In the Courts of the Crimson Kings

by Stirling, S. M.

  Weapons technology on Mars has long been in a state of relative stasis, like most other tembst. This is partially attributable to the prolonged contraction of population and economic activity in the post-Imperial period; the surplus for large wars and indeed for intensive scientific research does not exist. Furthermore, the general attitude is that optimum solutions to most tembst-related problems were discovered long ago and that further effort is a waste of time. Martian culture lacks the concept of progress. Rather, it views the present as a long declension from the glories of the High Imperial period. And the Crimson Dynasty at its height had a global police force, at most a gendarmerie rather than an army; its equipment reflected this orientation.

  Yet even during the period of conflict that followed the breakup of the planetary empire—what Martian historiography refers to as the Age of Dissonance—there is little evidence of an arms race, despite seemingly strong incentives as provinces and fragments of provinces broke free of control from the center and fought each other for dwindling resources and critical territory.

  Another factor is the inherent limitations of Martian biological technology. While subtle and often very effective, tembst tends to lack the raw power of Earth’s post–Industrial Revolution approach to technology. It arose on a planet without fossil fuels or uranium, where basic energy sources were limited to those that could be harvested from plants—that is, from life, and life on Mars is sparser than that on Earth or Venus. Hence use of tembst always required careful cost-consciousness and intensive conservation and recycling; the necessity for this has been so self-evident that it has never been seriously disputed. Biological energy used for machines or weapons always competed directly with food for the population.

  Explosives are known, but are often rather feeble because of the high cost of manufacture; the primary weapons are based on toxins delivered by relatively low-velocity projectiles propelled by methane-air combustion, and an assortment of lethal or damaging fungi, enzymes, and incendiary devices. These are often very deadly, but effective defenses or countermeasures also exist. It follows that hand-to-hand fighting with bladed weapons has remained a major factor in most combat.

  Yet Martian civilization could probably have invented more powerful weapons if motivated to do so. The extremely rationalist approach to conflict of all recorded Martian cultures seems to be the ultimate reason more resources are not devoted to this end. Martians fight wars, but they have never had anything analogous to crusades, jihads, or the industrialized “total war” of the twentieth century on Earth.

  Martians will fight, and fight with vicious ingenuity and determination as long as they see a probable advantage to doing so; when the balance of power is clearly demonstrated, they will then negotiate and make peace with little lasting residue of hostility. This resembles some patterns in Terran history—the “cabinet warfare” of Enlightenment-era Europe, the formalized condottiere warfare of the Italian Renaissance, or the period of the Warring States in China before the rise of Chin—but is more uniform and thorough-going, and appears more “natural” to the Martian mind. Similarly, there is a universal reluctance to fight in ways that damage the prizes for which the struggle takes place.

  In this context, the lack of competitive innovation in weapons technology makes considerable sense. Martians engage in conflict for limited aims; innovation would increase the overall costs of the system without in the long term giving any one party a decisive advantage. This calculation is similar to that which prevented all parties in World War Two from using poison gas, and which has to date prevented widespread use of nuclear weapons on Earth, but such unspoken bargains appear to be more natural to Martians than to their Terran cousins.

  Mars, City of Dvor Il-Adazar (Olympus Mons)

  Pits beneath the Palace of Restful Contemplation

  May 25, 2000 AD

  Jeremy paused to strip the harness and weapons from one of the unconscious—he hoped they were just unconscious—guards in the corridor. That gave him a pistol with clips of darts and syringes of gun-food, sword, dagger, and personal items—iron-ration biscuits that tasted and felt like the metal, a small flask of water, and Martian grooming gear. He tossed the pouch containing the latter; it wouldn’t help him shave and he was damned if he was going to clear out ear wax by letting a miniature beetle eat it in situ.

  Besides, a brief thumb test showed the dagger was sharp enough to shave with. This Prince Heltaw evidently got his personal troops good equipment.

  While he was busy, Doctor Daiyar put a small ceramic canister on the tunnel floor, gave the top a very careful twist, and stepped back. He didn’t want to know what it did, and followed her silently when she turned and started trotting down the corridor.

