Champion of Mars

by Guy Haley

  Vo’s mind, pushed to great heights by that of Tsu Keng, observed all possible quantum outcomes exactly simultaneously, not sequentially, preventing any one state of truth being determined before the desired outcome was chosen and enacted.

  Not all men could become pilots, just as not all spirits could be ships. The act of forcing one’s will onto an eleven-dimensional space required a stupendous act of double-thinking, for they had to be both ignorant and aware they were doing it. Awareness that all possible outcomes existed contaminated the observance of said outcomes, reducing the number of outcomes to one, and crippling the possibility of success. Through denial, they thus preserved the undetermined state of things before the time was ripe for determination to come into effect. At the same time, they saw what they saw; the inevitability. What happened was always the only answer. The pilots of Mars were unshakeable in their conviction that they were right.

  They were bred to defy fate.

  All truths, however, are subjective.

  Together, Tsu Keng and Krashtar Vo observed exactly where the Stone Kin would be, and fired. But the Stone Kin operated outside of time, observing their fire at precisely the same moment, their will undermining the certainty principles of the aggressor.

  Even if it was inevitable it would be hit, if the target could force its own interpretation of events onto the firer, then it would miraculously avoid the shot. Always. If the ship could force its own observed interpretations on a target’s, then the opposite would occur – it would always be hit. The target would either always be hit, or always be missed, but never both, as decided by the eleutheremic arguments constructed by the duelling craft, and how well they tricked their opposite number into adopting their point of view.

  Combat was a matter not of flight, then, but of sheer will.

  For a few brief moments, two observable realities vied with each other for dominance. Only one held true at any one time, but both could be true at different times, and the ships, the Stone Kin and the cannon’s ordnance flickered into and out of existence, describing multiple fractured courses and positions, the universe blurring into a myriad possibilities, time spread like a rainbow. The fabric of reality groaned under the strain.

  Probability was wracked by a monstrous contest of wills. Packets of energy exploded or failed ever to have existed about the weaving, poly-possible craft. The ship was, then wasn’t, then was again, its potential ruination hanging on the threads of contested interpretation.

  Seventeen thousandths of a second and it was over. Tsu Keng’s fire raked over the body of the Stone Kin. Volleys from his wingmates crisscrossed the thing. For one moment its pulsations stilled and its form solidified into something ugly and squamous.

  It imploded, and ceased to be.

  The Martian fleet flickered through the space the alien craft had occupied, rolling and singing as they moved from one potentiality to the next. Emboldened, they assailed the remaining three Stone Kin. Many died.

  The sky wept tears of light as ships left mankind’s birthplace in their millions, fleeing the tear in the sky. The harsh light of the transformed Jupiter glared at them all as they fled. The Stone Sun was one fight closer to being kindled, the Stone Kin one step closer to being trapped. Earth, Mars, Venus – the ancestral homes of Man – would be entombed with them, but the plague of the Stone Kin would go no further.

  Tsu Keng did not care. Tsu Keng flew.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Descent

  FOR THE BRIEFEST of moments, the Veil of Worlds parts and the stars shine strong and clear upon parts of Mars long alien to them. I feel displaced; unclean. The gap closes, and swirling unreality returns. Where before there was nothing, our silver dart drifts in the shrouded night high above the world.

  The rays of the true sun sweep around the planet, burning dimly through the Veil. Even sapped, it strikes glimmers of light from our many-finned hull. We drift, the ship turning as it begins to fall. It moves without direction. Burns and wounds criss-cross the hull; ugly welts and brassy contusions that mar the rainbow lustre of Tsu Keng’s seamless skin.

  Tsu Keng is dying. He has been true to his promise and to his fate.

  The ship’s pace quickens towards the shadowed deserts, the dusk-shrouded ice fields, the mottled ruptures where Stone intrusions pierce lower realities, to torture crust and time alike.

  Yoechakenon sleeps. His face is frozen in a grimace, whether of pain or terror I cannot discern. A nimbus encases him, like frozen curls of oil on water. The area within it shimmers, as if uncertain whether to be or to be not. My love looks more like the possibility of a man than a being that lives and breathes.

