“That’s great engineering. Someone really thought this one through.”
“Typical military work,” said Maung. He turned to Than. “Next time we come down, fully inspect that pour job to make sure it’s still good. And keep doing it every day until we trust it.”
Than holstered his pistol. “Sure. Give the Myanmarese the crap jobs.”
When they reached the top, they cycled through the airlock and Maung yanked his helmet off, closing his eyes and letting cool air from a vent blow on his face. His wetware spun up. A moment later it sent him a list of probable scenarios they might face, one of which was that the gophers would eventually deactivate life support.
“We have to go back out there,” he said. “Now that we know where to look we can move faster and get there earlier.”
“Why?” Nam asked.
“Because I want to go down. I want to see what’s at the bottom of that volcanic hole and see if there’s anything explaining this place. We can’t figure this out via computer, Nam. I tried and there are too many air gaps.”
“When do we go?”
Maung thought for a second. “Tomorrow. We should do it tomorrow.”
“I’m not going down into that damn hole, Pa,” said Than. “You can go by yourself. I want off this freaking rock.”
“I’m not asking you to. I’ll go with plenty of flares to keep them at bay.”
“No,” said Nang. “Not tomorrow.”
“Why?” asked Maung.
“Because I just got a copy of our schedule, courtesy of the colonel; check the rest of your messages. Tomorrow we have to crawl ten klicks of underground UV conduit networks to change light bulbs.”
Maung wanted to protest; Nang must have seen something on his face because before he could say anything she held her hands up. “No. We have to follow orders or they’ll get suspicious.”
“I thought you wanted us caught,” Nam said.
Nang spun and headed to her room, slamming the door behind her and then shouting through it. “Screw you. All of you!”
“Maung,” Nam said, rubbing his head. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but this is getting too confusing; will you please either get over the fact that she’s a spy, or kill her? Than and I would like some peace and quiet.”
The next day it took an hour to find the access bunker—a one-meter-square chunk of concrete with a single steel hatch—even with instructions from the colonel; red dirt covered it with an almost perfect camouflage. Maung clipped into a harness. Than and Nam handed him his equipment, which he lowered off a line attached to his belt until it dangled in the darkness of the access shaft. Nobody said anything. A hint of fear nibbled at the edges of Maung’s consciousness and he allowed his wetware to kick in, prodding his glands to produce a cocktail of hormones in an effort to prevent fear from growing into full-blown terror. He gave Nang the thumbs up. She pressed a button in a small access box, and a motor embedded in a triangular frame hummed, lowering Maung into the hole.
“I feel like bait,” he said.
“You have plenty of flares,” said Nang. “Use them if you need to. We also have a separate line so if you need more flares or ammo we can attach them and lower it down.”
Maung grunted, watching his slow progress on the suit’s heads up, a tiny green dot moving downward. The tunnels mapped out on his faceplate in blue lines that extended in two directions—a grid that resembled a massive fly swatter with millions of tiny squares, and where the lines represented UV shafts like the one into which he descended.
“Whoever designed this system was an ass,” he said.
“The good news is that you don’t have to go down all the way. Just to a main junction where the controls for robotic maintenance are located.”
“Why does he have to go down here at all?” Than asked. “Why can’t they do this from a central control room?”
Maung felt cut off, unable to see anything except solid black rock. But he was glad for the conversation; hearing their voices made him feel better and gave him something to distract his thoughts from the realization that he was in their territory now—underground, where those things lived.
“It must have something to do with security,” he said. “I think these things are so smart and lethal they want humans in the loop—no matter how dangerous it is—to keep a constant watch. Guys in control rooms get lazy.” A moment later, a faint glow appeared on the rock near his face. “I must be close to the control panel; start slowing me down.”
“Are you monitoring UV on your heads-up?” Nam asked.
Maung’s neck hair stood up, chilled by the tone of Nam’s voice. “No. Why?”
“The wall-mounted UV strips were active on your way down. They just went out.”
Maung flicked his faceplate controls, activating UV, and his heart pounded; everything was dark. He reached for a flare. They were attached to his belt and in the tight space were hard to reach, so he fumbled, cursing quietly inside his helmet. Finally he ripped a flare off. At the same moment he ignited it, something seized his foot and ripped at him, pulling him taught against the safety line until Maung slid the flare down as far as he could. He couldn’t see whatever it was that had grabbed him. There wasn’t enough room in the vertical tunnel for him to lean over and look down, but the flare must have done the job because he heard the sound of wailing, faint in the thin atmosphere, and the thing let go of his foot.
“What’s wrong, Pa?” Nam asked.
“Nothing. Those things are down here and tried getting me but I’ve got a flare lit.” Maung paused to attach the flare to a thin line, which he then looped from his belt, carefully letting it down between his stomach and the rock so that once he’d finished it hung underneath him, preventing anything from approaching from below. “I’m at the control panel now, Nam. Stop and hold me here.”
“You need to get out of there,” Nang said.