  After a few minutes the doors to the cells were retracted, their organic locks long removed or dead; a thin film of fine dust coated the floor, making him cough as their feet stirred it into a dry mist. They were probably the first to come this way for a very long time. About the same time, the glow-globes stopped—or rather, became inert and dark.

  “Wait up!” Jeremy yelped. “I can’t see!”

  Something was pushed into his hand . . . or was placed against it and grabbed his hand; he made himself stop his first impulse, which was to beat it off against the stone wall. It squirmed. Gritting his teeth, he applied it to his face. Four tentacles wrapped themselves around his head and shook hands behind it; he could feel them knotting together and then smoothing out. Waxy, flexible flesh covered his eyes; then a greenish light seemed to appear, and it coalesced into the face of Doctor Daiyar, who had a similar device on her face.

  Fortunately, it wasn’t one of the ones that plugged into your nerves; he wasn’t even sure if those would work with a Terran and he didn’t want to experiment. It just showed things on the equivalent of a viewscreen. From the glowing, mottled appearance of his surroundings, he suspected that he was seeing heat, an infrared view. In Martian terms it was cheap and nasty, inferior modern tembst rather than the subtle power of the ancient Imperial variety.

  I don’t care, he thought, and said aloud, “Thank you.”

  Actually I said “I express polite appreciation for your assistance,” he thought. But it comes to about the same thing.

  The doctor shrugged. “You would be hard to guide if you were effectively blind,” she said. “And I anticipate rewards of extreme generosity for your safe delivery. Bringing you to the other edge of the board for doubling will decide the outcome of this round of the Game of Life.”

  “Why did you wait four . . . no, five now . . . days,” Jeremy asked, “if you were going to spring me anyway?”

  “Releasing you was contingent on the random occurrence of favorable conditions. Most of Heltaw sa-Veynau’s Coercives have been drawn off to some other endeavor, and the rest were distracted,” Doctor Daiyar said. “Thus risk was reduced to a reasonable level, calculated against the possible result. I could then seize an opportunity to poison a number of the remaining guards, and then shoot the last two before they became aware of my lethal treachery.”

  “Oh,” Jeremy said.

  Well, you asked. It is like atanj and that’s a game where you have to keep in mind that any piece may change sides at any moment.

  The doctor-spy went on, “When the periodic all-is-in-order signal is not given, more of my employer’s Coercives will appear, deduce my actions, and pursue us.”

  As they spoke, she took a right turn, then a left, and then more in bewildering sequence. The tunnels mostly joined at right angles, but sometimes in angled Y-forks; he got the feeling that they’d originally been based on natural fissures or volcanic tubes, and such things didn’t form exactly the same way on Mars as they did on Earth. The floor coverings were more deeply worn here than they had been in the cell he’d occupied, or the corridor outside it nearer the Paiteng base. Given the dust, that probably meant they’d been abandoned when maintenance costs exceeded some curve of use. Occasionally they came through a hall or chamber, ranging fr
om living-room-size to one about the same dimension’s as the interior of St. Paul’s in Rome.

  “Where are we heading, and how the hell are they going to follow us?” Jeremy asked.

  There was relief in his voice; but he was never going to be entirely easy about walking under a darkened ceiling below a Martian city again. Not after Rema-Dza.

  “We will attempt to reach the deep levels. There are tunnels there that give ready access to areas occupied by the Imperial Coercives. And they will follow us with—”

  The word she used meant roughly “sniffers,” implying scent-hunting domestic canids.

  “That was why I left the scent-bomb in the corridor; I have several more. But they will delay pursuit, not completely frustrate it.”

  Jeremy remembered the weird dog-thing at the entrance to the central dome in Zar-tu-Kan and shivered. A bloodhound that could talk wasn’t pleasant to contemplate.

  “How long will it take?”

  “Assuming we survive and overcome all obstacles with dispatch, seven days.”

