“Essentially,” I play diplomat before Paul can censure him. “And maybe you can let us take point on the ground, assuming the threat is manageable.”
“It’s foolish to risk your lives at all.” I also recognize Rhiannon Dodds of Green Team by her voice, being far more honest than her cohort.
“One life in particular I’m concerned with,” Paul confronts my attendance. I catch Horst looking my way and reflexively nodding his agreement, but then he piles into the ship behind his team.
“I’m only coming because she is,” I tell them, nodding past the ship toward the southern edge of the pad, barely visible in the darkness. Paul and his “Power Rangers” turn to face the indicated direction, and suddenly Sakina has stepped in front of me, playing protector. I make a point of stepping forward so that we stand side-by-side.
Four figures come walking out of the cold Martian night, as if having simply appeared at the edge of the pad. Paul’s people instinctively put hands to their “tools”.
“Lady Sakura,” I greet with a slight bow as she approaches us, her black robes in contrast to the red camo suits of the three shinobi that escort her. They walk an idly cautious semi-circle around the rebuilt Lancer, then stop a formally cautious distance from the line of sealsuits. She wears her sword, and her guards are visibly armed with both blades and PDWs.
“Colonel Ram,” she greets coolly as always, returning my bow. “Are we as welcome as you assured?”
“The reason for your presence here is understood,” Paul answers her flatly.
“Acquiring your technology is no longer our priority,” she reassures flatly. “We have our reasons for agreeing to this joint venture, just as you do.”
“That doesn’t make you trustworthy,” Paul speaks for his team.
“I do not believe you are fools,” she gives him back. “However, I give you my word on my honor: We are not here to steal from you, or to do battle with you.” At that last oath, I see her look at Sakina.
“Then you are welcome on my ship,” Paul follows my example, bowing slightly.
The airlock is now only a single outer hatch backed up by a pressure field to hold the air in—it feels almost liquid as we pass through it.
Inside, the ship seems brighter, sparser than it was before. On closer inspection, it looks like a lot of the original equipment has been gutted and replaced with plain, clean surfaces. Occasional panels seem like quicksilver, but I don’t touch. My people find space for themselves in the middle and aft sections, while Paul leads me forward, along with Sakura and her shinobi. Sakina feels like she’s ready to kill them all at the slightest trigger, but keeps her discipline.
I admit I hesitate before stepping into the rebuilt cockpit. It isn’t smashed and burned and holed anymore. It’ all white and silver and new thick view-bubbles. But I still see Matthew, unrecognizable. I still see the inside of my best friend’s skull, his brains. I still smell his blood, feel it under my boots, no matter how clean everything is.
White and silver and clean, with the slowly purpling sky visible through the view-bubbles at the nose and sides. Brightly colored sealsuits take their positions, offer us seats that conform when we settle into them—seats I know they must have added specifically anticipating guests, like planning a party: A costume party with soldiers and ninjas and Power Rangers…
I hear humming and feel the ship lift smoothly. I think Smith would like to be here. (I did offer, but he said it wasn’t his ship anymore and he’d feel better sitting in our last ASV, spun up and ready to burn to our rescue if we needed him.)
The base slides away beneath us, buried and dark. The distant sun barely lighting the eastern horizon behind us.
“We have radar signals emanating from three separate locations on this side of the point,” Dodds announces, icons lighting up on a map table that grows out of the floor of the cockpit. “They’re high on the rim, so they must be using shelters or pressure suits. Our stealth systems will mask us, but they’ll see us if they have any kind of night-vision. Or as soon as the sun gets any higher…”
Sakura hasn’t said a word since she greeted us, but she looks intently at the map through her ever-present goggles.
“They have been watching your base,” she tells me what I’ve already assumed. “They likely have long-range optics as well as radar.”
I envision movie pirates with spyglasses.
“Any signals?” I ask.
“They’ve seen us,” Carter confirms, though I don’t see him using any visible equipment. “Reporting us as a Guardian Patrol.”
“I don’t think they saw us come from your base,” Paul hopes. “Our tangential course will hopefully convince them we’re just running the Rim.”
“Morning dust storms will be coming within the hour,” Sakura points out.
“We could exacerbate them with our lift fields,” Paul takes her suggestion. “Slip over the rim.”
“They will notice we are gone when the dust goes,” Sakura criticizes.
“We can jam their signals,” Carter offers. “It may buy us time before they realize where we’ve gone.”
“Drop my shinobi here and here,” Sakura counters, pointing to spots just downhill from two of the three observation posts. “Make it look like you are just passing, curious.”
“Killing the sentries will be as suspicious as jamming them,” I argue before Paul can protest. “And slower. And I need your people for when we find their base.”
The Lady Sakura surprisingly offers no resistance to my decision. I immediately start trying to anticipate her motives.
So we look like a patrol and take our time. The winds begin to rise with the sun, filling the valleys with dust-blows. Paul moves our ship as if it’s turning away from the Rim, leaving, and begins to kick up more dust using whatever forces keep us airborne. Soon there’s nothing but a ruddy cloud visible through the view-bubbles.
“Pirate sentries are reporting a bad storm,” Carter announces.
