We take our time, running back to the Turquoise feed lines as we need to refuel and hydrate. There’s a lot of territory to cover, and the terrain is difficult, with scrub clinging well up the slopes, perhaps halfway to the upper cliffs. (We are only assuming the scouting Knights were lost on or near the North Rim. If we had to cover the entire Coprates’ floor, this could take months.)
On the third day, we get past Tyr (well-stripped and still slightly toxic from the Apocalypse) to within what Bly calls “a decent days walk, for those that have to” from Chang’s former base. It’s late in the morning when I get my first hint that we may be close to something: I pick up a jamming signal. Bly insists it can’t be Chang’s: he used the ETE Atmosphere Net and existing background radiation hot spots (like Tyr) to hide his ship’s signature. This signal is definitely intentional. And traceable.
We find the source within the hour:
Mostly buried under a slope-fall I see the familiar lines of a certain scout vessel, or at least its production-line sibling. Sleek dart-like lines, almost vestigial triangular wings, black stealth skin (covered over, almost too carefully, by Martian sand). It’s the Lancer, or a Lancer-class ship. (And I remember that the Lancer, when it came to us out of the wilderness, bore signs of being buried. Hidden. Mysteriously abandoned.)
What’s exposed, conveniently, is the starboard side forward airlock. Also conveniently, it’s not hidden flush with the stealth skin—in fact, on examination, the seams have been stripped just enough to make a clearly visible outline. And the approach to it looks like it’s seen a lot of foot traffic, maybe for decades.
“Didn’t you have a ship like this?” Bly asks what he knows. (At least he’s making conversation.)
“It was sent from Earth sometime in the last few decades,” I tell him what he didn’t learn from trying to steal it—my first bloody encounter with his Air Pirates. “Equipped to gather and contain biological nanotechnology. The UN insists they had no knowledge, blamed it on a rogue corporate or national operation.”
I step back, look the ship over. Another thing that I notice is conveniently not buried: the ports for the gun turrets.
“Anybody home?” Lux purrs, reaching up to touch the hatch. It grinds and spins open. He jerks back. “I did not do that.”
Bly volunteers to keep watch outside, still feigning disinterest, while Lux and I step into the airlock (sending me first, quoting an old action movie). Again, with the barest touch, the hatchway pops into the mid-section, the crew section, and we get greeted by what must pass for a treasure cave for the wandering surface scavenger or refugee: There’s food, medical supplies, survival gear. It looks disturbed, some of it dumped and strewn, but certainly not significantly raided.
“Look at this…” Lux checks the inner hatch, finds this side of it marked by violence: hacked, pried at, shot. It’s been repaired numerous times. “What…?”
The hatch pulls away from her and slams shut, locks.
“I did not do that,” he repeats. I hear the outer hatch slam. Then compressors whir, and the air starts getting sucked out of the section. I try to reach Bly, but there’s too much interference. But then I hear the turrets come alive, start spraying.
“Neat trick…” Lux assesses while she still has air to speak with. “Lure in the unsuspecting with goodies. Seal them in. Drain the air and let them sit until their reserves run out. Shoot any friends they have outside.”
More gunfire. I expect Bly isn’t enjoying himself.
Lux and I look at each other for a few seconds, look around the makeshift cell, listen to some more gunfire.
“Bored yet?” he asks. I nod. She reaches out, hacks the ships operating systems, shuts everything down, releases the hatches. Bly kicks his way in a moment later. There are fresh holes in his surcoat, and he’s covered in Mars.
“Automated,” I tell Bly he doesn’t have a proper target for his rage.
Lux pops all the hatches.
“Something’s still live…” He scans, gestures for the aft section. In the Lancer, that’s where the nanotech labs were. I proceed cautiously.
All the containment equipment has been smashed. Pulverized. Something or someone really strong had a tantrum in here, and they were thorough about it.
“Systems are all burned out in here,” I read. “Except…”
There’s a small device pinned to the roof. It looks very much like one of the black “jewels” in the diadem Chang made Star wear.
