Chapter 1
The hieroglyphs shouldn’t have existed. Hell no. It made little sense.
Logan Wells stared at the spectral analysis results on his datapad. The stratigraphic layering and mineral deposition patterns confirmed what he’d found just days ago. What was carved into the Martian rock was buried under sediment layers dating back over 1.2 million years. Impossible, utterly impossible.
2043, and humanity had been on Mars for almost four years. With surveys and mining operations, they’d not found a single hint of anything but dead rock.
Until now.
He’d been awake thirty-three hours straight, running every test he could think of while his three colleagues slept in the hab module, Haskell curled toward the wall, Kerns flat on his back with one arm over his face, and Taya snoring the loudest. Shift rotation. They’d worked the previous thirty-six hours mapping the northern extraction zone. Routine work.
His coworkers saw his findings as mere lines cut through years of weathering. Geometric scratches, somehow forming perfect lines, though eroded by weather as well. As an archaeologist, Logan knew better. The other three were geologists. Merely mining surveyors. They saw rocks. They didn’t see history the way Logan did. To them, erosion patterns meant one thing: mineral accessibility. They needed the site clear for extraction and his theories no doubt slowed down their bonuses. And this wasn’t some hopeful wish, Logan’s mind making up illogical conclusions. No, not in the slightest.
Tetrahedrons, the merkaba symbol? Yes, but not intact. The left half of a merkaba star was eroded into the red dirt, but it was unmistakable.
He’d studied sacred geometry during his doctoral work on ancient Mesopotamian sites. The merkaba, two interlocking tetrahedrons, showed up in cultures separated by thousands of miles and centuries. Some called it mystical nonsense. Logan called it pattern recognition, and it didn’t spread on its own.
A dust devil spun on the horizon, a translucent column of red dust reaching toward the salmon sky. Logan’s exhausted mind registered it, and usually he’d spot several of those chaotic funnels during his morning routine. Today, just one. Or maybe there were more and his sleep-deprived brain simply couldn’t process them.
One, Logan Wells thought. God, I need some sleep.
He tapped the holographic viewport, staring out at Mars’s iron rock and soil spreading for kilometers. For safety reasons, this viewing portal was a high-tech embedded holo, where the outside world fed into this corner of Olympus Base via a video camera deeply set into the exterior wall. Only a few real, thick windows existed at the base, all airtight and nearly impossible to crack.
Why am I thinking about windows?
He stared at the spectral resonance analyzer’s display again, at the image of the tetrahedrons. They formed the merkaba, but like he kept seeing, only the left half remained. The right side was jagged and broken. This picture was taken from his helmet’s integrated imaging system four days ago, during what was supposed to be a routine geological survey sweep. Fine red particulates had clung to the lens even through the atmospheric filters. The six-wheeled titanium rim of his geological rover sat visible in the corner of the shot, all struts and shock absorbers. A piece of what appeared to be ancient ruins stuck up out of the Martian sand. He didn’t have time to dig, but he would soon. He’d make sure of it. Maybe he should sleep first, though.
Across from Logan, the quantum-link communicator’s blue holographic interface came on. He glanced up from his tablet.
The Tree of Life Mining Corporation logo rotated slowly above the communication unit. It showed a stylized pickaxe breaking open a meteor in cartoonish fashion, the rings of Saturn in the distance. The corporation’s name didn’t match the logo, but the animation said it all.
Logan was on Mars because of the 2039 Interplanetary Heritage Protection Act. Every corporate mining operation on the red planet required a certified archaeologist on-site. A government checkbox. The corporations hated it, treated it like an expensive formality. To them, it didn’t sit well, because according to logic, according to the scientific status quo, no civilization ever existed on Mars. Regardless, they hired Logan because they had to, and he was supposed to sign off that nothing of historical value existed in the extraction zones. Rubber stamp the destruction, and get paid. That was the deal.
Why would they create such an Act? He’d always wondered that, but the salary kept his lips tight the moment they hired him. It was too good of pay and too hard to turn down. But now? What the hell was he staring at? A real life ancient ruin on Mars? Couldn’t be, but to everything he knew, it was.
