The hieroglyphs shouldn’t exist. 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. That 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, 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, snoring in the hab module. 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. Wind. Sand. Geometric scratches, somehow forming perfect lines, though eroded by weather as well. As an archaeologist, Logan knew better. The other three were geologists. 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. His theories no doubt just slowed down their bonuses. And, this wasn’t just some hopeful wish, Logan’s mind making up illogical conclusions. 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. Somebody taught it to somebody.

  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 windows existed at the base. Thick. All airtight. Every one of them 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, 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 blinked to life. He glanced up from his tablet.

  The Tree of Life Mining Corporation logo rotated slowly above the communication unit. It showed a stylized pickaxe that broke 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. Government checkbox. Token compliance. 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. Get paid. That was the deal.

  Thing was, why would they create such an Act? He’d always wondered that, but the salary kept his lips tight the moment they hired him. Too good of pay, 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 sapiens were a blip in the Solar System. Unless this was a joke. Did anyone else know this? Had anyone else, through other archaeological digs or geological surveys, discovered 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. Shattered. The liquid spilled near his feet. He was already reading.

  A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  Nonetheless, the Tree of Life message on the screen was brief. They might as well have used that pick axe on his own 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. Tired and 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, just to make sure.

  Priority Override: Strip-mining operations advanced to T-minus 10 hours.

  He set the datapad down with both hands, very 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. Convoy arrives in four hours. He did the math twice, because his brain was running on stim pills and spite, and both times it came back the same.

  Ten hours minus six equals four. Yep, four frickin’ hours.

  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. That’s why.

  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 were shaking. He knew exactly why and didn’t bother naming it.

  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 voice came through the small speaker. Static from the quantum compression made it sound tinny, distant. She was only nine. Her voice came out soft, high, the way kids sound before the world gets to them.

  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. Thing was, 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. 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 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. The newest model. The MARS-14 (Modular Atmospheric Resistance Suit) pressure suit, rated for seventy-two hours of continuous operation in Martian atmosphere. Three full days before the recyclers maxed out and the CO2 scrubbers needed replacement. Military-grade insulation layers. The outer shell was white, designed to stand out on the Martian surface, for safety and emergency reasons and all. Titanium-weave fabric reinforced the joints at the shoulders, elbows, knees. 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. Heavy. Twenty-three kilograms of protection between him and a planet that wanted him dead. 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 into place. Clockwise. 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’d parked days earlier. Six wheels. Roll cage. Geological survey equipment strapped to the back.

  He climbed into the driver’s seat. The engine purred to life. 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. 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. Just tired fingers.

  He pressed the accelerator and the wheels bit into the regolith, 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.