“That’s Chang tech,” Bly confirms warily.
“Sending out a signal, maybe triggered by…”
Star is standing by the hatchway. She’s giving me the same sad look she gave me before we left Tranquility.
“What are you doing here?” I blurt out. Bly turns and looks, turns back—even without a visible face, I can tell he’s confused. Lux comes back, passes through Star, oblivious.
She’s projecting. And only to me.
“The operating AI is back up on basic function,” Lux announces. “It’s low on fuel, but this wreck can fly. What?” She realizes I’m looking past him. Turns and sees nothing unusual. Looks at me and narrows her eyes. Scans. Figures it out.
“Chang left the beacon to let him know if anyone else stumbled in here,” Star tells me, sounding like I’ve just uncovered a painful secret. “He’s in no condition to listen. I am.”
“You knew we’d find this place,” I confront. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Who are you talking to?” Bly asks with patient incredulity.
“Astarte,” Lux tells him, points to the sensor.
“She knew we’d find the ship,” I pass along.
“I heard that part.” He’s losing patience. “I didn’t know we’d find this. What is this?”
Star doesn’t answer. I go forward, and the others follow me into the cockpit. I hack in, take inventory. The AI tells me the ship is called Siren’s Song. The mainframe and its files appear to be intact, giving me launch and arrival dates in 2098, and listing a crew compliment of six: four men and two women, ranging from twenty-five to forty. The system’s last authorized access was only three weeks ago.
Also intact and operational is the uplink transmitter that was missing from the Lancer, though it’s been re-tasked to jam nearby comms. And programmed to send a signal, a beacon of its own, once its trap was sprung.
“Who is it calling?” I want to know. Now I see Star back by the airlock. She looks at me heavily and glides outside.
Star glides like a ghost up-slope, leading us like an elaborate pointer.
“Can’t be far,” Lux hopes, I’m not sure for himself or Bly, who trudges behind her heavily. “The signal wouldn’t have reached much past its own jamming field.”
The bright glowing phantom stays about twenty meters ahead of us as it leads me (since it’s just projected in my visual field), pausing when we lag on the severe terrain. She looks like we’re in a funeral procession.
She finally stops by an outcropping of larger-than-man-size boulders, points to a narrow gap between them. Then she vanishes when we get up to it. The gap hides a tunnel that would make the Shinkyo proud, just less than two meters high and a meter wide. It drops down a mild angle into the slide slope, and we quickly meet an airlock hatch—round, like the Siren’s Song’s—only this one has been blown, smashed.
It immediately smells like a mass grave I found in the Philippines. And stale charred flesh.
Lux wrinkles his nose, gives me a disgusted look like I shouldn’t expect him to go inside.
I’m about to go in first when Bly pushes past, examines the damaged hatch.
“One of Fohat’s toys did this,” he deduces from the scars. When he turns back to us, his skull-socket mask-eyes become spotlights, tracking down the tunnel the way we came. He traces telltale scrapes on the rocks. I’m reminded of our encounter with the prototype “Bug”.
The ship beyond that hatch is much bigger than the narrow tube-like Siren’s Song, perhaps the size of a small trans
port. I try to bring up the operating system, but get only emergency lighting and some basic diagnostics.
“Circe,” Lux mutters from the hatchway, doing her own hack. “It’s called Circe. Looks to be the mothership that carried the other one here.”
Then apparently made landfall, got well-hidden, and set up its smaller partner to play tempting trap for whoever might wander by.
I manage to get a deck plan. The ship has cargo bays, a number of sealed lab spaces, larger crew accommodations, even a small G-simulator centrifuge, big enough for two crew members at a time—whoever rode it here wanted to be sure to keep their Earth legs, their bone and muscle density.
The actual exploration quickly becomes gruesome. We find what’s left of four bodies, hacked and torn apart by something large and strong and vicious, long-dried blood sprayed on the walls and coating the deck like tar. Two are in different corridors. One is in a crew section. The last is on the command deck, the reinforced hatch smashed in like the entry airlock.
