This section of Coprates does have the benefit of two ETE Stations—Gray and Indigo—opposite each other on the North Rim and Divide respectively, which puts them only a hundred klicks apart, about ninety klicks further east of us. ETE Stations are usually at least twice that far away from each other, spaced around the valley rims, but for some reason they decided to give this region an extra share. Plus, since Coprates is only a third as wide as Melas, the Atmosphere Net across it is probably much more efficient. So even with the higher winds here, the air stays richer, warmer, and wetter than Melas, or even West-End Coprates where Tranquility sits.
It’s nothing like the far Northern Melas I knew living and serving at Industry, the barren deserts… The only way we knew there was plant life somewhere out there was from some of the odd fresh-made food we’d take off would-be raiders, and even that took us awhile to realize they weren’t growing in greenhouses like we did, when we took the first one alive that was willing to talk about the “Food Trade” from Coprates, as if that intel would be worth his life.
So while everybody else is having another let-down moment because we’ve yet again failed to find anything “worth” the long, slow drive, I have to hide one of my “secret smiles”. Because despite all the shit I’ve been through, and despite how disappointed everybody else on this mission seems to be so far, I realize: I’m lucky to be here. I’m lucky to see this new world.
I’m eager to go outside, to get my boots on rock and have a proper look around, but Rios goes with caution. He tells Jane to take a slow crawl around the colony site (or where the colony had been, since most of the foundations are indeed buried), then find a reasonably level place to park us for the night.
“We’re losing light and it’s getting cold. We’ll go out fresh after breakfast, when the morning winds die down, take a closer look…”
Then he goes to file his preliminary report, check in with Command in orbit.
24 April, 2118.
We get motion alarms just after 04:00.
I’m out of my rack in a burst—I wasn’t sleeping well anyway, and when I dozed, I dreamed of something moving outside. Now something is. Several somethings.
Horton was Night Watch, so he’s got them locked on sentry scans. I count six blips, staggered in a rough semi-circle around us.
“Light ‘em up, sir?” Horton asks Rios when he comes in behind me.
“Night vision,” Rios decides to be subtle, lowering the blast shields over the view ports to keep the light in so hopefully we still look asleep.
The screens glow green, giving us eerie views of the terrain outside. At first we don’t see much, except I realize there are boulders out there that weren’t there before, maybe forty to fifty meters out. Then one moves, raises a little bit out of the ground, slides closer. The shape is very squat and bulky—a man would have to be hunched down with his knees up to his chest and head down to move like that; and the mass is unusually wide, like it’s under a pile of armor and cloaks. I see the shaft of a thin spear poking out from under whatever robes it’s wearing.
Another moves. I think I see a bow and arrow.
“Nomads?” Rios wants my opinion as the others drag in, bleary-eyed but jacked on adrenaline.
“Not like I’ve ever seen,” Horton denies. “And this is pretty far east for them.”
“Abu Abbas was taking a group this way six months ago,” Rios suggests. “They could have made it out this far by now.”
“Abbas’ people wouldn’t get this close to something high-tech, not unless they were intending to say ‘hello’,” Jane counters, coming in to take his chair, adjusting his prosthesis.
“This doesn’t look like ‘hello’,” Horton agrees.
We watch. Two of the forms get brave and slide our way in short hops.
“They look like they’re stalking prey,” Rios assesses, keeping his voice down (not that they could hear us through the layered pressure hull). Jane hums and nods.
We keep playing dead until they get close enough to touch the ship. First, it looks almost reverent, awe-struck. Then they get bolder, examine the undercarriage, the drive train. We see tools come out.
“Okay, that’s enough of that,” Rios decides. “Lights!”
Spotlights blaze from our underhull and topside, washing the surrounding terrain bright white. Our visitors freeze for a second, then run, scurrying, still squat to the ground. They scatter, zig-zag like they’re trying to confuse.
