Mendez leaned Rutter back from the wheel, then recoiled. Rutter’s face had caved in around an impact across the bridge of her nose. Her eyes were wide and bulged out, staring sightlessly in different directions.
“Oh, jeez,” said Swann, stumbling backward.
Saxon looked back at the rocky expanse back to Base. There were two sets of tire tracks coming out, and one going back.
What had Rigby said? I won’t get back to Base—it won’t be me!
Caldwell had made it back to Base. But was it still Caldwell?
***
Saxon decided to move the bodies into the skimmer and take the rover back to Base. He again drove, his fingers avoiding a dark blotch on the steering wheel. He circled wide so he could approach the open bay door obliquely instead of head-on. As he pulled up near the gaping shadows of the open bay, Mendez volunteered to hop out and peer around the doorway. He did better, in fact; Saxon saw him slip inside and vanish. The four men still had their radios tuned into a common channel, but they heard nothing from Mendez for three long minutes, during which time Saxon could feel the treacly sweat of tension collect across his torso and along the rubber seals of his goggles. The door had not rolled up all the way; Saxon could see a convex dent in the door slats which kept it from retracting fully, and which had probably kept it from forming a seal at the bottom either.
They all started when Mendez stepped out into the sunlight and motioned them into the bay. Saxon drove in and waited for his eyes to adjust; aside from the skylights, the only illumination came from a pulsing red light over the outside door warning that it couldn’t close. Following Mendez’s lead of maintaining radio silence, even though he couldn’t rationally justify it, Saxon drove to the inner end of the bay. The second door that sealed the oxygen into the garage was still down, and another rover was parked haphazardly beside the personnel lock that could let individuals into the garage without needing to pressurize the entire bay. An amber light on the dash of the other rover told Saxon that it hadn’t been turned off after its last use; the automatic power shutoff had finally killed the engine after a period of idleness. The front fender bar bore feathery scrape marks that, Saxon was sure, matched the dent in the outer door that prevented it from closing.
The personnel lock was large enough to admit two at a time, so Saxon chose Swann to accompany him inside first. They crouched in the lock as it cycled, on the off-chance that someone was waiting just inside with a weapon ready to deploy at their heads. Was Saxon getting paranoid? He couldn’t tell if it was still that coppery flavor he could taste at the back of his throat, or the sour byproducts of too much adrenaline over too long a time.
There was, thankfully, no one inside the lit garage, and the cheerful lights beside the lock confirmed that interior pressure was normal. Saxon pulled off his breath mask and enjoyed a full lungful of air untainted by his own tension and fear.
The others cycled through the lock. Mendez shucked his own mask and the hood of his jumpsuit. “So what do we do next?”
“Find Caldwell,” Swann said. “Restrain him or neutralize him.”
“We should look for the others,” Chu objected. “They may have gotten Caldwell themselves.”
“We don’t even know that it is Caldwell,” said Mendez. “we should check medical.”
Saxon was surprised that there was still any question about that. Mendez was entertaining a hope that Saxon had rejected long before.
Chu said, “Now that we’re back, we can just call out wide and find out what’s going on.” His hand moved toward the nearest voice panel as he spoke.
Saxon reached out and stopped him. “If Caldwell hasn’t been watching out the window—if it is Caldwell—then he won’t know we’re back. Let’s not put him on his guard.”
“If it is Caldwell,” Mendez repeated. “If he’s not still lying in medical in a coma.”
“There are four of us,” Swann said. “We don’t all have to go together.”
“Right.” Saxon pointed at Swann and Chu. “You two circle through the cabins. Mendez and I will head directly to medical. If Caldwell is up and around, use the voice panels only if he’s been restrained or somehow neutralized. Otherwise, meet back here in half an hour. Let’s go.”
Saxon and Mendez still held their flashlights as their only weapons. Before leaving the garage, Swann stopped at Rigby’s wall rack of tools and selected a 24-inch wrench for himself. Chu let him lead the way out, sticking with his own flashlight.
