Champion of Mars

by Guy Haley

  Deep inside some of the shattered walls, crystal chips glow. These are weak, glimmerings in places that should have been ablaze with the illumination of self-knowledge.

  “Tsu Keng is dead?” he says.

  “He will pass soon. I am sorry.”

  He is quiet for a time. His thoughts are clouded with grief. “That is a great shame,” he says. He levers himself into a squatting position within the couch. He stays there for a few minutes, shivering from shock and cold. The air gusting through the breaches in the hull is icy and strangely flavoured, and his lungs burn with it.

  “Lost and without a means of return. Our situation appears grim.” Yoechakenon rubs at his forehead as nausea floods over him. Worse than the pain is the feeling of meaninglessness that permeates every part of his being, a side-effect of the Stone Lands. Men were not meant to tread here. “What hurts have I sustained? I feel as if death is upon me.”

  “As far as I can ascertain, you are only superficially damaged.”

  He runs his shaking hands through his braids. “It feels as if that is far from the case.”

  “Your spiritual energies remain intact. There is no contamination or sign of interference within your neural or interface frameworks – unlike the ship. I cannot be totally sure, I have lost most of my external processing centres. I cannot see beyond standard human spectral ranges; the ship’s sensor suite is smashed beyond repair. But I am almost certain you are undamaged.”

  “I should not feel so weak,” Yoechakenon says darkly. He grits his teeth, fighting the pain and queasiness, and succeeds at pulling himself upright. It is a supreme effort. He lays his head against the metal skin of the ship. It should be warm with life, but is clammy as a corpse. His hands are sticky with ship’s blood, his feet chilled by the thick fluids pooling on the floor.

  “This will pass. The stasis field would not go out. After we crashed and the ship’s spirit failed. I am sorry, but I had to use force to wake you. The sickness is a side effect of your abrupt reintegration with linear time.”

  Yoechakenon is disoriented. He feels vulnerable, an unaccustomed sensation that fills him with unease.

  I cannot wait for him to ground himself. There is a feeling, a scratching on my skin. It is swift and then gone, but it draws near the ship’s bridge. “There is something outside the ship.”

  Yoechakenon listens, focussing his hearing on the air beyond the gash in the wall. All he hears is the thin, malignant wind.

  “I hear nothing.”

  “They are stealthy. Much of the ship’s skin is numb, but there are places that can still feel. They pass over these, and are working their way up the hull towards us. Their claws hurt the ship’s flesh.”

  Yoechakenon risks switching his sphere of consciousness. Ours is the connection of the prime degree, higher than the first, lower only than that endured by the Emperor and his spirit twin. Through me, Yoechakenon may feel what I feel, as I may look into his heart and mind. He does so now, interfacing directly with the ship’s senses. He grimaces as he experiences the ship’s pains. The death pangs of such a large machine are strong. We feel the life draining from the huge hull, feel the canker of madness growing in the ship’s mind as Stone Land contamination forces itself between its streams of consciousness. Twists of golden thought turn black.

  There. Again. Claws upon the ship’s skin.

  He concentrates on the sensation. It is fleeting, intermittent, present only when whatever monster comes for us passes over a living section of the hull. Yoechakenon has spent only a single lifetime as a machine, unlike I, who have lived many times as a flesh woman. To him it is strange and unfamiliar, this machine pain, and dread creeps up his spine as surely as the creatures creep up the hull.

  I push back his senses from those of the ship. Tsu Keng is fading; Yoechakenon’s soul could be swept away by the ship’s mind as it dies.

  “Their touch is of utter chill. Yoechakenon, they may be Stone Beasts, but I cannot be sure.”

  “Sure or not, if there is but a chance they are Stone Beasts, we must leave. Now.” He pushes himself away from the wall. It takes most of his strength.

  “Yoechakenon, I do not think we can do so without them detecting us. Conflict is a likely outcome of our current situation.”

  “Do not fret, Kaibeli.” He moves silently to the gash in the hull. The air is dry, the wind cold, robbing his slime-crusted body of heat. He shivers violently.

  “They are gathering where there is life in the ship still.”

