Into the Maelstrom

by Loren L. Coleman

  Brygan maneuvered the cramped aisles with a casual grace belied by his stocky frame. Though only 165 centimeters in height, his thick body lent him the solid appearance that had earned him the nickname Bear. His rogue habits likely contributed to that as well. He had come to Mars for Mother Russia and the Neo-Soviet empire, yes, but also for the freedom of exploring a vast wilderness, alone. It was how he worked, trusting to his own skills and near-preternatural senses and his touch of goryachee—the hot stuff. The high-radiation environment so many Neo-Soviets were exposed to in their lives had developed many low-grade mutations. Brygan’s gave him less need for insulation from the extreme cold temperature of Mars and the ability to survive on a thinner oxygen mix than most. Though he couldn’t breathe the Martian atmosphere, he could stand fully exposed to the negative-ninety-degree Centigrade mean temperature for a fair length of time.

  Joining Mars’s commander at the window, Brygan stood at some semblance of attention. “Strasvi, Comrade General Leonov. Reporting as ordered.”

  Brygan did not salute. Though a ten-year veteran of Mars, he technically held no formal military rank. That would have placed him in the chain of command, and the Neo-Soviet military put little faith in rogue individuals such as Nystolov. The group would always be more important, and more desirable, than the individual. The empire did not mind exploiting talents such as his, but would never give him authority over others. And that suited him. So a semiformal greetings would have to suffice.

  The general nodded brusquely. “Da, Comrade Nystolov. Strasvi.” His voice was muffled slightly by the armored vest’s high collar. The thick guard up front was wired for sound augmentation to amplify the general’s voice if need be, and also came with a concealed mouthpiece for five minutes of secure air even on a chemically polluted battlefield. On Mars, such a feature was not without uses. “Welcome back from oblivion.”

  A Mars-traditional greeting, held over from the early days of the red planet’s exploration. Brygan stared out through the thick plex, taking in the landscape he had come to know and appreciate. Barren rock and dust, scarred and pocked from an ages-old shower of micrometeorites. Crimson streaked with darker rust reds. The lower slopes of Ascraeus Mons looked like a blood-drenched battlefield. “Oblivion and I remain on good terms, Comrade General. What was it our first cosmonaut to Mars said? ‘Everything to be cautious of, but nothing to truly fear.’ ”

  “Pavel Shtavyrik,” the general said, with a nod. “Three times he commanded missions here, bringing supplies to establish our first base. A hero of the people. Still, he died on Mars.”

  “The danger of familiarity,” Brygan agreed, reluctantly tearing his gaze from the view and back to the general. The man was of solid build, topping Brygan’s medium height by a dozen centimeters. Red-brown eyes—a cosmetic mutation. A scar ran from the general’s left temple, curving toward the cheekbone, then back to the base of his left ear—a souvenir of last year’s battle against Union forces trying again to win a foothold on Mars. Armored gloves covered each hand, fitted with a protective exoskeleton.

  Many of the personnel assigned to Mars had some touch of goryachee in one form or other. An added advantage for dealing with a hostile world. The Neo-Soviets did not possess the refined terraforming technology of the Union. The empire made do on the sheer might of its people. The general was a case in point—his strength was legendary. With those gloves, Leonov could punch through the thick plex without so much as scarring his hands. He was the only other person Brygan knew besides himself who often worked out under full Terran gravity, though the scout could not match half of Leonov’s weight press.

  It did give him cause to wonder, though, about Leonov’s position near the plex. A subtle warning against those who still thought the path to advancement lay in a carefully staged coup? Or simple intimidation? Brygan glanced back to the main floor where operators and junior officers continued to work, with the occasional nervous glance toward their general.

  “We have a problem?” Brygan finally asked, obviously rhetorical.

  “Only one? That would be a welcome relief.” Leonov glowered at the men gathered about a nearby console. “Our Mental has informed me that Union forces have landed a new expedition on-planet. We did not detect them, again, and skywatch offers only excuses. And now half of the alleged geniuses in this room cannot explain our communications trouble with Moskva.” He glared even more mercilessly at one hapless technician who happened to look up at the wrong time.

