Champion of Mars

by Guy Haley

  They drifted away one by one. Jensen first, saying he had a round of inspections to make, the rest shortly after. Holland could not finish his food; his stomach felt the size of a squash ball, and the erratic howling of the wind drove his appetite away. He tried to help the Van Houdts clear up – it was his turn on the kitchen rota – but they insisted he rest.

  He left, professing his thanks. When he turned back to ask them if he could perhaps take their slot next week in return, they were embracing; Kick comforting his wife, stroking her hair as she shook silently with tears.

  He left without saying a word.

  Outside, the wind howled louder with every passing hour. Down in the accommodation quarters, part buried as they were, it had become audible. Summer was coming, the ice caps’ CO2 was sublimating into the air, driving winds of surprising ferocity through the planet’s thin atmosphere. The storms could last for weeks; the very worst engulfed the entire planet, turning it from red to featureless orange.

  Holland lay in his bed, face to the brick wall. He tried to shut the noise out of his mind, but failed, and the drawn moaning of the wind became a soundtrack to his circling thoughts. It hounded him, began to sound triumphant, the baying of wolves closing in on their quarry. What the hell had they found down there? He felt feverish. He tossed and turned, rolling from side to side. He would find what he thought a comfortable position only for pain to grip him: a sharp stab in his shoulder joint, or a low, insistent throb in his legs that started as an innocuous ache but which soon became unbearable until he shifted again and the sorry process recommenced.

  He flipped onto his side for the hundredth time, and suddenly, he was wide awake. Something was watching him. His eyes snapped open.

  A silhouette in the dark. A woman. He made to move, but could not, the iron bindings of nightmare about his limbs. The woman came closer, her form stuttering as she moved. The shape moved through space jerkily, now closer, now further away, although its progress overall was towards him. She leaned in, and Holland made out a savage grin, huge eyes highlighted with green stars, the reflections of the lights of the equipment in his room. She brushed a strand of hair behind her ear; again, that stop-go zoetrope flicker, her hand jumping the spaces in between, missing out slivers of time. She held her finger to her lips and bared her teeth. They elongated, pink gums swelling, needle-fangs that dripped venom coming closer and closer to his face. Her jaw distended, as if she would devour him. He would have screamed, then, if he could. Her lips touched his head, and he was swallowed whole, wrapped tight in a skin that was not his own and yet one that he knew as intimately.

  Suddenly, he was in the corridor, wavering uncertainly on his feet. The woman stood in the light. She was naked, smooth where nipples, belly button and genitals should have been. Her skin was pale, with a light, bluish cast. She beckoned to him. He followed her up the short flight of stairs from the accommodation level, wading through the thick stuff of dream.

  He pitched forward into a maelstrom of shapes that made little sense to him, the spaces his senses could not comprehend. Terror returned, redoubled. The woman was still there, not as a woman, but as one of the forms in the tumult, alien and unknowable, vibrating like a plucked string, only one end of which was anchored in familiar reality.

  Space and time warped.

  Cold metal on his back, the howl of the storm. He lay on the floor, paralysed, neck contorted uncomfortably against the wall. The woman rose above him, a woman again, albeit briefly, her shape askew, paint dissolving into water.

  “We will meet again,” she said, or shrieked, or thought.

  She disappeared. Stulynow stood in the corridor in the space where she had been. He glared, his eyes locked for long seconds on Holland’s, his face an unreadable blank, somewhere between rage and forgetfulness, his eyes empty.

  He turned and walked away.

  Holland awoke. Alarms blared. Acrid smoke made him cough. Something with a hideous snout was bending over him, shaking him, its face falling into red shadow and back into full visibility in the flash of the alarm lights rotating on the walls. Demon to man to demon to man. The siren wailed like the souls of the damned.

  “Holland! Holland! What are you doing out here?”

  Not a demon, Kick Van Houdt. He was wearing a face mask.

  Holland sat and cried out. His bones felt like ice. He clutched at his neck. “I don’t know,” he mumbled. “I don’t know.”

  Bodies were struggling into clothes as they forced their way past them, faces invisible as they spluttered into fists and wet towels.

