A little more... And anotheredit. Further new findings.
1101
Mars, 'downstairs', south tunnel-
Pete McCord rushed along the glistening-walled passage, making what speed he could. The mission commander faced two very frustrating limits. The first was his hard suit, which simply wasn't constructed for marathon running.
Amid all the clicks and beeps of stressed machinery, and his own loud breathing, Pete could barely hear the other reason for his slowed pace: Doctor Kim. The exobiologist was in good shape, but her sex and petite size still slammed squealing brakes on the woman's top speed.
Nevertheless, they got there, arriving at the tunnel's narrowing far end to find Tracy half-hidden in the innards of the rock drill, bent like a shade tree mechanic over a bank of exposed transistors. Thorpe clung to an engine-access ladder just above him, shining a second helmet light upon Tracy's methodical efforts.
"Stop!" Pete commanded, briefly sounding like the proctor at a federal exam site. "What… the hell are… you doing?"
He was panting hard, and thirstier than he'd realized. Taking a quick sip from his own helmet's water tube, Pete waited while Tracy straightened up and turned to face him. Thorpe was a little slower.
"Lights," McCord reminded them, squinting in the sudden combined glare of twin head lamps. The glow dimmed immediately, allowing him to see the faces of pilot and engineer. They looked slightly guilty, and no wonder; his orders had been quite explicit.
"One more time. What the hell were you two trying to do?"
Tracy jerked a thumb at the drill, which was yellow and silent as an abandoned school bus.
"Reconfiguring our equipment for a better look inside, Pete. My family built this drill. I helped design it. I can alter its specs entirely, expand the scanning range, or have it stand on its rear treads and run for governor."
Pete blinked. Cho had joined them, edging around the mission commander to stand beside her Marine, who'd by now clanged his way off the access ladder.
"Fine. I'll keep that in mind, next time I cast a ballot. In the mean time, Tracy, you learn to follow instructions, or stand KP until end-of-mission."
An empty threat. John being placed on permanent kitchen duty would be more of a punishment for everyone else. The pilot nodded, though, his grave expression reminding Pete of the time he'd visited the Tracy household with Lydia and the new baby. That night, a very young John had entirely disassembled the engine of Pete's classic Stingray. (Four years old, and already a pain in the ass…) Then, as now, he'd had his reasons. The slightly 'off' vibration John thought he'd detected turned out be from a hair-fine crack in the engine casing, one that would have killed the car. This time…?
"Back to business, Tracy. Why reconfigure?"
John nodded again, still grim as a blue-eyed specter.
"Because whatever's back there yielded to acoustic probes, so it isn't entirely invulnerable, and I've never yet encountered a material capable of passively blocking all frequencies. Just thought we could learn something, without actually going in."
"Uh-huh. Thorpe?"
Roger turned away from his brief, private-channel conversation with Kim Cho, releasing her gloved hands.
"Made sense to me, Skipper. Trick is to pick the right frequency… one that penetrates rock, without setting anything off, in there. We did the figures, and came up with a likely range. Weren't going to move till you gave the word, though."
McCord shifted his stance, relaxing a little. Shaking his head, he put the icy quietus on free-thinking.
"I've called this one in to control, and they've passed it on to the president. Not Rand. The WorldGov president, Murasaki. Still waiting on a response, but I don't mind telling you that for some damn reason, this thing… whatever it is… scares the ever-living shit out of me. What've we got, so far?"
Roger and John exchanged glances. Then the Marine pulled out his databoard, and handed it over. Everyone crowded around Pete as their commander turned the device back on. It chimed to life, glowing like an oracle.
"Open 'drill instrument reads' file… Page forward," John advised him. "There. Acoustic scan frames 137- 155… Now, page back to 42… stop. This one's an earlier, accidental shot of the same artifact, from a different angle. We never noticed, at the time. Too busy. Anyhow, it's fuzzy, because we were drilling at speed, carving out the emergency drainage system, but it gives a 4-D view, providing volume (151,000 cubic meters) and evidence that the artifact is static along the time axis."
Pete shook his head impatiently, blowing at a strand of sandy hair that had fallen into his eyes.
"I'm not following you on the time-axis thing, Tracy. Explain."
"Okay… suppose I decide to fly to Thermopolis from the ranch airstrip, and I plan to check the herd while I'm doing it. Multi-tasking for tax reasons. I overfly, taking some pictures, stay in town a few days, then head back. Weather's gone bad, though, and I spend most of the time fighting the stick and trying to stay on course and off the landscape. Not too much sight-seeing on the way back, and no pictures but one, from a new, long distance angle. When I get home and print them out, I spot something in the first set of shots. It's on the later one, too. With (adjusting for image rotation) no change in position over time. It isn't moving."
Pete grunted, paging back and forth between the two acoustic scans and superimposing them in his mind. There was some sort of structure in there; a mere shadowy hulk, but…
"What'd it turn out to be?" He inquired, "...the thing you spotted from the plane, I mean?"
Tracy was extremely literal when it came to examples, and this one had to come from real life.
"Oh. A sacred site. I informed the tribal council, through some friends of mine, then… um… 'misfiled' the government report. Local business. No feds."
