In the Hall of the Martian King

by John Barnes

  “You are too kind.”

  “You may tell the skipper of John Carter that my assistant and I may be somewhat early, but I won’t request that his departure time be stepped up. Thank you again, sir.”

  Jak clicked off and let himself smile broadly. He spoke into his purse. “Draft a short favorable memo—

  “From: me.

  “To: every officer I talked to, and to his CO.

  “Subject: commendation for efficiency and cooperation.

  “Content: summarize what I just said to the commander.

  “Style: formal.”

  He airswam toward the door. “Back to regular security level,” he told his purse, and all the windows instantly became transparent again. The door dilated in front of him, and he airswam to Pikia’s desk.

  “Ahem,” Jak said.

  All four of the human staff looked up, and at least one camera on each of the dozens of robots swiveled toward him.

  “I have an emergency mission to the Martian surface; I may be gone for a period of weeks, and I am leaving immediately. Process all routine cases, defer anything that requires my approval. If it’s urgent or an emergency, call me on my purse. I’m taking the only other line officer with me—that’s you, Pikia—so all of you should pretend that you miss us.”

  The ragged cheer was slightly disconcerting, but not as much as Pikia’s impulsive hug, which nearly tumbled him backward. “Get packed,” Jak said, disentangling himself. “Departure in two hours and forty minutes. Make sure you have enough formal wear, we’re going to have to be polite to diplomats. Cancel all your social calendar for the next two weeks.”

  She was still grinning like a moron. “Jak, boss, chief, whatever,” she said, “I didn’t have a social calendar until you said we’re leaving. I’ll be back with a bag in ten minutes.”

  “That should be Mister Jinnaka or sir—” he said, to her rapidly flipping feet, as she airswam out the door.

  CHAPTER 4

  Not the Most Useless Person on the Team

  As Pikia and Jak floated in the cageway, waiting to go aboard John Carter, she said, “Can I ask a very immature question?”

  “As long as I don’t have to give a toktru mature answer.”

  “Where will we be sitting? I like to get a good view of the cameras and viewports.”

  Jak glanced sideways at her; he could tell she was excited and trying to hide it. “Don’t worry,” he said, “so do I. We’re on spare acceleration couches in the cockpit. It’s my first flight down to Mars; I wouldn’t miss being able to see it.”

  She smiled and her eyes twinkled. “That’s what I wanted to know.” Then, as if the thought would burst her if she didn’t voice it, she explained, “I’ve been down and up a hundred times at least, probably more, and I still love it. But so many adults pull down the shade.”

  “Toktru. They don’t do it because they’re adults. They do it because they’re boring. I still love the window, too.”

  Well, she might be the boss’s bratty relative, but she had a nice smile. And the job was simple—watch Duj and Teacher Copermisr talk, say some polite things himself, collect the package, put it on the next warship bound for the Hive.

  A crewie came out, gave the Spatial salute, and asked them to follow her inside. They entered through the main doors over the boarding-side wing, where the beanies would storm out in an opposed landing.

  Aside from its war room within the worryball, John Carter was exactly like every other warshuttle in the Hive’s fleet at Deimos, purpose-built to land on Mars, with wings designed to reconfigure to cope with the drastically varying reentry stress profile, the widest range of forces for any world with an atmosphere. The accidental terraformation of Mars by the Rubahy Bombardment had produced as strange a set of conditions as could be found anywhere in the solar system: breathable atmosphere farthest up, but lowest pressure at surface; very viscous low-density air that exerted high shearing but low heat on a reentering spacecraft; a thermosphere with easy aerobraking, and a troposphere with a steep glide ratio. An orbit-to-ground shuttle for Earth could be fixed geometry (though it would heat up like a furnace while high and fly like a brick while low), but the Martian atmosphere required continuously varying the exposed surface. Warshuttles and launches entered shaped like dolphins and landed shaped like condors, morphing constantly.

  Inside the boarding airlock, John Carter was folded down to almost a bare fuselage, a long ellipsoid with small curved fins on all sides, nose bulbous, tail conical, resting on the track.

