Logan huffed.

  He looked at his palms. “Just get out of the rover and fix what needs fixing, Logan,” he told himself.

  The exhaustion was there. It had been there for thirty hours. Regardless, he stepped out.

  Inside the rover, the cabin held at a steady nineteen degrees Celsius. Outside was a different conversation entirely. The suit’s thermal regution system kicked into a higher draw immediately, the soft whir of the heating elements cycling up along his legs and torso. The external temperature sat at minus sixty-three. He knew that without checking because his HUD told him and also because Mars had a way of making minus sixty-three feel like exactly what it was, even through four yers of insuted material. The suit handled it. That was the suit’s job. But handled wasn’t the same as comfortable, and the two got confused sometimes.

  He crouched beside the left front wheel. The servo housing had pulled in enough fine regolith to jam the joint mechanism. Annoying. The fix required pulling the housing cover, clearing the particute buildup with a compressed air tool from the rover’s external kit, checking the joint seal for micro-tears, and reseating the cover. Standard maintenance. Something you could do on Earth in a garage in fifteen minutes with a beer nearby. On Mars, in a suit, with gloves reducing his fine motor sensitivity by about forty percent, it was going to take closer to forty-five. He pulled the kit and got to work.

  At the thirty-minute mark, while the seant on the joint housing cured, he sat back against the rover’s front panel and pulled out his datapad. Thirty minutes gone. Eleven kilometers still to cover. The convoy had maybe ninety minutes on him, give or take, and that gap wasn’t getting wider. He had time to read. Not much, but some.

  He pulled up the Interpnetary Heritage and Preservation Act. He had to, since so many things were suddenly bugging him all at once, especially this Act. He’d read sections of it before, enough to know the broad strokes. The Act was the only legal framework applying to archaeological discovery on Mars, ratified by the IAGC, International Astronautical Governance Council, and it was the one thing standing between a significant find and a corporate extraction team with psma cutters.

  Section 4 covered notification protocols. Section 7 covered site preservation requirements. Section 9 covered jurisdictional authority in cases of corporate-government overp.

  He scrolled to Section 12. The enforcement provisions. The part that actually had teeth. Section 12.1 covered penalties for unauthorized site destruction. Section 12.2 covered whistleblower protections for reporting companies. Section 12.3 was a full page of solid bck. Just gone. Every line, every subsection, every word underneath a bck rectangle telling him nothing except someone had decided he didn’t need to know. That no one in his hab or in this rover, needed to know.

  How many other teams on Mars, or heck, how many other people on Earth working on the Mars project, had the same solid bck?

  He stared at it. The thing was, you redacted information to protect something. Sources, methods, ongoing operations, national security considerations. He understood that logic on Earth. He’d signed enough government research agreements to know the drill. But this was a preservation act for a pnet with no living popution, no active military presence, and no ongoing intelligence operations. The enforcement provisions for protecting archaeological sites on Mars had exactly one natural enemy.

  Corporate extraction contracts.

  The only thing worth protecting on Mars from a legal standpoint was archaeological evidence. And the only thing that needed redacting in an archaeological protection w was a process someone didn’t want followed.

  Someone who already knew where to look.

  He looked at the bck rectangle for another few seconds. Then he closed the datapad and checked the seant. Ready. He checked his dash clock. It’d been forty-seven minutes since he’d left the hab unit.

  He looked east across the basin toward the coordinates on his nav dispy. The Tree of Life convoy, if they’d maintained their projected speed, would be somewhere around thirty kilometers out from Site Gemini-4. That’s what it’d been beled. Gemini-4. The fourth site he’d fgged in the Olympus Mons region as potentially significant, yet the only one that had ever fgged back.

  Thirty kilometers for a heavy extraction convoy moving at roughly twenty-five kilometers per hour on this terrain meant just over an hour. Maybe less if they pushed it. He had eleven kilometers left to cover.

  Gonna be close.

  He reassembled the housing cover, torqued the fasteners down by feel, and stood up. His knees registered the compint they always registered after kneeling on regolith in a suit. The rover beeped twice, the system cycling back through its startup check. A low rumble settled into the cabin as the drive system came back online, and the dashboard indicators ran green left to right. He pulled out and accelerated.

  The remaining eleven kilometers took just under fifteen minutes. He kept the speed at forty-five and watched the nav dispy tick down. When the coordinates matched, he slowed the rover to a stop at the basin rim and sat for a moment just looking at it.

  The basin opened up wider here, the terrain dropping into a broad shallow depression roughly four hundred meters across. The walls of it were yered, sediment lines running horizontal in bands of ochre and dark burgundy. A geological record taking a million years or two to write. The floor of the basin was ft, almost unnaturally so compared to the chaos of rock fields he’d crossed to get here. A few scattered boulders at the eastern rim. Wind-carved ridges running southwest to northeast in parallel lines. And in the center of the basin floor, just barely visible from the rover’s elevation, the edge of something not belonging.

  He got out, grabbed his things. Drill. Extractor. Scanner. Pack. Datapad. Tripod. He walked toward it.

  He’d been to Gemini-4 once before, briefly, four days ago, the same surface pass where he’d caught the merkaba and the spiral patterns on his helmet camera te in the survey sweep, light already fading, already behind schedule. He’d taken photos, noted the location, and filed it somewhere between interesting and probably erosion in the back of his mind.

  Nature could do strange things with rock. Erosion moved in predictable directions, water and wind cutting lines that sometimes ran almost parallel, almost straight. Sandstone formations in Utah looked like apartment buildings from the right angle. The Giant’s Causeway in Irend produced hexagonal columns so regur they looked machined. Almost straight lines happened. Close-to-symmetrical shapes happened.

