Bruce Balfour - The Forge of Mars

The Forge of Mars

Bruce Balfour

An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY

Ace mass-market edition / September 2002

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PRINTED IN THE UNTIED STATES OF AMERICA

10 987654321

To Leslie Balfour

for the infinite delicacy of her heart, her loving support, and her incomparable wit

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The arrangement of words in this novel was made possible through the efforts of many fine individuals,

some of whom are still speaking to me now that it's finished. For their contributions of time, support, or

materials, I'd like to thank: John Morgan at Berkley; Sara and Bob Schwager, copyeditors; Pete

McCarthy at Penguin Putnam; Dr. Henry Lum at the NASA-Ames Research Center; Dr. Nils J. Nilsson

at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; Dr. K. Eric Drexler at the Foresight Institute; Warren

and Betty Balfour; Heather and Hope Wilson; and my agent, Richard Curtis.

Henceforth I spread confident wings to space

I fear no barrier of crystal or of glass;

I cleave the heavens and soar to the infinite.

And while I rise from my own globe to others

And penetrate even further through the eternal field,

That which others saw from afar, I leave far behind me.

(Giordano Bruno,On the Infinite Universe and Worlds , 1584)

__________________________1

THE hot rainbow of reentry danced across the window, ac-centing the precise ballet of the

computer-controlled descent, until the shuttle completed its hypersonic banking maneuvers at seventy

thousand feet. Then everything went to hell.

Almost an hour earlier, Tau Edison Wolfsinger received the "go for deorbit burn," then maneuvered the

shuttle tail for-ward to aim its OMS engines in the direction of flight. Orbit-ing the Earth at 17,490 miles

per hour, free of the atmosphere, it took only a gentle pressure on the rotational hand controller to adjust

the shuttle's flight attitude. The computer translated his hand movements to fire the proper combination of

six vernier thrusters in the nose and tail sections. In a slow pirou-ette high above the blue-and-white

planet, the shuttle pitched and rolled to its deorbit attitude.

Even after days in orbit, Tau still thought it odd that the verniers did their job without making a sound.

The remaining thirty-eight primary thrusters, used for translation maneuvers and rapid rotations,

announced their activity in a more spec-tacular fashion. The shuttle would shake and shudder as flashes

of flame burst from the nose and tail primaries, ac-companied by battle sounds as if cannons and mortars

were firing. They sounded like real rockets. Raised on Hollywood holies and sims, Tau considered it

wrong for the verniers to fire in silence.

Passing over the eastern coast of Africa at an altitude of 160 miles, he keyed the deorbit-burn command

into the flight computer, initiating the descent to California. Through the cockpit window, only a few

pearls of light were visible on the African continent, now shrouded in the blanket of night.

More silence. The G-meter remained fixed at zero on the dial as if it were painted on the glass. Tau felt

his heart beat faster and tried to concentrate on the sound of his breath hiss-ing in and out through his dry

nose, more audible now that his helmet was locked down on the suit's neck ring.

Fifteen seconds later, the OMS engines ignited. The bang reverberated through the ship, rattling Tau's

seat before a gen-tle deceleration pressed him back into the cushions. The three-minute burn of the OMS

would nudge the G-meter to 0.1, slowing the shuttle by two hundred miles per hour and using all of the

remaining fuel in the main maneuvering sys-tem. Facing forward, Tau couldn't see the bright blasts of

ex-haust from the OMS engines as they placed him on a new orbital path. With the deorbit bum

completed, there would be no turning back from the fiery plunge into the atmosphere thirty minutes later.

Confirming the shutdown of the OMS engines, Tau rocked the hand controller to rotate the shuttle's

nose forward, pitch-ing up at a forty-degree angle of attack to pancake the su-perinsulated underbody

into the brunt of the atmosphere. The chip in his G-suit talked to the flight computer, then triggered the

inflation of the bladders around his calves and thighs, squeezing them tight enough to prevent blood from

flowing away from his brain during reentry. In final preparation before hitting the atmosphere, Tau

dumped the remaining propellant from the forward reaction control system, then switched on the auxiliary

power units to give him aerodynamic control over the shuttle's descent.

