13 July, 2115:
At just after 0600, I get the call that Paul and Anton—after an apparently sleepless night—have “unlocked” the Lancer. We can fly it.
“You really mean to take a spin in this scary thing?” Matthew tries to dissuade me as we climb up into the Lancer’s forward airlock. “We do have two ASVs up now.”
“And if our attempted first-contact mission runs into problems?” I return.
“Mechanical problems or diplomatic problems?” he qualifies. “Ship breaking, or ship getting shot at? Or in this case: Ship getting impulsively disassembled on a molecular level by technology we can’t defend against.”
“At least the Lancer doesn’t look like it’s bristling with guns,” I give him one of my reasons.
“Is Blueboy going to make those weapons work for us?” he criticizes.
“I already have,” Paul himself answers as we come into the cockpit. Matthew just shakes his head and shuts up.
“We have access, Colonel,” Anton tells me, swiveling almost joyfully in the forward chair. A slide of his fingertips over the armrest, and the front of the cockpit seems to melt away, giving us a clear view of the bay in front of the ship. More graceful strokes bring up graphics that look like gun sights, target lock graphics.
“But this is the coolest part:”
A relief map hovers in front of the outside forward view. I immediately recognize the familiar shapes of the Chasmata that make up the Valles Marineris. But the map has changed. The bigger features—the lines of the canyons themselves—seem mostly the same, but the interior landscapes appear different, re-sculpted, smoothed. And there are many new craters. Anton rotates it in all planes, zooms in and out like an excited child with a new game.
“Recent orbital mapping,” Anton explains. “The images were probably taken before they made landfall. This is Marineris after the Big Blow. This…” He brings up another map—the map I ingrained in my memory on the trip from Earth and studied tactically every day in the years before we went to sleep—and lays it over the top of the first. “…is ‘Pre-Apocalypse.’ And this…” Icons flash. Dots and lines and labels detail the parallel maps. “This shows us where everything used to be, in comparison to what it looks like now. Colony sites. ETE Stations. Feed Lines. The other two UNMAC bases.”
“Are they still there?” Matthew speaks up instantly. Anton makes the ghostly old map vanish, tries to zoom in on the new one, increasing resolution.
“Melas Three looks completely buried,” Anton confirms. “Worse than what happened to us—a nuke hit closer.” He highlights the offending crater, the resulting slide patterns. “But then Three was all heavy bunker, most of it flush with the surface—our hardest site. It may be intact.”
“But no Hiber-Sleep,” Matthew remembers sourly. “They hadn’t installed the couches yet.”
“And the new surface over it looks undisturbed,” Anton shows him. “No one’s tried to dig it out.”
“That doesn’t mean no one is there,” Paul tries. “Remember: Most of the survivors have gone to great lengths to hide themselves from anyone who might be looking down from the skies.”
“Base One looks like a loss,” Anton continues, zooming in on the original base site west of us. There’s a spread of half-buried twisted wreckage—little is recognizable. The unfinished bunkers look shattered, collapsed, completely breached.
“Never was in the best real estate,” Matthew mourns what was to be his command, probably considering what his fate might have been if he was there and not here when the bombs fell.
“Either site might be salvageable,” Anton offers. “We might be able to find what we need to get the transmitter tower up. Or at least supplies. Food. Ammo. Even vehicles.”
“I doubt they’ve gone un-looted,” Paul argues. “Your site here was the farthest from our Feed Lines, and I think that’s what protected it from opportunistic raiding. Not many could get here and back to a tap-site without running out of the bottled air they could practically carry with them.”
“And there’s been no activity from our own people, no survivors?” I ask him. His lips purse.
“What I have heard is anecdotal only, Colonel, but this is what I have been told: In the beginning, the UNMAC survivors couldn’t contact Earthside, and—like many other groups—were eventually driven to evacuate, relocate,” he explains. “They were either too far from our surviving Feed Lines to keep the sites viable, or there was too much pressure from competing tribes. Some probably fell in with existing groups, pooling resources and skills, working toward mutual survival. Others… Many lives were literally lost in those early days, their fates unknown.”