  “Well?” Leonov demanded of the man.

  “Comrade General, we still are not sure,” the tech stammered. “The disturbances behave similarly to interruptions from heavy solar radiation, but no large flares have been detected and radiation readings are nominal.” He swallowed hard, looking to one of his fellows for support. “The satellite array did lose tracking on Terra for an instant earlier today, but no cause has been determined, and it does not appear to be related to current difficulties.”

  Leonov reached out one gloved hand to touch the plex wall. Brygan drew in a deep, silent breath of the stale air, just in case.

  “You tell me what it isn’t and what shouldn’t be involved,” the general said, his voice dangerously quiet. He brought his free hand up and slowly closed it into a tight fist. “I want communications restored with Terra, and I want it done now.” Several men and women visibly paled under the general’s gaze.

  Mention of Ascraeus’s Mental, one of the rare individuals who exhibited extraordinary powers of the mind, instantly caught Brygan’s attention. Though pitifully weak of body and ostracized to an even greater extent than rogues like Brygan, it was the Mentals who’d helped save Neo-Soviet security when technology and manpower failed to detect threats. If a Mental said that the Union had landed on Mars, then it must be so. And likely up to Brygan to track them.

  “You want me to locate the Union expedition?” he asked the general.

  Unspent, Leonov’s anger continued to color his voice. “Da, Brygan. The Union controls Venus and Europa and who knows how many other outposts out here. Mars belongs to the Neo-Soviet empire. We fed it our blood and sweat while they built their precious atmosphere processors in the safety of Terra’s gravity. We will not give it up now. It is ours by right.”

  Brygan ignored the speech. “Chaos or the Labyrinth?” he asked simply.

  A grim smile touched the corner of Leonov’s mouth. “Aureum Chaos,” he said. “They always want to buy themselves time by putting down there or at Noctis Labyrinthus, thinking we will never find them in those twisted, broken lands. All they really do is pin themselves into an enclosed area with limited options, waiting for us to come destroy them.” Only grudgingly did the general admit, “A mistake that many would make, though.”

  “I would not make that mistake against you, Comrade General.” Brygan finger-combed red fines from his beard. There was no escaping the minute dust particles that covered so much of Mars. To live on the red planet was an agreement to ingest and breathe them. To feel the ultrafine grit against your skin and constantly shake the red dust from your clothing.

  Leonov frowned, either at Brygan’s challenge or the fall of dust in his command center. Brygan had made his peace with the red planet long ago. He knew where he could push, and where Mars would kill him if he paid too little respect. That relationship was what made him invaluable.

  Amid the incompetence currently demonstrated by the rest of the command center, Brygan decided to remind Vladimir Leonov of that fact.

  “I would take control of the orbital facilities,” he began, “and then land a base on the higher slopes of Olympus Mons—or perhaps the caldera of Pavonis Mons—against you. Make you expend energy coming up to meet me. Every time you launched missiles, it would give me a fix, and I could respond with gravity-assisted bombardment.”

  Leonov nodded slowly, his irritation forgotten as he envisioned such a plan. “Perhaps you could hold one of the magnificent mountains against me. You know Mars, how to fight alongside its strength
s.” He smiled fully. “And that is why you were born Neo-Soviet and not Union. They would remake Mars as they did Venus. So might we, one day, but not in our lifetime. The Union would accomplish it much quicker. And that would destroy you because the red planet would be no more.”

  He turned his gaze back to the plex wall and the red landscape beyond. “Find them, Brygan Vassilyevich. Find them, and I will destroy them. For Mother Russia, the empire, and Mars.”

  * * *

  A light wind stirred the fines, casting a reddish haze into the air as Brygan Nystolov abandoned his rover to trail the last two kilometers on foot. There would be no easy retreat. But driving what was essentially a stripped-down Blizzard military crawler into what might be a well-defended Union encampment seemed the poorer idea. On foot, no one could match him in this terrain.

