The Rings of Mars

You can’t run away from me, Jack,” I said into my helmet mic. “I can radio base and get your suit coordinates.”

“Screw you, Malcolm,” he said, then refused to talk again. I followed his trail and tried not to think about why my oldest and closest friend in two worlds, and his robotic digger Nellie, had left me far behind.

Instead, I concentrated on perfecting the loping stride Jack had taught me months before. It was an awkward, unnatural rhythm, but he assured me it was the most efficient method. And of the humans on Mars, no one had covered more ground than Jack.

Tiny dervishes lifted from the dust churned by Nellie’s tracks, swirling on a delicate breeze, but my passage was enough to cause their collapse. Everything on Mars seemed ancient and tired, even the wind.

Jack’s boot prints—wide apart and shallow—were on a straight course and easy to follow, but Nellie’s tracks peeled off in strange directions many times. She must’ve sniffed out oxide-rich gravel patches to melt in her electrolysis furnace, but no matter how far she went, the robot’s path always returned to Jack’s. I followed their trail and tried to rejoice in being one of the few humans to ever see Mars like this, but my regrets persisted.

Against all reason and expectation, Jack thought himself more colonist than explorer and was willing to trample anyone in that pursuit. If devious resourcefulness was typical of Martians, then Jack was a good one.

An alarm squawked in my ears, surprising me enough that I stumbled and skidded to a floundering stop.

RADIATION ALERT! RADIATION ALERT! ETA, 47 MINUTES. SEEK IMMEDIATE SHELTER.

Forty-seven minutes? My suit’s magnetized outer skin was protection against the ambient radiation, but not huge solar flares. I fought growing panic as I turned in circles, looking for a cave, stone outcropping or even a boulder, but saw only dust and scattered rocks. The nearest ridge line was blurry with distance. Anger also grew in the wake of my fear. Nellie provided our only radiation protection, and Jack had taken her. They were probably digging in already, and I had to find them if I wanted to survive. I started running.

“Malcolm? Jack? This is base, do you copy?” I could hear the tension in the communication’s officer’s voice.

“I read you, Courtney,” I said, my voice jarred by running. “Why so little warning? I thought we were supposed to get it days ahead of time?”

“I don’t know, but you and Jack had better get to shelter. There’s no way we can get a truck or the dirigible to you fast enough.”

“I’m trying,” I said and signed off.

Then Jack’s voice crackled into my helmet. “Malcolm! We’re coming back for you. Follow our trail to meet us and run!”

I ran faster.

Their dust cloud was visible long before I could resolve shapes, but they kept coming and soon Nellie’s squat hexagonal form appeared at the head of her rooster-tail dust plume. I didn’t see Jack. Five minutes later, I staggered and gasped to a stop next to the robot as Jack climbed down from her back. The creep never mentioned we could ride her.

She trundled back and forth over a large flat spot, then, finding a suitable location, jolted to a stop. Her treaded drive units separated and rotated on their mountings, raising the shoulder-high robot into the air on its toes like a three-footed ballerina. Panels slid open between the tracks, revealing large spinning cutters that folded out and locked into place. Nellie sank rapidly into the ground as sand jetted skyward from tubes on her back.

The alarm sounded again, this time giving us less than twenty minutes. I glanced at Jack, but he stared at the robot’s interface panel on his sleeve and said nothing.

Nellie disappeared below the lip of the hole and within a couple of minutes, the dirt stopped flying. Jack tapped out a few more commands and a cloud of dust poofed from the hole. He ran to look inside, then pulled an aluminum rod from his pack. With several twists and pulls, it became a telescoping ladder with rungs folding out from each side. He dropped it into the dark excavation and climbed down, motioning for me to follow.

I peered over the edge just as Jack opened Nellie’s top hatch and disappeared inside. I was confused, because there wasn’t room for us both, but followed him down and through. Once inside I understood. Nellie had split in two, with her upper half forming the airlock and her lower part a larder and mini-lab. The pieces were connected by a telescoping post in the center and mottled gray plastic surrounded us, sagging in pleats like a discarded skirt. Jack had designed her well.

As I dogged the hatch behind me, Jack flipped a switch, and Nellie started inflating the plastic envelope with oxygen she had collected through her rock melting electrolysis procedure. Air pushed the big plastic bag open until it tightened against the dirt and rock walls, creating a fifteen-foot-diameter by seven-foot-tall pressurized donut-shaped habitat.

“We’ll leave our outer suits here,” Jack said, indicating where we stood in the donut’s hole. “Use nose plugs until we’re through the second seal.”

When the status light turned green, Jack released his helmet seal with an equalizing pop. I did the same and held my breath until my nose filters were in place, then started breathing in through my nose and out through my mouth, a routine everyone on Mars had mastered within the first few days.

“Can we get a comm link down here?” I asked, while loosening the seals on my excursion suit. “How will we know when the radiation storm is over?”

Jack ignored me as he removed his suit’s radiation skin, leaving only the biomaintenance layer, or what he called million-dollar long johns. The nano-plied material absorbed moisture, adjusted body temperature and used a powerful elastic netting to maintain the skin’s surface tension at about a third of Earth normal. Only the helmet held pressurized air. They were extremely efficient, but they fit too snugly, and mine was already chafing in sensitive spots.

We slipped through two overlapping seals to enter the main chamber and I was surprised by the noise from Nellie’s fans. She was pumping and filtering enough air to maintain half Earth normal pressure. Coupled with the heat she was generating to warm the burrow, it must be a huge drain on her batteries.