"Right. So, what we got here's a roomful of possible machinery, probably not sacred, and definitely not moving. …Meaning it's dead, or switched off."
"More likely powered down, Skipper," Thorpe cut in. "Thinking long-term, here, you might want to shut most things down, to conserve energy, but even in sleep mode, your appliances and computer gear have got a small charge reservoir, so they can be turned on again, remotely."
Doctor Kim had been examining the scanner images, along with Pete. Now she pointed at something on the data board's greenish screen, the slight pressure of her gloved finger causing the image to magnify.
"What is this?" she asked, indicating a long, smudgy shadow at the chamber's curving floor. "A shaft or tunnel?"
"Could be…" Roger mused, increasing magnification still further. "Assuming your 'shaft' continues without deviating, it's headed to the core. Geothermal power source, maybe?"
Cho looked up at him through curving helmet glass, her dark, almond eyes rather puzzled.
"The core of Mars is nearlysolid, Roger. There is no significant energy left to be had from it."
"Not now," the combat engineer agreed easily, patting his fiancé's hard-suited shoulder, "but this thing could've been here awhile."
Pete shifted uncomfortably. The tunnel-end was cramped, and he'd never liked tight spaces.
"Sure wish Houston would get back to us on this one. I've got… the pucker factor's off the scale here, people. Sucking up major Fruit-of-the-Loom."
And the hell of it was, he couldn't quite put his finger on why. Except that a big, perfectly spherical chamber on an alien world, scanner-shielded and full of machinery, wasn't likely a damn McDonald's. Pete shut off the databoard, and handed it over. Maybe Tracy had the right idea, with that 'shifted scanning range' business… although, they sure as hell didn't want to accidentally turn anything on.
It was, however, just about exactly too late. Thorpe had taken a half-step backward, giving himself a little room to put away the databoard. Maybe he triggered something. Maybe it had been warming up already; drawing energy from the drill's scanning waves and ground vibrations. At any rate, a disk lit up on the ground under the Marine's booted feet.
Cho screamed a warning in shrill Korean, and dove forward, but John was faster. He backhanded her out of the way, reaching out with the other arm to jerk Roger off the disk… almost.
There was a flash, a cylinder of searing-bright light that left them all nearly blind. John hauled violently on what he held. Most of Thorpe collapsed against him an instant later, minus his right leg below the knee, and part of his right hand. The cut was better than surgically precise. No burns, slashes or tearing. Just… sudden absence.
Blood misted forth, spattering them all with a cloud of quick-frozen red droplets. The Marine didn't scream, only grunting,
"God, oh God…!" over and over. His suit sealed itself automatically, beginning a temporary patch-up as John slung him further away from the widening cylinder, and into Pete and Cho.
"Tracy!" The commander shouted, dragging Thorpe's arm across his shoulders, "Reconfig! Can you rig the drill to blow up? Collapse the tunnel, or send our 'friends' a TNT telegram?"
The pilot nodded.
"Yeah."
"Do it, quick then, and get your ass back upstairs for evac. We don't leave without you. Got it?"
John nodded once more, and they turned away from each other, Tracy to vandalize the rock drill, McCord to wrestle an injured Marine down-passage, with Cho's anguished assistance.
A few moments ticked past. The mission commander's panting image appeared on John's heads-up display just as the pilot (halfway up the access ladder) was in the midst of a rapid rewiring job. The cylinder, he noted briefly, had now grown within three feet of the drill's cutter face. Much farther and he would have no way past it.
"What's on your mind, Pete?" He asked.
"Upstairs… Dr. Bennett… You interested in making things official?"
Strangely enough…
"Yeah. Sounds like a plan."
Using his combination flashdrive and multi-tool, John rewired the batteries for maximum resistance, jammed the drilling mechanism and disabled its cooling system. Good to go. Set to highest gear, and…
Linda's face had blinked onto the now split helmet display. She was pale, but composed. Never a screamer, Doctor Bennett. He couldn't see her hands, of course, but assumed that they were pressed to her belly.
John flipped a few contact switches, heard and felt the drill roar back to violent, sparking life. Said Pete, gasping as he struggled with Roger's lurching weight,
"Right. Ship captain's authority… as highest official on-planet… duly empowered… to declare legal union… consenting individuals… Blah, blah, blah… Say, 'I do', Tracy."
Trouble. By the time he shinned down the ladder, the beam's expanding edge would have reached that side of the drill. The other side was too closely pressed to the tunnel wall to provide a way through. He might clamber across the top, though. Maybe hop off in back…? Good a plan as any.
"Yeah. I do."
Tucking away the multi-tool, John began scrambling across the shuddering mechanism, painfully hunched between dripping rock and hot metal.
"Likewise," Linda whispered hoarsely, her brown eyes very large.
Evidently losing his grip on Thorpe, Pete started to curse, then caught himself.
"God d- Sorry…! Then, by the power vested in… (urf!) … me… state of Michigan and… Church of Universal Light, etc…. Sight of these two undersigned witnesses… You're man and wife… and baby. God bless.
"Now, get the #$&! out of there, Tracy, so you can kiss the damn bride!"
He tried.