by William Cray
Emerging alone from the elevator, Duran scanned his surroundings. His route into Dome 11 through an old arc smeltering facility was guarded, but was easy enough to bypass the first the sleepy scout in the ventilation shaft. The three thugs at the facilities entrance had required a more direct method, but they were little trouble. He looked at his exposure tab. He was in the Zone.
The domes interior was dark with thin traces of ambient light peering through the dust covered ceiling almost four hundred meters above him. Even in the dark, Duran could sense the wind passing over the dome, creating a swirling specter dancing outside in a cascading sea of sand. Through the dust he could make out the flashing anti-collision strobes still scorching the night sky from the Stratospire, just a few kilometers north of the dome through a connecting tunnel. He found it hard to believe there were enclaves of humans living in the desolation of the Zone, much less an economy that supported their existence.
A few wrecked and abandoned freecars sat in haphazard formations along the travelways path, but the nearby streets were empty of activity or signs of habitation. No police either, Duran observed, not even P-Teks. Amazing, he thought. An area like this in the inner worlds ruled by anarchist society. Duran nodded in the darkness. It was the perfect place to conceal an alien presence so close to a vulnerable humanity.
Duran reached out with his mind. Nothing. Hansen had believed this was the place and he followed Axe’s logic. Habitation Dome 11 housed over two hundred thousand residents before the explosion of Power Generating Dome 3 and now its silent anarchy was terrifying.
Not wanting to delay longer, Duran initialized his navigation system and picked up his location and the waypoints he had sketched out to get to his destination. Duran bounded past the abandoned vehicles and across the abandoned streets, following the green que on his eye filament. He alternated between speed and caution as made each waypoint.
The streets were lined on either side with large abandoned automated industries and warehouses. The buildings were twelve tiers high with large material elevators along the exterior to raise and lower cargo to the multi-level loading docks. Giant tramways crisscrossed the roofs above, carrying raw materials and large component pieces to their manufacturing destination. This was the heart of the industrial might of the Old Empire. Mars was a dying world, Duran saw, kept barely alive by the infrastructure that had been created to support it, but the infrastructure could not exist only to support itself. As the Empire had grown out to the stars, it left Mars behind with nothing to offer the new order. With the failure of the terraforming efforts and the loss of its industrial purpose, Mars would fade and crumble back into the red dust of its past.
Duran slid into the corner of a holding garage adjacent to one of the smelters. Once covered by the blanket of shadows, he reached into his coat, pulling the Talon out of its holster. Reaching into a pocket, he attached the night sight viewer along the upper rail assembly. Duran moved the gun around to check his surroundings, the gun feeding firing solutions and field of view data to his IP that displayed over his eye filaments. He returned the gun to its holster, latching it, but enabling the quick release. He started a timer on his percom. He wanted to be in and out as quickly as possible. The radiation levels were within tolerances but he didn’t want the slow accumulation of rads to become an additional stressor on his body later.
Picking up his navigation cue he moved out of the garage, staying on the darkest path, connecting long shadows with natural cover to obscure lines of sight if he were being observed. His soft-soled boots made a gentle skip on the street, echoing in the emptiness around him. Duran scanned the area around him for signs of activity using the techniques of low light vision learned deep in the claustrophobic tunnels of his time with Imperial Sappers.
His destination was up ahead. Taking the visual cue from his navigation system, he turned right, skirting between two abandoned cars and down the narrow alley that led to the mid sized square yellow buildings on each side of the road. As he approached the designated point on the ground he began to reach out with his mind, feeling for the tendrils of intrusion. Empty.
Duran squatted down near the travelway curb at his destination, his gloved hand reaching down, running along the coarse grit of the street. The fine dust obliterated any sense of direction from the confused vehicle tracks. The tactile feel of the grit kept its secrets. Of all the places Axe had pressed his boots into the ground, here was the place Eric Hansen took his final breath.
Duran stood, looking down the street and up at the tall buildings before making his way back to the shadows, walking a second time past the place where Axe had killed himself. Nothing.
Moving a block beyond the destination, Duran turned down an alley between the adjacent buildings, looking for an entrance. Hansen had stopped here for some purpose. It seemed to be a random location, but something had drawn him here.
Duran scanned the alley to find a way to the roof. It probably wasn’t good investigative technique, but his military training said, “Get to the high ground,” and he trusted his instincts. They had kept him alive for too long to easily ignore.
Moving up the alley he found an unmarked entrance nestled into a small U-shaped building across from the street. He took the slight incline of the ramp to the door in three steps and stopped in front of it. First, he tried the door with a tug on the manual latch, but it was unforgiving. Not wanting to waste time trying to finesse the door, he placed both hands on the release, gripping the door latch tight, shearing the mechanism, with a loud pop as it failed. He flexed his hands from the strain as he pushed in.