Something, or someone, or rather a group of someones, existed on Mars way before homo sapiens were a blip in the Solar System. Unless this was a joke. Did anyone else know this? Did anyone else, through other archaeological digs or geological surveys, discover similar ruins? Was he the only one?
He filed that thought away. There’d be time to be paranoid later.
The quantum-link beeped.
He moved to the desk beside him, bumping into his cup of coffee. The mug hit the floor and shattered, the liquid spilling near his feet. He was already reading.
The Tree of Life message on the screen was brief and they might as well have used that pickaxe on his chest for what he’d just read.
“You gotta be kidding me,” he muttered under his breath. “Why the hell would they…”
Maybe he read it wrong. He was exhausted, after all.
Logan’s lips moved as he read the text a second time. The strip-mining operations had been moved up due to “favorable atmospheric conditions and equipment availability.”
He read it again to make sure.
PRIORITY OVERRIDE: STRIP-MINING OPERATIONS ADVANCED TO T-MINUS 10 HOURS.
He set the datapad down with both hands, carefully. The message had been sent six hours ago from Earth, meaning the mining convoy was probably already en route from New Meridiani Base. Ten-hour transit time, which means the convoy arrives in four hours. He calculated it a couple of times, because his brain was running on stim pills and spite, and every time it came back the same.
Ten hours minus six equals four. Yep, four frickin’ hours.
But why there? Mars had over 144 million square kilometers of surface. Tree of Life held extraction licenses on eleven separate zones. The ore density surveys on the northern ridge were better by every metric he’d seen. So why had they accelerated operations specifically at Gemini-4?
He didn’t have an answer. He placed it next to the question he’d been putting things next to all morning: Why did the 2039 Act exist at all?
Four hours until plasma cutters tore through the site. They’d work at that site, dig up the most significant archaeological discovery in human history, and destroy it before anyone could study it properly. Why? Because profits over history. Maybe. Or something worse than that.
Strip-mining didn’t leave evidence. It pulverized. The convoy would arrive with plasma cutters and gravitational extractors. They’d tear through twenty-five meters of sediment in the first five hours. Everything he’d found would become processed ore and tailings, and they wouldn’t be none the wiser. Plus, his photos wouldn’t be enough in the first place, neither to cause any fuss nor to stop the strip miners from doing their thing when they arrived. He needed core samples. Intact fragments. Something physical that couldn’t be dismissed as imaging artifacts or weathering patterns. No second chances, and no going back.
He stepped back from the screen, his hands shaking.
The locket sat in his breast pocket and it buzzed. He pulled it out and thumbed the activation stud. It was a compact personal unit, smaller than a playing card, civilian-grade, running on the HomeLink network. The holographic emitter flickered, projecting Hannah’s face above his palm. She was grinning, missing her two front teeth. Earth-Mars communication lag meant her messages came through that same network. Twenty-two minutes one way in 2043, depending on orbital positions. His government-issued QuantumRelay cut that to near-instantaneous, but she didn’t have access to military tech. What he saw now had been her reality a little over twenty minutes ago.
“Did you find aliens yet, Dad?”
Her words came through the small speaker. Static from the quantum compression made them sound tinny, distant. She was only nine. His ex-wife Paige let her record these whenever she wanted. Her words came out soft and high.
Logan nodded, speaking in a whisper. “I think I did, kiddo.”
His daughter didn’t know her father was about to risk his career, and heck, maybe his life, for something nobody else up here would believe. She didn’t know he’d already lost his tenure at Berkeley over a paper suggesting human civilization was older than accepted. Every decade brought bones older than the ‘oldest possible’ date. The experts revised, declared the new date definitive, then acted shocked when it happened again. Mars was another chance, perhaps his last, to prove the establishment wrong.
He closed his fist around the locket without answering. The hologram blinked out.
Ten hours minus six equals four.
