Now I’ve got more than the ETE, and without asking. Unfortunately, I’ve also got memories that say I didn’t do good with it, didn’t save the world. I abused it and wasted it like pretty much everybody else did. And I wanted a second chance, but there was nothing I could do.
Maybe there’s something I can do now, in this time.
I need to rethink. The me from the other time, the one sent to stop Chang, has failed, lost the war before he even got on the field. But the me from this time has his gifts, his tools. His weapons.
What can I do with them?
It’s enough to get me up, get me walking.
I make it to the end of the mountains by nightfall, only because much of it was downhill. I realize I’ve been running a day-and-a-half on the surface, no water except what I can absorb out of the thin frost, no food, no heat.
(“Figured out all the upgrades, yet?”)
My helmet apparently will serve as a moderate-efficiency rebreather and compressor, splitting the CO2 I exhale and condensing additional O2 out of the existing atmosphere. It’s taking the strain off whatever tech lives in my lungs, lets me breathe almost normally. The residual carbon is a building block for my nano-buggers.
I haven’t peed since Melas Two. I seem to be in some kind of strict recycle mode. And my skin has “hardened” again.
Bonus: I can apparently draw solar power.
Still, none of these nano-miracles are a substitute for a good meal and a tall glass of water. But I am starting to not miss being human.
I dream of Lisa.
Not the one I saw die. This one—the one from the other time stream—never did. Maybe never will. (Unless this whole muck-with-time thing has erased her, obliterated her.) But she hates me as much as the other one, though for different reasons.
Matthew was a big part of that.
I was so angry at him, because he wouldn’t take the tech. I saw him getting sicker, weaker. Older. And then when the diagnosis came out… (Funny. Both versions got the same fucking kind of cancer.) The bastard would rather die—sick and in pain—than accept what would save him.
I couldn’t watch. That was what Lisa couldn’t deal with. I abandoned him. In a righteous fucking snit because he was being so stupid, so selfish… It was easier because he’d gone to Mars, last assignment, security consultant for a big corporation. (Stupid fucker was working for a company that made what could save him, and he wouldn’t put it in himself.)
And I think it pissed me off worse that he was happy.
I have an unexpected chuckle now—a crazy idiot wearing a ram’s skull on his head wandering the desert giggling to himself—because it took me this long to remember: That Matthew married Tru Greenlove.
I didn’t even try to go to the funeral, not even virtually. Or make peace with my fucking best friend on his deathbed. Because I couldn’t face it. Because he didn’t have to die at all.
Lisa really wouldn’t speak to me after that. Disappeared from my life entirely, maybe permanently. (But who knows, when it comes to immortals. Small universe.)
But at least I knew she was alive.
Maybe that’s why I’m not wrapping my head around her death. It’s like I know she’s not dead, can’t die. If that other time still exists.
And if it doesn’t, it’s more I owe Chang for, an incalculable amount… It’s not just all the people he killed—tens of thousands—cutting us off from Earth to keep that future from happening, but if he’s actually erased—obliterated—everyone in that time… And the math for all of the descendants the people he killed here might have had…
No. I can’t empathize with Chang. And I can never make him repay those debts.
It’s just a matter of stopping him from doing more damage, saving what’s left.
(The irony doesn’t escape: I’ll probably need to do the same against Earth.)
I’ve actually slept lying down, curled up in my cloak in a patch of relatively soft sand.
No breakfast. I shake off the dust and walk.
It’s still almost a hundred klicks to Tranquility.
Now that I’m out of the mountains, I have to cross the open valley, get to the Datum-high Divide that separates Coprates Chasma from the narrower parallel Catena that runs along its southern edge, a thousand kilometers long.
I’m already starting to see wild scrub, hybrid adapted plants taking hold in the desert, probably wind-spread from the Tranquility gardens. Life, finding a way on a sterile world.
