When a ship sinks, sometimes people would kill to get on the lifeboat.
A climbing accident. A broken rope.
And once again, Brandon got what he wanted.
It was all clear to her now. She’d thought that the broken rope was suspicious. It had been Brandon.
And now Brandon was dead.
28
Scott’s Fossils
The fossils that Brandon had found on his last night were magnificent. Tana stood in front of them and marveled. How had he managed to find it? Was this what he was looking for? Was this what he had died to find?
The fossil his body had been found next to looked as if it were the complete organism, or possibly a casting of the complete organism, permineralized by a more durable material. It looked as though it were carved from onyx.
The organism itself looked something like a medusa, or perhaps some branching plant, with sinuous branches or tentacles radiating out from a cylindrical body. Was it an animal or a plant, Tana wondered? Or, on Mars, was there even a difference?
She took out the rock hammer and began, carefully, to chip around the edges. “You want to give me some help in excising this specimen?” she said.
Ryan, standing behind her, said nothing.
She looked up, slightly annoyed. “Come on! It’ll go faster if you give me a hand here.”
“There’s no point in it, Tana,” he said softly. “We can’t take them with us. I’m sorry.”
“Ryan, you don’t understand.” She put down the hammer and looked directly at him. “This is the greatest discovery of the twenty-first century. Life existed on Mars. This proves it. Even if we don’t return ourselves, we have to preserve these. We have to! This is why we’re here.” She picked up the hammer again and began to chip at the stone, using sharp, clean blows now that she had defined the edges. “This is more important than any of us.”
“Like the Scott expedition,” Ryan said.
Tana put down the hammer and looked up. “What?”
“Antarctica,” Ryan said. “They were the second to reach the south pole. When they got there, they found Amundsen’s abandoned camps, and discovered that they had missed being first by thirty-four days. It must have been a crushing disappointment. But it was a scientific expedition. On the way, they found fossils in the mountains near the south pole. Fossils, almost at the south pole! At the time, it must have been quite an important scientific find. They were perilously low on supplies, fighting frostbite and blizzards and ferocious winds. They were dying slowly of vitamin deficiency, but they collected fifty pounds of rocks from those mountains and dragged the samples behind them for over a thousand kilometers on foot, because they thought that the scientific samples would make their expedition a success, even though they failed to reach the pole first.”
“And?” Tana asked.
“And they died,” Ryan said. “Every one of them.”
Tana was silent for a moment. “It was the fossils?” she said.
Ryan shrugged. “If they hadn’t tried to carry rocks with them, useless dead weight, would they have made it? Who can say? But I can tell this: It didn’t help.”
Tana dropped the rock hammer and sighed.
“Okay,” she said, and stood up. “We leave the fossils.”
Ryan had brought one rock with him, the small fossil that Brandon had found that day at the wall of the Valles Marineris. The fist-shaped rock seemed small and tawdry next to the large fossils of the fault wall, but it was the one Brandon had found.
They had left Brandon’s body propped up where he had died, leaning against the wall and sightlessly staring toward the eastern horizon. Ryan leaned down, placed the little fossil in Brandon’s right hand, and closed his left hand over it. “Trevor—Brandon—whoever you are,” he said. “I guess it’s too late now to really even know. Goodbye, Brandon.”
He paused. “Wherever you are—good luck.”
When they returned to the habitat for the night, Ryan gathered them together to talk about their plans. It was frightening to see how few the expedition had become. We knew people were going to die, he thought. We knew it, and yet, when it happens, we still can’t quite get a grip on it. Chamlong, and then John, and now Trevor, gone. He knew that Trevor—Brandon, he should think of him as Brandon now—had deceived all of them, that he must have killed Radkowski, but somehow he still couldn’t quite believe it. He lied right from the beginning, he thought. He deceived all of us.
What secrets did the others have?
Ryan had liked him. The betrayal was somehow worse for that. And now he’s dead, too.
“We can’t afford any more accidents,” he said. “The expedition is already dangerously small. We can’t lose anybody else; we can’t make any mistakes. From here, we travel light and last, no sidetracks, no exploration, no sight-seeing, just speed. No more wandering. We make a straight-line dash for the Agamemnon site.
“We leave behind everything that we don’t absolutely need. Agamemnon was the Cadillac of expeditions. They had everything, and they abandoned it at the site, for the most part completely unused. We’ll resupply there.”
“Showers,” Tana said.
“Decent food,” Estrela whispered.
“All that,” Ryan said. “All that, and one thing, the most important thing of all.
“Agamemnon brought an airplane.”
PART SIX
Ryan Martin
1
Ares Vallis
It gave him a sense of déjà vu.
Ryan had been here before. When could he have been here? Never; it was impossible. But yet he felt that the territory was familiar.
They had crossed an area of low hills, and then for two days they had walked through a region of immense buttes, imposing flat-topped mesas that loomed hundreds of meters above them. Ryan felt the pressure of the landscape, felt that they were as small as ants moving across an inhumanly large landscape.
Now they had left the mesa territory behind. The land was furrowed. Low, rolling ridges ran parallel to their direction of travel, with half-buried boulders tumbled in clusters around. It was a flood plain, Ryan realized. An ancient deluge had carved these grooves and moved these boulders. In his memory this rang a distant bell, but he couldn’t quite bring it to mind.
A low, lone mountain—a volcano, perhaps—rose up out of the plain, and it too looked weirdly familiar. As they moved across the land, and moved into a new perspective, he saw that it was doubled, like the twin humps of a Bactrian camel, and that didn’t surprise him. Of course it was a double peak.