That’s all he had to document proof that 1.2 million years ago, when the Homo antecessor was just beginning to migrate across continents, they weren’t alone in the Solar System. When early hominins, the very ancestors of modern humans, hadn’t yet left Africa in significant numbers, something else was carving symbols into Martian rock.
Logan stepped over the broken mug and headed for the airlock prep chamber. With only four hours before the strip mining convoy made it to the site, he had to go now. The overhead lights whirred their constant low buzz, lighting up the metal floor. His boots left coffee prints behind him.
The EVA suit hung in its charging dock. It was the newest model, the MARS-14 Modular Atmospheric Resistance Suit, rated for seventy-two hours of continuous operation in Martian atmosphere. The helmet sat on the upper rack with a gold-tinted visor, where he could see his reflection.
After rubbing his eyes, he yawned, taking a look at his face in the visor. “My God, I look like crap.”
He pulled the suit from its dock. It was twenty-three kilograms of protection between him and a planet that wanted him dead, though in Mars’s point-three-eight g it felt like nine kilos. He stepped into the legs first, then worked his arms through the sleeves. The auto-seal mechanisms engaged with soft clicks as each section locked into place. The internal diagnostics display lit up along his left forearm. Green across the board.
“Here we go,” he said.
He was about to leave without authorization. The tracking system would log it. That was a tomorrow problem.
The helmet came last. He lifted it, turned it over in his hands. The HUD system would activate the moment it connected to the suit’s collar ring. He twisted it clockwise into place. The seal hissed. Pressure equalized. The HUD blinked on, flooding his vision with telemetry data.
Oxygen: 98%. Battery: 100%. Temp regulation: Online.
Logan cycled through the airlock. The outer door slid open. Mars greeted him with its cold, thin atmosphere and endless crimson. The rover sat where he parked days earlier. It had six wheels, a roll cage, and geological survey equipment strapped to the back.
He climbed into the driver’s seat. The engine hummed on, electric motors quiet as a prayer.
The sun crept over the eastern ridge. Dawn on Mars looked nothing like Earth, the light coming in pale and weak, diffusing through dust that never settled.
He reached for the nav panel and punched in the site coordinates, then stopped, and then stared at what he’d typed. He’d entered the base coordinates instead of the site. He deleted it and typed it again, slower this time, checking each digit before moving to the next. The nav system plotted the route. Nineteen kilometers. He exhaled through his nose and told himself it was nothing. That it was simply his tired fingers.
He pressed the accelerator and the wheels bit into the regolith, the loose top layer of Martian soil, kicking up red powder behind him.
Ten minutes into the drive, the HUD flashed red.
ANOMALOUS EM SIGNATURE DETECTED.
Logan gripped the controls tighter. The source indicator pointed ahead, directly at the site.
SIGNAL STRENGTH: INCREASING.
The readout spiked.
He furrowed his brow. “What the…”
Whatever was down there, at the site he drove toward, had just powered on.
Chapter 2
An electromagnetic signature. And it powered up.
Logan repeated the question cycling through his mind, the one he’d been repeating since the HUD flashed red ten minutes ago.
What’s going on?
Whatever it was, he’d get there and find out. Most likely nothing. The rover’s sensor array had misfired before, cross-reading signals from the base’s own transmitters and throwing false positives across the HUD. Something about the iron oxide saturation in the regolith interfering with the magnetometer calibration, especially after a dust event. The techs back at New Meridiani had a name for it. Phantom bleed. Common enough that most crews logged it and moved on.
Most crews.
He kept driving.
Outside, the terrain was nothing but flat stretches of compacted rust-colored soil broken up by scattered basalt fields. The rocks sat where ancient lava flows had left them and nowhere else. The occasional crater rim rose and dropped off in the middle distance. Shallow and eroded, nothing dramatic. To the northeast, the slope of Olympus Mons climbed toward the horizon so gradually you could stare at it for an hour before your brain registered the incline. The largest volcano in the solar system, and from ground level it looked like a long, slow nothing. Mars specialized in that. Grand things that looked like nothing until you checked the numbers.
The site was nineteen kilometers out. He’d covered nine.