“Let’s go quick,” Paul tells his team. I feel the ship turn, accelerate, climb.
Five minutes later, we break out above the dust clouds and I’m seeing something I haven’t seen since I first dropped on this planet: the open Ophir plains above the Marineris valley, wind-whipped, marbled red and pale yellow-ochre, a desert plateau as far as the eye can see, cratered like the moon, crenellated intermittently by ancient stress faults, broken sharp in the distance by the shadows that must be Candor. And to our port side, it drops off into Melas Chasma like the edge of the world, the valley full of the ruddy clouds of morning storms, all held down like the surface of a sea or great lake by the ETE atmosphere nets.
And I get to especially appreciate one thing the ETE have done to this ship: My view is through new, crystal-clear plexi, not screens. I remember being a little boy, taking his first ride on a commercial jet, pressing my face to the thick window, looking down on the world as I had never seen it before.
And then I remember what we have come to do.
Our initial assumptions at least appear accurate: We detect no obvious sentries or radar as we approach the side canyon. The Zodangans have probably considered that lining their part of the Northeast Rim with observation posts is sufficient. Attack from the airless Planum would be impossible for their usual enemies, though they must know both us and the ETE could manage it. Perhaps they simply lack the resources to maintain equipment or personnel so far above the atmosphere net. Or perhaps, knowing our limited resources, they’re hoping to lead us into ambush…
Sakura’s shinobi are apparently outfitted with some kind of light pressure suit. They look like a nightmare version of the ETE once they get their low-profile helmets sealed, their visors covered by armored mempo-style masks. As agreed, we drop low within a klick of the canyon rim and drop two of her entourage behind the cover of an artificial dust cloud. Her third shinobi—who I notice is significantly larger than the other two—remains close at her side. (I have yet to hear one of them speak. They only bow and fo
llow her instructions without hesitation.)
Not completely (or remotely?) trusting, I have Horst get his armor ready to drop. They’re already intently studying the scans of the terrain being fed through the new ETE screens in their makeshift squad bays. Unfortunately, we don’t dare pass over the canyon to get a better look—we have to rely on Sakura to get us eyes down into the Zodangan stronghold.
It takes only twenty minutes for the shinobi to get us those eyes.
“My ninja have encountered no Planum-level sentries,” Sakura confirms through what must be a dedicated—and probably implanted—Link. “They have located what appears to be a large facility.”
She turns her signals over to the ETE bands, and we see what her shinobi see on our screens, as the map table updates with new 3D constructs. The relatively shear walls of the canyon—a few miles wide and perhaps two miles deep—make it a dark abyss, its depths shielded from sunlight except at highest midday. Most interesting, the Zodangans (unless Chang has been helping them for some years) have erected their own more literal version of an atmosphere net: A gridiron of cables, spaced hundreds of yards apart, stretch across the canyon, forming a sparse roof about five hundred meters down from the Planum. The shinobi optics zoom; this grid appears to be repeated several hundred meters beneath the first, and then again, forming at least three layers. The ETE read electromagnetic fields that, while only a fraction as strong as their own—appear sufficient to keep a reasonable air pressure down inside the huge gorge. A marvel of engineering, it also looks like it could serve as defense, providing an annoying obstacle against attack from above. (It may also serve as a detection system if anything sizeable were to breach it, which might explain the lack of sentries watching the Planum.)
“I wouldn’t want to clip one of those going in or out,” I idly say what I’m thinking. The ETE don’t comment. I expect they could simply dissolve a cable to avoid collision, but that might compromise the Zodangan’s atmosphere. If they’re careful with their new ship, they should be able to slip between, assuming we don’t run into more surprises.
What the shinobi are more intently focusing on gets our attention next: A veritable cliff city, cut into the rock walls, perhaps another five hundred meters below the lowest visible layer of net but still well above the canyon floor. (And what we can see of the canyon floor, shrouded in shadow and a mist of dust bled off the larger morning blows in the valley beyond, appears to be littered with man-made debris—wreckage, salvage or manufacturing cast-off?). Our POV is far too steep to see into the manmade cliff caves, but there are numerous “docks” jutting out from the larger ones.
But there’s no sign of airships moored or even cruising the canyon.
Or any heat that would indicate human habitation.
“Where is everybody?” Dodds says what we’re all thinking.
“I’ve got something odd up ahead, Planum level on the other side of the canyon,” Carter announces, pointing to a long shadow on his screens several hundred meters past the far rim of the Zodangan stronghold.
“Crater,” Paul extrapolates. “Deep. It’s new. Take us up. Lady Sakura, inform your men we are not going far or long.”
She nods with her usual serenity. The ship lifts smoothly, climbs a few thousand feet, gets us a better look at the Planum across the canyon. The hole we see looks more volcanic than meteoric, hundreds of meters across. But there is no up-thrust, no expulsion of material.
“Sinkhole?” I wonder.
“I have seen these before, the result of careless mining operations undercutting the rims,” Paul tells us. “But this one looks like it collapsed in the last few months, if not weeks.”
“And it’s huge,” Dodds mirrors Paul’s concern. “They could have built a whole colony with the minerals extracted.”