“I can’t. If I do, they’ll just send us back down here again. Someone has to do this; we may as well get it over with.”
“Then hurry,” said Than.
“Can you link up directly and do it that way?” Nam asked.
“I’d just as soon not, not with those things running around below me. Quiet and let me concentrate.”
Maung tapped at the console, which ran off a secondary power line, and finally succeeded in activating it; he went down the checklist on his heads-up. Once it was ready and its main power restored, Maung slammed his fist against the rock at all the caution messages, a kaleidoscope of blinking icons that he had to attend to one at a time before doing anything else. The creatures must have somehow gotten into the primary power conduits, he figured, and Maung brought up a schematic to see where the worst damage was. It took him a minute to trace the lines. But when he did he nearly shouted with the shock of having discovered something and he was about to tell the others over the open radio before reminding himself of the danger. It only took a few minutes to get the robotic repair menu up, and a few more to fill it with repair job instructions, starting with the power conduits.
When he finished he said a silent prayer of thanks. “OK, it’s done. Pull me up; we can come back and check the bots’ progress tomorrow. I found something else, though.”
“What?” Nang asked.
“I’ll tell you at the outpost.”
“They have a lab and manufacturing complex where they breed these things. It isn’t far from here—maybe a day and a half on foot. The maintenance database had a full schematic of power conduits and where they traced.”
“So what?” Nang asked. “We can’t spend the night out there, Maung.”
“We don’t have to. When the gophers went after the main power line, it triggered an emergency access protocol for repairs; I got to see more than I would have under normal circumstances. Access conduits run from a fusion cluster at the production site and out to all the UV access shafts on the perimeter. Like spokes in a wheel. All we have to do is access one of these conduits and we can crawl to the wh
eel’s center in relative safety.”
“Over twenty klicks. Crawling on our hands and knees?”
Than pointed at Maung and wagged his finger. “And what will we find there, Pa? Why do we have to keep risking our lives for this?”
Maung looked at Nam, who looked away; Than wouldn’t look at him either. “What?” he asked. “What’s going on?”
Nam’s voice was almost a whisper. “We’re done with this, Pa. We appreciate all you did for us at Karin, but this is too much. We don’t want to die on this planet and we’re thinking of telling the colonel that we don’t belong here; it’s time to go home, to Earth, or to prison; I don’t care anymore. Those things out there aren’t right. Everyone has a point where they can’t go on, and Than and I just reached ours; we’ve been talking about this ever since we left Karin.”
“But what about the war?”
“What about it?” Than asked. “We’re in just as much danger here as on Earth, Maung. More. And every time you want to go mess around with those underground things I’m not sure if we’re coming back.”
For a while, nobody spoke. Maung watched Than play with a zipper on his environment suit and he heard the faint chittering of the creatures outside, glad for the moment that Mars’ atmosphere carried sound differently; on Earth, the noise would be unbearable. Still, a deep booming came from the tower base where the gophers pounded on the elevator door all night, trying to break through.
“They had it planned,” he said.
Than shrugged. “Who had what planned?”
“The gophers. They’re smart. They learned that technicians come to the control ports and they cut the UV power lines at the same time I went underground. So they had it timed and planned how to execute. They just weren’t fast enough.”
“That’s not going to change our mind,” Nam said. “In fact, just the opposite.”
Maung shook his head. “You’re not getting it. Why? All this time I’ve thought maybe the Americans weren’t as bad as the Chinese. I used to spend all the time I had awake in Charleston trying to figure out how to get my kid American citizenship, to make him part of the one place that was worth living in because they were nothing like the Chinese and there was so much opportunity. The truth? I don’t like either country. But it was always clear that the Chinese were evil, the Americans good.” Maung paused and then lowered his head in exhaustion. “Now I don’t know if that’s true.”
“Why would you say that?” Nang asked.
“Because they kill prisoners and use them as food. They had a Dream Warrior program, just like the Chinese. And now they’re creating monsters and playing god at the same time—just like the Chinese. I want to find out why.”
“Not me,” Than said. “I’m with Nam. I don’t care about your why.”
Nam nodded. “Sorry, Maung. We’re turning ourselves in.”
“OK,” said Maung. “But can you wait until tomorrow morning? As soon as the sun rises, I’ll head out for one of the access conduits, and once I’m gone you two can turn yourselves in. At least that will give me some time.”
“Us,” Nang said. “I’m going with you, Maung. The Americans aren’t evil and I want to be there when you figure it out. They must be doing all this for a good reason.”
Nam looked at both of them, Maung and Nang, shaking his head as if convinced the two were insane.
“OK,” he said.
A wind blew as they moved along the same path they used earlier, the one that had brought them to the volcanic glass bowl the first time. Not strong enough to push them, the breeze nevertheless picked up dust to form a red wall that Maung turned to watch as it approached them from behind, heading toward the mountains.
“We’ve got to get to the bowl fast,” he said.