He tapped the anomaly warning on the monitor. It stayed. Steady signal, no fluctuation, no dropout suggesting instrument error.
The speedometer held at forty-five kilometers per hour. Fast enough to cover ground, slow enough to keep the chassis in the green. Push past sixty out here and the suspension started arguing with the terrain, and the terrain always won. He’d seen a rover from a survey crew flip on a slope half this grade two months back. Nobody hurt, but the equipment loss had cost them three weeks of work. He wasn’t doing that today.
His pulse had doubled since he’d left. Not nerves. Just an alertness coming from over thirty hours with no real sleep, two stim pills, and the specific sensation of moving toward something that probably had an explanation and might not. His body was hedging its bets.
He wondered if anyone back at the hab had noticed he was gone yet. Probably not. Their shift didn’t start for another few hours and the three of them slept like they were compensating for everything Mars had put them through. Which, fair enough, as the schedule here didn’t leave much room for the things actually keeping people sane. You couldn’t just talk science all day. Somewhere in there you needed to complain about your family, or debate whether the coffee from the last resupply was worse than the one before it, or just sit with someone and say nothing useful for twenty minutes. Anything to put something familiar in your head. Something not involving the planet’s relentless red burning at the edges of everything you looked at, because even Earth’s political crap was better than that.
After a while, there wasn’t anything exciting about Mars. The first few weeks, yes. Then it became a job, and jobs became routine. To add to it, the landscape was simply the same crimson void stretching out in every direction until you stopped really seeing it.
Except today.
Ruins. Actual ruins. Carved symbols buried under 1.2 million years of sediment, and whatever was down there had just switched on.
He pressed the accelerator and the rover climbed a low basalt ridge, the chassis tilting, the suspension absorbing it with a dull metallic knock. On the other side, the ground dropped into a wide flat basin, and he brought the speed back down, the tires finding purchase in the softer soil and kicking red powder in twin plumes behind him. A scatter of pointy rocks forced him wide to the left, nothing serious, then the path opened up again and he could see the coordinates on the nav display ticking closer.
His helmet’s HUD flashed.
The rover’s dashboard lit up at the same moment, both systems syncing on the same data.
ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE VARIANCE DETECTED.
WIND SHEAR: INCREASING.
DUST STORM PROBABILITY: 74% WITHIN 4.5 HOURS.
He squinted at the readout.
Four and a half hours. He figured it out quickly in his head and didn’t like where it landed.
Martian dust storms built fast and hit hard. A major event could ground everything for days. The fine particulate got into joints, filters, and sensor housings. Everything. One storm three months back had taken out two of the base’s external arrays and set the geological survey back a full week.
Four and a half hours was enough. Maybe. He stared at the warning a second longer than he needed to.
Mars storms weren’t like Earth storms. No ocean keeping things predictable or thick atmosphere building the kind of pressure gradients giving meteorologists something to work with twelve hours out. Out here, a regional event could go planetary in the time it took to eat a meal.
But Tree of Life caught it, and he thought about the message. Priority Override. Strip-mining operations advanced. T-minus ten hours. Sent six hours ago, which put the convoy already moving, already driving toward the site while he’d been running tests in the hab and trying not to fall asleep at his desk.
Ten hours from that message put the convoy arriving in under four hours. An hour before the storm.
Their equipment didn’t care about the storm. Plasma cutters and gravitational extractors operated under pressurized canopies. They didn’t need clear skies. They needed a window long enough to get set up, and an hour before a major dust event was exactly that. Enough time to anchor the canopies, enough time to get the cutters into the sediment. Twenty-five meters in the first five hours. They’d be through the first archaeological layer before the storm peaked, and once they were through it, the storm almost didn’t matter because the evidence would already be gone.
His rover, on the other hand, needed clear conditions to operate. His suit could handle a moderate event. A major one would pin him to whatever shelter he could find and keep him there.
Tree of Life had timed well. Arrive an hour before the storm, set up under clear skies, and start cutting while anyone else got pinned down by the weather.