“WE MEAN YOU NO HARM. WE COME IN PEACE.” Rios is calling to them through the PA, then our translators repeat the message in Russian, Chinese, Arabic, French and Japanese for good measure. In the time that takes, our visitors have run six different directs, and one-by-one, have vanished into the terrain. Just gone. Figuring they’re hiding in the rocks, Rios keeps trying variations of his message of reassurance, identifying himself, identifying us. (I’m not sure that’s very reassuring. Even if these folks don’t know about Earthside’s new policy to relocate native peoples “for their own safety”, UNMAC still means Unmaker, Bringer of Nuclear Fire.)
“Pursue?” Sharp seems almost keen.
“No. We wait for proper daylight. Then take a careful walk outside. Try to look reasonably friendly.”
But he doesn’t sound confident. I remember the woman he was in love with died making first contact with an unknown quantity.
He calls in another report. And we sit.
The downside of the richer atmosphere is we get ice. Lots of ice.
The hatches are sticky with it when we pop outside at 06:00. The rocks are slick—I have no idea how our night visitors didn’t slip all over, not even while they were running away.
Walking on ice-glazed rough terrain in an H-A can is a balancing trick with every step. Each one of us stumbles embarrassingly more than once just in the first dozen meters of boots on the ground, not something you want to be showing a potential enemy.
Horton is the first to find footprints, which look normal enough, but show cuts from some kind of bladed cleat. What we don’t find is any sign at all of our visitors, despite keeping glued to the screens for the last three hours. We didn’t see them retreat further than maybe seventy-five meters before they hunkered down and hid from us, didn’t see any movement further out to suggest they managed to sneak away. But they aren’t here.
I suggest we may need to be looking for tunnels, for sally-ports hidden in the rocks, like we used to defend our Keeps, like the Shinkyo used.
Rios—stuck in the ship because tactical priority won out over his own desire to be out here himself—reminds us to be careful, to stay alert.
We stagger around where we last had visual contacts. And I’m realizing the patch of dirt I’m standing on in a trench-like depression isn’t nearly as icy as what’s around it, when I hear something that sounds remarkably like a rocket launcher.
“INCO…!!!” I don’t manage to shout before I see something fly fast, trailing smoke, at Horton. He spins. And I think that saves his life. He gets hit, staggers, falls back. He’s got some kind of a long thin rod—longer and stouter than an arrow—stuck through his left shoulder between his plates, the butt-end still smoking. Thankfully, that’s all it does.
But then I have to duck arrows.
“GET DOWN!” Rios shouts at us. Then he answers back, raking the perimeter with the forward AP turret, just a few quick but intimidating bursts. The arrows stop coming.
Wei is running for Horton, who’s half-sitting on his back. I can hear him panting and groaning into his helmet Link.
“I’m okay… God…”
I scan the perimeter through my ICW sights, my helmet-feed trying infrared, sound, motion detection. There’s nothing but us.
Then I realize we’re one short.
“Sharp! Where’s Sharp?!”
I run over to where I last saw her, falling on my face and not caring. She was poking around some exposed foundation sections… Rios feeds me sentry-footage of her last location: She ducks when the shit flie
s, but then suddenly just drops out of sight. On her helmet cam, all we see is the blur of a sudden fall into darkness, then just more black for a second or two until the feed stops. Slowed down, we get a flash of armored hands. She doesn’t even scream.
I get to the spot. At the base of a low wall of reinforced concrete, the dirt looks freshly dug. I start digging with my gloves.
“Straker! Get back here! Now!” Rios orders. I ignore him.
I’m scooping armloads of regolith, but getting nowhere. If she’s buried, she’s not just a meter or less under. Calls to her Link continue to get nothing. Rios gets on uplink with orbit, has them lock a satellite on us. It takes an eternal four minutes. I’m up to my hips in shoveled dirt. Wei’s already helped Horton back inside, and he’s cycling back out to help me.
I get fed Sharp’s tag tracking. It’s faint, but it’s all wrong.
