Keystone (18 page)

Now looking at
a perfectly rectangular rump steak, she picked up a scalpel from the table and
made a small incision across the middle. Prying the cut apart to reveal the
bloodless cross section, she nodded approvingly and used the scalpel to cut the
slab into three equal parts, before stacking them on a plastic plate and
placing them in the sample fridge under the table.

“As soon as I
make a steak-shaped receptacle, it won’t look like I just slaughtered a square
cow,” she muttered under her breath.

She walked to
the MLP’s communications console and depressed a button at its centre, before
speaking into the microphone stalk.

“Hey guys,
while you’ve been out there playing in the sand, I’ve been preparing this
evening’s meal. How does rump steak and mash sound?” she said cheerfully.

There was a
short wait, during which the Martian static undulated out over the MLP’s
speaker system. The Russian replied, fainter than usual.

“That sounds
great, Jane. Any way you can make a couple of cold beers using that nano-stuff
of yours?”

“I second
that,” Montreaux laughed.

She smiled and
pressed the com button once more.

“Hey, as soon
as I develop a nanocapsule that adds a kick, no problem. In the meantime, we’re
going to have to make do with alcohol-free, if that’s alright with you?”

Captains
Montreaux and Marchenko had driven Herbie to the very edge of Hellas Basin
about two and a half kilometres from
the MLP. Exiting the vehicle, they walked to the cliff apprehensively. They
instinctively stopped two metres from the edge, and Montreaux let out a gasp.

The view they
beheld was simply astonishing.

Hellas Basin
was a crater, the largest visible asteroid impact crater in the Solar System,
with a diameter of over two thousand three hundred kilometres. It had been
created nearly four billion years earlier, and the debris field of the impact
covered almost a third of the planet. The main bulk of the debris had formed a
sloped rim of rocks and sand more than one hundred kilometres wide around its
circumference. The MLP had landed on this rim almost three kilometres from the
crater, but it was only when they stood at the very edge and looked back
towards their landing site that the gentle slope down to Martian ‘sea level’
could be fully appreciated.
 

Looking the
other way, towards the centre of the Basin, was a truly terrifying experience.
From the very bottom of the crater to where Montreaux and Marchenko now stood
was a height difference of almost nine kilometres. If Mount Everest had been
placed in the centre, they would be looking down on its peak. As it was, they
were looking down a steep slope, and across a wide expansive plain larger than
India.
 
The crisp Martian atmosphere gave
them near perfect visibility, and only the curve of the horizon prevented them
appreciating the crater fully.

In the
distance, they could easily see the brilliant white reflection of frost that
covered most of the floor of the crater.

Emboldened by
curiosity after his initial shock, Montreaux edged closer to the precipice and
looked down. Contrary to his initial impression, instead of a sheer drop, the
crater sloped away from him, not as gently as the debris field behind him, but
certainly not vertical either. He found himself comparing it to a tough ski
slope: potentially deadly if he’d had skis on and it was covered in snow, but
quite possible to clamber down given the circumstances. What did impress,
however, was not the incline of the slope but its scale. Whereas on Earth he
would have expected the drop to end after at the most a few hundred metres, the
wall of the Hellas Basin did not.
 
It
continued on its way down, gradually levelling out as it neared the bottom like
the inside of a soup bowl, until he imagined it must merge with the crater
floor kilometres below.
 
He had to
‘imagine’ where it met the bottom for two reasons, he surmised. Firstly, he
calculated that with the depth of the crater and gradient of the slope, the
intersection of ‘floor’ and ‘wall’ of the crater had to be at least fifteen
kilometres away from him, and his ability to define accurate shapes at such
distances without visual aid was quite low. This was in no way helped by his
second reason, which was that as far as the eye could see, all the rocks and
debris looked the same.

Looking to his
left and right, he saw that from a distance, the crater rim looked like an
unbroken ring of mountains, imprisoning the plain below.

