by Greg Bear
“We think not everything in the mines below was destroyed,” Borden says.
“But what’s up with all that black shit—sir?” Jacobi asks.
Kumar is about to interrupt when comm crackles and Litvinov demands entry. He passes through the lock and the Russians brush him down before he carries forward a steel bottle and offers us hot coffee. The Russians distribute tin cups. Our Skyrines join in with the sudden manners of polite society. I don’t ask where the Russians got coffee.
“No doubt you see water and heat,” Litvinov says as we sip. “Before last and biggest impact, we sent exploration team inside Drifter—down deep. Instructed to bring back specimen from crystal pillar. Some brave fool attempted to cut away pieces. He turned dark glass—what you name silicon disease.”
“The sample that caused so much trouble—was it from here?” I ask. “Was it your soldier?”
“It is him,” Sergeant Durov says, and taps his head. “We bring him back, but do not touch him—very difficult. He is filled with lights. No lights when we pack him on return lifter.” The colonel’s look is intense. “He is dead—but I feel him. Do you?”
I shake my head. The shotgun, Federov, holds his finger to his lips, lightly grips Durov’s arm. What’s that about? No speaking of the dead? The undead in our heads?
Follows our fourth silence. The Russians are stony, mostly, but the square-faced soldier clutches his cup and weeps. He’s not afraid—he’s sad and bewildered. He reaches inside his helm and brushes away tears, then looks aside, ashamed.
“Satellites reported big incoming. We evacuate Drifter,” Litvinov says. “Before we get all out—biggest comet does this. Half of team, far enough distance, survives… Other half still inside.” He swallows hard. These are hard men and women, I know that—but what they’ve experienced is more traumatic, in some ways, than what our Skyrines went through. “Have you study mountain at center?”
We lower our cups, close our faceplates, and magnify that view. The central peak is not just dark. As Jacobi observed, it’s black—with shiny surfaces.
“That happen after comet. Everything in center of impact is black glass.”
“They blew it the fuck up,” I say. “It felt threatened.”
“What felt threatened?” Litvinov asks sharply. “It is rock! How can rock know fear? You are to give answers! Is it angry at us, Venn?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know if anger is part of it.”
“I say it is angry, deep down,” Litvinov insists. “Everything it touches… black glass.” He lifts his bushy eyebrows into an arch above his thick, broad nose. “We leave here now. Too dangerous. Too strange.”
“I believe we’ve established that nothing practical can be done here,” Kumar agrees.
“You know madness from inside,” Litvinov says to me. “Old moons, crystal towers, make many things, dangerous, strange, and special. Including, what did you call it? ‘Ice Moon Tea.’”
“That was DJ—Corporal Dan Johnson,” I say.
“Affects a few of my soldiers. What is it doing to them?” Litvinov asks.
“I’m not sure, sir,” I say. “It could make us sensitive to something old. Something still down there.”
“Our dead?” Litvinov waves that question off. The colonel’s not a believer, and Durov isn’t going to convert him. “No understanding, no sense,” Litvinov says, then instructs Durov to back us off the rim and begin the long trek to Fiddler’s Green. “I will stay with you,” he says. “Best soldiers in Chesty, put on strong weapons.”
“Good to hear,” Kumar says.
Borden quietly observes that central peak until it’s out of our sight. I wonder what she knows—what she thinks she knows and how that fits into why I’m here. “What do you see out there?” I ask her.
“Same things you see,” she murmurs.
“I do not like being kept ignorant,” I say.
“Neither do I. When I know for sure what I’m seeing, I’ll tell you. And you’ll tell me. Deal?”
“Yeah,” I say.
We backtrack, then head northeast. In the rear of the warm Tonka we absorb ourselves, hide ourselves, by finishing the cooling coffee.
Once we are well under way, Litvinov arranges his words carefully, with a tinge of bitterness. “Where we are going, three camps have been attacked and destroyed. For safety, some settlers and your people move into second mine. We delivered to them your token, Master Sergeant Venn.” Litvinov reaches into his belt pouch and brings out a quarter-sized circle of inscribed platinum. I recognize the spiral of numbers. It looks like the coin I brought back from Mars, hid from the medicals, then smuggled out to Joe, along with my notes.