When the shuttle hit the atmosphere, seventy-five miles over the Pacific Ocean at Mach 25, Tau

reminded himself to breathe. Air whispered past the exterior, gaining in volume as a faint red glow

appeared at the edges of the cockpit windows. No longer floating in the comfortable microgravity that

had become normal during the previous week, Tau felt the pres-sure of 1.7 Gs pressing him hard into his

seat. He now weighed 255 pounds—a butterfly transformed into an ele-phant—far more ponderous than

his normal weight of 150 on Earth. Beads of sweat on his forehead, held there previously by surface

tension, now dripped into his eyes to make him blink.

The glow spread across the cockpit windows, shifting from red to orange to a hot pink as the

carbon-carbon insula-tion that covered the nose and the leading edges of the delta wings slammed its

way through the air molecules with enough force to strip away electrons. Communications with the

ground blacked out for twelve minutes as an electromag-netic cone formed around the shuttle during the

period of maximum heat. His instruments showed the leading edge temperatures reaching 2,490 degrees

Fahrenheit as the shuttle dissipated its kinetic energy against the angry atmosphere.

Slowing to fifteen thousand miles an hour, Tau heard the rush of air climbing the scale from a hoarse

growl to a thun-dering roar. More sweat dripped in his eyes, even though logic told him that the heat of

reentry dissipated against the insula-tion before it reached the interior of the flight deck. A fright-ened

animal deep in his brain knew that the intense flames burned just a few feet away from his body,

threatening to melt the flesh on his bones until his corpse became nothing but ash drifting on the wind.

Still flying faster than sound, Tau watched the horizon line roll to almost vertical. The autopilot began its

series of hy-personic banking maneuvers with a left turn. Braking against the atmosphere like a snow

skier making sweeping turns to slow his descent down a mountain, the shuttle reversed its bank. Tau

watched the horizon swing in the opposite direction as his stomach lurched. He kept his hand on the

controller, but he knew the quick-thinking flight computer, communicating with the microwave landing

system in California, could han-dle the reentry far better than he could. The elevons on the wings

controlled the pitch and roll while the split rudder on the tail controlled the yaw and acted as a speed

brake. Nudg-ing the stick in the wrong direction could put him hundreds of miles off course, but it

comforted him to have his hand on the controls.

When the right limb of the horizon rolled until it disap-peared out the top of the cockpit window, the left

limb was hidden by the shuttle's nose. Tau closed his eyes. The hyper-sonic "S"-turns gave him a

headache, but the altimeter told him he'd reached seventy thousand feet, so he'd be safe on the ground in

a few minutes.

Tau opened his eyes and smiled. The sun peeked over the eastern horizon, filling the sky with a pale light

that erased the last traces of glowing pink from the windows.

A red light flashed on the console.

An alarm buzzer went off.

The right wing snapped up faster than the computer could correct for it.

The shuttle flipped over.

Reacting to the change in brightness, the tint of his helmet visor lightened just long enough for him to

glimpse the cloud tops rotating far below before a giant hand played Ping-Pong with his head. The shuttle

bucked, spun, bounced, and tum-bled, all at the same time. His helmet slammed against the cockpit

window as his body jerked from side to side. The in-strument displays went dark. He tasted copper in

his mouth as he bit his tongue. Ominous booming noises, the drums of doom, reverberated through the

hull.

Tau realized he'd soon be dead.

The thought of being dead at twenty-four chilled his blood. He had too much to do. It wasn't fair.

The shuttle began to tear itself apart with a horrendous di-nosaur scream of tortured metal, alerting the

survival com-puter in his seat. Explosive bolts fired, the overhead panel tore away, and a rocket kicked

him in the seat of the pants, ram-ming him up and out at over one hundred miles per hour.

