And then there had been his dream. His dreams had always been very vivid, and surreal. But this one? He could still feel, taste and hear the crater-site on Mars, as it was in the time of the Xynutians. It wasn’t just a dream. It felt more like a recollection. The image had stuck with him ever since.
Nevertheless, he had certainly not expected the crew to find the Xynutian remains within days of arriving, by simply throwing a stone at them. Either the crew were incredibly lucky, or there were so many remains on Mars that they simply had to stumble upon one sooner or later. More importantly though, his dream, and the book, had been bang-on.
No one could ever find out about their finds, not even NASA, which was where his headache had come from. Influencing the decision to put the mission on the shore of the Hellas Basin had been fairly straight forward: enough of the scientific community thought it would be a good place to land anyway, which reduced the amount of lobbying needed along NASA’s corridors. Making sure that no one outside his office knew they had been influenced, and even more importantly, why they had been, was infinitely harder.
It had been easy enough to control the nanostations on-board the Clarke, and the interception of the communication relay with Earth had been straightforward. DEFCOMM built and maintained the satellites in orbit, the receiver dishes on Earth, and owned the encryption technology that was used to hide the signal from the rest of the world. With five hundred and twelve bit encryption, even an intercepted signal would take over three years to decode using the fastest supercomputer on the planet, barring the use of quantum computers, which remained inaccessible in a practical sense. For all intents and purposes, he was in total control of the Earth’s view of the spaceship.
Their first mistake, however, had come after introduction of the time-delay. Sooner or later they would need to be able to edit what was happening to the mission so that if they did eventually stumble upon alien remains on Mars, those facts could remain hidden from Earth. The most obvious solution was one that had been used for decades in reality television: a time lag, which meant that what people were watching was actually minutes or even hours old, giving the show’s producers ample time to cut to adverts, bleep out swearwords before the watershed, or change camera to avoid showing certain things that the censors would rather the public didn’t see.
Of course on Earth it would become painfully apparent that something was wrong if anyone tried to have a real-time conversation, which was why they had waited for Clarke to be far enough away to make any kind of to-and-fro impractical. Earth sent messages out, and the crew replied when it was convenient to do so, and the time delay would never be noticed.
But on Clarke, they had not counted on Su Ning, her excellent mental arithmetic and, crucially, her clandestine watch that kept perfect time with Beijing. After she realised the time delay had been introduced, only eliminating her avoided compromising the entire mission.
Shortly after the discovery of the Jetty, and the Xynutian settlement, they had switched to computer generated imagery, to replace almost all external shots on Mars with faked footage generated by their programmers. Shots outside were easy to produce, mainly because everything was either mechanical or alien. Anyone watching would be unable to tell the difference between a fake rock or a real one, and a spacesuit doesn’t exactly have a personality. But everything inside the MLP continued to be real footage, edited and modified as little as possible depending on the topic of the astronaut’s banter.
But then, disaster.
In the space of a few hours, the two leading astronauts on the project had disappeared inside the Xynutian settlement. That had a double effect: firstly, it was now obvious on all video returning from Mars that Dr Jane Richardson was alone. Secondly, she had been in a near-hysterical state for hours now, and when she wasn’t screaming into the cameras, she was sitting down staring into her hands, or shouting into the microphone at the comms panel in a desperate attempt to get hold of her fellow astronauts, whose air had long since run out.
None of the video coming back from Mars could be sent to NASA without him having a lot of explaining to do. He couldn’t allow that to happen.
So for a while now, there had been no feed from Mars. NASA had been told there was a technical problem with one of the satellites in the receiver array. At best, it would buy them a month before a new satellite or repair crew could be launched, at worst NASA would demand that video be transmitted via a different satellite. To stop it coming to that, they had provided a steady stream of synthesised voice clips from Mars. These had been much easier to produce, due to the interference that plagued interplanetary communications.
His headache was starting to subside, and he opened his eyes. Looking at the screen, he watched Dr Richardson fetch herself a glass of water from the kitchen unit of the MLP. She was millions of miles away, alone on a dead planet.
He picked up the phone and dialled a secure line. Almost immediately, there was an answer from the other end.
“How long till they reach their target?” he asked.
“Just under an hour, Sir.”
“Let me know when you have news.” He hung up abruptly and looked at the video from Mars.
Dr Patterson and Dr Turner had come up with a hair-brained scheme, in his opinion. But if the Amarna Library did, miraculously, give them a clue as to how the Xynutian door mechanism would open, then there may be some hope. If the astronauts trapped inside had somehow survived, if there was some improbable source of oxygen inside the ancient settlement, then there was a chance that they could return to the surface of Mars soon, and they could return to normal video feeds before NASA decided to intervene.
That was a lot of ifs, and the odds on the last two were too long for his liking.
From his perspective, the Mars mission had already fulfilled its primary objective: it had proven without a doubt that the book from Amarna had been telling the truth. The Xynutians had indeed existed, hundreds of thousands, millions of years before modern humans had crawled from the dirt and started their long journey to civilisation. This in turn meant that they must have been wiped out by Aniquilus, which in turn led to the worst possible conclusion: there was no doubt that mankind was about to meet the same fate.
Which was what was making his head hurt. He had come to terms with the Xynutians, and their advanced civilisation, but what troubled him was Aniquilus. This thing that wiped them out just didn’t make sense. It came from nowhere.
Unless Aniquilus was the Xynutians. And if that turned out to be true, then humans would become their own Aniquilus.
There would be one last roll of the dice, one last chance for Mars to reveal more of the Xynutian’s secrets, how the end came about and what could be done to avoid the same fate for the humans. That last chance lay in the mission to Amarna, with Dr Patterson.
And if they don’t succeed? In his mind, the Amarna books were clear on one detail: the Xynutians had been erased because they spread too far, they consumed everything and they failed to fit in with their environment. Mankind had achieved the same dominance on Earth, and there was only one way back.
If there was no good news from Amarna, then there would be no choice but to pass to Plan B, before it was too late. All the pieces fit together perfectly.
That he had come across the architect’s script and found the texts from Amarna, both could be put down to chance. That he was also able to manipulate a manned mission to Mars, and that half the world’s defence systems were in his control could not. There was only one person on Earth who had been placed in such a position, or indeed could have been.