Entering the abysmal black, Duran pulled out the Mag-gun, selecting the zero vision mode. The filament over his left eye became a greenish image of the area, revealing a sixty-degree arc in front of his gun. Turning his head left and right, the view gimbaled as the low light system traversed on the upper receiver of his weapon, scanning the area with his eye. His S.P.E.C.A.T.S. combat suit could take a three hundred and sixty degree snapshot, convert it to a three dimensional image, and update the sight picture as he moved around in the area. Tying the data to his internal navigation system, the formidable system could use the image for targeting, intelligence gathering probes, or tactical placement. Once again he felt naked and vulnerable without the weapon of war he was created to wear. His gun sights would have to do the job now but it was like looking through a straw.
After a few minutes of fumbling in the dark Duran found the route to the facility’s roof and emerged through a small access door. He looked up, much closer to the domes transparent ceiling with the swirl of winds outside. The view at street level was dominated by a row of giant fusion smelter plants surrounding the small machining shop, creating a valley of possible threats above him.
He stayed low so he wasn’t silhouetted against the lighter skyline as he moved forward along the roof’s edge. Once at the precipice he used the Mag-gun, angling it down towards the street. Sweeping the gun back and forth, the green image on the filament eye showed an empty street below. His footprints were visible in the dust coming up the street. The improperly maintained filtration vents built up gasses and atmospheric impurities, stirring up particles from the domes exterior. Most area’s were coated with the fine residue. It was inevitable that external contaminates, including radioactive ones would find their way into the dome. The outer edges of the domes were the most contaminated, but this side was facing away from the Power Dome 3 attack. It wasn’t safe by any means, but it wasn’t the worst place either. The outer ring of the dome facing the radiation blast was uninhabitable for any length of time, despite the efforts of the domes autonomous maintenance systems to keep the scrubbers and shielding serviceable. The fine dust covering the domes floor and buildings had built up over the last generations like the flaking of dead skin.
Duran checked his percom. He needed to head back. Three hours to sun-up, then another two and a half before Floss was supposed to pick him up. He looked s
kyward, through the haze of the dome to the brashing lights of the space elevator in the distance.
Duran changed his vantage point again before heading back, doing a final sweep, focusing on the streets. As he traced Eric’s likely route through the abandoned street he spotted what looked like a wide trail in the dust made by a heavy mover. They were the only tracks of his kind he had seen so far. He kept the view of the trail centered, allowing the resolution to improve. He followed the wide tire tracks back to one of the large smelters lining the street ahead.
Not seeing anything else, Duran decided to follow them a short way. He made his way down to street level, following the tracks from the shadows until he reached a building with a sign that read Skyline Composite Materials. Duran approached a side entrance and was about to force it, but the door slid open when he applied the first increment of pressure. The front lock had been torched off. Recently…by the look of the burn marks.
Duran slipped inside and had a look around. Mammoth smelters were lined across the back wall, five across. Giant robotic arms hung from the ceiling. The smelters were frozen over by slabs of cooled metal slag. Quenching chambers sat next to each conveyer. The smelters reactor’s had cooled until they hardened, ruining them in the rush to abandon the dome.
Duran followed the line of smelters, searching the floor for the tracks he spotted earlier, leading out from the facility. The third smelter from the entrance revealed the millimeter thin rut in the dust, with two old style heavy lift flat bed ground trucks backed up to the covered loading dock which Duran could make out through the bay door windows. The width of the tracks inside looked like they corresponded to the trails in the dust outside the building. Unlike the other four bays, the storage racks here were empty.
Duran walked by the row of metal racks that once held processed materials from the smelters. He found a label and ran his gloved hand over the dust covering it, but couldn’t make out the writing. Giving up on the racks and he headed back off into the warehouse looking for a manifest, a rod, or even a scrap that would indicate what had been stored in that vacant row. There was a workstation off to the side with a monitor and some filament papers sitting haphazardly on the corner. The paper was brittle and un-powered. Duran put the first paper on the center of the desk and reached into his pocket, pulling out a penlight. He shined the white light down onto the photocell corner of the paper, trying to re-energize the filaments. The filament paper re-energized after a moment, and the images reorganized themselves into something coherent. A union work schedule evolved on the flyer and Duran tossed it on the floor before it finished. Grabbing the rest of the stack, about thirty in all, he laid them out six at a time on the desktop and charged them each with the light, going through about half the stack until he ran across an old productivity report with production schedules and material volumes. The report was issued three days before Avery Phelman and his Red Brigade punks detonated Power Dome 3. He focused his light on the page and it formed.
The five production lines were listed along with the previous month's output, the anticipated production for the current month, and how far they were from their goal. A goal they would never meet. He scanned over to the production line column, scrolling down the paper until he found something. Shit, Duran thought, tritanium.
Tritanium was a very expensive composite with many military applications. It was resistant to heat stresses and could flex a great deal before exceeding its tolerances. It wasn’t especially useful as armor, but a the application of secret processes and currents could give the alloy a luminescent quality. A modulated electrical current could be passed through the refined material causing it to be come semi-transparent from view. Variation of the current could also produce different colors and pre-defined patterns. When insolated properly the effect generated very little surface heat and was hard to pick up on thermal scanners. The refining and bonding process to make Tri-Lum was extensive and one of the most highly guarded secrets of the Commonwealth.