  “It’s Dr Vance,” said Kick. “She’s gone into arrest, Suzanne found you here on her way to the sickbay, told me to wait with you. There’s a fire somewhere.”

  He thrust a mask at Holland, who took it in one limp hand, but did not put it on. A thought seized him. “Kick, you said, you said you dreamed –”

  Kick recoiled from him; dismay flashed across his face. “Not now, not now. Come on, there’s a fire.” He stood and ran, leaving Holland to pull himself to his feet.

  Jensen spoke on the tannoy. “I need help up here. Now. We’ve a fire in Mission Control.”

  Orson rolled down the corridor, coughing. His permatanned eugene skin was bare to the waist, rich silk pyjamas cladding his legs. “Has anyone seen Stulynow?” he demanded. “Has anyone seen Stulynow?” He stopped at a box on the wall, pulled out a face mask and jogged into the smoke.

  Holland followed him.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The Last War of Tsu Keng

  Year 15,105 of the Hegemony of Man

  THE SHIPS SANG for joy as their pilots approached, eager to be free of their hangar.

  The cavernous eyrie of the Royal Dock vibrated with energy, men and sheathed spirits running to and fro, support automata refuelling the machines and loading them with projectiles. The scramble alarm chimed its carillon, a calm exhortation to battle. Light dazzled, caught on a million facets of crystal and metals. The Royal Dock was a wonderful display of the decorative arts; that, and power.

  Tsu Keng’s principal eyes were poor at such close quarters. He saw the furthest ships clearly: slender, killing darts a kilometre distant. They would appear distorted to a human’s perception, for Tsu Keng’s field of vision extended all around him; everything nearer to him was a smear of colour and movement.

  But he could feel his pilot, the ripple of his approach cutting through the Second World as he walked toward the ship. He walked Tsu Keng’s gangway and presented himself at the ship’s main port. Krashtar Vo came into sharp focus as he came close to Tsu Keng’s near-sight eyes around the door. Behind him floated the spirit form of his companion, Kybele, ethereal against the tumult of preparations for war.

  Tsu Keng saw the pilot in both worlds: as he was now, a Martian bred for the rigours of combat space flight – squat, heavy featured, dense bones, thick muscle, internal organs protected by fluid sacs and strengthened by encysted smart gels – and as he was in the Library, a flickering mass of faces, of histories, one laid over the other, a line of personalities stretching back to the dawn of this era. Permissions and activation whispers swarmed from Krashtar Vo, to interface with the ship’s own Second World self. Tsu Keng’s soul was different, monolithic. Not for him the psyche-clouds of the human Martians, or the choirs of the spirits, whose co-operative subminds made up a greater whole. Tsu Keng’s material and psychic self were indivisible. He was made for one purpose, and desirous only to serve that purpose.

  Tsu Keng lived to fly, nothing but to fly.

  His systems thrummed in anticipation of it.

  “Greetings, Tsu Keng.”

  “Greetings, Krashtar Vo. Welcome aboard, my pilot.”

  Tsu Keng’s door skin developed a seam and rippled apart, and Krashtar Vo stepped inside. The gangway and door deliquesced, and Tsu Keng drew their lead-grey substance back into his larger mass. His door eyes rolled backward, their eyelids closed, and these too retracted into his body. The portal became smooth skin. H
is epidermal layer shivered, and a pattern of scales rippled, diamond plates lifting sharp edges up and then lying flat as Tsu Keng activated his armour. The atomic structure of his hide interlocked and became rigid, pressurising the liquid and ablative layers below it.

  Krashtar Vo’s feet made only a padding sound as he waddled through the ship. He was heavily adapted for his role, and could lead a comfortable life neither upon the surface of Mars nor within a microgravity environment. It was said some of the pilots enjoyed the deep habitats within the atmospheres of the gas giants, but they seldom stayed there long; the call of deep space was too great. A sacrifice, this modification, some of the humans held.

  What do they know? Krashtar spoke mind to mind. He had been a pilot only a few years, but already his bond with Tsu Keng was such that they could achieve interface without the aid of machine or spirit. No price is too great for this.

  Tsu Keng thought this true. He had no conception that it could be otherwise.

