Pale Mars

by Garnett Elliott

  "He's got his reasons, trust me. Now, can you stand?"

  "I think so."

  "On three, then. One, two, three."

  Wobbling, leaning from one side to another, they managed to regain their feet. Nadezhda shuffled in a circle until she faced the window, but couldn't see much.

  "Your friend hog-tied us good," Ramos said.

  "Don't strain. It'll tighten the knots."

  "How the hell are we supposed to get out of this, then?"

  "Gennady wasn't thinking clearly. He bound me over my suit's gauntlets. There's a manual release on the forearm. If I can just … find the corner of the table, here …"

  It took several frantic minutes of raising their wrists in unison, then bringing the gauntlet down against the table's edge until she was able to trip the latch. Wriggling her hand, she worked it free of the leftmost gauntlet, then unlatched the right.

  "I've got a knife in my boot," Ramos said.

  She took out a keen-edged Bowie and used it to saw through the EVA tether. More precious time drained away. Once Ramos was freed he rubbed first at his wrist, then at the blood oozing from his nostrils.

  "Sorry about that," she said.

  "Yeah, well, remind me to stay on your good side."

  She snatched up field glasses and scanned the area around the platform. No little girl, but there, sitting with his back to a support column, hugging his knees, was Gennady. His shoulders heaved every now and then, as if he was crying hysterically.

  Ramos saw him, too. "Let's go get the little backstabber," he said, setting down his glasses.

  Nadezhda shook her head. "It might not be as it seems."

  "You mean …?"

  "I want you to stay behind and watch. Do you know much about explosives?"

  "Aside from using half-sticks of dynamite to catch fish with my daddy, no. I'm a restaurateur, remember?"

  She found the faulty detonator and turned it over in her hands. "I watched Gennady prepare the charges around the platform. They seemed simple enough to activate. But I didn't watch him connect the cord to the detonator, so the problem might be there. It could just be a few unattached leads on this end."

  "Hmmm." Ramos checked the cord's connection, then pried open the casing with his knife and peered inside.

  "This could be our last chance," Nadezhda continued. "I'm going to talk with Gennady. If I signal by raising my right hand over my head—like this—I want you to detonate, if you can. Otherwise, you'll need to find a good place to hide, somewhere you haven't shown us before. My crewmate Alyona should be landing shortly. Find her, and convince her to get out of here as quickly as possible."

  Ramos hunched his shoulders. "Lady, you think I'm going to just stand around and watch you sacrifice yourself? My ma didn't raise me that way."

  "No heroics, please. You're not trained for it."

  "You don't even have your gun."

  "Do you still have the shard-thrower? I didn't see Gennady take it."

  Ramos pulled the antique from his belt. "That's because he knew it wouldn't do any good."

  "Loaded?"

  "Of course."

  She thrust it into her empty holster. "There. Now I have a gun."

  "You're one hell of a gal," he said, shaking his head. "I might have to adjust my opinion of Communists."

  She surprised him by kissing his scraggly cheek. Just a peck; sentimentality wasn't her strong point. "We can't let this thing get to Earth, Ray. And that's exactly what will happen if we don't stop it here. I need you to do what I say."

  "Alright. Alright, captain."

  "Get to work on the detonator, and keep an eye out for my signal. We can't waste any more time. If that thing's Gennady and decides to leave, it can come at us again whenever it wants, in any disguise it wants."

  "What if that really is Gennady?"

  "Let me find out."

  She climbed from the booth. Her feet felt unsteady, with the sedatives in her system. Her mind, too, was foggier than it should be. She forced her attention on the figure in the distance.

  Gennady remained slumped against the beam. His shoulders had stopped moving, so maybe he wasn't crying anymore. She slowed her pace. Every step was more time for Ramos to get the detonator working. The dome felt eerily silent, save for the banal muzak playing in the background. And her own breathing. Waiting ahead: either an overly-ambitious Cosmonaut, or the destroyer of an entire civilization.

  The Lady or the Tiger?

  At three meters her clumsy feet scuffed pavement. Gennady turned around. His eyes were swollen red and his cheeks puffy. He looked at her for a long moment before lowering his head.