Her helmet is about a dozen meters from me, stationary. Her suit tag is moving south away from it, almost running speed, already thirty meters on a winding course before I’m up out of my hole. Her weapon is headed in a whole other direction.
I get to where her helmet should be, but it’s just more dirt.
“She’s underground!” I figure the obvious. But as I say it, the tags on her suit and gun go dead.
Shit.
Melas Two sends an ASV to pick up Horton, even though he stubbornly insisted on waiting until we find Sharp. Rios sends him anyway. The projectile that hit him had a sharp-edged triangular cross-section, making for a messy wound that’s tough to staunch, compounded by spring-loaded razor-sharp fins (like stabilizers or arrow fletchings). We couldn’t even safely get it out of him, so we had to pack it in place and evac him with the two-hundred centimeter long thing still stuck through his shoulder.
Jackson decides to waste precious fuel doing flyovers with heavily armed AAVs, while Rios keeps booming polite but firm requests over the PA to return our personnel, promising we’ll leave the area as soon as we get her back.
“The Cast leader told me stories about some of the outsiders they’d faced,” Rios remembers as we suffer the wait, glued to the screens and ports for any sign of movement. “He described a rocket-powered lance.”
He locks eyes on Lyra, then hits the uplink.
“Leviathan Three to Station. This is Captain Rios. I need to speak with General Richards.”
He gets on in impressive time. (The General actually strikes me as a good officer, true to his men, and trying his best to do what’s right over all the fear-politics spewing from Earth.)
“What do you need, son?”
“Restricted access, General. The files we got from the Circe. The exams they did on the locals. I don’t need the sensitive material, just the anthropological and medical reports. Any subjects carrying a weapon like the one that hit Sergeant Horton.”
We get silence. But then we get fed.
Pictures. Videos. Exam logs. Clinical reports. (Just none of the experimental records, the atrocities the crew of the Circe—including Lyra’s parents—had been ordered to commit.)
What we see is an almost unreal form: Human, certainly. But short, thick-limbed, broad-chested, heavy lids over deep eyes. The skin is sickly-pale, worse than our tunnel dwellers (but we had medic-ordered doses of UV). The exams report thick, calcified bones and joints (in this gravity, de-calcification is the major risk), enlarged lungs and heart, peripheral signs of mild frostbite and severe capillary rupture from years of exposure to low pressure. And geometric scarring from many years of healing pressure sores, on the limbs, torso and waist, that the onboard medic attributed to the heavy steel plate armor each subject wore, almost twice their own body mass of metal. Thick enough to stop small-arms fire.
Lyra recognizes some of this. She was privy to the early exams, the Circe’s initial catch-and-release studies of the local population (or at least the locals that wandered by, entrapped by basic curiosity). She even got full disclosure on everything they managed to take from the one ETE they managed to catch. But she got kept in the dark about the experimental phase, when her family was ordered to try cultivating and implanting the ETE nanotech in other bodies.
“Silvermen,” Rios mutters. “Two Gun called them ‘Silvermen’.”
The heavy layered armor is bare polished metal. Apparently they don’t have anything to paint it with, or don’t care to, relying on their cloaks for surface camo.
“It looked like they lived underground,” Lyra tells us what the reports do. “They also carried heavy digging tools. And cutting tools. They had old mining gear on under their armor, but all the colony tags had been removed. But no pressure suits. Just basic masks. Some not even that.”
“They’ve acclimatized to the thin air,” Rios figures.
What we don’t see: any interviews, interrogations.
“We kept them unconscious, drugged so they wouldn’t remember,” Lyra explains.
So we don’t know where they come from, how they live, how they get around. Numbers. Fortifications. But apparently, they can dig.
Two more hours pass. Doctor Mann has a relief flight bring us a present: It drops a GPR charge on the colony site. In minutes, we can see the ghosts of tunnels, but more random than the ones I grew up in. And not contiguous. Just sections.
“It looks like they use cave-ins to keep anyone from following them,” I suspect, remembering what we had to do to slow the Bug that Chang sent after us at Industry.
