Four petal-like blue solar panels slowly unfolded. A weather mast extended upward along with the IMP, the Imager for Mars Pathfinder. Resting on one of the solar panels was a small vehicle, the Sojourner Truth, named for a nineteenth-century African-American antislavery crusader. The Rover was twenty-six inches long by nineteen inches wide and twelve inches high, weighing in at twenty- two pounds.
As dawn came to Mars on July 5, 1997, the IMP, which actually had two slightly offset cameras that produced a three-dimensional image when used together, took the first pictures of the surface of the planet from the surface. Sojourner’s wheels, retracted while in transit, slowly extended and locked into place. It rolled down onto the Martian surface, the first human moving vehicle on another planet since the last Apollo missions to the moon. Sojourner moved about sixteen inches to a rock, which controllers had given the name Barnacle Bill, and analyzed it using the APXS, Alpha Proton X-Ray Spectrometer. The APXS bombarded the rock with alpha particles and measured the radiation that bounced back. The resulting data was relayed to Pathfinder, which then transmitted it back to Earth. Analyzing the results, scientists were able to get a very good idea of the rock’s composition.
One of the problems with moving Sojourner about was that it took two and a half minutes for images and data to make it to Earth and then the same amount of time for controlling information to be sent the other way. Thus, the controllers only could see where the vehicle had been and had to plan future movements very carefully. So fascinated was the American public with this accomplishment that forty-four million people logged onto NASA’s web site the first day Sojourner moved.
Designed to last only seven days, Sojourner continued to function well past that limit. In August it was moved to a spot about thirty-three feet away, where it measured the composition of several rocks. On September 26, with power indications down to 30 percent, Sojourner was sent off on its greatest journey, a 165-foot trek around the Pathfinder lander. However, the next day, the signal from both Sojourner and the Pathfinder lander were lost. Scientists believed that the onset of the Martian autumn had caused Pathfinder’s temperature to fall below the point where the transmitter conuld function.
Still, scientists continued for several weeks to send orders to Sojourner, on the chance that while it could not relay data back through Pathfinder, it still might be able to receive orders and function with power from the solar panels.
Unknown to the scientists, their orders were indeed relayed through Pathfinder to Sojourner, and it continued its journey, moving across the Martian surface at a very slow pace, using the rudimentary laser guidance system that allowed it to avoid obstacles directly ahead. Sojourner traveled almost a quarter of a mile, over four hundred yards away from the lander, before its batteries finally gave out.
It came to a halt in the center of an open area, a small symbol of mankind’s ability to travel to other worlds.
It was still dead in that spot years later when a plume of red dust on the horizon indicated something was headed toward it. The main Airlia convoy was almost to the base of Mons Olympus. Miles behind it, the vehicle that had recovered the crystal from the rubble of the Face hurried to catch up. Huge treads tore into the Martian landscape, spewing a long plume of red dust behind them.
A track pad on the Airlia vehicle approaching was larger than the entire Rover.
And one of those track pads ground the Rover into the Martian soil as a man might step on an ant without noticing.
The Pathfinder lander, a quarter mile away, wasn’t even noticed as the Airlia crew hurried to catch up with the rest of the convey headed toward Mons Olympus.
Aspasia’s Shadow had the Talon flying at an altitude of over eighty thousand feet, well above the paths crisscrossed by commercial airlines, as he pondered his current situation. He wasted no time on anger or regrets, but simply reviewed the facts.
The nanovirus no longer functioned, and those who had once been his unwilling slaves were now free.
By his own hand Easter Island was no more.
The Mission in Mount Sinai was crawling with Israeli forces.
Aspasia had died in space.
Artad was free, currently being tracked in a Talon by the humans, apparently on his way to Mars.
Aspasia’s Shadow had lost much. And all he had was a Talon, incapable of warp speed. Unacceptable.
Aspasia’s Shadow had known that even as he made the deal. He would not spend eternity slowly flying between star systems at sub-light speed. He would not do so even in suspended sleep. He had waited too long to accept such a fate.
He still had some options. The Guides. He had recruited many people over the years, bringing them to Sinai and forcing them to make direct contact with the guardian. The machine had literally “rewired” their brains to make them his servants without the necessity of infecting them with the nanovirus. And since the programming was imprinted on their minds, it would still function even without Aspasia’s Shadow having control of a guardian. He had sent these people back to wherever they had come from, agents ready to do his bidding when given the proper code word. Always have a backup plan. That was a lesson Aspasia’s Shadow had learned over the millennia in his various reincarnations. The ultimate backup had always been to have a cloned body in the ka tube and his memories up to his last visit loaded into the computer. Thus if he were somehow killed, as had happened on occasion, the ka machine would activate on a preset date, load memories into the clone, and he would be “alive” once more. Of course whatever had happened from the last time he updated the machine until his “death” would be lost, but he had always tried to keep the machine relatively current, rarely letting more than ten years elapse before an update. The Israelis controlled the machine now, as it was deep inside the base at Mount Sinai, but that didn’t concern Aspasia’s Shadow at the moment, He had something much better as the ultimate backup — immortality.
He also had a backup emergency plan for support in case things went terribly wrong, which they had. Aspasia’s Shadow checked his location. He was over west Texas, where the Rio Grande took a long turn, near Big Bend National Park.
He dropped the Talon down through the atmosphere at high speed, decelerating only when he was just above the desert floor. There were no lights in sight, no sign of civilization. That wasn’t unusual, as Big Bend was the least visited national park in the United States, sprawling across over eight hundred thousand acres. The Indians had called the area the Great Spirit’s rock storage facility, giving one an idea of the terrain. The early Spanish explorers had called it El Despoblado, the uninhabited land.
The Talon landed at the base of Chilicota Mountain, a four-thousand-foot-high mountain with no road within forty miles. Once the Talon was securely on the ground, Aspasia’s Shadow turned on a strobe light near the top of the vessel. The beacon flashed across the darkened terrain, visible for over thirty miles where it wasn’t obstructed by the mountain.
Then Aspasia’s Shadow leaned back in the command chair and waited.
A steady stream of doctors entered the room, checked the charts, examined the patient, then left. Not because they thought that there was anything more any of them could do, but because no one could believe she was still alive, and they had to see with their own eyes.
Kelly Reynolds weighed about eighty pounds, a significant drop from her normal 165. Simply getting intravenous feeds into her emaciated body had proven an almost impossible task. But since there was no other way to get essential nourishment into her body, the doctors had persisted until finally the had two lines directly into arteries. She had not regained consciousness since being transported here from Easter Island and there was little hope she would. Not a single one of the doctors who were amazed she was alive was willing to wager that she would still be in a few days. She had lost too much critical body mass and there was too much damage to vital organs. They couldn’t explain why she wasn’t dead already. But she lived. And one nurse on the intensive care ward thought differently than the doctors. Terry Cummings had worked at Tripler for over thirty-five years. She’d cut her teeth on the planeloads of wounded brought in from Vietnam near the end of that war. She’d seen people who should have lived give up and die and she’d seen those the doctors had written off fight their supposedly fatal wounds and live.