  This is fortunate. The stasis field holds. I do not have much time. Tsu Keng is disabled and I cannot control his failing body.

  The instruments of the ship blaze around Yoechakenon, and blinking lamps measure the beat of the craft’s slowing heart. The lights flutter with increasing irregularity; some do not return to life. As the seconds pass, fewer and fewer shine, and those that still shine do so ever more dimly. The ruined cabin vibrates. Globules of viscous fluid quiver in the air, floating from torn arteries and smashed organs revealed by the ruptured walls.

  I try to assert myself, throwing out parts of myself to fill the space Tsu Keng has vacated. I do not know what I am doing. His instruments are unfamiliar. I find an image bank, but its projectors ripple and fail, and no image appears. A shower of sparks issues from them, and many fall dark.

  “My love.” My voice struggles into being, vibrating frayed vocal cords of living glass. It fades away, before swelling to fill the cabin of the slipship. I feel pain, as part of Tsu Keng’s voice breaks forever. “My love. Awake.” My voice is perfect, alluring and husky, for it was designed to be so, but also cracked and stuttering, and this I do not intend. I am afraid. “I am blind. I cannot see. We are caught. The ship is damaged, and it does not respond. Tsu Keng is dying. We are falling.”

  “Warning.” My voice; a second voice from a subsidiary mind that has infiltrated part of the ship’s control system. Good. My choir grows into my new skin. This voice is impassive, isolated from my fear, and there is a terrible finality to its words. “Plasma drive offline, atmospheric entry in three minutes, thirty-seven seconds and counting. Warning.”

  I attempt to rouse Yoechakenon. I struggle deep in the ship’s matrix, trying to shut off his protective cocoon. He was a pilot, once. He will know what to do. I caress sigils floating in the innerspace of the ship’s private world, but they do not respond. I push harder until something breaks, optic beams burning through crystalline arrangements stressed beyond tolerance by the ship’s transference from the higher dimensions to the lower. The field remains imperturbable, and Yoechakenon stays enmeshed in his nightmare.

  “My love, Yoechakenon, wake up, please wake up!” I whisper. My voice is fractured, multiple layers of pleading. “I need you!” My other voice carries on its relentless countdown. “Atmospheric entry in two minutes, fifty-six seconds.”

  I push and push, attempting to break into systems I barely understand. I feel trapped, imprisoned. I cannot get out.

  Something gives, and I have influence over another system – the ship’s damage control. I steel myself.

  This is going to hurt.

  Agony assails me as I take on the suffering of the vessel. My mind fractures further as I wrestle with it. Then the pain is gone; I have offloaded the feeling onto a sub-personality, and walled it off, screaming, in a part of myself. Another of my voices sings a song of destruction. “Extensive hull damage. Slip shields disrupted during transit. Crystalline matrix disrupted. Columnar link severed, ship’s mind contaminated. Ship’s systems at twenty-seven per cent of prime capacity and falling. Probability of ship intellect survival fourteen per cent and falling. Wake up, Yoechakenon, wake up! The ship is caught!” My voices sound under and around each other in chorus, a melody of hull integrity, pleas, atomic cohesion, uncertainty, temporal positioning, fear. A hundred subroutines speak thei
r opinions and announce procedures, possible as well as attempted, as my choir attempts to halt the descent. There is a coughing from the ship’s rear, a flare of light that overwhelms the viewports’ darkening mechanisms. The ship slews violently around, taking us broadside on to the planet. A cascade of molten half-metal rains past. “Plasma drive destroyed. Initiating emergency landing procedures.” My voices come together, speaking together with polyphonic certainty. “We are going to crash.”

  The ship gathers speed. Elsewhere on Mars it will be full day, but the Veil lets little light through, and the land below lies under a greyish murk. The enfeebled sun illuminates orbital artefacts of ages past. Corpses in orbit, decaying platforms of long-forgotten purpose, their remains pointing tangled fingers of ruinous superstructure accusingly at the planet below.