Straight into the superhot slipstream of the shuttle.

The seat started to burn. The spacesuit thermostat tried to compensate, but the heat passed through the

suit as if it wasn't there. After the initial shock of hitting air that felt as soft as a brick wall, the seat slowed,

the crash web detached, and an-other small charge fired to kick him away from the seat as it danced out

of the slipstream. The shuttle dropped away, tear-ing itself into shrapnel-sized bits.

Tumbling toward the ground, he glimpsed the burning seat overhead, following him like the angel of

death, snagging the parachute shroud lines to set them on fire. In desperation, he hoped the lines wouldn't

burn through before—

The chute banged open, a glorious sight, slapping him hard and dislodging the seat from the shroud lines.

Then the burning seat smashed into his helmet, shattering the "shatterproof bubble, as it shot past him on

its flaming journey, racing him toward death on the ground. A demon with a bass drum rattled his ears,

but his attention focused on the flames that suddenly erupted around his head. Pure oxy-gen poured out

of his suit, and the hot seat ignited the seal of his neck ring after breaking his helmet. He gasped, trying to

choke some air into his lungs through the smoke, drawing the flame closer to his face. The scent of

burning meat filled his nostrils.

Confused by conflicting signals from its sensors, the spacesuit shut off the oxygen supply and gave up.

The flames subsided. Still dazed from the seat's impact, Tau peered over the hot neck ring, down past his

feet, as the rocky ground raced up to greet him. Too fast.

A glance upward confirmed his suspicion. Two of the smoldering chute lines had burned through, and

half the para-chute flapped uselessly in the breeze, taunting him, soon to be his death shroud.

He closed his eyes tight, preparing for an impact that would probably kill him. Then everything went

black.

FSED sky at night, sailor's delight; red sky at morning, sailors take warning. But what if the sky is

red all the time? Ed Shepard looked up at the salmon pink glow of late morn-ing on Mars and shivered

despite the heat in his pressure suit. When he worked miles away from the nearest colony, he'd

sometimes feel a moment of loneliness and isolation. He'd been on Mars for three years, one of the first

construction workers to qualify for sponsorship to make the trip. Having worked on construction sites

from the deserts of the Middle East to the ice fields of Antarctica, he'd never thought the vast emptiness

of a new world would bother him, but it did now. The unending sea of bloody red rocks and sand, cut

with streaks of black and orange, filled his view all the way out to a horizon that was too close. He knew

he'd feel better if he could smell his dusty surroundings—he related best to new environments by

smell—but all he could detect was an odor reminiscent of old gym shoes in the recycled air of his suit.

Ed heard a loud ping when his tracker made contact with one of the diggers. Two of the robot

excavators, controlled part-time by human teleoperators at the Vulcan's Forge colony, had collided with

each other the previous day. They were precision diggers, designed to work in tight spaces, but the

cheap models covered with tools would often get caught between rocks or on other robots. During the

night, the inter-locked robots wandered away from their work site to fall in a hole somewhere, hidden

from the satellites, and it was Ed's job to find them. His partner, Larry DiMarco, searched on the

opposite side of the ridge that separated the Umbra Labyrinthus—the Labyrinth of Shadows—from the

Noctis Labyrinthus—the Labyrinth of Night. Both areas were mazes of narrow canyons at the summit of

the Tharsis uplift, a vol-canic region dominated by Mons Olympus and three other shield volcanoes. The

robots couldn't have chosen a worse place to fall in a hole.

