21

A FRENCH VOLCANOLOGIST

Newton cooled his heels in the endless corridors of the Ecological Sciences building, bleached to within an inch of their life. The glare from their neon tubes of light outshone the entire sickly sphere of Sol resting low on the dunes. Mike nudged his shades up the bridge of his nose. What a place...

He'd been kicked out of the lab where the Magnuses and Tesla were deep in conversation, endlessly musing about murder and impending doom. Everyone else was scrambling madly to save what they could from the remains of the destroyed building.

Smoke shrouded the streets, pressed down by the freezing air. It swirled, kicking up against the stone spires like a restless, grey ocean lurking beneath a storm. The sirens and screams had stopped leaving only steel and rock slowly tearing apart as the last dip of light vanished and night engulfed the settlement. The darkness lasted longer each time and now, on the very edge of the horizon, a line of glowing red dots appeared. They flickered like Vulcan's necklace – a trickle of lava from a fresh eruption on the slopes of Olympus Mons.

Newton felt a chill in his bones. There was no money to repair or rebuild. Prosperity was falling, literally. He'd seen this before.

His boots slipped and sent him careening into a nearby wall. Newton fumbled, clutching wildly at a door handle which snapped off under his weight. He smashed into the floor and -

"Holy – crap..." He had landed between two trails of semi-dried blood. Something had been dragged the length of the corridor. Something – dead.

Blood on his hands, Newton struggled to his feet and limped along beside the grisly streak marks, glancing frantically around, scouring the corridor for any hint as to what terrible thing had transpired. At the corner, Newton looked away, shielding his eyes. He wished he could undo that image – wipe it from his memory.

It wasn't so much a body as – bits of a body.

Pieces of Professor Hill.

"Is it even possible?" Ashley asked, sitting in a tight huddle with Tesla and her mother. They had their laptops out, streaming through data with trashy, thousand year old music in the background to thwart anyone trying to listen in. Ashley was wrapped in a thick orange blanket with a steady supply of hot coffee beside her. Her lips and nails were still blue from the freezing water. "A Hyperspecies Abnormal, here on Mars?"

"If there's life here, anything is possible," Helen admitted. "It would have to be naturally occurring."

Nikola sighed and dragged out a collection of hand written files that he'd pilfered from the vaults beneath the building.

"Where'd you get those!" Helen scorned.

"Never mind where, just be thankful that I did," he spun them around to face Helen and her daughter. "Fossil evidence suggests that early lifeforms of Mars were large. With less gravity and a predominantly aquatic environment, they sprawled out to creatures the size of buildings."

"Like the Legoree Skeleton," Ashley nodded slowly. The corpse of the whale-like creature curled through the rock, its bones peaking out from the rusted seabed, too immense to remove. It looked as though it were swept from an apocalyptic horror science fiction film.

Nikola nodded. "Exactly. We assume that the majority of Martian life has become extinct save the micro organisms in the hydrogardens and an alarming population of sand-dwelling jellyfish but what – what if it's not. What if another creature escaped its fate, burrowing down through the soft ocean sediment toward deep, disused lava tubes?"

Ashley was shaking her head. "But why?" she insisted. "Why are the Cabal after it? Even they wouldn't go to such an incredible expense to obtain a rare creature unless -"

"Unless..." Helen pressed her finger against her lips, deep in thought. "Unless it contains something valuable to them."

"Valuable enough to waste a thousand years on," Ashley added. "Man I really thought that vicious organisation was extinct as well."

"We need to work out what they're after fast," Nikola insisted. "This city isn't going to hold for long. We might be able to use what we find to bargain a lift out of this hell – obviously before we double cross them..." He quickly added when Helen threw him a disapproving glare.

"Do we still have records on file of the expeditions teams to Mars?" Helen asked.

Ashley nodded. "Every mission and its personnel from the first five hundred years of settlement are on file. It gets a bit murky after that."

"That should be enough. I'm looking for something in particular and it would have had to happen very early in colonisation history."

