I raked the chassis with gunfire, dragging bullets along the vehicle’s length until the magazine clicked empty.
Invading the new silence, my gun hissed as its self-cooling system kicked in. Severed wiring swung against live tracks and discharged sparks with an almost rhythmic metallic pop. The suitcase rattled on the walkway, its bulk trapped behind its owner’s corpse wedged into the exit ramp by the moving escalator.
As I took a step forwards, Hawkes dragged his body up the side of the pod and crawled through a destroyed window onto the opposite platform. He left a trail of blood along the vehicle’s interior furnishings. Ripped apart, his right trouser leg darkened with seeping blood. He’d been lucky; having only taken one hit from my barrage. Shaking my head in mild disbelief, I spat stale gum across the platform. Hawkes pulled himself clear of the wreckage, struggling to keep his weapon with him.
The handcuff remained on his wrist but severed silver links dangled from under his shirt sleeve. The briefcase lay on the floor of the transit pod, the chain’s shattered metal glinting under the pod’s crude lights. Hawkes staggered to his feet and hobbled from the scene.
I couldn’t jump across the tracks, the gap was too wide, but further along the platform a simple bridge traversed the space. Removing my spent magazine and tossing it aside, I climbed onto the crossing and rammed a fresh cartridge into place. Before reaching the other side, I flipped the weapon into single-fire mode.
Hawkes neared the edge of the transfer node and made his way towards the furthest truss—a possible escape route that would take him higher into the city. He dragged his leg like a wounded animal fleeing a predator, spreading a bloodied path behind him. A quick scan of the node convinced me we were still alone.
“Hawkes,” I shouted. “Stop, man. I just want to talk to you.”
The fugitive turned, stumbling on his one good leg, scowling in desperation, teeth bared in a wild snarl. The node’s high, bright lighting reflected off the sweat dotting his bald head.
“Come on, Hawkes. Give it up.”
Hawkes’ features hardened as he leveled his firearm. Composure always prevails over desperation, and I had an abundance of self-control. I fired before Hawkes raised the gun halfway.
My shot struck his shoulder, the velocity lifting him off his feet. It tore an exit hole through his flesh, blasting a cloud of blood from his back. The bullet had enough punch that it shattered the suicide-proof glass behind him.
His weapon clattered to the platform as a grunt escaped his lips, and then he slammed into the dome’s newly made hole with enough force to knock a sliver of glass free.
He hovered there for a second, as if sitting calmly on its edge, then gravity caught him and Hawkes flipped from view.
“Shit.”
I hadn’t even interrogated him. I ran to the gap and leaned over the ledge. Glass splinters crunched under my boots and those on the rim nipped at my abdomen with a subtle pinch.
Perhaps five feet below the edge, Hawkes swung as if suspended in midair, his fingers curled around a large bolt used to construct the node. Somehow, he’d found strength enough to grip the outcrop, while his other arm hung limp from his traumatized shoulder. Eyes wide, his forehead creased in a grimace of determination. He hung rigid, just the slightest kick from swinging legs. One hundred and eighty meters below Hawkes’ dangling body, the ninth district of level one glowed under faint lighting. Dark areas of housing estates were dotted with lights like watchful eyes.
I reached down to Hawkes. “Take my hand. I can pull you up.”
His answering grimace made it clear he didn’t trust me. Even in his desperate predicament he seemed to say, ‘Come on, you don’t expect me to fall for that one, do you?’
I’d let him fall, but I had to at least try and get him to talk first. He wouldn’t say anything of note while hanging so far above level one’s suburbs. Hooking a leg around one of the nodes’ nearby support beams and leaning further out, my hand stopped about two feet from his.
“Come on, try and reach up with your other arm and grab my hand.”
His fingers slid on the smooth bolt and he kicked out in an attempt to push his bodyweight upwards and recover his grip. His face contorted in agony. I had no option but to cut the crap and get to the main question.
“Where’s Pierce?”
