Star Trek: Enterprise: The Romulan War: Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Star Trek : Enterprise)

by Michael A. Martin

“Now I think I understand why you went into politics,” Brooks said, unable to tear her gaze away from the exterior view. “You’re telepathic.”

  She heard him chuckle gently in response as she watched the rough southern highlands of Margaritifer Terra rolling away behind the skimmer’s belly as the craft headed nearly due west into the rising sun. The oddly diminished orb’s yellow rays scattered across the boulder-strewn eastern edge of Ophir Planum and glinted against the large pressure-dome habitats to the south. Her eyes moved north to follow the long, sinuous gouge of the Valles Marineris as it snaked its way back into the night that still enveloped the rugged highlands of Sinai Planum, Syria Planum, and the mighty space-scraping peak of Olympus Mons, all of which still lay below the approaching western horizon. As still more of the ancient Martian terrain rolled toward the skimmer, the horizon formed an ever-retreating line that appeared weirdly foreshortened because of the planet’s relatively small size, the relentlessly unfolding red-and-ocher landscape taking on the aspect of a forced-perspective painting.

  “Thank you again for agreeing to show me your hometown,” Brooks said as she turned to face the Martian Colonies’ official representative to the Coalition Council. “It’s really very gracious of you—particularly after I ambushed you right before we left Earth.”

  He smiled beneficently. “I’m more than happy to help a journalist who doesn’t seem hell-bent on making us all look like a bunch of ignorant hicks,” he said.

  And it probably doesn’t hurt that he knows that Mars will be my last stop in the Sol system for the foreseeable future, she thought as she paused to contemplate the next leg of her outbound “frontier tour” with a mixture of anticipation and apprehension. He had to know as well as she did that the war correspondent beat she was heading out to cover could well take her on a one-way journey.

  “I just want to write an honest account of how people are dealing with this Romulan conflict,” she said as she looked back toward the hazy sunrise, which now illuminated the upper reaches of the approaching Mariner Valley’s eastern extremity with a clarity she had never seen before, even in the high-definition holopics taken by aerial drones. “I intend to report from the home front all the way to the farthest-flung human settlements I can reach.”

  And that’s because people need to know everything they can about whatever threat these Romulans really pose, she thought. Not to scare them away from deep space the way Naquase would, or send them packing back to Earth to hide under the bed. But to show them there’s nothing out there that we can’t find a way to deal with.

  Or maybe even come to terms with.

  “I’m curious,” he said. “Why did you pick Mars instead of the Luna colonies?”

  The question surprised her. “Mars always seemed like the best offEarth starting place I could ask for to kick off a frontier tour like this one.”

  “But why? I mean, Luna seems like a much rougher place than Mars, at least as frontiers go. At least Mars has an atmosphere, even if you can’t quite breathe it yet.”

  Brooks reluctantly turned away from the vast, rapidly approaching canyon, facing him again. “I’ll grant you that your chances of surviving a rip in your suit are marginally better any place where there’s no hard vacuum waiting to boil your blood in your veins. On the other hand, Luna can never lull you into a false sense of security because it looks so much like Wyoming or New Mexico.”

  “True enough,” he said. “But you go outside the Moon habs with a bad suit, it’ll all be over pretty darned fast.”

  She nodded. “Also true. But on Luna you’re never more than a few hours away from the best medical care Earth has to offer, assuming that whatever mishap you’ve had doesn’t kill you outright. Besides, an airless place like Luna can’t whip up a funnel cloud that picks up enough iron-oxide dust to generate a high-voltage static charge. I saw one of those things discharge directly into a man once during a sudden windstorm near Sagan Station. It hit him like a Jovian lightning bolt. His suit’s electronics failed on the spot, and his helmet blew out like it was made of papier mâché. The only difference between dying that way and ripping your suit open in the Tycho crater is how long it takes you to die.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, his dusky features taking on a pensive cast.

