“Six Years, Mars,” the speaker admits cautiously. That’s more than eleven on the Earth Standard Calendar. If time runs the same here as at home, they’ve been here since well before Chang appeared, before Earth’s return. They have no idea what’s been happening.
“Our world is at war,” my father tells them. “Your people have been called to honor the old treaties. Earth has returned—that’s why we had to leave our homes in Melas. And there is a threat from this world: beings of unimaginable power, immortals. Machines like these. Aircraft. Satellites in the sky. Cannons as powerful as meteorite strikes. The peoples of Mars need to join together against them. Many have died. We need to stop fighting each other.”
They digest that silently. They’re certainly disciplined. (And this is the first time I’ve gotten to really see their armor without them trying to kill us. Despite dirt all over them like they’ve recently been buried in it, it’s beautiful, finely crafted and engraved, fit together in overlapping layers of plate to allow mobility. Thick face masks hide their expressions, except for their eyes, which are deep-set and thickly-hooded. What little skin I can see is very pale.)
“Can you take us home?” their leader finally asks, trying his best to maintain his tone of command, but I think I hear desperation, hope.
“We came on a ship,” my father repeats. Admits, “It isn’t our own, but we can ask. You don’t belong here, so maybe the captain will take you… How did you get here?”
The leader withdraws his spear, stands it upright.
“We marched. Under cover of the dust, digging in during the calms. Our Century—eighty strong, and supports—was sent from the Southern Wall to Pax and Katar, to renew the Old Treaties of the Triumvirate. But there was a discrepancy when we reached North Blade: the radiation levels of the Hot Zone had dropped. Our Primus decided to investigate, because the Zone promised a wealth of precious metals from Skyfall. Greed. When we camped for the night—here, at the foot of the Oval Mountain—we awoke the next morning under a different sky with the water all around us. We could not cross back.”
I wonder how Jed would explain that. (And I wonder how the Jinn Elias would ridicule that explanation.)
In any case, they’ve been here—stuck here—for more than a decade (more than half my lifetime).
“We will help you if we can,” my father agrees. “We have to find our friends.”
“The ship was carrying them that way,” I try to clarify, pointing east.
“There is land across the water on clear days, but we have no way to get there,” their leader gives back. “Sometimes people come across—frail, and without weapons or armor—to launch their floating vessels from the sand on this side, out into the bigger water. They hold ceremonies, sometimes celebrations, then go. The vessels they send far sometimes return after days, riders near death, or sometimes never do.”
“You never tried to take one of the water craft?” my father asks carefully, trying not to sound accusatory.
“They are not for us. When we try, they fill with water and vanish under the surface. If the water is higher than we are tall when this happens, those who try die and are lost in it.”
They haven’t figured out it’s their metal that traps them, or maybe they can’t conceptualize taking it off. It explains their reaction when we admitted discarding our own armor to keep from drowning.
“What is it you seek here?” the leader goes back to interrogation. “A weapon?”
“We…” My father considers his words. “We’re not really seeking anything. Powerful AI—living, thinking machines—have attached themselves to a few of our friends. They demanded we come here to find others like them. There are supposedly five. We hope to stop them—the more there are together, the stronger they become. They’ve already tried to take control of the Terraforming Stations.”
I watch the leader’s eyes track elsewhere—this has made him think of something, something specific. A number of his soldiers are also showing this in their eyes, the way they shift uncomfortably behind their shields and weapons. I see several of them look back toward the mountain.
“What do these things look like?” we get asked with a new urgency, nervous.
“They can be anything, change shape. They need to attract a host, so they offer power to those in need that they think can serve them. In our world, they’ve appeared as fine swords.”
That information gets received with even more shock than anything else we’ve told them. I see definite recognition in their eyes, even—for the first time—fear. We stand frozen in the wind for several long seconds—the only sign that they haven’t re-decided to kill us is that their leader keeps his spear-weapon at rest. Finally, he signals his decision by moving aside his shield, symbolically exposing himself (though he’s not really, given all the body armor he’s wearing). This gets his warriors to raise their spears skyward, relax their bows.