“Or a fleet of those new ships,” I calculate darkly.
“No,” Paul corrects. “We analyzed that ship Chang built. It was surprisingly economical regarding materials. Much of it appeared recycled, not fresh-mined.”
“Recycled out of what?” I ask for what Earthside hasn’t been able (or willing) to tell us after we sent them detailed scans of the wreck.
“Most of it looked like old colony metals.”
“I thought most of the abandoned structures had been stripped long ago?”
“From the junkyard on the canyon floor, it appears they may have been stockpiling,” Sakura surmises.
“Then why all the mining?” Dodds follows my concern.
“What did they have to build in such a dangerous rush?” Carter asks the next question.
“There is still no sign of habitation,” Sakura reports.
“Perhaps they decided to relocate, strip the site for whatever they could,” Paul considers.
“We need to take a closer look,” I decide.
We drop close to the western canyon rim and pick up Sakura’s scouts, then carefully descend through the cable nets. I remind the ETE to consider the likelihood that the Zodangans may have booby-trapped their apparently abandoned facilities, or maybe the entire canyon, expecting us sooner or later. This is a deep, steep hole to get ambushed in.
The ETE “crew” scans intently as we slowly ease towards what look like the most sizeable docks. Our maps steadily become more detailed: The facilities appear to burrow deep into the cliffs. Smaller branches and peripheral caves look like they may have been set up for habitation, families. But the biggest caverns could fit one of those new ships, or at least large components of their frigate dirigibles.
This facility is much larger than the original pre-Apocalypse colony that had been built into the Melas Rim. It looks more like a civilization (and one of some age) rather than the speculative startup of a brain trust of hotshot engineers that scraped together enough backing to come to Mars in hopes of creating a new industry of local-made transportation and gear for the booming corporate-driven colonization.
(As I recall, the name for their endeavor was a “second choice”: Another investment group had already legally taken the name “Helium”, after the protagonist city-state from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ classic John Carter of Mars novels. “Zodanga” was the name of a competing city-state—the “bad guys” in some of the books—and that came to appeal more than their original choice. Besides, Zodanga sounded cooler than Helium.)
The best view—again—is through the new view bubbles. The Zodangan stronghold looks both old and well lived in. It must have taken them decades to cut this, even with heavy mining and construction equipment. But the caves themselves are all dark, and what we can see of them looks like they were stripped in a hurry.
“No sign of explosives, unless they’re well masked,” Carter announces (and I’m sure the ETE have invested themselves in detecting such things thanks to their misadventures with the Shinkyo). “Traces of solid rocket fuel all over the larger bays. Nothing left in obvious quantity.”
“Set down?” Paul looks to see if I’m game. I nod.
“Land on one of the big docks,” Paul tells his people, even though the caverns could easily accommodate it. “Let’s keep the ship out of the cave hangars. I don’t want to risk a roof coming down on it. And keep the lifters live in case the dock is rigged to drop out from under us.”
The Lancer barely jolts as it settles onto what looks like the main dock, which connects to the largest central manmade cavern, which is big enough to possibly “dry dock” one of their frigates (assuming all the masts were taken down first). Scaffolds and rigging across the cavern ceiling seems to support its use for working on something dirigible-sized. The cavern branches into almost a dozen smaller tunnels, some of which look like they go well back into the cliff.
Sakura’s two “scout” shinobi are out of the airlock as soon as it opens, taking the large open “hangar” cave we’re docked outside at a low, animal-like run, splitting and clinging to opposite walls.
Paul and Rhiannon are out next, holding position like statues between the cave and the ship while Horst’s squa
d deploys into formation.
Sakura moves to the lock next, her large bodyguard right behind her.
“You would be safer in the ship, Lady Hatsumi,” I try to halt her, “at least until we can be sure the site is secure.”
“Are you so content to wait here and miss this experience?” she challenges lightly.
I gesture for her to go before me.
Even through my mask, the Zodangan caves smell stale, musty, almost like the makeshift prisons where we’ve kept captured pirates. But there’s also the smell of metal, fuel, machinery.
It was probably worse when the caves were closed. Answering the question of how they lived and worked in the low atmospheric pressure, we see signs of old sealing material and the telltale grooves and bolt-holes that say, until recently, each section of these caverns, including the big hangar-sized openings, had some kind of light makeshift airlock, probably the fabric type usually common to emergency shelters. They could have pressurized the big spaces while they worked on their ships, then sealed the smaller sections whenever they had to open the hangar “doors”. But it’s all been stripped.
“Waste not, want not,” I hear Rhiannon mutter, her boot kicking at the cut in the stone deck, gunked with old sealant, where one of these “airlocks” used to be.
There are tubes—probably for feeding and removing precious oxygen from different work spaces—bored through the rock near most of the connecting tunnels, but any gas lines they held are also gone.
The floors are littered with random debris. Broken machines and tools have been left behind. Empty crates. Pieces of pressure suits and environmental gear—some obviously marked with pirate art—all well beyond usefulness. Even the working scaffolding looks like it had been much more extensive, that they’d taken everything they could manage.
The God Mars Book Two: Lost Worlds Page 29