Were they aware of the ruins? Was someone inside that corporation, looking at the same data he had? Had that person made a vid call? Or if this was just brutal operational efficiency, that was almost worse. An extraction company optimizing its window, without a single thought for what might be underneath the rock they were about to pulverize… or with every thought for it.
Either way, the site was gone in four hours, and Logan sat with that for a few moments. He pushed the speed to fifty and watched the green band on the speedometer narrow.
The rover lurched. Hard.
He gripped the controls and the vehicle slewed right, the rear end stepping out before the stability system caught it. He braked, brought it to a stop, and checked the dashboard.
Left front wheel servo. Red indicator. Fault code: REGOLITH INGESTION, JOINT HOUSING.
“Come on,” he said. “You bastard, come on!”
He put it in park and climbed out.
Chapter 3
Logan huffed.
He looked at his palms. “Just get out of the rover and fix what needs fixing, Logan,” he told himself.
The exhaustion was there. It had been there for thirty hours. Regardless, he stepped out.
Inside the rover, the cabin held at a steady nineteen degrees Celsius. Outside was a different conversation entirely. The suit’s thermal regulation system kicked into a higher draw immediately, the soft whir of the heating elements cycling up along his legs and torso. The external temperature sat at minus sixty-three. He knew that without checking because his HUD told him and also because Mars had a way of making minus sixty-three feel like exactly what it was, even through four layers of insulated material. The suit handled it. But “handled” wasn’t the same as “comfortable,” and the two got confused sometimes.
He crouched beside the left front wheel. The servo housing had pulled in enough fine regolith to jam the joint mechanism. Annoying. It was a standard fix, though, and at the same time, while out on the red dust, nothing was standard, even a little bit. On Earth, it would take fifteen minutes and a beer. On Mars, in gloves that cut his dexterity in half, forty-five minutes minimum and no beer. He pulled the kit out and got to work.
At the thirty-minute mark, while the sealant on the joint housing cured, he sat back against the rover’s front panel and pulled out his datapad. Thirty minutes gone. Eleven kilometers still to cover. The convoy had maybe ninety minutes on him, give or take, and that gap wasn’t getting wider. He had time to read. Not much, but some.
He pulled up the Interplanetary Heritage Protection Act. He had to, since so many things were suddenly bugging him all at once, especially this Act. He’d read sections of it before, enough to know the broad strokes. The Act was the only legal framework applying to archaeological discovery on Mars, ratified by the IAGC, International Astronautical Governance Council, and it was the one thing standing between a significant find and a corporate extraction team with plasma cutters.
Section 4 covered notification protocols. Section 7 covered site preservation requirements. Section 9 covered jurisdictional authority in cases of corporate-government overlap.
He scrolled to Section 12. The enforcement provisions. The part that actually had teeth. Section 12.1 covered penalties for unauthorized site destruction. Section 12.2 covered whistleblower protections for reporting companies. Section 12.3 was a full page of solid black. Just gone. Every line and subsection and word underneath a black rectangle telling him nothing except someone had decided he didn’t need to know. That no one in his hab or in this rover needed to know.
How many other teams on Mars, or heck, how many other people on Earth working on the Mars project, had the same solid black?
He stared at it. The thing was, you redacted information to protect something. Sources, methods, ongoing operations, national security considerations. He understood that logic on Earth. He’d signed enough government research agreements to know the drill. But this was a preservation act for a planet with no living population, no active military presence, and no ongoing intelligence operations. The enforcement provisions for protecting archaeological sites on Mars had exactly one natural enemy.
Corporate extraction contracts.
The only thing worth protecting on Mars from a legal standpoint was archaeological evidence. And the only thing that needed redacting in an archaeological protection law was a process someone didn’t want followed.
Someone who already knew where to look.
He looked at the black rectangle for another few seconds. Then he closed the datapad and checked the sealant. Ready. He checked his dash clock. It’d been forty-seven minutes since he’d left the hab unit.
