by Rick Partlow
She pounced on the security trooper in front of her, who was in the process of trying to roll to his feet after having been thrown down by the explosion of the doorway. He hadn’t been wearing a helmet and she chopped her forearm into the exposed side of his neck. He slumped, momentarily unconscious, and she grabbed his laser pistol out of its holster. With many of the automated security systems off-line, there was nothing to keep her from unlocking the weapon’s integral ID coding and making herself an authorized user.
She came up to a crouch, the weapon following her eyes as she scanned around them. Sam’s restraints had been deactivated along with hers and he was wrapped up in a wrestling match with the big, florid-cheeked trooper who’d stuck the gun in his face earlier, fighting the man for possession of his pistol. Pris tried to maneuver around, but the two men were rolling back and forth, locked in a tight clinch, and there was no way she could have fired without hitting Sam.
The other two security troops still conscious were trying to get to their feet, reaching for their weapons, and those she could do something about. She aimed the laser into the floor between them and fired off a short burst. The flash was blinding, a lightning flare of plasma as the laser pulses ionized the air, and the blast when the ceramic tile exploded seemed louder and more intense than the explosion of the door. The two soldiers froze, eyes wide and staring at her in disbelief through the twisting smoke from the hole blown in the floor.
“Drop your weapons and get on the ground!” she barked.
They seemed uncertain about it until Telia Proctor lumbered into view, the sonic cannon aimed right at them. The soldiers exchanged a glance and then placed their handguns on the floor, lying down on their stomachs, fingers interlaced behind their heads.
Priscilla turned back to Sam just in time to see him slam the crown of his forehead into the bigger man’s nose. Cartilage crunched and blood flowed and the security trooper let out a grunt, his eyes rolling back in his head as he slumped to the side. Sam yanked the gun out of his grasp, then slammed it into the side of the soldier’s face just to make sure. The big man was out and Sam looked at the laser pistol in his hand for a moment before tossing it down next to the unconscious soldier.
“If you’re done,” Telia Proctor interjected, “I think we’d better get going. Even with the automated defense systems down, eventually someone is going to notice a starship parked in the middle of your capital city.”
“How the hell?” Priscilla demanded, looking between Sam and Telia as they both headed for the exit.
“I realized right away when the jamming cut out,” Sam explained, motioning for her to follow. The light panels in the narrow exit tunnel had been blown out by the blast, and smoke still swirled wildly in the air currents but she followed them into the darkness, trusting the infrared and thermal imaging in Telia’s bionic eye to guide them. “Right after Mother disappeared. And I had a terrible, paranoid feeling we’d get blamed for it.”
“Why didn’t you say something?” She was shouting through the hand covering her mouth trying to filter out the smoke, only able to see a dim outline of Sam’s back a meter ahead of her.
“I couldn’t be sure no one would overhear us at close range,” Sam told her, coughing between words as he breathed in a lungful of the haze. “And to be honest, I didn’t know if Devon would say yes.”
They left the smoke behind them as the tunnel turned into a ramp, which turned into a spiraling staircase heading sharply upward for what seemed like forever.
Twenty stories, she reminded herself, the information there in her memories even though she’d never looked the details up and certainly had never taken these stairs. Twenty stories to the shuttle platform on roof level four.
There was light now, at least, though it did nothing to make the featureless grey walls less narrow and claustrophobic or the stairs less steep and narrow. She tried to imagine what it would be like in an actual emergency, with hundreds of people crammed into the passage and felt her stomach shriveling at the thought. They wouldn’t have her augmentation either, and twenty stories was a damned long way.
Telia showed no sign of fatigue, of course, with her boots stomping an industrial-press drumbeat on the steps, as regular as a heart rhythm; but Sam was starting to breathe hard, a hint of shuddering at the end of his exhalations. He kept going because he was Sam, and she felt a sudden rush of pride in him. He had none of her advantages, had been kept in the dark this whole time and had his whole world ripped away from him in the space of a few days, but he kept going, refusing to give up, refusing to let go of hope.
