An electromagnetic signature. And it powered up.

  Logan repeated the question cycling through his mind, the one he’d been repeating since the HUD flashed red ten minutes ago.

  What’s going on?

  Whatever it was, he’d get there and find out. Most likely nothing. The rover’s sensor array had misfired before, cross-reading signals from the base’s own transmitters and throwing false positives across the HUD. Something about the iron oxide saturation in the regolith interfering with the magnetometer calibration, especially after a dust event. The techs back at New Meridiani had a name for it. Phantom bleed. Common enough that most crews logged it and moved on.

  Most crews.

  He kept driving.

  Outside, the terrain was nothing but flat stretches of compacted rust-colored soil broken up by scattered basalt fields. The rocks sat where ancient lava flows had left them and nowhere else. The occasional crater rim rose and dropped off in the middle distance. Shallow and eroded. Nothing dramatic. To the northeast, the slope of Olympus Mons climbed toward the horizon so gradually you could stare at it for an hour before your brain registered the incline. The largest volcano in the solar system, and from ground level it looked like a long, slow nothing. Mars specialized in that. Grand things that looked like nothing until you checked the numbers.

  The site was nineteen kilometers out. He’d covered nine.

  He tapped the anomaly warning on the monitor. It stayed. Steady signal, no fluctuation, no dropout suggesting instrument error.

  The speedometer held at forty-five kilometers per hour. Fast enough to cover ground, slow enough to keep the chassis in the green. Push past sixty out here and the suspension started arguing with the terrain, and the terrain always won. He’d seen a rover from a survey crew flip on a slope half this grade two months back. Nobody hurt, but the equipment loss had cost them three weeks of work. He wasn’t doing that today.

  His pulse had doubled since he’d left. Not nerves. Just an alertness coming from over thirty hours with no real sleep, two stim pills, and the specific sensation of moving toward something that probably had an explanation and might not. His body was hedging its bets.

  He wondered if anyone back at the hab had noticed he was gone yet. Probably not. Their shift didn’t start for another few hours and the three of them slept like they were compensating for everything Mars had put them through. Which, fair enough, as the schedule here didn’t leave much room for the things actually keeping people sane. You couldn’t just talk science all day. Somewhere in there you needed to complain about your family, or debate whether the coffee from the last resupply was worse than the one before it, or just sit with someone and say nothing useful for twenty minutes. Anything to put something familiar in your head. Something not involving the planet’s relentless red burning at the edges of everything you looked at, because even Earth’s political crap was better than that.

  After a while, there wasn’t much exciting about Mars. The first few weeks, yes. Then it became a job, and jobs became routine. To add to it, the landscape was simply the same crimson void stretching out in every direction until you stopped really seeing it.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  Except today.

  Ruins. Actual ruins. Carved symbols buried under 1.2 million years of sediment, and whatever was down there had just switched on.

  He pressed the accelerator and the rover climbed a low basalt ridge, the chassis tilting, the suspension absorbing it with a dull metallic knock. On the other side, the ground dropped into a wide flat basin, and he brought the speed back down, the tires finding purchase in the softer soil and kicking red powder in twin plumes behind him. A scatter of pointy rocks forced him wide to the left, nothing serious, and then the path opened up again and he could see the coordinates on the nav display ticking closer.

  His helmet’s HUD flashed.

  The rover’s dashboard lit up in the same moment, both systems syncing on the same data.

  ATMOSPHERIC PRESSURE VARIANCE DETECTED

  WIND SHEAR: INCREASING

  DUST STORM PROBABILITY: 74% WITHIN 4.5 HOURS

  He squinted at the readout.

  Four and a half hours. He did the math. Didn’t like where it landed.

  Martian dust storms built fast and hit hard. A major event could ground everything for days. The fine particulate got into joints, filters, sensor housings. Everything. One storm three months back had taken out two of the base’s external arrays and set the geological survey back a full week.

  Four and a half hours was enough. Maybe.

  He stared at the warning a second longer than he needed to.

  Mars storms weren’t like Earth storms. No ocean keeping things predictable, no thick atmosphere building the kind of pressure gradients giving meteorologists something to work with twelve hours out. Out here, a regional event could go planetary in the time it took to eat a meal.

  But Tree of Life caught it.

  He thought about the message. Priority Override. Strip-mining operations advanced. T-minus ten hours. Sent six hours ago, which put the convoy already moving, already driving toward the site while he’d been running tests in the hab and trying not to fall asleep at his desk.

  Ten hours from that message put the convoy arriving in under four hours. An hour before the storm.

  Their equipment didn’t care about the storm. Plasma cutters and gravitational extractors operated under pressurized canopies. They didn’t need clear skies. They needed a window long enough to get set up, and an hour before a major dust event was exactly that. Enough time to anchor the canopies, enough time to get the cutters into the sediment. Twenty-five meters in the first five hours. They’d be through the first archaeological layer before the storm peaked, and once they were through it, the storm almost didn’t matter. The evidence would already be gone.

  His rover, on the other hand, needed clear conditions to operate. His suit could handle a moderate event. A major one would pin him to whatever shelter he could find and keep him there.

  Tree of Life had timed well. Arrive an hour before the storm, set up under clear skies, and start cutting while anyone else got pinned down by the weather.

  Were they aware of the ruins? Was someone inside that corporation, looking at the same data he had? Had that person made a vid call? Or if this was just brutal operational efficiency, that was almost worse. An extraction company optimizing its window the way extraction companies did, without a single thought for what might be underneath the rock they were about to pulverize.

  Either way, the site was gone in four hours.

  Logan sat with that for a few moments. Seconds later, he pushed the speed to fifty and watched the green band on the speedometer narrow.

  The rover lurched. Hard.

  He gripped the controls and the vehicle slewed right, the rear end stepping out before the stability system caught it. He braked, brought it to a stop, and checked the dashboard.

  Left front wheel servo. Red indicator. Fault code: REGOLITH INGESTION, JOINT HOUSING.

  “Come on,” he said. “You bastard, come on!”

  He put it in park and climbed out.