  "Let me guess," she said. "The vampire got away."

  He nodded, eyes still downcast. "So much for my admiralty. I took too long talking to you, in the booth. The girl was gone by the time I got here."

  "You don't seem surprised, to see me free."

  "I was in a hurry when I tied you up. Where's Ramos?"

  "Back at the booth. Asleep."

  "I'm sorry about all this, kapitan." He gestured around the empty platform. "I don't suppose you'll ever trust me again."

  "You can start by giving me my gun back."

  "Oh, right. Here."

  He handed her the Topchev. She noticed he still had his own, plus the hypogun tucked away in his belt. She noticed something else, as soon as her fingers curled around the grips: too light. Normally, a full load of liquid deuterium would bow her wrist when she handled the pistol. She kept her face blank as she transferred the shard-thrower to a thigh pocket, and re-holstered the empty Topchev.

  "That better?"

  "Much better, Gennady. We can talk about your insubordination later, after we're clear of this mess."

  "I'm glad you're so forgiving."

  "A necessary trait for a commanding officer."

  He swayed to his feet. All his sadness seemed to have vanished. The redness coloring his face was clearing; the puffiness around his eyes diminishing, rapidly. He grinned, showing bright teeth. "Honestly, I'd expect you to be angrier after what I just did. I mean, you've always been pretty angry with me in the past, for much less severe infractions."

  He locked eyes with her. The hornet-sounds came buzzing in her head, faint, but closing.

  She looked away. Ramos—God, she hoped he'd had enough time with that switch. She raised her right hand over her head, trying to make it look natural, like part of a yawn. Inwardly, she winced, imagining several kilograms of Tovex charge going off at once.

  For the second time that day, the anticipated blast didn't come.

  "Why'd you do that?" the Gennady-thing asked.

  "Do what?"

  "Make that funny gesture, just now. If I was the suspicious type I'd think you were signaling someone."

  She looked at him again, intending to deny. Yegor stared back at her. Yegor's head, on Gennady's slender shoulders. He winked.

  "Alright. I suppose I should've just killed you when you were tied up. My mistake." He drew his own Topchev and pointed —not at her, but the PA booth in the distance. Without bothering to aim, he squeezed the firing stud. At fifty meters, set for medium dispersal, the beam flashed out as a crimson cone. The booth caught fire, sagged. In seconds it became a conflagration of melting plastic and glass.

  "Adios, Ramos," he said.

  "You—"

  The barrel swiveled back to point at her. "Touch that shard-thrower and you're vapor."

  She kept her hands clear of her pockets.

  The Yegor-thing waggled the gun. "Nice weapons your people make. Too bad the Martians didn't have anything like it, or my job wouldn't have been so easy."

  His mannerisms—at once so casual, so human—disconcerted her. "Your job?"

  "A long story. I'm not from around here."

  His face flickered, wavered, flowed into something else: the broad, narrow-eyed visage of a Martian. It uttered nonsense syllables in a bassoon voice, several decibels too loud. Then it snapped back to Yegor. "It's
a little early to say, but I think I like your species better. Four lobes instead of three, and there's an interesting flavor to the sex-drive. I've never sampled anything like it before. This one called 'Yegor,' for example. When his mind wasn't puzzling out equations, he was imagining copulation with you in endless varieties."

  "Where's my engineer?"

  "Oh, I shat him out already. The body's over there, behind some fake bushes." The creature gestured with Gennady's hand. "I have to say, I didn't care for his offer. Never liked politics, let alone alien politics. I was hoping you'd think I was him and I could visit your planet unannounced. But I see you're too damn clever."

  She took a step backwards. "Azarova was right. You are a vampire."

  "Technically, I'm a psychovore. A living repository. I was made that way, to retain what I destroy." It tapped at its Yegor-shaped head. "Personally, I consider myself a gourmand. And before you start lecturing—I attach as much moral significance to eating as you do."

  "My species doesn't eat sentients."

  "Oh, the hell it doesn't. Your species just has a convenient definition of what 'sentience' is. Anyways, I'm getting tired of chopping logic." He/it looked up momentarily to check the sky. "Your co-pilot should be landing soon with my ticket off this rock. My 'Demeter,' as it were. Get the reference?"