Lux tries to ignore the gore, concentrates on interfacing with the ship’s AI.
“There’s just some surge damage. I think I can get it working…”
I realize Bly’s gone off on his own.
“Hmmm…” I hear Lux in my head as I work my way aft toward the lab sections. “Personnel files have been erased, including personal logs. Looks like it happened right before the systems fried. Probably the last thing this poor bastard did before he repainted the place.”
The lab hatches have been forced open. Like the smaller ship, all the nano-research equipment has been destroyed, but there are also what looks like burned samples, some of which include telltale bone fragments, etched and laced as if they’d been nano-enhanced. But there’s no live nanotech anywhere. It’s all been cooked, pulsed, broken down. Whoever did this was exceptionally thorough.
In the third lab I find bodies, only more than expected. One is on the deck, torn apart and incinerated. But there are three more on what look like exam tables, beyond a shattered Iso wall. These have been torched to charcoal. (I think I see the remains of restraints on the tables.)
The next lab contains six med-grade stasis pods, all torn open, all holding the remains of cremated bodies. I expect I’m seeing the fates of previous victims of the Siren’s Song.
There are six more pods in the final lab. Four had people in them. And I think I’ve found the last of the crew, but this one’s been left on display, crucified to the bulkhead with found wire and random hand tools. The body is desiccated, with what look like claw-punctures in the mummified face. Like Palmer. Fed on by a modded being, probably while still alive.
I find Bly in one of the cargo holds. It looks like a museum’s storeroom. There are collections of clothing, surface gear, handcrafted armor, manufactured and homemade weapons. I find the armor and weapons of three of Kendrick’s missing knights (but only three—barely one scout team). And designs I haven’t seen before: intricately-laced red-lacquered pieces that look like whoever wore them had to be child-slim, except for the torso plates, which look oversized. The limb pieces are also unusually long. Other sets are of heavy steel and iron armor, hand-forged, thick and squat. I remember the cave illustrations Bel showed me. I’d assumed the drawings were exaggerated, but neither of these distinct sets of armor would fit a normally-proportioned human (or at least an Earth-born human). I also remember what Murphy told me about the “Sider” groups that attacked the Cast over the years: “Red Men” and “Silver Men”.
I find arrows and spears that may match the triangular wounds to Chang’s slain minions. One particular spear design reminds me of a Roman pilum: a long narrow spearhead on a stout shaft. On closer inspection it appears modular—the head snaps off the shaft, resembling a heavy arrow. It’s packed with an SRF charge, triggered by a demolition cap, with a plunger striker in the shaft to ignite it, designed to launch the head like a missile. There are a number of spare heads without shafts.
I realize Bly is picking through pieces with Zodangan markings, including jewelry, probably unique enough to ID the owners.
I count sets of belongings here for more than two-dozen people.
Bly punches the bulkhead with a roar of rage. The heroes have come too late to save anyone.
I turn and see Astarte in the hatchway.
“Chang found this place, combing the aerial surveys, a week before he went for your Melas Three base.” She sounds like she’s come to deliver tragic news, hesitant, gentle, deeply regretful. “He flew into a rage, said it was proof of Earth’s true intentions. He slaughtered the scientists and crew, burned their samples and their test subjects—that part was almost mercy…”
“What is she saying now?” Bly demands, recognizing the look on my face. I give him the basic details.
“…had been capturing people, locals, initially to study. They’d trap them, deplete their oxygen until they passed out, then kept them unconscious while they ran tests. They’d use chemicals to dump their short-term memory of their capture, and when they were done testing they’d leave them somewhere far away, catch and release. Then they captured an ETE from the nearby Station, about ten years ago. They managed to take live samples, preserve them, get them to reproduce. To study. Then they fried him severely with EMR, left him to regenerate and return home with no memory, no evidence… But when things started going bad here, when Chang let you see him, they got new orders. They were forced to begin human trials, implanting the nanites they’d been working on. A lot of the first subjects died. Some had to be euthanized because of the damage done. But then a few started to take. Just not… properly. There were random modifications, mutagenic effects, but they sent back promising reports…”
“Sent them back where?” I demand. “To whom?”
