It looked so real it could have turned its head and said hello and Yves wouldn’t have been more surprised. There was no characterisation, no roughness, and even though he had never seen the creature before, or any of its kind, he was certain its depiction was as true to life as was possible in an engraving on stone, with no artistic licence applied. He said as much to Danny and Jane, whose movements he was tracking on the second display.
“Absolutely!” she said without hesitation. “I’ve looked at the carvings; they’re all over the walls. I don’t like to speculate and I’m by no means the authority on such things, but I can’t see how they’re possible without some kind of laser technology.”
“Are you saying that something buried hundreds of thousands of years ago was made with technology as advanced as our own?” he said in disbelief.
“What’s the alternative? That primitive man made a spaceship of wood and sailed across space with his bow and arrow and a bucket on his head?” she responded sarcastically.
“Well, that’s not exactly…”
“What Jane is saying, Yves,” Danny interrupted, “is that we already accept that this find is hundreds of thousands of years old, and that Man did not have the means to do this sort of thing back then. This means we must be looking at artefacts from Mars. Artefacts from the Martians.”
Yves was about to answer when a piercing sound came over the speakers. Before he had a chance to turn the volume down, it stopped. Danny said a single word in Russian that Yves didn’t understand but was almost certainly rude. “Everything OK?”
Then the sound came back, except this time it was pulsating. With every pulse the video feed from Danny’s suit filled with static.
“What’s wrong?” Jane said, worried.
“No idea, his cam is all messed up and the audio…”
“I can’t hear you Yves! That whining is cutting you off every second word!”
“What?”
“I said I can’t hear… ah! That’s better!” The noise had stopped.
“Shit,” Yves said between gritted teeth. “Danny, can you hear us?”
Danny’s video, audio and medical feeds had all stopped transmitting. Looking at Jane’s screen, he could see the Russian standing in front of the alien engravings. His arms drooped lazily by his sides, his head lolled dangerously. Jane leaped towards him and pulled him back, stopping him from falling head first into the tunnel wall. She lay him down and shone her flashlight through his visor.
His eyes were open, the pupils fully dilated. They didn’t respond to the bright light as she moved it frantically from eye to eye.
“Is he breathing?”
She looked at the breastplate of his suit and tapped it twice quickly. A small OLED display flashed briefly. She hit it again several times, but it didn’t come back. No battery. Moving to his wrist, she checked his suit controls. The suit should have had enough charge for another week’s use, before they would need to be hooked up to the station’s power source for two whole days to fill up.
The wrist controls were powered by a kinetic wrist band, as a failsafe redundancy; shake your arm and you’ll always be able to check your oxygen. The readout showed twenty-five per cent air. It also confirmed his pulse, faint but still present. He had enough air for a couple of hours breathing, but no power meant that he’d freeze to death before that time was up.
She said as much to Yves, then paused. When she spoke again her voice was grave. “I can’t carry him up the cliff on my own. I can’t get him out of here without you.”
And I can’t get to you, he thought to himself. “Have you checked your own suit?” He was going over the readouts himself. “You look fine from here.”
“Confirmed. Everything looks good to me. It’s just Danny, his suit just suddenly lost all its power. I have to get him warm, somehow!”
“Jane, go back to the Rover. Remove one of the fuel cells, and take it back to Danny.”
“Of course!” She was already running.
It only took her five minutes to reach the vehicle, another two to remove the fuel cell. God Bless mission planners she thought to herself as she marvelled at the simplicity of the power source’s design: completely self-contained like an old fashioned battery. The cable connecting it to the Rover was identical to the cable that emerged from the underside of the suits to charge them up. With a bit of twisting you could even reach it yourself and plug yourself in.
The way back was slightly longer, as she negotiated a couple of rock slides and steep slopes. The cell wasn’t excessively heavy, but it offset her centre of balance enough for her to risk falling down the crater if she wasn’t careful. She finally entered the tunnel and her flashlight automatically came on.
She reached the dead end just in time to see the stone wall slide back down to meet the floor. And Danny was gone.
Chapter 58
A sudden sense of urgency filled the DEFCOMM control room after the Russian cosmonaut’s disappearance.
Following that, it took Gail less than an hour to get her tablet back. The hieroglyphic analysis tools would help decipher the engravings on the walls, she had claimed.
She could only thank her lucky stars that she had the tablet in Mahmoud’s office back in Cairo, and that her abductors had thought to bring it with them.
Using translation tools was, of course, a decoy. George’s application wasn’t a translator, and in any case she didn’t know of any software on Earth that would help with the alien writing she had seen carved into the tunnel walls on Mars. As much as she would have loved to help solve the mystery of where Captain Marchenko had gone, this was her chance to save herself first.
Save yourself, the thought, and you stand a chance of saving them. All that she needed to do now was make sure that no one was looking.
Dr Patterson looked over her shoulder at the screen. “Interesting tool,” he said thoughtfully. “It looks a bit out of date, how old is it?”
She grunted and tapped a command into the screen. “There’s not a huge demand for this sort of application, in fact I don’t know anyone else who uses it. So it’ll pretty much do the job until it breaks or something much better comes along.” She didn’t tell him that George had developed it for her; it was pointless arousing suspicions when she was so close. “Can you get me some coffee?”
“Sure. How do you take it?”
“Julie Andrews,” she replied. Seeing the look on his face, she elaborated. “White, none.”
He stared at her blankly, then shook his head and made to leave.
“And something to eat!” she shouted after him. Anything to buy some time!
Using the interactive pen that slid out of the front edge of the computer, she scanned the first line of symbols from the printout Patterson had given her, and pretended to study the output until she was sure he had gone.
She tilted her head to one side to check for noise from the corridor. Hearing none, she browsed her saved images and found an appropriately-sized photo of some engravings from the Sixth Pylon at Karnak: the texture of the stone and lighting were similar to that of the Library. She tapped an on-screen menu and accessed the application’s ‘about’ pop-up, before holding down a special combination of keys to open a small text-input screen.
It took her less than a minute to write the message, a little under one hundred characters. She knew that any more would be pushing it; she would only get one shot at this, and the smaller the message the easier it would be to hide.
She had known for a while that her tablet would be her best bet of contacting someone on the outside. Her first problem had been getting hold of it; something the events on Mars had precipitated.