“So how long will Nellie’s batteries let us stay down here?”

Jack didn’t answer, but opened a flap, pulled a long clear tub from Nellie’s guts and looked at the water sloshing inside.

“Looks like she collected about half a liter,” I said. “Is that good or bad?”

He still didn’t respond.

“We’ll be stuck down here for hours, or maybe even days. How long are you going to keep up this childish silent treatment?”

He turned to glare at me. The dim light provided by Nellie’s lamps gave him a menacing appearance.

“Shut the hell up, Malcolm.”

I wasn’t going to leave it alone. This trip would be my last opportunity to see him face-to-face for years, or if his present state was any indicator, the rest of my life.

“You did this to yourself; why are you blaming me?” I yelled over the fan noise.

We’d been best friends since our sophomore year at Purdue and he’d never in fifteen years been so angry at me. I hadn’t caused the board to order him home, but I had supported their decision. To Jack, it was the same thing.

He glared at me for a second and then moved around the donut where I couldn’t see him. I followed. When he lowered himself to the floor against the outer wall, I sat down facing him, making sure he knew I wasn’t giving up.

“I warned you this would happen,” I said. “I tried to help you.”

“Did you ever consider—for even a second—that I knew what I was doing?”

“Well, yes, but—”

“And I wanted to take this last walk alone,” he said, barely audible above the fan noise. “I invited you to come on every walking trip I took, and you always turned me down. Why now?”

Because you didn’t invite me this trip, I thought, but didn’t say aloud. Jack could disable the locator on his excursion suit and with Nellie’s help, easily hide until the Earth-Mars cycler window passed. That would give him an extra six months.

“Because this will be our last chance to do this together,” I said. “You’ve been telling me for a year that I hadn’t seen the real Mars. Now is your chance to show me.”

He scrambled toward me on all fours, stopping inches from my face, close enough for me to smell his stale sweat. “Together? Go to hell, Malcolm. I wanted you to see what I’d found, because you were my friend. But your job and that stinking corporation are more important to you than anything else.”

I shoved him out of my face. “Bull! I busted my tail to get you up here. I pulled strings and called in favors. Because you are my friend and I knew you would love it here, but you screwed it up. That stinking corporation flew you to Mars and is paying you a salary to find mineral deposits big enough to justify building a permanent colony. You need satellites and robot flyers for that. Not even a hot jock geologist like you can do it wandering aimlessly around the surface.”

He shook his head. “You’re a planetologist, for God’s sake. One of the first in history to actually walk on another world and yet you’ve never even seen it.”

“I spend every day studying this planet. I go out in the field—”

“Don’t give me that crap,” he said. “You fly to a spot, get out and walk around for a few hours, then come back to a nice cozy little office. You don’t know this planet.”

“Well, here I am. Show me.”

He shook his head and again moved around to the opposite side.

I gave up and leaned back against the curved wall. My muscles ached from the unaccustomed workout, but the cool Martian soil behind the plastic felt good against my throbbing head.

I didn’t remember falling asleep, but I woke stiff and cold to the sounds of Jack rummaging through supplies in Nellie’s larder. I sat up with a groan. He tossed me a nutrition bar and a water bag.

“It’s morning and the radiation warning’s over. We’re leaving.”

We emerged under a sky thick with brilliant stars. I almost made a nasty comment about it not being morning, but was stunned into silence. One couldn’t see anything like this through Earth’s atmosphere, even out in the mountains and at the base, work and safety lights diminished the brilliance. Man always had to leave the cities to see the stars. That hadn’t changed.

Jack ignored me and watched Nellie struggle from her hole like some cybernetic land crab. My helmet prevented me from looking up for very long. I wished I could remove it and see that sky without the reflections and scratches of my faceplate, to feel the soft breezes and smell the air, but we never could. Someday humans might feel the Martian wind on their faces, but it wouldn’t be me or Jack and it wouldn’t be the same Mars.

Dawn came quickly in the thin atmosphere and while I watched, the stars faded and the black-and-gray landscape bloomed purple and orange. I’d seen two Martian sunrises outside the base, and both had been in passing while loading trucks for field excursions. Never had I taken the time to actually experience dawn on our new world. Not like this.

“Thanks, Jack,” I said. “If you show me nothing else, that sunrise was worth the trip.”

“It’s always been here.”

Once the anemic white sun peeked over the hills, we started east, this time slowly enough for me to keep up.

A few hours later, after Nellie had once again topped off her oxygen tanks, we descended a long grade into a deep, narrow canyon. The wind picked up, showering us with blowing sand and the occasional dust devil. I marveled at the simple beauty of the untouched stone surrounding us. The canyon walls were painted by purple shadows, but where the sun struck the sides, bright bloody reds and sandy whites sprang into stark and sudden brilliance.

We rounded some rocks and Jack stopped. I stopped too. Ten or twelve black twisted shapes stood alone in the middle of the broad canyon floor. The largest stood over ten feet tall, with arms stretching toward us and others reaching to the sky. My pulse raced and I made myself move forward. They were black stone. Some were pitted, porous and a few polished to an almost mirror finish. I could see that some of their lengths had been recently uncovered, evidence of Jack’s previous visits.

“Basalt? With the surrounding soft stone eroded away?”

“Maybe they’re Martians,” Jack said.

“They do look like tormented souls, frozen in their misery. The lava must’ve squeezed though some tight spaces, fast and under extreme pressure to form that way.”

“Odd, isn’t it?” he said.

