Champion of Mars

by Guy Haley

  “So Delaware could be hiding round the corner?”

  Cybele was quiet for a moment. “Delware could be hiding round the corner.”

  Holland was lucky. His own environment suit was at the lava tube end of the base. If it had been in the other locker room by the atrium, he would have had to take someone else’s, which could have been a problem. He dressed quickly. Cybele reassured him that nothing was coming.

  As he was putting on his boots, he heard the distant sound of gunfire.

  He donned the rest of the gear more swiftly.

  There was more gunfire, then it stopped. His hands shook as he put the helmet on. He kept glancing toward the artefact, making sure that it hadn’t been taken. “Cybele? Jensen, what has happened to him?”

  “I am sorry, Dr Holland.” She paused. “Hurry.”

  He went into the corridor, began to make his way down toward the lava tube airlock.

  Metallic footsteps, unhurried, sounded behind him. “Shit, what’s that?”

  “Get into the restroom, quickly!” said Cybele.

  He ducked into the room. A row of stalls ran down one side, two shower heads in a communal shower. The door slammed and locked fast, sealed around its perimeter with multiple dead bolts. Sealant foam hissed from the edge, gluing it shut.

  “I have initiated hull breach procedure,” said Cybele.

  “What? Delaware’ll know where I am for sure.”

  “It already does. It is outside.” There was a rush of static. “It is trying to force itself into my communications with you. I have switched to a randomly modulated frequency. That will be safe for a while.”

  The door rang under heavy blows.

  Holland stood in the toilet in an environment suit, an artefact of unimaginable power in one hand. “What the fuck do I do now?” He continued to whisper even though he was caught.

  “The wall,” said Cybele. “Use your rock knife.”

  This room was right up against the base’s inflatable cellular wall. Double-skinned hexagonal pockets, inflated to slightly above Mars’ air pressure, were held in place on a lightweight carbon frame.

  Holland fished out a rock knife from his tool belt. A vibrating, monomolecular blade, designed to take slivers of stone for study.

  It should go through the wall like the proverbial knife through butter.

  The wall was tougher to cut than he figured, but he’d already cut out the inner skin by the time the heat lance started to burn its way in through the toilet wall. He watched it for a moment, a bright point of blue-white, moving slowly around the panels.

  He turned back to the task in hand.

  With the air gone from the wall cell, the fabric on the outside sagged in and bowed in the wind, which made it harder to cut. He pierced it, and the depressurisation of the room made it even more difficult. He was close to crying by the time he’d carved it away. Alarms should have been going crazy by this point, but sand poured into the bathroom unremarked. There was a rush of air, inwards this time, as the pressure equalised and wind pushed its way into the station.

  He pulled himself out of the hole, banging his suit on the way out and causing it to bleep angrily. He glanced behind him; Delaware was halfway down a second side of his impromptu entryway.

  Holland fled into the storm.

  The wind battered him, spinning him this way and that as he staggered from the base. Its locational lights, running from integrated batteries now the fusion plant was offline, blurred from distinct points to vague blotches. The next time he turned back, they had gone altogether. Sand and grit rattled off his visor, and if the noise of the wind had been unsettling from inside the base, out here it was terrifying.

  “What do I do? Where do I go?” shouted Holland.

  “The second entrance to the caves. The one that Stulynow took. I will guide you there.”

  A compass flared into life along the bottom of his helmet display – as if he were the needle in the centre, and he looked at the ring round the edge. He had no idea how it was oriented with the comms down; Mars had no magnetic field.

  “Turn northeast. Slowly.”

  Holland did so, and the wheel rotated about his head. A green arrow appeared at around 35 degrees.

  “Follow the green arrow. I advise you to pay close attention to the area immediately around your feet.”

  “Okay, okay, we can do this.” He gripped the artefact tightly, and set off toward the second lava tube.

  He lost count of how many times he nearly fell. The wind came from the northwest, buffeting him as he walked. The lower gravity and uneven terrain made his footing treacherous. When he reached the lava tube, he nearly killed himself.

