11 September, 2115:
It takes Thomasen’s engineering crew two days to dig down to the most accessible airlock, using the ASVs to shuttle equipment and manpower.
Melas Three is misnamed: it isn’t actually in Melas Chasma. It sits just inside of the Coprates Valley, where it joins the broader Melas. The site was specifically picked to offer ready air defense for Disc attacks that had been consistently coming out of Coprates and the parallel Catena: Melas Two and Melas Three effectively coordinated to cover all entry into Melas Chasma from the east.
Melas Three sits on the valley floor at the base of the foothill slopes of the Coprates South Rim (actually the Catena South Rim at this point, as the two have merged). The Rim towers up over fifteen thousand feet to the Datum-line Thaumasia Planum, the upper mile of that rise comprised of cliffs that keep going east into the Catena, almost unbroken for another two-hundred miles.
There is an ETE Station only two-dozen miles away from the base site (but two miles above it), planted just inside of Melas Chasma, around the west side of the “point” where the two valley rims join. Paul shows us a tapsite on the valley floor barely twenty miles from the base. This provides our salvage teams with oxygen, water and fuel. Though it’s within rover range, or even a brisk low-grav walk with extra canisters, we use the ASVs to make the runs, vigilant for any potential encounters with Nomads not of Abbas’ tribe (or other factions we haven’t met yet).
Having a tapsite so close to the base is a practical blessing, but it also portends that there may be potential “competitors” in the area. The base site is on the opposite side of Melas from the PK colonies and Zodanga, and two hundred miles from Shinkyo, but well within what Abbas says is Farouk’s current territory. And Melas Three is within seventy-five miles of the Tranquility site, which Abbas and Paul both cryptically warned us about.
GPR mapping told us most of the facility is still intact, a testament to its design and construction. Almost all of the structure was sub-surface and heavily reinforced. It’s only a fraction of the size of Melas Two, being designed primarily as a forward airbase. The main structure is a cross-shape of five underground aircraft bays, complete with elevator launch and landing pads, along with the shops, barracks, processors and stores to support its operations. What surface batteries it had to protect it have likely been sheered away, and the integrity of the squat two-story Operations “Tower” (the only significant structure that had been above the surface) is a concern.
It takes Thomasen and Anton the better part of another day to get the doors open. Whoever was last to leave wanted to make sure no one else got in after: once we cut our way in to take our first look, Anton reports that all the relays to the reactors had been blown with hand-set charges, killing all power and rendering the coded hatch locks unresponsive. Then they used portable arc-welders to fuse the manual locks to all the external hatchways—all but one from the inside—so that no one could get in without cutting away the two-foot-thick blast-grade outer doors, assuming they could even be reached under a slide-mass that’s over twenty feet deep in places. The hatch that wasn’t sealed from the inside—the one they must have used as an exit—was welded shut from the outside, and then had several tons of stone piled over it. Whoever left the base this way must also have had no intention of returning.
The damage done means that every airlock hatch—once cut open—will need major retooling before the base has any atmosphere integrity in the adjacent sections. In the interim, temporary shelters have been modified and sealed to each open external hatch to serve as fragile replacements. (The most uncomfortable drawback is the lack of security that the heavy hatches would provide, especially in territory that may be hostile.)
The main bunker structure checked out as mostly intact; some minimal breakage and a few cracks, but it looks like it will hold pressure once the atmosphere recyclers can be restarted.
The Tower did show structural damage severe enough to cause depressurization, likely from the near-miss blast wave or when the subsequent slide rolled over it. Someone did a rough job of patching all the ruptures—the work is old, but it tells us that there were survivors, and that they tried to keep the base viable after the bombardment, tried to restore their operations center.
But we found much more calculated sabotage when Anton got his crew in to examine the Command Deck in the Operations Tower. The base AI—MAI’s counterpart—has been surgically gutted: the processor core and all of the file hardware have been removed, and are nowhere to be found. That means no records, no logs, and also (the likely reason for the act) no intel that could be taken by enemies who might break in. The fact that the gutting also leaves no useful intel for any Earthside rescue makes me wonder if it was simply unavoidable or purposeful; that they didn’t want anyone to know who’d survived, what they’d been up to, and—perhaps most critically—where they had gone.
The only thing resembling any kind of message for potential rescuers was as meaningless as it was chilling, and Anton was the first to see it after they pried open the Command Deck hatches. Someone had carved eight neat square letters, each a foot tall, deep into the concrete above the “forward” set of pillbox-slit viewports:
“CROATOAN”
“Okay, so what is this supposed to mean?” Rios asks first, his helmet light playing over the letters while we watch his feed back at Melas Two Ops.
