In the Hall of the Martian King

by John Barnes

  With a bass twang that they felt through the soles of their feet, the control tower went over backward.

  “If that just landed on the main hangar,” Jak shouted, “I think those technicians are feeling very unlucky right now.” He told his purse to switch the water jets that had been on the control tower over to the Pertrans and main linducer tracks.

  The elevator doors opened, and Dujuv bellowed, above the din, “That was the most inept guard I’ve ever seen. He just walked up to Shadow, completely unfocused, and said, ‘Papers?’ Shadow threw him against the wall.”

  “It seemed like the minimum necessary. Is Pikia here yet?”

  “No, but we still have fifteen minutes till pickup.”

  “Then she will be. She has considerable skill and she is a person of honor.”

  “Did you get the lifelog?”

  Shadow on the Frost shouted, “Thanks to your clever friend Dujuv, yes. Without his intuition we would have been lost.”

  Dujuv unfastened his tunic and pulled out a scorched, soggy, multicolored ball of lacy fabric. “I was running with it in my hands till that gun went off and you wet them down. Which I’m glad you did, because that flash had set my shirt to smoldering, too. Anyway, I scooped it up, and if all these provided enough protection—”

  Jak began to laugh, and then Sib joined in.

  Shadow explained. “We got into the Princess’s yacht and liberated weapons; smashed into her boudoir and sealed the door to the room where she was bathing; blasted her safe, and found … nothing. It was about to be for nothing. And then Dujuv whacked his forehead and said, ‘Where do women put something valuable?’ ”

  “And it was in her underwear drawer, right enough,” the panth finished. “Which also gave me something to wrap it in.” Nakasen’s lifelog lay on the plotting desk, among a large heap of soggy, shredded, and scorched lace panties, but the layers nearest it seemed to be dry and undamaged. “By the way, sir,” he shouted to Sibroillo, over the roar of the monitors, “you’re right about historic events needing something to frame them! The biggest religious revelation in centuries didn’t arrive through normal diplomacy and bureaucratic procedure. It arrived in a panty raid!”

  Pikia stared in dismay at the artificial river now pouring past her; the water washing from Cradle Two had created a torrent that she was guessing was at least as deep as she was tall. She couldn’t very well swim that, let alone wade it.

  Well, it would have to fan out sooner or later. She trotted beside it for a half kilometer before she came to a place where she judged it safe enough to try for a crossing. She was almost right; she only went down into potholes twice, going over her head each time but immediately washing up onto the soft sand on the downstream side, spitting mud and using language that might have surprised her friends.

  As she climbed out onto the far bank, she considered her mauled hair from earlier in the evening, the drenching she had just taken, and her exhaustion, and decided that she wanted to see Clarbo Waynong again soon, and she wanted him to say something about her appearance, so that she could rip off his genitals and force-feed them to him.

  Once she was on the right side of the water, it was a relatively short dash to the monitor tower, and the prospect of having all of this be someone else’s decisions to make and problems to solve seemed very promising indeed. As she approached the tower, she lost all ability to hear, for outside the din of the big monitors was even louder than inside. It was like standing close to a large waterfall.

  As she rushed in through the door, she thought she might have to fight the guard, but something about her seemed to make him cower in the corner and say, “Don’t hurt me.” The elevator doors opened, and the rest of the party stood there, staring at her—soaking wet, missing hair from half her head, covered with mud, grinning like a maniac, and clutching a sling-bag of weapons. “Hey,” she said, “can you boys come out and play?”

  CHAPTER 11

  The Third Purpose of a Rubahy Dagger

  Outside it was far too noisy to hear the two ground-effect buses, and Gweshira and Xlini were driving with the lights off, so they were almost on top of the party when they braked by the monitor tower. “Looks like you had success at the motor pool. One hour of dark remaining,” Jak said. “That should just cover our run to Freehold.”

  “Will someone, somewhere, sometime, tell me what is going on?” Waynong asked, and got no answer. Everyone climbed in as quickly as possible, and the hovercars shot off into the night.

