Champion of Mars

by Guy Haley

  Yoechakenon looks and looks as the Emperor continues to talk. He speaks of many things, of lost empires, of ancient cities long cast down in ruin, and he points at them as he speaks, but Yoechakenon sees nothing. The Emperor speaks of far-flung worlds and heroes with names no other men remember. Yoechakenon cannot see anything in the shifting patterns of light. He gazes more intently, and the Emperor talks on, his voice hypnotic.

  Suddenly the layers of the image fall into place, and to Yoechakenon’s amazement he is looking at a landscape. A ravaged, blasted world of desert and oily oceans, scarred by stone intrusion and ice caps made huge by the dimming of the sun. But there is life. He is looking at an arc of Yerth. A sliver of it is in darkness, the rest in greyish light. The dark grows, and as night moves over the world, he sees lights. They are dim and distant from one another, but they shine dauntless, undeniable, beacons of life in an uncertain sea of shadow.

  “Do you see now? This is Yerth, and there is a lie. Those lights are the lights of mankind’s cities. This is no lifeless orb. If the Quinarchy will lie about our brethren, what else will it lie about?”

  “This image cannot be real,” says Yoechakenon. “No one has looked upon Yerth since the time of the Third Stone War.”

  “You do not believe that. Your face betrays that you do not believe your own words. I have become adept at reading faces, in my time away from the Library.”

  They look again at the images of Yerth. Yoechakenon watches in wonder as the Emperor adjusts the viewing aperture, bringing into sharp focus vast cities with lights as bright as suns at their heart. He shifts the view, showing a party of skin-clad men bearing a slaughtered animal of bizarre appearance across a blasted heath. The device is so finely tuned we can see their faces, and the steam billowing from their mouths in the freezing air. If the Emperor has created this as a ruse, it is an impressive one.

  We gaze at the image for several minutes, until a black shadow passes over Yerth, and the image fills with the suggestion of something large and gelatinous, undulating in a manner that makes Yoechakenon’s skin crawl. The picture contracts, and there comes an inhuman, distant cry as of many creatures suffering together, and the picture fades away.

  “Stone Kin,” whispers Yoechakenon. He feels the chill of terror.

  “Stone Beast,” corrects the Emperor. “A mindless animal that dwells within the Veil, not one of the Kin.” He says this steadily. “The higher forms are gone.”

  “Where are they?” he asks.

  “They are here,” says the Emperor. He moves his hands, and another image leaps into life, clearer.

  This time we see a portion of Mars; where, I do not know. The images shimmer in that strange manner the air takes where the Stone Lands hold sway and men do not go. At first we see nothing, and then: “It is an army, I see an army,” says Yoechakenon.

  “You do,” says the Emperor. “An army of the Stone Kin, coming to Mars.”

  We look upon their ranks. They are strange to behold, when they can be seen at all. They are not of this reality, these creatures.

  “Time moves differently for them, and they come but slowly from the Stone Lands. When the Stone Sun draws close to Mars, then they will come forth and join with their allies, the treacherous servants of the Quinarchy.

  “There is more.” He passes his hands through the air. Another scene, another army, this one of men and machines ridden by spirits. In the centre of it, a great beast. It warps and flutters in the picture, its form yet to fully establish itself within the strictures of our reality. It hurts the mind. If I or Yoechakenon had any lingering doubts, they are gone.

  “Do you see? Do you see now? The League openly employs Stone Beasts; the Quinarchs tell their allies they are the masters of these creatures. The League remains ignorant, I am sure, of the depths of its betrayal.”

  We watch the army. It is assailing a citadel, the assault preluded by the particle fires we saw from the head of Might.

  “This thing, this window, can you see the Librarian? How can you be sure he still exists?” asks Yoechakenon.

  The Emperor shrugged, “He hides itself from all, as he has for ages. But his voice comes and goes, never within the halls of the Library, always outside. Sometimes it is a whisper, sometimes a roar. Sometimes it is not there at all. But it is there.”