  Atmosphere-flight craft always looked wrong to Jak; he had grown up in space. Spaceships should be spheres joined by struts, with platforms, discs, or squares stuck on at any convenient angle, and the working guts out and visible. Craft made for air were weirdly seamless, squashed-and-squeezed alien phalloi, with big, awkward-looking wings stuck on like some equally alien birth-control device.

  “Welcome aboard,” Tror Adlongongu, the captain, said, and traded forearm grips with them both. He was short but not small; his heavily muscled frame suggested many years in garrison without much to do but resistance lifting, and perhaps kobold or panth genes. He was depilated like all Spatial crewies. His skin was a coppery shade of brown, and the faceplate-shaped patch of deeper tan around his face indicated frequent EVs. His habit of having a hand on something solid at all times confirmed him as a long-term crewie. “Well,” he said, “though they told me that what we’re making this flight for is none of my business, they did confirm that this is important, by telling me that if I messed things up it would be bad for the Hive, the Spatial, Deimos Base, and me personally—in rising order of badness.”

  “They weren’t exaggerating,” Jak said. “They told me much the same thing. Sorry we’re making you land in a backwater.”

  “Oh, yeah. At least Red Amber Magenta Green has a landing field,” the captain said. “Some of the Harmless Zone nations would have had to build one for us first, or we’d have landed on a beach or a lake and brought along a disassembled cradle and some engineers to be able to fly back up. But Red Amber Magenta Green has a modern all-weather runway to go with their pretensions. They have a national spaceline, you see—three suborbital transports and an old launch that might date to the Second Empire. So, not only do they have a good place for us to land, but (more important from my standpoint) they have a cradle to get us back up. Plus they’re thrilled to have a real warcraft landing there.”

  “It’s such a beautiful ship,” Pikia said, lying. “All smooth silvery curves. What does its name mean?”

  With chilly correctness, Adlongongu said, “I am happy to have the opportunity to tell you both what is true and what is not. The ship is actually named after the warrior hero of a Late Medieval English epic set on Mars, which was immensely popular for about two generations in Old America. But some nitwit of a crewie, knowing only that the ship was named in Late Medieval English, looked up the parts of the name and concluded that it meant ‘transporter of prostitutes’ customers.’ Despite all of my efforts to correct this unfounded legend—which I think is prejudicial to good discipline—”

  The acceleration bell rang, and everyone airswam to a safety couch. With a subtle push, the linducers activated. The ship glided along at a meter or two per second. Jak tilted his acceleration couch up for a better view; there was a subtle shimmer outside the window as air was recovered from the lock, and then the great metal doors in front of them dilated, opening to a view of the black night of space dotted with bright stars.

  Jak didn’t have time to spot any familiar constellation before John Carter rotated end for end horizontally, so that now it was moving backward on the linducer track; the nose viewports filled with the red-blue-green-white whorl of Mars.

  Jak’s purse tingled his left hand for a private message. He pressed to acknowledge, then looked down at his palm; letters scrolled across.

  DO YOU SUPPOSE THAT THE COMMON USE FOR SPACE AVAILABLE SLOTS ON THIS WARSHUTTLE HAS ANYTHING TO DO WITH THE PERSISTENCE OF A C
ERTAIN LEGEND PREJUDICIAL TO GOOD DISCIPLINE?— PIKIA

  Jak rested the fingers of his right hand in his left palm and, double-keying, sent a quick response:

  NAUGHTY. SHUT UP BEFORE YOU MAKE ME LAUGH. — JAK

  A slight increase in gravity made Jak look to the side; a screen showed the linducer grapple grabbing the Deimos loop. As the linducer gradually increased the strength of the magnetic field, their coupling to the loop increased, and they accelerated. For this part of the flight, they would not go above a quarter of a g, and the couches were really needed only as protection from safety inspectors and insurance agents.

  Tourist brochures said modern Deimos looked like a diamond ring. Jak thought it looked more like a hula hoop glued to a smoldering lump of coal. The main recreational/shopping area was in a roofed-over dome at the West Pole; from space, the many lights under the dome, and their reflections, littered brightly in the darkness. At the East Pole, the loop was sixty-five kilometers across, several times the largest dimension of Deimos itself, but barely visible because it was formed by a ribbon of superconductor five centimeters wide and three millimeters thick.