  The hovercars were capable of about 250 kph on flat ground or calm water, and in this part of the Chryse Desert, the anchored dunes rolled gently and low. Freehold was only about twenty minutes away, and figuring that it would take at least ten minutes for the other side to organize a pursuit—which could not be coming by anything much faster than a hovercar—it seemed certain that they would reach Freehold, and assured political asylum, well before anything could close in on them.

  Freehold was the capital of Magenta Yellow Amber Cyan, a Harmless Zone nation devoted to a kind of passionately mad capitalism in which every odd thing the market did was taken to be a parable of moral instruction. A sudden rise in the price of plums might be read as instruction on chastity; a brief shortfall of soap powder, as a lesson on the vanity of earthly greatness. Whatever happened in the city’s markets—a decline in rents in one neighborhood, an increase in durable goods orders, a brief blip in the consumer interest rate—was interpreted by an academy of priest-economists for the archive that Freehold maintained “for whenever the solar system is ready for it.” One popular tour guide described Freehold as “Emerald City if it had been designed by Ayn Rand specifically to produce self-help books.” But peculiar as Freehold was, it had a tradition of giving asylum to all who asked, and it was close.

  The hovercars were self-piloting and built to seat eight, so four people in each had some room to stretch out as they whizzed across the desert. Shortly there was no conversation, just snoring.

  Jak’s purse buzzed and rattled to wake him. He sat up and reflexively checked the time—they should be in Freehold in eight minutes—

  “Emergency,” his purse said. “Massive communications and information penetration is under way. It appears to be an attempt to take control of—”

  The hoverjets shut off abruptly and the car dropped the ten centimeters onto the desert floor in less than two seconds as the overpressure leaked out from under the flexible skirt that surrounded its base. The normal soft-landing safeties were shut off, so the hovercar was still moving at over 200 kph when its bottom struck the rock-strewn gravel hillside. In a sudden, mad, four-g whirl, the car flipped over twice before coming to rest on its side.

  “Sorry,” the purse said.

  “What happened?” Jak looked around; everyone had been belted in and the crash prediction system had worked as advertised, so Sib, Pikia, and Gweshira, at least, were all right.

  Before his purse could answer, Jak got a call from Dujuv. “Jak, are you all right?”

  “We just crashed. Probably a software attack. Can you get the lifelog to Freehold?”

  “We just crashed too. We’re about eighty meters behind you. Nobody’s hurt here. At least we stayed upright.”

  “Must’ve been your skill and daring, old pizo. All of us are all right here, too. But I think we may have a battle at any moment. And it’s possible our purses have been penetrated and turned.” He thought only for a moment; the situation was clear enough—the hovercars had simultaneously crashed during a hostile infopenetration, hardly likely to be a coincidence. Besides, toktru Jak didn’t want to hear Sib’s six standard pieces of advice right now. “All right, then, we have to figure we’re about to have to fight. Be careful what you send over your purse and run all your defensive software now. Everyone out and meet between the hovercars.”

  When Jak’s group joined Dujuv’s, in a little depression between the two wrecked hovercars, the first streaks of dawn were beginning to appear in the eastern sky; another effec
t of the very large-scale height and the dense gas mix on terraformed Mars was that light scattered far before and behind the sun, so that sunsets and sunrises lingered for hours. In the dim glow, he saw Dujuv concentrating on his left palm and muttering.

  Jak knew Dujuv too well to worry about security; if Dujuv was using the purse, it was secure to his satisfaction, and that was more than good enough for Jak. “Getting anything, Duj?”

  “Looks like nine heets riding strap-on flyers. Speed and altitude are more than Harmless Zone legal for military—so I bet payload and weapons are too, and that those are off the Princess’s yacht. Or in short, big, mean, and really open for business.”

  “If it’s the Royal Palace Guards, we’re outnumbered but not badly, but if it’s B&Es, we’re dead,” Sibroillo observed.