  Almost was doing a lot of work right now.

  Because standing here, in the full basin, the spiral stopped being almost anything. Thirty meters across. Dark red, nearly burgundy against the surrounding rust-colored surface. Carved into the bedrock in a single continuous groove winding inward from the outer edge to a center point without a single interruption. It had exposed itself more since his st visit. Wind erosion pulling the fine surface dust back, or something else, he didn’t know. It sat in the basin floor.

  He crouched at the outer edge and looked it over. The groove was uniform. Not close to uniform. Exactly uniform, the same width and depth for the entire length he could see, the walls of the cut clean and vertical, with no taper, no variation, no evidence of the tool marks you’d expect from any mechanical process he could name. The rock itself was basaltic, dark and dense, and the cut surface had a quality to it, one where smooth wasn’t the right word. Finished, maybe. He pushed the rust-colored dust out of the groove with a brush and looked at the exposed surface underneath. Nothing in the geological record of Mars made cuts like that.

  He stood up and pulled the ground-penetrating radar unit from his pack, set the tripod, and ran the first sweep.

  “Okay,” he said to no one. “Let’s see what you’ve got down there.”

  The GPR returned data in thirty-eight seconds. He pulled it up on the datapad and stared at it. The chamber had moved. Not the chamber. The signal. The EM source that MARCO had been reading at 2.3 kilometers down had shifted. His own unit was now pcing the primary return at 900 meters. That wasn’t the signal relocating. Something had come up. Or the reading at 2.3 kilometers had been wrong from the start, the signal bleeding through rock strata and registering deeper than its true origin. Either way, it was closer than it had been this morning, and closer meant something had changed.

  He ran the sweep a second time. Same result. 900 meters down, directly beneath the spiral. And the GPR was pulling something else now, a secondary signature nested inside the primary return. A shape. Roughly eleven meters long, four meters across, tapered at both ends. The density reading didn’t match basalt, didn’t match any iron-oxide compound common to the region. He ran it against the unit’s onboard database.

  METALLIC ALLOY. COMPOSITION: UNKNOWN. NO COMPARABLE SAMPLE IN DATABASE.

  He ran it a third time. Again, same damn result. Eleven meters long. Four meters across.

  Something’s not right, he thought. He would have scratched his head if it wasn’t for the helmet.

  He packed the GPR, picked up the scanner, and walked east toward the st pce he’d stood on his previous visit. A hundred meters out, just past a low shelf of exposed bedrock, the merkaba sat where he’d left it in his photos.

  Half of it, anyway.

  The western face had eroded down to almost nothing, the edges soft and crumbled, the original form barely readable. The eastern half was different. That side had been sheltered by the rock shelf somehow, protected from the prevailing wind pattern, and it had held. It rose roughly 1.4 meters from the ground, a double tetrahedron in cross-section, the geometry still good enough to make his stomach grow nerves when he looked at it directly.

  The symbols covered the intact face in three horizontal registers. He’d assumed Egyptian on first look, the broad category of it, simir how a non-expert might look at cuneiform and call it scratches. Closer, they weren’t Egyptian. The shapes referenced the same visual vocabury, the same organizational logic of a pictographic writing system, vertical registers, combined symbols, repeated elements suggesting grammar rather than decoration.

  But the specific characters were different. Some looked like hybrids, a familiar form slightly rotated, or stretched, or combined with a second element that had no Egyptian equivalent he could identify. Whatever this was, it hadn’t come from Egypt. Why would it? Unless someone hauled it up from Earth as a gag, which, hell no. That wasn’t what this was.

  He pulled the scanner from his pack and lined up the sensor over the lowest register of glyphs. Then he rested his other hand on the surface of the merkaba to steady himself.

  The current hit him the moment his glove made contact. Not through the glove. The glove didn’t conduct. Whatever came through the merkaba went around the insution entirely, arriving at his palm like it had skipped the material between them, like it had chosen him specifically and the glove was simply not part of the conversation.

  For one second he’d been electrocuted, every nerve in his body saying so at once. Akin to the time as a kid he’d touched the element of a rice cooker with wet fingers. That same full-system wrongness. Except this wasn’t electricity. He knew what electricity felt like. This was something else wearing electricity’s clothes.

  Then the basin was gone. He was standing on grass. Green and dense beneath his boots, and the sky above him was the color of a salmon fillet with a blue undertone pushing through it.

  Warm.

  He could feel warm without a suit, which meant he wasn’t in a suit, which meant this wasn’t real, which his brain noted and then completely failed to act on.

  Domed structures around him in every direction, low and wide, built from a pale stone. To his right, a cathedral. There was no better word for it. It rose two hundred meters at least, tapered at the top, covered in the same register of symbols from the merkaba, but alive here, inid with something catching the salmon light and gave it back in gold. At the top, the tetrahedron, the merkaba.

  He looked past it and higher. A moon hung in the sky. Perfectly round. No, that was no moon. It was too rge, too close. A green atmospheric glow ringed it like a halo. Then the shockwave hit it, striking it from the far side, and for one fraction of a second the entire body cracked along its equator like an egg, and then it didn’t exist anymore. It was just fragments, thousands of them, expanding outward in every direction, and the shockwave of fire preceding them was moving faster than the pieces, and it was moving toward him, and the sky went white, and the cathedral went white, and the grass went white, and—

  He was on his back on the basin floor. The ochre sky was above him. Minus sixty-three degrees. Suit integrity working, all a go. No issues, other than what just happened to his brain.

  The world tilted, and his vision narrowed at the edges. He got his feet under him and walked toward the rover, one step, then another, the world continuing to spin, then the ground came up and that was that.