“Somebody took some time on it,” Anton observes, appraising the neatness of the carving.
I feel a chill go straight down through me. Matthew gives me a look like he either recognizes the reference too, or maybe I’ve just scared him by how pale I’ve gone.
“What is it?” Lisa asks, her concern edged with that look that says she thinks I’m keeping something from her again, but MAI manages to dig a brief snippet from what’s left of its historical files.
“Late fifteen, early sixteen hundreds,” I tell her before she can read it. “The English tried three times to establish a colony on Roanoke Island, Virginia. First try, the colonists begged to come home after a few months. So they left some soldiers behind in a picket fort they’d built, but when the ship got back the next year, the locals had killed them all. This time, they leave over a hundred men, women and children when the ship goes back for supplies. But when the ship gets back to England, it gets waylaid in the latest conflict with Spain, and doesn’t make it back for three years.
“When they do get back, the colony is deserted. No sign of attack, just empty. And carved into a post is that nonsense word: ‘Croatoan’.”
“One of the great spooky stories of American history,” Matthew remembers.
“So what happened?” Lisa asks. “What did it mean?”
“The colony leader—who left his own wife and kids in the colony when he took the boat back for supplies—apparently told his people to leave a message if things got bad and they had to bug out,” I continue. “One plan was to fall back to Croatan Island, but there was no sign they made it there. There was also a tribe called the Croatan, but no evidence they’d had any contact.”
“Years later, Chief Powhattan—Pocahontas’ dad—bragged to John Smith he’d killed the colonists himself, but there was no way to back up his claim except a few random trinkets,” Matthew adds. “But decades after, there was this one small tribe that seemed to have an unusual grasp of the English language and a predisposition for Caucasian features.”
Lisa is looking at both of us like we’ve turned some unnatural color.
“I went to Roanoke one summer as a kid,” Matthew excuses. “The story is a tourist draw.”
“And I just like weird shit like that,” I remind her.
“So is this a code?” Rios asks over the Link.
“Not in any of our records,” Lisa confirms.
“Did we have a fall-back plan if we lost the base?” Rios throws out the next possibility.
“They were supposed to come here,” Matthew tells him. “Or the nearest viable colony.”
“But what ab
out worst-case?” Anton tries. “What if all ground facilities were lost?”
“Then they would have tried to call home,” I remind him. “If there wasn’t a more viable site, they would have dug in and made do.”
“So they either found better real estate or had to leave,” Rios concludes. “Doesn’t explain the cryptic bullshit.”
“Somebody knew the story,” Lisa considers. “And was driven enough to do some cutting.”
“Might have just been going stir-crazy,” Matthew tries to lighten. “Left a bad joke for whoever came looking.”
“Spooky,” Anton mutters. I see him tracing the cut letters with his gloved fingertips.
“Or maybe the message isn’t for us,” Rios offers. “Maybe they made plans with someone else, sometime after the bombing.”
“Another surviving faction?” Anton plays, but the thought can go no further.
Anton managed to get the power back on within another twenty-four hours. That got us lights and heat. The recyclers were left intact, and after a good overhaul were back online at partial efficiency by the end of the day, enough to support Rios’ platoon and our teams of tech and construction engineers.
While Anton kept busy bringing Melas Three back to partial life, Rios’ troopers (at least the squads not on sentry duty) started taking inventory. There wasn’t much left behind of ready use. Whoever survived here took (or used up) all the food stocks and small arms, as well as the survival gear, emergency shelters, and the more portable tools. They left behind what they couldn’t carry and probably considered unusable: Two damaged ASVs, and one mostly-stripped AAV, as well as two of the tank-like mobile gun platforms we’d fielded against the Discs (one with wrecked suspension and another with a shredded transmission). Morales eagerly moved in with one of her mechanic teams as soon as we could get a flight out the next morning.
I made the one-hundred-and-twelve mile trip out on Day Five, prompted by a call from Anton that he had something he wanted to talk over with me in person. The base site was still mostly buried when the ASV took me over it in a slow circle, the aircraft pads and bays inaccessible under the rock and sand. Only Thomasen’s excavation team camp, his digging equipment, and a wide trench dug down to Airlock One (on the “post” of the cross, closest to Ops) were visible on the surface. Anybody watching us from a distance would probably be wondering what the hell we were doing, digging a hole so earnestly in the middle of nowhere. And I’m sure such odd behavior will likely generate “aggressive” curiosity soon enough.