  “That would be my assessment, also,” Shadow on the Frost said, quietly hefting two of the weapons from the sling-bags. “Was there a B&E contingent on the Princess’s yacht? I didn’t see any evidence of one, and I don’t recall hearing anything about it.”

  “Me either,” Jak said, and the headshakes around him made it unanimous. “But it wouldn’t be hard for them to have concealed nine beanies, and if that’s what is coming after us, Sib is toktru singing-on right.”

  Dujuv grunted. “Well, whatever they are, they’ll be overhead in four minutes. We can’t outrun them and we won’t stay hidden for long. That leaves fighting or giving up. And fighting has a lot of uncertainties, all of them between bad and worse. I’d say we’re on the bad side of entropy, old pizo, and maybe we ought to just admit it.”

  “Not fight?” Clarbo Waynong asked, sounding shocked.

  “I wasn’t calling for a vote,” Jak said. “But since you mention the issue, I’m thinking compromise. Let’s take their first assault or hear their first offer, and then I’ll decide.”

  Everyone except Dujuv was nodding slowly. Jak said, “Duj, I want to hear what you’re thinking.”

  “I’d hate to have any of us get killed—or even any of them—just so you won’t have to give up without a fight, or to give you a basis for making up your mind.”

  Jak swallowed hard; it was an irritating point, but Dujuv was telling him the toktru truth, just as Jak had asked. Nonetheless … “Duj, it’s a good point, but … this is a high-stakes mission. I can’t quite bring myself to give up when we’re so close to Freehold and to attaining all the mission objectives. Not when there’s a chance, and I think there is.”

  “Besides,” Waynong said, “this is the mission that’s essential to my career.”

  In the gray, gradually rising light, Jak could see Dujuv’s eyebrow go up, so hard and fast that he could practically hear it crunch to a stop on his friend’s forehead.

  “So—with reservations noted—” Jak said, “we’re going to fight, but I want everyone to stay alert and ready to roll over fast if we have to.” Dujuv nodded deeply, once, almost bowing. Jak nodded back. “All right, what’s the axis of approach?” Jak asked.

  “About nine degrees south of true west.”

  “All right, then,” Jak said. “Box guard, by the numbers, just like in gen school Citizen Basic. Set the square at three hundred meters. Northwest—Sib. Southwest—Shadow. Northeast—Gweshira. Southeast—Dujuv.” Jak was playing this very much like Citizen Basic, the year of military training that all Hive citizen-candidates underwent in gen school at the age of sixteen. In a solar system where war had been endemic for a thousand years, every citizen of a large, powerful republic had to have some understanding of basic military procedures, and of what it was to command and to follow.

  Box guard was a way for a small armed group to defend itself against an oncoming airborne attack; it was neither the best nor the most effective way, but it was easy to learn, and not severely flawed, and therefore everyone in gen school basic had practiced leading and following through a box guard deployment.

  Sibroillo, Dujuv, Gweshira, and Shadow on the Frost were the best trained and the best shots in the group; the orthodox way was to put the best shots at the outer corners. Jak added, “Sib, you’re the closest thing to an expert we have with the laser pistol—you take that.” His uncle accepted it gravely, checking the charge and swapping in a fresh block.

  Next, within that square, Jak set up the interior diamond, seventy-five meters on the side: “West—me. South—Pikia. East—Xlini. North—Clarbo. Fire on the first shot from either side, except Gweshira—Gweshira, take the first shot, on your initiative. It’s your call, but if you can make your first shot at their rearmost, we’ll have a pretty much classical ambush, as you no doubt know.”

  Clarbo raised a hand as if to speak and Pikia turned and handed him a slug rifle; he appeared to start at it, then to stare at it as if he had never seen one, but it clearly made him forget whatever he was about to say.

  Jak was hoping to have some good luck, for once, just for variety; if it was possible for Gweshira to hold fire until she could hit the enemy rear, since she was the one farthest from them, it should put the foremost enemy at point-blank range for Jak’s front shooters, and ensure that their whole party was attacked at once; whatever surprise was possible (probably none) it would be maximized (probably to zero). “Now, places, people, and get under cover. Good luck.”