  The tube had been blasted open, to allow the methane blocked by Deep Two’s airlock to vent into the atmosphere, so rather than a round cave entrance, the ground yawned into an open pit. He tottered on the edge, windmilling his arms, but it was no use. He tumbled in, bouncing from stone to stone, trying to protect his faceplate as he fell.

  He landed on the tube floor, bruised and winded.

  His clock told him he’d taken forty-three minutes to get there. It felt like half a lifetime.

  He pushed himself up, and switched his suit lights on. Three lamps set around his helmet sent beams of light through the dust-laden air. They lit upon movement, white in the dark, and Holland jumped.

  “Hey, Holly.”

  “Maguire? Maguire!” Holland’s fright turned to relief. “You’re alive!”

  “Yeah, me and Suzanne, figured this was as safe a place as any once it kicked off down there. We were both off duty, but then the gunfire...”

  Holland glanced around his helmet display, found the private channel he was looking for, and used his mental implant to activate it. “I hope you’re the only one hearing this, Dave.”

  “I think so. You’re better at this than me already.”

  “They’re all dead, Dave.”

  Maguire stole a look behind him, to where Suzanne sat on the floor hugging her knees. “All of them?”

  “All of them. Jensen, one of the mercs, I’m not sure. Everyone else is gone. The artefact came online when the Six tried to sample it. Me and Orson deactivated the fusion plant, but then the Six went mental. It killed half a dozen people before we blew its sheath away.”

  “Only it has more sheaths.”

  “Right. I’m taking this back.”

  “Why? What’s that got to do with this? Sounds like the fecking Five Crisis again, so it does.”

  Holland took in a deep breath. “Call it a hunch, okay?”

  “Yeah, sure. Whatever,” said Maguire.

  “I need to get to Wonderland, Dave.”

  “There are two open tops down here. The one we brought’s hidden outside. There’s another one here all the time. Trust Jensen, he brought a new one here after Stulynow wrecked the other. Good job he is a pedant, isn’t it?”

  “Dave, get Suzanne out of here. Get as far away as you can. Put Suzanne in your drone and have it take you to the People’s Dynasty base on the other side of the mountain. It’s not safe here. Delaware is going to come through here soon. It’s following me.”

  In his helmet, face picked out by orange light, Maguire nodded. He clapped his friend on the shoulder. “I’m sorry I recommended this post to you.”

  “Yeah, well, next time maybe I’ll tell you to piss off. Let’s get out of this first, okay?”

  Holland didn’t stay to watch them climb out and leave. He disengaged the open top’s near-I and rattled down the lava tube, dangerously fast. The tube came out four hundred metres beyond Deep Two. When he got there, Cybele was waiting for him in her acid-scarred cave sheath.

  He nodded to her. They hurried past the airlock leading into Deep Two’s cave, and began the descent.

  Their journey down was swift and nightmarish; every shadow quivered with peril, every step seemed intent on tripping him. The lights, fed by power from above, were out. His suit maps wavered with his motion, casting monstrous sh
adows up the walls, and coaxing sinister, glittering displays from the fairy castles. The EM relays had barely enough energy to carry Cybele’s presence to the sheath. They did not stop. They did not talk. The noise of his own breathing was Holland’s only connection with life.

  Five hours later, they were down at the entrance to the tube where they had found the artefact. The light and relay network had been extended down into it, but all were off.

  “Are you still okay to proceed, Cybele?”

  The cave sheath nodded. “There is enough residual energy here for the relays to carry my signal.”

  “And Delaware, any sign of him?”

  “Mine is the only signal.”

  Holland felt emboldened by that.

  By the crevasse, a blue-skinned girl waited for him.

  “I am sorry,” she said. “I am sorry, it is the only way. This gate must be closed. Were it to open now, it would be the doom of everything. I am sorry.”

  “Holland!” Cybele called.

  Behind them came a sheath. As it passed, the drones and other sheaths used by the team to investigate and remove the artefact came to life. Lamps lit up, shining so bright they burst with gouts of glowing fluids.

  “There is no signal,” said Cybele. “There is no signal!”