His tone made me turn to look. He was staring down into a shallow depression between the figures, then turned toward me. His haunted expression made a chill crawl up my back. For the first time in my life, Jack frightened me.

“I found something, Malcolm. Something important.”

I stared at him, surprised and waiting, but he didn’t elaborate. “Well? What did you find?”

“I’m trying to decide if I want to show you or not,” he said.

That stunned me. Did Jack’s distrust cut that deep? But even if it did, how could anyone find something important on Mars and not share it with the rest of humanity?

“What the hell does that mean?” I said.

“Right now, I’m in control. When you realize what I’ve found, you’ll try to take over. I don’t want that. I want you to remember that you’re my friend.”

The implication frightened me. Could his find be so important that it would cause a schism between us larger than my agreeing to send him home? I said the only thing I could say. “Of course, I’m your friend. I can’t forget that.”

He shook his head and said, “I’m not so sure.”

When he started walking, Nellie and I followed, but I was frustrated and worried.

Our Mars base had been continuously occupied for nearly three years, but we’d found nothing surprising. At least nothing eye-popping enough to goad MarsCorp into building a permanent colony. We’d proved we could live here, but it was expensive and the coolness aspect was wearing off back home. We needed a “Holy Crap” factor. If Jack had found that and was keeping it to himself, I’d beat him to a pulp.

He wouldn’t hesitate to tell me if he’d found a huge underground aquifer or a large platinum deposit. So he’d found something momentous. Was it some kind of moss or lichen living under the sand? Or a fossil of some long-dead plant or animal? I itched to question him, to threaten or coerce him into telling me, but knew that wouldn’t work with Jack. He’d tell me or he wouldn’t, and nothing I said or did at this point would change that.

By midafternoon we came to a low ridge. We were almost on top of it before I realized it was the ejecta blanket from an ancient crater. I followed him up the gentle slope and looked down on a chaotic scene.

The crater floor was covered with boot prints, Nellie’s tracks and piles of stone that formed a ring, easily a hundred yards across. I had a sinking feeling. Jack had obviously arranged the stones.

“Wow, Martian crop circles?”

He ignored me and followed the rim until he and Nellie turned into a narrow opening where the crater wall had collapsed. Their past traffic had packed the fall into a hard ramp that led down to the floor. As we descended, I saw a hole surrounded by darker, finely spread sand. I recognized the robot’s handiwork. Jack had slept there at some point.

He went directly to the hole, mounted a collapsible ladder already inside and disappeared into the dark interior.

My excitement grew as I followed, nearly falling off the ladder twice in my haste to get to the bottom. About halfway down, the hole opened into the upside-down mushroom shape where Nellie’s inflatable shelter had once expanded.

“Careful,” Jack said. “There’s a big hole in the floor.”

I stepped off the ladder and in the dim light could see the bottom littered with gravel and several large discarded bags made from rope and a cut-up plastic tarp. I turned on my helmet lamp and saw a large hole in the floor, nearly two yards in diameter just a few feet from the ladder. Wispy steam floated from inside. I looked up to ask Jack why, but he was gone. I spun around and saw a large opening in one wall. Light flickered inside.

“Jack?”

“In the tunnel. This will be easier to explain if you see it.”

The tunnel was narrow and just tall enough to clear my helmet, but ran about ten feet, then teed left and right. I stopped. The wall before me curved and twinkled in my headlamp. When I moved the light, I saw parts of the surface were translucent. Blues, grays and whites flowed together, making odd shadows. I moved slowly along the tunnel, one side of which was the strange material, until it opened into a small chamber. Only then did I realize I was looking at a large cylinder that disappeared into the ceiling and floor. Jack waited on the far side.

“Jack. Please tell me you didn’t make this.”

“Nope.”

“What’s it made of? Have you analyzed it yet?”

“Water ice,” he said.

My hammering heart slowed and I relaxed a little. Of course, it would be something natural. For a moment I’d envisioned beautiful stone pillars holding up the roof of an ancient Martian temple. But then I realized, even if it didn’t match my wild imagination, he’d still made an amazing find. I touched it again.

“There’s so much. How deep do you think it goes?”

“Nellie estimates another forty feet or so beyond this.”

“Holy crap.”

“They’re all that deep. All thirty-six of them.”

“I don’t . . . thirty-six what?”

Jack dragged his hand along the ice and moved to face me. “Thirty-six ice pillars. I’ve only uncovered five, but those stones up top show the pattern Nellie found. These five are all perfectly smooth and exactly the same diameter. And I’d bet they are all the same depth too.”

I stared at him. A lump formed in my throat and I felt a weight on my chest. I was a scientist. I couldn’t let myself believe the conclusions my mind formed. I wanted something like this too bad. It had to be studied.

“It has to be some natural formation,” I said with an overly dry mouth. “Nature does strange things, like those creepy basalt shapes.”

He shrugged. “I’m not saying otherwise. But these things are also equally spaced, thirty-five forming a ring, with another one in the center.”

I turned and rushed back out to the hole in the floor.

“Is this one of them too?” I asked, dreading his response.

“Yeah,” Jack said and came up behind me. “Nellie sensed the water ice and stopped here to dig. I wouldn’t have thought to even look back in the hole after we were done except she’d filled her nearly empty water tanks with this single dig and threw extra ice out onto the surface to evaporate. That never happened before.”

“And the hole is—”

“Because it’s sublimating. The light hits it during the day. I tried covering it up, but that created a heated pocket and made it worse.”

My hands shook. If his claim was true, Jack had stumbled across what might be the largest single find in human history . . . and he was letting it vaporize. “You’re digging the others out?”