  He moved past tall, standing columns of tannish and orange rock, and easily glided over one three-meter crevice that barred his way. Aureum Chaos was a fractured land the likes of which Terra could never hope to see. Mars’s lower gravity allowed for higher rises and treacherously sheer drops that fell away without warning. But the light gravity worked in favor of the hiker. A ridge standing less than six meters high or a chasm less than four across was more annoyance than hindrance.

  It was on the gentler slopes that Brygan was more cautious. Crossing open areas he was most vulnerable. In the confines of Chaos he had a better chance of spotting Union pickets before they noticed him. His gliding stride stirred the fines very little, and he knew to avoid the detritus piled below cliff edges. It was too easy to start a rock rolling along in two-fifths gravity. Hidden scouts or patrols would have no such experience.

  Also, the easier slopes were usually signs of unstable areas that had shaken themselves down from a collection of steep cliffs and deep canyons. And, worse, might be ready to shake apart again. The underlying bedrock of such places tended to be layered with tiny faults, ready to shift and grind together in miniature imitation of continental plates back on Terra.

  Brygan found the decoy site exactly where low-orbit spy satellites had placed the telltale shine of new metal. When Vladimir Leonov radioed him the information, Brygan almost took it at face value. Considering the century and a half of manned spaceflight, it still amazed him that the Union—and before them the Americans—never tired of making their spacecraft and satellites so easy to locate. Always a white or shiny metal finish.

  An easy assignment—his first thought. Too easy—his second.

  Chaos might not allow an army to concentrate its forces and move according to proper tactical doctrine, but it did make for an excellent hiding place. Nothing hiding in there would be seen, unless it wanted to be seen. He requested and won two hours’ grace time to check the situation before the general assembled Baskurgan’s army and flew out for deployment around the site. Not that Brygan believed he’d really get it. Leonov would assemble the army regardless, then wait only so long as he could control his desire to kill Union soldiers and keep Mars clean.

  Brygan gave himself twenty more minutes. Maximum.

  So, no time to waste. He watched the area carefully for a long and precious five minutes. A wide clearing. Cliffs on one side. Standing columns and a small ridgeline guarding two more. The fourth was danger territory, a fairly steep grade but not in keeping with the surrounding Chaos.

  Finding no strange stirring of fines or flash of white Union space suit, however, he moved in slowly with his easy gliding step. Carefully approaching the lone vehicle, Brygan scanned the ground for evidence of further Union forces. The vehicle itself reminded him of the old exploration type, flatbed with eight caterpillar wheels, flywheel drive, and a simple steering cockpit. Something definitely was not right. The ground showed marks of a single large landing craft and some foot travel, but no large numbers.

  If he’d been more of a true military mind, Brygan Nystolov might have recognized the trap sooner. His specialty was reading the land and recognizing immediate dangers to a single individual versus menace to large numbers. It cost him a few precious heartbeats and several loping paces closer to the flatbed lander before the alarm bells rang in his mind. He spun in the air, ready to come down and leap back for cover.

  The vehicle exploded first.

  The blast’s shock wave caught him in the small of the back, knocking him off his feet and hurling him back toward the standing columns. He felt sharp stabs of pain as a few metal shards lanced his suit and cut into his limbs and body. His breath squeezed from his lungs, as if a giant fist held him in its grip and then slammed him down against the surface of Mars, scraping him along and tearing away a portion of one sleeve already lacerated by shrapnel. When the blast’s force finally released him, Brygan was immediately into a crouch on his hands and feet. Then he noticed the landslide flying toward him.

  Flying was the correct term for it. The cascade of dirt and rock appeared to ride a cushion of air as it swept down the slope and toward the clearing. A few pieces might touch ground briefly, kicking off again to tumble airborne. Geysering fines and dirt and small rocks at the top of the slope promised that it had been set off by planted charges. A well-laid trap to catch anyone not killed by the exploding vehicle. Brygan’s first instincts were to take cover over the ridge or in the forest of standing columns, and the columns were closer.

  It surprised even him when his first jump bounded him toward the avalanche rather than at an angle to its path. He justified the directions he didn’t move before touching ground again. If an enemy left a path of escape open, then that was a direction he did not want to travel. At the upper arc of his second glide, he realized something about the avalanche that might buy him a chance. It was falling slowly, not in the mad rush one might expect under Terran-standard gravity but powered by Mars’s much weaker pull.