He looked east across the basin toward the coordinates on his nav display. The Tree of Life convoy, if they’d maintained their projected speed, would be somewhere around thirty kilometers out from Site Gemini-4. That’s what it’d been labeled. Gemini-4. The fourth site he’d flagged in the Olympus Mons region as potentially significant, yet the only one that had ever flagged back.
Sixty kilometers for a heavy extraction convoy moving at roughly twenty-five kilometers per hour on this terrain meant just over an hour. Maybe less if they pushed it. He had eleven kilometers left to cover.
Gonna be close.
He reassembled the housing cover, torqued the fasteners down by feel, and stood up. His knees registered the complaint they always registered after kneeling on regolith in a suit. The rover beeped twice, the system cycling back through its startup check. A low rumble settled into the cabin as the drive system came back online, and the dashboard indicators ran green left to right. He pulled out and accelerated.
The remaining eleven kilometers took just under fifteen minutes. He kept the speed at forty-five and watched the nav display tick down. When the coordinates matched, he slowed the rover to a stop at the basin rim and sat for a moment just looking at it.
The basin opened up wider here, the terrain dropping into a broad shallow depression roughly four hundred meters across. The walls of it were layered, sediment lines running horizontal in bands of ochre and dark burgundy. A geological record taking a million years or two to write. The floor of the basin was flat, almost unnaturally so compared to the chaos of rock fields he’d crossed to get here. A few scattered boulders at the eastern rim. Wind-carved ridges running southwest to northeast in parallel lines. And in the center of the basin floor, just barely visible from the rover’s elevation, the edge of something not belonging.
He got out, grabbed his things. Drill, extractor, scanner, pack, datapad, and tripod. He walked toward it.
He’d been to Gemini-4 once before, briefly, four days ago, the same surface pass where he’d caught the merkaba and the spiral patterns on his helmet camera late in the survey sweep, light already fading, already behind schedule. He’d taken photos, noted the location, and filed it somewhere between interesting and probably erosion in the back of his mind.
Nature could do strange things with rock. Erosion moved in predictable directions, water and wind cutting lines that sometimes ran almost parallel, almost straight. Sandstone formations in Utah looked like apartment buildings from the right angle. The Giant’s Causeway in Ireland produced hexagonal columns so regular they looked machined. Almost straight lines happened. Close-to-symmetrical shapes happened.
Almost was doing a lot of heavy lifting right now.
Because standing here, in the full basin, the spiral stopped being almost anything. Thirty meters across. Dark red, nearly burgundy against the surrounding rust-colored surface. Carved into the bedrock in a single continuous groove winding inward from the outer edge to a center point without a single interruption. It had exposed itself more since his last visit. Wind erosion pulling the fine surface dust back, or something else, he didn’t know. It sat on the basin floor.
He crouched at the outer edge and looked it over. The groove was uniform. Exactly uniform, the same width and depth for the entire length he could see, the walls of the cut clean and vertical, with no taper or variation or evidence of the tool marks you’d expect from any mechanical process he knew. The rock itself was basaltic, dark and dense, and the cut surface had a quality to it, one where smooth wasn’t the right word. Finished, maybe. He pushed the rust-colored dust out of the groove with a brush and looked at the exposed surface underneath. Nothing in the geological record of Mars made cuts like that.
He stood up and pulled the ground-penetrating radar unit from his pack, set the tripod, and ran the first sweep.
“Okay,” he said to himself. “Let’s see what you’ve got down there.”
The GPR returned data in thirty-eight seconds. He pulled it up on the datapad and stared at it. The chamber had moved. Not the chamber. The signal. The EM source his GPR had picked up four days ago at 2.3 kilometers down shifted. His own unit was now placing the primary return at 900 meters. That meant something had come up or the reading at 2.3 kilometers had been wrong from the start, the signal bleeding through rock strata and registering deeper than its true origin. Either way, it was closer than it had been this morning, and closer meant something had changed.
He ran the sweep a second time. Identical result. 900 meters down, directly beneath the spiral. And the GPR was pulling something else now, a secondary signature nested inside the primary return. A shape. Roughly eleven meters long, four meters across, tapered at both ends. The density reading didn’t match basalt or any iron-oxide compound common to the region. He ran it against the unit’s onboard database.