  “Yikes!” he said. “Wait a minute—pursuit isn’t an obstacle.”

  “No. However, the pits, even the abandoned sections, are far from uninhabited. This is Dvor Il-Adazar. The water resources are large and life is correspondingly abundant.”

  Yikes! he thought; he was afraid if he said it aloud this time, it would come out something more like “yelp!” Or even “help!” Rema-Dza had been bad enough, and it was in the Deep Beyond.

  “Feral engines?” he said, clearing his throat.

  “Those, and others. That is why the tunnels are not blocked beyond the detention center.”

  “How so?”

  “It was assumed that no rational captive would attempt to escape, given the alternatives.”

  They came to a spiral staircase, winding down around a central pillar.

  “Ah, a swift means of descent. Follow me.”

  The doctor hopped onto the balustrade. It was polished and smooth; she vanished around the corner with a ssssss of robes on stone.

  The Terran hesitated for a long moment. Those, and others, he thought, looking into the pit of darkness below. He remembered a theory some of the paleontologists at Kennedy Base had expressed, that the first protohumans introduced on Mars a couple of hundred thousand years ago had spent a good long while as cavern dwellers right around here before coming up and conquering the surface.

  Then: “Oh, what the hell,” Jeremy said, grinning. “Here goes!”

  He jumped up, hooking a boot over the rail below himself for braking if he had to, drew his dart pistol, settled his sword, and kicked himself into motion. Speed built, and he was accelerating in a descending whirl until the cold air rushed into his face like the wind in the mountains of home, and friction caused the seat of his pants to heat up despite the insulation of the robe’s tough fabric. His hair fluttered, and the long sleeves peeled back up his forearms.

  “Yeee-ha!”

  Mars, Over Dvor Il-Adazar (Mons Olympus)

  Altitude 11,000 feet

  May 26, 2000 AD

  The air was no thinner outside the Useful Burdens, but it seemed so, and it was colder; the oxygen mask labored to compress air for Teyud. She spread her limbs to stop the natural tumble, and the horizon stopped flipping from land to sky and stabilized. She was on her back when it did, and she could see the long, finned teardrop of the airship silhouetted against the aching blue of the sky, like a thistle-ball shedding seeds in a breeze as the crew abandoned her. The binoculars focused with their new, unnerving speed; she could even see the faces of the individuals as they planed away from the vessel. Paiteng wheeled about it, the riderless ones plunged away sharply at command-whistles from their mounted handlers.

  Then her vision darkened for a moment as two million cubic feet of hydrogen exploded and the binoculars shielded against the glare. All of the crew were far enough away to escape, as were most of the Paiteng with riders, but two were caught as the frame of the burning flier plummeted to the ground. Behind the oxygen mask Teyud’s lips parted in amusement; they must have been very surprised . . . very briefly. The rest of the riders turned in disciplined pairs and began stooping downward, splitting up to follow the crew; those scattered in turn, body-surfing through the air to make their pursuers’ task as difficult as possible. All of them would delay triggering their parachutes until the last possible moment, that they might spend as little time as possible dangling slowly and to make the attackers’ task of identifying Teyud as difficult as they could.

  Teyud rolled facedown, selected a spot below—an abandoned terrace below a mansion, between two peaks shaped into half-dhwar faces—and turned her body into a knife, head down and arms at her side. That position presented the least resistance to the air, and the ground swelled with alarming speed. Two Paiteng suddenly dove past her, braking with a boom of wings and matching her speed at fifty yards to either side—well beyond practical pistol range at this height. The riders turned the blank black-goggled shapes of their faces toward her, studying her . . . and then signing Confirmation: target to each other.

  She prepared to dodge a strike by a Paiteng’s claws, but the pair of riders were too skilled, their birds too highly trained, for crude tactics like that. One of them unstrapped himself and launched his body into the air toward her, swimming in the swift-moving onrush with minimal flicks, like a fish in water. The other unslung his dart rifle and angled his mount in closer. The riderless bird spiraled below them, matching the speed of their fall and ready for the rider to steer her unconscious body to its saddle. It couldn’t support two for long, but landing wouldn’t be much of a problem.

