by Paul Preuss
A note, written with ballpoint on a scrap of checklist, was stuck in back of the seat frame in front of her.
“We have no communications and are lost to searchers. I am walking in the direction of the nearest habitation. I pray that you recover soon. Your only hope is to stay with the plane. God will be good to us.” Khalid hadn’t bothered to sign it.
Sparta released her harness straps and gingerly flexed her wrists and elbows and knees. Physically she was undamaged, it seemed. She was stiff and her lower back was aching, but her headache had subsided to nothing worse than an irritable sensitivity to light.
She tried the instruments. As many switches and combinations of switches as she tried, she could get only succotash from the screens.
She checked to see that her pressure suit was sealed. She hit the rugged switches that controlled the air pumps; they at least were still functioning. The plane’s apparent electrical failure wasn’t total. Maybe some of its other critical systems were still operative.
When the cockpit was evacuated she moved to lift the canopy, but as she did so the pain in her belly came back. Gasping, she fell back. She left the canopy sealed and undisturbed.
She knew intimately the place of the pain, the locality of the layered sheets of polymer battery that had been grafted beneath her diaphragm, the place from which they sent surges of electrical power to the oscillator surgically implanted in her breast-bone and the superconducting ceramics that coated the bones of her arms.
Like some biological creatures—but unlike humans—she was sensitive to the electromagnetic spectrum from the near infrared into the ultraviolet. Like a few other species of naturally evolved living things—but unlike humans—she was sensitive to electric and magnetic fields of much higher and lower frequencies, and of almost vanishingly weak fluxes.
Unlike any natural creature, she could transmit and receive modulated beams of radio frequency.
Whether this peculiar and artificial power, foreign to her body and unwanted—not asked for or agreed to by her, and put into her at a time she could not even bring to memory—had now been permanently destroyed, she did not know. All she knew was her terrible pain.
She tried to reconstruct what must have happened. At first she remembered only soaring above the endless desert. Khalid had said something that had disturbed her…
…that he knew her, that was it. And something else—that someone was trying to kill her…
And then the pain.
She did not have the one benefit radio could have conferred in her present desperate situation. A brief burst of targeted microwaves, however faint, would have appeared as a small, bright blip in the sensor field of an orbiting satellite, pinpointing the exact position of the downed marsplane. She had been deprived of the ability to make such a blip, and she did not think that was by chance.
From what she had seen it appeared that the marsplane must have been crippled by a powerful broad-frequency pulse that had fried the onboard sensors and computers—and at the same time had ruptured Sparta’s only nonbiological function. Until she inspected the plane she would not know whether the source of the pulse had been onboard or beamed from outside. Nor would she know whether it had been planted and triggered by a person unknown or by Khalid himself.
Why had Khalid taken the plane apart? To keep it from being destroyed by the wind. Why would he bother, if he only wanted to kill her? Because, of course, a tragic accident must seem perfectly accidental.
She lay back in her harness and concentrated on the fire under her heart, trying to dispel it by entering it. But too soon the pain overwhelmed her conscious mind, and she slipped back into fitful sleep and lurid dreams.
Swirling signs tantalized her with elusive meaning…
Midday. Lydia Zeromski’s marstruck drove north.
To the west a huge shield volcano, Ascraeus, rose from Tharsis into the Martian stratosphere. On Earth nobody would have noticed it, not from this angle; one can stand on the side of Mauna Loa, the largest volcanic mass on Earth, and not notice anything more impressive than nearby trees and rolling hills and a mildly tilted plain, so gentle is its slope. Here on Mars the much bigger volcano made its presence known only by the lava flows and raveling arroyos at the hem of its skirt.
Lydia had reassumed her customary taciturnity. The morning had passed in silence except for the now-familiar whine of the turbines, transmitted through the truck frame. Blake sat on his side of the cab, brooding.
There were no more cards in his deck. He’d tried charm. He’d tried competence—gone so far as to save her life, probably—but nothing was going to make her loosen up. Lydia Zeromski was a tough cookie.
