The question, of course, was what was going to happen to them when they arrived.
He felt a growing discomfort in the small of his back, where the wrist-top he’d hidden there was trapped, pinched between him and the inside of his armor. They’d searched him again before he’d suited up, but he’d palmed the microcomputer when they frisked him, hiding it under hands clasped behind his head as they patted him down. By pretending to adjust his trousers before climbing into his armor, he’d managed to hide it again in his waistband. He wondered just how much stress the device could take, though, as several Gs slammed him back into the thinly padded seat.
Acceleration cut off, and for a long time after that they were in free fall, save for occasional violent thumps and kicks when the pilot fired steering jets to maintain attitude or to adjust their course. Their captors had made certain that all of the Marines were strapped down, and two of them sat now at the forward end of the compartment, as uncomfortable as any of the Americans as they kept an eye on their prisoners.
Garroway was wedged in between two Marines, with a third sitting half on top of him and half on the Marine to his right. In their armor, they were anonymous…but he could still recognize voices occasionally over the comm channel…mingled occasionally with the harsh, retching sounds of people being sick in their helmets.
The shuttle’s cargo hold was designed to hold thirty passengers in something like relative comfort, and it could manage another ten, perhaps, with some crowding. That, however, assumed that the passengers weren’t wearing bulky Class-Ones…or EVA suits. Most of the scientists, Garroway noticed, had been kept at Cydonia, but five had been packed into Mars surface suits and loaded aboard the shuttle with the Marines…the ones who’d discovered those Homo erectus corpses two days before. They’d nearly had to drag Alexander physically from the hab and chuck him into the lobber.
There were twenty-five Marines on board—Colonel Lloyd and Private Groller, both wounded, had been left at Cydonia under the care of Dr. Penkov, the Russian doctor at the base. That put a total of thirty prisoners aboard the shuttle, and the crowding was nightmarish with them all wearing armor or surface EVA suits.
After a small eternity of free fall, they were jarred by a sharp, dizzying swoop as the shuttle flipped end for end, and then acceleration hammered at them again when the main drive fired. The world tilted sickeningly, and then was obscured by swirling ocher dust as the craft settled in for a cushioned landing on its four hydraulic jacks.
They were down.
“Gentlemen, and ladies, we have arrived at your new home,” Bergerac told them, climbing down the narrow ladder from the pilot’s compartment. Had he flown the ship himself, Garroway wondered? No, he could see a NASA pilot behind him, seated at the console. The UN colonel must have been riding strapped to the bridge jumpseat.
With two UN guards urging them to move, the Marines and scientists clambered awkwardly down the center passageway ladder and into the shuttle’s airlock bay. Since everyone had been suited up for the flight, the shuttle was already open to the Martian atmosphere. The loading ramp was down; in moments, Garroway stood with the others on the cold, still, and nearly airless desert.
This was not Candor Chasma.
That fact was beginning to register with the others as well. He heard several low-murmured comments, and several Marines exchanged words by touching their helmets together for a quick, sound-inducted comment or two.
Garroway had not been to Mars Prime, of course, but he’d read about the place often enough during the cycler flight out, and he’d seen plenty of video transmissions downloaded off the Spacenet. Mars Prime, the first permanent settlement on the red planet, lay close to the site of the first manned landing on the floor of Candor Chasma, one of the larger canyons in the vast and labyrinthine complex of canyons known as Valles Marineris, the Valley of the Mariner Spacecraft. It consisted of some fifteen hab modules, a large, permanent landing strip, and water-drilling, fuel-production, and storage facilities even larger and more extensive than those at Cydonia. Compared to Mars Prime, the base at Cydonia was a small and somewhat primitive frontier outpost.
This base was smaller still. Located on a valley floor—Garroway could see the distant red cliffs, mostly still lost in shadow but capped by gleaming gold, the reflected light of the rising sun—it was a small outstation of some kind, consisting of a single hab partly covered over by sand and piles of bulldozed regolith. A Mars cat was parked nearby, but Garroway could see no drilling or fuel-production facilities, no storage structures, nothing, in fact, other than the hab, the cat, and the grounded shuttle.
Lieutenant Russel King, standing nearby, turned to him. “So what do we do now, Major?”
Garroway blinked at the platoon leader, unable for a moment to reply. Until that moment, he’d not thought about the command structure at all. But with Colonel Lloyd wounded and left at Cydonia, he was the senior officer of a section of twenty-four US Marines, plus five scientists.
It was not a responsibility that Garroway had ever imagined having to assume.
The other Marines were talking among themselves, and with growing agitation. “What the fuck?” one man said over the talk channel. “The bastards are just leaving us here?”
Bergerac stood at the top of the ramp. “We are not monsters,” he told them, “or barbarians. We must have full control of the Cydonian base, however, and for that we need all of you out of the way. I’m sure you all realize that we could have killed you…but instead we are leaving you here, with plenty of food, water, and a portable drilling unit for more water.”
“I think we need some things clarified, Bergerac,” Garroway said. “Are we prisoners of war?”
“Technically, of course, no state of war exists between your country and the United Nations, at least for the moment. Let us simply say that we are temporarily reassigning you to this outpost.”
“Yeah, but for how long?” a woman’s voice—Garroway thought it was Ostrowsky—called out. “You can’t just abandon us here!”
“Silence in the ranks, Marine,” Garroway rasped out. If he was in command, he would have to maintain order, starting now.
“How long,” Bergerac said, “depends entirely on how long it takes to, eh, assess Dr. Alexander’s finds at Cydonia.”
“To hide them, you mean,” Alexander called out, “or destroy them.”
“Please, Dr. Alexander,” Garroway said. He could see Alexander about twenty feet away, out of place among the armored Marines in his blue EVA suit. “Let’s hear what he has to say.”
“We are not vandals, Doctor,” Bergerac added. “But we do intend to secure what technological assets we can from the Cydonia site. For the benefit of all Mankind.”
“What the hell are you babbling about, Bergerac?” Alexander snapped back. “We haven’t been holding out on anybody!”
“Yes, we could tell,” Bergerac replied dryly. “So many papers published on the alien Ship. On the surveys. On the Builders’ technology you’ve uncovered so far. What have we learned from you since you began studying these ruins? Nothing! Some of us believe that you are deceiving the rest of the world.”
“The rest of the world, Colonel,” Garroway said quietly, hoping to forestall another riposte from Alexander, “is deceiving itself. We’ve gone out of our way to accommodate