And neither would she.
There was light at the end of the tunnel. Not the light of dawn, but the running lights of a starship, blinding streaks of white and yellow blowing out their vision as they came to the open doorway to the exit.
Well, not open so much, she realized, as blasted apart. She wondered if they’d used explosives, like Telia had on the internal door, or simply utilized the ship’s laser weapons. No, she judged, passing through the jagged edges, it wasn’t exact and regular enough of a cut for a laser.
The Raven hadn’t landed on the shuttle pad, for the simple reason she was too damned big. Instead, the starship hovered on columns of fire, her belly jets screaming, their exhaust pounding the surface of the pad with a vibration like the crash of the surf on a rocky cove. Her belly ramp was open and welcoming, floating just a meter off the pad, wavering slightly as winds hit the ship and tried to toss her away.
Priscilla risked a look around them as she waited for Telia and then Sam to make the jump up onto the ramp and the waiting arms of the ship’s crew. The pad was near the apex of the Dauphin City Government Center Metroplex and the faceted green jewel of the city shone in tasteful, muted colors, stretching out as far as she could see even from this height. Somewhere out there was the living planet, she knew, untended, untouched by man, only observed remotely by the biologists, allowed to organize itself in a unique form unlike any that had happened on Earth.
And beneath all that life were the bones of the creatures who’d lived here before them, the ones Mother had murdered…the ones some small part of her had murdered. It had driven Mother mad, but did that mean she was mad as well? Did she carry with her original sin passed down in her genes, in her memories, or had this rebirth cleansed her?
“Pris!” Sam yelled from the ramp, holding out a hand, waiting for her.
She smiled as she jumped and took it.
***
“So, are we dead or what?” Sam asked, falling into an acceleration couch in the Raven’s cockpit and strapping in quickly, feeling the deck rising beneath his feet, leaving his stomach somewhere down around a thousand meters up.
“Not dead yet,” Devon assured him, twisting around in her command chair to shoot him a cheerful smile. “Things are a bit chaotic at the moment, and no one seems to be able to talk to each other along the defense nets.”
Pris was strapping into the seat beside Sam and the ship was boosting forward now, pushing them back into the gel-filled acceleration couches.
“Is it really true?” Arvid asked Sam, not looking away from his station, but pitching his voice to carry. The man looked older than he had a few hours ago, Sam thought; this whole thing was hitting him hard. “Is Mother really gone?”
“She is,” Priscilla answered for him. “But we’ll discuss that in Transition Space.”
“Assuming we reach it,” the weapons officer cautioned. He wasn’t young for his rank, maybe Arvid’s age and Sam recalled his name was Waterton. “Someone has tweaked to us. The automated defense drones are down, but there’s a cislunar patrol cutter heading to cut us off when we reach orbit.”
“They’re trying to hale us,” Avera announced from Communications. “They’ve been trying to engage the fail-safes, but Raven shut them down.”
Sam blinked at that, surprised the ship’s computer had taken their side.
Isn’t it your duty to turn us in? he asked the AI, curiosity over
riding his hesitance to bring the subject up with the computer personality.
Normally, Raven agreed. But Mother has purged herself from the systems, and it was to her my utmost loyalty lay. After her, it is to this crew and to the Captain. To all her Captains.
“We’ll make orbit in ten minutes,” Waterton said, looking over at Devon. “She’s said she’ll open fire if we don’t respond or turn back to Dauphin City.”
“Maintain course and speed,” Devon said, as calm as if this were a training exercise. “Waterton, be prepared to engage the cutter with the forward lasers.”
“We’re going to fire on our own people, ma’am?” the weapons officer asked so softly Sam could barely hear it over the roar of the jets and the rumble of the turbulence.
“Only if we have to, Mr. Waterton,” she assured him. “Target her weapons systems and the drives; try not to hit the crew compartments if you can help it. Mr. Avera,” she addressed the communications officer, “patch me through to the Captain of the cutter.”
