I closed my eyes briefly.

“Yeah, I was at Innenin. You want to tell me about this corporate wealth deal or not?”

Schneider was almost falling over himself to tell someone. He helped himself to another of my cigarettes and sat back in his chair.

“Did you know that the Northern Rim coastline, up beyond Sauberville, has some of the oldest Martian settlement sites known to human archaeology?”

Oh well. I sighed and slid my gaze past his face and back out to the view of Sanction IV. I should have expected something like this, but somehow I was disappointed in Jan Schneider. In the short minutes of our acquaintance, I thought I’d picked up on a gritty core that seemed too tightly wired for this kind of lost civilisation and buried techno-treasure bullshit.

It’s the best part of five hundred years since we stumbled on the mausoleum of Martian civilisation, and people still haven’t worked out that the artefacts our extinct planetary neighbours left lying around are largely either way out of our reach or wrecked. (Or very likely both, but how would we know?) About the only truly useful things we’ve been able to salvage are the astrogation charts whose vaguely understood notation enabled us to send our own colony ships to guaranteed terrestroid destinations.

This success, plus the scattered ruins and artefacts we’ve found on the worlds the maps gave us, have given rise to a widely varied crop of theories, ideas and cult beliefs. In the time I’ve spent shuttling back and forth across the Protectorate, I’ve heard most of them. In some places you’ve got the gibbering paranoia that says the whole thing is a cover-up, designed by the UN to hide the fact that the astrogation maps were really provided by time travellers from our own future. Then there’s a carefully articulated religious faith that believes we’re the lost descendants of the Martians, waiting to be reunited with the spirits of our ancestors when we’ve attained sufficient karmic enlightenment.