A cynical laugh wheezed through his lips. Hawkes looked past me, over my head, as if trying to pick out a purchase higher up he might be able to exploit. His fingers slipped again.
Time was pressing.
I made sure my voice sounded pleading. “Tell me, Hawkes. Where is he?”
“Fuck you, Steele,” Hawkes said, then released his grip.
SIX
No one needed the key to a briefcase, or even to know the combination, if one possessed a Gibson and Marx semi-automatic such as mine.
I considered the case might be booby trapped, but as Pierce and Hawkes didn’t usually branch into the use of explosive devices I figured the threat to be minimal. Besides, Hawkes had the thing cuffed to his wrist, and only a complete lunatic would chain a bomb to the end of their arm. For all I knew the case contained a clean pair of boxers, a few days change of clothes, and maybe a bunch of flowers for one of those cheap prostitutes Hawkes sometimes indulged himself with in Olympia’s hazardous red light district.
It might also contain information I needed: a location, a name, anything to bring me one step closer to my quarry. As for other options; well, there weren’t any. Hawkes now lay splattered across a small area of level one, and to make matters worse Pierce’s whereabouts remained a mystery. With all his closest confidants exterminated, Pierce became as invisible as the stale city air I breathed. Placing the gun’s barrel against the briefcase’s locking mechanism I squeezed the trigger and blew the lock apart. The bullet probably ended up buried in Olympia’s foundations some two hundred meters below, but unless it tore through a few bodies on its way no one would care.
Prying the lid open with my weapon, I studied the case’s contents.
Martian money contained a crimson hue, the same shade as the dust that coated this planet’s inhospitable landscape. Arranged in neat rows, the bundles were tied together by black ribbons. A quick search told me each note was worth a hundred phobi; the currency named after Mars’s closest orbiting moon. There had to be about eight thousand notes stuffed into the briefcase, more than I could hope to earn during a six hundred and eighty-seven day Martian year. I stuffed my pockets with currency until I couldn’t fit another note into my clothing. My employers would pay me a substantial sum once I concluded this mission, but I figured a little extra cash always comes in handy.
“Call this a bonus.”
The inside of the case’s lid included a zipped pocket and I opened it carefully. Holding my breath, each snap of loosening teeth on the compartment echoed in my growing tension, my ears straining to hear the tell-tale click of an incendiary device being activated. I heard nothing untoward.
With the pouch open, I pulled the flap down, reached inside, and retrieved a single sheet of folded paper.
A hurried scrawl and a poorly detailed sketch were scribbled onto the single sheet, yet I recognized the writing immediately. A bolt of excitement interrupted my usually calm veneer as I realized I’d now come one step closer to locating my final target. The sketch pointed to his whereabouts, yet the location caused a stirring of dread to pull at my guts, a sensation I needed to rapidly get under control. If my emotions dictated my actions, this mission might become my last for entirely different reasons than leaving Mars. Muffled words floated to my ears from somewhere beyond the connection node. With no wind blowing inside this entombed city, voices didn’t carry far, so whoever spoke had to be closer than I’d like them to be. Maintenance would have been alerted about a problem on the track when I stopped the transit pod, and people hearing gunshots might have called the police. The node probably wouldn’t be crawling with cops, but there’d be enough commotion to completely fuck up my pla
ns if I stayed too long. The Martian Interstellar Correction Agency wouldn’t take too kindly to me once they found out about the considerable damage I’d done to a public transfer point.
As such, I could no longer call this a routine mission.
If it wasn’t successfully completed within the deadline, nothing I said or did would be enough to justify my actions. I crossed Hawkes’ name from my list and ran to the nearest truss. Using the network of transit pods, it took sixteen minutes to reach my destination.
Abandoned more than two years ago, the sixty-fourth district of Olympia’s first level was shrouded in darkness. The entire area had a view of the outside world. At this hour however, the panorama became a black veil of night, deepened by turbulent storm clouds and heavy rain, as if Mars itself had become too ashamed to reveal its bleak landscape.