Following the position indicators on his handheld tracker, Ed shuffled over to the opening of a large

volcanic vent— maybe eighty feet across—that angled steeply down into the darkness. A few years

earlier, surveys of this area with deep-ground-penetrating radar discovered hot water reservoirs trapped

just three thousand feet beneath the surface. Deep geothermal heat sources melted subsurface ice to form

trapped pools of water. Water-mining rigs were set up in volcanic vents such as this one because the lava

tubes often ran deep under the surface, simplifying access to the water pock-ets. However, he couldn't

see any survey markers, so there was little chance of finding a well-worn trail to a water-min-ing rig. Ed

switched on his flashlight, wishing that his spon-sor had provided one of the fancier pressure suits with the

big lights built into the chestplate and helmet. He peered into the pit as he signaled his partner, noting that

he could work his way down the slope without a rope. If the vent got steeper as he ventured lower, he'd

wait for Larry to arrive before going any farther. Technically, he knew he should wait for Larry be-fore

entering the vent, but it would take his partner at least ten minutes to walk over the ridge, and Ed needed

his breakfast,

Larry's voice barked in his ears. After twenty years of working at noisy construction sites, he'd

developed the habit of shouting, even when wearing a pressure suit— only one of many irritating habits.

"Shep? Ya got 'em?"

'Tracker says they're in a hole," said Ed, turning his audio volume down. "I'm goin' in to eyeball it."

"Better wait for me."

"Yeah, I'll wait for ya. I'll be the guy standin' here with the two robots."

"You gonna haul 'em out all by yourself, tough guy?"

"If you weren't such an old lady, you'd be down here al-ready."

"You're gonna look awful silly when ya fall down that hole and I have to winch ya out."

"I'll take my chances. I'm hungry."

"Suit yourself, ace."

Ed rolled his eyes and started down the vent, picking his way among the deep gouges in the rough

reddish brown rock. When he was about sixty feet down, he noticed that the walls of the vent didn't look

quite the same as other volcanic tubes he'd seen on Mars. The walls seemed rougher, scored by

ex-plosive pressure but not melted from the heat of the lava. Something unusual about the local rock,

maybe, but he wasn't a geologist, and he didn't really care that much. The tracker pinged again, its strong

signal implying that the two diggers were still close together wherever they'd fallen.

The vent steepened and narrowed as Ed continued his lurching progress. Almost an hour of strenuous

effort brought him to a ledge where the walls of the vent sparkled with shards of milk white volcanic

glass, as if someone had broken dishes at a fancy picnic. He picked up one of the flat shards and

frowned at the sharp edges, wondering how hot glass could have broken that way. Maybe a sudden

change in tem-perature as the glass cooled? The thick shard slipped from his glove despite his tight grip.

Ed aimed his flashlight down beyond the ledge. The drop was vertical, maybe sixty feet to the next flat

area. Rubble had narrowed the opening in the vent to about ten feet across, but a wider chamber yawned

beneath the hole. He could climb down farther with the spider line, but he'd need Larry's help to haul the

robots out. Naturally, the perverse little ma-chines had rolled far into the vent, making it impossible for

Ed to drag them out by himself. Then he noticed that the floor of the pit was glowing. He shut off the

flashlight to be sure and found that he no longer needed it. The walls of the chamber below him were

coated with the white glass, glow-ing enough to provide sufficient light for his needs. He crouched for a

better look, then bent over and poked his head through the opening.

The diggers sat on the floor of a horizontal tube with smooth white walls. Their running lights were off,

but one of the robots twitched. Each spasm jerked the six tool arms, making the digger look like a sand

crab that had been flipped on its back. The dead unit had a trenching tool buried in its side, presumably

left there after the two robots broke apart from the impact after their tumbling dance of death. Lubricant

leaked from the wounded digger, forming a pool of brown liq-uid beneath the two machines.

"Larry? I see 'em."

"Good. I'm tired," he said, breathing hard.

"We'll need both spider lines to get 'em outta this hole."

"Yeah, I figured."

Ed continued studying the tube. It looked straight, like a subway tunnel, ending at rockfalls that blocked

both ends. "And there's somethin' else, Larry."

"Let me guess. Ya want me to carry your sorry ass outta there."

Ed's gaze fell on a glint of metal protruding from the rock-fall at the east end of the tunnel, less than a

hundred feet away. "There's a tunnel down here, and it ain't natural."

