We move well out of sight of the Tapsite, covering our own tracks. The Ghaddar finds us a depression deep enough to set up our shelters, with enough open flat around it to be relatively defensible. As we unpack and inflate our meager homes, I take another silent inventory: We’ve lost a third of our number since Tyr, since we crossed into this invisibly occupied land, two hundred and fifty klicks and nearly five months ago.
I watch my father as I go about my ritual duties. He still tries not to show how much he favors his right leg, though his insistence on walking on it all day, as he has since the one day of rest he allowed himself after his calf was run-through by the enemy spearhead, has made the wound slow to heal. At least the bleeding has stopped. The triangular cross-sections and razor fins of the enemy weapons make messy wounds that are difficult to close. Thankfully Ambassador Murphy is a skilled field surgeon. And Ambassador Murphy insists we are blessed by being out in the sterile air rather than inside a crowded colony that could breed infection—my father’s wound is clean.
Unfortunately, my second step-mother Sarai has not been so lucky. Her gut wound, though relatively small, supplies its own infectious matter. She remains feverish, too weak to walk, so must be carried on a makeshift stretcher. My father will not give up hope.
Nor will he give up hope that we can cross this hostile territory, find respite somewhere beyond it. But the reach of our tenacious opponents has been unexpectedly long, spread across both the north and south rims of the valley. We have managed to go no more than a week between nocturnal attacks, though they usually come when we approach within a few klicks of the foothills, an intermittent necessity because that’s where most of the edible plants cling (though the bounty in the lower lands gets richer as we progress eastward). And always our enemies vanish into the rock, closing their tunnels behind them, burying themselves like corpses.
Silvermen. That’s what Ambassador Murphy calls them. Though he had never seen one himself before he joined us on our journey, he knew them from old video records of attacks on his colony. Squat like boulders, wearing armor thick enough to waste too much of our precious ammunition trying to penetrate. We don’t even know if we’ve killed any of them, because they are sure to carry off their wounded.
And they are very strong and skilled with short swords and axes and bows and arrows and lances—lances that can fire their arrow-like heads long distances if we back out of reach. Conversely, our edged and non-firearm weapons can barely find any flesh in them for satisfaction. It’s like stabbing and hacking into piles of scrap metal.
I must check my journal to count our dead. We have lost twenty-seven, buried with honor along our course. Six more are significantly wounded, Sarai being the worst.
I see Ambassador Murphy re-check his remaining ammunition. He’s down to four spare speed loaders for his revolver. He has taken to carrying a sword—a stout double-edged blade we managed to take from an enemy—hoping to conserve what he has left.
I look back west, back home, into the wind. I think of the rest of our people, waiting for us, waiting for word. We could go back, take the straightest route through the center of the valley floor, best to avoid the armored burrowing enemy. Go home, to Melas. Ride out the twin disasters of atmosphere loss and nuclear fallout brought by the Unmakers, hold onto our ancestral lands, maintain the Food Trade with Tranquility. But it’s not only the loss of air, and territory to radiation. We would be in the shadow of the Unmakers, too close to their base in Northeast Melas.
But it’s more than fear and hardship that drives us on: Many of us, my father included, have been seduced by these greener lands; the richer, warmer air; the hope that we can simply get past this enemy and find a new home, still far out of Unmaker reach (and let the Unmakers deal with the Silvermen).
I admit this is a tempting dream, and I do hope my father and my people find what they need out here. But I still have my own private hopes, a desire I will not speak of to anyone (especially not my father).
I hope to find out where I came from. I hope to find out about my birth parents, about Samuel and Caroline Drake.
I already know the story they told me was a lie, I just don’t know for what reason they did so. I was told we came from Tranquility, driven out by the Cast, moving west (why not east?) until we joined a group of refugees from the Air Pirates, those who refused to take up their brutal ways. Unfortunately, their humanity made them prey to their former fellows, and my parents with them.