Blake slouched in his harness listening to the hissing turbines and the grab and scurry of the treads against the sand. He’d assimilated some novel sensations on this trip. He’d slowly learned the different feel of rock and lava and sand and desert quicksand and rotten permafrost, each texture translating itself into subtle superimpositions of vibration as they passed beneath the traveling treads. Now he became aware of something new—
—a rhythmic heave and rumble quite out of synchronization with the rhythms of the treads.
“What’s that?” he said, turning to Lydia. For the first time he saw fear in her eyes.
“Flash flood,” she said. She sealed her pressure helmet.
Without prompting he did the same. A flash flood on Mars? Unheard of, but obviously it was nothing fantastic to her.
She leaned on the throttles. The big rig leaped ahead.
They were crossing a wide alluvial fan at the base of the distant volcano, a thin spreading sheet of pebbles and boulders sorted by weight, of terraced sand and packed conglomerate cut through and exposed by intermittent floods of liquid water. Blake, trusting the texts he’d hastily absorbed during his journey to Mars, had placidly assumed these water-carved features to be a billion years old. Looking out the cab of the speeding truck, he now acknowledged what he’d seen but not believed: the sharply sliced contours of fresh erosion.
The huge rig was plunging and wallowing dangerously through the sand, slamming into boulders and spraying gravel from beneath its treads. Lydia had never driven with such abandon.
“We’re not going to make it,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“We can’t get to high ground. If we can just get to an island, at least…”
“Lydia, how can there be a flood here?”
“Volcano. Outgassing melts the permafrost into a slurry and it rolls down any available channel. We’re in the middle of a big one.” She glanced up from the wheel. “Listen, Mycroft, when I say jump, you jump. Grab a couple of rock bolts and winch cables and get as far forward as you can. Don’t worry about good rock, you won’t find any in this gravel, just get out front a hundred meters or so and shoot the bolts as deep as they’ll go. Tie off. Cross your fingers they hold.”
“That bad?”
She didn’t answer.
She found the midstream island she was looking for a few moments later and pushed the truck up and over its shallow bank. Then she swerved the whole rig around to face upchannel, into the approaching deluge.
“Jump!”
As the truck skidded to a halt he jumped and ran. A second later she was out of her side of the cab and running out parallel lines. He found an enormous basalt boulder and figured that it was worth more than a steel bolt sunk into gravel, so he looped the winch cable around it. He planted two more bolts and tied off the cables.
By now he could feel the ground vibrating under his boots like the magic fingers in a cheap hive bed. He looked upstream.
“Oh, damn.”
A seven-meter wall of slush the color and consistency of melted chocolate ice cream was bearing down the channel, carrying whole boulders with it. He turned and ran for the truck. Lydia was ahead of him. He saw her climb in and struggle to secure the damaged door on her side of the cab, then reach across to his. Nice of her to open it for him.
> He jumped nimbly up and over the tread and pulled the door handle. It was struck.
He pulled again. “It’s stuck,” he yelled over the suitcomm. “Get it from in there, will you?”
Through his helmet, through the truck’s bubble dome, through her sealed helmet, through layers of reflection he saw her white and determined face, set in a mask. She did not move to help him.
“Lydia, the door’s stuck! Let me inside!” The wall of mud was coming at him like a miniature flood in a cheap viddie, shot in slow motion. This was no miniature. Billows of steam poured from the improbably high crest of the wave—hot water from the melted permafrost was vaporizing instantly as it was exposed to the dry, thin atmosphere.
“Who are you working for, Mycroft?” Lydia asked.
“What? Lydia…!”
Her voice was husky and low, but it sounded plenty loud enough in his suitcomm. “We’ve known about you for months, Mycroft. Are you just a company fink? Or are you one of the STW’s bully boys?”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You want inside this truck, fink? Tell me who you work for.”
“Lydia, I don’t have anything to do with the company or the STW.”