  “Then they must be Stone Beasts,” says Yoechakenon, his breath pluming in the frigid air. “Mortal creatures would not be so fastidious in their feeding. Our situation, it appears, is not improving.” He pauses a moment, weighing our chances. “Can Tsu Keng be saved?”

  “No,” I say. My voice diverges into a chorus. A few dissenting voices sing a different song, but softly. “The ship and its mind are broken beyond repair. Even if it were to survive its injuries, it will never fly again. We will have to find another way from the Stone Lands.”

  “I wonder if the Emperor planned for us to return at all,” he says. Yoechakenon frowns. “We must sacrifice our good brother to save ourselves.” He hunts through the wreckage as he speaks, his movements increasingly sure as his strength returns. His mind pushes out the dark futility bedded in his subconscious. A quick investigation of the combat sheath the Emperor provided me tells him that the body is smashed beyond repair.

  You are going to have to ride in the armour, he says to me, mind to mind.

  “Yes, Yoechakenon,” I say. I do not want to ride with the armour. Its spirit is vicious and despises me. I try to disregard such pettiness and concentrate on the matter in hand.

  “Kaibeli, when I direct you, you must divert all remaining energies into the hull, as far away as from us as is possible. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, Yoechakenon. I understand. It will draw them away.”

  We feel a twinge in our mind from the ship, a sensation close to fear. Underneath its Stone-brought madness, Tsu Keng understands. Yoechakenon pulls aside a wrinkle of metal, unearthing supplies from a cyst in the ship’s wall – a survival pack and particle pistol.

  He places them in the couch, then reaches in and removes the armour. He does this slowly, whether from fear or reverence I cannot tell. He handles it like a priest would a relic. His fascination with it angers me.

  Inert, the armour is a small looking thing, no thicker than a forearm and about as long as the span of two hands, lead-grey, dull. Two thick bands inscribed with words no one can read circle the top and bottom. He weighs it in his hand. He does not activate it yet.

  The things scrabble closer.

  “Yoechakenon, please; I understand your reasons for hesitating, but you must don the armour now!” I hate myself for saying it.

  “It has been a long time,” he whispers. Then louder, “Above all things I longed for while I lay captive in the arena, the chance to wear this armour again was paramount. I cast it aside, and yet I yearned for it.”

  “Yoechakenon, I hate the armour, you know this, and nothing would make me happier than if you were to forswear it forever, and live unclad until the end of your days. But, though I am loath to admit it, we need it now. We will both perish without it.”

  There is a crash from outside. Yoechakenon looks at the case. He thinks of the power of the armour, of the protection it brought him, of the strength it lent his arm, yet still he hesitates. Images of the death that follows it wherever it goes fill his mind unbidden, images he can force aside only with difficulty. He sees faces, dying and dead, and tastes blood in his mouth that is not his own. The Armour Prime is far more than the scarab-harness worn by the palace guard and Praetorians. It is truly alive, one of only thirteen such armours ever to have existed. An army cannot stand against a skilled warrior so garbed, but there is a price, and it is this price that caused Yoechakenon to set it aside when confronted by the Spirefather of Olm.

  The spirits that dwell within the
armour are utterly malevolent, unlike any other of the Martian spirits, the Door-ward included. Its needs are vile, and they affect a man after a time. As much as Yoechakenon hungers for its power, he still fears it. The promise of death that it brings does far worse than sicken him.

  It excites him.

  “Very well,” says Yoechakenon. A shot of anguish makes him shiver, but his thumbs are already moving toward the hidden lock studs. He finds them by instinct, and presses.

  There is a hiss as the capsule melts in his hands, pouring through his fingers like quicksilver, and wisps of super-chilled air rise from it. It splashes quietly into the muck on the floor and spreads as a slick of metal. A pseudopod reaches up, a single, freezing, probing digit. It moves tentatively until it brushes Yoechakenon’s hand, then it is tentative no more.