The Sanctuary, Old City - EARTH

5th May, 2424

He was French but Helen tried not to hold that against the young scientist bounding over the lawn toward her manor. Even from her third-floor window, obscured by a carpet of cobwebs, she could make out his halo of dark, curly hair which bounced in time with his steps. Expressive eyebrows were permanently lofted in surprise as he gazed up at the fresh leaves erupting out of her ailing trees. He kept pausing at various plants she now regretted placing along the footpath, each one apparently more fascinating than the next. Perhaps he'd missed his calling in life – he should have been a botanist. Maybe a hippy. God, she missed hippies.

Instead, the volcanologist perched on her antique lounge several hours later, adjusting his glasses as he sank into a book. He flipped its aged pages reverently, scanning through the data with soft gasps of fascination.

"Will it do?" Helen asked. She removed a teabag from her cup, slipped in a brown cube of sugar and stirred it with a succession of soft 'clinks' as the metal hit porcelain. It fizzled away to nothing leaving a creamy brown liquid that she lifted to her lips and sipped.

"Do?" he replied, dragging his pale eyes up from the journal. "It is positively treasure."

Helen smirked. It appeared that she'd been alive so long that her hand written journals were now transformed into artefacts – collector items housing mysterious ancient secrets. If she'd known they'd be so useful as bribes she would have taken the trouble to write a lot more.

"It is yours – assuming, of course," she lifted her hand to keep the young man from leaping excitedly from his seat, "you can find the location of this creature, as we discussed."

"I know my rocks," the man insisted. "If you're after a lost network of lava tubes, I'll find them for you. Access to your extensive databases would obviously help..." he ventured carefully.

Helen nodded.

The man was relieved by that. "Much better than working for the government," he smiled at her. "They still think that the only interesting volcano is one terrorising the locals. I keep tellin' them, there's no point studying something after it explodes."

"Tea?" Helen asked, walking a neatly set tray over to her guest.

He recoiled from it as though she'd offered him a severed hand. "No sir! This is poison, not tea..."

Her British heart died a little at his words. The man rescued her honour slightly by stealing a few biscuits instead.

"Bernard..." she started, trying not to sound overly curious as she settled on the couch beside him. "I hear business is picking up for you – word in the universities is that you've been adopted by a mystery benefactor for their pet project."

He closed the journal and placed his hand reverently on its leather cover. He was a little blind in one eye and sensitive to the many lamps glowing on Magnus's alarming amount of coffee tables. "I am quite looking forward to it," he admitted. "You could say – it's out of this world."

Final approach to MARS

16th January, 2430

Bernard sat with his head against his knees – eyes tightly shut and his hands clasped around the back of his head. A gentle hand rubbed his back as the shuttle shook violently, wrestling with the wisp of Martian atmosphere and fierce swirl of red sand beneath. Mercifully it ended with a gentle press of the shuttle's metal feet into the dirt.

The interior lit up as a thousands panels of computer monitors set about analysing the world outside. The team of scientists looked nervously at each other. Their narrow shuttle left them four each side, knee to knee. Bernard wasn't the only one that found the flight down to the surface of Mars alarming. A young Vietnamese marine biologist dry heaved several times before calming herself down, laying her head against the cold wall for a moment of peace.

The woman with her hand on Bernard's back smiled as he finally took a deep breath and lifted his head to look up at her. Some of his curly hair had escaped, covering his eyes. "You okay?" Dr Janet Horvath asked.

"Provided we keep to the ground for a while," he nodded. "I adore rocks – I'm just not overly fond of flying toward them."

"Things are looking up for you then. There's a whole planet of nothing but rock for you waiting out there."

The woman with red hair was right. As he stepped out from the shuttle and onto the Martian surface, Bernard feared his head might explode. To his right was the beginning of the famous Martian settlement, Prosperity. It was only a few rises of rock against the world but it was human and perched on another world.

There were other shuttles, much larger than theirs, parked on the dunes around a basin almost like a nest of black insects with plumes of smoke rising from their feet. Beyond them were several rows of fragile silver domes glistening in sun, housing the famous food gardens that the permanent settlement used to survive. Further still were more solid looking, squat buildings cut from the nearby rock, built to provide a safe place for the immense computer systems.

"What's going on over there?" Bernard asked, nodding at the drilling equipment.

