carry well in near vacuum, but Dr. David Alexander felt the slight, ringing vibration of each step through the insulation of his Marsuit boots. Thered been no sound within this chamber in how long? The teams best guess was half a million years.

Halfway across the catwalk, he said, speaking into the needle mike positioned close by his lips. Twenty meters. Over the headset clamped down over his ears, he could hear the unsteady rasp of his own breathing, the hiss-thump of his backpack PLSS. His breath, hot and moist, fogged his helmet visor with each exhalation, a white smear immediately dissolved by the stream of cool air blowing past his face.

Ah, we copy that, Aladdin, a voice crackled in his ears. Youre looking good.

Aladdin. The radio handle was a last-minute joke concocted by Ed Pohl that morning, back at C-Prime. Naming this place the Cave of Wonders had been his idea, after hed seen the first transmissions from the penetrator robot three days ago.

It could as easily have been Ali Baba. The cavern, apparently, required a human presence to operate it, a living open, sesame to switch on power and lights and to open doors. Robots massing one hundred kilos and programmed to radiate at thirty-seven degreeshuman body temperaturehad failed to learn anything about the long-sealed chamber. Alexander, claiming the right as the one whod found the cavern entrance in the first place, had volunteered to go in. He was, he estimated, a hundred meters into the vast and labyrinthine complex hollowed out beneath the Cydonian Face, and perhaps ten meters beneath the surface of the ground outside.

Aladdin, were seeing an increase in heart rate and respiration. Please check your O mix.

Copy. His eyes flicked to the med and PLSS readouts mirrored above and to the right of his visor, checking that all were well in the green. Of course his heart and breathing were faster, the idiots! O-two at six-point-three. Systems nominal. Fifteen meters.

Ah, roger that, Aladdin. Watch the hyperventilation.

That sounded like Doc Penkov. He could imagine all of the Team members back at Cydonia Prime, crowded into the radio shack as they followed his progress. Only Devora Druzhinova and Louis Vandemeer were on the surface today, now waiting just outside the tunnel entrance in case he needed help.

The catwalk of black metal trembled harder with his next few steps, and he stopped, gripping the pencil-thin guardrails to either side until the motion dampened itself out. His heart was pounding hard now, beneath the breastplate of his suit. At last, he was inside the Face

The Face first observed on photographs transmitted to Earth late in the previous century by the Viking orbiters and subsequently confirmed by other robot spacecraft. The Face enigma and lure, drawing scientists like David Alexander to probe its secrets, held in silence now for half a million years. Even now, with all the evidence of the ancient ruins uncovered on the Cydonian plain, with the uncanny discovery of flash-frozen and desiccated corpses of long-dead archaic Homo sapiens on Mars, there were some who yet thought the two-kilometer-long mesas vague and sandblasted resemblance to a human face to be the product of chance and human psychology.

The discovery of the Cave of Wonders had all but put to rest that notion. Sometime between four and five hundred thousand years ago, someone had reshaped a natural landform, giving it the vaguely apelike, vaguely human features that had attracted so much comment when they were first noticed sixty years before. At the same time, theyd hollowed out the Cave in the bedrock beneath the towering mesa, connecting it by a long, descending, and carefully sealed tunnel to the well-hidden entrance on the Faces eastern corner, just below the left end of the harsh-carved canyon slash that formed the Faces mouth.

Once, the Cave had been airtight, accessed through a series of airlocks that still worked at the touch of a gloved, human hand. But even solid rock is porous over geological time. The air within this enormous chamberradar probings had established that it was a spherical cavern half a kilometer acrosshad leaked out long ago. The air pressure inside now stood at a little below ten millibars, the temperature constant at minus fifteen degrees Celsius.

Alexander tried not to look down. The catwalk seemed impossibly frail, a spiders web of black, interlacing threads woven into a deck that felt solid and metallic enough but was hard to see against the deeper black of the two-hundred-meter depths below. Ahead, a pale lighta white-yellow glow a meter across without visible sourceilluminated the end of the catwalk; the only other light in the place came from the worklights mounted on the shoulders of his suit and from the telltales inside his helmet.

Ten meters, he said.

Hold it, Aladdin. Can you pan for us?

Roger. Panning to the right. Carefully, he turned himself in place, allowing the camera mounted on the outside of his helmet to relay the view across a full three-sixty. He could see nothing but black; the cavern swallowed his worklights in impenetrable darkness, but the camera would be picking up frequencies invisible to his eye. Perhaps they were enjoying a better view of things than he, back at the Team HQ.

Alexander thought of Howard Carter. On November 26, 1922, after a long dig and repeated disappointments, the British archeologist had chiseled a narrow hole through a stone door separating him from another world, in a long-sealed tomb in Egypts Valley of the Kings. Air thirty centuries old, hot and stale, had gusted from the opening; a candle thrust through the hole flickered but remained lit, proving the air breathable.