  Not eager to absorb anybody’s unsolicited sympathy, she continued with her original point. “Besides, I’ve visited the New Berlin colony a few times, as well as a couple of the other Lunar habs. I know that Luna used to be a legit frontier, at least once upon a time. But it’s turning into a posh low-g retirement resort. It’s a place where old folks who can never re-acclimate to Earth-normal gravity get to play golf all day under the Alan B. Shepard Dome without worrying about breaking a hip if they happen to take a fall. And their great-grandchildren on Earth are still close enough for regular visits.”

  “Shows how long it’s been since I’ve been to Luna,” Qaletaqu said. “Here on Mars, we’ve come to think that Earth regards us as another Canada. Looks like the Moon has become another Florida.”

  Brooks allowed a wry snicker to escape her lips. “It’s also a tourist trap. Did you know there’s a hotel and casino right smack in the Sea of Tranquillity now?”

  He scowled. “No. But I hope they haven’t messed up the old Apollo landing sites. We learned our lesson about that sort of thing here when the workers at the Utopia Planitia settlement nearly backed over the Viking 2 lander with one of the mohole borers.”

  “It looks like the Lunar Schooners had a similar experience,” she said. “At least all the artifacts and bootprints that Armstrong and Aldrin left behind are right there in the hotel lobby, on display in a vacuum chamber surrounded by a bunch of red velvet ropes. Uggh.” She shuddered theatrically.

  She turned back toward the window as the skimmer plunged over the lip of the immensely broad, four-thousand-kilometer-long canyon, whose eastern side, now probably more than one hundred fifty klicks distant, had already retreated over the horizon. The skimmer then dived into the valley’s frost-and-fog-shrouded vertical expanse, spaces some seven kilometers deep that the approaching dawn had yet to penetrate. A pattern of approaching lights quickly emerged from the mist as the skimmer descended into the disconcerting darkness that obscured the canyon floor despite the persistent presence of a brightening purple-and-salmon sky directly overhead.

  It took nearly a minute for Brooks to realize that the lights she saw weren’t intended to guide the skimmer to a landing strip on the ground. She grasped this fact at the same instant she realized that the lights weren’t even on the ground; rather, they were nestled all along the expanse of the vertical face of the rough southern wall of the Valles Marineris, like the windows of a steel-and-glass high-rise building melded seamlessly with the natural contours of Mars.

  “Welcome to Popé Pueblo, Miz Brooks,” Qaletaqu said, speaking a place name that evoked images of the cliffside cavern dwellings in which his Anasazi, Hopi, and Pueblo ancestors had dwelled during pre-Columbian times in the deserts of North America’s southwest. “You’re about to visit the jewel of the Mariner Valley, and the home of my people—for now, at least.”

  Brooks paused for a moment to wonder just what he meant by that. But before she could ask, the skimmer’s wheels made percussive but not violent contact with the kilometers-long ribbon of pressed regolith tarmac on the canyon floor. Her weight shifted forward distractingly against her seat restraints as the pilot began the final deceleration that would bring the vehicle to a slow, rolling stop.

  Gannet Brooks’s first impression of the vast subterranean complex built by the citizens of Popé Pueblo—known as “Canyontown” to the locals—was that they had done an incredible job of living off the land.

  According to the background Qaletaqu’s office had provided, this was no mere metaphor. The interiors of the Canyontowners’ pressurized, cliffside cavern dwellings had been hewn directly out of the red-brown Martian rock, thick stone walls being a survival necessity because the planet’s
relatively insubstantial atmosphere provided essentially no protection against incoming radiation. The radiation-resistant windows through which the Canyontowners looked upon the still mostly untamed Martian surface were synthesized from the local minerals as well. The very air they breathed and the water they drank were likewise reconstituted, both from the Martian environment and the inhabitants’ own waste, abetted by the huge, industrial-scale atmosphere-processing units they had mounted along the canyon floor, the first place on the planet expected to provide a breathable-air, shirtsleeve environment, assuming that the Martian terraforming project continued at its present pace for at least the next few centuries.