  Above the north pole, the blue-fringed Stone Sun rises to oppose the true sun, its light an anti-light, a light that blinds with darkness. So far away outside the Veil, the usual laws do not apply within the realms of the Stone Lands. The Stone Sun was made by Man, Jupiter resculpted to imprison the Stone Kin. Its stuff is of the Stone Realms entirely, and within this interface it waxes strong, a monstrous vortex of malice.

  The damaged slipship continues its tumble. Tsu Keng’s dimension-warping technologies are functional, but useless in the face of mundane gravity. I am trapped in a disintegrating body, and I will die if I fail in my struggle for mastery of it.

  Yoechakenon will die.

  I re-route streams of light-borne data through unbroken areas of the ship’s inner network, I tear up the living machine’s operating protocols, destroying swathes of its personality in the process; anything to bring my beloved Yoechakenon down safely.

  I feel great pain, and part of my greater being burns out: that which was bound to the ship’s soul, a temporary arrangement that could now turn fatal. Titanic cathedrals woven of thought that dance with more possibilities than there are atoms in the universe sputter and go black. Memories I have held for tens of thousands of years are gone. I isolate my core aspects while struggling with the craft’s few functioning systems. Should we survive, I will remain Kaibeli.

  Should we survive.

  “Warning, atmospheric impact in fifty-four, fifty-three, fifty-two, fifty-one, fifty, forty-nine, forty-eight...” My submind’s voice emotionlessly counts down as thirteen other pieces of me attempt to devise a way out. All solutions are found wanting and discarded.

  “Three per cent probability of ship intellect survival. Six per cent of occupant’s survival. Nine point seven five of hosted AI survival.

  “The ship is breaching the atmosphere. Warning. Approach vector incorrect. Destruction certain.”

  A sharp whistling resounds through the hull as the ship passes through the upper layers of the atmosphere. Our velocity is comparatively low, but with my side-on approach I am certain to bounce across Mars’ thin sheath of air like a stone skipping on a pond, breaking up and plummeting to fiery ruin. Either that or I will pass over the Stone Lands entirely, and hit the Veil of Worlds at the far side, and be destroyed utterly.

  The craft judders. The viewports glow red. The whistling grows to a roar. I try again to rouse the ship’s soul, but it is slumped in one corner of itself, mumbling in terminal quinary. I recoil; its routines are shot through with the spirit-slaying particles of the Stone Realms. It is closer to death than I thought.

  “Yoechakenon!” I shout. “I don’t know how to do this! Yoechakenon, for the love of all life, wake up!” Part of me is amused. Yoechakenon has rarely seen me perturbed. There is no response from the frozen man, and he stays locked outside the normal flow of time.

  I cast wildly around for salvation. Just as I am beginning to give up hope, I find activation routines for three directional impellers buried deep in the ship’s mental framework. I follow the trail of electrons to their locations upon the ship’s hull. My minds debate with one another if they will work, if they were damaged by our journey through the Veil, if they will do any good should they be sound. The conclusions I reach, swifter than lightning, are all negative. Lacking other options, I try them anyway. One goes instantly to destruction, searing my mind like a red hot knife. I force calm upon myself, and power the remaining pair up slowly. I pray, even though I know the Great Librarian cannot hear me.

  There is a low counterpoint to the roar of the air outside, a pulsing that jostles with the vibrations of the cabin. One of the impellers is online. I manipulate it gently, as careful as I can be. Slowly, the craft tilts, nose forward, presenting its prow to atmosphere. Another gravity thruster sounds, stray graviton particles rippling through my being. The ship pitches to the right.

  “Four per cent probability of ship intellect survival.” My relentless voice chimes, barely audible. “Twenty-three per cent of occupant survival. Thirty-six per cent of hosted AI survival.”

  The ship streaks through the sky, a blazing spear trailing fire in its wake. My body roars over glacial peaks, passing over the endless plains that lie at the feet of towering cliffs of ice, dazzling places with my passage that have not seen light for thousands of years. Strange things, not of Mars, track the ship with cold eyes. I take little of this in. I try my best to slow the ship’s descent with the few means at my disposal.

  “Seven point eight six per cent probability of ship intellect survival. Forty-six point four per cent of occupant survival. Sixty-seven per cent of hosted AI survival.”

