The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades

by Michael Rizzo

  “But the lands to that point are uninhabited?” he asks to confirm. She thinks, as if replaying her long journey in her head, then nods. The thought of a hundred kilometers of available Coprates seems to appeal, even though none of those who actually know this territory have chosen to live there, not even the Silvermen who live underground.

  But he wants to claim it in peace. So he offers:

  “We can escort you home. As friends. Perhaps we can help you against the Black Clothes. We have certainly fought them ourselves, with some success. And we believe we may have stronger allies somewhere in the region that may also help.”

  “Then I will advocate for you with my father,” she accepts. “But your presence in our lands will be at our pleasure.”

  “Of course, my lady.”

  Chapter 5: In the Belly of the Beast

  26 May, 2118.

  Jak Straker:

  We risk going outside again to visually check the treads and the power train before we start moving for the day. The morning cold and wind make the job as difficult as it has been any other day for the last month-plus, though it’s been almost two weeks since the last nocturnal attack, and nearly three since the last “sapping” attempt to drop us into a hole. Rios thinks (hopes) that we’ve made it well-past the territory of the tenacious Silvermen, but he wisely won’t let us let our guards down.

  While Wei and I do our checks underneath, Lyra heads topside and adjusts our makeshift “camo netting”—her own idea, after we realized that the rust and ochre paint job was no longer blending so well as the terrain got greener. The girl’s made herself a veritable garden on our roof, lacing the main hull with sturdy Graingrass vines, keeping it green with a daily misting from our condensation collectors (except on those odd mornings when we get a free misting from the extra-thick Station clouds that build up every few days down here, something Rios and the other Sleeper Vets celebrate as “almost rain”). It manages to make our ride look even more monster-like.

  Jane has Wei triple-check the last field repairs we had to make. The patched Starboard-Front Number Two caterpillar tracks are holding together, but the bearing set on one of the battered idler wheels is still squeaking, the wheel itself wobbling visibly as we roll. Matheson is trying to scrounge us a replacement or machine one to fit back at base, but we’d need to get his crew out here along with a pair of ASV’s to lift the hull to repair it properly in the field. The alternative is to turn around and limp home, but Command says no, so we’ll keep moving until we break. And we’re okay with that, because we’re finally getting somewhere really interesting (though “interesting” usually means someone will try to attack us pretty shortly).

  Lyra calls what we’re heading into “The Belly.” And it was a hell of a trip getting here.

  She got the term from her own personal names for the local map features, studying the geology of Marineris as she grew up, the only child of an isolated spaceship crew. So the names have a child’s whimsy, but they also make as good a sense as anything Latin that got stuck to the planetary map from long before anyone landed here:

  The first five hundred klicks of Coprates—the western half—is pretty straight, tapering mostly steadily from being a hundred klicks wide where it connects with Melas, down to around sixty just before Concordia. She says her parents used to call that part “The Alley”, apparently inspired by an old science fiction novel.

  The eastern half still runs basically straight, but the Rim walls are more varied in their sculpting by collapse, erosion and possible ancient water flow: curved, widened, scalloped, and finally the valley gets divided straight down the middle for the final two hundred klicks by an almost Datum-level mountain range.

  Lyra points out that, to less scholarly eyes, this half of the valley looks sort of like a man, though sideways (head west, feet east). And I do see it: bulbous head, torso and two legs; standing with a bad slouch and hands lazily in pockets, as if seen from about forty-five degrees to his left.

  And we’ve been through the top of his head and down his throat.

  The last human trouble we collided with was back at his “forelock”, where sits the ruins of Concordia in its narrow side-canyon, stripped bare and long-buried like every other colony we’d surveyed in the Alley, a testament to the devastating power of the “sterilizing” nukes that fell on us all (well, on those of us that lived here—our grandparents) fifty years ago. And a testament to the greater resilience of human kind, no matter what culture and shape it might need take to survive.