"Water miners?"

Ed patched the end of his spider line to the ledge and low-ered himself into the hole. "I don't think so.

There ain't no rig, unless it got buried in a cave-in. But this whole tunnel looks artificial, like the walls are

coated with white glass stuff."

"Nobody's worked this area. No exploration markers up top."

Ed slipped on the smooth floor as his boots made contact. When he regained his footing, he stepped on

areas that were covered in sand so that he could get better traction. Free of the spider line, he walked

over to the shiny metal protruding from the rockfall. It didn't look like a natural deposit, more like chrome

that had been formed into a delicate curving shape. Elaborate patterns were visible at close range.

He reached out to touch it.

His head exploded with light.

"Ed?" Larry's voice, the last human sound he'd ever hear.

Ed tried to scream, but he couldn't make a sound. He slumped against the metal surface, his brain

burning with inter-nal fire. The coppery taste of blood filled his mouth. His body twitched while nerve

impulses misfired in a high-voltage flow of energy. As his eyes rolled back into his head, a mental image

of a shadowy face tried to take shape before his synapses failed.

When the incomplete face faded away, to be replaced by the brilliant multicolored glow of expanding

gases from an exploding star, he felt a sense of loss, certain that he'd failed some sort of test he didn't

understand.

And failure meant death.

STORM.

Tau shook his head, blinking while he adapted to the new situation. He stood on an isolated rock spire

of brilliant red sandstone punched into the sky—an angry fist rising hun-dreds of feet above an endless

sea of sand. The Wind People were restless. Lightning ripped jagged holes in the velvety midnight

darkness. Thunder boomed and rolled over his body in tides of sound. The scent of ozone filled his

nostrils as a torrential male rain began to pound his skin, water tracing a path along his deep-set brown

eyes, past high cheekbones, on down his wide face to the sharp angle of his jaw. The water continued its

journey down his blue permacotton shirt and jeans to roll off the toes of his hiking boots—a miniature

wa-terfall spraying into the abyss.

Tau Edison Wolfsinger, born for the Towering House Peo-ple Clan, whom the Navajo call theKin

yaa'aanü , looked up at the raging sky, squinted against the raindrops, and smiled as he considered his

new reality. This could only be a place from his past, a warm day in May during the Season When the

Thunder Sleeps. Judging by the intensity of the storm, the Thunder People must be wide-awake. He had

often journeyed to this place of great beauty, suspended in time, to relax and meditate, to retreat and

reflect, to hide and remember, some-times chanting words he'd been taught by his uncle, Hosteen Joseph

Wolfsinger.

After the long climb up the vertical rock face, he'd hoped to sit and contemplate the stars and his

destiny, but the clouds obscured the stars, and his destiny had been mapped out long before he reached

the summit of the Fist.

He glanced at the time display in one corner of his vision; behind schedule again. He took a moment to

stretch his fa-tigued muscles, filled his lungs with the cool air, then stepped off the ledge to plummet

toward the desert floor.

A quick mental calculation told him he'd be moving at 120 miles per hour when he hit the sand at the

base of the Fist, as-suming the Wind People didn't slam him into the rock face on the way down.

The Fist had been Tau's favorite refuge during his four years at NASA's Ames Research Center, so he

felt it only fit-ting that he make one final climb on the day that he would be fired. The NASA hierarchy, in

its infinite wisdom, had already decided that the work of Tau Edison Wolfsinger, which none of them

understood, was too dangerous to be inflicted on so-ciety.

The wind rushed past his body, whispering thoughts in his ears that he lacked the knowledge to

understand. Tau felt free and happy, almost as if he could fly. This felt nothing like the uncontrolled fall

from the shuttle. The fabric of his loose shirt flapped like a flag while he swallowed to equalize the

pres-sure in his ears. A flash of lightning illuminated the landscape, throwing a giant shadow of Tau

against the rock wall, and he glimpsed the spot where he would land on the desert floor— in a wide

clump of prickly pear cactus. The thought of cactus needles penetrating his skin worried him for a

moment, until he remembered he'd be moving at terminal velocity. At that speed, he'd make a big

impression on the landscape, so a few cactus needles wouldn't make any difference.