“Still, we can use the Lancer and the maps to start doing recon,” Anton changes the subject back to what’s pressing. “Check the other base sites. And the colonies.”
“I can show you where Nomad tap-sites have been established on our Feed Lines so you can refuel and refill,” Paul offers.
“Maybe we should check the other bases first,” Matthew considers. “We might find what we need there, and not have to deal with the ETE at all.”
I digest that for a few moments, then turn to Paul:
“I’m assuming your people will be watching us, whatever we do. So what if we go looking for our own means and don’t approach you—what would your Elder Council make of that?”
“I see your point, Colonel,” Paul allows. “You’re assuming a no-win: If you go to the Council, they will refuse you. If you act without contacting the Council, they will assume you are suspicious, prejudicial; the UNMAC everyone is afraid of.”
“Would they try to stop us?” I ask him directly.
He purses his lips again, shakes his head like he isn’t sure.
“Is that why your people left us sleeping so damn long?” Matthew confronts. “So you wouldn’t have to make that decision?”
“Perhaps partially, Colonel Burke,” Paul agrees candidly. “I expect the Council was hoping for… Well, for some other solution to present itself. Our longevity does give anything our Elders do an appearance of protracted procrastination. The planet had already been isolated for many years—as well as having become a violent, predatory, desperate place—when I finally discovered you were sleeping here and the Council explicitly ordered that I not revive you. As I said: they deliberated about that for many days. They have never shared with me the content of that debate, but I expect there were a number of reasons behind the final decision, though I doubt you will find any of them acceptable. The foremost would be the fear that you would contact Earth and bring down another Apocalypse, intentionally or otherwise. There is also the fear that you would attempt to enforce order among the various competing survivor factions—you do possess an advantage in terms of weapons and technology over the majority of the tribes, but the tribes would likely fight you to the death, and you would replace the balance of tribal violence with actual genocide. And I am quite certain at least some on the Council—many of my Elders have become men of patience, not action—felt the situation would be best served by waiting for Earth’s inevitable return, perhaps imagining that your ‘discovery’ at that time might have made such a return hopeful, joyous. As things stand now, any visit from Earth or representatives of its military force would likely be met with fear and violence. And Earth would find a planet of what they would consider hostile savages.”
“Explains why you didn’t just kill us while we slept,” Matthew accuses. “You needed us around for whenever it became clear that Earth would try a second coming. Are we supposed some kind of intermediary? Or leverage—hostages?”
“No, Colonel,” Paul defends, sounding honestly hurt. “Whatever my Council’s motives, you must believe me when I say that killing you was never even considered. The ETE exist to bring life to this world—it is all we live for. We do not kill—taking life is our greatest taboo. And I know you have absolutely no reason to believe me.”
“Perhaps we should do both,” I interrupt them. “Send a delegatio
n to meet with the ETE, while we use our ASVs to scout for supplies and other survivors.”
“I still strongly urge caution on the latter objective,” Paul warns again. “Most anyone you meet will see your ships and your uniforms and think of the stories they still tell of the Apocalypse and the world before the Apocalypse. They will know you as Unmakers, come to kill them.”
“Then we will do what we can to avoid direct confrontation,” I reassure him. “But we can’t just sit here. We need to see what’s out there—if for no other reason than to tell Earth what’s been happening here when we do manage to call out.”
“So who goes to Oz?” Matthew wants to know.
“The Peacemaker,” I tell him with a grin. Paul smiles at me.
Anton gets the Lancer communicating with MAI, uploading its few remaining files. The updated maps and pictures—even though they’re likely decades old—are priceless intel. Command Briefing is packed by 0800.