But more urgently, was this important? Duran asked himself. There were probably thousands of abandoned caches of valuable materials like this all over the Zone. Most of it had been abandoned in place in the rush to escape the lethal doses of radiation expelled from the cracked fusion bottles of the neighboring dome. If there were such cache’s of valuables just lying about, even raw materials, it would make perfect sense for the locals to pilfer it. Duran looked back at the empty tritanium storage racks. Unprocessed the base material wasn’t much value to anyone, much less the Intruders. Processed, though…. Duran contemplated the possibilities, then dismissed them. This was just another dead end. But he would check some things tomorrow.
The noise of a free car settled down outside on the street. Duran stepped into the shadow of the building as he slipped outside. The cars exterior lights were off, but he could tell it was a government cruiser. Duran came out in the shadows towards the vehicle, knowing his excursion was discovered, and no point in fighting its inevitable conclusion.
Duran walked out of the alley to find James Floss waiting patiently in a clear isolation suit outside the black sedan. Duran approached, stepping onto the extended polarization pad to eject any clinging particles, then climbed into the car as Floss watched. Floss said nothing as the car lifted onto its wheels and rolled for nearest police barricade.
Finally Floss spoke, “Find anything?”
Duran shrugged, “Mostly things I didn’t want to know.”
“I would have brought you here in the morning if you wanted.”
“I got tired of waiting.”
Floss looked over through the cars interior lighting. “Don’t come down here alone again.”
3 Martian Days prior to NOVA Event
6
New Meridian City
Hebes Chasma Trench, Mars
En route to the Arsia Commonwealth Military Station
Duran lay listless, as the glory of a yellow earthen sun rose into the sky. He had seen the sunrise in many far away places, with strange stars and nearby immense bodies that joined the rising majesty, but nothing in existence brought the feeling of home with the rising of Sol. Humanity was inexorably tied to the Sun. But not this one, the one blaring into his eyes right now.
Never taking to sleep, Duran laid restlessly in the depths of a dark, cold trench, ninety-three million miles from the site of the scene unfolding on the wall screen in front of him. The small, poorly appointed room filled with the artificial light, until its harshness couldn’t be ignored.
Duran rose from his unsheeted rest and shut off the image. He ran some simskin across his face and cleaned off the stubble. He stared into the mirror, looking at the older face staring back at him. He was too young for the gray and stone looking back at him. He dressed and checked his chrono. It was almost time for Floss.
He put his day kit into the L-bag, and pulled on a pair of old service boots, shaping them with his hands into the perfect fit. Last was the Talon. He checked it, holding it a moment, feeling its weight and realizing the way in which his hands molded around its grip. The comfort in his hands was frightening. It needed no adjustment or slight alteration. The two were married together, his hands, his mind and the composites of the gun formed one. He released it to its holster, his hands feeling the emptiness of the weapns power. Duran slung the bag over his shoulder and headed out to meet Floss.
Floss stood patiently in the lobby, looking fresh and rested which irratated Duran. As he approached, Floss turned towards the entrance of the traveler’s quarters and outside to the waiting car. Duran followed.
The two rode in silence again as the car jetted through morning traffic, sidelining any cars on the travelway as they passed. As the cars lane navigator jumped paths to the lifter pad Floss finally spoke out, “We'll be catching the shuttle up to Phobos, provided the blow doesn't scratch it.” Floss quipped. “We already have clearance from Colonel Cochran to use their ICE-40.”
“Colonel Cochrane?” Duran asked.
Floss nodde
d. “He's the base intelligence officer, I believe. He's always helped us out even though we aren’t Commonwealth.”
“It’s not John Cochrane is it?” Duran asked.
Floss looked at him, “I think so. Do you know him? Quiet and serious guy. He's got a scar on the side of his face and he walks with kind of a limp.”
“I don’t know,” Duran responded
“I don’t usually see him, I normally go through his attaché. I'm sure Colonel Cochrane would meet with us if you know him. I gave them your name for clearance so they know you are coming.”
Within a few minutes they arrived at a lifter pad jutting just off the main chasm’s north wall below the lead line. There, an LTC police lifter squatted on the pad, its engines idling.
Once Duran and Floss were securely aboard, the lifter thrust upward with ease in the one third ESG, climbing up the walls of the trench and swiftly reaching the transparent containment ceiling that kept out the harsh summer environment of the surface. The early morning sky opened up as they passed through an open access tunnel. Sol was a tiny dot on the horizon through the pink haze.
As the lifter gained altitude Duran could make out the torrential dust storms raging to the north. How far away the swirling red blight was he couldn’t tell but it seemed to be edging closer. This was summer on Mars and the centuries old terraforming efforts still had not mastered the atmospheric nuances of the thin atmosphere and its unpredictable storms. As the lifter climbed to altitude and turned west a massive silver form passed into view, blocking out the horizon with its wide base. The Stratospire hulked above the tiny domes at its pedestal that served as the original settlements of Meridian City.