Saxon discovered, as he and Mendez left by a different doorway, how many little sounds that he had never paid attention to before filled the base. The air regulation system maintained a white-noise hiss as it kept consistent air pressure and temperature throughout the installation, and its monitor boxes spaced evenly along the walls pinged softly to indicate their operating status. The light panels in the ceiling emitted an almost subliminal buzz, nearly a hum, and as Saxon walked softly down the corridor, he discovered that there were at least two distinct tones at which various panels operated. He and Mendez walked as smoothly as they could, but there were tiny crackles and pops from their weight on the floor tiles, sometimes a yard or more away from the footfall that had caused it.
After passing several closed doors, which Saxon ignored in favor of reaching the medical bay quickly, the first open door they came to was the conference and dining room. Saxon waved Mendez back, then peeked around the edge of the door frame.
Dishes with half-eaten meals sat in front of three of the seats. Most of the rest of the table was taken up by a human body, sprawled so far across that his head—Saxon could at least tell that it was one of the men—hung off the far side.
Saxon stepped in warily. The door to the food prep area at the far end was just barely ajar; he couldn’t see past it, but any sound he made out here would be audible to anyone behind that door.
He circled the table far enough to identify the body. It was Huyck, and his head wasn’t just hanging lazily off the table. His neck had been broken, and his head hung straight down from his shoulders at an angle Saxon couldn’t have imagined before.
Saxon walked backward out of the conference room, his eyes on the food prep door until he was back out in the hall to where Mendez waited with restless eyes.
“Huyck,” whispered Saxon, and nodded toward the next door on the right, which led to medical.
Together they crept down the hall. They saw from a distance that the medical door was similarly open, despite Kettrick’s habit. Saxon peeked in.
The examination area was deserted, and the furnishings had been practically destroyed. The bed which had held Caldwell was lying on its side, the linens ripped from it. Medical equipment stands were tipped every which way, leaving very little of the floor clear. Jars of supplies and medications had been smashed, littering every surface and leaving a briny smell in the air. The door to Kettrick’s small office was open, and Saxon could see it was empty.
Saxon turned to see Mendez’s eyes focused on the overturned bed. It was the proof that finally extinguished the man’s hope that Caldwell, his friend, wasn’t behind the radio silence—and the bodies.
But it wasn’t really Caldwell, Saxon reminded himself. I won’t get back to Base—it won’t be me! Had there been anything of Caldwell left inside him, even when he, Rigby and Kettrick had found him flung from the wrecked skimmer?
And now Rigby was dead. And where was Kettrick?
Saxon motioned Mendez to enter and shut the door so that silence wasn’t as imperative. Then he waded through the wreckage to Kettrick’s office, hoping that a splash of red wouldn’t announce that yet another murder had been committed here.
What caught his eye wasn’t red, but black—something scrawled on the beige top of Kettrick’s desk surface. He came around the desk to read it.
LOOKING FOR COFFEE—K.K.
For an instant, it just seemed like a horribly out-of-place echo of humor, almost surreal in these surroundings.
Then he got it.
“The food storeroom,” he said to Mendez, pointing the way back out into the corridor.
They crept out, watching both directions, and back through the meeting room to peer cautiously around the door at the far end.
The prep area was a small version of the kind of industrial kitchen found in a cafeteria or other institution. Stainless steel and porcelain covered almost every surface. At the far end of the kitchen was the door that led out to the food storeroom, a separate square building—almost a bunker—of Martian stone, connected by a narrow twelve-foot corridor with locking doors at either end to which only Kettrick had access. The door leading out of the prep area was ajar, the first time Saxon had ever seen it like that.
The overhead lights in the corridor were out, and Saxon didn’t want to stop and hunt for the controls. He crept to the far end, acutely conscious of the sound of his passage reflecting back to his ears in the close space; it was like wearing a face mask out on the surface.
The door at the other end of the corridor was closed. Saxon couldn’t see any signs of violence or occupancy in his flashlight’s beam; it was just a slab of featureless metal with a numeric dial above the door handle. He thought he might have heard motion beyond, but the door was too thick and his senses too hair-triggered with adrenaline to be sure. And would anyone in there respond to a simple knock, when they had gone in there to hide?