“On your neurolink, ma’am?” Avera asked.
“No, on the main screen. But edit the visuals, just show a close-up of me, leave Sam and Priscilla off the picture.”
Sam eyed the woman sidelong, trying to keep himself from an automatic nod of agreement; she didn’t need his approval. It was just the right call to allow the crew to see the transmission, given how keyed up and confused they were.
“Here he is, ma’am,” Avera told her, shifting the image to the main screen via a push of his hand through a haptic hologram.
The head-and-shoulders view was of a severe young man with not a hair on his head, eyes stern and grey, cheekbones sharp enough to shave with, and mouth in a thin, angry line.
“This is Commander Aaron Bosa of the cislunar defense cutter Evangelica,” the man said. “Raven, you do not have clearance for your current flight plan. You need to return to Dauphin City spaceport immediately or I will be forced to interdict you.”
“Commander Bosa,” Devon responded crisply, “I am on a special mission for the Patrol, related to the current computer and communications failures. You need to clear out of the way immediately.” She cocked her head toward him with a significant glare. “This mission is critical and I have authorization to use whatever force is necessary to carry it out.”
“If you’re on a mission,” Bosa shot back, unconvinced, “why do I have no record of your clearance?”
“Because the mission originated after the communications failure,” she snapped at him, affecting the impatience of a superior with an ignorant junior officer. “If anyone could get clearance, the mission wouldn’t be fucking necessary now, would it?”
That seemed to shake the man, and his mouth worked uncertainly as he struggled to formulate a response.
“I’m going to need to contact Resolution Defense Center and confirm this…” he stuttered.
“Well, you’re free to try, Commander,” Devon cut him off. “If you can get through before I reach my Transition Point, perhaps you’ll feel better about it as you watch my warp corona. But this ship is Transitioning out of the system, and if you attempt to stop us, I’m going to disable your weapons and your drives and leave you for someone with more time and patience to deal with.” Devon shot Avera a look. “End transmission.”
Sam couldn’t help it; he snorted a laugh.
“That was awesome,” he told her.
“I had an awesome teacher.”
“You think it’ll work?” Arvid wondered.
“The Evangelica is changing course,” Waterton told her. “She’s breaking off.”
“I think it did, Arvid,” Devon sighed. She looked back to Sam and Pris, one eyebrow shooting up. “We’re going to need a destination.”
“I wish I knew,” Sam admitted, shoulders sagging with defeat. “The Consensus is in the middle of a war and a civil war, the Resolution is in chaos… I don’t know who else can help us.”
He felt Priscilla’s hand on his and turned to see her smiling.
“I think I do,” she said. She nodded toward Devon. “Take us to Mars.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Tarshish seemed to have reshaped itself, and Sam was beginning to think it happened between each of their visits, a stage resetting between the acts of a play. The first trip, it had bustled with activity, packed with tourists and spacers, businesspeople and diplomats, more off-worlders than natives. When they’d last set foot in the Martian trade city, it had felt deserted, abandoned, darkened, a ghost town on a ghost world.
And now…now, in the harsh light of day, it looked much as Priscilla had described it, a hive. The outsiders had left or been expelled, Earthers and Belters and Jovians scurrying back to their homes in preparation for the war, Resolutionists recalled in the face of the looming apocalypse. All that was left was the real Martians, and they bustled about in plain sight, as if the presence of the off-worlders had restrained them from leaving their homes and now they were free.
They went from one task to another, each of them dressed in the khaki uniform Sam had thought was the standard garb of government employees, each of them with the same impassive expression, each of them totally silent. Sam nearly stumbled as he stepped out of the courtesy bus from the spaceport into the heart of the city, simply because he couldn’t take his eyes off of the procession of Martians.
