This was too much for Mrs. Fitzpatrick. “What nonsense! It is clear that the ruins were built on land and that they later slipped into the water and were submerged. An earthquake, I expect. The Martian primitives clearly could not have constructed such sophisticated buildings beneath the water.” She shot a contemptuous glance at Mr. Edgeware. “I mean, look at the creatures. Most native Martians can scarcely speak a civilized tongue.”
These ‘primitives’, Harriet thought, had found their way from Earth to Mars thousands of years before the first British and Chinese explorers. They had built a civilization and developed technology that even the greatest mechanicians alive struggled to replicate. The civilization had collapsed almost two thousand years ago, but many of their artifacts remained in their ruins and in the hidden dragon tombs and were objects of great value.
The pilot shrugged. “The ruins show signs of having once been sealed against the pressure of the water.”
“Nonsense, girl. I’m sure your… type… find such things hard to grasp, but I have been to Vienna and Paris. There are wonders there you could scarcely comprehend.”
Wonders that had been built on the foundations of Ancient Martian technology, Harriet thought. She had visited the Great Wall of Cyclopia in the Martian wilderness. Vienna and Paris would both have been lost in its shadow.
If the pilot was bothered by Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s comments, she didn’t show it. She simply turned and disappeared back through the door to the control room, leaving the passengers to watch the water slide past their portholes.
“Well,” Mrs. Fitzpatrick said loudly. “Well, really.”
It took nearly an hour for the submersible to make its way through the waters of the Valles Marineris to the sunken ruins, but eventually Harriet spotted them through her porthole.
“There!” she said, and crowded with Bertrand against the glass. A series of elegant domes rose from a wide underwater ridge. They had once been joined by sweeping hallways, but both the domes and the hallways had been shattered by time or some seismic force, opening them to the water. Still, in places the domes and arches remained, and Harriet could just make out the strange twisted patterns that covered their surfaces. Ancient Martian decorations tricked the eye, seeming to change from abstract, curving patterns to hints of scenes, then away again, but here, in the deep water, among shifting strands of seaweed and darting shoals of fish, the buildings themselves seemed to suddenly disappear, only to reappear again moments later. The sun had finally risen above the surface of the Valles Marineris. Faint light made the whole scene look ghostly.
The Louros Hotel was a squat, new building of white marble and reinforced glass constructed in the middle of the ruins. On one end, a glass and steel ballroom, looking like a bulky greenhouse, had been added to the hotel. The ballroom had only been finished in the last couple of months, and the ball was being held to celebrate its official opening. Harriet understood that the hotel could accommodate two hundred guests, and most would be crammed into that glass and steel bowl. It was a remarkable engineering achievement. Always assuming it didn’t collapse.
The submersible sank below the ridge and entered what Harriet at first assumed to be a cave. But then the submersible’s lights picked out more of the Ancient Martian carvings on the walls, and she realized it must have been a tunnel. Within a couple of minutes, they were rising toward bright lights.
The submersible broke the surface of an enclosed pool. Through the porthole, Harriet saw two other moored submersibles. A grand marble entrance led into the hotel. Water-filled pillars, alive with luminescent creatures, reached to the high ceiling, throwing fluid light in bright green, red, and blue across the walls.
Harriet and the other passengers disembarked, followed by the submersible’s automatic servants carrying the luggage.
“This is the life, eh, Harry?” Bertrand said. “You know”—he laughed—“I really thought they were sidelining me when they stuck me in the Extraordinary Investigations Department.” He threw out an arm, almost knocking one of the red-headed young men into the water. “But look at all this! They wouldn’t have sent me here if they were sidelining me, would they?”
Harriet kept her face still. Bertrand didn’t pick up on much, but he’d been right the first time.
“Let’s find our rooms, shall we?”
Humming, Bertrand led the way into the hotel foyer, where he came to an abrupt halt.
A short, stocky man with bristling sideburns and small eyeglasses had leapt up from his chair and was now striding toward Bertrand, his face furious.
“Sir William…” Bertrand managed.
Sir William Huntsworth, Harriet thought. Head of the Tharsis City Police Service.
“What a surprise,” Bertrand said. “I didn’t know you were coming, too.” He turned to Harriet, who was standing stock still in horror. “See, Harry—”
“Deputy Chief Inspector Simpson,” Sir William ground out. “What the devil are you doing here?”
“I don’t understand it, Harry.” Bertrand sat back on his bed, head in hands. “Why was Sir William surprised to see me? Why was he angry? I thought he’d sent me the invitation.”
Harriet gritted her teeth. Someone in the British-Martian Intelligence Service hadn’t done their research. They should have known Sir William would be here and prepared a different cover story. Or, worse, someone had known he would be here and decided on this story anyway. Someone who wanted to make it difficult. Someone like Reginald Pratt.
“I thought he thought I was doing well. You saw that piece in the Tharsis Times saying what a wonderful job I’d done with the Glass Phantom. Everyone was talking about it.”
Not only had Harriet read it, she had written it, anonymously, after they’d returned from the dinosaur hunt.
“All it means is that you’ve got another well-wisher. Isn’t it good that you have someone important on your side, even if you don’t know who they are?”
Bertrand let out a sigh and buried his hand in his thick, black hair, making even more of a mess of it. Harriet resisted the urge to pat it back down.
“I suppose,” Bertrand said. Then he brightened. Bertrand could never stay miserable for long. “Why don’t we take a poke around? I’ve never been anywhere like this before, and I dare say you haven’t either, even with that Lady Felchester of yours.”
They found a large drawing room with a steel-framed window looking out through the dim water to the silhouettes of the ruins. The glass was no thicker than Harriet’s knuckle. It’s safe. It has to be. The secret to this glass had been discovered among the artifacts of a dragon tomb, and she knew it was strong enough. Even so, it didn’t feel like it should support the pressure of so much water. A shoal of spiral-fish whirled past just outside, sliding through the water like glittering drill bits.
“I’m going to see if I can get us some tea,” Bertrand announced. “And, you know, some cakes or something.”
Harriet waved him off, entranced by the spectacle through the window. This was what she’d always dreamed of, seeing the wonders of Mars.
Light grew within one of the collapsed domes twenty or thirty feet beyond the window. At first Harriet thought it was a passing submersible or perhaps a strange sea creature, but then she saw a train of photon emission globes appear through a break in the wall to glide through the water toward the next set of ruins.