“Confirmed.” The shooter calls back up. “Clear.”
Two more bodies rappel down and join us in the crowded space. I recognize one by cloak and armor and sword.
“Grandmaster Kendricks,” I greet gratefully.
“Peacemaker,” he gives me one of my popular titles. His eyes grin through his armored faceplate.
I see motion across the fissure. More Knights are rappelling down into the nest of the other sniper, and down to the bottom to where Scheffe is.
“Does this mean your mission was successful?” I ask, nodding at the others I don’t know.
The man who shot at me lowers his weapon and drops to a knee, bowing his head formally.
“Sir Frodo Baker,” he introduces himself. “Of the New Knights of Liberty. At your service, Colonel Ram.”
Apparently they share the tradition of their Melas brothers of naming their children after popular fictional heroes. I resist the temptation to count his fingers.
“My companion…” I look back down the ravine where two Knights are pulling her helmet and giving her oxygen. Her visor is shattered. I see blood.
“Superficial,” I hear one of them report on a close-range rotating encryption. The other is rinsing her eyes with a squeeze bottle while he reassures her. “Round lanced across her visor, blew some polycarb into her face… Her eyes look to be intact…”
“Someone took two more of my companions,” I tell them.
“And a rover-bot,” Kendricks confirms. “We saw. They’ve already made it home across their perimeter with their prizes. Still alive. For now.”
“Who?”
Baker bends over the man whose brains I accidentally bashed in, and tears open his jacket and the threadbare thermal shirt underneath. This reveals what looks like a primitive tattoo that’s both readily recognizable and not: A rectangle of seven red horizontal stripes with a smaller rectangle of blue dominating the upper left corner. But instead of the expected fifty stars (or some historical reduction thereof), there’s only one. The white parts of the flag are the pallid tone of his skin.
“Liberty?” I assume.
“Descendant of the colony survivors,” Baker confirms. “Third-gen. I know him. Militiaman. One of their better snipers. Was, from the look of the skull fracture, even if he survives.”
“We need to relieve the pressure on his brain,” the Knight tending my victim decides.
“Can you work on him here?” Baker asks him. The Knight shakes his head.
“They can’t afford to let the any of the Sons see the locations of their bases,” Kendricks explains grimly. “It prevents unnecessary bloodshed.”
“Is that why you didn’t interfere with the party that took my people?”
“We didn’t know they were your people,” Kendricks doesn’t apologize. “We thought they were Earthside. We owe nothing to Earthside, not anymore.”
“They are Earthside, but one is an old friend from before the Apocalypse. Lieutenant Horst—I think you might remember him.”
Kendricks nods.
“The other is a new friend, born on-planet. I left her with Earthside because she had nowhere else after Chang made her an orphan. Their mission is to find where Asmodeus is basing. I’m tagging along because of what will happen if they do find him.”
“I thought Asmodeus was defeated?” Kendricks takes the news with a mix of shock and anger.
“That was a clone, made out of an innocent victim. I’ve encountered three others like it so far. His primary body is somewhere else. Or maybe nowhere at all—he may be existing as a networked consciousness between multiple host bodies. Signals were detected coming from the east. Earthside believes he may have taken Liberty, Alchera or Iving. He was seen transporting scrap to build that last Stormcloud from somewhere out this way.”
“Not from Liberty,” Baker insists. It seems he’s been briefed enough that my tale neither confuses nor surprises him. “But we’d observed large aircraft passing from the directions of both outer colonies a few months ago, headed west.”
“He made no attempt to approach Liberty?” I’m having trouble believing, though I’m sure he had a scheme in doing so as Baker shakes his head.
“You’re wondering why not,” Kendricks picks up.
“You’ll see,” Baker assures me heavily. Kendricks flashes me a sad half-smile. “We need to move quickly, if we’re to have any chance of extracting your friends alive.”