I’d been to Melas Three a handful of times before the Bombardment. It was a Spartan facility even in its heyday. Its biggest tragedy was its lack of a proper medical facility. The bays and corridors became makeshift field hospitals after every engagement, the wounded waiting hours until the skies were safe enough to evac them to Melas Two or to the Orbital Station. Officers’ quarters sometimes became operating rooms if the delay was unacceptable. I expect to see the dark traces of old blood stains on the cast concrete walls and steel decks, but everything is a dusty gray. The place is stripped bare as if being prepared for decommission and salvage, but the staleness and dust (worse than Melas Two when we woke up) makes it feel like I’ve descended into an ancient archeological dig.
Up in the Tower, Anton has the guts of the Command Deck consoles pulled out and spread all over in his version of ordered chaos. The cryptic inscription—freshly dusted—presides silently over his work. Rick is with him, having arrived the evening before, and he shoots me that look that tells me (again) he can’t understand how anyone can work so maniacally and sloppily and still get delicate tech working. Anton takes a moment to extract himself from the com-station he’s been digging into, wipes his dirty brow with the back of his hand (only managing to re-arrange the grime), and grins at me like he’s found some treasure.
“The uplink outside is scrap, of course,” he begins, sounding like he’s getting punchy from exhaustion. “But they left the transmitter gear—probably didn’t think anyone would ever use it. It’s no good here, not with the static shield overhead, but that doesn’t mean we have to use it here. I think I can pull it out whole, fly it back home, make a new dish array out of my old ‘Tower’ with Simon’s help, and get a portable transmitter cobbled together, maybe in a week.”
“Portable?” I ask him.
“I’ve been thinking about this, Colonel…” He’s almost breathless. “This gear won’t pierce the ETE static shield any better than the gear I burned trying it before. But now that Paul’s helping get us back our wings and Simon can help make us a new antenna, we could use the ASVs to shuttle the equipment out beyond the range of the net—going up into Candor would be the closest option. The atmosphere would be thin and it’d be damn cold, but it still beats Datum-level conditions. We would need to work in pressure gear, set up an outpost with shelters. Work on the surface to assemble the dish, then use one of the ASV power plants to juice it. It would require keeping an ASV on the ground to act as our working outpost, at least until we could build something more permanent, but Morales says at least two of the three ships left here look no worse off than the ones we started with. If we set up a relay system—we could use other ASVs or even troop Link gear—we might be able to patch back to base. It would be snowy and there’d be delay as the signal crawls back and forth between the two planets, but you could make a call out by next alignment, clear enough to get a verbal report through, maybe even a compressed data stream, convince Earthside to send relief.”
Rick shrugs in semi-agreement, but doesn’t appear to be nearly as optimistic.
“January?” I estimate the next time the two planets will be coming close.
“Or sooner,” Anton tries to encourage.
I don’t answer him for a few moments. I’m suddenly struck by an irrational impulse to tell him no, to delay him, to give him some excuse to shoot down his plan, to put off contacting home. But I also know it will be another two years before the two planets’ orbits bring them close on the same side of the sun if we don’t take this opportunity. I feel nauseous, cold.
Do I really not want to call home?
“I know you’re worried about leaving a team and probably at least two ASVs planted hell-and-gone for the time it will take,” Rick allows me, knowing me long enough to catch my ambivalence (though misunderstanding it).
“Candor isn’t close to a Station or a feed line,” Anton admits, pulling up a topographic map on his workpad. “And the geography sucks. It’s all slide-plain. And we’d be sitting out in the open if anyone did try to attack us. The other choice would be flying west into Ius, but that’s a longer stretch.”
“I’m less concerned with the distance than who’s likely to be sitting between us and the transmitter,” Rick argues. “If we take the Candor option, we pass right by all three of the so-called PK Keeps, as well as where Zodanga supposedly raids from. The Ius route takes us past both Industry and Shinkyo and who knows what else. Most of it is Nomad territory, but your friend Abbas is only king of the closest wedge of that.”
Rick is making my excuses for me. It would be easy to agree with him, delay this attempt. I’m wondering what Matthew or Lisa would say; if they would share Anton’s hope or Rick’s concerns or both. But what I’m feeling is neither hope nor practical concern for the safety of my people.
“Colonel?” Anton tries to bring me out of my brooding.
I realize what I feel: I am afraid of the same thing the survivor factions are. I’m afraid of what will happen when Earth hears about what’s really been transpiring here these last fifty years. And I’m the one who has to make the call that may result in genocide instead of rescue.