The slope was
made up of a mixture of varying sizes of rock and Martian soil. Almost
everything was the same colour, a pale shade of orangey-brown. Occasionally a
particular rock would be slightly darker or lighter, but there were few obvious
geological variances, at least to his untrained eyes.

He looked over
at Danny, who was kneeling at the edge examining a small spherical rock about
the size of a baseball.

“Impressive,
isn’t it?” he said.

The Russian
looked up across the plain and nodded slowly before standing. He wrapped his
fingers around the stone and bounced it in his palm a few times, getting a feel
for its weight and balance. Without a word he stretched his arm back fully
before sweeping it forwards in a flash, releasing the stone mid-swing. They
watched the stone fly forwards at least a hundred metres before gravity started
to bring it down to the ground.

The low
gravity made for an impressive pitch indeed.

Because of the
incline, the stone continued to fall for about three hundred metres before
finally striking a large flat rock jutting out from the cliff-face. A small
cloud of pale orange debris was thrown up from the rock as the stone bounced
off and disappeared below.
 

 
“See if you can beat that,” he grinned and
looked at Montreaux.

But Montreaux
wasn’t listening. He was still looking down at the flat rock that the stone had
struck; the dust had now settled and despite its distance, it was obvious that
there was a striking difference in colour between the surface dust that had
been disturbed and the rock beneath. It was jet black.

“Captain
Marchenko, pass me the binoculars, please.”

He focussed
the electronic device on the stone below. After several long minutes, he passed
the binoculars back.

“Look at the
flat rock you just hit,” he said, seriously.

Danny’s first
instinct was to be sarcastic. He felt like saying that he was sorry he’d
damaged a Martian rock, but that there were billions more identical ones where
that came from. Instead, he took the binoculars and steadied the image on the
flat rock.

“What do you
think it is?” He didn’t move his eyes from the binoculars, but instead zoomed
in further to examine the small patch of jet black stone that had been
uncovered. They had spent days picking up rocks and digging test holes in the
soil near their base, and had never seen anything like it.

Montreaux had
already been thinking about his answer, and had remembered some basic facts
from his early days at school. “Well, on Earth, a black colour in stone often
comes from carbon.”

Marchenko
pulled his eyes away from the binoculars and looked at the American.

“Carbon? From
plants and animals?”

“Yes, I think,
although I don’t know if it can be naturally occurring too.” He thought about
this for a moment. “In any case, we’ll never know until we get down there to
look at it. We’ll need a sample to take back to Dr Richardson.”

“Wow! That was
one lucky throw!”

“It certainly
was. Now, I propose that we climb down together, but first, we need fresh air,
I only have half an hour’s worth left.”

They climbed
down the cliff in parallel, connected by a thin strand of synthetic rope for
safety.
 
It was by no means a dangerous
climb, and on Earth could certainly have been attempted with barely a second’s
thought. But on Mars, the combination of reduced gravity and airtight suits
made for a nervous descent for both men.

As they came
within twenty metres of the flat stone, Montreaux paused and turned his upper
body round to face it. He tugged sharply on the safety line to get Danny’s
attention and pointed down at their goal.

“It’s
definitely not your standard Martian rock formation, is it?” he said, out of
breath.

“There’s
something out of place about it, definitely. Something –”

“Not natural,”
Montreaux finished his sentence for him, “I agree.”

From where
they now sat, the stone betrayed not only its huge dimensions, but also its
unexpected shape and orientation. It was about six metres wide and rectangular,
protruding at least ten metres from the cliff-face.

Although it
was difficult to tell with any accuracy from where they were sitting, the stone
looked to be completely flat amidst the chaos of debris deposited around them.

“It looks
almost like a,” Danny searched for the word. “Like a
jetty
, where you moor a boat on a riverbank.”

The two
astronauts looked at each other and then continued to descend in silence.
Montreaux checked the small LCD display on his forearm to ensure that his suit
camera was capturing the whole event.

The Russian
reached the stone first. He stood up to his full height and looked at
Montreaux, who had continued past the stone and was now investigating below.