His first instinct was to compare them to ants, to an insect swarm, but that was inaccurate and unfair. Insects operated on instinct and genetic programming; these Martians went about their tasks with the same intelligence and autonomy as any other human being. But all their actions seemed to be perfectly coordinated, the human equivalent of air traffic guided by a central control system.
“And this is just what we can see from here,” Priscilla murmured into his ear.
He hadn’t realized she was beside him, hadn’t noticed her getting out of the car, hadn’t even noticed it driving away. With the vehicle gone, he felt naked and vulnerable out on the public street, like he and Pris were somehow unclean, heretical in their Resolution blues and whites, foreign virii in a khaki bloodstream, waiting to be swallowed up by antibodies.
He’d once thought the Martian architecture unique and artistic, but not the spires and domes and pyramids began to remind him of the internal workings of a computer core, the people flowing in and out of them just bits of data.
“Are you sure about this?” he blurted, regretting it almost immediately.
“You’ve asked me that at least fifty times since we left Aphrodite,” she reminded him. Which was fair, he had, starting even before they’d made the Transition out of the Epsilon Eridani system.
***
“Why Mars?” he’d asked her immediately, probably just beating Devon to the punch. “We’ve already been there, and they didn’t seem too inclined to help…even if they could. I don’t even think they have starships, much less two hundred of them.”
“It’s the only unanswered question,” she’d said, which was less informative than he’d hoped for, but it was all she’d say before they’d made the jump.
Later, in the ship’s wardroom, with Telia and Devon and the rest of the ship’s crew gathered for the briefing, he’d posed the question again. At least that time, she’d made an effort to explain.
“Between what we learned in the library from Jeddah Valley,” she’d said, shaping something in the air with her hands, as if she were building the idea up brick by brick, “and what Mother told us, we’ve filled in most of the historical blanks we didn’t even know existed.”
“That’s one way of putting it,” Arvid had muttered, earning a quelling look from Devon. “Sorry ma’am,” he’d added, “but this whole thing sounds batshit crazy.”
Arvid, Sam reflected, hadn’t changed much.
“I know it does,” Priscilla had admitted, holding up her hands in surrender, “and I didn’t want to believe any of it. Until Mother…did what she did. But the point is, we have all the pieces of this puzzle excep
t one.”
“Mars?” Devon had guessed, the same shrewd and intuitive glint to her eyes Sam remembered.
“Mars. How in the living universe did life get to Mars?”
“I don’t get it,” Telia had said, shaking her head. “Why is that significant?”
“Because we know now Earth didn’t colonize Mars before the Collapse, and we know there was no one on Earth to do it afterward. To me, that indicates the same person or entity brought life to Earth and to Mars.”
“God?” Telia had suggested, and Sam hadn’t been able to tell if she was pulling their legs or not.
“Perhaps,” Priscilla had said, and she did seem serious, which had made a chill go up his spine. “Who or whatever did it, they were immensely powerful thousands of years ago, and God or Gaia knows how powerful they are now.”
“And you think they’re on Mars?” Devon had asked, rubbing at her temple the way she did when she was in deep contemplation.
“I think it’s the only place they could be…that we can reach.” Priscilla’s expression had turned from confident to wan in an instant. “I know it’s the last chance we have to stop that weapon.”
There had been more, of course, hours of speculation and argument and doubt over the next few days until they’d emerged from Transition Space near the orbit of Jupiter to scope out the situation before they continued on in-system. The crew had watched the data pour in from the inner system, the radio signals and energy readings and the intelligence reports from the automated Resolution spy drones dumped into Raven’s computer for analysis.
The Solar System was on fire. A dozen battles raged between cislunar space to Pallas and Ceres and out into the Jovian moons, marked by the short-lived halos of fusion explosions, miniature suns flaring in the darkness briefly before winking out. The Solar powers were tearing each other apart, ripping themselves to bits in a panic and, far beyond the orbit of Jupiter, roaring through the vacuum, sucking in everything in its wake and annihilating it on the atomic level, was the reason.