  The Canyontowners’ basic “build it here out of whatever’s handy” ethos allowed them to elevate their self-sufficiency to a fine art, with the vast majority of their food coming from the ranks of ultravioletshielded greenhouses they had arranged along the canyon lip, as well as from underground nurseries whose full-spectrum lights drew their power from the areothermal heat released through the mining moholes that the Dytallix-Barsoom Resource Extraction Corporation had sunk deep into the Red Planet’s thick mantle.

  Brooks’s second impression of the Canyontowners was gained as Qaletaqu conducted her on a tour of the underground city’s brightly lit main street. Its charmingly anachronistic-looking array of apparently mom-and-pop, proprietor-run businesses were interspersed with a number of recognizable corporate franchises—starting with a tavern and hotel whose retro architecture and dungaree-clad habitués could have been taken directly from an old vid about North America’s Wild West. The Canyontowners themselves seemed paradoxically wild in their habits and culture, despite the obvious discipline the construction and maintenance of a safe, livable, and prosperous habitat such as Popé Pueblo in an environment as unforgiving as Mars required.

  The first solid evidence of this dichotomy that she witnessed directly was the bar fight that broke out right before her eyes as she and Qaletaqu walked along the concrete walkway between the tavern and the storefront office of the Dytallix-Barsoom Resource Extraction Corporation. The tavern’s swinging doors had flown open just ahead of a pair of scuffling workmen, whose movements followed a weirdly elastic trajectory dictated by the low Martian gravity. Qaletaqu wasted no time plunging into their midst in order to separate the men, sending them on their respective ways once he’d determined that neither man had sustained any serious injuries and had extracted their mumbled pledges to cause no further trouble, at least for the rest of the day.

  Brooks had expected Qaletaqu to offer a bouquet-and-fruit-basket-full of embarrassed apologies immediately after the fracas was done and the instigators had moved on. Instead he surprised her by commenting that since neither man had any critical duties to perform before sobriety returned, no harm had been done. Then he simply resumed the tour of central Canyontown to which he had been treating her, as though a bar fight that spilled into the street was the most ordinary occurrence imaginable. He must be messing with my head on purpose, she thought as she walked mutely beside him along Popé Boulevard. She decided right then and there not to let herself appear to be surprised in the least by any other strangeness she might see here. Grateful at least for this little bit of local color for her next news feature, she followed him across the empty, bare-rock street beneath the simulated sun that hung suspended from the high, cathedral-like ceiling.

  They came to a stop on the concrete walkway that fronted what appeared to be a cluster of public buildings. Qaletaqu gestured toward an A-frame building that was unlike all the flatter, squatter structures that dominated central Canyontown. Standing directly between the office of the local sheriff and the town hall, both fashioned from stone slabs anchored in place jointly by gravity and Martian adobe, the peak-roofed building in the middle resembled a log house of the sort built by a number of ancient North American native tribes. Upon closer examination, however, it turned out to be composed of a local pressed-regolith concrete that had been formed, textured, and painted to resemble genuine wood, which was doubtless an exceedingly rare commodity on the treeless and still all-but-lifeless Red Planet.

  In a voice filled with reverence, Qaletaqu explained that this place was the consecrated site of the local habak, or religious shrine, a sacred place where the Canyontowners came to seek guidance in the form of visions from their animal spirit guides and the shades of their dead ancestors.

  When they aren’t brawling in the tavern, she thought, but refrained from saying aloud.

  An hour or so later, after she had booked herself a room over Ahota’s Public House, Canyontown’s sole tavern, Brooks quietly took a seat in the back of the establishment’s smoky but surprisingly spacious game room. From the careworn condition of some of the furniture and fixtures, she concluded that the place must have been experiencing something of a slump recently, perhaps because the specter of war was never particularly friendly to the tourist trade of any nation or world.