“I’m not exposing them to the light. They haven’t lost anything from their diameters.”

My respiration peaked so rapidly an alarm sounded in my helmet as the suit adjusted my gas levels.

“Jack! We . . . we . . . have no idea how old these things are or what the open air will do to them. We have no right. We’re not qualified to make this kind of decision for the entire human race.”

“Why not?” Jack said. “No one on Earth has ever encountered alien artifacts, so we’re the new experts.”

I had a panicky feeling about losing more of this material. I had to stop him. But I took a deep breath and tried to focus. Jack wasn’t an idiot, so I needed to listen to what he was saying. I entered the tunnel and checked the ambient temperature inside. Minus sixty-three Celsius, which might be fine since it wasn’t in direct sunlight.

“We don’t know what’s in that ice,” I said. “Maybe there were sculptures, or carved instructions or some kind of microorganisms. Maybe even cold-suspended Martian DNA. We could be losing hundreds of painfully preserved Martian species.”

“This one was an accident. And it’s too late to save it.”

“Maybe not. We could fill it back up with dirt, then call it in and get all of mankind’s resources behind us.”

“And lose them forever to MarsCorp?”

I paused, not sure what he meant. “No one will take this away from you, Jack. You’ll still get all the credit.”

He slapped a dusty glove against my helmet, making my ears ring. “Credit? You just don’t get it, do you? I don’t care about getting credit. This is a message. It’s a puzzle and I want to figure it out. I feel like I’m so close.”

The swat on my helmet made me furious, but I held back. I still wanted to convince him it was right before I reported this to the base. “You’ll still be able—”

“No!” he said and bumped his visor against mine, putting his face as close to me as possible. “If we report this, MarsCorp will turn it into a Martian Disneyland. Most of those idiots on Earth care about nothing but making money, so this will become a cash cow vacation spot.”

“Oh, come on. You don’t think—”

“There’s dignity in this place, Malcolm. It’s a serious message, aimed directly at humanity, not some damned tourist attraction.”

“A message? You don’t know that. If these were put here by some other intelligence, it could have just been a water cache.”

“It’s a message designed for us. What better way to signal Earthlings coming to Mars? We’d be looking for water. Even if this is several million years old, and they didn’t know what we would be like, they would still know any species coming from Earth would need water.”

I swallowed and tried to control my building frustration. “You may be right, but we have tools at the base to protect these artifacts while we study them. If there’s a message, we’ll find it. I’m going to call it in.”

He stared at me, but there was no anger in his eyes, only cold determination.

“I have to, Jack.”

He nodded inside his helmet and then grabbed both of my arms in an iron grip. “I knew I couldn’t trust you with this, so I guess we’ll do it the hard way,” he said. “Into the hole.”

“What?” I was confused.

He started pushing me backward toward the opening in the floor. “I don’t want to damage your suit, but, if you don’t jump down into that hole, I’ll throw you in.”

“Oh, come on! You can’t—”

“Now, Malcolm!”

I turned my torso enough so I could look down into the hole. The ice floor was easily twenty feet down, much too deep to jump out, even with Martian gravity.

“Jack, don’t be—”

He gave me a little shove and I staggered backward toward the hole. I had no choice but to jump or would have fallen in butt first. I landed on the slick surface with a bone-jarring thump, but kept my feet.

He stared down at me, still wearing that cold, blank expression. I considered the possibility that my best friend was about to kill me. It would be easy enough and hard to prove.

“Jack, what—”

“I doubt that you can contact base from down there, but I’ll call in your location. Your MarsCorp lackeys will be here to rescue you in a couple of hours. And, boy, will they be surprised at your spectacular find.”

Before I could answer, he disappeared from view.

He was wrong. Reception was bad down in the hole, but I did make contact with the base. My call generated equal amounts of excitement and incredulity. I wished I’d thought to record video, but hadn’t planned on reporting from a hole within a hole. I could tell by their carefully phrased responses that they only half believed me, but would hold their skepticism in check until they could see it themselves.

They also gave me bad news. A large dust storm was rolling in and would prevent launching a dirigible. Courtney said they were sending the ground trucks immediately, but it would be four hours minimum, depending on the storm’s severity.

The link faded into static. I looked up and could only see pale powder spiraling into the hole. Sandstorms on Mars carried millions of tons of the talc-fine dust that could easily bury me. I pulled the climbing axe from my belt and tried to hack hand- and footholds into the hard-packed wall.

Ten minutes and three handholds later, I paused to check my oxygen usage. Five hours and twenty minutes at my current rate. I had to slow my breathing.

I looked up and saw only dust swirling in my helmet lamp, then caught a metallic glint. Jack had not taken the ladder. I fumbled the line from my utility pouch and tied on two chisels about ten inches apart. On my fifth try, the makeshift bolo did not come back. I pulled and tugged. The ladder jerked suddenly and sailed into the hole, hitting my shoulder on the way down. I cursed, then held my breath waiting for my suit alarms to tell me I had a tear, but had been lucky.

Once on the surface, with wind driven sand pelting my suit, I had a decision to make. I could wait down in the hole, safe from the ravaging storm, and probably die as my air ran out. Or I could go find Jack. The wind was steady and mild at the moment, but even tired old Mars could drive abrasive grit at 200 mph on the open plains. My suit’s tough outer skin was all one piece and could stand that abuse for a long time, but my helmet seal was at risk.