  Krashtar Vo gained the command bridge; he slipped into his couch and lay back. Tsu Keng wrapped himself about the pilot. Krashtar Vo’s body was hardened to the perils of slip space, and so required no stasis field, but Tsu Keng held him tight nevertheless.

  There was a sensation like a kiss, and their minds ran one into the other. Tsu Keng felt a caress, and the man’s companion departed. They were lovers, it was said, Krashtar Vo and Kybele, and had been through many lifetimes. Unusual, a man and his companion to be actively engaged in an affair of the heart, or so Tsu Keng had been told. This also, Tsu Keng did not truly understand, not even when he and Krashtar Vo were one.

  A call echoed through the canyon; one note, long and low, the song of the squadron alpha leader. The other ships responded, and the hangar became a sounding chamber for a harmonious outpouring of emotion.

  We are ready, the ships and their pilots thought as one. We will fly.

  The cradle arms holding the alpha ship folded back, and the ship dropped from the racks, plummeting to the floor. Gravity engines came alive, and it sped toward the dock mouth and out into sunlight.

  Follow, it thought. The beta ships dropped – one, two, three. Then all the ships rained down, like oak leaves in autumn. They twisted around one another, a cacophony of hooting song sounding in both worlds, the electomagnetic spectrum crowded with their delight.

  Tsu Keng and his squadron mates jockeyed for position, not breaking formation, not quite. Below them on the floor of the Royal Dock, men and machines moved painfully slowly, as slow as unphased Stone Kin. Tsu Keng and his kin laughed at them, fighting the desire to engage their slip drives there and then.

  Not here, not now, said Krashtar Vo. Not safe.

  The ships tumbled out of the hangar mouth into the Marrin, great bats leaving their roost. Sunlight turned their grey skins silver, and when they passed through the broad beams of the mirror suns, the scales of their armour sparkled iridescence.

  Onward, upward! To war! To war! the alpha sang. Five hundred combat ships obeyed, falling into formation. Their shadows raced up and over the canyon bluffs, drawing excited gestures from onlookers below. In the Second World, companion spirits mobbed the souls of the ships and their pilots, wishing them well, good hunting, come home. Air roared against Tsu Keng’s skin, his sharp prow forcing it aside.

  Oh, to be a ship of war! they sang. Oh, to be in flight!

  Sky turned from caramel to blue to purple to black, the ships’ song became thin and then vanished into vacuum, heard only now in the Second World.

  Stars shone unhindered upon the raiment of infinity. They were not alone. The heavens blazed with shiplight, bright dots moving swiftly, vessels the size of countries diminished by distance to needle-tips. Thousands upon thousands of them filled the sky in long trains, rising from Earth, Venus, and Mars, from the habitats, from the belt, from the moons of the giants, heading away from the Sulian System, heading out for the stars and for safety.

  The greater part of mankind was in flight.

  Out from the warships, past the crescent of Mars, a great light burned, one that appeared foul and wrong to the eyes of the ships, a second sun in place of Jupiter.

  The Stone Sun, brighter now than the tear in the sky it would close. The hyper-dimensional object Jupiter was becoming would constrain the Stone Kin within the gravity well of Sul, seal the tear in reality and keep the Stone Kin from infecting the wider universe. Sulian ships swarmed about the transmogrified gas giant, the fruit of Man’s last great labour, working without pause to ignite this second, uncanny star and save mankind.

  It was here the Martian ships flew. This is where the Stone Kin concentrated their efforts. The craft of the Kin descended to the lower dimensions and assailed the construction fleet daily, for they, like Man, wished to be free. This was but the latest of a thousand skirmishes.

  To the fight, my brothers! called the alpha ship. To the battle!

  Tsu Keng’s wings unfurled, as did those of his brothers and sisters. Their unity of purpose and mind saw them all drop up from this world, their wings folding them into complex eleven-dimensional geometries where the wills of the pilots could more effectively move them.

  You are not here. Krashtar Vo’s inner voice, indistinguishable from Tsu Keng’s own, told him of his place in the universe, convinced him utterly that he belonged somewhere else. You are here.