I have the satisfaction of stabbing to death the animals that killed them, the monsters who tried to rape my mother as she bled her life away. It’s ironic: that basic act of vengeance earned me my new family, when the Nomads came to our aid too late, and my adoptive father found me covered in the blood of my parents’ murderers, cowering with a knife in each hand. I had attacked them from hiding, from behind, stabbing first into groin and inner thighs to bring them down, then into their necks as they tried to seize me, reach for their weapons. Then I watched them bleed out, crawling after me with what little life they had left, and I kicked them in their faces, then fell upon their backs and stabbed their corpses until I couldn’t feel my arms any more, as I looked into my mother’s empty eyes. Then I hid and waited for more monsters to come, and that’s how I was found. I was twelve years old, counted by the old Earth calendar.
But now I know we did not come from Tranquility. The Cast Leader Two Gun confirmed that his people never drove away any of their own: they either became Cast or failed and died there. The only ones driven away were Siders—outsiders who either stumbled upon the ruin hoping for shelter, or invaders hoping to pillage it. And the Cast kept written records—intact after the destruction of the Tranquility AI and its files—that show there was never a family named “Drake” at the colony.
So my hope to connect with my past has become a disturbing mystery. Where did my parents and I come from? And why did they need to lie about it?
(My memories are all of the refugee camp: moving, hiding, scavenging, trading the Nomads for food, tapping the Feed Lines for another day’s necessities. But I have fragments of earlier memories, of green gardens, and someplace warm with solid walls and a solid roof over my head. Or they could just be the dreams of imagination.)
As there is no other population evident between Melas and Tranquility, I’m thinking my parents must have come from somewhere beyond Tranquility, someplace green. So perhaps I’ll find some group that knew or had records of them in deeper Coprates. But all we’ve encountered for the majority of our journey are the freakish, deadly Silvermen.
We set up sentries, and begin to prepare communal food from what we’ve gathered along the way, from our risky forays into the highlands. The winds drop as the sun sets, and the temperature approaches freezing again. But it is easier to breathe here, and the edible plant life is abundant enough—the Silvermen shouldn’t need to deny our small group our subsistence foraging. (And that means their aggression is not about resources as it would be in Melas. This is about territory. Or just intolerance.)
We go inside in shifts to eat, to wash, to tend our wounds and clean our weapons, to perform our evening Salat, and hopefully sleep without being attacked.
I’m not on watch tonight. The gift of sleep is not an easy one to accept. There’s too much threat beyond the flimsy rippling walls of our small shelter.
7 May, 2018:
We pass morning Salat and breakfast unmolested. But as we prepare to move cautiously toward Concordia, the Ghaddar returns from the nearby heights, and tells my father that we’re being followed. Intentionally or otherwise is unclear. But our pursuers are not Silvermen. There are two, and both appear to have normal proportions. Both wear Nomad-style cloaks. And both walk openly across the desert from the west. But they travel separately, one seemingly following the other at distance, perhaps far enough back to remain out of the other’s sight line, but she says the follower does not appear to be trying to hide from the leader.
I immediately wonder if someone has c
ome from our people in Melas, to seek after our condition, but it’s unlikely they would travel solo, and less likely they’d have managed to catch up if they’d followed our course. The Ghaddar also insists that the closer one—the one she could see clearer through her sniper scope—did not look Nomad. Perhaps Knight. But the Knights wouldn’t expose themselves so blatantly, not even when moving in force.
That leaves immortal, and the foolhardiness of walking alone and in plain sight would agree. But Colonel Ram and his disturbing company had been traveling by personal aircraft when last we saw them. My father hopes that one of them may have met with the misfortune of having lost their flyer and therefore forced to walk back to their new base (assuming they’ve established one), just to have word of our old friend after all these months. In our last conversation, Colonel Ram was headed into the Deep Green, toward what the Jinn call the “Vajra”, a region our maps say lies yet another hundred and fifty kilometers further east. And that was the last we saw of them. That was months ago now.
