Empress of Mars

by Kage Baker

  “And beer,” said Alf. “Whoo-hoo!”

  “The new battle cry of Mars, ladies and gentlemen!” Chiring ranted. “The ancient demand of Beer for the Workers! Now, if you're still getting the picture from the monitor clearly, you can see the slope of Mons Olympus rising before us. Our road is that paler area between the two rows of boulders. We, er, we're fighting quite a headwind, but our progress has been quite good so far, due to the several ice freighters kindly donated by the Haulers Union, which are really doing a tremendous job of moving Ms. Griffith's structure.”

  “Yeh, fanks,” said Alf.

  “And the, er, the chains used for this amazing feat are the same gauge used for tackling and hauling polar ice, so as you can imagine, they're quite strong—” Chiring babbled, keeping his camera on the forward monitor because he had spotted something he did not understand in the rear monitor. He paused again and squinted at it.

  “What the hell's that?” he whispered to Alf. Alf looked up at the monitor.

  “Uh-oh,” he said. “That's a Strawberry.”

  “And, and, er, ladies and gentlemen, if you'll follow now as I turn my cam on the rear monitor, you can see one of the unique phenomena of the Martian landscape. That sort of lumpy pink thing that appears to be advancing on the Settlement Base at high speed is what the locals call a Strawberry. Let's ask local weather expert Mr. Alfred Chipping to explain just exactly what a Strawberry is. Mr. Chipping?”

  Alf stared into the cam, blinking. “Well, it's—it's like a storm kind of a fing. See, you got yer sandstorms, wot is bad news eh? And you got yer funny jogeraphy up here and jolligy and, er, now and again you get yer Strawberry, wot is like all free of ‘em coming together to make this really fick sandstorm wot pingpongs off the hills and rocks and changes direction wifout warning.”

  “And—why's it that funny spotty color, Mr. Chipping?”

  “Cos it's got rocks in,” grunted Alf, slapping all three accelerator levers up with one blow of his hamhand.

  Chiring began to pray to Vishnu, but he did it silently, and turned his camera back to the forward monitor.

  “Well, isn't that interesting!” he cried brightly. “More details on the fascinating Martian weather coming up soon, ladies and gentlemen!”

  * * * *

  “I'll be damned,” said the Brick, in a voice that meant he had abruptly sobered. “There's a Strawberry down there.”

  “Where?” Mary craned her head, instinctively looking for a window, but he pointed at the rear monitor. “What's a Strawberry?”

  “Trouble for somebody,” the Brick replied, accelerating. “Settlement Base, looks like.”

  “What?”

  “Oh!” said Mona. “You mean one of those cyclone things like Tiny Reg was in?”

  “What?”

  “Yeah,” grunted the Brick, accelerating more.

  “Tiny Reg said he was hit by one down by Terra Sirenum and it just took his freighter and picked it up with him in it and he went round and round so fast it broke all his gyros and his compass as well,” Mona explained.

  “Bloody Hell!” Mary began to undo her seat harness, but the Brick put out an arm to restrain her.

  “You don't want to do that, babe,” he said quietly.

  “What do we care if it hits Settlement Base, anyroad?” Mona asked.

  “Girl, your sister's down there!”

  “Oh!” Mona looked up at the monitor in horror, just as the Strawberry collided with the new Temple of Diana, which imploded in a puff of crimson sand.

  “Alice!” Mary screamed, searching across the monitors for a glimpse of the transport station. There was the shuttle, safe on its pad, lights still blinking in loading patterns. There it stayed safe, too, for the Strawberry turned now and shot away from the Base, tearing through Tubes as it went, and the lockout klaxons sounded as oxygen blew away white like seafoam in the burning-cold day.

  “Never saw one come up on Tharsis before,” was all the Brick said, steering carefully.

  “But the transport station's safe!” Mona said.

  “Goddess thank You, Goddess thank You, Goddess.... Is it getting bigger?” Mary stared fixedly at the monitor bank.

  “No,” said the Brick. “It's just getting closer.”

  * * * *

  Within the Empress, Mr. Morton scrambled spiderlike along the network of crossing stabilizer struts, which had telescoped out to prop the Empress’ walls like glass threads in a witchball. He peered down worriedly at the floor. It was heaving and flexing rather more than he had thought it would. He looked over at the telltale he had mounted on the wall to monitor stress changes, but it was too far away to read easily.

