BEAR HEAD
ALSO BY ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY
SHADOWS OF THE APT
Empire in Black and Gold
Dragonfly Falling
Blood of the Mantis
Salute the Dark
The Scarab Path
The Sea Watch
Heirs of the Blade
The Air War
War Master’s Gate
Seal of the Worm
TALES OF THE APT
Spoils of War
A Time for Grief
For Love of Distant Shores
The Scent of Tears (with Frances Hardinge et al.)
ECHOES OF THE FALL
The Tiger and the Wolf
The Bear and the Serpent
The Hyena and the Hawk
CHILDREN OF TIME
Children of Time
Children of Ruin
Guns of the Dawn
Spiderlight
Ironclads
Cage of Souls
Firewalkers
The Doors of Eden
Feast and Famine (collection)
Dogs of War
ADRIAN
TCHAIKOVSKY
ARTHUR C. CLARKE AWARD WINNER
BEAR
HEAD
AN AD ASTRA BOOK
www.headofzeus.com
First published in the UK in 2021 by Head of Zeus Ltd
An Ad Astra Book
Copyright © Adrian Tchaikovsky, 2021
The moral right of Adrian Tchaikovsky to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN (HB): 9781800241541
ISBN (XTPB): 9781800241558
ISBN (E): 9781800241572
Head of Zeus Ltd
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Contents
Also by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Title Page
Copyright
PART I: NECESSITIES
1. JIMMY
2. SPRINGER
3. JIMMY
PART II: SORE HEADS
4. [RECOVERED DATA ARCHIVE: IDENTITY PENDING]
5. SPRINGER
6. JIMMY
7. [RECOVERED DATA ARCHIVE: ‘HONEY’]
8. JIMMY
PART III: SMARTER THAN THE AVERAGE
9. [RECOVERED DATA ARCHIVE: ‘HONEY’]
10. JIMMY
11. SPRINGER
12. JIMMY
13. SPRINGER
14. [RECOVERED DATA ARCHIVE: ‘HONEY’]
PART IV: BEAR WITNESS
15. HONEY
16. SPRINGER
17. JIMMY
18. ASLAN
19. JIMMY
20. SPRINGER
PART V: BEARS REPEATING
21. JIMMY
22. HONEY
23. JIMMY
24. HONEY
25. JIMMY
26. HONEY
27. SPRINGER
28. JIMMY
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
PART I
NECESSITIES
1
JIMMY
We’re off to the perimeter, heading uphill on our little Loonie towards where a canopy tether should have been but – Damage Central tells us – isn’t. Three of us crammed into the front, and a big old crate of technical magic in the back because it’s not obvious what the problem is, and cheaper to send us out with a grab-bag of stuff than muck about with multiple trips. Better to have and not need et cetera.
You’d not tell us apart in the suits. They’re standard issue, one size fits all, which the boffins back home accomplished by the scientific expedient of telling the recruiters not to hire shortasses or beanpoles. I reckon there isn’t more than twenty centimetres between the tallest of all the Hell City construction crew and the shortest, which is me. Us human crew, anyway. Bioforms get their own suits. They’re worth more than us, and work harder.
I might as well admit that a lot of people work harder than me. I’m not what you might call employee of the month at Hell City, not of any month. I mean Mars has two moons and one of them completes an orbit in less than eight hours. That’s a whole lot of months and your man Jimmy Marten hasn’t been top employee for any of them, take it from me.
Going out to fix the canopy’s a crap job by most people’s standards. That means Admin’s well aware of my lack of attendance and dedication trophies, and my fellow in-the-shitters Brian and Indra are similarly lowly. Indra spends all her scrip on imported dramas, pays for every damn network and channel they send over to us, so she’s always desperate for the teeny tiny bonus you get for suit-work. Brian’s just weird and nobody much likes him. He’s one of those guys who always looks like they’re working twice as hard as anyone else and then you check their work and they’ve left half the dust covers off and haven’t turned on the electronic security.
The Loonie bumbles on, puffy tyres eating as much of the jolt and bounce of the rocky Martian surface as they can. And we’re days out from home, by now. And they could have goddamn flown us out only some bean counter reckons it’s more economic, and flying in the thin Mars air, in engine-choking dust, is always a bit of a dicey prospect, even here under the canopy.
Ahead of us, half-lost in the swirling dust and the canopy’s glaze, the edge of Hellas Planitia rises like it’s the wall of the world, cutting short even the foreshortened horizon Mars is supposed to have. Big old meteor, basically, crater the size of a subcontinent. Perfect place to live, if you actually want to live on Mars. I guess at some point I had actually wanted to live on Mars, because here I am on Mars, if you can call it living. The money was supposed to be good, and how else was a working Joe like me supposed to get off-planet exactly? Jimmy Marten, construction worker with half-assed delusions of being an engineer. I just about scraped the Tech Competence, and that was apparently enough to go to Mars.