Scheffe is having trouble seeing, but she’s only suffered some minor facial lacerations and corneal abrasions. The Knights have cleaned her up, sealed the larger wounds, and hooked a mask into her re-breather, her ruined helmet discarded. They set her up with rappelling gear, while I wave away a similar offer, having what I need built into my armor.
Soon we’re being hauled up the ravine, up high in the cliffs. We have to take multiple lines. When we’re up five-hundred meters, I start seeing the telltale signs of frequent climbing, wear on the rocks. Then we get our boots barely on a very narrow ledge, and do a slow but smooth slide eastward along the sheer jagged wall, clinging to it face-first. The evening winds get stronger and stronger as we go, as if trying to peel us off.
We travel a good hundred meters like that, before we come to a niche that gets us partly out of the wind. Scheffe looks tired and shaken. One of the Knights gives her a thermal cap to protect her bare head and ears from the icy cold up here.
“You all right, Specialist?” I ask her over the wind. She gives me a shaky thumbs-up, her eyes raw and bloodshot under her borrowed goggles.
We stop long enough for water.
“We’ve got an hour until nightfall,” Baker prods us stoically. “We’ve still got two klicks to the Perimeter.”
“Roughly-drawn colony border,” Kendricks clarifies. “The survivor-descendants have spread out from the ruin over the decades. They have outposts all through the foothills of the mountains on the northeast side of the crater, similar to the Pax ‘Steads, but fortified in the rocks and tight-knit enough to maintain a secure perimeter.”
“Against who?” I wonder, since the Katar only spoke of a few encounters many years ago.
“Us,” Baker admits heavily. “And now you, come to justify their paranoia.”
He doesn’t explain further, as if the subject offends him, just turns and leads his team forward. We quickly come to the head of a narrow trail the winds along the slope—we’ve come through the rim itself and out onto the range of mountains that sprout from the crater. Ahead and below us is a small valley between the short mountain chain we’re on and a longer one just to the south. Everything on this side of the crater has already been swallowed by the shadows of the setting sun at our backs, but in the far distance, in the bottom of the valley, I can see the remains of Liberty Colony, blasted to a skeletal ruin and overgrown.
“The Colony took the worst of a near-miss, the blast-wave ripping through the gap between the mountains and up the crater rim,” Kendricks gives me a history lesson as we hike the trail with purpose. “Liberty was a US corporate nanotech producer, but given the threat of the bombs over their heads, they started digging shelters into the mountains nearly a year before the Apocalypse.”
“But Liberty had a Spec-Ops garrison,” I point out the origin of the local Order of Knights.
“Those soldiers agreed to keep the colonists’ secret from Earthside, in defiance of their own orders. Then they helped them evac, helped them get through what came next, working in desperate conditions with the colony scientists and engineers.”
Baker doesn’t bother to comment or add to Kendricks’ narrative, but I can’t help but grin at the thought of the operators’ small but vital act of rebellion, especially since those men were my contemporaries (in this version of reality, anyway).
“How long until things went bad?” I have to dig into the wound.
“Nearly thirty years,” Baker finally chimes in over his shoulder. “Things were hard in the beginning, but the first-gens made do, were even able to
raise families, but we all had to maintain hard discipline. Resources were delicately thin, and our rigged habitats were always on the edge of failure. We became the enforcers of that discipline. The civvies resented that, despite the necessity of it, especially as it started to get slowly but steadily easier over the decades. We’d tapped the nearest ETE feed line and risked running regular supply runs at the edge of our surface range to keep the survivors alive. We surveyed the geology and sank wells by hand into the deep permafrost to supplement our water. We managed hydroponic gardens that also supplemented our oxygen, obsessively monitored to keep the balance of gasses from tipping into catastrophic combustibility. We kept the recyclers running even when they’d been repaired so much that they bore no resemblance to their original specs. But the greening of the planet was both blessing and curse.