“You should come with us,” he tells us urgently.
We weave through the green, following him on a frustratingly maze-like route. His men don’t all follow the same path, but move with purpose—I expect they divide to keep from leaving too-obvious trails. Looking behind, I saw a few of them using their shields like big shovels to scoop water from the Lake and douse our prints in the sand, partially erasing them.
I’m reminded of the approach to the Pax Keep: masking growth, then through a short maze of boulders, except this maze is a steep climb uphill. And what we eventually come to about fifty or sixty meters up isn’t a developed cliff fortification, only a small hole, well hidden and no bigger than an emergency shelter hatch, which means we must pass through it singly and hunched low. (I realize it’s about exactly wide enough to accommodate our hosts’ bulk.)
Inside, we pass down a short, narrow tunnel in almost total darkness, to finally emerge in a larger cave that looks like it was meticulously carved out by hand tools. It’s dimly lit by small flames, fueled by tubes of what look like some kind of solidified liquid (it melts and drips where the flame sits atop it). The warriors that passed ahead of us array themselves as if to block our further passage.
“Your machines will have to wait outs…” the leader begins to apologize, but then I hear motors and scraping of metal on rock. The big bots have managed to fold and compact themselves and crawl through a space that should be less than half their size. (A design feature?) They partially unfold in the bigger space, shaking off dirt, taking positions behind us, protective.
The rest of the armored warriors make it in. I hear boulders being moved down the tunnel, and the daylight disappears. We’re sealed in.
Our “hosts” strip off their green camouflage, their cloaks, but don’t remove their armor, except to set their shields in racks along the walls with dozens of others. (This gives me my best look yet at their metal-craft. They are completely covered with segmented armor. There are almost no vulnerable gaps—everything is perfectly fitted together.)
Then their leader gestures us down another, larger tunnel. They move in force before and behind us, keeping us surrounded.
The tunnel reaches a hub of sorts, branching three ways. The digging still looks as if it was done by hand, though very cleanly. Weak points are shored up by cut and carefully fitted rocks, as well as steel beams that look like they’re made from scrap. It’s stuffy in the tunnels, but we can breathe easily enough, and it’s warm.
We keep on deeper into the mountain, passing side chambers that smell rank and musty, and appear to be used to grow some odd kinds of leafless plants, with thick flower-like leaves or dome-shaped or conical “caps” of various colors and textures. They grow in very little light.
The other Silvermen we pass also wear armor, though most just the mail and “lighter” plate we saw on their archers, and no masks. Their faces are pale and almost swollen-looking, with a lot of ruddy blotching on the cheeks and nose from living in low pressure. They’re all short and wide, especially across the chests, but their arms are disproportionally long. They keep
their hair and beards chopped short or braided. Some have facial tattoos, or ornamental scars that might be burns.
As we go deeper still, I see more metal shoring the tunnels, and more metal-made objects in side-chambers: Tables, benches… We pass what I think is a kitchen, since I see a glowing burn like the Pax had, but they cook in metal pots and pans, not on a grate over open heat, and I smell no flesh, just savory herbs.
We also pass what I think is their armorer, their smiths working on armor repair, painstakingly crafting arrows and those rocket spearheads of theirs, testing them for true by eye in the dim light. These men especially stop at our passing, fascinated by the bots that walk on all-sixes behind us.
We come up upon an especially large cave, the far wall of which is an actual wall: smooth cast concrete, like a colony foundation or Unmaker bunker. It looks like the Silvermen may have found it by chance and have been digging to uncover it, but it seems to just go on and on. They’ve tried cutting through it in several places, only to hit a uniform layer of metal that they’ve scarred with their tools but not breached.
Finally, we stop at a massive metal hatchway that they’ve uncovered, set deep into the wall. It’s clearly Earth manufacture, sealed and reinforced like I’ve seen at the Unmaker installations, only much larger than a door designed just for personnel—it’s more like the cargo-loading portals I’ve seen at Melas Two and Tranquility.