I remember the videos. They had some guys, not even in suits, watching robots and bees and Bioforms doing the work, like we were lord and master of all we’d survey. And Mars has a short horizon and big mountains. You can survey a lot of the planet at once from a good vantage. Except we’re down in a hole, and even a hole two thousand klicks across is still a hole. And they stick a roof on it, so we can survey even less and we aren’t even masters of that.
I wondered more than once if they hadn’t shown the free Bioforms a very different video about who got to boss about whom and, if so, they got the truer one.
Well, OK, not a roof. A canopy, like a great big top for the solar system’s most shambolic circus, Yours Truly chief clown. And we three are being sent to sweep up the spotlight at the edge of the ring yet again. When we first arrived it was smaller – the canopy, not the crater, which has, believe it or not, been pretty much the same size for the history of the human race – but getting the whole damn thing covered was priority one, and a feat of engineering they didn’t trust schmucks like your man Jimmy with. That was hive-work. Odd how sometimes to make a big thing you got to work real small.
Now this isn’t like Space City from those old sciency-fiction books, with a
big glass dome over all those fairy-tale towers. It isn’t airtight, because even for people who planned to put a silk canopy over a subcontinent-sized crater, that would be crazy, right? And while we’re generating atmosphere underneath, we do actually want it to get out, little by little, just slow enough that we get to keep enough of it around at any one time. Math. There’s a lot of math that your man here doesn’t need to know. Brian, now, he knows the math. He can talk algebra like he majored in conversational equations. And then he leaves the dust covers off and we all get docked pay.
The canopy has like a million tethers all around the outside of it. As the Loonie – the balloon-wheeled truck we’ve got – labours uphill, we can see exactly the problem, because there’s one direction that has a crapton more dust coming in than the rest, which is going to make the work even more fun. Brian’s trying to hail the hive that should have been minding shop there, but gets nada. When we arrive, the tether’s snapped and the rent in the canopy above us must be a full klick long. There’s a big old dust storm going on up above past the distant lip of the Hellas crater, and plenty of it’s funnelling down through the rent and sweeping around us, cutting visibility to crap and getting absolutely everywhere. I can already feel it caking my suit, one extra serving of misery to go with the cold leaching into your arms and legs and the cumbersome inflation that keeps your body rigid and means you can’t draw your arms in or kneel down properly.
“Well this is beyond our pay grade and no mistake,” Indra’s crisp voice says over the radio. “’Less you want to go jump up and catch it.” She’s pointing at the broken tether, or where it probably would be if any of us care to faff about with visor magnification until we can see it. Flapping away in the Martian wind way above our heads, and the gravity isn’t that low that I can just Superman up there with a single bound and bring it down.
“Not the problem,” Brian tells us in his flat, nasal voice. “Hive’s gone dead.”
More good news. We go on a bit, further uphill and well into the shadow of the Hellas wall. The near end of the broke tether is in the wind and whipping about like a mad snake. Indra has to send out a crawler to the anchor point where it can latch onto the cable and reel it in so it’s safe to approach, meaning two hours of waiting and watching the meters and readouts of our suits because we’re on the clock and we’ll get docked for unnecessary use of resources if we give Admin the least excuse. Let me tell you, they’re goddamn going to make the Hell City project come in under its gut-wrenchingly enormous budget, and stiffing us working schmoes is the easiest way. What are we going to do, down tools and walk off site?
Indra drains suit power by watching three episodes of some Venezuelan soap I never heard of, and Brian just goes off into his head – see his lips moving through his visor but nothing over the radio. Yours Truly starts to feel the first plucking pangs, a little trembling, a little hunger, dry eyes, dry mouth. Which is bad news because it’s a long way back to camp, even longer to Hell City, and you’d be amazed how few wandering dealers you run into just out in the Martian wilds.
I have one hit of Stringer on me, which I’m absolutely saving for tonight at the very earliest. And by the time the crawler starts getting the cable in, I’d have popped that pill right there and then if it hadn’t been in the suit, and if the outside temperature and pressure and general living conditions hadn’t been a bit too Martian for me to just open up and go rummaging in my pockets.
Then we’re making our approach, following the flailing end of the cable as it’s hauled back in. The anchor point itself isn’t all that – the cable is engineered spiderweb stuff, ridiculously strong and light, and the serious business of it is all underground. I sunk some of those pilings, I know of what I speak. Our real problem is the slotted box next to it, surrounded by a field of solar cells angled away from the wall to catch the sun and now completely coated in dust.
“Dead,” Brian says and makes a show of kicking the slabcrete box. “Maybe power failure.”
“Maybe doesn’t get us our bonus,” Indra points out, and so it’s for Brian to run the diagnostics while Indra and me get to clean off the panels so he’ll have power. This takes more time, each second of which feels like grit under my eyelids – something you get very familiar with on Mars.
“Well?” we ask him, after even that tedious job’s used up its necessary allocation of time.
“Dead,” is all he has to say. “Lost power then froze, or froze then lost power.”