  “You do not know if it is truly there, then. You do not know that this is not a device of the Stone Kin to deceive you.”

  “No, I do not.”

  Dim lights come on in the room. There remains the possibility that the shimmering Yerth and the stone army is a trick, the last torment of a man soon to lose his throne. We both think otherwise.

  “Go, Yoechakenon, take up your armour again. Find the Librarian of Mars. We will no longer be slaves to the Quinarchy, our people sacrificed to them. Perhaps from that our people will take heart, and Man will grow to be a power to be reckoned with once more. I have not been a wicked Emperor; but I have caused more pain than good. I want the few who are free enough of the Quinarchy to remember well the Emperor Kalinilak, and his champion Yoechakenon Val Mora, and I want that knowledge to bring them succour in the dark days ahead. This is no suicide mission, Yoechakenon. I intend for you to return, for how else will the people know what you will learn? That is to be your redemption. Return with the Librarian and you will be remembered forever. You have been punished, now, every man can see that, and the people love you as much as a gladiator as they did a champion. And they will love you as a hero thrice over. Think of it!” Agitated, the Emperor grasps Yoechakenon’s shoulders. His hands are dry and veinous, white, dry skin mottling the red. They are the hands of a used-up man. “My friend, that is what we have dreamed of for nigh on two hundred centuries, and you have the chance to make it happen.”

  Yoechakenon’s throat constricts, his mouth runs dry. “And if I refuse?” he says carefully.

  “You will not refuse, Yoechakenon. You have already decided to go. I can rest easy. Your honour is so great you will be compelled to carry out the task as long as you have strength in your limbs. Nor will you fail, for your pride will not permit it.”

  “My pride, strength and honour mean little if I am slain. If I die, then so will Kaibeli. Your will shall lie broken in the dust, and our souls also. Here at least I have a chance to return to the stacks.”

  “And you will certainly die here! You have no chance for the stacks, and they will be destroyed themselves. What more must I say to you?” The Emperor drops his head and stares into the dismal shadows of the room. His brow creases, as if he can see something that Yoechakenon cannot, and that thing disturbs him. He grips Yoechakenon’s shoulders the tighter.

  Yoechakenon looks deep into the eyes of the Emperor. They blaze too brightly; the candle of his life burns fast. “I could refuse, even though I know in my heart that you are right, and that both Kaibeli and I will suffer greatly when the city falls. I could refuse and watch you suffer, knowing that you, too, will never have the legacy you desire. But I will not. I will have you know that I am not swayed by fear, likewise that I am not swayed by revenge. I am a better man than you. But though I agree to do your bidding, you shall never have my forgiveness.”

  “It is not your forgiveness, but your skill at arms and will to survive I require.”

  “Then you have my word, they are once more at your service, nothing more. My spirit remains my own.”

  The Emperor closes his eyes and smiles, and his grip lessens upon the champion’s shoulders. “Good, good,” he sighs and nods, as if his mind has finally come to agreement with itself after a bitter dispute. “That is as good as I could expect.” He looks older and paler, a sick man who has expended a great effort. “Come, you must leave immediately before the Quinarchy discovers me and is forced to act. Even now, it will be growing suspicious; you have been away from the arena for too long.” He walks across the chamber. He makes motions that are swallowed by the weird illumination of the room, and a door opens that appears only as slivers of lights in t
he darkness.

  “How will I find the Librarian?”

  “The answer to that and your passage to him lie in the same place. Follow me. We have little time.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Wonderland

  ON WEDNESDAY, HIS fourth day at Ascraeus, Holland was taken into the caves. Early in the morning, he and his teammates ate a large breakfast. The walk to base camp took around five hours, so they were to be there two nights; breakfast was their last chance at real food for a while. Eggs, fresh bread, tomatoes, and beans – all Mars-grown. The food was good, and nutritionally balanced, but it would not be long before Holland was ready to kill for a steak.