I remember the updated maps we got from the Lancer, the satellite shots: It gets greener as you go east, as Coprates gets deeper. Five hundred klicks past Tranquility there’s apparently forest, jungle. And more humans, descendants of Earth adapted to this new world. Living. Thriving. Defending their homes. All still ignorant to the twin threats that are coming for them.
Maybe I’ll go that way, keep going east. They’ll need me.
But there are also people in Melas Chasma, back the way I came. Nomads. The Knights. Even the Shinkyo and the remaining PK. And those I left at Melas Two and Three. I remember Tru talking about how her civilian refugee community—a lot of them ex-Ecos—were starting to consider an exodus from the UNMAC facilities to find their own way, and that was before Burns descended on them, before they got a better taste of what Earthside had in mind as “rescue and relief”.
And I start laughing at myself again. Because despite all my godlike super powers, I’m still only one guy. I can’t be everywhere. Not even Superman could be everywhere. And I’m stuck getting around by walking.
There’s more plant life as I walk. The ridged slopes of the Catena get slowly larger as I trudge over rock. The branching ridges have formed (and reformed) over the millennia with the shifting seasons, as the summers warm frozen subsurface water and CO2, sublimating it into the thin air, causing micro-slides, dry gullies down the steep slopes, eroding the Catena. The effect is similar along the long northern rim of Coprates, speaking to similarities in geology. The rims are unstable, but their more regular instability has avoided the mega-slides that devastated some of the Melas Chasma colony sites (triggered by careless mining, and then by nuclear bombardment).
Eighty klicks further east on the Catena slopes, nestled in one of the older slide-ravines, is Tranquility Colony, in whatever condition it survives in today.
The space and time and my recent memory dreams of Lisa make me recall the Lisa of this world, a quiet memorial in a wasteland. One mourner.
I miserably calculate that despite knowing her for more than forty years (ninety, if I decide to add the decades we spent in oblivious Hiber Sleep), we only had about five happy ones, or at least passionate ones.
I remember meeting her, when I was recruiting for the new UNACT Tactical Force at Fort Bragg. Barely able to keep my eyes off her even in a crowd of fellow boots, even performing, showing off the then-bleeding-edge interface armor and weapons. Then running an impromptu “war game”, playing suicide attacker making a run on her barracks in the middle of the night—but she’d seen me pull a similar play against another platoon the previous night, and she had her unit waiting for me. She took me down herself. In her underwear. The most profound thing I could say with her sitting on my chest was “You’re hired.”
She took a prime gig at NetCom, our Infowar division (her division—she made it what it would become), despite her scores on the Tactical course (my course), and we started not-too-discreetly flirting. Then impulsively consummating our relationship, daring the Uniform Code (she was a lieutenant, and I was a major, and then her indirect CO). But we were in a war that made us targets everywhere, kept us locked down (potentially for life), so accommodations were made. And we took comfort in each other through those dark days, nested in our bunker “homes”, made a part-time life almost like a real couple. Happy.
But the ugliness of the job, and the realization that some of our masters had been playing both sides for their own benefit, steadily dragged me away from her. No. I wasn’t dragged. I ran. Because m
y rage was more important. I needed to fix it (and fixing it meant killing and destroying a lot of powerful people). And I deployed myself to that fight—and away from her—without a second thought. When I came back—when I tried to come back—it was too little, too late. She couldn’t be second priority to my righteous rage, no matter how much she still loved me.
So we managed to be civil, friendly compatriots, working our jobs: She continuing to impress, me continuing to make trouble. I started seeing Star, and not secretly enough that Lisa didn’t figure it out. Lisa had her own romances, my jealousy stoked enough each time to prove there was no closure between us. Still looking at each other when we thought the other wasn’t looking, trying not to show anything more than civility, the friendship of professionals.
All the way up to the day I got her killed.
I will never forgive myself the wasted time. And now I apparently have immortality to punish myself in.
I avoid stepping on a shoot of Graingrass, weaving between the rocks, searching for nutrients, water; freeze-proof narrow leaves open to collect sunlight.
