* * *
After they had finished, Kieran put a call through to Solomon Leppo. “Have you sent the drone off with those things yet?” he asked him.
“I’ve cleared it with Mahom and got the stuff you listed. I was leaving it till after dark, like you said,” Leppo answered.
“Good,” Kieran said. “Hold it a little longer. There’ll be one more item. Someone will be contacting you. She’ll deliver it. Let me know when you’re set to go.”
* * *
June called back with profiles of the four people that Zorken had sent to Mars. Justin Banks, from what everyone had seen, the senior member of the group, was listed in Zorken’s organizational tree as an executive project leader, reporting to a Thornton Velte, projects appraisals director for the Mining Division and one of Hamilton Gilder’s inner clique. That Banks represented the corporation’s mining interests, not construction or engineering, was surely significant—all the more so when taken in conjunction with the backgrounds of the three people who had come with him. Gertrude Heissen, who had to have been the thin-lipped, pale-faced woman present with Banks at the first meeting with Hamil, was described as a corporate mineralogist. The bearded Asian with them was almost certainly Tran Xedeidang, a geochemist also employed by Zorken. The fourth Mars arrival, Clarence Porter, not seen on that occasion, was an outside consultant specializing in petrological magnetism and radiation.
“Great stuff!” Kieran complimented. “Now it’s starting to make more sense. Look, there’s one more thing I’d like you to do. There’s a guy in Lowell who’s into biological nano-research. He has a package that I need sent out here. Can you pick it up from him and deliver it to Mahom’s mechanic out on Beacon Way? He’s going to ship it out with some other stuff that’s waiting.”
“What are you up to now, Kieran?” June asked suspiciously.
“Remote-programming body cells to change color. What do you think? It could open up a whole new world of body art. How would you like a completely different medium of self-expression?”
“Right now, I don’t think I’m even up to hearing about it. Just give me the details,” June sighed.
* * *
Hamil confirmed that the expedition’s own work had found an abnormally high radiation background in the plateau area. He hadn’t mentioned it to Kieran before because it hadn’t seemed relevant. But the clear implication seemed to be that what was holding the interest of Zorken Consolidated in this part of the Tharsis region was minerals potential. “It makes sense,” Kieran said when he reviewed his findings with the scientists. “Extract what’s under the ground first. Then use your land rights for development afterward.”
“Very efficient. Very thorough,” Hamil conceded. “So do you have an answer to it? You seem to have been very busy.”
The others were following with solemn faces. Kieran cast an eye around the circle, then said to them all, “Going back to these Technolithic structures and sites back on Earth . . . You sometimes hear legends of `curses’ and `perils’ associated with these things—mysteries that popular fears get built around, which are said to defy explanation. I’d like to know more. What can you tell me about them?”
Some of the listeners looked taken aback, but gradually they opened up. The talk went on to cover strange accidents said by some to have befallen desecraters of tombs; alignments of structures supposedly modeling astronomical configurations and the precessional cycle of the equinoxes; peculiar ratios of height and base measurements coming out at precise multiples of pi, giving rise to speculation that both Egyptian and Central American pyramids were planar representations of a hemisphere of the Earth. Katrina mentioned that the French sites at Quimper, Tombeau de Geant, and Istres marked a triangle in exact proportion to a side of the Cheops Pyramid but fourteen million times larger. Personally, she didn’t assign any particular significance to this—it was just an observation that some had drawn attention to; but that was the kind of thing Kieran had asked for. Jean Graas described the mysterious ground drawings of Nazca, in Peru, which made sense only when viewed from high altitudes—and how they could have been marked out so precisely without direction from such a vantage point was also difficult to imagine.