I see signs of weld repairs to the hatch, rigging to the manual lock work. There are four fully armored and armed guards posted in this space. Their leader speaks with them quickly, quietly but urgently. Whatever he’s telling them, it makes them clearly nervous, but they obey.
They step aside from the hatch. Their leader performs what looks like a series of ritual gestures, then pounds his fist on his chest plating, over his heart, then against his helmet. Two of his men step forward and set to unlatching the hatch. It takes six of them to pull it open.
Beyond the hatch is a clear chamber and another matching hatch—an airlock. This second hatch also looks repaired and tampered with. The leader repeats his ritual, and this hatch is unsealed. On the other side is
Light. Space.
It’s a huge cavern, almost as big as the inside of the Tranquility dome. Arches of reinforced concrete and steel rise over a dozen meters to a ceiling pierced by skylights that efficiently channel daylight down here.
There are gaps—square cut holes—in the walls and columns that tell me large pieces of equipment have been removed. The place looks stripped to the basic structure.
“What was this?” my father breaks the silence to ask. “What was in here?”
“We do not know,” the leader tells us. “We found it this way, digging our shelters. All buried. We had to make new locks for the doors. There was only scrap left, which we have claimed, cycled. Until we found our way to one cavern…”
He leads us on. We take a wide corridor deeper in. Our steps (and the scuttling of the bots) echo up in the rafters. I notice a lot of dust on the sealed concrete floor, no prints disturbing it but ours. They’ve kept out of here for a long time.
We pass a few more large stripped chambers, lateral junctions stretching as far as I can see—this place is bigger than any colony site or Unmaker base I’ve seen, maybe bigger than a Jinn Station—but we keep on mostly straight until we come to another set of big hatches, these painted bright red, with warning symbols, though the icons are unfamiliar.
The outer hatch is unlocked and opened—there’s no ceremony this time, but they seem to be trying to be as quiet as possible, as if they don’t want to wake something. They also seem even more tense now—they look like men opening a door into hell. Those not working the hatch stand ready for attack.
Hatch open, we file inside the lock and wait, facing the still-sealed inner doors. The hatch behind us is carefully shut and locked, sealing us in. Inside this massive airlock, I realize I see battle damage, specifically cuts made deep into metal and concrete, and dark stains of old blood. There’s a lot of it…
We stand still and listen for a few moments. Then, apparently satisfied that we haven’t woken whatever monster they fear, they very carefully open the inner hatch. Their leader cautions our bot friends to stay here in the lock, and my father and I to tread softly and not touch anything. Then he very warily leads us into… another empty chamber.
There’s nothing to touch. Perhaps less so, this time, as it looks like massive machinery has been pulled out of floor and ceiling as well as the walls, leaving deep holes.
Our leader—I still don’t know what to call him—points across the chamber to an alcove on one side. In it is the only technology that seems to be left: a series of clear polycarbonate tubes, each half the size of a man, standing upright and set into some kind of larger device that has no visible controls, just clean black surfaces, except where a metal plate has been welded. But it does look like metal, some kind of alloy, and looks pristine. The only tampering I see is the tubes: There are five. Three are ruptured, burst from inside. A fourth looks like it’s been cut into, forced (the welded plate is fixed over the top of this one). Those tubes are empty.
The fifth tube, which looks intact, holds a sword. Except I don’t think it was a sword when we came in here. It seems to be forming, shaping itself. When it finishes, I see a fine polished blade with a swirling pattern in the steel, magnificent scrollwork on the guard and pommel. Truly beautiful.
Just like Erickson’s. And his brother’s and the Unmaker’s.
I find myself wanting it.
I shake it off, remember why we’re here, the threat…
But there’s only one. There’s supposed to be t…
“FREE ME. I WILL MAKE YOU STRONG. I WILL GIVE YOU POWER.”