“I don’t know who it belongs to—I found it in—”
Litvinov waves that off as well. “Joe Sanchez tells me to give it back, so you will know,” Litvinov says, and hands me the coin. “Reminder of hard things yet to do.”
I’m trying to remember how well the colonel fought back in the bar at Hawthorne. Funny—that stuff is less clear to me than what it feels like to be ridden by a smart parasite under a hundred klicks of ice. I’m thinking the Wait Staff had good reason to be concerned and keep me locked away.
I might not be human much longer.
ACROSS THE DUSTY DESERT
We’re twelve hours crossing the huge basalt plain. The going is smoother the farther east we move, away from the battle zone. Kumar is awake but unfocused. Borden spends most of the time sleeping. I’ve napped and played a little helmet chess with the starshina, a slender young woman with small green eyes named Irina Ulyanova, who in other decades might have been a ballerina or a gymnast.
Even the thought that I might see Joe and Teal again is darkened by the realization that it’s been a while since we were here and so many things could have happened. Teal could have been forced to mate with one of the Muskies, the Voors—one of de Groot’s sons—and squeeze out that fabled third-gen baby, momma and poppa and then infant double-dosed with Ice Moon Tea. I do not want to think about that.
Joe’s being here—and Joe himself—are complete ciphers. Was he ever really back on Earth? Alice said he was, but could I trust anything Alice was telling me, back in the condo? After all, I ended up in the hands of the Wait Staff. I never made it to Canada and freedom.
You don’t know folks until you’ve fought with them. In large part because of my relationship with Joe, fighting fills the list of important things I’ve done for twelve years. It’s all I know, really: how to train to fight and travel to fight and arrive to fight and then just fight. Make scrap and stain on the Red. I’m sick and tired of fighting. I want to be done with it. Don’t we all. I’m avoiding the main issue, aren’t I?
It really disturbs me to think about Teal and what might have been. It disturbs me more that I wasn’t here for her, but what disturbs me most is the uncertainty she would even have wanted me to stay and help in the first place, or the second place—or any place.
I don’t know nothing about anything.
And I’m hungry.
The wind is blowing strong enough to rock the Tonka. There’s a light patter on the outer skin.
“What’s that?” Borden asks.
“Storm,” Litvinov says, hunching his shoulders. “Strange weather always now.”
I lean over and look through the windscreen. Little hard bits of white are striking the Tonka—hail. I’ve never seen hail on Mars. The wind picks up.
Borden becomes sharply interested. “It’s because of the comets,” she says. “More moisture in the air.” As if in a trance, she tries to get closer to the windscreen, but Federov holds out his arm.
“Two kilometers from mine camp,” Durov announces. “Going dark fast.”
Litvinov squats behind Federov to study the forward view. The silvery light through the windscreen darkens from pewter to gray steel. The line of vehicles keeps rolling, but this degree of wind and hail is not part of our training. Nobody’s fought on Mars during such extreme
weather.
The Tonka sways as if kicked by a big boot.
“Tornado!” Durov shouts. The dust devils have given up scribbling and combined to form a Dorothy-sized funnel of dirt and rock, swaying and touching down to our left, rising and wagging like the tail of a huge dog, then digging up our right. I don’t know if it has enough strength to lift us—the air is so thin! I can’t work up the brainpower to understand how the hell this is even happening—
Then I hear another voice, clear but far off—far inside. Bold but also scared:
Let me hook you up to the straight shit, Skyrine. There’s a lot to see, but they won’t let me do it without you, and I’m getting bored.
I jerk and look around, but nobody’s playing a joke, the others are as quiet as little packaged lambs. I stare at Borden. She’s focused on the storm. The Tonka shudders and the steely sky flashes. A brilliant white arc moves from left to right across our path.
Sergeant Durov shouts back, “Bolt!”
Litvinov drops his hand. Everyone in the cabin charges sidearms. The whees of ramping energy are painful in the enclosed space. Durov turns the wheel hard left. Through curtains of hail, we see the Trundle in front go just as sharply right. The line is splitting to form a perpendicular to the arc of the bolt, a decent enough maneuver for running over flat and open, if one shot is the only info you have as to location and concentration of opposing force.