  Brooks watched as about two dozen of the locals, whose ages ranged from teen to elderly, slowly filled the room’s obviously temporary complement of plastiform folding chairs, which someone had arranged in three rough concentric circles around a forlorn-looking pool table. Quietly studying the primarily Native American but nevertheless highly variegated faces arrayed about her, she wondered whether the anarchic behavior she had seen so far today had been merely a fluke. She already strongly suspected it wasn’t, however, as she watched the grizzled old man who had taken the seat beside her busily typing on a square padd that had a larger than usual display, probably to accommodate his failing eyesight. The old man told her, without being asked, that he was working on a political manifesto. The elderly but strong-looking woman seated at his other side interrupted him long enough to explain that he’d been working diligently on this very same manifesto every day of the past twenty-two years. The old man then interrupted the interruption to describe his work as a reimagining of the Fundamental Declarations of the Martian Colonies, using a political vocabulary that made it sound like a weird and probably explosive mix of classical Marxism, post–World War III Meltdown Nihilism, Grange Populism, and grab-up-the-guns Ayn Rand Objectivist-Libertarianism. He finished his rhapsodic description by saying that his document, while still a work in progress, promised to deliver the long-sought-after goal of proving the ultimate perfectibility of human nature.

  Good luck with that, she thought from behind her politest smile. She refrained from pointing out that a perfected human nature wasn’t likely to be of much more help against the Romulans than would the Canyontowners’ streak of eccentric, colorful independence.

  As the old man returned to his work, Brooks continued to study the rest of the faces in the crowd. They displayed a panoply of diverse emotions ranging all the way from eager anticipation to stuporous boredom, but all of them living, breathing manifestations of that independent streak. Brooks considered using that singular characteristic as the primary angle for the profile she was going to write about these people. Based both on what she’d observed so far and the backgrounders she had read, she assumed that the Canyontowners’ ornery self-reliance shared an origin with the formal name the place had received from its Hopi-Pueblo expat founders—Popé Pueblo—when they had established it in 2109. A quick search of the local infonets right after she’d checked into her room revealed that Popé was the name of the Native American tribal leader who’d led the 1680 revolt against the Spanish conquerors who had dragged his people into forced labor in Mexican mines.

  Brooks wondered if she was already becoming used to the weirdness of this place, so far from the mainstream of ordinary Earthbound human experience, yet so much closer to humanity’s cradle than Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, Altair, or any of the human species’ other long-term habitations. If human weirdness turns out to correlate positively with distance from Earth, she thought, then I’d better learn to anticipate strangeness and adapt to it a lot faster than I’ve been doing.

  Of course, Brooks had already half expected
something strange to come out of today’s public political meeting—a gathering that Qaletaqu himself had called in order to brief the people of his tribe on the report he was to deliver tomorrow morning under the Ares City Dome before the full Governing Council of the Confederated Martian Colonies—which wasn’t being held in the nominally official town hall across the street. And she received further confirmation of the weirdness of today’s meeting even before Mars’s official Coalition representative formally called the oddly informal proceedings to order.

  This occurred when the local mining and areothermal power magnate who ran the Dytallix-Barsoom Resource Extraction Corporation, a grizzled, overall-clad man whom the two dozen or so people present called Kolichiyaw, abruptly rose from the folding chair between the two occupied, respectively, by Kwahu, Canyontown’s sheriff, and Cheveyo, the shaman in charge of Popé Pueblo’s communal habak.

  “Where you off to, Kolichiyaw?” the sheriff said, polishing the star-shaped badge pinned to his black lapel with a soiled white sleeve. “The town meeting’s about to start.”

  “I need a drink,” Kolichiyaw said, thrusting out his jaw belligerently. To Brooks’s eye, the BREMCO executive had already had more than enough to drink. “I’ll be right back.”

  Still seated near the sheriff, Cheveyo the shaman shook her head. “You know the rules, Koli. There’s no drinkin’ at the town meetings.”