METALLIC ALLOY. COMPOSITION: UNKNOWN. NO COMPARABLE SAMPLE IN DATABASE.
He ran it a third time. Again, same damn result. Eleven meters long and four meters across.
Something’s not right, he thought. He would have scratched his head if it wasn’t for the helmet.
Whatever the GPR was painting at nine hundred meters, it wasn’t the spiral, and wasn’t anything connected to it, either. The spiral was surface level, carved into bedrock. This was something else. Something far beneath it. Something that hadn’t registered at this depth before today, which meant either the earlier readings had been wrong, or it had moved. He wasn’t sure which answer he preferred.
He packed the GPR, picked up the scanner, and walked east toward the last place he’d stood on his previous visit. A hundred meters out, just past a low shelf of exposed bedrock, the merkaba sat where he’d left it in his photos. Half of it, anyway.
The western face had eroded down to almost nothing, the edges soft and crumbled, the original form barely readable. The eastern half was different. That side had been sheltered by the rock shelf somehow, protected from the prevailing wind pattern, and it had held. It rose roughly 1.4 meters from the ground, a double tetrahedron in cross-section, the geometry still good enough to make his stomach grow nerves when he looked at it directly.
The symbols covered the intact face in three horizontal registers. He’d assumed Egyptian on first look, the broad category of it, similar to how a non-expert might look at cuneiform and call it scratches. Closer, they weren’t Egyptian. The shapes referenced the same visual vocabulary and organizational logic of a pictographic writing system, vertical registers, combined symbols, repeated elements suggesting grammar rather than decoration.
But the specific characters were different. Some looked like hybrids, a familiar form slightly rotated, or stretched, or combined with a second element that had no Egyptian equivalent he could identify. Whatever this was, it hadn’t come from Egypt. Why would it? Unless someone hauled it up from Earth as a gag, which, hell no. That wasn’t what this was.
He pulled the scanner from his pack and lined up the sensor over the lowest register of glyphs. Then he rested his other hand on the surface of the merkaba to steady himself.
The current hit him the moment his glove made contact. Not through the glove. The glove didn’t conduct. Whatever came through the merkaba went around the insulation entirely, arriving at his palm like it had skipped the material between them, like it had chosen him specifically and the glove was simply not part of the conversation.
For one second he’d been electrocuted, every nerve in his body saying so at once. Akin to the time as a kid he’d touched the element of a rice cooker with wet fingers. That same full-system wrongness, except this wasn’t electricity. He knew what electricity felt like.
Then the basin was gone. He was standing on grass. Green and dense beneath his boots, and the sky above him was the color of a salmon fillet with a blue undertone pushing through it.
He could feel warmth without a suit, which meant he wasn’t in a suit, which meant this wasn’t real, which his brain noted, then completely failed to act on.
Domed structures around him in every direction, low and wide, built from a pale stone. To his right, a cathedral. There was no better word for it. It rose two hundred meters at least, tapered at the top, covered in the same register of symbols from the merkaba, but alive here, inlaid with something catching the salmon light and throwing it back in gold. At the top, the tetrahedron, the merkaba.
He looked past it and higher. A moon hung in the sky. Perfectly round. No, that was no moon. It was too large, too close. A green atmospheric glow ringed it like a halo. Then the shockwave hit it, striking it from the far side, and for one fraction of a second the entire body cracked along its equator like an egg, then it didn’t exist anymore. It was just fragments, thousands of them, expanding outward in every direction, and the shockwave of fire preceding them was moving faster than the pieces, and it was moving toward him, and the sky went white, and the cathedral went white, and the grass went white, and—
He was on his back on the basin floor. The ochre sky was above him. Minus sixty-three degrees. Suit integrity working, all a go. No issues, other than what just happened to his brain.
The world tilted, and his vision narrowed at the edges. He got his feet under him and walked toward the rover, one step, then another, the world continuing to spin, then the ground came up and that was that.