Nang breathed hard enough that it triggered her mic before she answered. “I’m tired, Maung. Why do we have to go back to the bowl? I thought we’d head for the control shaft again.”
“The schematics showed the conduit running right through here.” Maung plucked a copy of them off his wetware and mentally scanned it for a hundredth time. “The conduit damage came from a spot just below the bowl; we can get to the conduit faster if we risk it.”
“I don’t know if we can outrun the storm.”
Maung stopped and clipped a safety line from his belt to Nang’s. “I’ll help pull you along. We have to make it.”
“Why? Can’t we just navigate via HUD?”
“No. We’ll never be able to see any traps if we try to do it that way, and the dust may block enough UV light to let those things get to us above ground.”
Once they reached the notch, Maung slumped against one of the rocks to rest and Nang slid to the ground beside him, still breathing hard in Maung’s ears. They had plenty of oxygen. Maung went down the safety checklist again and breathed a sigh of relief when his systems concluded that despite the coming storm, there was still an abundance of UV light, even between the boulders. It was midday. Somewhere overhead was the sun but Maung soon gave up trying to find it through a thick blanket of red clouds and dirt that now sent a pattering rain of debris over his helmet.
“How smart do you think these things are?” Nang asked.
“Too smart. Your American friends have gone mad, Nang.”
Nang sat up straight and turned her back on him. “These aren’t my friends, Maung. I had no idea this place even existed, just like you. But there must be a good reason if the Americans went this far.”
“Humanity is disappearing, Nang. And the Allies seem to want to help it. You say that the Allies didn’t kill my wife and the other Dream Warriors. Fine. Let’s pretend that’s true.”
“It is true.”
Maung continued. “I would have rather that the Americans and their allies were trying to kill me. At least that would give me some hope that they didn’t want to be like the Chinese.”
“I don’t know how to respond to that, Maung.”
“Why were you assigned to me?” he asked. “What were you supposed to do and why?”
Nang turned back to him and picked up a small rock, throwing it against the boulder opposite them.
“To monitor. If I saw evidence that you were a Dream Warrior I was to report it via secure coms. I can’t tell you why, Maung. I don’t know why.”
“Did you report me?”
Nang’s voice was barely audible. “Yes. That’s why they sent the first fleet. To take you in.”
The storm showed no sign of letting up. Already, an inch of dust had covered the ground and Maung thought he heard the chittering of those things so he lifted his pistol to aim in the direction of the bowl. There was nothing. But the light dimmed when the dust thickened, and Maung checked his heads up before cursing at the UV indicator. He stood, dragging Nang to her feet.
“Aren’t we going to wait out the storm?” she asked.
“It’s getting worse; in a few minutes there won’t be enough UV light reaching the surface to contain them and they’ll come out.”
Maung moved closer to the bowl and yanked a satchel from his shoulder, dropping it to the ground near the rim. He pulled out a bundle of thin cable. It was getting hard to see and he told Nang to help him wrap the cable around a narrow part of one of the boulders; once it was secure, Maung climbed into a harness. When he was ready, he helped Nang into hers.
“I’m tossing some UV flares down and then going first. Don’t waste any time. As soon as I radio, clip in and follow me down.”
“I can’t see a damn thing.”
Maung snapped two flares and dropped them on the ground on either side of her, then tossed two more into the hole. “Those should keep them away—at least until I hit the bottom.”
His harness servos whined, controlling his descent. Soon the bowl walls steepened. Maung’s form reflected off the volcanic glass, even in the dim light and through the dust, and his wetware told him that this was once a vent where Mars lava flowed from the planet’s interior and spilled over its face. The walls went
vertical. Now the light was almost gone and Maung snapped one more flare, this one for himself; he lowered it from his belt to dangle less than a meter below his feet.
A moment later his boots crunched on touching down; Maung stood, unclipped, and panted. “Your turn,” he radioed. “And hurry.”
“Clipping in now. I’m hearing things up here, Maung. I think they’re pretty close by.”
Maung watched the line flick back and forth with Nang’s descent; when red dust filtered down from above, he breathed deeply, willing himself to stay calm and to survey his surroundings.
All your components are optimal, Maung, his system said.
He was at the bottom of a volcanic shaft. Above him the sky formed a circle of dim red and Maung arranged the lit flares around him to make sure that nothing got close; then he amplified his helmet pickups to the greatest extent he could—in the hope he’d hear the things if they approached. Three dark tunnels led out from the vent. The tunnels were small holes at about waist height and already Maung’s back and knees ached from just the thought of how much crawling lay ahead of them. His boots crunched again, and Maung finally took the time to examine his footing, looking down and regretting the decision; he stood on a bone pile, so thick it blocked any view of volcanic rock underneath.
A minute later, Nang landed beside him and unclipped. “They’re up there. I counted two heading for the line when I was halfway”—before she finished, the line whipped down from above, severed by something that had to have been razor sharp and as hard as steel—“down. Maung, what are you doing? We have to get going, they’re right up there.”
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