“The air eventually got thick enough to start compressing the O2 out of. Then the spread of wild plants took the pressure off our gardens and recyclers. Thirty years after we should have all been dead, the colony—as it was—had plenty. But that plenty started tipping the civvies against us. They didn’t need us anymore. And there was pervasive fear, left over from the Apocalypse, passed down through the generations, kept alive. Distorted. We were UN. We were the soldiers of what tried to kill them, and then we were their oppressors, the ones that had made the hard rationing decisions, the ones that had forced dangerous work for the survival of all. We’d kept them alive, given them the future that their children and grandchildren enjoy, but they started to forget that. And all we were at that point was the enemy.”
He gets interrupted when I have to catch Scheffe as she takes a bad slip on some loose rock. I think I impress the Knights by hauling her back up by one hand like she’s no heavier than a small pack. She mutters a thank-you between terror and embarrassment, and keeps moving like nothing happened.
“The colonists had stockpiled colony security weapons, and supplemented their arsenal by secretly breaking into caches we’d buried,” Baker continues bitterly, like this had all just happened. “There were incidents. Lives lost needlessly, stupidly. We didn’t want to perpetuate the slaughter, so when it came to a head, we withdrew. They took it as a victory, and emboldened, started making raids. They were smart, smarter than we expected, and patient. They took more of our weapons caches. Twelve years ago, they found and destroyed our hidden transmitters, cutting us off from our distant brothers in Melas. We moved up higher, trying to keep out of reach—we had the better survival gear. But they had the resources, the numbers. We let them have the valley—there was no way we could take back control over the new colony without a slaughter, and maybe not even then. So we kept out of sight, let them think they’d beaten us, watching over them as they spread out, thrived. And went mad.”
He goes silent. I’m not sure if he’s letting that sink in or struggling to find the words. He just keeps moving forward, his face turned away and hidden by cowl and mask. Kendricks doesn’t take over the tale, just gives me a look to confirm that this is a painful subject, and has been for generations now.
We hike another klick-and-a-half before we come to a stop and hunker down in the rocks, crawling forward until we can see down into the valley. Baker points out positions in the rocks all along the slopes beneath us where they know sentries are nested, then points out where the bigger shelters are dug. One of the Knights offers me a pair of binoculars, but I wave him off, assuring him I can see just fine.
And I can. There is faint heat, not enough to be seen from any great distance, but there’s a lot of it, spread all around the lowlands in thin broken lines, possibly betraying cave facilities of various sizes. It looks like a buried village, habitats around natural “squares” or plazas. There could be hundreds of people living down there, maybe thousands. I’d take the time to ask about demographics, but I have my priorities.
“Any idea where they have my people?”
Either Baker’s eyes are better than mine or he has scout intel, because he points out the rover, hidden by vines thrown over it, down in the bottoms, roughly dead-center of a semi-circle of heat. There are no obvious guards out in the open.
“They’ll be questioned,” Baker gives me the news I expect. “Tortured. Then executed as threats to the colony, out in the open for our benefit. We still lose a scout now-and-then to carelessness or the boldness of our enemies. If they take our people alive, they use their suffering to try to draw us out, get us to reveal our positions so they can have something to prove their bravery by shooting at. I suppose if we gave them more opportunity, they’d be out of ammo by now.”
“But you’re still hoping for a more reasonable solution,” I allow. I see him shake his head under his cowl.
“There was a man, a colony leader… Getting old, suffering the madness of age and isolation… But he was charismatic. He convinced people of his fantasy, enough to do the damage... He was a patriot. He was sure that the United States had fallen—that was the only possible explanation why rescue was never sent. The United States would never give up on its people unless there was no United States anymore. The UN must have overthrown their government, enslaved their people, or that the United States as we’d known it had been destroyed in the resulting war. He thought—and he wasn’t alone—that if the UN could bomb Mars, they would do the same to Earth. As the years passed without contact, without rescue, that nightmare became the accepted truth… The one star on their flag: they honestly believe they’re the last of the United States of America. The Last Colony…”
“Now they’ve seen you,” Kendricks takes over when Baker falls silent. “UNMAC patrol flights. Then your scouting party, your armored vehicle… They’ve seen it. They’ll try to take or destroy it once they decide they’re not afraid of it. They have RPGs.”