"They are burrowing into the bedrock. The place is almost solid Lodestone, they're hoping to use it to power massive generators for a shield but don't ask me how. I'm only here for the water."

"I'm guessing those are ours..." Bernard nodded at the gaping holes that dotted the landscape. Some were the size of football fields – black voids in which the world vanished abruptly.

"You bet; massive, unexplained circular caverns in the surface of the planet. Hopefully you can finally tell us what caused them. It's been a persistent mystery."

"No pressure." Bernard bit his lip, staring at the mysterious sight.

"Goodness gracious!" Bernard was on his stomach, his head the only thing hanging over the black hole. He gaped at the void beneath. There was just – nothing. "Are we really going in?"

Janet swatted his helmet with her glove. "Obviously. We didn't fly all this way to gape at the damn thing. We can do that from the comfort of our computers on Earth. Kit up rockboy – we're taking the equipment down on one run with us."

"What about the others?" They were wandering toward the main conglomerate of chaos in the distance.

"They're checking in with base. We're spreading out into two unit teams to start but we have permission to begin immediately."

He rolled over onto his back and gazed up at the opinionated, domineering woman whom he suspected was going to get her own way in most things. None of which he minded. "And I'm stuck with you?"

She grinned. "And you're stuck with me."

"Okay it's official," Bernard announced, as soon as his boots splashed into the stretch dark water. "My presence here is money wasted. I have no idea what this place is but it's certainly not volcanic – whoa!" he startled as the water around him erupted in a blue glow. The eerie light clouded out in plumes wherever there was movement like some kind of life form.

"Don't panic," Janet held out her hand to calm him, gripping onto his arm. "This is my project, Dr Rousseau. Don't be shy, you've just met with the most prevalent life form discovered on Mars to date."

"Glowing water?" he frowned.

She tilted her head. Why was she stuck with the rock guy again? "Urgh – not quite. They're like -" she fished for an explanation, "plankton. Glowing, ancient, alien plankton." She paused and frown, looking at the edges of the hole. "Are you sure it's not volcanic? These massive structures are only found around or on extinct volcanoes."

"I know my rocks," Bernard insisted, pacing over to the edge of the hole. "This is Lodestone and it certainly just doesn't collapse into massive, perfectly cylindrical chasms." It took about ten minutes to reach the scarred surface. It was like a fragment of hell, sharp and tortured outcrops of rock. "If it's natural, it's formed by something I've never seen before."

She waved him back from the edge. There was a perfect, natural island in the centre of the water, big enough to set up their tents. "The thick mats of peat floating in the water are giving off a breathable atmosphere." If you looked carefully, you could see the faint line where it ended, fifty or so metres above their heads. "We can take off our helmets and start setting up camp – dig in for the night."

John Druitt paused, sweat streaming off his bald head as he gazed over at the dried ocean bed. There was a new bump on its surface, a small research shuttle by the looks of it. He grinned. About time, really. He'd been waiting months for her to arrive.

Mars, 27th December, 3082

"I told you – I fucking told you!" Nikola violently gestured at the blood soaked room. He wished he could say he'd never seen anything like it but he'd lived through the horrors of Whitechapel and himself been under the sharp edge of John's knife on more than one occasion.

"Nikola," Helen all but begged. "We don't know this was John."

He just stared at her, stretching out his arm to the massacre. "There's only one creature ever born that could do that do another human being. He probably off'ed Edwards as well.

"I highly doubt that..." Although she couldn't deny that this murder was classic John. "Where is he?"

"No one knows. He's been stalking in and out of this place whenever he likes."

Helen wished she could stop looking at the torn body of Hill. There was anger in this kill. It lacked the sickening artistry that John usually bestowed on his mistresses. "If and I really mean if John killed Professor Hill, why?"

"We have to find him," Nikola pushed aside an aid that tried to rush into the room, making him wait. "He knows more than he's letting on about what's going on in this hell hole."

"And what about him?" Helen nodded at the human collapsed against the corridor outside. Mike Newton was white as a sheet.

"I don't think he's going to be much use to us for a while."

"Cut him a break, Nikola. This is exactly how his grandfather died."

"How many of your lovers has Druitt's jealousy claimed?"

Helen looked away, feeling sick.