“This is
incredible,” he said. “The stone comes right out of the cliff, it’s about a
metre and a half thick, below is filled up with soil and other rocks, but apart
from that you can clearly see the shape of the stone.” His voice was filled
with awe. “This stone has to be artificial. The edge is perfectly flat all
around, and wait.” His gloves had a built in rubber wiper along the seam of the
thumb, for his own visor in case of sandstorms. He used it to scrape the stone
clean. “Yes, that’s incredible! There’s a thick coat of dirt and dust, but
underneath it’s the same jet black stone, and it’s so smooth!”

Danny was
using his gloves to expand the impact crater that his small projectile had
created.

“Same up here;
it’s perfectly smooth. And whatever it is, it’s –”

Montreaux
waited for him to finish his sentence, but the words didn’t come.

“Yes?” he pressed.

“Oh, my God,”
Danny said, followed by a short burst of Russian that Montreaux didn’t
understand. “Yves, get up here and look at this!”

Despite his
usual friendly carefree attitude, Marchenko never referred to Montreaux using
his Christian name.
 
That was a break in
protocol that only Dr Richardson enjoyed. Montreaux almost fell over himself
reaching the top of the stone to join the Russian.

“What?” he
said, urgently, glancing sideways at the stone.

He pointed to
the patch of black surface he had uncovered. His hand was shaking visibly.

Captain
Montreaux did not need it spelled out. What had stunned Danny had the same
effect on him. His knees grew weak, and he sank down slowly until he could
touch the stone. He ran his gloved fingers across it until they slotted neatly
into a groove, about two centimetres deep and ten wide that ran in a perfectly
straight line from under one edge of the cleaned area, near the wall of the
crater out towards its centre. Danny’s gloved fingers had left small furrows
where he had done his best to clear out most of the sand. After about sixty
centimetres, the groove split in two in a perfect V. At the edges of the
cleared area, he could make out the lines of two more possible grooves. He
stood up and tilted his head as he examined the stone.
 
The grooves made the shape of a V, pointing
towards the crater wall, with a line emerging from its apex and disappearing
into the cliff.

The grooves
had been perfectly, and unmistakably, carved into the stone. And both
astronauts immediately interpreted them in the same way: whatever had made the
lines had intended them to point towards something that was now buried under
the rock and debris of the cliff-wall.

They sat in
silence for several minutes before Montreaux regained his composure. He pressed
a button on his communicator pad and hailed the MLP.

“Dr
Richardson, please confirm that you are getting the data feed from Captain
Marchenko’s and my helmet cams.”

There was a
momentary pause.

“Hi there.
What am I looking at?” Jane said in a confused voice.

“Please
confirm that you are getting this data feed and that it is being stored
correctly, Dr Richardson,” he said plainly.

 
“That’s affirmative, Captain Montreaux, both
feeds coming in, there’s a bit of atmospheric interference, a little worse than
when we spoke earlier. But what the hell am I looking at?”

“We are out of
your line of sight, I imagine that is causing the interference,” he explained.
“Can you give a quick assessment of the material we are standing on?”

There was a
long silence, after which the scientist spoke quite cautiously. “I would say
from its colour that it could be an igneous rock, it resembles obsidian.”

“Igneous?
Obsidian?” Montreaux asked.

She sighed.
“Igneous rocks are basically cooled down magma that on Earth forms most of the
crust,” she elaborated. “Basically, magma leaves the mantle, normally during
movement of tectonic plates or during a volcanic eruption, for instance, and
solidifies as it becomes part of the crust because it is further from the
heated core of the planet. In theory, the closer the magma is to the surface
when it hardens, the faster it will do so because the ambient temperature will
be lower. If magma cools slowly, the solid crystals that form can easily be
bigger than your fist. As the rate of cooling increases, however, so the size
of those crystals decreases. If the magma is on the surface, what we would
normally call
lava
, and the
environmental conditions are
just
right, it can cool so fast that crystals hardly have the opportunity to form,
in which case we get obsidian. In these cases, the crystals have to be observed
under a microscope.”