“UNCORT. A top-secret cabal of military scientists. Their first priority was to find a means to disable the ETE. Then it turned to creating weapons against Chang. And then the rest of us, once you stumbled back into your old base and scared them past crazy.”
“That means Earth—or somebody on Earth—knew there were people here decades ago,” I grumble the first most damning piece. I can see Bly start and stiffen in his armor. Lux is chuckling sickly in my head.
“They’d been keeping it secret until they were sure they could come back safely,” Star tries to reason it. “Most of the early exams were just to clear people, see what life here had done to them, if there was any sign of infection…”
“And there wasn’t,” I almost spit.
“Until they snagged a Terraformer,” Star confirms.
“And then they started ordering experiments on innocent victims.”
“I have a question,” Lux interrupts my rage. “If Captain Gooey Mess up here—or Doctor Gooey Mess as the case may be—was part of something so fucking evil and had time to erase the evidence, why did he erase the personnel records instead?”
Good question. It’s not like any of them made it out of here. Perhaps there was something in their logs that named names back home. Names I want, for whatever good it will do me.
“Is the ship viable?” I ask Lux.
“It’ll fly. It even comes with a dozer tractor to move the rock off the roof.”
“Why did Chang leave it here?” I ask Star. “Why didn’t he just blow it up?”
“It was his proof that he was right. Earth had jumped right back into nanotech research, no matter the motive, and damn the consequences to anyone in the path of that progress. They were treating the locals as lab rats, less than human, objects for study. Any talk of rescue from the on-planet team got shot down by the research agenda.”
At least some of the on-planet researchers were human enough to consider humanitarian relief over experimentation, just not enough to refuse their orders. I expect what they were learning was just too tempting.
“Is there enough in the files to incriminate UNCORT, or UNMAC?” I ask Lux.
“You know this game better than I do,” she defers. “Political skull
duggery was always your thing, wasn’t it?”
“Let’s see about moving this thing,” I decide.
I head back out through the lock, start down the tunnel with Bly right behind me, and realize almost too late that something is amiss. There’s a trigger signal, and something wedged in the rocks ahead of us that wasn’t there before.
Antipersonnel mine.
I spin, harden, shield Bly just out of courtesy, and get slammed in the back by shock and frag. Bly catches me as I stagger into him, my surcoat shredded. The back of my head burns where shrapnel bit me. Rock falls, partially blocking our way out, and the daylight beyond is obscured by a thick haze of dust.
“That was unfriendly,” Bly deadpans. I shake off, start pushing rock out of my way.
I get out under the sky, do a quick scan, but almost immediately have to dodge a sniper round: high caliber, high explosive. I turn on the shooter—he’s somewhere upslope and east. I duck another shot. See him move, change positions. Smart.
I debate firing back, but I want to know who’s shooting at us, want to know what they know. With the jamming field down, I can summon my flyer, jump to meet it as another shell comes at me. Bly is out of the cave, sword drawn, calling his own ride.
I weave to make a poor target, see my own target panic and start running, scrambling over rockfall: slight figure in a light surface suit, wearing a red cloak and hood. As I get closer, the figure switches the long sniper rifle for an ICW, pops a grenade at me, then sprays, pinging my wings and hull. I send my ride on without me, jump off and down at the shooter, drawing my own blade.
He tries to get away—he’s fast, nimble—but I’m faster. And Bly closes things up, jumping down in his path (getting shot again for his trouble).
Once the ICW runs empty of bullets, he switches quickly to spend the last five grenades in the cylinder, which I have to duck or swat away. Unfortunately, the scattered detonations shake loose the old slide-slope, making it slick.
The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are Page 31