He raised the flashlight and tapped out: Shave-and-a-haircut...
An ominously long silence followed, until finally there were two spaced taps in response.
Saxon leaned back from the door. There was a pause, then the seal disengaged and it swung inward.
Kettrick faced him, holding a meat cleaver over her head.
Instantly her arm dropped as she recognized him. She collapsed forward into an embrace that Saxon found oddly enjoyable, even though he suspected that if Mendez had been in front, he would have received a similar welcome.
“Thank God you’re here!” Kettrick said as she quickly withdrew. Behind her, Saxon could see Cooper, awkwardly clutching a meat knife, and Duchesne, holding an object that Saxon recognized as the man’s own shoe.
Saxon motioned Mendez forward, and the two of them entered the storeroom and shut the door behind them. The structure was low and narrow, gently lit by a light strip powered by the solar cells on the roof, separate from the rest of the base’s power. There was only a narrow walkway down the center; all other space was occupied by uniform bricks of freeze-dried food from Earth.
“Did you just get back? Who else—did you meet anyone inside?” Kettrick set her cleaver on a box and retreated so there would be room—only just—for the five people.
Saxon nodded. “Barely got here. We... found Draney and Rutter out in a rover.” His tone of voice relieved him from needing to explain further. “And Huyck was in the meeting room.”
Cooper put her knuckle against her lips.
“The rest of us are in here,” Kettrick said.
“What about Chatterjee?” Saxon asked.
“He... didn’t make it.” Kettrick turned to Duchesne, who tapped the shoe in his hand on the door of a refirgerated cabinet. “He was injured by the time we got in here, and a few hours ago...” She shook herself. “Everyone came back with you? What about Ishida?”
“Ishida’s dead. And we lost Rigby.”
Saxon stumbled through a quick account of their encounter under Isidis Planitia, complicated by an instinctive compulsion to shy away from the most disturbing details—whether for his own good or for that of his listeners, he was unsure. When he was finished, Kettrick nodded.
“It was Caldwell,” she confirmed. “When it was still dark this morning, he started struggling. We had to restrain him, and that worked for a while. And he spoke for the first time, but he didn’t make much sense. He kept talking about ‘us’ and ‘our brothers’—I didn’t know who ‘us’ was, or if he was referring to himself in the plural. And the sound he made in between the words...” Kettrick shivered. “It sounded like he had a disk sander in his throat.
“And then right before dawn, he just—he screamed.” Kettrick’s face contorted as she remembered. “It was like no sound I’ve ever heard before. Like...” She struggled, then gave up the attempt at description. “And then he heaved his arms, and broke through the restraints just like that. I was alone in medical. I ran.”
Mendez looked to Saxon. “That was right when Rigby used his plasma saw. Maybe Caldwell wants vengeance.”
“Maybe vengeance... but not just vengeance.” Saxon checked his chronometer. “We need to meet Swann and Chu back at the garage. I don’t know how safe it will be out there with us, but—”
Cooper stepped up. “There’s no water in here. I’ve got to go out, if only to get a drink.”
Duchesne shrugged. Kettrick nodded. “Staying together makes sense, especially if we don’t trust the radios. And... Chatterjee.”
Saxon led the other four back through the passage out of the storeroom. Cooper’s breath caught in her throat as they opened the door from the prep area and trooped through past Huyck’s corpse. Mendez brought up the rear, and watched their backs as they made their way back to the garage.
When they were just around the corner from the garage entrance, Saxon heard something, or felt it in the soles of his feet: A high mechanical whine that become very familiar in the past twenty-four hours. Someone had a skimmer in the air, and even as he listened it receded into the distance.
He rushed into the garage. Chu lay on the floor a dozen steps in front of him. The back of his collar was red where blood from the back of his skull had spattered it. Kettrick pushed toward him while Saxon raced to the viewing slits to the outside.
The six-man skimmer was gone.
