Preface
PREFACE: The Last Discovery. A.D. 2428- The Valles Marineris Slab excavation site- late in the Martian day.
The dig site was silent now. The others had left hours ago, retreating to their orbiters as the Martian light began to fail. Only Arthur remained on the site- half out of stubbornness, half out of instinct. Something was here and he was close.
He chipped again at the rockface. Shards of crimson scattered into the thin air, catching the last rays of Mars light like whisps of ruby smoke. A grin tugged at the corners of his mouth, that clever smiling mouth invisible under a wiry black moustache. He had heard it, that subtle difference in tone. A hollow echo behind the strike. The stone had given way, just slightly. Arthur paused and listened as the sound of trickling sand and gravel continued to fall and settle.
His grin faded as he looked around the field lab, waiting, half-expecting, to hear the cheer of discovery. But there was nothing. Just the soft hiss of recycled air and the long, crooked shadows stretching over abandoned tools. Mugs of half-drunk coffee. A half-dismantled scanner blinked lazily. His team had long since retired, probably halfway through their second bottle of Sake and demolishing the rehydrated curry back on the orbit-station mess.
He crouched again, brushing the dust aside with one gloved hand. A thin crack had opened in the stone. Geometric, precise, and too perfect to be natural. As he tapped the edge, the crack widened with a dry snap. A small puff of dust lifted into the air, like the artifact itself had just exhaled. A lump rose in Arthurs throat as the dust continued to rise and fall around the crack in the stone, this could only mean one thing.
A breath later…
“Gunther, you there?” Arthur said into the comm on his shoulder, his voice low, and cracking. It had been decades since he’d made such a discovery. Now, staring down at the suggestion of another alien relic, he felt it, that old pressure in his chest. It was not fear, nor excitement but an unsettling coolness. The chill of millennia old spirits peering over his shoulder. Silence reigned unabated and Arthur shivered, he started as the comm cracked into life. “Gunther here,” came the response.
The scientist shook off the freezing mist of ghosts and paralysing thought obstructions. The scientist paused his mind and drew in one deep meditative breath before exhaling purposely. He leaned out through the quavering threshold of the temporary field lab as it shook in the evening wind. Glancing hurriedly about the ruins he nervously stroked his sparse black beard peering into the dim afternoon. Through the haze, he spotted movement among the fractured stone. Gunther.
The figure on the perimeter moved with a predator’s grace, unhurried, measured, and always watching. To anyone else, he looked like a man out for a stroll. Arthurs experience told him otherwise. There was a precision in that gait, a readiness in the posture. Even silhouetted in the haze, Gunther looked coiled. Arthur exhaled, thumbed off the comm, and turned back toward the slab.
“Still watching my back,” Arthur murmured, casting one last glance toward the dark silhouette on the ridge before turning back to the excavation. In the span of mere minutes, the light had changed. The thin Martian air carried a peculiar warmth now, casting long, amber shafts through the flapping seams of the field lab. The fissure he’d uncovered had widened further a pinkish glow emanated from beneath the sand surrounding it. The shape beneath was now unmistakable: a perfect rectangle, its edges crisp but unnatural. Dust curled, glowing in the splinters of pinkish light as it puffed from the perimeter. With each breath-like pulse, it was as if the artifact were exhaling, alive beneath the stone.
Arthur leaned close, voice low but steady as he keyed the comm. “Gunther; we have a slab here, my friend. I’m going to begin extraction. If you feel like rejoining me, now is the time,” another beat of silence, then Gunther’s familiar baritone crackled back. “On my way,” Arthur exhaled at the news and thumbed off the mic, re-entering the lab. He trudged across the rocky floor and stepped back into the trench, the dust still swirled gently from that breath-like exhale. Kneeling before his excavation, Arthur slid a small plasma blade from his belt and began to trace along the cracks. The stone hissed in protest; a thin plume of vapour lifted from the incision as if the Martian regolith itself was reluctant to give up its secret. Bit by bit, the scientist pried the chips of rusty crust away.
Then he saw it…
Smooth. Obsidian dark, like crystalline ink. Just a sliver at first but unmistakable. The surface was unlike anything natural, unlike anything fabricated. It did not reflect the Martian light so much as swallow it, turning even the waning sun into a pale reflection upon its surface.