Cabins used as offices, and poorly constructed processing plants stood as dark silhouettes against the backdrop of an angry tempest. The mines of Olympia were the city’s biggest embarrassment despite the project’s success in bringing water to the city. In the past, Olympia contained no prisons. A criminal could expect his cell to be a darkened tunnel beneath the city, and the duration of his purgatory to be spent excavating ice. Now, with changing times and mass emigration in progress, the usual sentence was swift execution—judging by the stories I’d heard, a far better option than the mines. Tunnels and caverns, some of them many miles deep, crisscrossed beneath the city’s foundations, a network of mines dug through Martian bedrock by the bare hands of Olympia’s convicts.
All the people I apprehended, both men and women, had been sent there to work and most of them probably perished beneath the planet’s surface.
Chain-link fencing surrounded all four surfaces of the district’s pyramid structure. At one time electrified, the barrier had two functions: to keep Olympia’s citizens out, but, more importantly, to prevent the mine’s current inhabitants from escaping. I’d heard the rumors of what lived here, and it didn’t make me any more confident about the task ahead.
I located the fissure in the district’s enclosure about ten yards from the old entrance. Local residents in the area bordering the mines often told about nocturnal raids by the collieries’ populace, but not enough of a police force remained within the city walls to give a damn about this plague of violence. The gap in the chain was low to the ground; a two-foot long split no doubt made using mining tools long since discarded.
Silence draped over the district, its completeness disturbed by the drum of torrential rain across Olympia’s outer skin. This area of the city received no air conditioning, its static air tainted by the stench of death and decay wafting from the region’s darkness. Setting my weapon to rapid fire, I sank to my knees, and crawled through the gap into the mining district.
Martian dust extracted from the mines lay scattered across the derelict neighborhood. Large rocks peppered the ground as if the terrain outside infected the city and seeped through the foundations. Because transporting rock gouged from the planet’s innards required adequate space, the area surrounding the mine entrance wasn’t heavily developed. The processing plants’ large dark bodies stretched around the district’s edge, close to the city walls. Those buildings had no windows, so I didn’t focus my attention there. Smallholdings dotted the expansive concourse, once serving as offices, mess huts, and torture chambers.
They had windows, and I felt eyes watching me as I edged across the open space.
My boots crunched on scattered dust, and the particles hung in the air as a mist, irritating my lungs with every breath I took. I turned a full three-sixty as I walked, checking my back. Above, the underside of Olympia’s upper levels appeared darker than the Martian night, their blackness perforated at regular intervals by illuminated transfer points that resembled a spattering of distant constellations.
The mine entrance had been constructed in the center of the floor plan. There were no elevators to the lower levels. A small shed with a sloping roof capped the entrance, the tunnel’s mouth darker than the surrounding district.
Shadows, thick like sodden rain clouds, billowed over the borough. Outside, the tempest intensified and a spark of lightning forked the edge of rolling clouds.
Illuminated for a fraction of a second, dark figures followed my progress from the smallholdings. Their chatter met my ears, a language that had altered over the years until it formed words I couldn’t understand. They were hunting me—I knew that much.
Over years of dangerous work my senses have intensified, so I easily discerned the sound of bare feet on Martian dust. My pursuers stalked on either flank and at my back—surrounding me. I quickened my pace. Their chatter became more agitated, their footfalls louder; echoing off the processing plant walls so it seemed twice as many hunters chased me. Breathing deep to quell my nerves, I inhaled a lungful of course grains. I started to cough, and the chasing horde seized their opportunity. The echoing noise of their slapping feet intensified as they broke into a run. They grunted in excitement—the sound neither human nor alien, but something caught morbidly in between. I ran too, sprinting for the mine entrance.
Another flash of electricity in the storm sent strobes of light dancing around the concourse. Illumination flickered off darkened bodies huddled near the opening to the shack. I squeezed the trigger.