  A flood of steaming, living metal pours at once from the floor, entwining itself about Yoechakenon’s legs. Streamers of it embrace his waist. Yoechakenon gasps as the armour flows, encasing his body from neck to foot, insulating his naked, muscular body from the cold with a repellent numbness all its own. His skin crawls as the armour wraps itself about him. As much as he craves the powerful symbiosis, he has never grown used to the moment the armour embraces him. Nor have I. I fear the day when the armour leaves him and his eyes snap open and something else looks out of them.

  The armour’s tendrils seek out the control ports studded down his spine, bringing the mind that dwells within the armour into direct contact with his own, and through him, with mine. The feel of its being is like iced water flowing into warm bones, the touch of a dead enemy. His mind is lost for a moment, and I am exposed alone to the brutality of the armour’s ancient soul; memories of war and victory from times long gone smash themselves into my mind. It whispers its hunger to tell more such stories, and write them large in blood.

  “Master,” says a voice, the smooth tongue of extinction itself.

  Then it passes, and Yoechakenon has a skin of metal, and he is warm and invincible and feels complete for the first time in two years.

  I am sad. When he is like this, in the armour, I lose him. “Hurry, the ship is dying,” I say. My voice betrays nothing. “It has but a few more moments. Go quickly.”

  “Is the ship ready?” he says.

  “It is.”

  “Then prepare yourself also.” He moves to the rent in the wall, and tears at the viscous strands forming over the hole. Even in the face of death, the ship struggles to heal itself. “Farewell, Tsu Keng,” he says, and jumps to the ground below.

  He lands easily in the runnel created by the ship’s crash. The mounds of soil thrown up around the buckled hull are already solid with ice. Something grey and mottled, silhouetted high above him on the ship’s bulk, turns its long head in his direction, its saucer eyes those of a deep-sea predator, alive with their own illumination.

  Now, thinks Yoechakenon.

  I reroute the ship’s remaining life to the broken cabin, and light flares within. The thing’s head whips around, away from where Yoechakenon hides. It lets out an awful cry, and is answered by others. The thing spreads corpse-grey wings and takes to the air, skimming the hull to the breach in the bridge. With raucous screams and a savage rattling of iron-hard claws on half-metal, others join it. We feel sharp pain, then I withdraw our minds from Tsu Keng’s. I slip my mind into the armour. Its spirit shifts, but does not trouble me.

  Yoechakenon, the after-effects of his awakening held at bay by the armour’s devices, bears us stealthily away over the bitter steppe.

  We reach a safe distance. Yoechakenon watches through the armour’s eyes as a flock of shadows rip into the still-living fabric of the craft.

  His sorrow chokes me.

  The creatures squabble violently with each other, sporting in the air over choicer morsels, engrossed in their feast. Yoechakenon powers down his armour to its bare minimum, trusting to its innate ability to warm him, lest the expenditure of further energies attract the monsters ravaging the ship. That he is wary of the armour’s influence also, he does not admit to himself. The sound of its voice has raised old terrors within him.

  Yoechakenon watches awhile. As the night turned grey, he turns away, begins a slow run across the plains. The armour soothes the pain in his limbs, aids his legs to bear us over the frozen wastes, away into the ceaseless wind. To the east looms the vast bulk of Mulympiu, stretching into the sky.

  I have the location of the ancient city of Arn Vashtena fixed in my mind. I direct him toward it, then I fall silent. I lie awake for a long time in the blood-dark of the armour. I cry myself into exhaustion, then sleep.

  Yoechakenon pretends not to notice my tears.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Stulynow

  GAS WHOOSHED FROM fire suppression systems, pure CO2 harvested from the atmosphere, as Holland half-ran, half-stumbled up into Mission Control.

  Mission Control was a large, multi-sided room. Screens and consoles lined every wall, except the one occupied by the large window overlooking the atrium. In the centre was a round meeting table with inbuilt holographic projectors; most of the twelve chairs surrounding it were upset. A small fire burned up against a console on the wall furthest from the door, licking the wall with yellow flame.

  The scientists, all bar Vance, Suzanne Van Houdt and Stulynow, were there, breathing masks over their mouths. Kick and Ito Miyazaki wielded a fire extinguisher, supplementing the base’s fire control, directing icy white clouds at the fire on the far side of the room. Red lights flickered. The fire went out.