  His team was a foursome: he, Stulynow, Vance – who was to monitor his physical and psychological reactions to the cave environment – and, to his irritation, the base’s Class Three.

  “Can’t be helped, I’m afraid. The carriage goes on all the expeditions, and she rides it all the way down on those where we have new team members,” said Maguire on the way down to Deep Two. “Don’t mind it, though, you’ll forget she’s there. Stuly’s the best cave expert we have, and he’s a bloody good guide. Two things that man is enthusiastic about: drinking and caves. I can’t wait for you to see it.”

  Maguire said a lot on the trip. Holland paid him little attention; his mind was on other matters. Maguire either did not notice or did not mind.

  Holland had seen video of the caves, and had explored a portion of them in a somewhat lacklustre virtspace – it was low resolution, and far from immersive. He figured this was for two reasons: first, full immersion in an environment that could simultaneously explode, choke, burn and freeze you would be excruciatingly painful, even in a virtspace. Second, if Marsform exhibited the caves’ glories for all to see, then they’d have a whole lot more people complaining about the possible extinction of everything inside.

  Holland had an inkling of the disparity between the bland VR and the reality. He’d had some samples of the lifeforms in his laboratory. He’d seen how industrious Mars’ chemotrophs were, and that had been out of their natural habitat.

  Suiting up under the watchful eyes of Jensen took forever. Holland was made to remove his survival undersuit and re-don it before he was allowed into the hard shell cave gear. They each had their own undersuit. The hard shells, of which there were five, were shared.

  “No, no, no,” said Jensen, slapping Holland’s hands away. “The undersuit on its own can keep you alive for a few days, but only if worn properly. Compressing the recycling systems by improper wear severely reduces their operational span, and it must maintain even pressure or your soft tissues will swell in the event of hard shell failure.” He fiddled at Holland’s undersuit and stood back. “There,” he said.

  Jensen took the opportunity to lecture all of them on the correct safety procedures for a solid half an hour. Holland was made to recite the location and usage of all the hard shell suit’s emergency equipment: quick release for its chest and back plates, alkali wash for acid contamination, medical packs, rapid foam patching gear, spares for water and air scrubbers... the list was long and Jensen made him go over it twice.

  “You, Doctors Vance and Stulynow. All well and good to stand there with those long faces. It will do you no harm to listen to this again. You may have the supply mules and the android, but should there be a cave-in and you are trapped, the equipment in the hard shells is all you will have between you and a lingering death.”

  “I am listening, Dr Jensen,” said Dr Vance steadily.

  “Well, I am not, you Viking bore. Get on with it,” said Stulynow.

  Jensen gave him a hard stare and went back to asking Holland his endless list of questions, then made him repack his equipment case.

  The point where they plugged the hard shell directly into his interface port was particularly unpleasant.

  Finally, Jensen was finished. They sealed the hard shells. Maguire tapped Holland on the shoulder. His vision was restricted to a one-hundred-and-seventy-degree arc in front of him, and he had to clump round to look Maguire in the face.

  “I’ll be watching everything from the control suite with Jensen, don’t you worry, Holly,” said Maguire. He held his hand up, thumb and forefinger pressed together in an ‘okay’ signal. Maguire and Jensen left the suit space. The door back into the station hissed as the seal engaged.

  “We will now check suit system telemetry,” said Jensen from the observation suite. Data displays flashed on, crowding the suit visor’s periphery. Tiny windows with a view of the observation suite and images from Stulynow, Vance and the android’s cameras, perfect as jewels, were stacked on the top right. Holland cycled through them, bringing Stulynow’s POV to the top as he would be leading the way. Cave maps, locational data, seismic readings, atmospheric composition, video capture, VR logging, Grid link (if he wished to see the Martian Grid’s contents, rather than having it forced into his head; he was grateful for that). Drop-down menus gave access to more data. Jensen instructed him to access a random selection of data sets and apps with his implant.