The Ghaddar says that the one she got a decent look at bore no resemblance to any of the immortals that we know (though others may have arisen). The other possibility is a Jinn, a Terraformer. They’ve been known to travel the valleys on foot, relying on their wondrous Tools to protect them. But Paul Stilson told us that his leaders were placing extreme restrictions on his kind to keep them confined to their remote Stations. (And then he defied them again, in favor of his friendship with Colonel Ram, of his higher calling to put his talents to the service of others.)
The Ghaddar insists that they are still too far out, more than two klicks back, around the eastern tail slopes of the last mountain of the Lesser Divide, and therefore not able to have seen us yet. My father chooses to ignore them for the time being, to see if they follow us to Concordia, and keeping an eye behind us to see if they draw enemy attention in our wake.
We pack quickly and move out, south-southwest, for Concordia, five klicks away.
Unwilling to risk any more of our numbers to idle curiosity, we get within half a kilometer of the colony site and find high ground to observe. The colony sat just east and south around the point where the valley widens out, though we can see now that the slide-slopes reach most of that into the valley floor, forming a cluster of low rocky mountains that rise up out of the decline just east of the point, probably left by erosion. The nearest of these mountains forms a narrow perpendicular side canyon to the main valley between its western slopes and the southeasterly curving of the much higher Divide Rim to its west. The resulting depression—only a few hundred meters wide at the bottom—slopes gently upwards toward the Rim, probably cut by either rimfall or ancient permafrost melt or both. It eventually snakes up and around behind the mountain maybe eight klicks in, but the colony is just inside the mouth of this lopsided canyon. Many colony sites were placed at the bases of such “drainage” cuts, likely in hopes of accessing water and exposed mineral deposits. The UASP—the founders of Baraka and Uqba—were among the few that chose the open valley floor rather than build up against rim slope. (And while that spared our ancestral homes from slides, it left them exposed to nuclear blast waves.)
I assume the location must also provide some relief from the evening winds that blow from the west, the rim point and the mountains we have just come around acting as a break, but the colony is not far back enough into the canyon to be fully protected from the morning winds.
Now, the terrain proves itself a rich support for plant life: Graingrass, Rustbean, Amarette, Tealeaf and even Red Olive are growing well out into the valley floor, while the belly of the side canyon is deep green as far as the eye can see down it and hundreds of meters up-slope on either side. There’s plenty of food within a canister’s walk for our whole band.
But the Ghaddar quickly finds signs of gathering, picking, stripping, and pruning. It’s been done carefully, spread out and at random, to not appear obvious to the casual visitor. They’ve also been careful to conceal their tracks.
“This is that different print again,” Murphy announces, managing to find a barely-visible detail, partially hidden by the growth, and amazingly before the Ghaddar does.
“Lighter foot,” the Ghaddar repeats her prior assessment, gently moving the Grass vines aside for a better look at what Murphy has found. “No damage to the plants. No cleat marks.”
“Thinner, too,” I try. She seems to ignore me, as she always does.
Crouching down, I realize the growth here is thick and tall enough to hide in if one stays low.
The Ghaddar shifts her attention. My father is signaling her. He’s lying prone at the crest of the low ridge with a good view of the colony and its canyon. We climb to join him, staying low, trying to avoid whatever eyes may be watching us.
I settle next to him and pull out my own binoculars.
After a moment’s scanning, I can see the colony foundations, mostly buried by slides and dunes and masked in ground-clinging over-growth, but still visible. Other than the richer greenery, it looks like Tyr, like Nike, like Gagarin. Gone. Blasted away, buried. And stripped. Nothing left but the concrete, and even that looks stripped of reinforcing metals.
Ambassador Murphy is on his back next to me, taking a radiation level from the soil. There’s the background “glow” of an old hit, a ghost of the Apocalypse.