  Deimos orbits Mars at about 1350 m/sec; riding around to the retrograde side of the loop in a very light coupling, they could have killed their orbital velocity and simply dropped. This would have resulted in their arrival on the surface at a speed of about five kilometers per second and a temperature of around two thousand kelvins, in an excellent impression of a meteor impact. (In fact the impression might have been as large as 250 meters in diameter.)

  Therefore they stayed on the loop until they were on the side moving against Deimos’s orbital direction, but they coupled lightly, so as not to completely kill their forward velocity relative to Mars. As they released from the loop, they were pointed in the direction of Deimos’s orbit, but moving much slower than Deimos’s orbital velocity; they rolled over, and the great bulk of Deimos, a vast flying mountain, shot forward in the upper viewports, gone on ahead of them in the blink of an eye. The warshuttle’s cold jets fired in a whoosh of white noise, as they course-corrected for their approach.

  “I hate taking off backward,” Captain Adlongongu commented. “Just seems undignified. A spaceship ought to take off on its tail, self-propelled, like in vid and viv.”

  For most of the four hours of free fall as they approached the Martian atmosphere, Jak and Pikia did little but float weightless and take in the view. All of the lower planets of the solar system had been drastically altered by the Bombardment a thousand years before, but none more than Mars. The softening-up rain of light-speed projectiles that had begun the First Rubahy War had pockmarked Earth with lakes and started a new ice age, battered the Venerean surface into gravel with sonic damage, and honeycombed Mercury with fracture tubes, but it had accidentally done what no Old Martian Emperor could ever have mustered the political will and the budget to do—it had terraformed the fourth planet.

  Effectively, the Bombardment had restarted a case of arrested development. Because Mars had been too small to develop plate tectonics to recirculate volatiles, eventually, after a billion years or so of being a wet world with abundant life, Mars had lost its water and CO2 into the pores and cavities of its thick crust. As its internal heat had retreated toward the core, the kilometers-deep beds of groundwater had frozen solid, leaving the planet with a slush-mud “permafrost ocean” underlying a thin smear of almost-vacuum desert.

  For fifty years before the Rubahy invasion ships arrived from Sigma Draconis, the Bombardment, a spray of tennis-ball-sized chunks of quartz moving so close to lightspeed that only precision instruments detected the difference, had whacked each of the four lower planets with fifty impacts per day. On little, dense, heavily cratered, airless Mercury, the effect had been like rifle shots fired into a ball of soft clay, leaving a tube of shattered and melted rock right through the planet, a deep round pit at the entry point, and a shallower pit at the exit, with thousands of rocks raining back for the next few hours. This had meant little, except the occasional accidental losses of unlucky miners, habitats, or pieces of machinery. On Venus the thick atmosphere had absorbed much of the energy into immense shock waves that traveled around the planet several times, battering the surface to gravel, and heaping the gravel into dunes and ridges; in the millennium since, the howling, lead-melting-hot winds had reshaped the dust and gravel surface into one vast dune field.

  Earth’s atmosphere had absorbed most but not all of the force of each projectile. Ocean impacts had put enormous quantities of water into the atmosphere, darkening the skies, spreading blankets of snow on the adjoining land, and filling northern rivers with freshwater that had stopped the flow of the great warm currents in the oceans. The impacts on land had left kilometer-wide circular pocks, averaging a few kilometers apart, all over the northern hemisphere north of twenty-one degrees north, their frequency falling off until, below twenty-one degrees south, the body of the planet had shielded it. Earth was now the planet of pocks and glaciers, a pretty place if you could avoid knowing that it was also the grave of seven billion people and about three million species.

  But Mars had become another world entirely.

  The frozen ancient oceans, with much of the atmosphere dissolved in them, underlay most of her northern hemisphere. The thin atmosphere provided little shielding. Every impact had broken through the thin, weak soil and rock of the surface and plunged deep into the honeycombed ice, giving up its kinetic energy as heat, leaving an open channel to the surface for the great blasts of steam, methane, carbon dioxide, and ammonia, the greenhouse gases needed to warm the planet back to life.