“Get on it, Anton,” I tell him instead, making myself smile. “You’ll get whatever you need.”
I get out of there as fast as I can without looking like I’m running. Back onto the surface. Back under the dusty sky. Hide my face under a mask and goggles and cap shroud so no one can see me doubting.
“This is
a great place for old farts like us,” I remember what Matthew had said shortly after we’d first arrived on this world. “Low grav is easy on the joints. Air’s clean even if it ain’t fresh. So’s the water. No crowds. Lots of space. Lots of young, lean bodies bounding around all over, all annoyingly bright-eyed and charged-up with hope for a better world. A few nut-jobs, of course, but I’d rather have these Eco hippies protesting than the endless sea of kill-babies-for-God extremists we kept slapping down back home—at least these boneheads up here don’t want to kill everybody rather than give an inch. Place is fucking heaven, Mikey.”
(And then we killed everybody—or almost everybody, and abandoned the rest. We might not have pulled the trigger ourselves, but we pointed the weapon.)
I try to convince myself that this is normal, expected: I jumped straight into doing my job, my duty. I paid lip-service to what everybody else was feeling—fear of never seeing home, fear of what was out there in a newly-unknown world, fear of how we would survive, fear of how Earth might treat us if and when we managed to call for help, fear of what Earth had become in the last half-century that passed for us as one long night’s sleep, fear we’d lost control of this world and would never have a place in it again.
Fear we had become—and now always would be—the villains.
I didn’t let myself feel anything. But now I have to. There’s no more putting it off.
I want more time. I need more time to make things right, to pull this world together enough that Earth won’t be terrified of it.
I walk. I walk out beyond the salvage work, set my boots to the task of climbing a low ridge, sending loose gravel pouring down-slope behind me like liquid. And I get up where I can see better: I look east down the Everest-walled parallel canyons of Coprates and the Catena that disappear unending over the horizon, side-by-side gateways to what those I’ve met so far assure me is even more untenable than what we’ve encountered in Melas. I am reminded of an old story—a puzzle—about a pair of doors: one leads to treasure, the other to certain death. But here, each path leads to both.
It’s greener that way—Abbas and Paul (and the outdated mapping we got from the Lancer) promise. But it’s also more deadly. And that frustrates me: If there’s more food and resources, it would reason that there should be less violent competition. Even Abbas (apparently my most candid ally) can give me little intelligence to explain why—the food-runners who make the journey are notorious for telling only tall tales and keeping the details of where they go a well-guarded secret to preserve their monopoly on the trade. It would be easy to write off the stories as a smoke-screen to discourage competition, but Abbas insists that the food caravans return with wounded and with men missing who are never seen again. And then I get vague tales about the descendents of Pax and the survivors of Tranquility and others the ETE insist they don’t even know. All brutal, primitive, xenophobic. (But enduring.)
I turn west: look back across the open basin of Melas, almost three hundred miles across, and home to an inestimable number of human beings, all living in fear of each other, but living in greater fear of the planet they came from (and very likely with good reason).
And where did our own people go? They survived the bombardment in these bunkers, made repairs and lived here for months, perhaps years, then took significant resources with them when they left. To go where? (CROATOAN?) To assimilate into some other tribe? Or to some prepared fall-back position? I scan the foothills and cliffs like I expect to see them, or some convenient sign of them, but our ASVs have searched…
My eyes are getting lost in the endless desert-scape when I see her—and I can tell she’s female, despite the bulk of her camouflaged cloaks rippling around her in the wind, just from the way she stands—just standing still, perfectly still, watching me, balanced on a fragile ridge-crest not a hundred yards away. She wears the cloaks and mask of a Nomad, but lacks the bulk of equipment they carry with them. Instead, her lean body shimmers with polished blood-red armor, making her look almost reptilian. In her right hand is some kind of large black-bladed knife. I remember what Jon Drake said about the “desert-demon” that serves Farouk.
We stand there like that, neither moving, for several moments. Then I use the greeting, the signal that I come in peace that Abbas taught me: I draw my pistol slowly, hold it by the slide and raise it over my head. Then I set it down on a rock at my feet, and hold my open hand high.
She doesn’t move, doesn’t acknowledge the gesture. Then all of a sudden she makes a little leap and vanishes from sight, leaving only a ghost-like wisp of dust.
I stay where I am for another fifteen minutes, until my air is getting low, but there is no further sign of life. I go back to the salvage camp to recharge, and tell Rios we’ve apparently drawn attention.
The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN Page 25