“Yevgeny was waiting for you in the yard, Mycroft—he thought you were going to blow up the yard so they wouldn’t send you to the pipeline. But it seems you do want to go to the pipeline. What we want to know now is why.”
Blake looked at the steaming face of the flood, its tumbling wings now spilling around the banks of the shallow braided channels that flanked the midstream island, carving new miniature cliffs in the sand as it came. The agonizing slowness with which it approached was almost more horrible than the onrush of an earthly flood.
“Lydia, all I wanted was a ride to the line head. With you—you in particular.”
“You admit you sabotaged the yard?”
“I’ll explain. Let me inside.”
The first gooey surf was breaking over the island’s prow.
“I figure thirty more seconds, maybe less,” she said. “Explain first.” She ignored the flood, staring at him implacably.
He thought about it for a couple seconds and couldn’t think of anything more that he had to lose. “My name’s Blake Redfield,” he said. “I’m working for the Space Board on the murders of Morland and Chin. I needed to get close to you, to find out about you.”
“You think I’m a murderer?” Her astonishment seemed genuine.
“No, I don’t think that, but you can prove me wrong in about fifteen seconds.”
“They think I killed Dare?”
“You had opportunity, Lydia. You had to be a suspect, and somebody had to check you out. I volunteered.”
She still stared at him through layers of reflecting plastic.
“Lydia…”
“Relax, whatever-your-name-is. You’re not going to die.” Still she made no move toward the door of the cab. Keeping her eyes on his, she tilted her chin upstream, toward the approaching flood.
What had been an enormous wall of water a minute ago was now a low-running slurry. It reached the marstruck as Blake watched; wavelets of semisolid slush lapped over the treads and dirtied his boots, but they carried no more force, and before the flood had run the length of the truck it had subsided into a smooth layer of fine ash and dirt. For a while the hot mush, like a pyroclastic flow on Earth, had sustained itself on steam; now all the moisture which had lubricated the flow had evaporated and nothing was left but a deep layer of those fine particles which covered so much of the dry surface of Mars.
Blake looked at Lydia. “Great timing.”
“I improvised. Believe it or not, I wouldn’t have left you out there to die, even if you were a fink. And maybe you are.” She opened her own side of the cab and climbed out. “Help me pull up the stakes.”
It took effort to dig down through the compacted layers of new gravel and ash and uproot the cable anchors, but in a few minutes they had done the work and were back in the cab.
The turbines rose to a scream. The marstruck floundered on across the desert.
Lydia lapsed into her characteristic meditation, fixing her eyes on the horizon of the endlessly unfolding landscape. She looked at Blake only once, a few minutes after they had resumed their journey across the alluvial fan. “What did you say your name was?”
He told her. When she said nothing more, he lapsed into his own reverie. He watched the sand hills slide by and thought about how badly he’d botched this assignment he’d insisted on giving himself. Botched it right from the beginning. The reasons for everything that had happened to him since he’d become Mike Mycroft were suddenly obvious.
He knew why he’d been attacked outside Mycroft’s hotel on Mars Station and how Yevgeny had gotten rid of his attackers so swiftly—they were Yevgeny’s own people, and he’d told them he wanted this Mycroft character to himself. That’s why Yevgeny had befriended him, gotten him a job, waited for him in the marshaling yard. Yevgeny had set him up.
They’d known about Mycroft for months, Lydia had said. Which meant that Michael Mycroft was a species of fink—a false identity the Mars Station office of the Space Board had used once or twice too often.
Just before they climbed out of the channeled terrain and moved on into the higher desert, they passed the blackened skeleton of a marstruck which had not made it across these alluvial sands. Looking at its twisted, ragged frame, half buried in sand, Blake wondered if Lydia really would have let him inside had the flood not dissipated itself too soon. Or was she waiting for a better chance to stage the perfect accident?
Sparta hung above the still point of the turning world.
She was a sun hawk, her eyes ten times sharper than any human’s, her ears tuned to the farthest, faintest cry.
There was a bare tree in the desert, and around it the world turned. The world was a desert of drifting sand and plains of smooth, bare stone.