Federov returns fire but his choices are few—his targets unseen.
Another bolt. The Trundle on our right erupts in a brilliant violet flare, lighting up the storm and flinging molten chunks of fuselage and frame, then veers toward us and slams our tail, front wheels chattering against our bumper and almost locking before the pilot torques us right and we’re free again. We’ve all sealed our faceplates. We know what’s going to happen next. We’re sitting ducks in here.
“Outside!” Litvinov shouts. The airlock hatch blows and we push through and jump free, trying to find someplace, anyplace, to lie flat and return fire. The hail is pea-sized and falls faster than it does on Earth—really stings, even though it weighs less. There’s a wall of dust and what might be mud spinning off to what I think is the south, obscuring the outline of the big Chesty, which is now laying down a series of sizzling purple barrages.
Then something over to our left fires a volley of chain ballistas, designed to take out vehicles—the double strike of a first charge hitting one side and six meters of thin, strong chain swinging the second charge around to the other side.
One of our guns? I don’t think so.
Chain ballistas tend to belong to Antags.
Jacobi is right beside me and Borden is opposite. We all go flatter than flat as two more of our vehicles, right and left, are blown to hell. Sizzling blobs of aluminum and steel and flaring pieces of composite drop all around.
Jacobi’s Skyrines disperse into three fire teams, arranged in a spread-out triangle. My status puts me as a fourth wheel on the short team, and Borden thrusts a pistol into my hands.
The hail and wind blow up and away, exposing us to anyone who cares to look (of course). The air is amazingly clear. Sizzling, popping ice litters the dust—hail drying faster than it can melt. Jacobi sticks up like a meerkat, surveys the flats from her full five nine, then swings her right arm to the northeast. I see our enemy, too, bobbing black dots out there at maybe half a klick. Jacobi pivots and swings her hand southeast—more dots. Things with ill intent fill fighting holes on both sides of our line of travel, as if they knew we’d be coming.
A bolt lifts up and screams to hit not twenty meters off, upending the flaming chassis of the Trundle, which emits that ghastly, up-smeared glow of spent matter depleting all at once into the sky—the vehicle’s energy rising in controlled detonation. Three surviving vehicles—two Tonkas and the Chesty—roll around us, any minute over us, firing with all they’ve got at the same targets Jacobi has spotted—quick curves of rising and falling bolts, the straight-out, washboard-roaring, nauseating rip of lawnmower pulses, whiz-screams of disruptors, concentrated on the fighting holes. Two broad patches become flaming blue-green luaus.
Then our team leaps as one and crazy-jogs the distance to where we saw heads bob. I take the run with Ishida and Jacobi. We square off at about ten meters and stoop. Something in the hole is blasting our direction without taking aim, single weapon sputtering half-charged bolts—down to almost nothing. I’m hit by a smoking green blob that tries to burn a hole through my chest but can’t do more than crisp the upper layer of skintight. More green blobs lob from the ditch—
One brighter than the others passes over my right, and the Skyrine behind me—the gunnery sergeant? Tanaka?—keels over flat with fire twisting from his back—
We’re within three meters of the ditch, staring down at a fucking Antag sprawled on its back, wings out, doing a dust angel, faceplate fogged, low on gasps, and scared shitless—even so, aiming its bolt rifle over the rim of the hole to zero us if it can.
Ishida drops to her knees, the pair of us behind her follow, and together, we all pump the hole with bolts and a lawnmower beam until dust and dirt and charred bastard kibble blow from the ditch like the plume from a small volcano.
Another brighter bolt flies over our lowered heads from the Chesty, I hope, and blows the ditch all to hell, knocking us back on our lightly padded asses. We’re kept busy for a few seconds cursing and brushing each other off, tamping out the smoking shit with the backs of our gloves. A comic display of self-concern before we even know the fight is over, but what the fuck, it’ll be over for us right now if our skintights don’t hold suck.
I’ve somehow hit the deck again and spread out. Borden has her arm over my back, cozy-protective. I try to shove her off but she stubbornly shields me. Jacobi stands again, slings her bolt rifle, daring more fire—she’ll take it or she’ll know where the fuck it comes from, and I admire that, I really do.
Then, “Thirty it. We’re done,” she says over comm.