I pulled the aluminum ladder from the hole and attached an antenna wire. Much to my surprise, I established an immediate satellite link through the static-charged dust. I called Jack and got no response. I tried to get his suit’s transponder location and failed. So I called base.

“The trucks had to stop and wait for better visibility,” Courtney said through static. “You need to hunker down and conserve your air until they arrive.”

My tank level read less than five hours remaining. If the trucks started moving now and had no more delays, they might make it to me in time. My decision was now easy. I had to find Nellie.

“Can you contact Jack for me?”

“He called in to give us your location about ten minutes after your first call. He wanted to make sure we could find you. But we haven’t been able to contact him since. And his transponder stopped transmitting right after that.”

The bastard dumped me in a hole so he could run off and hide? It made no sense. Even if I died, my suit transponder would eventually lead rescuers to me and the pillars. His secret was out. Why let me die?

“Can you give me a line between my position and his last call so I’ll have a direction?”

“Sure,” she said. The static was worsening.

If Jack didn’t want to be found, he would have changed course immediately after his call, but it was a starting place. If I could get close enough, maybe he would hear my call. Staying here and waiting wasn’t a real option.

“I just sent the coordinates from Jack’s last call and his last five transponder pings. I had no idea he’d covered so much ground on his walkabouts.”

“How do you know that?” I asked.

“I’m looking at a map of his ping locations for all of his excursions. I have one for everyone who—”

“Can you send me that map?” If I could see where Jack had been, I might get an idea where he could hide.

Courtney paused. “Sure. It might take several tries with this bad connection, but it’s on the way.”

“Thanks,” I said and started to sign off.

“Malcolm? Why did Jack leave you there?”

“I pissed him off.”

“He’s lost it,” she said, with obvious anger in her voice. “Well, if he wasn’t already going home, he would be now. Stay put. The ground trucks are moving again, but slowly. We’re also rigging a flier to bring you some O2 canisters.”

The robotic fliers were more like powered gliders with long fragile wings. They wouldn’t get one even close to me in this wind.

“Don’t waste the flier, Courtney. I’m going to try and find Jack. Malcolm out.”

I broke the connection and pulled up the ping map on my helmet’s HUD screen. Thousands of random dots covered a topographical map with location numbers on a grid. The widely scattered dots made my eyes hurt, but I could see some patterns. Many dots were arranged in snaky lines, obviously sent while he was on the move, but there were also heavy clumps representing locations where he’d spent time.

I zoomed the view out and as the dots converged, I saw it. Most were in clumps that formed a pattern. I added in a red dot for my location and it appeared atop one of the heavy traffic clusters.

The wind buffeted me, some gusts threatening to knock me down, and dust had drifted around my feet, but I ignored it as my pulse raced and my heart thudded. I instructed my suit’s computer to ignore the noise data and only chart those points where twenty or more appeared in close proximity. Seventeen clumps appeared, evenly dispersed along a broad arc. I told the computer to consider each cluster a single point and extrapolate the pattern based on the existing group.

The new pattern formed a ring nearly forty miles across and contained thirty-five points. The ring of pillars Jack had marked in the crater contained thirty-five with one in the middle. The center of the large ring fell in the canyon where we’d seen the basalt formations earlier that morning.

Even though his actions might kill me, I had to appreciate Jack’s devious mind this time. He’d shown me these ice pillars as bait, to get me excited and keep me and the base off his back while he explored the real find. And this was his last trip before being sent home, so it had to be now. I fixed the canyon location on my map, pulled the patching tape from my repair kit and wrapped my helmet seal for extra protection, then started walking.

I carried the ladder with me, using it both as antenna and a pole to feel out terrain made invisible by the thick whirling dust. I also kept broadcasting directly to Jack. “I know you’re in the center with your Martian friends and I’m on my way to meet you. I need oxygen.” As an added incentive, I also said, “This is encrypted, but my transponder is still broadcasting.”

An hour into my trek, Courtney called to tell me their specially rigged flier had crashed. With a voice strained by grief, she rattled off the standard oxygen conservation litany and again begged me to stay put. I told her I could find Jack, then signed off and kept walking.

When the one-hour oxygen warning dinged, I checked my position and realized I couldn’t make it to the basalt formations, even if I’d guessed Jack’s location correctly. The wide plain between canyon and crater would have been safe enough to allow running, with only a slight chance of falling, but my slow, cautious advance through the storm had killed me. I tossed the ladder aside and started running.

Less than a minute later, my radio crackled to life with Jack’s voice. “Turn on your emergency strobe and stop moving, Malcolm. According to your transponder blip on my map, I should be right on you.”

I stopped and fumbled for the strobe switch on my helmet, but before I could flip it, Nellie materialized out of the dust and nearly ran over me as she shot past. I turned as she skidded to a halt amid scattered sand and gravel.

Tears formed, blurring my vision, and warm relief flowed through me like very old Scotch. Jack jumped down from Nellie’s back and started detaching oxygen canisters from her side.

“This whole Jack arriving like the cavalry to save Malcolm thing is getting kinda old,” he said as he turned me around, opened my pack and switched out my tanks.

I swallowed, trying to clear the lump in my throat. “Thanks,” I said. “Did you hear my calls to you?”

“Yeah, but I started back as soon as I realized your MarsCorp friends were going to let you die.”

“So I was right? The basalt formations are at the center of a larger pattern?”

“Yeah,” he said with a grim expression. “How’d you know?”

After I explained, he shook his head and sighed. “I knew I should’ve disconnected that damned transponder a long time ago. Not that it matters now. I had my chance and I blew it.”