He laughed at the thought.

____________e

ULJRLTER Beckett studied the column of blinking red num-bers projected in the air above his gray

metal desk, then com-pared them against a column of black numbers. He smiled. With a wave of his

hand, the red numbers changed to black, demonstrating once again his genius for turning negative

re-ports into positive feedback for his NASA superiors.

Beckett had started out as a mediocre exobiologist, but

soon discovered a flair for administration. When supplies were delayed, or proper forms had not been

filled out, young Beckett wormed his way through the bureaucracy at the Ames Research Center with

more efficiency than a maggot in search of food. After one of his more spectacular paperwork coups

brought unexpected funds to the division, Beckett got himself promoted to branch chief. Continued

bureaucratic success over the next twenty years landed him the job of division chief in the troubled Mars

Development Office at headquar-ters.

Ever since the Apollo days, NASA had fought to maintain government funding, recently shifting to the

role of interplan-etary real estate developer to improve its odds of survival. De-fying the trend, Beckett

spent ten years building the MDO into a large division, arranging deals with other countries and private

industry for commercial development of the Moon and Mars. Cutbacks still occurred, but the MDO

could always justify its existence to meddling politicians, especially when they realized that Beckett was

of their kind. At meetings with other division heads, Beckett carefully diverted attention away from the

MDO's expanding operating budget by com-miserating with the rest of them, cursing the evil government

funding powers for their shortsighted attitudes.

Beckett opened a desk drawer and glanced down at the row of images from his pinhead spy cameras in

the offices of his direct superiors, making sure they'd left for the evening so that he could go home. After

Beckett left, his personal AI would periodically trigger communications, office noise, and generic memos

until the wee hours of the morning to maintain the appearance that he worked twenty hours a day, seven

days a week. A holo of Beckett's thin frame hunched over his work, convincing enough when seen from

the small window in the locked office door, completed the effect.

When he started out of the office, a flashing red orb appeared over his desk. Beckett sighed, cursed by

his own sensor tap on the Deep Space Network's priority communica-

tions channel, and stuck his head into the orb to hear the covert message.

Vulcan's Forge, the spearhead long-term Mars colony in the Tharsis uplift, had suppressed the normal

data traffic to Earth with an emergency alert. Beckett stopped breathing for almost a minute as he listened

and realized he now had a chance to become director of a NASA research center. When he started

breathing again, he giggled.

Beckett surged into action, drawing on all of his adminis-trative powers to secure and cloak the Deep

Space Network's Martian data channel, contact a friend in the Public Relations Office who owed him a

favor, send dummy news memos to his superiors, start his AI on building a glitzy presentation, summon

his speechwriter, and alert the media that he would hold a major press conference in a few hours. He

knew it was risky to go outside normal channels of communication with his managers, but if he moved

fast enough, he'd be able to get away with it before anyone could slap him down.

berrldo Cruz, primary mediahead forNewsNow !, checked his fingermirror to make sure the curly white

hair framing his tanned, angular face presented the proper image of a news-savvy man-about-town.

Perched on one of the cushy NASA auditorium seats, he would leap into action as soon as Walter

Beckett announced his readiness for questions.

"Don't worry. You look beautiful."

Cruz turned a baleful eye on the stunning blonde seated to his left, Lola Larkspur ofEye-Q !, the only

show maxing the charts for audience approval in the quickratings at that mo-ment, even though Lola

wasn't on camera. The intellectualEye-Q ! audience would wait patiently. He ground his teeth, wondering

how he could possibly outgun a scantily clad, over-enhanced Amazon with a genius-level IQ; it simply

wasn't fair.

Cruz smiled. "You too, Lola."