  The boom of the ship’s arrival shatters the silence of the freezing Stone Lands. I draw closer and closer to the ground, hurtling over the prairies that girt Mulympiu, lands that have not felt the tread of true Martians since the end of the Third Stone War. I punch through clean air and the choking fumes of Stone intrusion alike. I am pulled down, betrayed by my borrowed body.

  “Eight point eight six per cent probability of ship intellect survival. Fifty-seven point four per cent of occupant survival. Seventy-eight per cent of hosted AI survival.”

  And then we hit. To my minds, functioning far faster than that of a human being ever could, there is a universe of silence, an eternity of calm hidden in a nanosecond of fury. Then there is nothing but noise and blinding pain and the scream of tearing half-metals.

  Soil drags at the ship, scrabbling to bring my warmth into its freezing embrace. I break free and hurtle forward several hundred spans; once, twice, spinning over and over. I ram the ground again. Iron-hard ground claws at my ruined fins, hauling the ship back into line with itself, sending sprays of turf, water, steam, and dirt out either side of me. Caught fully in the clutches of the steppe, the ship skids to a long stop, leaving a steaming furrow four thousand spans long behind it. I cry out as the ship’s spine snaps. The craft breaks in two before coming to a final, tumbling halt.

  Within, the few lights about the cabin flicker. But they do not die.

  The ship sits in an empty landscape of sere grasses and dirty, timeless snow. High above, the Stone Sun burns in the sky with silent fury, Suul opposite cowed and faint.

  The ground hisses, the ship’s half-metal body ticks as it cools. All too soon it is cold. The heat of re-entry dissipates into the frigid steppe, and a sheen of frost runs spidery caresses over the hull. All falls silent within the craft. Without, the land returns to its deathly watch, the gnarled heather and grasses that cloak it moving fitfully in the wind, as if it stirs in fever-sleep.

  The noise of energy generation invades the inside of the ship, as a few more points of life spring uncertainly back to life. Flames gout from a smashed wall and die back, leaving the greasy smell of burnt meat upon the air.

  “Yoechakenon?” My voices speak together again, quiet and tentative. I run my selves round the vessel. The field protecting Yoechakenon glows bright. This time, when I try the sigils and they do not respond, I smash them with a lash of my psyche.

  The nimbus about Yoechakenon shuts off, and his tensed body crumples in upon itself. He utters an inchoate shout that seems the end of a greater cry, and is still. />
  I direct my will to preventing the dropping temperatures from slaying the one I love, and wait for him to awake.

  YOECHAKENON AWAKES. HE blinks, clearing tears and sweat from his eyes. His body tingles with the remembered pain of stasis. This signals good news, that he is in stasis no more.

  “Yoechakenon? Yoechakenon,” I say. I hide my concern for his wellbeing. Stasis is not a natural state: those who step outside of time do not always return, and some of those that do are not the men they were when they departed.

  He comes to properly, and I feel joy. He coughs on the alien air of the Stone Lands.

  “You are here.” He attempts to rise, but is weak, and lies back on the couch, clutching at his armour and glaive.

  “Yes, Yoechakenon, I am here.”

  “Then the Emperor was not lying, in that one regard.” He puts aside the glaive and runs his hands over his face, as if feeling it for the first time. Another spasm of coughs racked his body. He looks around the pilot’s chamber. “What happened?”

  “The ship sustained serious damage in our flight through the Veil of Worlds. My memory is seriously impaired, but from what I can gather, many of the ship’s defences were undone once it pierced the Veil. Yoechakenon, I...” – my voice struggles, fading out as more of the ship’s communication system shatters – “I am not sure, I saw...” I doubt myself, and Yoechakenon sees it. “The ship’s mind suffered greatly.”

  Yoechakenon struggles up onto his elbows, and his movement provokes a million hurts, though these are but echoes of his earlier agony. Ignoring the discomfort, he looks about himself, gauging the danger in his immediacy. The cabin is dark, only the dim light of failing instruments allowing him to see anything. Ruptured bulkheads spill smashed crystals on the crumpled floor; the ship’s ergonomic lines are buckled. In one wall a rent stands, revealing the cold blackness of the Stone Lands outside.