“Remember people may be watching this live, Danny – we don’t want to offend anyone with profanities, do we?”

“No problem, Yves, sorry about that everybody back home, but can you see what I can see?” Danny asked, the pitch of his voice reaching prepubescent levels.

Yves leaned forward and concentrated on the display. “You need to clean your camera a little bit more.”

‘Cleaning the camera’ wasn’t technically or physically possible. It was housed within Danny’s helmet, protected from the harsh atmosphere of Mars by half an inch of transparent aluminium. Even if one of them, heaven forbid, fell down to the bottom of the gigantic crater, the camera would emerge intact. Anything that had not been relayed in real-time to the MLP’s processors would be saved to solid-state storage ready for processing at a later date.

Danny swept his glove across the protective housing, wiping clear the layer of dust that had settled during his excavation of the tunnel. “How about now?” he said.

On the display, he could make out a smooth wall of darkened stone. A bold, straight line cut the wall in half vertically from off-screen at the top to where the wall met the equally smooth floor at the bottom. The left-hand half of the wall was unmarked, but on the right, in strokes equally as bold as the vertical line and the Amarna Stickman outside was the picture of a creature, it’s long lizard-like form lying prone and its mouth open in a grin, like a komodo dragon celebrating catching its dinner.

It looked so real it could have turned its head and said hello and Yves wouldn’t have been more surprised. There was no characterisation, no roughness, and even though he had never seen the creature before, or any of its kind, he was certain its depiction was as true to life as was possible in an engraving on stone, with no artistic licence applied. He said as much to Danny and Jane, whose movements he was tracking on the second display.

“Absolutely!” she said without hesitation. “I’ve looked at the carvings; they’re all over the walls. I don’t like to speculate and I’m by no means the authority on such things, but I can’t see how they’re possible without some kind of laser technology.”

“Are you saying that something buried hundreds of thousands of years ago was made with technology as advanced as our own?” he said in disbelief.

“What’s the alternative? That primitive man made a spaceship of wood and sailed across space with his bow and arrow and a bucket on his head?” she responded sarcastically.

“Well, that’s not exactly…”

“What Jane is saying, Yves,” Danny interrupted, “is that we already accept that this find is hundreds of thousands of years old, and that Man did not have the means to do this sort of thing back then. This means we must be looking at artefacts from Mars. Artefacts from the Martians.”

Yves was about to answer when a piercing sound came over the speakers. Before he had a chance to turn the volume down, it stopped. Danny said a single word in Russian that Yves didn’t understand but was almost certainly rude. “Everything OK?”

Then the sound came back, except this time it was pulsating. With every pulse the video feed from Danny’s suit filled with static.

“What’s wrong?” Jane said, worried.

“No idea, his cam is all messed up and the audio…”

“I can’t hear you Yves! That whining is cutting you off every second word!”

“What?”

“I said I can’t hear… ah! That’s better!” The noise had stopped.

“Shit,” Yves said between gritted teeth. “Danny, can you hear us?”

Danny’s video, audio and medical feeds had all stopped transmitting. Looking at Jane’s screen, he could see the Russian standing in front of the alien engravings. His arms drooped lazily by his sides, his head lolled dangerously. Jane leaped towards him and pulled him back, stopping him from falling head first into the tunnel wall. She lay him down and shone her flashlight through his visor.

His eyes were open, the pupils fully dilated. They didn’t respond to the bright light as she moved it frantically from eye to eye.

“Is he breathing?”

She looked at the breastplate of his suit and tapped it twice quickly. A small OLED display flashed briefly. She hit it again several times, but it didn’t come back. No battery. Moving to his wrist, she checked his suit controls. The suit should have had enough charge for another week’s use, before they would need to be hooked up to the station’s power source for two whole days to fill up.

The wrist controls were powered by a kinetic wrist band, as a failsafe redundancy; shake your arm and you’ll always be able to check your oxygen. The readout showed twenty-five per cent air. It also confirmed his pulse, faint but still present. He had enough air for a couple of hours breathing, but no power meant that he’d freeze to death before that time was up.

She said as much to Yves, then paused. When she spoke again her voice was grave. “I can’t carry him up the cliff on my own. I can’t get him out of here without you.”

And I can’t get to you, he thought to himself. “Have you checked your own suit?” He was going over the readouts himself. “You look fine from here.”

“Confirmed. Everything looks good to me. It’s just Danny, his suit just suddenly lost all its power. I have to get him warm, somehow!”

“Jane, go back to the Rover. Remove one of the fuel cells, and take it back to Danny.”

“Of course!” She was already running.

It only took her five minutes to reach the vehicle, another two to remove the fuel cell. God Bless mission planners she thought to herself as she marvelled at the simplicity of the power source’s design: completely self-contained like an old fashioned battery. The cable connecting it to the Rover was identical to the cable that emerged from the underside of the suits to charge them up. With a bit of twisting you could even reach it yourself and plug yourself in.

The way back was slightly longer, as she negotiated a couple of rock slides and steep slopes. The cell wasn’t excessively heavy, but it offset her centre of balance enough for her to risk falling down the crater if she wasn’t careful. She finally entered the tunnel and her flashlight automatically came on.

She reached the dead end just in time to see the stone wall slide back down to meet the floor. And Danny was gone.

Chapter 58

A sudden sense of urgency filled the DEFCOMM control room after the Russian cosmonaut’s disappearance.

Following that, it took Gail less than an hour to get her tablet back. The hieroglyphic analysis tools would help decipher the engravings on the walls, she had claimed.

She could only thank her lucky stars that she had the tablet in Mahmoud’s office back in Cairo, and that her abductors had thought to bring it with them.

Using translation tools was, of course, a decoy. George’s application wasn’t a translator, and in any case she didn’t know of any software on Earth that would help with the alien writing she had seen carved into the tunnel walls on Mars. As much as she would have loved to help solve the mystery of where Captain Marchenko had gone, this was her chance to save herself first.

Save yourself, the thought, and you stand a chance of saving them. All that she needed to do now was make sure that no one was looking.

Dr Patterson looked over her shoulder at the screen. “Interesting tool,” he said thoughtfully. “It looks a bit out of date, how old is it?”

She grunted and tapped a command into the screen. “There’s not a huge demand for this sort of application, in fact I don’t know anyone else who uses it. So it’ll pretty much do the job until it breaks or something much better comes along.” She didn’t tell him that George had developed it for her; it was pointless arousing suspicions when she was so close. “Can you get me some coffee?”