  The Bombardment had not been easy on the Martians themselves; the planet had started with two billion people and finished with three hundred million, fifty Earth years later. But during those twenty-seven Mars years, as the Old Empire collapsed, as all the nations of the solar system seceded from the Empire and convulsed in war and revolution, as the League of Polities seized control of the Imperial Fleet and Army and prepared to meet the oncoming invasion, and as refugees poured back and forth over the face of Mars in bewildered, helpless, and ever-dwindling hordes, day after day, year after year, the ancient volatiles had poured out onto the surface again.

  At first the projectiles had arrived with almost no atmosphere to penetrate, giving up all their energy in the permafrost layer. The water and carbon dioxide fell out as snow, forming glaciers over the old collapsed surface. But under the thickening blanket of greenhouse gas, the surface of Mars grew warmer, and the pressure climbed. Algaes and lichens, all the microbiota of Earth whose spores had carelessly strewn the planet for centuries before, bloomed on the rocks; other living material leaked out of abandoned habitats and wrecked cities.

  Photosynthesis liberated oxygen; chemical reactions and the explosions of the quartz projectiles broke down ammonia to liberate nitrogen, and burned the methane and oxygen together. Near the surface, water deposits began to melt and flow; dirt and rock collapsed to the bottom of the new sinkholes.

  Due to Mars’s great scale height, each year the projectiles reached the surface with less force, but still they raised dust and grit into the atmosphere, dirtying the ice, preventing the albedo from rising too high. A wet, warm world began to come back together on top of the sunken ruins of the old.

  In the tenth Martian year of the Bombardment, water stood in small lakes on the hitherto dry bottom of the Boreal Ocean; in the twentieth Martian year, the Boreal Ocean did not freeze over, and the first hurricanes blew. Just after the Bombardment, when Ralph Smith, and the last remnants of the Grand Army of the League of Polities, battered the desperate Rubahy into submission on Titan, the backup plan relied, in part, on submarines beneath the Martian seas. And when Ralph Smith’s grandson accepted the imperium of the Second Empire, at Chrysepolis, the Imperial Sea Guard swore its loyalty to him on the docks there.

  Earth has a worldwide ocean interrupted by a scattering of continents; Mars, a worldwide continent surrounding a small oc
ean, with only two inland seas to help moderate the climate. Large parts of the planet broil and freeze, far from any moderating water, the thinner atmosphere responds with much greater violence to the differences, the Coriolis force per kilometer of north-south difference is about twice what it is on Earth, and the high-viscosity atmosphere delivers more of its force to any exposed surface. Martian hurricados—savage spiral thunderstorms, fifty kilometers across— rip across the Martian desert, their sticky almost-Mach-1 winds flinging gravel and mud. Waterspouts deposit whole lakes onto surrounding land. Double-length seasons bake grass dry for prairie fires in summer, and bury the black land deep with blizzards in the winter.

  Jak and Pikia could see all these things from the viewport of the warshuttle: violent tight swirls of hurricados, bouncing and weaving ice clouds above waterspouts, streaks of black smoke from grass fires, big white feathers of blizzards.

  Jak’s purse tingled again; he glanced down, mentally preparing to tell Pikia to cut it out, but it wasn’t from her. He slipped on his goggles and earpieces.

  Hel Faczel looked sour. “Hive Intel has won two concessions. The first is that two stringers for Hive Intel, Sibroillo Jinnaka and Gweshira Byeloaibari, are accredited to join your party when you land. Reeb Waxajovna assured me that you would be less than pleased. I hope you can come up with something clever to keep them sidetracked and harmless.”

  That’s a forlorn hope, Jak thought. Oh, well, I tried to keep Sib out of things.

  “They will shortly be joined by a regular Hive Intel agent. He’s low-level probationary, in his third year of probation—I am trusting you to dak the implications—”

  Most Hive bureaucracies either took new officers off probation, or fired them, within ninety days. Jak’s own probation had been thirty days, and Dujuv’s less than two weeks.