Surrounded by little whirls of smoke, in the middle of our own fading dust devil of soot and flakes of enemy, we stop, lift our heads, look around, assess.…
We’re alive.
Some of us.
I roll out from under Borden’s arm but we wait another few seconds to rise, not as ape-shit brave as Jacobi. And perhaps not as sensitive to when the action is over. I’m out of practice, I tell myself—but truly, I accept that Jacobi is superior, I’ll follow her anywhere, even knowing we’re going to die in the end, because she’s so fucking awesome.
Borden shadows me, just inches away. Our brand-new Tonka is behind us, flaring and slumping into puddles of silvery metal. I see maybe three crispy critters within the collapsed and sputtering frame. We are left with two intact vehicles and perhaps twelve Russians and as many Skyrines and of course Kumar, he made it, I’ve made it—
Shit. I’m pumped, I’m scared, I’ve pissed and filled my drawers—I’ve become shit sausage. My skintight works frantically to process what was once safely wrapped in bowels and bladder, as well as filtering the salty, smelly fluid leaking from all of my pores.
All I can say to Borden is “Stinky.”
Big-eyed, she nods.
Litvinov and three of his soldiers join us. The Russians take a knee and view the scene through scoped bolt rifles. I hear little seeking whees and clicks.
I can still hear. That’s good. One thing about air on the Red is—
Fuck that.
Litvinov sends four more soldiers across the flats to make sure the opposite attackers are down and scrapped. They drop and zig-crawl, rise and run hunched—a talent in low-g, where any little toe jab can loft you like a clay pigeon. When Jacobi gives the all-clear, we cross the dust and join them.
Along the horizon, as if nothing’s happened, rise more of those goddamned drunken pillars of dust, reeling and scribbling in Mars’s diary: What you say, Bwana? Bullll-shee-it. Don’t look at us. We’re busy.
Jacobi kicks her boot at a piece of ch
arred reddish-gray fabric that barely covers what was once the arm or wing of an Antag warrior. Another step and she nudges a helm, weirdly intact after all that energy—a cup cradling the four-eyed, beaked head of a warrior who came all the way from the distant stars to die right here on the Red. This one looks at us with a lazy, crowlike leer—or maybe not—through two large outboard eyes and two smaller eyes above the bridge of the beak. The eyes are frosting over and shrinking now that the big heat is gone and moisture is being sucked away. Its raspy tongue is frozen between the open halves of the beak, like a bird’s, but studded with what look like teeth. Ishida comes over and pries open the beak. Inside—flatter teeth for grinding. It chews with its tongue. More like a squid or a snail, somehow.
Ishida mocks a gag and backs away.
As if conducting a tour, Jacobi joins Ishida and both wave us forward, then jump into one of the Antag fighting holes and pull back strips of camouflaged cover, sliced into six-inch ribbons by our lawnmower. The strips barely conceal a small pressure tank and a broken-bladed fan—a small fountain. For gathering sips and gasps and fuel from the thin atmosphere. The Antags weren’t many, at this point in their mission, but they were here for the long haul. And they knew they would die.
Litvinov approaches, opens comm, and turns to me. We’re wearing weird little skull grins, both of us; our cheeks hurt, Momma says our faces will freeze this way—but we’re alive, and it’s either grin or bawl like a baby, even the big, tough colonel.
He says, “Bet you other Antagonista soon come and finish. Is it bet?”
“House always wins,” I say.
“Truth,” he says. This is afterglow, we’re stinky and jazzy and fear isn’t in it, not now. We’re beyond that sour shit into hypercalm or just plain hyper, a weirdly happy state almost like an out-of-body experience. Like the Antags in the trench, we know we’re going to die out here. Nobody fucking goes home.
The colonel scans the smoking wrecks and our own charred dead. Skyrines and Russians join to assess our losses. Taking names and blazes if any. We’ve heard that Russians reduce their dead in place. There’s little oxygen for cremation so bolts do the work. Litvinov’s soldiers start that process, shooting energy into the shattered Trundle and two Tonkas, taking care of their dead and ours as well. The vehicles flare purple-white. The corpses wither and smoke. Bits of char and ash top our helms and shoulders. We brush them off.