Life.
I have a thought that scares me: If I fail to stop what’s coming, it may just be me and the plants left. Maybe not even the plants.
Forever.
Chapter 4: Tranquility
31 March, 2117:
Tranquility was comprised of three large bio domes stagger-stacked up the slope of the ravine cut in the Coprates side of the Catena Divide. Now only the ruptured lower dome is visible, the Divide having slid down and buried the upper two, either shook loose by the nuclear bombardment of the Apocalypse or knocked loose on purpose to hide the colony from Earth, making it look lost and dead.
The new slopes are covered in thick scrub, at least a dozen different species, that pour out of the broken-open remaining dome and spread up the slopes almost a third of the way to Datum, down and out into the valley floor, and laterally across the jagged terrain of the Divide slopes. The dome itself is webbed with climbing greenery, like a jungle ruin slowly being overgrown.
There is no obvious sign of human life. The wind howls like an army of ghosts through the big holes in the dome, like the place is screaming at me, warning me away.
This is the first time I’ve seen it up close. The only other time was by ASV cam and then by armor Link feed. When I watched the people that live here kill two of my men.
There has been sign of human activity on the way here, but only because I’ve been looking for it close-up. Faint trails, but packed and worn enough to be well-traveled. Probably the secret routes of the Food Traders who’ve been bringing the bounty of Tranquility back to the Melas Nomads. I even found an apparent “oasis” on the way here: a deep cistern in the ridges with actual mud in the bottom of it, and markings on the stone that suggest there is sometimes standing water.
I also got to see close-up other signs of free water—either condensation dense enough to form runoff, or actual rain from the clouds the ETE Stations spew up: there are shallow gullies, soil packed into dried and cracked mud. And plants.
And plants mean I actually got to eat: grain and nuts and even a few meager blood strawberries plucked from between the rocks. (Unfortunately, “drinking” was a matter of laying my hands on the silt mud in the cistern and absorbing enough to rehydrate.)
I camp out just over a ridge from the colony ruin, out of sight.
In the frozen dark of night, I climb up to the ridgeline and take another look, but the locals are careful, at least to a point. There are no visible lights, nothing that would reveal them to eyes in orbit or Earthbound telescopes. But I can see heat: small pockets deep inside the green of the stadium-sized dome, well-masked but definitely cooking. Probably small hydrogen heating units—not a central colony system. But there are maybe a hundred of them in there.
I crawl back out of sight (and relatively out of the wind), pull my cowl around me, and tip up my helmet to nibble on the pocket full of seeds I’d collected on the way.
I’m assuming since there’s no sign of Chang, and the dome looks just like it did on our disastrous first-contact attempt, that he hasn’t come yet. It would be nice to know when to expect him.
I consider sneaking down now, having a look in the dark when no one is likely to notice me. But I expect the locals stay on continuous alert for unwanted visitors, given the bounty they have to protect in a hungry world, and especially given that there’s another group we’ve seen apparently hunting them. If I’m caught skulking in the middle of the night, I’ll likely be even more poorly received.
So I get to spend another night brooding under the starry sky, hardened numb against the sub-freezing temperatures, my idle mind rerunning the dual movies of my lives.
But it’s the two really important things I still can’t remember that are eating at me. Why can’t I remember a damn thing about this great plan I supposedly signed on for? And why can’t I remember who sent me? (Star kept saying “he” and “him”. But no name. No sense of who “he” is or how or why he put this little impossible jaunt together.)
Looking up at all the stars, I gel an answer that disturbs me. Star said the reason I’d keep my this-world memories despite being almost completely remade was a failsafe, so if my mind had to be restored from some kind of “backup” in case of catastrophic damage, any interim memories still intact wouldn’t be lost. Maybe the “seed” that remade me was a version loaded before I got told the plan, or even met its engineer, which strikes me as a remarkably stupid oversight.