Arthur brushed the void like surface gently with the back of his glove. The slab was warm but not sun-warmed, internally warm, as if it possessed a core or system. Martian glyphs curled across its surface in sharp, angular lines, some etched in tendril like patterns, some raised like serpentine veins. They pulsed faintly with a violet hue, dim as a heartbeat beneath skin. Arthur’s throat tightened. He reached for his wrist console and activated the field scanner. Instantly, the holographic display flared and then fuzzed out, overloaded by the data signature. Symbols, gibberish, code, or language all poured across the screen and then vanished just as fast. A cold sweat trickled down Arthur’s spine. He tapped the recorder.
“Subject: Martian Slab. Location: Valles Marineris, Sector Sixteen. Condition: semi-buried, active glyphs. Resonance pulse consistent with similar Phobos artifacts. Slab material… unknown composite. Signature indicates…” He paused.
“…indicates recent activation.”
He looked again at the symbols. One glowed brighter than the rest. A curve that intersected a triangle, a glyph he had seen before.
Genesis.
A sharp shout echoed through the canyon beyond, a raw and human cry of alarm. Arthur snapped upright, his sweat froze on his brow.
The scientist scrambled hurriedly from the trench, dust shedding from his knees. As he cleared the flap of the field lab and stumbled into the dusk, the source of the noise came into view. Beyond the perimeter ruins, dark shapes were moving fast, shadows against shadows, creeping low across the rocks with weapons drawn and armour patched together from salvaged gear. They bore no insignias. They wore no comms lights. Pirates.
Gunther burst from his position crouched behind a fallen red-stone pillar.
He ambushed the interlopers with brutal efficiency, he dropped the first with a bone-crunching strike, pivoting to fire two clean shots into the next. Arthur watched in stunned silence as his assistant became the soldier he once was, fluid, sharp and unrelenting. The pirates came at him in waves, shouting orders in a code Arthur didn’t recognise. Gunther fought on, his blade flashing red in the last light of the Martian sunset. Another pirate fell with a gurgled scream. Then a fifth. But another group still, surged from the shadows and the assistant caught a blaster shot in the side. The burly man stumbled. “Arthur!” Gunther roared, blood on his teeth. “Go!”
Arthur hesitated for just a second, but Gunther’s glare snapped him out of it. He turned and sprinted back to the trench, heart thundering. He glared painedly at the partly recovered slab. The archaeologist slid down beside it, reached for the beacon remote and triggered the servo droid. The machine stirred from standby behind the lab wall, unfolded like a tracked-crab, and clicked its way toward him. Arthur gritted his teeth and grunted as he slid the slab, still warm, still pulsing, onto the droids back harness. “Go for the flyer Roy, I’ll see you there in a minute!” he barked at the servo. Roy just bleeped and clicked his response trundling away with the slab secured on his back.
Racing back towards the lab airlock, Arthur yanked open a supply locker and pulled free a thermal charge. This was not standard-issue, this one was handmade, precise and effective. Gunther engineered them for quicker clearing of debris fields. Arthur twisted the dial and armed it, he set the timer for sixty seconds, and wedged it deep inside a scanning rig. “Sorry, old girl,” he muttered, patting the side of the scanner terminal.
Outside, another scream rose into the night, this one, more pained. Arthur didn’t look from his intended path.
The lumbering scientist sprinted after Roy through the swirling dust, and angled himself toward the concealed flyer tucked into a cliffside hollow. The sleek flyer was half-covered by a thermal camo tarp and low Martian brush. The servo droid reached it first, and activated the ramp with a coded ping. Arthur was right behind Roy, diving into the cockpit and yanking the hatch shut.
As the flyer’s systems powered up, he cast one last glance through the viewport.
Gunther was still fighting. Still standing. Just barely.
The lab vanished behind them as the flyer lifted into the sky, then flared white in the distance as the charge went off. The explosion lit the canyon in a bloom of fire, flattening tents, crushing gear, and erasing all trace of the dig.
Arthur didn’t breathe again until Mars was a shrinking crescent behind him.
He tapped the console once, opening a narrowband encrypted link.
“This is Maya,” he said hoarsely.
“Slab recovered,” a stream of tears rolled from his large dark eyes.