  “Are we going to be okay?” inquired Manco, remarkably stoic for a man dangling in a harness ten meters above uncertain eternity. The Heretic swung counterclockwise beside him, her red eye shut, listening to the clatter of her saucepans within their wired-up cupboards.

  “Masks on, I think,” said Mr. Morton.

  “Gotcha,” said Manco, and he slipped his on as Mr. Morton did the same, and gulped oxygen, and after a moment he nudged the Heretic as she orbited past. “Come on, honey, mask up. Leaks, you know?”

  “Yeah,” said the Heretic, not opening her eye, but she slipped on her mask and adjusted the fit.

  “So what do we do?” Manco asked.

  “Hang in there,” said Mr. Morton, with a pitch in his giggle suggesting the long sharp teeth of impending catastrophe.

  “Ha bloody Ha,” said Manco, watching the walls. “We're shaking more. Are they speeding up out there?”

  “Oh, no, certainly not,” Mr. Morton said. “They know better than to do that. No more than two kilometers an hour, I told them, or the stresses will exceed acceptable limits.”

  “Really?” Manco squinted through his goggles at a bit of rushing-by ground glimpsed through a crack on the floor that opened and shut like a mouth.

  “All right, here's something we can do—” Mr. Morton edged his way along a strut to the bundle of extras. “Let's reinforce! Never hurts to be sure, does it?” He pulled out a telescoping unit and passed it hand over hand to Manco. “Just pop that open and wedge it into any of the cantilevers I haven't already braced.”

  Manco grabbed the strut and twisted it. It unlocked and shot out in two directions, and he swung himself up to the nearest joist to ram it into place.

  “Splendid,” said Mr. Morton, unlocking another strut and wedging it athwart two others.

  “Should I be doing that too?” asked the Heretic, opening her good eye.

  “Well, er—” Mr. Morton thought of her inability to hold on to a pan, let alone a structural element requiring strength and exactitude in placement, and kindly as possible he said: “Here's a thought: why don't you rappel down to that big box there on the wall, you see? And just, er, watch the little numbers on the screen and let us know if they exceed 5008. Can you do that?”

  “Okay,” said the Heretic, and went down to the telltale in a sort of controlled plummet. Below her, the floor winked open and gave another glimpse of Mars, which seemed to be going by faster than it had a moment earlier.

  “This box says 5024,” the Heretic announced.

  Mr. Morton said a word he had never used before. Manco, hanging by one hand, turned to stare, and the Heretic's ocular implant began to whirr in and out, gravely disturbing the fit of her mask.

  * * * *

  “So, Mr. Brick,” said Mary in a voice calm as iron, “Am I to understand that the storm is bearing down upon us now?”

  “Bearing up, babe, but that's it, essentially,” said the Brick, not taking his eyes off the monitor.

  “Can we outrun it, Mr. Brick?”

  “We might,” he said, “If we weren't towing a house behind us.”

  “I see,” said Mary.

  There followed what would have been a silence, were it not for the roar of the motors and the rotors and the rising percussive howl of the wind.

  “How does one release the tow li
nes, Mr. Brick?” Mary inquired.

  “That lever right there, babe,” said the Brick.

  “Mum, that's our house!” said Mona.

  “A house is only a thing, girl,” said Mary.

  “And there's still people in it! Mr. Morton stayed inside, didn't he? And Manco stayed with him! They're holding it together!”

  Mary did not answer, staring at the monitor. The Strawberry loomed now like a mountain behind them, and under it the Empress seemed tiny as a horseshoe crab scuttling for cover.

  “And there's always the chance the Strawberry'll hit something and go poinging off in another direction,” said the Brick, in a carefully neutral voice.

  “Mr. Brick,” said Mary, “Basing your judgment on your years of experience hauling carbon dioxide from the icy and intolerant polar regions, could you please think carefully now and tell me exactly what chance there is that the Strawberry will, in fact, change direction and leave us alone? In your opinion, see?”

  “I absolutely do not know,” the Brick replied.

  “Right,” said Mary. She reached out and pulled down the lever to release the tow line.

  A nasty twanging mess was avoided by the fact that Alf, in his freighter, had made the same decision to cast loose at nearly the same second, as had Tiny Reg (who had actually lived through a Strawberry after all and who would have cast loose even earlier, had his reflexes not been somewhat impaired by seventeen imperial pints of Red Crater Ale).