  “Not all of my kind believe we should move on,” said the blue-skinned girl. “I do. I am sorry. One of the others got out. I did not intend this to happen. It has stolen your friend.”

  Delaware advanced implacably, clad in a heavy cave sheath, a small cohort of lesser robots behind it. In its hands it held a pick-axe.

  “The gate will remain open!” it shrieked, and its voice was not that of Delaware.

  Cybele launched herself at the other machine. They fell to the floor, raining blows upon each other.

  “Please, give me my form,” said the blue-skinned girl. “It will hold the gate until something better comes. But for now, it must not be found.” She held out her hand. Holland looked at the cylinder in his grasp, at her. Her eyes pleaded with him.

  “Now is one of the times,” she said. “Now the universe is as it should be, but soon it will not be so.

  “For now, you are free to choose.”

  He held out the cylinder. She took it. Her skin glowed, lighting the cave. “Let me show you. Let me make you see. There will be a better Mars.” A window opened in the air upon a world teeming with life and people, aircraft coursing across a blue sky, blue seas and green grass and red trees. “I promise you that you will see it, and that you will be a legend.”

  Wind blew through the window in time: sweet, oxygen-laden wind.

  Behind him, Cybele smashed the rogue sheath repeatedly in the face. It flowed and twisted beneath her, in ways that should not have been possible.

  In the blue girl’s hand, the cylinder melted to a flow of quicksilver, and disappeared into cracks in the ground. “Now is not the time, John Holland, for such things to be known to mankind. But there will be a time, and we will meet again.”

  Alarms trilled in Holland’s helmet, drawing his attention to the changing atmospheric composition of the cave.

  Oxygen-rich air mixed with the cave’s methane.

  “I am sorry,” said the blue-skinned girl. “I will make it up to you.”

  Cybele’s fist, stripped of toughened plastic, plunged toward the head of Delaware’s suborned sheath. Whatever was riding it dodged.

  Her fist struck the rock, dragging a shower of sparks from it.

  The world exploded.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The Golden Man

  WE EMERGE FROM the tunnel in the middle of the morning. Yoechakenon sickens. The armour has healed part of its damage and has turned to tending some of his hurts. His broken clavicle has been stabilised, but the venom of the Spirefather courses in him. It is beyond the ability of the armour to neutralise.

  The creatures of the spire do not pursue us far. After several hundred spans, their noise dies away, and we are alone. We walk in silence dense with years, until there is movement in the tunnel’s air.

  We arrive at a place where the tunnel has been breached. Harsh sky, rippled white with the Veil of Worlds, can be seen. The tunnel has been hit by some kind of weapon, taking a great scoop from it and from the earth above, and a hemisphere of fused sand and metal brings the passage to an end. Sand and debris have half-filled the crater, but it is still possible to see the glassy aftermath of a high energy discharge.

  I urge Yoechakenon up. Wordlessly, we climb from the hole.

  He falls into a deep sleep, and we remain there for the remainder of the day and all of the night.

  The morning, when it comes, is like the dawning of no day I have seen. Sunrise on Mars is a haphazard affair. First, the true dawn brings slow light to the land. Then mirror suns bring parts of the land from darkness to full light in seconds, bright circles of noon upon the morning of the planet.

  Here no mirror suns shine. The true sun, Suul, comes up a half an hour before the Stone Sun rises in the opposite half of the sky, from where it glares at its smaller twin. It is both larger and in a different place from where it would be seen outside the Stone Lands, but here, where two realities overlap, the rules are not the same.

  Both suns shine together, both are shrouded by the Veil, and neither can bring their illumination to bear with any strength. The light of the Stone Sun, of the Stone Realms, is a curious unlight, whereas that of Suul is a pale yellow. Forced to mix, the light of the mismatched stars makes the landscape uncertain, doubling it with false images.

  Yoechakenon groans and stirs. His bone is healing. Still he is weak.

  “Kaibeli, how long have I slept?”

  “Eighteen hours,” say I. “Are you well?”