  Assuming we don’t run into them again, the still-mysterious and universally unfriendly Silvermen appear to control the entire eastern half of the Alley, almost two hundred and fifty klicks worth, all from underground tunnel systems that defy GPR scans because they seem to be in constant flux. As far as we can guess, they’re a society of extremely proficient diggers, miners (they certainly have a lot of metal and the necessary chemicals to make explosives). Rios started calling them “mole men”, a reference to something from his pre-service youth on Earth—Old Earth. (A “mole” is apparently some kind of small burrowing creature. The file references showed me a freakish thing that looks like it can barely see or move, much less fight. I wonder if such things still exist on New Earth. The only definitions of the word I know are a chemical measure and the name of a popular model of mining digger.)

  Once we got past Concordia, the journey down through the “head” was mostly uneventful, and that respite let us get more time safely outside to make proper repairs and put together the living camouflage. It also let us gather some of the local wild bounty, officially for scientific analysis, actually to supplement our rations. It’s such a badly-needed treat in our routine of cloistered monotony (broken only by those moments of mortal terror) that not even the gung-ho new Upworld Cherry replacements we’ve been running through chose to protest or report the defiance of a still-standing order to abstain from eating anything made of local produce, as if it’s all infected with some unstoppable nano-plague, of which there has never been a single sign.

  We did see a few signs of recent travelers, carefully masked to disguise their numbers, but at least the footprints that we could make out did not bear the signature cleat marks of the Silvermen.

  Then we hit the “Teeth”: Almost conical mountains between one and two thousand klicks high, forming a rough frown across the narrows of the “Neck,” where the valley closed in to only thirty-odd klicks wide. The Neck brought intense winds, and low visibility. The sandblast scoured our paint and tore at our camo net, gummed our sensor ports and kept the blast shields down over the viewports. Thankfully it only lasted for a dozen klicks, but it was a slow dozen klicks, taking the better part of a day even though we didn’t linger.

  But past the Neck, Coprates started to digest us, physically and mentally.

  Thirty klicks of what Rios called “bad lands”: a maze of terraces rising thousands of klicks up, thinning the air, making it cold. Even with satellites trying to guide us from orbit, we spent four days lost, frustrated. Getting stuck, our way blocked by sharp rises or deep ravines. Backtracking. Trying to find another way. The ground almost giving out under our treads when we miscalculated its ability to take our mass. The terrain so bone-jarringly rough even at a crawl that we all felt battered, our spines and everything aching, by the end of each day’s drive.

  We wound up taking the southern route, though it made us hug the foothills of the Rim. Thankfully, we had no trouble from Silvermen, or anyone else.

  And now, today, we’re looking forward to a reasonably survivable decline. Things are already getting green again, and the view ahead is spectacular. From here, from the heights, the torso of the “Coprates Man” looks like a blanket of green almost from Rim-to-Rim and as far east as the eye can see.

  And even better: if we hold course, in ten easy klicks we’ll be entering the legendary “Vajra”, where the Terraformers told Colonel Ram that the green was thicker and taller than in the Tranquility gardens. It’s the
abdomen and right arm of the “Coprates Man” figure, and down to his pelvis. And within it lay the presumably lost colonies of Pax, Eureka, Liberty, Alchera and Iving.

  The Terraformers have told us the survivors of Pax still thrive somewhere in there, having relocated from their compromised colony at the westernmost tip of the double-ended trident. And they’ve suggested that at least one other group competes with them in that deep, lush land. Perhaps the Silvermen. Perhaps someone else yet.

  I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.

  Morning maintenance done, we take the time to gather edibles from the nearby growth (for scientific purposes, of course). Then we get back inside so Rios can give the order for Jane to start driving.

  After a few hours, we realize the terrain is no longer our primary barrier.