Jack had come back for me, risking his opportunity to be the first person to see the big find. He wanted a chance to solve the puzzle, to discern the message he perceived in those formations. Helping him still do that was the least I could do in thanks.

“What’s down there?” I said. “In the canyon?”

“I don’t know yet, but Nellie says it’s nearly thirty feet square and the part I’ve uncovered so far is flat, smooth basalt. Those weird shapes you saw are attached to it like sprues to an injection molded part.”

“Like it was molded or formed in place?”

He nodded.

Huge and square, I thought and tried to dampen my new excitement. “Amazing. So you haven’t exposed anything that will melt?”

He laughed, for the first time since learning he was going home. “No, basalt doesn’t melt easily. But there’s something else.”

I waited and could see him smiling through the visor. “Well?”

“There’s a pattern in the face I uncovered. Thirty-five cylindrical pockets arranged in a ring, with one in the center. According to Nellie’s analysis, the translucent material at the bottom of each hole is diamond.”

“What could that mean?”

“I have no idea. I had to stop and come rescue you.”

It was my turn to smile. I held up a finger and called base.

“Sorry for the scare, Courtney,” I said. “But I found Jack. Nellie is working fine, so we have plenty of air and are not in any danger now.”

“Thank God, Malcolm. Meteorology says this storm could last another two or three days. Are you sure you have enough supplies for that long?”

Jack cut in on the conversation, reassuring her we were going to be fine.

“You’re in a heap of trouble, Jack! And I still don’t have a transponder signal for you.”

He opened his mouth, but I cut him off. “Actually, Courtney, I may be losing my transponder signal too. We’re about to go into an area that seems to play hell with most of our communications gear. So don’t worry if you don’t hear from us for a few days.”

“I don’t think—”

“We’ll meet up with the investigation team at the dig site in two or three days, or whenever this storm lets up.”

“But—”

“Malcolm and Jack signing off,” I said and killed the connection.

Jack looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “If you could find that pattern, they can too. Besides, they have enough information to know what direction you were going.”

“Yeah, but we could head north for a few hours and cut off my transponder, then enter the canyon from the north end. That should mess them up for awhile. It may only give us a few days. Probably only until the storm ends. Will that be enough time?”

He shrugged, always a strange gesture in an excursion suit. “Maybe, but if you do this, there is a good chance you’ll be sent home too.”

“I wouldn’t miss this for anything,” I said and started running.

We dug in for the night near the canyon’s north end and awoke to a sickly yellowish-pink dawn. The weak sun struggled to break through the haze, but the storm had abated and the winds died, so the timer was running. If our luck ran out, our fellow explorers could find us within a matter of hours.

Ninety minutes after breaking camp, we stood atop the basalt block. Using Nellie’s vacuum system, we removed the dust accumulated from the storm revealing a smooth polished surface, with the now-familiar pattern of holes in the center of the top surface.

“How odd that they’d make this finely polished cube, yet have these weird, gnarly sprues marring its perfection,” I said.

“It does look to be part of the formation process,” Jack said. “Maybe they just didn’t care about the sprues.”

“Yeah, but why these holes? Why their fascination with this particular pattern?”

He knelt down and aimed his helmet light into the holes. They were the diameter of a golf ball and about a foot deep, and, as he’d earlier reported, their bottoms were glassy and clear. “I don’t know, but I’d sure as hell like to find out.”

“Looks like we need some kind of key,” I said. “And if we had a key, I wonder what it would do?”

Jack stared at the holes, occasionally poking his gloved finger in one. “Maybe we could make a key.”

“You know,” I said, pausing, not sure if I should voice my latest thought. “The other holes are filled with water ice. Maybe . . .”

Jack almost leapt to his feet. “It couldn’t hurt to try!”

Of course, that comment left me feeling more than a little uneasy, but there was no stopping him once he got started. Forty minutes later I dubiously examined Jack’s kludge work. He’d originally wanted to build a manifold of tubes to feed water into each hole evenly, but I had stopped him when I realized he’d have to cannibalize most of Nellie’s internal plumbing to realize the contraption.

We instead covered the pattern with a shallow tent made from extra sheet plastic, precariously sealed to the surrounding surface with our entire stock of suit repair putty. A hole in the center was cinched up tight around a tube attached to Nellie’s tanks. Jack assured me that if we pumped water in fast enough, it would fill the holes and freeze before evaporating. I wasn’t convinced, but we had nothing to lose, except of course most of our water.

“What if we do open the lock? Or activate something? What if we break it?”

Jack looked up at me, his exasperation obvious even through the dusty visor. “Make up your mind, Malcolm. We’re never going to get another shot at this. It’s us—right now—or we forget about it. They are going to be pissed enough to ship us back home and instead of us figuring this out, some Martian Mickey Mouse will build an enchanted castle around it.”

He was right. I had made my decision and sealed my allegiance. “Let’s try it.”

We stood on a pile of excavated dirt at the cube’s edge and pumped the water in under pressure. Wispy vapor curls immediately revealed the gaps in our crude seal. The tent filled and tightened rapidly, to the point we feared it would burst the seal.

“Stop!” I yelled.

Jack killed the flow and the plastic almost immediately started to deflate.

“Crap,” he said. “We’d better look quick.”

Before we could pull the cover off and check our handiwork, a series of reports—loud enough in the weak Martian air to hear through our helmets—made us both step backward. Fissures appeared in the basalt, radiating outward from under the plastic cover in an oddly uniform pattern.

“You were right,” Jack muttered. “We broke it.”