“According to the Lancer’s orbital imaging, Melas Three may be as intact as we are, assuming it survived the blast and the slide,” Anton lays it out on the screens, zooming in on the real estate in question: just beyond the prominence where the southeastern rim of Melas meets the south rim of Coprates. But even on maximum resolution, nothing is visible but rock and sand where the base should be. “The lack of ruins or debris is actually promising. I ran some quick structural models, and the probability of the main facility surviving is high. But getting to it will be more than we can manage right now. It looks buried deep, with no surface markers—we could spend days digging before we find it. Maybe weeks. And it’s a long way to go to come back with nothing.”
“But Melas One looks gutted, abandoned and picked clean,” Rick redirects, and Anton shifts the map.
“There are colony sites closer to Melas One than Melas Three,” Tru points out. “That might be the better place to start, promising or not.”
Anton zooms out a bit, selects the northern Melas Chasma, and lights up the Melas One ruin and the five colony sites in that region.
“Mariner is gone,” Anton tells us heavily, zooming in on the mostly-buried ruin, the patterns of wreckage swept away by rock. “It looks like it got hit hard by multiple close blasts before it got swept by a slide. It wasn’t reinforced enough yet to have survived—I ran the model a hundred times. There’s less left of it than Melas One.”
He stops, realizing he needs to give Tru some time and silence to process. There were three hundred UNMAC personnel and a hundred-plus construction engineers at Melas One, but there were almost eight hundred civilian colonists working to rebuild Mariner, many of whom shared air with us here.
“What about the other sites?” Tru pushes us on with little pause.
Anton hops the map zoom about thirty miles east-southeast.
“Avalon,” he names the colony. The site from orbit is mostly buried and broken, but show signs of what may be some intact bunker structures, or at least that someone attempted to make repairs, to dig out. “We had Special Forces there from the Eco conflict.”
“Paul mentioned that some of our people survived, but they moved elsewhere when they couldn’t keep their sites viable,” Lisa remembers. Paul nods. “They might still be close, or they may have left sign of where they went.”
“Where’s Zodanga?” I ask, scanning the north-eastern rim of Melas. Zodanga had been built high up into the rim, above the less-stable slide zones where there was good strong rock, and mineral resources to supply their manufacturing efforts. Zodanga was an on-planet support industry, refining fuel and building vehicles and aircraft for the other colonies using native resources. When I find the site, I realize why it was so hard to spot: it looks picked bare, but very cleanly, like a thorough salvage job—they took everything but the concrete.
“There were close nukes, but the colony was up high and dug into rock,” Rick considers. “The sim model spares them in most variations. Damaged, but survivable.”
“Still, it looks like they stripped everything and relocated,” Anton theorizes.
“So where’d they go?” Matthew wants to know. I look at Paul. He frowns, looks like he doesn’t know what to say.
“We register draws off our lines in the rim area, too high for the valley Nomads. And we’ve heard stories of a raiding tribe that uses homemade aircraft, but we haven’t seen them.”
“Have you looked?” Matthew criticizes.
“We have kept our distance from the survivors, more so as the years have passed.”
“And let them rape and pillage each other?”
“You would prefer we controlled them by superior force?”
“Not at all,” I try to defuse. “As you’ve said: You’re scientists, not soldiers.”
Matthew doesn’t seem the least bit soothed. Paul looks away, ignores him.
Anton moves south, across the open valley.
“Arcadia Colony also looks like a total loss,” Rick admits, seeing only twisted scrap scattered in the rock and sand, a fresh crater more than close enough to have put the colony in the nuclear blast wave. Foundations aren’t even recognizable.
Freedom, near the southeast rim, looks like Avalon: Like someone may have tried to dig out, rebuild, then stripped and abandoned it.
“Another colony we had Special Operators in,” Lisa remembers.
Anton moves west, across the valley.
“This is weird,” Anton points out three sites that run roughly in a vertical line through the center of Melas. “Okay: Uqba and Baraka—the UME sites—look similar to Arcadia: blasted, ripped apart and picked clean. But look here:” He zooms in on the southern-most site, sitting just east of a promontory ridge that stretches fifty miles into the valley floor from the south rim. “This is where Shinkyo—the Japanese corporate that made so much money on tech toys—was. And it’s gone. Just gone.”