  They were halfway to the ground. Teyud pulled the oxygen mask from her face and tossed it aside to flail its tentacles as it vanished in the wind. The rifle spat, and the dart banged painfully into her gut—the rider was a good shot. Robe cloth wouldn’t always keep out a rifle dart, but this time it did. Teyud let herself go completely limp; even let the pistol whip away from her relaxing fingers. Now she fell instead of steering herself, limbs flailing akimbo, the world spinning around her once more.

  The dismounted rider swooped in—he had only seconds to act, now—hands reaching out for her, ready to accept a bad thump to achieve his goal.

  Thump.

  Teyud forced herself not to grunt; there was a sharp pain in her partially healed shoulder. Then they were spinning around the axis of their meeting, and the man was struggling with arms and legs to stabilize her. Teyud waited until he had. His mouth was a compressed line of fierce concentration; then her own left hand shot out and grabbed him by a chest-strap, and the other came up with the long curved knife.

  He was very fast; she could feel his determination, somehow. He managed to get a wrist on hers; and then something made him let go, thrashing to escape. That killed him; the blade punched through his body suit and up into the heart and lungs. She released him to fall straight down and snatched at the toggle of her parachute. It would be extremely close . . .

  Thump.

  The shock of the fabric scoop’s impact on the air made her teeth click together and her vertebrae gave a series of clicking sounds; some distant corner of her mind outside the diamond focus of concentration reflected that the orthopedic effect would be beneficial. The ground came up and hit the soles of her boots a bare minimum of time later; if she hadn’t had the strong bones and tendons of the Thoughtful Grace—and the Tollamunes—she would have been injured and rendered helpless, if not dead. As it was, the rolling impact left her breathless for an instant.

  She hit the quick-release catch of the parachute and rolled erect. The cloth billowed out of the way, to reveal the dead rider’s Paiteng swooping toward her. She could feel it, too, with that same massive certainty, feel the killing rage and grief in the small, fierce mind at the death of the one to whom it had bonded as a chick, like a raw wound rubbed with salt. It flipped out of its swoop and flared wings like the shadow of falling night, coming at her with huge claws
outstretched in a trajectory that would scoop her up like a vash . . . and break half the bones in her body at the massive impact.

  It was screaming as it came, its own hunting-shriek commingled with a half-intelligible wail of dieeeee!

  Her hand flashed to the hilt of her sword. But something else moved within her, too, a ferocity that matched the bird’s. It went through her, out into the bird’s body, like the point of her outstretched sword. She felt the Paiteng die, every nerve in its body flaring into overload and its mind flickering out like a pinched wick; the final stoop turned into a tumble that struck the soil of the dead garden and fountained it toward her like spray from a projectile weapon.

  That Which Compels, she thought; and then the weight struck her, and there was nothing.

  Mars, City of Dvor Il-Adazar (Olympus Mons)

  Pits beneath the Palace of Restful Contemplation

  May 27, 2000 AD

  “Don’t you have any lights?” Jeremy grumbled a day after his balustrade ride, tired of the green-glowing infrared view.

  Everything was so uniformly cold down here that his viewers was less useful, too, barely giving an outline. He stumbled again on an irregularity in the tunnel floor and cursed.

  He did that in English. “Consanguineously mated male offspring of a domestic canid” just wasn’t very satisfying when he stubbed his toe. Neither was “excrement!” or “feces!” And shouting “I feel extreme annoyance” didn’t do it for him at all, when you came right down to it. Swearing in a language without taboos was hard.

  And she did have lights; he could see half a dozen glow-sticks clipped to her harness, and there were some in the equipment haversack on his.

  “In fact, why don’t we use a light?”

  Doctor Daiyar turned to look at him. “I do not wish to absolutely confirm that nourishment is available to the entire local ecology,” she said, which was savage sarcasm, in Demotic. The epithet “you unfit-to-survive individual of subnormal intellect” was unmistakably implied.