“Maybe not. The lines are all straight and equally spaced, like pie wedges. They don’t look like natural fractures.”

Before I could say another word, he jumped down onto the surface, tested it with a couple of bounces, then dropped to his knees, shining his helmet light into the cracks. He motioned for me to come down.

“The basalt is only about a foot thick,” he said. “And it looks like more diamond under it. Holy crap. Do you think this stuff just covers a big block of diamond?”

“Well, it would sure be durable,” I said and joined him. I removed the cover to look at the pattern. It had nearly disappeared, but I could tell by the fragment arrangement that the cracks had each started at a hole, then run across the top and disappeared down the sides into the dirt.

“Looks like our ice expanded and started the breaks,” I said.

“No way. One or two cracks maybe, to relieve pressure, but not—” He paused and ran a hand along the edge of several sections, then started pulling on them.

“Unless of course,” he grunted, “it was designed to break this way.”

The wedge moved nearly an inch. He stood up and looked at me. “I bet if the whole block had been uncovered, this shell would have fallen away. I think it was meant to fall away.”

We used Nellie to dig all morning, but by mid-afternoon had to send her out in search of ice to replenish our air and water supply. So we dug by hand, using our climbing axes. Once we’d totally cleared the second side, Jack slipped his axe blade behind one of the loose basalt sections and started gently rocking it. With an audible pop, the strip collapsed into large chunks that tumbled down on him like stacked blocks pushed over by a petulant child. I heard him grunt and curse over the comm link as he disappeared in a pile of stone and dust.

“Jack!” I ran to him and started moving yard-wide pieces of stone I wouldn’t have been able to lift on Earth.

“Crap,” he muttered as I pulled the last piece off.

“Are you leaking? Are you hurt?”

“No leaks,” he said, but I could hear pain in his voice. “And I’m fine, just help me get up.”

I moved one more slab and couldn’t miss its obvious uniformity. Jack had been right again. The basalt covering had been designed to come apart easily. The shell’s inside face had been serrated in a grid pattern, the squares held together by a thin strip of surface stone that was easily broken once the interconnecting tensions and supporting soil had been removed.

I turned my attention to what lay beneath the shell. It appeared to be a solid block of diamond. I switched on my helmet light and looked inside. Prickles and chills crawled up my back, as I unwittingly uttered the phrase from the old science fiction classic. “My God, it’s full of stars.”

Jack grunted as he brushed off dust and checked his suit and harness equipment for damage. “Stop screwing around. What do you see?”

I opened my mouth, but words wouldn’t come. The interior of the block was filled with what looked like constellations of sparkling stars. It was as if someone had cut a block of the stunning Martian midnight and buried it for us to find.

“Malcolm?” Jack moved up next to me, leaning in to see.

The star-like points in the block only glowed when my light touched them. My scientific mind argued that they could be impurities or microfractures in the diamond block, but part of me knew I was looking at a three-dimensional celestial map.

“A map,” Jack whispered.

My comm link hissed and popped, then Courtney’s voice intruded on our discovery. “Come in, Malcolm, this is Mars Base One.”

I almost succumbed to training and long ingrained habit to answer her, but remained silent. I glanced at Jack, but he was totally focused on the block’s interior.

“Come in, Malcolm. We’ve had fliers all over the area since the storm ended. There are no communication anomalies. We don’t know what you two are doing out there, but the commander is pissed.” She paused for a second, then resumed. “He says Jack is going home no matter what, but considering the amazing find you reported he might consider letting you stay. If you call in now.”

The urge to respond with a long string of obscenity was nearly overwhelming. They were prepared to let me die in the storm, yet were now threatening to punish me? I bit my lip, made sure my frequency setting was set for local and Jack’s channel and told him.

“We’d better hurry. Base just called. I don’t think they know where we are yet, but they are sure looking.”

We started digging faster. When Nellie returned, I focused my efforts on getting video of the map from every exposed angle. By sundown the three of us had cleared two more sides, leaving only the bottom and one side still covered, but the light failed quickly in the canyon.

Base had tried to call me and Jack several more times during the day and at one point we saw a flier high in the east, over the area we’d been heading before killing my transponder.

“We’d better dig in for the night,” Jack said.

“If we’re going to uncover this, we’d better work through the night,” I said. “Now that the wind has died, they’ll eventually see Nellie’s fresh tracks and follow them back here.”

“Yeah, but if we’re lucky they won’t find the tracks until tomorrow, then it will take hours for them to get here by truck or blimp. But if they keep those fliers looking all night, they would see our work lights or even our IR signatures and be here before morning. I think we should get underground.”

I hated to leave the find for that long, but reluctantly agreed. Once out of our suits and settled in our burrow for the night, I linked my suit’s computer to Nellie so that we could both see the video on her foldout display screen. I instructed the computer to build a 3D map based on the footage and overlay the actual video with graphics. We both immediately noticed that among the thousands of points some were three to four times larger than the rest, looking more like embedded pearls than distant stars. Those pearl points were located in pairs, some almost touching and others separated by up to an inch. Each pearl was also connected to another, more distant, pearl by a hair-thin line.

“Weird,” Jack said in an almost whisper. “Those bolos or barbells are some kind of pattern, but . . .”

“Computer, overlay any existing star charts in the database with these patterns.”

“I have only rudimentary navigational aid star charts in my local database,” the computer said in its charming southern belle voice, causing Jack to look at me with a smile and raised eyebrows. “Do you want me to search the base archives or send a download request to Earth?”