  "I'm afraid I don't—"

  "The ship? In Dracula? The one that carries his body to England, with all the coffins onboard? Christ woman, don't you read? Half the colonists loved that one. And it's a Russian ship, too …"

  He/It started to advance, Yegor's jaw unhinging as it widened impossibly. The Topchev's barrel never wavered. Nadezhda steeled herself to draw the shard-thrower and fire; better to be vaporized than swallowed, body, mind, and soul.

  "Nadia!"

  She saw Ramos charging towards them, out the corner of her eye. For a second she thought he might be a hallucination, a result of her over-taxed brain descending into madness. But he was still there, his jaw set with determination. He gripped the Bowie knife in one hand and the detonator in the other, without the cord attached. There was no way he could've covered the distance from the booth to here so quickly, unless he'd been shadowing her the whole time.

  Yegor's face showed no reaction. It pointed the gun. Ramos broke into an awkward roll, momentum carrying his body behind a support column just as the Topchev's beam flashed. Molten steel spattered.

  She had the shard-thrower out, quick as thought. Jammed her fingers into the unfamiliar firing mechanism. The brass wand bucked, spat out its cloud of crystalline death. At this range accuracy wasn't an issue. Shrapnel tore into the thing's hand and struck sparks from the Topchev; a stray piece pulped its eyeball, exploding in a shower of pale blue ichor. It howled, that same high-pitch trill she'd first heard in the pumping station. The sound alone was enough to freeze her blood. But she found herself plunging forward, reaching for Gennady's gun.

  "That's it! Grab 'em!"

  Ramos came barreling out from behind the sundered beam. He wrapped both arms around the thing's torso, at the same time stabbing upwards with the Bowie. Sluicing sounds mixed with alien trills. Nadezhda closed to join the grapple, at once aware of the enormous strength heaving through Yegor's faux form. She couldn't see the Topchev; her hands scrabbled at its sides, touched what felt like a pistol-butt and tore it free. Above her, Yegor's head split down the middle and shaped itself into a saw-toothed maw.

  She blindly thrust the gun against its thigh. Instead of the sparks and heat of a fission beam, there was an all too familiar hiss. She'd fired the hypogun by mistake. The thing's keening oscillated into eardrum-shattering range. It reeled back, the full dose of liquid nitrogen already spreading over its leg, turning the flesh as hard as frost-rimed stone. Ramos held on. With a rending sound, the frozen limb broke off at the hip and shattered.

  "Help me," Ramos shouted. "Push him back, against that support column."

  "What're you—"

  "Just do it."

  She dropped the hypogun and pushed. It felt like trying to shove a boulder, but the Yegor-thing moved. Its maw-shaped head, now broad and flat like a Venus flytrap, snapped open and closed. A second leg began to extrude beneath the stump of the original. This one was slender, insect-like, and covered with spiky hairs.

  Nadezhda looked for the Topchev, but the thing's hands were empty. It must've tossed the gun somewhere—

  Thud. They'd forced it back against the column. She saw a Tovex charge wrapped around the steel beam. Ramos let go, used both his trembling hands to connect the leads from the detonator to the charge.

  "Ramos—"

  "Get out of here!"

  She reached down to help him. The thing's maw closed neatly over the top of his head. Teeth sunk into flesh, meeting the resistance of bone. He kept on working. "Goddamn it, Nadia," he yelled, his voice muffled, "I told you to—"

  It was the creature's reflexive kick that saved her. Pinned against the column, with its new leg, it shoved against her abdomen and flexed. She flew backwards, sailing off the platform. Even as she tumbled airborne she saw the maw slide downwards to encompass Ramos's shoulders. And still he yelled.

  "You're not dealing with just anyone here, slick, you've got a Texan by the short-hairs—"

  His finger stabbed.