  “That all seems to be working,” Jensen said.

  “Don’t forget, Holly, you can customise what you have up on your dashboard. You can save your own profile so whatever suit you are in in future, it will boot up with your preferences. It’s only like having a new phone, it is.”

  “We recommend, however, that you keep all environmental information locked in as presented,” said Jensen. “Stulynow, is your team ready?”

  “Da,” said Stulynow. He stepped round the other two, awkward in the confined space of the suiting room, and checked each of them over. “See anything wrong, Jensen?”

  “All is in order,” said Jensen.

  “Let’s go,” said Stulynow.

  The door to the lava tube rolled open. They walked outside, over to the racks of equipment and inactive near-I mules. One, loaded with food and water, whirred into life and got unsteadily to its feet, followed by a second, bearing heavier gear. The mules had no real front or back. They were headless, both sets of legs identical, jointed oppositely to each other, but someone had stuck a stuffed donkey head to one end of the lead mule. It was dirty and had a number of small holes melted into it.

  “Where’s the android?” said Stulynow.

  “I am here,” said Cybele’s perfect voice. She strode out from the equipment store, wearing a sheath Holland had not seen before. It was heavier than her usual, its paint scratched, metal pitted with acid burns.

  “Her cave body,” said Stulynow. He tapped the chest plate of his suit. “Aluminium. Some of the methanogens down there eat through plastics, even modern latticed carbon, like grandmothers go through chocolates.”

  They went to the large airlock sealing the beginnings of the cave system from Deep Two’s chamber. Toothed doors unlocked from one another. They stepped through and the doors slid shut. No fans activated, there was no need for them on the way in. The doors were not there to regulate pressure, but to keep Wonderland’s methane from reaching Deep Two.

  The outer doors re-engaged with a clunk, and the inner doors opened. From here Holland could see the path down as a chain of lights, leading out from the tube, into the first cavern, and then on into the darkness.

  “Into the rabbit hole,” said Vance. She clipped herself, then Holland, to the safety line.

  “Welcome to Heaven,” said Stulynow laconically. “Or Hell. It depends on how you feel about caves.”

  Stulynow set out, and the others followed. Holland was growing more surefooted in Martian gravity, but the steps daunted him in the bulky hard shell. He took them slowly, Vance helping him down, Cybele standing at the bottom in case he should fall. He went over to the silicon formation, and began taking pictures and chemical readings from it with his suit.

  There was a lot of laughing.

  “Er, John?” said Maguire. Holland looked up to see him watching behind the observation suite’s window. “I wouldn’t bother with that. There’s plenty more of that lower dow
n.”

  “You really don’t know what to expect?” said Stulynow.

  “No,” said Holland. “Not really.”

  “Let me show you, my new friend Dr Holland.”

  Their descent began in earnest.

  THE PATH RAN down through caves stacked one atop the other. The caves followed what had been veins of sulphur deposited by the volcano; these had been eaten out by the lifeforms, leaving nothing but acid-scarred basalt. Now there was little living in the upper caves. A few small examples of the fairy castles, as the team called them, were the only things visible to the eye. In places, other mineral structures left by microbes coated the walls or the floors, but, confused by deposits leached in from the surface, they were little use for study.

  “Life here dates from a time when Mars still had a hydrological cycle,” said Holland.

  “Yes,” said Vance. “Not much alive this high up. Some methanogens cracking CO2 from the air. Without the sulphur oxidisers, the biome is limited. They’re the foundation.”

  Some of the caverns were stupendous in size. The old magma chambers and inflationary caves, mixed in with spaces full of the evidence of past biotic activity, fractured into crazed labyrinths where microbes had eaten away the rock. Holland’s suit lights often did not hit the far wall. He felt dwarfed by the scale of it. The weight of the shield volcano above them vanished in his mind. It was not possible to reconcile the size of Ascraeus Mons with the spaces beneath it.