Unless I never did meet the engineer. Maybe somebody just stole my “backup”, press-ganged a restore-file version of me into this circus, either without my knowledge or against my will.
So why is Star telling me I was all for it?
It’s funny, but something about that otherwise sinister possibility is actually liberating, because it lets me feel like it’s not two of me sharing this body, this mind. I’m really just the me from this time, simply given the tools, weapons and (incomplete) intel of the other version, like somebody (for whatever reason) just left me his gear.
And that’s fine. This me I know. That other one was a flake.
I wait until the sun is well up, the morning gusts easing, before I make my big entrance.
I do it casually, just walking up on the “front door” of the exposed dome from the most open approach, so they have plenty of time to see me coming. I don’t bother to alter my appearance. (I do fold up and put away the helmet—a skull head with big horns is just a little too outrageous, even if it might go far to intimidate.)
The “front door” is the way Thomas brought her team last time. A fresh water gully runs down the bottom of the ravine the colony sits in, apparently passing through the garden dome and coming out a large cargo airlock at ground level, its doors cut away a long time ago. (And that was our first sign of trouble: If you wanted to protect your home from invaders, why remove a blast-grade set of hatches? Unless you wanted them to come inside.)
One thing Thomas’s team didn’t get the benefit of, because they were sealed in their H-A shells: The smells. Green. Wet. Almost full-wetland. It hits me thick as I come up to the hatch. And under the green-smell: Human smells. Shit. Piss. Sweat. And death. Corpses and rotting meat. I imagine this is what a primitive village might smell like (assuming they weren’t managing the trash and sewage).
It’s thick by the time I’m through the great airlock and inside the dome. And humid.
The interior is more stunning than I imagined from the feed. This used to be a terraced garden, ringed by labs and smaller greenhouses. (The other two domes were housing and support facilities.) Now it’s overgrown like a rainforest took root, took over, the original structures barely visible.
And it’s several degrees warmer than outside. Atmospheric pressure is up above .30 because we’re deeper here than in Melas, but the oxygen content is much richer, almost rich enough to survive without a mask.
I’m walking in the footsteps of Thomas’ ill-fate
d expedition. Under foot, the ground crunches beneath the webbing of Graingrass that sparsely carpets the path in. I can see bits of bone in the gravel. Teeth. An appropriate welcome mat for anyone stupid enough to dare come here.
Another familiar milepost: A support column on the path, twisted with vines, original paint giving up to time and exposure. But it is marked with new paint: childlike scrawls in old blood:
“2GUN” “MAK” “SPYK” “AKS” “FERA”
By each name are tally marks.
I stand and appraise the scorecard while I wait.
They are absolutely silent: no rustling, no crunching of gravel. And invisible. Or they would be, if I couldn’t see heat.
There are hundreds of them. All around me.
I look over the green smoothly, calmly, looking at where they are so maybe they’ll get that I see them. Then I approach their Golgotha.
The trail ends at an overgrown hill I know is made entirely of human bones, crested by skulls, four meters wide and two tall. This is where Thomas’ team encountered
“Two Gun!” I call into the dome, letting them know I’m impatient. “Mak! Spyk! Fera!”
“No fear,” I hear a mask-muffled rasp from the top of the hill. “Stupid stupid. Dead dead.”
A low chant repeats all around me. “Stupid stupid. Dead dead. Stupid stupid.”
The indoor forest erupts. Something ape-like comes flying out of the green at me, tries to land a spear-point. While the creature is still airborne, I grab the shaft and snap it (it’s made of rebar), using the whipping action to fling its wielder past me overhead. Another one is already lunging from my blind spot (if I had one). It’s child-small, thick dreadlocks, wearing a breather mask and dressed in a hodge-podge of rags and scraps of colony clothing. I grab it by the cloak before it can stab me, and toss it away, not sparing it height or distance (and clearly demonstrating that I’m strong enough to toss a human being like a small knapsack). It flies into the shrubbery with a satisfying yelp.
The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are Page 7