  There’s been no avoiding crushing some of the wild growth under tread since we passed Concordia. Now it seems to be exacting its revenge. As we roll downhill, the Graingrass gets steadily sturdier, growing more upright; and other species that had been small shrubs are now meters tall and wide, with thick primary stalks. The Old-Earth vets start using the words “tree”, “trunks”, “forest” and “jungle”. (Again: I know the terms and have seen file images to have an idea what they’re talking about, but like oceans and animals, I have no personal frame of reference—this is all just too unbelievable, fantastic. And, I have to admit, as disturbing as it is totally thrilling.) We can hear plant life crushing and snapping even inside the pressure hull, and we keep hitting density that we can’t push through, so we have to keep reversing, trying to find a way around. We’re in a green maze.

  More unsettling, we can’t see more than several meters around us at ground level. Topside cameras only show us the leafy tops of the growth that form a lumpy blanket over everything—what Rios calls a “canopy” (like we all should know what that means)—not what could be hiding in there. And looking back behind us, we’re leaving a path of smashed growth that can probably be seen from orbit.

  Heat scans show nothing above ambient, but the layered cloaks of many of the surface groups defeat the scans readily enough. And motion sensors are useless: If our own momentum didn’t shove and shake the growth all around us, the winds keep it rustling.

  Satellite eyes don’t do any better, blocked by the “canopy”. We could be surrounded by an army and not know it.

  “The forests on Earth were scary places for early peoples,” Rios tells us, as if to reassure us by validating our growing dread. “It was easy to get lost, fall prey to predators, get ambushed by enemies. Even modern armies…”

  “Whoa!!” Jane suddenly screams, jerking in his chair, and we grind to a full stop. There’s movement outside our forward viewports, right up close to the hull. Darting, flapping, jerking about randomly in the air. I see what looks like a long, narrow body that may be made of some kind of metal or carbon composite, perhaps half a meter long, propelled and held aloft by even longer wings that move so fast all I see is a blur. (On high-speed freeze-frame, I count four of them, looking like they’re made of fine wire mesh, almost transparent.). There are six short, thin, jointed legs sprouting from the thing’s underbelly. The “head” is dominated by a pair of bizarre fist-sized round faceted eyes that scan us mechanically.

  “Is that… Is that at dragonfly?” Rios stares back at the thing in wonder. I’m wondering why we aren’t shooting at it.

  “Some kind of drone?” I assume, thinking we may have just found Chang, or whoever may have succeeded him. And he’s just seen us.

  “No. It’s a bug,” Rios names, still all wonder and no panic.

  “A new bot?” I’m trying.

  “An insect,” he clarifies patiently. “A living thing. From Earth.”

  “Except they’re not that big…” Jane, at least, sounds shaken (which is saying something).

  “How big are they supposed to be?” I ask the obvious. He holds up his forefinger and thumb, the tips maybe five or six centimeters apart.

  “Wow…” Wei says, coming forward to squeeze in with us for a look. “That is a scary looking beasty…”

  “They’re harmless,” Rios insists.

  “But they are predators,” Lyra joins us, with the measured awe of a scientist. She’s scanning a flashcard. “It looks like they eat smaller insects—at least the ones on Earth did… Maybe they’d ignore us… It looks like it’s just being curious…”

  “We’re sure it’s not some kind of machine?” I try to hold the line of reason.

  “T-Wave scan shows organic,” Jane reads, sounding like he’s believing this only slightly more than I am. “No EM signature. No signals.”

  We watch, mesmerized, as the thing continues to dart and hover around us for several more seconds. Then it flies off on its nearly-invisible wings, vanishing into the green.

  “So if that thing is a predator, what is it eating?” Jane asks uncomfortably. “I mean, assuming it isn’t eating people.”

  “They usually eat mosquitoes, right?” Wei remembers.

  “And ants, flies, bees, wasps,” Lyra lists.

  “Nothing I’d want to run into if they’re on the same scale,” Wei assesses, shuddering.

  I’m trying to remember my Earth biology classes, lessons I pretty thoroughly slept through because I couldn’t imagine any useful value to memorizing endless “orders” of things that didn’t exist here. Except now, apparently, they do.