"Isn't a NASA briefing somewhat out of your league?"

"We got a four-alarm news conference alert. Who else would they send?"

"Someone who knows the difference between Olympus Mons and the Valles Marineris, for one thing."

Cruz blinked, stalling to do a quick scan off an older-model reference chip implanted by his editor. "Oh,

yeah? Olympus Mons is the largest known volcano in the solar sys-tem, as wide as Arizona and twice

the height of Everest."

"Uh-huh. Handy things, those reference chips. What planet is it on?"

"Uh," stalled Cruz, madly scanning the old chip.

"Mars, perhaps," she prompted.

"Yes."

Lola rolled her eyes.

"Okay, you're so smart, Miss Eye-Q, what's this an-nouncement about? NASA hasn't sent out a

four-alarm since they found hot water underground on Mars a few years ago."

Lola sighed. "It was hot water with bacteria in it. Life."

"So the colonists could take hot showers. Whatever."

"NASA blocked the Martian data channel last night. My guess is the Vulcan's Forge colony blew up, or

they found lit-tle green men."

Cruz nodded knowingly and looked up at the stage. "Ei-ther one is good for ratings."

"THERE are moments in history we all remember. I'm sure you've all been asked, 'Where were you

when President Her-nandez was shot?' or, 'Where were you when the first explor-ers landed on Mars?'

Each society, and each generation, asks such questions about turning points in history and in individ-ual

lives. I called this press conference today to announce a momentous event that will become the primary

turning point of our generation."

Walter Beckett paused with his right index finger raised high in the air so that the sea of media people

could savor the drama of the moment. For once, no one could leave the room while he spoke; to make

certain of it, he'd taken the precau-

tion of locking the exit doors. The respectful silence of the au-dience delighted him, especially when

compared to the smirk-ing, know-it-all scientists he normally had to address. He looked up at the sea of

faces and tried to make eye contact with as many as possible, a task made more difficult by the spotlights

shining back at him. In truth, he could see only the silhouettes of maybe one hundred people in a

forum-style au-ditorium designed to hold four hundred. The silhouettes were disconcerting until he

realized that the hood ornaments on the heads of all the reporters were newsnet cameras.

A cough from the audience brought Beckett's wandering attention back to the subject. He blinked and

glanced right to trigger the scrolling of his retinal TelePrompTer. The carefully chosen words of his

speechwriter rose into his field of vision.

"In 1996, the world focused its attention on a dull gray rock found twelve years earlier in the Antarctic.

This potato-sized meteorite, known as ALH84001, had been part of the early Martian crust about 4.5

billion years ago, making it the oldest known rock discovered anywhere up to that point. It also provided

strong evidence that primitive life once existed on Mars, not unlike fossilized microorganisms found here

on Earth." Beckett paused and smiled, allowing a moment for the easily distracted minds of the

mediaheads to absorb his words.

"After ALH84001 paved the way, twenty years passed be-fore the Russians successfully soft-landed

the first of several sample-return missions on the surface of Mars. Two rocks collected during these

missions verified the analysis of ALH84001, sparking further interest in manned missions to the Martian

surface. While the first Russian military research base on Chryse Planitia was unable to locate further

signs of primitive life, continued study by international civilian groups, with NASA participation, led to the

discovery of bac-teria living in hot water reservoirs deep underground."

CHIEF of Security Richard Powell heard an emergency beep in his ear, startling him out of a pleasant

dream about

shooting Veggie protestors off the NASA perimeter fence. He opened his eyes to see the angry and

semitransparent face of Murphy Scott, the operations director, floating above his desk.

"Powell, you've got work to do!"

He sat upright. Outside of casual greetings, the OD had never spoken to him before. "Sir?"

"You know Walter Beckett?"

"No, sir, but I can look him up."

"Don't bother; he's on the news right now. He's holding a press conference in the auditorium. I heed you

to get in there right now and pull Beckett off that stage."

Bruce Balfour - The Forge of Mars

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