  They all three sheared away in different directions, as though released from slings, speeding madly over the red stony desolation and slaloming through piles of rock the color of traffic cones. Behind them the Empress of Mars drifted to a halt, its tow lines fluttering like streamers. The Strawberry kept coming.

  * * * *

  “5020,” the Heretic announced in a trembling voice. “5010. 5000. 4050.”

  “Much better,” said Mr. Morton, gasping in relief. “Good sensible fellows. Perhaps they were only giving in to the temptation to race, or something manly like that. Now, I'll just get out my flexospanner and we'll—”

  “4051,” said the Heretic.

  “What the hell's that noi—” said Manco, just before the ordered world ended.

  * * * *

  On thirty-seven monitors, which was exactly how many there were on the planet, horrified spectators saw the Strawberry bend over as though it were having a good look at the Empress of Mars; then they saw it leap away, only giving the Empress a swat with its tail end as it bounced off to play with the quailing sand dunes of Amazonia Planitia. The Empress, for its part, shot away up the swell of Mons Olympus, rotating end over end as it went.

  * * * *

  Mr. Morton found himself swung about on his tether in ever-decreasing circles, ever closer to a lethal-looking tangle of snapping struts to which he was unfortunately still moored. The Heretic caromed past him, clinging with both arms to the stress telltale, which had torn free of the wall. Something hit him from behind like a sack of sand, and then was in front of him, and he clutched at it and looked into Manco's eyes. Manco seized hold of the nearest strut with bleeding hands, but his grasp was slick, and it took both of them scrabbling with hands and feet to fend off the broken struts and find a comparatively still bit of chaos where they clung, as the floor and ceiling revolved, revolved, slower now revolving—

  Floor upwards—

  Righting itself—

  Going over again, oh no, was the floor going to crack right open?—

  Still tumbling—oh, don't let it settle on its side, it'll split open for sure—

  Righting itself again—

  And then a colossal lurch as the wind hit the Empress, only the ordinary gale force wind of Mars now but enough to sail anything mounted on ag-units, and Mr. Morton thought: We're going to be blown to the South Pole!

  Something dropped toward them from above, and both men saw the Heretic hurtling past, still clutching the stress telltale as well as a long confusion of line that had become wrapped about her legs. She regarded them blankly in the second before she went through the floor, which opened now like split fruit rind. The line fell after her and then snapped taut, in the inrush of freezing no-air. There was a shuddering shock and the Empress strained at what anchored it, but in vain.

  The men yelled and sucked air, clutching at their masks. Staring down through the vortex of blasting sand, Manco saw Mr. Morton's neoGothic pumping station with the stress telltale bedded firmly in its roof, and several snarls of line wound around its decorative gables.

  And he saw, and Mr. Morton saw too, the Heretic rising on the air like a blown leaf, mask gone, her clothing being scoured away but replaced like a second skin by a coating of sand and blood that froze, her hair streaming sidelong. Were her arms flung out in a pointless clutching reflex, or was she opening them in an embrace? Was her mouth wide in a cry of pain or of delight, as the red sand filled it?

  And Manco watched, stunned, and saw what he saw, and Mr. Morton saw it too, and they both swore ever afterward to what they saw then, which was: that the Heretic turned her head, smiled at them, and flew away into the tempest.

  * * * *

  “Take us back!” Mary shrieked. “Look, look, it's been blown halfway up the damn volcano, but it's still in one piece!”

  The Brick dutifully came about and sent them hurtling back, through a cloud of sand and gravel that whined against the freighter's hull. “Looks like it's stuck on something,” he said.

  “So maybe everybody's okay!” cried Mona. “Don't you think, Mum? Maybe they just rode inside like it was a ship, and nobody even got hurt?”

  Mary and the Brick exchanged glances. “Certainly,” said Mary. “Not to worry, dear.”

  But as they neared the drilling platform, it was painfully obvious that the Empress was still in trouble. Air plumed from a dozen cracks in the dome, and lay like a white mist along the underside, eddying where the occasional gust hit it. Several of the ag-units had broken or gone offline, causing it to sag groundward here and there, and even above the roar of the wind and through the walls of the cab, Mary could hear the Empress groaning in all its beams.

  “Mum, there's a hole in the floor!” Mona screamed.

  “I can see that. Hush, girl.”

  “But they'll all be dead inside!”

  “Maybe not. They'd masks, hadn't they? Mr. Brick, I think we'd best see for ourselves.”

  The Brick just nodded, and made careful landing on the high plateau. They left Mona weeping in the cab and walked out, bent over against the wind, deflecting sand from their goggles with gloved hands.