  Concentration was difficult. Things assailed them as they passed the Veil of Worlds into slip space, the infections of the Stone Kin spreading even there.

  Screams scarred the higher reality of the Veil as ships succumbed to raking claws and incomprehensible technologies.

  A short slip. Tsu Keng knew that he was elsewhere. That was the natural order of it. How could it be otherwise?

  The Martian squadron materialised deep in the Jovian subsystem and into the heart of battle. Tsu Keng’s wingmate flew straight into a cloud of debris at near-luminal speed, tumbling into a million pieces. Tsu Keng’s combat wing split, the four remaining ships spiralling in evasive manoeuvres as thousands of anti-collision hardbeams vaporised the debris.

  Krashtar Vo looked upon the battle through Tsu Keng’s eyes, his mind comprehending their situation as Tsu Keng bent his own mind to the task of survival. Their battlefield spanned anything up to eight spatial dimensions, only the highest and the second temporal axes safe, unsullied by violence. Combat was conducted at speeds approaching the four-dimensional maximum for objects of their mass. At such velocities, relative position at a distance was impossible to judge, so they fought at close quarters.

  A dozen Terran ships fought a desperate fight with four Stone Kin vessels. The Terran ships were near-identical to those of Mars, the same in all but song. Their armour was scarred and their movements panicked. The Stone Kin craft – if they were craft, none had ever been captured, and no crew ever seen – warped and flexed. Their presence was an intrusion into three dimensional space, and their forms were not fixed. It was as if they rotated in their own space, presenting first this aspect of themselves to the lower dimensions, then that, where they could be understood only as disparate parts. The spirits and humans of ordinary spacetime perceived them no more clearly than blind men describing an elephant. Beams of exotic particles erupted unpredictably from their surfaces. Their effusion and potency defied analysis. Eleutheremics could not predict them. They might impact upon a ship with less effect than a ray of moonlight, or they could cut it in two.

  The alpha ship severed the fleet’s higher linkages, lest the Stone Kin infiltrate the ship’s cortices. Training, experience, and force of will would determine the outcome of the day.

  The Stone Kin shattered two more of the Terran ships to glittering clouds, and bright fire roiled and died in the vacuum. The remaining Terran craft fell back, joining with the Martian fleet. The ships greeted each other with long songs, broadcast on inter-ship ranges, but they were muted. The Terran ships were exhausted and afraid.

  Today they could all die. They were poorly matched against the Stone
Kin, no matter how many Sulian craft crowded the sky. The Stone Kin’s power was ineffable.

  Survival did not matter, not to Tsu Keng. He and his fellow ships found the Terrans’ fear contemptible. To fly, that was all. To fight, that was what was demanded. He had no fear, he would fly, he would fight. Death was immaterial.

  The Martian fleet surged forward. They ducked and arced like dolphins as their engines pushed at the fabric of space.

  The Stone Kin revolved their incomprehensible bodies to face this new threat. Beams jagged out from them, all targeted unerringly on the alpha craft. Beams of infinite colouring intersected on the space where the alpha swam. Too late, its pilot attempted to exert her will and force the ship elsewhere. Its wings were part unfurled as it was cut into a hundred pieces, fragments of it spinning out and impacting on those following it.

  Some of the younger vessels, those with inexperienced pilots, hesitated and swerved, songs vibrating with panic. The rest hurled themselves on, diving through the lattice of beams the warping Stone Kin projected. More ships died in ecstasy, annihilated as they flew.

  The Martians had lost thirty ships already.

  Krashtar Vo and Tsu Keng moved themself into an attack pattern. They part-deployed their slip wings. Their remaining wingmates spiralled down after them, copying their leader’s action.

  Pilot’s and ship’s shared skin prickled as slip shields came online. Krashtar Vo enforced his interpretation of events upon Tsu Keng and the craft jinked madly, moving from location to location without crossing the space in between.

  Tsu Keng deployed his cannons and opened fire. Krashtar Vo extended his mind, unique organs in his brain pre-observing an infinity of outcomes. Their joined mind was capable of processing vast amounts of information at once. Self-imposed ignorance was the lever to the imposition of will.