  The blast hit after she struck the ground, lifted her bodily, and flung her again.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Fist of Freedom's atmospheric lander came roaring down out of lavender sky, retros guiding it towards the blasted concrete pad where the Sokol waited. Much farther above, the cigar-shaped silhouette of its mother ship hung in low orbit. An early evening storm had just blown itself out. Nadezhda and Alyona waited under the starboard wing of the Sokol, peering up at the American craft. Nadezhda's right arm was bound in a sling. Ever since the explosion six days earlier she'd been hearing a ringing in her ears, and it showed no signs of abating. She'd already decided to keep the injury to herself. Command could use it as an excuse to ground her; there was no telling what the repercussions would be for failing to procure the Last Martian.

  "No matter what happens," she told Alyona, "let me do all the talking."

  They maintained stoic expressions as wash from the lander's engines flung grit in their faces. Nadezhda had thought it more fitting to go without helmets, as a show of openness. She'd also stowed the Topchevs in the ship's armory, though the gesture made her feel vulnerable.

  The lander touched down with a graceless clang. A seam appeared in its sloped side, beneath the gaudy American flag. Pressure valves hissed open. The seam widened and a lip of steel lowered itself to the ground, becoming an exit ramp. Four figures in armored vacc suits hustled out, submachine guns hugged to their chests. They formed up two abreast, holding their weapons at port arms. Down through the human corridor marched a man in a dove gray suit with gold epaulets. Though he wore a respirator, his sandy blond crewcut and narrow cheekbones were at once familiar.

  Nadezhda fought the urge to roll her eyes.

  She'd been in radio contact with Captain Macready since the Fist entered Mars orbit, so his appearance came as no surprise. He approached the Sokol with weighty steps, his ego supplying its own sense of gravity. As he drew closer his face registered anger, then resentment, then softened when he made eye contact with Nadezhda. She swept her unbound hair over her shoulder. The American sighed beneath his respirator, tore the clumsy mask free, and seized her left hand to kiss it. Alyona's face tightened as if stifling a laugh.

  "Captain Gura—Nadia—if I'd known earlier it was you waiting for me I would've gotten out and pushed." He added: "You didn't tell me you were injured."

  She extricated her hand. "Nothing serious. And I'm pleased to see you too, Captain Macready. It's been a long time since Venus. I hope the … misunderstanding there didn't damage your career."

  "Forgive and forget, that's my motto." He gestured around them. "But it looks like you've landed in even more trouble, here."

  "Alyona h
as prepared a magnetic tape with a full debriefing, which I will present to you in the spirit of cooperation between our two—"

  "Can the formal stuff, alright? What the hell happened to the main dome? From the air, it looks like it was blown open."

  "As near as we can tell, there must have been an uncontrolled reaction in the fission pile." She was grateful for the respirator, hiding at least part of her face as she lied. "The explosion claimed half my crew. We still don't know what caused it, or the initial disaster itself. My guess would be political dissidents. We found a patch of high radioactivity out near the cairn towers, too."

  Macready's blue eyes remained flat as she spoke, offering no hint if he believed her. In truth, the Sokol's fission batteries had punched a hole in the main dome, after she and Alyona had verified there were no survivors inside. Atomic fire melted the pile of steel girders covering Ramos and the alien, melted the pumping station and all the withered bodies, too, until there was no trace of what had happened. They'd flown out to the cairn towers as well, to similarly dispose of the Volga and Dr. Whitcombe's corpse. An investigation would no doubt uncover holes in their story, but only after the Sokol was far away.

  And the Americans would never learn the secret of the Last Martian.

  Macready cleared his throat. "On the radio, you mentioned there was only one survivor. I'd like to speak with her if possible."

  "Of course. She's right over here."

  She led him under the port side of the ship, where Azarova, bundled for the cold, sat hunched against a landing strut. They'd found her hiding in a maintenance shack not far from the Howard Johnson's. Her dark eyes widened when she saw Macready.

  "Please, please take me with you," she said, speaking in plaintive English. A thick strand of drool escaped her mouth as she fumbled forward to embrace him. Some of it got on the dove gray suit.

  "Ma'am, if you'd just—"

  "This place is haunted by vampires. I saw one of them when it appeared in the hotel. It swallowed people like a snake swallows eggs, but it left me alone because it didn't like how my mind tastes …"

  Macready managed to slip out of her hold. He stepped back, brushing at the saliva on his chest, while Alyona took the archeologist by the wrist and led her away.