Looking back the way we came, back out across the valley, I realize I’m seeing the scarred land of a nuclear airburst, a great shallow crater that we’re on the edge of, slowly being erased—healed—by dune drift and new life. I recognize it because similar blasts burned and smashed my adopted people’s ancestral homes, Baraka and Uqba, killing many hundreds and destroying the first Holy Mosque built on this planet. My new father took me to the Baraka ruin many times—his home, when he was a small child—to stand on sacred ground, so I would know what was lost and why we still face toward a stripped ruin when we pray. And we prayed on the barren foundations, praising God who allowed His children to live through the Unmakers nuclear fire and all that came after, and through His bounty, to thrive in what lesser men would see as a wasteland.
I dig my gloved fingers into the sand under me, find shards of telltale silicate glass rained by the nuclear blast, fifty three Earth years ago.
I look back at the colony site. It would have been beyond the actual nuclear fireball, but certainly too close to the inferno of the resulting flash and the shattering blast wave. But if the colonists had shelters, or deep mines, like the Faithful at Baraka and Uqba…
I recheck the notes I made in my journal, from the old datafiles I studied before we left Melas. Concordia was a bio-engineering facility. As was Gagarin. No indication they did any deep digging, though they may have prepared shelters, expecting the fate that Earth placed in the sky over their heads to fall one day. But without deep caves to protect them from the radiation, and access to the Jinn’s precious Feed Lines for water, air and fuel, they wouldn’t have been able to stay here. (Likely, they would have sought shelter in the shadow of one of the nearer Terraforming Stations, for heat and feed, until the valleys warmed and the air thickened enough to seek better lands. Assuming any survived.)
But Tyr and Nike did have mining equipment. And maybe it’s still in service, maintained by the Silvermen to live and move below ground, through the slopes and mountains, to mine their metal.
So maybe here, at Concordia, we’re finally close to being beyond the reach of the Silvermen. But now there are new footprints. A new enemy? Have we just wandered from one hostile territory into another?
“Heat,” my father announces heavily. Ambassador Murphy and I slide up and join him, following his binoculars with our own, shifting over to infrared.
Heat. Faint, but there. Almost a klick into the canyon in front of us, just beyond the colony ruin, above it in the jagged Divide slopes. But there’s no sign of movement or shelter, nothing visible on the surface, just the scrub shivering the wind.
“Caves?” Murphy wonders.
“It’s not like the Silvers to leave an open tunnel,” my father considers our experience.
We sit and watch for a full hour. The heat radiating out of the rocks doesn’t diminish. Nor is there any sign of activity. I offer the possibility that we may be seeing bleed from the Jinn’s resource mining, as their robotic deep taps bore through the ridge rock seeking underground permafrost to thaw. Occasionally a slide opens one of the resulting tunnels to the surface. It’s an innocent possibility, but Ambassador Murphy points out that such tunnels, though highly unstable, do present tempting shelter. If there are locals foraging this area…
“We should pull everyone back,” the Ghaddar suggests heavily. She isn’t one to choose retreat lightly.
“You don’t want to know what’s over there?” Murphy dares, hoping she recognizes his challenge is just playful humor.
“Of course I do,” she tells him flatly and without looking at him. “But we have wounded. A small recon would be best.”
My father agrees with her advice. He is very wise, a great warrior and a great leader of our people. But the Ghaddar is legend, Champion of more than one Sharif in her time, even bodyguard to the great Mike Ram (when he was still mortal and needed such service), and now—thanks to a recent difficult revelation—she’s known as the Daughter of the Devil as well.
(Her eyes—the only part of her she shows any man—are both terrifying and beautiful. I can’t help but stare when I think I can do so unobserved, but she catches me every time.)
We move our people and set up camp out of sight of the colony canyon, and take the time to top our tanks and perform noontime Salat. My father sits with Sarai, makes sure she’s as comfortable as she can be as she sweats and shivers through her high fever. My first stepmother Fatima reassures him that she’ll be well cared for.
The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades Page 6