A Face on Cydonia (First Contact Trilogy #1)

By the year 2100 everybody, apart from some extreme recidivists, knew the so-called Face of Cydonia was simply a battered butte, and a live TV program was to poke fun at those recidivists, except that the battered butte morphed into something like the Viking image and winked. This was considered a great joke, except that nobody knew who was responsible or how it was done. Coupled with two unexplained physical measurements associated with this butte, when signals were found emanating from Epsilon Eridani, a nearby star far too young for such advanced life to have evolved, the issue of alien life arose. As a consequence, Grigori Timoshenko, Federation Commissioner for Defence and Science, is forced to form a party and settle for once and for all whether there had been alien activity around this butte.

The expedition seems doomed, as there are at least three attempts to murder at least one of the party, which comprises: Fiona Bolton, an expert at sonic imaging and a well-known anti-corporate; Nathan Gill, from Theppot and who owns a registered dome near the Face; Jonathon Munro, a corporate who has been responsible for part-funding the expedition, and who wants to bypass the law and take his Corporation to Mars; and Sharon Galloway, a corporate who has developed the most advanced excavating device known. Each of these has a problem with all of the others, each has some expectation of what they will get from the expedition, and each finds exactly what they do not want to find.