So all we can do is keep broadcasting our deal: Give us back our trooper and we’ll go.
We don’t get a motion alarm until 23:20.
The spotlights go live, washing the terrain blazing white. There’s one figure coming toward us in the icy night, staggering. It’s Sharp. She’s got her hands up over her eyes. The light is blinding her. She’s moving slow, like she’s drunk or drugged. All she’s wearing is the jumpsuit she had on under her armor, though it’s hard to tell because she’s completely crusted in dirt, like she’d just crawled up out of her own grave. Then I realize she’s barefoot.
And she isn’t wearing a mask.
“Go!” Rios orders. Wei and I are already at the lock, cycling.
We grab her and drag. She fights us, weak, disoriented, confused, dirty. But she doesn’t seem to be hurt.
Lyra’s on the other side of the hatch to help drag her in. We pressurize the lock, start vacuuming all the dirt off, check for wounds. She’s shivering, coughing, hyperventilating. She won’t open her eyes.
“Check her!” Rios insists, expecting treachery, but she isn’t booby-trapped.
We get her through the lock and into our tiny medical bay, get her oxygen, strip her out of her dirt-packed clothing, get hot packs and a saline IV started. She’s hypoxic, hypothermic, and she keeps trying to cover her eyes, won’t open them for the exam.
“…dark…” she rasps out. “…kept me in the dark… total dark… I couldn’t see…”
We try to comfort, but it takes a shot to settle her.
Outside, there’s no more sign of movement.
Rios orders Jane to honor our part of the deal. We roll out. Retreat.
We get a hundred meters, and there’s an explosion. We can feel it through the hull, through the suspension. Grit rains on us seconds later.
Satellite confirms, even in the dark: Where we were parked is now a hole, and it looks big and deep enough to have swallowed us up.
Chapter 3: “Not All That Wander…”
6 May, 2018.
From the Diaries of Jonathan Drake, when he was still known as Ishmael Abbas:
We come within five klicks of Concordia just as the evening winds begin battering our backs. Hopefully this is far enough away from their territory to camp for the night in relative safety.
We’ve made it around the east end of the Lesser Divide Range, to a point where the Coprates Valley suddenly widens out about a dozen klicks south, due to the combined ending of that secondary ridge of mountains and the Divide’s own recession from ancient slope-fall. But w
e’re sure to stay well away from the highlands. If the established pattern holds, we’re less likely to come under attack down here in the belly-lands.
We find the next Tapsite easily enough, right where the map Paul Stilson gave us said it would be. It’s not a Nomad Tap, certainly not this far out, so it proves the place is (or had been) routinely visited by some local population. Thankfully, the gas fixtures are still universal. From the age of the welds and tool marks, it’s probably been here since just after the Apocalypse, just like the taps in Melas, when the original survivors scrambled for necessary resources as well as viable homes, their colonies destroyed. (And the colony sites we’ve passed so far look just as burned and blasted as any in Central Melas, including our own Uqba and Baraka.)
We’re initially thankful that it doesn’t look recently used, unvisited long enough for dunes to shift across all the obvious approaches. But both Ambassador Murphy and The Ghaddar agree on closer inspection that the appearance is deceiving. They note signs of soil compression that could only have been made by heavy boots—complete with the distinctive cleat-marks we’ve become too-familiar with. Carefully covered, but they were made shortly before the last “wet misting” (a disturbing phenomenon that occurs every few mornings in this region, when the sky gets thick with Station emissions and the water vapor partially condenses out of it as a super-fine chilly spray over everything, lasting for up to an hour). So that means people have been here anywhere from several days to a week ago. We are not out of enemy territory. Not here. Not yet. And that news is disheartening.
But then her eyes find other covered prints, these much lighter, smaller, and without cleats. My father initially wonders if our new enemies ever travel the surface with their children, but the Ghaddar insists that these tracks occurred at a different time, and more recently—since the last misting.
The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades Page 5