  “YOU GOT UNITS 4, 6 AND 10 DEAD, LOOKS LIKE,” announced the Brick. “IF WE SHUT OFF 2, 8 AND 12, THAT OUGHT TO EVEN OUT THE STRESS AND LET HER DOWN SOME.”

  “WILL YOU GIVE ME A LEG UP, THEN, PLEASE?”

  The Brick obliged, hoisting Mary to his shoulders, and there she balanced to just reach the shutoff switches, and little by little the Empress evened out, and settled, and looked not quite so much like a drunken dowager with her skirts over her head. Mary was just climbing down when Alf and Tiny Reg pulled up in their freighters. Chiring scrambled from Alf's cab and came running toward her with his cam held high.

  “UNBELIEVABLE!” he said. “IT'S AN ACT OF THE GODS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! NARROW ESCAPE FROM CERTAIN DEATH! FREAK STORM DEPOSITING BUILDING INTACT ON VERY SITE INTENDED! MARS'S FIRST RECORDED MIRACLE!”

  “SHUT THE DAMN THING OFF,” Mary told the audience of Posterity. “WE'VE GOT PEOPLE INSIDE.”

  Chiring gulped, seeing the wreckage clearly for the first time. He ran for the Empress, where the Brick was already taking a crowbar to the airlock.

  “MUM!” Rowan jumped from Tiny Reg's cab. She reached her mother just as Mona did the same, and they clung to Mary, weeping.

  “HUSH YOUR NOISE!” Mary yelled. “WE'RE ALIVE, AREN'T WE? THE HOUSE IS HERE, ISN'T IT?”

  “DAMN YOU, MUM, WHAT'LL WE BREATHE UP HERE?” Rowan yelled back. “HOW'LL WE LIVE? WE'LL FREEZE!”r />
  “THE GODDESS WILL PROVIDE!”

  Rowan said something atheistical and uncomplimentary then, and Mary would have slapped her if she hadn't been wearing a mask, and as they stood glaring at each other Mary noticed, far down the slope below Rowan, a traveling plume of grit coming up the road. It was the CeltCart.

  By the time the cart reached the plateau, Mary had armed herself with the Brick's crowbar, and marched out swinging it threateningly.

  “COCHEVELOU, YOU'RE ON MY LAND,” she said. She aimed a round blow at his head but it only glanced off, and he kept coming and wrapped his arms around her.

  “DARLING GIRL, I'M BEGGING YOUR PARDON ON MY KNEES,” said Cochevelou. Mary tried to take another swipe at him but dropped the crowbar.

  “HOUND,” she gasped, “GO BACK TO EARTH, TO YOUR SOFT LIFE, AND I, ON MARS, WILL DRY MY TEARS, AND LIVE TO MAKE MY ENEMIES KNEEL!”

  “AW, HONEY, YOU DON'T MEAN THAT,” Cochevelou said. “HAVEN'T I GONE AND GIVEN IT ALL UP FOR YOUR SAKE? THE SPOILED DARLINGS CAN ELECT THEMSELVES ANOTHER CHIEFTAIN. I'M STAYING ON.”

  Mary peered over his shoulder at the CeltCart, and noted the preponderance of tools he had brought with him: anvil, portable forge, pig iron ... and she thought of the thousand repairs the Empress's tanks and cantilevers would now require. Drawing a deep breath, she cried:

  “OH, MY DEAR, I'M THE GLADDEST WOMAN THAT EVER WAS!”

  “MUM! MUM!” Mona fought her way through the blowing sand. “THEY'VE COME ROUND!”

  Mary broke from Cochevelou's embrace, and he followed her back to the cab of the Brick's freighter, where Manco and Mr. Morton were sitting up, or more correctly propping themselves up, weak as newborns, letting Alf swab BioGoo on their cuts and scrapes.

  “ARE YOU ALL RIGHT, BOYS? WHERE'S THE HERETIC GONE?” Mary demanded.

  Mr. Morton began to cry, but Manco stared at her with eyes like eggs and said, “There was a miracle, Mama.”

  * * * *

  Miracles are good for business, and so is the attraction of a hot bath in a frozen place of eternal dirt, and so are fine ales and beers in an otherwise joyless proletarian agricultural paradise. And free arethermal energy is very good indeed, if it's only free to you and costs others a packet, especially if they have to crawl and apologize to you and treat you like a lady in addition to paying your price for it.