  “Shut that damn alarm off!” Commander Orson shouted, his voice muffled behind his mask.

  The tumult ceased and the scientists came to a slow halt, looking for leadership from Orson. Quiet fell, but for the pervasive machine hum. A final plume of gas burst from the suppression system. Emergency lights painted the room red, black, red. The wind growled outside.

  “Can we get some goddamned lights on in here, please?” said the commander. He had his fists on his hips, stood in the middle of the room like a statue of a small town sporting hero. Jensen did something at his console, and white light flickered on. “Holland, why the hell aren’t you wearing your breathing mask?”

  Holland looked down at the mask, sweaty in his hand.

  “I...”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Jensen stood from the console he was at and pulled his own mask off. “We’re okay.” He hit a button and fans whirred, venting the fumes.

  Orson took his mask off, followed by the others. “The hell it matters. You were lucky, Holland; follow procedure next time.” He turned on Jensen. “Just what the Sam Hill is going on in here?”

  “Fire,” said the Swede, without a trace of irony. “Deliberate.” He pointed past Miyazaki and Van Houdt to a scorched pile of clothes wrapped round a gas cylinder at the base of the burned console. Scorch marks stained the wall, and the gelscreens there were shrivelled and dead, although the woven carbon plastic of the console was unaffected.

  “If that had gone off...” Orson said. “Cybele?”

  “Offline, I think,” said Maguire. “I don’t like this.”

  “What the hell, again? Stulynow? Is he behind this?” asked Orson.

  Jensen inclined his head. “Maybe. He’s the only one not accounted for, him and Vance, and she isn’t going anywhere. Someone did this.”

  “How is Vance? Anyone know? And find Stulynow, for Christ’s sake!” demanded Orson. For all his eugene poise, he was close to consternation, trying to hold it back for the sake of his crew. Tinkered genes didn’t stamp on fear, not entirely. Holland had heard of some cybernetic trials that removed it altogether. Not an experiment that had ended well. If you remove fear, you remove humanity. Orson had been antenatally altered, expensive and exclusive. His genes were flawless, his advantages many, but he was still human, and the situation was veering way off normal. “Where’s your wife, Kick? She okay?”

  “Ja, ja, ik ben okay.” Suzanne came into the room, face streaked with swe
at and soot, mask still on. There was a rip in her sleeve and she limped.

  “Are you all right?” Kick said. He and Ito moved to her, supporting her. “If that bastard has hurt you...” He lapsed into strained Dutch.

  She shook her head, trying to regain her breath and her English. “I said I’m fine. I haven’t seen Leonid. I fell. I twisted my knee.”

  “Vance? What about Vance?” said Orson.

  She looked up, pale blue eyes moving from one face to the next. “Dr Vance is dead,” she said.

  JENSEN GOT THE system mainframe back up quickly, although Cybele remained down. Once the place was running again, he brought up the last ten minutes of station camera data.

  “Look,” he said. “West entrance airlock. A suit is missing.”

  “Leo’s gone outside? In this?” said Maguire.

  “It appears so,” said Jensen. “That’s not all.” He brought the science package online. “I’ve a massive spike of energy here, thirty-three minutes ago. That’s when it starts.”

  They watched as Stulynow, viewed from above, walked from his room. Holland followed, coming out of his own room and staggering from wall to wall like a drunk.

  “What were you doing?” said Suzanne. “Are you a sleepwalker?”

  “Never in my life,” said Holland. He watched himself stumble along a corridor and fall, neck crooked against the wall; the way he was, he remembered, when he woke. Jensen speeded up the footage. They followed Stulynow from camera to camera as he set the fire in Mission Control, watched him walk into Cybele’s chamber with a fire axe.

  “He smashed up the AI?” said Suzanne, holding tight to her husband’s arm.

  Orson shook his head. “No. He’d never be able to get through the casing with a freaking axe. This energy spike, it’s similar to what we saw when the cylinder was uncovered. That took her down then, it’s done the same again. Looks like he was trying to finish the job.”