  At least there was an abundance of broken terrain to take cover in. The area they had crashed in was a little spandrel, less than half a kilometer on a side, between three very-weathered Bombardment craters. The thrice-smashed soil had collapsed and bulged in so many different directions that there were dozens of small peaks and pits to hide in.

  Jak found a position between two head-high boulders, with a good natural firing slit pointing in the right direction between them, and an overhang to stay under until the enemy aircraft grounded. His purse told him that he was less than three meters from the map coordinates of his assigned spot in the inner diamond. He checked and readied his slug rifle; it was Hive manufacture and had been Hive Spatial maintained, so it was in fine shape.

  Light from the gray-blue sky overhead was now bright enough to read by, though the sun itself would not rise for another half hour. Jak laid out mag reloads even though the battle would probably not last two hundred shots or five minutes.

  With the spare magazines at hand, Jak put on his goggles and sat watching his sector of the sky. “Purse, comcheck everyone.”

  “All other purses in the party are set to your general channel.”

  “Good. Do I have back channels to Gweshira and Dujuv?”

  “You do now. I’ve set them up and their purses have acknowledged.”

  “Good.” Jak pressed the reward spot and his purse chee-bled softly, happy to have pleased him. “Now put a situation map up on my goggles, transparent, overlaid on a five-power real-time view.”

  A ghostly map faded into existence before Jak’s eyes; the surrounding landscape seemed to leap closer. The approaching green wedges of the enemy would have cleared the horizon within two minutes, had they continued flying at that speed and altitude. But even as Jak made that estimate, the oncoming flyers began a quick descent to cover just over the horizon. So far, whoever their pursuers were, their tactics were just as by-the-book as Jak’s were.

  Jak’s forces as yet had no way to engage the enemy; their one laser pistol could only fire in a straight line, and the slug throwers were treaty-limited for the Harmless Zone, and reached only about two kilometers at best, not even to the horizon. Jak regretted that very much because right now would have been the perfect time to hit the enemy, before they were down and into cover. At least the other side seemed to be at a complementary disadvantage; though they apparently had non-Harmless Zone-legal tech, they weren’t firing, which meant, probably, that they hadn’t specked the positions of Jak’s team closely enough to use their far superior firepower.

  As soon as the other side had gotten off their flyers, they sent them on robot pilot at Jak’s forces, the tiny craft coming over the horizon zigging and zagging close to the surface
as if scouting or doing close air support. The buzzing wing-and-rotor craft were supposed to draw fire and cause Jak’s force to give away positions, but they were backlit by the bright predawn. Everyone could easily see that they carried no weapons and that their trapeze seats were empty.

  Jak kept his attention on the now-flickering green wedges on the map. Now that the nine fighters from the other side were on the ground, the purse was having a hard time assembling enough information from overhead satellites, stray radar, and all the myriad other clues out on the net. Consequently the green wedges flickered in and out of existence and instead of an identifying number often bore only a yellow x, indicating that there was definitely one of them there but the purse was unconfident about which, or even a yellow question mark, indicating the purse only thought that it was more likely than not that one was there.

  But the flickering green wedges, when they existed, were drawing ever closer, and as they came closer, some of the party’s own instruments began to pick up the enemy forces, so that the green wedges flickered less, and bore black numbers more often.

  The terrain was just as broken for the attackers as it was for Jak’s team; their cover was as good, and they darted and zigzagged their way toward his position. Eventually he had a clear fix on all nine of them on his map, and had settled on following the guide dots in his goggles to find Enemy Number Five, the one at the center of the formation who might possibly be the commander. (Though Enemy Number Three or Enemy Number Eight might also be.)

  Almost, it might have been a fight between the beanies in a friendly game of Maniples, except that through the map, in the real image with its steadily improving light, he caught glimpses of the tiny black stick-figure of his target, crossing between two rocks or coming over a low ridge. Jak waited for the moment and hoped the figure would be in his sights when it was time to pull the trigger.