Her sharp eyes saw shapes carved deeply into the barren sandstone, carved so deeply that the shadows in them, pooled there by the low sun, were like ink on the page. Her sharp ears heard the cry from the tree.
Her hawk wings sifted the air and she descended, curious to see more.
The outward form of the shape on the tree was human, a girl not quite grown to womanhood, hanging from the branches of the dead tree. They had nailed her to the tree with splintered bones—arm bones and thigh bones. Her belly was split from breast bone to navel and the cavity was empty, dark, and red.
In her oval face her brows were wide ink strokes above eyes of liquid brown. Her unwashed brown hair hung in lank strands against her pale cheeks. She turned her liquid eyes to hold fast Sparta’s gaze with her own.
I ween that I hung on the windy tree.
Hung there for nights full nine;
With the spear I was wounded, and offered I was
To Othin, myself to myself.
On the tree that none may ever know
What root beneath it runs…
The voice was not that of a Norse god but that of a woman, rich and deep—not that of the girl on the tree, but of a woman of years and knowledge.
I took up the runes, shrieking I took them…
The face upturned to her twisted and melted. The eyes of the face flared with light, and when the flare subsided the eyes were pale, the thin lips were full and parted, and the dark hair had lightened to the color of sand.
Then began I to thrive and wisdom to get
I grew and well I was;
Each word led me on to another word.
Each deed to another deed.
Now the girl’s belly wound had closed in a purple scar, but she had aged and was still aging with her pain. Her eyes speared Sparta with their light.
Sparta, full of fear, felt for the wind with her wingtips, found it, and rose into the pink sky. The runes were all around below her, carved in the polished desert stone. If she could stop the world from spinning long enough, she could read them…
She mounted higher, making the painful climb—
—to consciousness. She was in the cockpit of the marsplane. She was alone. The sun had dropped low in the west, and moving upward past it was the crisp thin crescent of Phobos.
The moon Fear.
Sparta lay motionless for a moment, not denying her fear but acknowledging it, acknowledging the likelihood of her approaching death. She let the fear of death wash through her.
When she had accepted it she let it drain away. Then at last she could turn to the business of life.
She tried the switches of the air pumps and found that they still worked. But she had already evacuated the air from the canopy—why had she forgotten?—and her suit was still sealed. This time, when she reached to release the canopy locks, the pain in her belly was only a twinge.
She stumbled out upon the steep slope of ash. The wind was steady from the west at twenty kilometers an hour. She noted the way the plane’s wings had been detached from the fuselage, the way everything had been neatly pinned to the ground.
The plan and layout of the marsplane were evident. She had no doubt that she could reassemble it—it had been designed that way. But before she did anything, she needed to find out what had gone wrong. She went to the instrument access panel in the fuselage and opened it.
Her darting macrozoom eye traced the visual outlines of the devastation inside, the fused micro-connections of invisibly fine solid circuitry.
An electromagnetic “pulse bomb,” a surge generator like one she’d seen only once before—in a Board of Space Control class on sabotage—had been lodged in the autopilot comparator. It wasn’t there now, but Sparta could picture it clearly.
It would have been a steel ball about the size of a lime; greenish-blue discoloration after detonation would have made the sour-fruit comparison even more apt. Before detonation it would have contained a microscopic sphere of frozen hydrogen isotopes, tritium and deuterium, surrounded by larger spheres of liquid nitrogen, liquid lithium, high explosives, and insulators, all under immense pressure. Triggered by an external signal, the explosives would have crushed the hydrogen isotopes, creating thermonuclear fusion—a microscopic H-bomb. The products of the miniature blast would have radiated outward, some ions at a much higher rate than others, and even though the actual force of the blast wouldn’t have been enough even to rupture the superstrong steel casing, the radiation, moving at different velocities and spreading apart like the sound of a handclap in a culvert, would have produced a sort of electronic whistler, an electromagnetic pulse strong enough to fry all the unshielded circuits in the vicinity.