“He’s taken it!” he shouted. “Caldwell’s got the skimmer!”
“But where can he—” began Mendez.
“Back to Isidis,” Saxon answered. “His ‘brothers.’ He wants to rescue them.”
He turned around. Kettrick, kneeling over Chu, shook her head.
Mendez said, “Even if one or two of those things are still alive and he gets them out, what can he do? He knows he can’t come back here with them.”
“There’s more than one or two,” said Saxon. “Remember how many cubes there were? Thousands. And I’ll bet there’s one of those artificial bodies, dehydrated and stored, waiting for each cube. Waiting...”
Saxon froze, then turned back to the viewscreen the showing satellite paths over Mars.
“Waiting for water,” Saxon finished.
Kettrick joined him looking up at the viewscreen. “In the middle of Isidis Planitia,” she said. “Which we’re about to turn into the Sea of Isidis.”
Saxon looked at the innocuous vectors on the screen showing the Isidis basin, the target of all their work since they had come to this planet. There was already enough moisture in the air for at least one of the artificial things to resuscitate, even before it had then drained Ishida’s body dry. He didn’t know how many had gotten crushed when Rigby had sacrificed his life to close the mouth of the cavern—three at most? And even if they were crushed, did they really die? Or did the intelligences which had lain for eons beneath the Martian surface simply wait until another conveyance was available?
Saxon hadn’t ever entertained the fantasies of finding the “missing Martians” like Caldwell and others had, but he would have been delighted to encounter some other life form with which humans could relate and exchange knowledge. But these refugees from the fifth planet... He had seen what they worshiped. He had felt its presence in the substrate of his mind, aggressively hungering to replace his very being with Its own. It brought the metallic aftertaste back to his throat even to acknowledge to himself how fully, and yet incompletely, he had felt Its brutal awareness of him, and Its hunger to subjugate and devour from this planet outward. It Sees And Eats.
And now they, the alien intelligences—which meant It, their master and the center of their being—had a
human body to work through. And the only operating skimmer on the planet.
He turned away from the viewscreen. Duchesne stood near the door, guarding it now with a spare support strut for a rover jeep. Mendez looked at the workbench and tool racks.
“He took some plasma saws,” Mendez said. “At least two.”
Cooper stood over Chu’s body, her arms wrapped around herself despite the precisely controlled temperature. Kettrick watched him, waiting for a decision, a plan, a motivating force.
“First things first,” said Saxon. “Cooper, you’re second up on paragrav. Can you repair the wrecked skimmer?”
She shook her head, eyes still on Chu. “I trained on the geophysical operations. I can operate the paragrav satellite, and even repair it if it’s on the ground. But transport mechanics...” She shook her head again. “That was Rigby, and Ishida.”
One skimmer was ruined. Another was under the piloting hand, if not the mind, of Caldwell. There was a third skimmer, but it was still in storage in its component parts since its transport to Mars; even if Cooper had been confident in her ability to assemble it to working order, the assembly would have taken at least a dozen hours, and by then Caldwell would have reached the Isidis catacombs and perhaps freed his “brothers,” perhaps spirited the cubes away together with the preserved artificial bodies, just waiting for the reservoir that was to come to revive them...
He looked again at the viewscreen.
“Duchesne,” he said, “with the radio satellite still synchronous between us and Isidis, it should be able to pick up the skimmer’s transponder, right?”
Duchesne left his post by the door and came to join Saxon and Kettrick. “That’s correct,” he said.
“Patch the transponder signal in on this viewscreen,” Saxon said. “I want to be able to follow the skimmer’s progress.”
He and Kettrick stepped back as Duchesne placed his hands on the controls.
“We need to find Swann,” Mendez said. “He was with Chu.”
Chu. Saxon looked again to Chu’s body on the floor. Then he went to a set of cubbied shelving and withdrew a folded tarpaulin that Rigby had placed beneath machinery while he worked. He unfurled it over Chu’s body, and in the lazy gravity it descended like a feather until Chu was nothing more than a man-shaped lump beneath the tarp.
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