  “What is it doing here?” Jane wants to know. “And how is it that big?”

  “Pax,” Rios guesses. “They were working on adapting a number of species to the planet, trying to create a sustainable biosphere. They had livestock specimens as well.”

  “Meat?” Wei perks up. “You mean I might actually get another cheeseburger before I die?”

  I am completely confused. I remember my mother reading me the nonsense-tales of places called Wonderland and Oz. It’s like I’ve just fallen into such a world.

  “Okay, this is interesting,” Lyra finds something on her screen. “Dragonfly larva—the babies—are aquatic. They need standing water.”

  The report we send to Command—with video, scans and all—generates a buzz almost as freaked as when Colonel Ram wandered back from the dead and morphed into a much younger and pretty indestructible version of himself (and then turned Colonel Ava into one too, according to scut just by “intimate contact”, which makes me worry when I think about what he did for me, to me).

  The concern here is similar: Whatever this thing is, it’s not just some normal Earth insect let loose in a new world. It’s been engineered. And that means biological nanotech, or DNA manipulation, or both. And if this thing can breed, reproduce itself…

  We sit put for the next two hours as messages get sent back and forth to Earth, especially to the Big Brains at UNCORT, as they try to guess exactly what we’ve seen based just on a few seconds of eyes-on.

  So I get to sit through a lot of scientific arguments that are almost informative: Yes, the buggers the thing resembles are predatory. And fast—the tiny Earth versions can move up to 100KPH. But the originals do breed in water, and while some can tolerate cool climates, they don’t do well with freezing. (On Earth, dragonflies would migrate to avoid winters, or survive as eggs until it warmed up again. On Mars, they’d have to do this every night.) But some insects do tolerate freezing conditions: they either produce natural antifreeze or manage to survive regular freezing and thawing. Given that the plants all around us do fine despite the nightly freezes, the insect we saw may have similar designed adaptations. As for the size, that might be a function of the lower gravity, but that’s not really selling. And none of that answers why it’s here: Why would the Pax scientists choose to introduce a flying predator? Unless it’s been redesigned as a vegetarian, what do they need it to eat to balance their planned ecosystem?

  Pre-Bang files say Pax had no live specimens when everything blew up, but they did have embryos for a dozen species that they were trying to adapt. We get a list that
’s in tongue-twisting Latin, that Lyra translates into more nonsense (for me) names: Cows. Horses. Pigs. Sheep. Rabbits. Chickens. Sparrows. Lizards. Dragonflies. Butterflies. Bees. Beetles. I barely recognize some of their pictures from my childhood classes—beyond that, I really have no idea what they are or what they do. My best frame of reference is watching Wei’s facial expressions as Lyra looks up each thing’s “common” name: Some of these seem to stoke his appetite for meat. (Yes, I know meat comes from animal muscle, but any of it that got to Mars as radiation-preserved rations was hell-and-gone removed from whatever it got removed from.) Others get no reaction, maybe a barely-interested shrug. But a few make him wince, like he’s worried. The Bees seem to particularly unnerve him. Plus, the Pax also had DNA for several “species” of creature, which they may have been able to use to make who-knows-what.

  This all implies their possible intent: Either to create a complex self-sustaining biosphere of Mars-adapted plants and animals, or to create engineered life for specific individual purposes, perhaps just for the sake of experimenting.

  I remember my visit to the Tranquility Gardens, which supposedly provided the seeds for all of the wild growth we’ve seen throughout Coprates, spread by the winds. Their awe-inspiring facility was populated by dozens of plants specifically designed and chosen to give us things to eat or materials to use. The only reciprocity in that human/plant relationship was that the Tranquility gardeners would throw the corpses of the dead in with the human waste and other recycled organic slop they used to feed the plants, making them grow bigger, faster. Outside the domes, the green just grows opportunistically, and opportunistically fills our bellies, as if put there by some incidental act of science-as-God (a benevolent non-deity, at least when it’s not creating weapons).