There’s a voice in my head, in my mind. It sings to me, soft and sweet. Seductive, like a lover.
“Did… anyone hear that?” I ask nervously.
“I CAN MAKE YOU WHATEVER YOU WANT. WE CAN BE WHATEVER YOU WANT.”
My father nods, unsettled.
“Don’t listen,” their leader warns. “Don’t listen to it.”
“FREE ME. I AM YOURS. I AM POWER.”
I step back from the case.
“YOU THINK YOU ARE STILL ONLY A BOY, NOT YET A MAN. YOU WANT TO BE MORE. I CAN FEEL IT. YOU WANT TO BE WORTHY. I CAN MAKE YOU AN IMMORTAL. A HERO. STRONG. FAST. INVINCIBLE. WE CAN SAVE YOUR PEOPLE. WE CAN MAKE THEM STRONG, SAFE. WE CAN AVENGE YOUR PARENTS. ”
How…?
“It can get in your head,” the leader answers the question before I can ask, as if he knows. His men step between us and the sword, level their spears. “It will say things like it knows you. You must not listen to it. You must never listen.”
“OPEN THE CASE. JUST PRESS YOUR PALM ON THE PANEL. I AM YOURS. I AM EVERYTHING YOU NEED. OPEN THE CASE.”
A section of the black surface above the occupied tube lights up, shows me the shape of an open hand (in the same spot as where the plate is welded above the tampered tube).
“JUST PRESS YOUR PALM ON THE PANEL. I WILL GIVE YOU EVERYTHING YOU NEED.”
My father shakes his head like he’s trying to clear it.
“You hear it too?” I have to ask him again. He nods. He seems to steel himself, gather his will, and finally steps back.
“It promises power,” he tells me what he’s heard, what I’ve heard. “Power to protect our people. But we’ve seen what these things can do to those they take.”
“So have we,” the leader says grimly. “When we first found it, we tried to stay away. We knew it was danger. But one night our Tribune snuck in and broke open the case. It took him. It took him over. He started killing… Consuming… He killed twenty-six of us, including our Primus—he died hacking the thing off with the Tribune’s arm, but even then… We had to cut the Tribune into pieces, burn him. The thing tried to escape, melt into the floor. One of the rank Milites grabbed it, let it start taking him. We thought we would have to fight, but he ran, ran here, put the thing into t
he last intact cage. We had to cut off his arm. But the thing put a poison in him and he died when we carried him away from it.”
My father risks stepping closer to the cases, gesturing that he’s fine, that he’s being careful. The warriors still keep their spears on him. He examines the five of them, looks them over.
“Which one was the sword taken from?”
The leader indicates the forced empty case. They probably welded the steel plate over the release mechanism to try to defy temptation, so their “Tribune” just forced the case with violence, probably destroying its containment function in the process. Then he points to the case it’s in.
“This was the only cage that was intact, the only one that would still hold it.”
That there’s no plate welded over the release tells me they may have just run when they had the chance, locked themselves out of the chamber, and locked the sword in. It explains the guards.
“And it was that one empty before?”
“All the others were empty when we opened the chamber.”
My father turns and looks at me. I know what he’s thinking:
One’s missing.
Chapter 4: Haven
Jak Straker:
“This Doc Long… He’s Modded? Immortal?” Erickson’s grilling our hosts as we wait for their runner to return.
Jane nods uncomfortably. Our other hosts seem to squirm nervously. I expect they’ve been taught all their lives to fear hybrid beings. Like us. Me. Maybe Long is some kind of community secret, his existence breaking generational taboos, not something they’d easily admit to, especially with strangers. (But then, they’ve never met strangers, have they?) Or maybe admitting to Long’s presence opens the door for us to stay—something their founder grandparents expressly forbade.
In any case, at least one of them, then two, have been willing to admit to him. Out of… What? Compassion? For Bly (a scary monster in a metal suit)? Or is it fear? (They do seem to be completely defenseless against creatures like us. Me.)
The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades Page 33