  He touches the wound in the armour. It is sealed along most of its length, but the skin has lost its elasticity and its lustre there, and bunches when Yoechakenon moves. “The armour fares better than I.”

  The world is wrapped in a perpetual gloom. This is Mars’ true face revealed, old and worn and dead. We are above the city of Arn Vashtena, high upon the slopes of Mulympiu. In places, shattered landmarks thrust though the loess, marmoreal remembrances to brighter days.

  “Can you run?” I ask him. I speak aloud; the silence of the steppe is oppressive.

  Yoechakenon nods. I direct him then northwest, toward the summit of the mountain. He can hear the voices of my under-personalities, as they search for the right way, as echoes in his mind.

  “I can find no definitive location for the Golden Man, in my own mind or in the information of the book. The book says only that the Golden Man wanders the heights of the mountain. We must place ourselves in the hands of fate,” I tell him.

  “I do not have long,” says Yoechakenon. “The armour can keep me buoyed, but the poison of the Stone Lands works in me. When the end comes, it will be swift.”

  I can think of nothing to say to this.

  “Keep the Stone Sun to your right and the True Sun to the left in the mornings, and we will reach him. Keep running, Yoechakenon,” I say. “Keep running.” So that is what Yoechakenon does, and his steady footfalls speed us over the limitless prairie of Stone-caught Mulympiu.

  FOR TWO DAYS and nights we travel. I keep myself alert, searching for signs of further Second World fragments, but there are none, and the evidence of Man’s habitation dwindles to nothing. We pass a village of rude huts, little more than hollows in the ground, roofed with the ribs of great animals and turf. The turf is dry, the bone rafters sunken in. Skeletons of men and hyenas lie around in abundance, tatters of dessicated flesh stuck to their bones. There was a battle here, a long time ago.

  It is the last sign of men we see.

  Yoechakenon grows weaker.

  Sometimes I feel something fell upon the earth nearby. On these occasions, we stop. At night we lie in rips in the peat, under skies streaked with cankerous aurora. The stars are masked by the Veil of Worlds. It is bitterly cold. The nights are foreboding.
Noisome stenches drift over us. The menacing silence is broken rarely, by bloodcurdling howls and shrieks. I remain alert. Yoechakenon leaves his armour half-powered, only waking it when cold or danger threaten, for its soul and mine are bright lights to those of the Stone Realms.

  The days are never brighter than twilight. The suns, pure and corrupt alike, are pale discs burning from opposite sides of the universe. They do not rise and fall in concert, and there are periods of the day when one or the other is ascendant. When the True Sun, Suul, shines alone, the land is lit as if it is minutes before daybreak. When the situation is reversed, and the Stone Sun stands solitary, the land is stark, the shadows oily and brooding. Its eerie non-light plays tricks with depth and distance and hurts the eyes.

  We head always upward, and all the while the temperature drops. The days darken, the True Sun fades as we approach the centre of the Stone Lands; the Stone Sun is funereal in its splendour. The dimmed glow of sinking Suul glitters feebly off the glaciers on the mountain. Not a soul do we see, nor a mortal beast, and only once the terrible things of the Stone Realms.

  They are like this. We see them through a pall of dust; they march under it and it moves with them, against the wind. They are fixed, more or less, to our perceptions. Their shapes are solid, but they do not move smoothly. They stand, motionless, for seconds at a time, then, in an eyeblink, they are fifty spans further on, or further back, or to the left or the right, or there are fewer or more of them. The dry steppe around their procession trembles, it loses its singularity of purpose and vibrates from one state to another. The rocks move, then there are fewer rocks, then only sand, then lush grass. Where they have passed, the earth is blackened and cracked, the matter of our domain discohered by this quantum forcing. The Stone Kin are roughly bipedal, sometimes. Sometimes they are not, but always, whatever their form, they are angular and cruel, weapons and armour like none I have ever seen, helms faceless, banners fluttering in a wind that does not blow in our world.

  They pass on, silent and unheeding of us. They go down, this band of fifty or so, toward the base of the mountain. Close to the Veil, there is evidence of many more. An army gathers at the edge of reality.