Muzzle flash brightened my surroundings. Stones splintered and dust billowed, flesh split and blood painted the dirt a deeper red. I raked the front of the small building, freakish bodies flailing under the barrage of high velocity projectiles.
They backed off, and I sprinted into the tunnels.
Panting from the rush of adrenaline, I stopped running about twenty feet inside the mine shaft. Silhouettes crowded the entrance, blocking out the dim, gray light thrown down from the boiling storm outside. Some people claimed these creatures were former convicts who’d gotten lost in the maze of excavations beneath the city; others said they were simply left behind when the mining operation ceased.
Whatever they were, they’d once been human, but generations of a harsh existence had turned them into animals.
One of them picked up a rock near the mine entrance and hurled it after me into the dark. They wouldn’t enter the mine’s blackness. They ruled above ground in the neglected district, but something even more disturbing controlled the Martian underground.
SEVEN
Darkness enveloped me in a heavy cocoon.
I’d been walking deep into the mines for about ten minutes. Every tick of the seconds on my wrist readout seemed to echo off the walls, reminding me how quickly time evaporated. Hawkes’ map now resided in the back pocket of my trousers along with a wad of cash, but with no lighting this deep into the planet’s surface I had no means of reading it.
Fortunately I’d been blessed with a good memory, and so far had navigated the tunnels without mistake.
Sweat ran in rivulets down my body, gluing my clothing to my skin. The immense volcanic outcrop of Olympus Mons towered over the city; its heated vents of molten rock weaved beneath the city’s foundations like blood-filled arteries. The tunnel walls radiated heat into the confined space, and each time my hand or shoulder brushed against the rock, sweat sizzled and I flinched with pain. The mineshafts were high enough to stand in, but they weren’t wide. If lighting had been laid through the tunnels to guide the convicts, it’d long been removed. I knew which direction to take, but had to palm my way along the cavern wall to find the right course.
The mineshafts forked at regular intervals, and each new tunnel would take the prospective digger to a different area beneath the city. As I recall, not much ice had ever been found down here so close to the giant thermal volcano. Probably, the excavations were just a way of occupying the convicts until they succumbed to the extreme underground conditions.
I understood why Pierce chose to hide down here, in a place no one dared to venture, in a horrific world within a lawless city. Of course there was always the possibility he’d been killed a
long time ago by the creature lurking in this gruesome underworld. A faint aroma hung in the tunnel, unlike anything I’d ever smelled before. It could have been seeping from the warm rock, the odor coming from volcanic activity deeper in the substratum. My sweat masked most of the smell, the musky odor of perspiration prevalent in the air. Three times I banged my head on a low point in the ceiling; once I’d taken the wrong fork and had to double back. I considered the possibility that the map may have been telling lies, and Pierce wouldn’t be found on the planet at all, let alone so far beneath Mars’s exterior. I listened to the tunnel ahead but heard nothing unusual. That didn’t calm my nerves, however; I wasn’t alone.
I smelled it before I heard it.
An overpowering stench wafted up the tunnel through the abyss, fanned by rising thermal air. The atmosphere grew thick with the reek of rotting flesh. Some of the government workers I’d shared a beer with over the years had told me about the smell that sometimes seeped from the mine entrance. Most blamed the odor on dead inmates who’d rotted quickly in the heat. Others were convinced the fetid aroma came from something alive in the mines. The stench wrapped me and I gagged, clasping a hand to my mouth.
If I had my bearings correct, then I stood about six paces from another branch in the mineshafts. I’d navigated four junctions so far, each time continuing along the tunnel to my left, but if my memory of the map was correct I’d need to go right this time. Resonating thuds echoed up the tunnel and the surrounding walls vibrated with each boom. There were three, sometimes four, heavy bangs in succession, its sound almost musical. It took me a moment to comprehend why the noise was so rhythmical, the realization twisting my guts with a pinch of fear. Two quick thumps had to be the fall of each foot slamming the surface of the tunnel; a third or fourth pounding surely coming from one or both of the creature’s arms slamming the rough walls in anger.
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