“Jesus, you are a useless son of a bitch,” I tell him.
“You want to Jesus these bees back to life so we can get out of here?” Indra puts in. She’s gone to the Loonie’s cargo space and hauled the starter hive out. It’ll take about twenty days to bootstrap itself to the point where it can function, and some poor schmuck’ll have to come out and check up on it. Probably us, I reckon, although with what happens soon after, a little suit-work might have been a goddamn blessing.
So these hives, these are not independent Beeshives, what with how all that had gone, and how things back home were going. Hell City is a determined no-go zone for Distributed Intelligence. So our bees are dumb, but they’ll wake up and draw power and build more bees and, eventually, spin a new tether and mend the tear in the canopy. Until then, this corner of the dome will be dustier and colder and shorter on atmosphere than the rest, a constant slow leak for the whole project. One more problem, basically, but we’ve done what we can, which means it isn’t our problem any more. We get to pass it up for Admin to worry about. After all, one little tear, or fifty little tears even, it isn’t going to stop work on Hell City. They’ve built in plenty of redundancy, because they know everything screws up some time. That was why they wanted us and not just robots. We’re the duct tape of the whole project, we humans, we Bioforms. We’re the thing that could fix anything, if you apply enough of us to it.
“Hive’s set,” Brian reports. “Green lights ’cross the board.”
“Like hell.” I check over his work, and Indra too, but beeshive architecture is the one thing Brian does actually do a full-assed job on and it looks like everything’s up and running. We put a call into Admin and say what we’ve done, tell them to send a team to check up in twenty days.
Nothing for it but the long ramble back to camp, and then the next camp, and the next, and eventually Hell City itself and home, and a chance to score something before I go completely out of my mind. I’m going to be miserable company for the others, but nothing to be done about that. I’ll just keep it to myself, and it isn’t as if either of the others are scintillating socialites.
On the way back, though, Indra does want to talk. “So, it die, or was it killed?”
“Say what?” I snap, mostly because I’d been thinking the same.
“Die,” Brian says.
“Or was it?” Indra presses, sounding like she’s enjoying herself. “Fucker’s out there, we all know that.”
“Nope,” Brian says.
“First Mars mission, they got sent up here, we all know that.”
“Nope.”
“And they never left. They just kept building. They built that science place, up near the pole. They built Namseng base, where they don’t have to do this shit with canopies because they live underground like civilised people. Even picked the site for Hell City. You think they just went away? They are among us, man! How’d you even know which bees are ours and which are… Bees?”
“Nope,” Brian says, exactly the same inflection or lack of it. Then: “Nothing doing. Bees is dead. Or Bees doing Bees things. Think we gon’ matter to them?”
“They want Mars for themselves!” Indra says, most definitely trying to put the wind up us. “I hear they’ve got bugs that can tunnel into your head now, take over your brain.”
“Jesus, give it a rest, will you?” I shout at her, which comes right out of my Jonesing, but to her must have come out of nowhere. It kills the conversation anyway, which is something. I don’t want to think about the Bees intelligence.
First resident of Mars, like she said, and for a long time it was our pet Martian, laying the groundwork for all the human footfall the planet’s seeing right now. Except Bees and people stopped seeing eye to eye, and there’s a whole raft of politicos back home talking it up like it’s the Antichrist. Except I don’t believe in the Antichrist but I sure as hell believe that Bees is out there on Mars. And I think we do matter to them, whatever Brian says. We made Bees, and the monster always comes back for its creator some day.
*
I pop my last tab that night, which at least means I sleep well. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t buy wellbeing and a contented soul, just remember that the first one might have been cheap but the price goes up steeply after that.
The next day we get the warning light on all our displays.
Now there are lights you really don’t want to see. There are lights that tell you you’re going to die, and some of us had died, mostly in the early days when there wasn’t so much canopy. Right now we’ve been out here seven (Earth) years, automated foundations building themselves for nine years before that, and we’ve got Hellas Planitia mostly tamed. People still die, but mostly from stupidity rather than Mars. So now this has become the light we really don’t want to see, and this light is Conserve Resources. An insistent little blip in the top right corner of your visor, flashing blue because they still reserve the red lights for the kill-you sort of stuff. Conserve Resources. Meaning air in the tanks. Meaning wear and tear on the suits. Meaning the mod cons of carrying a little of Earth around between you and Mars.
“Ah, crap,” Indra says, and takes her helmet off. I do the same, and we go through the slow motion clumsy-dance that’s shrugging your suit off and getting down to your skivvies, out there in the cold thin air of Mars. We’ve got clothes in the back: thermal undies, overalls, boots. Hard hats even, although the only thing likely to drop on our heads is a meteor and I don’t reckon they’re rated for that. I take a deep breath. The suits carry a real watered-down air mix, 10 per cent O2. Under the canopy at the distance we are from home, it’s down to about 6 or 7 per cent. Deep breaths.
Bear Head Page 1