“Does Nellie have star charts?” I asked the still grinning Jack.

“Malcolm? You must really . . .”

“Just answer the question.”

He shook his head. “No real need. Go ahead and tap base camp, it’s only a matter of hours until they find us anyway.”

“Check the base first, then send to Earth if they don’t have an all-inclusive chart.”

“I’m loading the 3D star chart from base camp data stores,” the computer said. “Please provide a relative scale for the newly constructed pattern.”

Jack and I looked at the slowly rotating pattern on the screen, then back at each other with shrugs.

“We have no scale. You’ll have to look for relational patterns, then adjust scales accordingly.”

“Understood,” the computer said.

“Inform us if you have any pattern match greater than seventy percent.”

“Understood.”

Radio calls from base camp increased after the computer’s download connection, but we ignored them. Jack started fixing a simple dinner, but I couldn’t stop looking at the pattern. I could see two exceptions to the pearls appearing in pairs. A single pearl resided in one corner of the block, but was connected to the nearest pair by a line nearly two feet long. The second exception was a line that ran to a large cluster in the diagonally opposite corner, but due to my shaky camera work, the computer just showed them as a slightly disc-shaped clump.

We took turns counting while we ate and agreed upon seventeen pearls excluding the clump.

The display changed abruptly, showing the original pattern in blue, overlaid with a new blinking red pattern. The legend at the bottom of the screen identified the red as “KNOWN STARS.” A little over half the points overlaid perfectly, but a few were shifted, all in the same direction, but by different amounts. About twenty percent of the stars in the blue pattern had no red counterpart and none of the red points aligned with the pearls.

“Well, crap,” muttered Jack. “That wasn’t much help.”

“Computer? If you take known movement into account and project backwards, would some of those stars from our database have matched the new pattern at some time in the past?”

At first the computer didn’t understand the request, but after I explained it in simpler terms a counter appeared at the bottom of the screen and the red stars started creeping toward the blue points. When they stopped moving the number on the counter read “4372 BCE.” Aside from six that blinked a label of “track unknown” all of the shifted red stars now matched. There were still no points at the pearl locations.

“Damn! Over six thousand years ago,” I said.

“They’re still not as old as I expected,” Jack said.

“Computer? Have you displayed all the stellar information you have? Please show quasars, pulsars, brown dwarfs, comets, asteroids and galaxies, any objects that would show up within this pattern.”

“And black holes,” Jack included.

The red star pattern density nearly doubled. Now six dots matched locations with the pearls.

“Computer. Show black holes or singularities as green.”

Dozens of points flashed green, including all six that were coincident with the pearls.

“So,” Jack said and sat back with a wide grin. “They travel using black holes.”

“Or maybe just use them to communicate? Computer? Label the Sol system if it is on this map.”

SOL appeared next to the star nearest the lone corner pearl.

“Oh, wow!” Jack said and crawled up next to the screen. He pointed at the pearl nearest Earth. “We enter a black hole here . . .” He moved his finger along the line to the next pearl. “And exit here, then move in normal space to this black hole . . .”

“These are too conveniently placed,” I said. “I bet they’re artificially constructed worm holes.”

He nodded and continued tracing the path, big jumps between black holes with the lines, and small trips to the next black hole, then another jump. The path led all the way to the big clump at the opposite corner.

“Grand Central Station,” he said tapping the clump.

“Well, there isn’t anything really new about that idea,” I said.

“Except this time it’s real!”

Once again my scientific mind refused to see the obvious as a real possibility, but I shoved those thoughts aside and laughed. “Yeah, there is that. Maybe.”

We stared at the display for a few minutes, neither of us talking. Then I tapped the cluster on the screen, stood up and started donning my suit. “I need to see this clump again.”

“Dawn is still five hours away,” Jack said.

“Does it matter? We have to assume they know where we are now.”

Twenty minutes later we stood atop the diamond cube and beneath a brilliant Martian night. Somewhere out in that thick star mass lived other sentient beings. It was now fact, not speculation. We looked down, switched on our helmet lights and dropped to hands and knees.

The pearl clump was near a top corner and when our lights revealed it, we both gasped, then laughed. When viewed from the correct angle, the thirty-five pearls formed a ring around a central point or star. The last line in the “path” connected to a pearl in that ring.

Daylight still hadn’t penetrated the canyon when we took one last look at the cube.

Jack fidgeted, looking from me to his wrist computer, then back at me. “This still makes me nervous, Malcolm. What if there’s another storm or radiation alert?”

“It’s a risk, but I can override communication security with voice recognition and you can’t. And if we all go, they will find us for sure. Nellie’s tracks are just too easy to see from the air.”

He still looked uneasy. In order to insure that MarsCorp didn’t hide the find for years while they tried to think up a way to exploit it, we’d decided to break the news to Earth ourselves. Jack would go east, then call base telling them he was looking for me. That would hopefully make them focus their search east of the canyon while I went west to the uplink antenna on the crater wall a mile from the base camp.

“You’re just pissed that you have to provide the diversion this time.”

He didn’t laugh or even smile. “If you run most of the day, you should be back at the base camp just after sunset. You have the extra tank and water?”

“Yes, Mom.”

He gripped my arms and squeezed. “Call if you get in trouble. And I’ll come and rescue your sorry tail again.”

“Get moving!” I said.

He started south, to exit the canyon from that end, and his graceful, gazelle-like stride took him out of sight in seconds. My gait was awkward as I started for the canyon’s north end, but it soon smoothed out. Jack was still definitely the best Martian, but I was getting better.