  Partway up the slope he spotted a protruding boulder that looked likely to remain anchored, even after the slide hit it. He angled for the boulder, figuring he would lose the race by a long ten meters. He was twenty short when the first of the debris swept up to and around the boulder, throwing more red fines into the already-hazy air. At fifteen, the larger rocks were smashing into and sliding around the anchored boulder, and the first small rocks bounced off Brygan’s legs. He allowed himself one last gliding step, then crouched and jumped for it.

  Though well built for someone of his size used to Terran gravity, Brygan Nystolov weighed less than sixty-five kilograms after counting in his environment suit. His leap was poorly timed, but managed to net him eight airborne meters over the worst of the slide. He came down in the boulder’s lee, a scant two meters short, and scrabbled for the top just as a new series of explosions rocked the landscape behind him.

  Perched atop the boulder, panting with exertion, he surveyed the damage. The ridgeline had disintegrated under the last explosive chain, and a dozen of the tan-and-orange standing rock columns had crumbled to the ground. If he hadn’t jumped free, Brygan estimated he would have been buried under several tons of Chaos rock. The bulk of the slide having swept by him now, he looked downhill and realized how close that still came to being true. He shook his head lightly. He had narrowly escaped a trap meant to catch and destroy an army. Or a good measure of one anyway. He swallowed hard.

  He’d overestimated the Union’s cleverness. They had not guarded against a single individual springing their trap early, thinking to catch the Neo-Soviet forces as they swept in on the decoy en masse. That had worked for him, too, since what did they care if one or two had been able to survive? But with that question came the realization that the Mental had been wrong and had steered the Neo-Soviet forces into a trap. Such a thing had never happened before. The Union had also landed uncontested on Mars, and still remained hidden. That was a new concern as well.

  Brygan sat down heavily—for all the two-fifths gravity—on one edge of the boulder. He felt the pain blossoming in his body from the rough treatment. Looking down at his left arm, he saw a large frozen patch of blood covering the area he�
��d scraped raw. He frowned, noticing now a few more ice-rimed bleeders on his legs. He was looking at a two-kilometer walk back to his rover. The Union force on-planet had still to be located. And if he had the larger picture in place, the best Mental on Mars was guessing wrong and communication was out with the empire on Terra.

  General Leonov was right. Having just one problem would be a relief.

  4

  * * *

  A rguing bursts of machine-gun fire echoed throughout the shallow valley—long, regularly paced statements from below answered by hard, chopped replies. The retorts echoed sharply from nearby cliff faces of pale tan stone, rolling into a thunderous peal as the violent debate mixed in the deeper folds of Gory Putorana.

  Sergeant Tom Tousley hugged up to the back side of a large rock outcropping, he and his squad pinned against the slope halfway down to the valley floor. He felt the stone’s freezing touch even through his thick fatigues, a few of the sharper edges jabbing uncomfortably. The terrain offered good cover behind large boulders or inside shallow trenches cut into the land by occasional heavy rains. Small, bushy alpine pines clustered on the valley floor and dotted the lower slopes, one patch stretching almost to the rim in a long but thin stand that likely followed some unseen water source. The lower edge of that wood had been fired. Red-and-orange fingers danced over the dry needles and snapped at pitch-covered branches. Wispy dark smoke trailed up into an overcast sky.

  Tousley rose up in a half crouch, bracing his arms over the sandstone ledge. He watched for the telltale muzzle flash below. Found one. Squeezing off two bursts from his Pitbull assault rifle, the sergeant easily rode out the recoil and stayed on target until he saw the enemy crumple forward. Large, wearing heavy boots and military-issue pants but a heavily muscled chest bare to the day’s chill. Even from seventy meters distance Tousley noted the abnormal bone structure of its upper body, the hairless head growing out of oversize shoulders like a thick knob, and saw the mask strapped over the lower face. Mutant. Rad Trooper, sure enough.