I think I know why Asmodeus left them be. He left them in our path, in UNMAC’s path, knowing there’d be a ready-made bloodbath. The beauty of it is that he wouldn’t have to lift a finger to make it happen. He just drew us out this way, expecting to find enemies. All he has to do now is sit back and watch.
“That track is carrying four tactical warheads,” I decide to tell them. “It’s hoping to deliver them to Asmodeus’ base and burn him off the planet. Earthside has eyes on it from orbit, but otherwise it’s silent running to keep Asmodeus from hearing it. They will defend it with everything they have. Or destroy it to keep it from falling into enemy hands. If they see an unknown quantity attack the vehicle, they’ll assume the worst. They won’t hold fire.”
I can feel Kendricks, Baker and the other Knights tense and simmer on that news, frustrated, helpless. The only thing they can do will shed an unacceptable amount of blood.
“Neither will the Sons of Liberty,” Kendricks confirms miserably. “You have to get your vehicle far away from here. Leave your people. Two lives against the hundreds more that may be lost.”
“Even if I was willing to do that, we’re at a crawl in this terrain.”
“We could try to hold the Sons back, give you time to get away,” Baker offers.
“I appreciate that, but I’m not leaving friends of mine to be tortured to death. You know my history. I’m stubborn like that.”
I think I see Kendricks grin inside his armored mask.
“We can get in after dark, slip through their lines,” Baker gives me. “But we’ll have to take lives to get your people out, assuming we even get the chance. More than two lives, certainly.” He says it like he’s leaving the decision to me, but it’s clear he’s not eager to kill colonists, despite all they may have done, all of his own people they may have killed.
“Stay here,” I tell them.
“What are you going to do?” Kendricks wants to know, but already does.
“Try to earn my reputation.”
I get up and start marching down the slope.
My camo gets me through their lines, but I can’t be sound-stealthy on the steep talus slopes and make good time. I hear their link chatter as they communicate back-and-f
orth, trying to get eyes on whatever’s making the trickling rockslide down into their territory. They speak in gibberish that I can’t tell is code or shattered English or a mix of both. Even in their midst, I can barely see them—their sentry nests are like hidden pillboxes, dug artfully into the slopes. The Sons of Liberty are almost as good at being invisible in their home ground as the Nomads or the Pax or the Katar. I should have asked Baker just how many SOF weapons they’d stolen, not that it would have made a difference in my impulsive decision to throw myself into their midst.
I pick up more faint heat signatures as I get closer to the bottom of the pocket valley, aiming for the rover. My stealth thankfully improves (through no skill of my own) as I crunch and slide less and less on the gravel and rock as I get lower. This is not just due to the rapidly-thickening growth providing a slick carpet of sorts. It’s also because the stones underneath the ground-clinging vines are getting well-worn from decades of human traffic, the soil compacted. This place is lived-in, has been lived in, no matter how wild it still looks from a distance.
I’m drawn immediately to the rover, hoping to find some kind of tracks, sign of where Horst and Lyra may have been taken. I’m in the middle of a stone-age village square, heat leaking out of the shuttered slit-like windows and small doorways of over a dozen structures that now look like a combination of dug cave and built-up false cave. But there’s no visible light: there must be sealed shutters and hatches in place, but the way the rocks are cut and placed make the gaps look almost natural, enough to be invisible from the heights, certainly from orbit.
The camouflage engineering would impress the Katar. Where it fails is in the smell: The place reeks of old piss, shit and garbage, but I’m reminded somewhat less of a latrine or landfill and more of the Tranquility gardens, fed by composted waste. Still, it’s an undeniably human stink. A lot of people live here, and have lived here for a long time.
The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming Page 29