“That’s a big crater dead-zero,” Matthew concludes from the image.
“But that’s the weird part,” Anton explains, “the other craters have residual radiation signatures—and this is an old map—but this one is cold. And the larger blast-pattern doesn’t look right, not compared to the other craters.”
“It’s a fake?” Lisa realizes, incredulous. “Did they bury themselves?”
Anton brings up a pre-Apocalypse image: four heavy pressure domes almost the size of stadiums, connected to big blocky manufacturing fabs, two reactors and a large landing facility. There’s no sign of any of it on the newer map.
“There’s never been a draw off our Feeds, so we assumed there were no survivors,” Paul insists, then apologizes like the error his own: “But we didn’t look closely.”
“Still, burying a site that size would be an amazing piece of engineering,” Anton doesn’t believe. “Same with relocating it.”
“But it’s another long way to go for potentially nothing,” Rick de-prioritizes our curiosity.
“Or to look for folks that don’t want finding,” Tru agrees.
“Maybe not this trip,” I decide. “What else is in the neighborhood—close to Melas One?”
“City of Industry, Pioneer, Frontier,” Anton moves the map north, lists the northern Melas and Candor US corporate colonies out beyond Melas One. “These are weird in a different way: Wrecked and apparently not viable, but they don’t show the same signs of scavenging as anything else that’s left above ground—it’s like they’ve remained untouched since the bombing.”
“And all of those sites had UNMAC garrisons,” Matthew recalls, his brow lowering.
“They do draw off our Feeds,” Paul admits, “but all of our attempts at contact have been met by gunfire. The Nomads also say getting anywhere near them means death. We decided to give them their space—they didn’t seem to want or need anything more from us than air and water and fuel. We’ve never seen any surface activity. No idea what the population might be.”
“They’re still populated?” Lisa asks for clarification. Paul nods lightly, like we’ve asked about somet
hing obvious.
“Explains why they don’t look scavenged,” I calculate. “Maybe made to look destroyed from orbit.” Law of the Land: Hide from the sky.
“How sizable is the drain?” Anton asks.
“Significant, but draw is not a good estimator. Conservation efficiency is too variable.”
“They could be a few with leaky seals and bad recycling, or hundreds with good seals and recyclers,” Halley agrees.
“What about Coprates?” Ryder asks. Anton shifts the map east into the long, narrow canyons.
“Too far,” Morales shoots down. “We might be able to make Tranquility. The next nearest colony is over two hundred miles away.”
“And gone,” Anton shows us Tyr, out on the Coprates north rim: It’s all slide, close strike. He moves another hundred miles further east: Nike is also gone. And fifty miles beyond there, Gagarin and Concordia have been erased.
“No Feed draw,” Paul confirms the likely worst. “Not that I’ve ever seen.”
“How many sites aren’t drawing off your lines?” Ryder asks. He turns from the view and considers the map.
“Shinkyo, Uqba, Baraka, Mariner, Arcadia, Tyr, Nike, Gagarin, Concordia, Alchera, and Iving…” he rattles off the names as he points out more than half of the colonies.
“That many…” Ryder shakes her head.
“Remember, Doctor: Just because a colony site is destroyed, it doesn’t mean there are no survivors,” Paul gives her. “The Nomads left their colony sites almost immediately after the Apocalypse, and they subsist: living in the deeper Melas floor, using a number of small taps in our Lines to feed their traveling camps. And in some of the deeper canyons in Coprates, there is enough free air and water now to live without tapping our Lines.”
“So they could have just relocated,” Lisa extrapolates hopefully.
“But four sites are likely occupied,” I refocus, pointing to Industry, Liberty, Frontier and Tranquility.
“And we have promising draws from the regions near Avalon, Zodanga, Freedom, and Eureka,” Paul encourages.
“You mentioned Pax in your first interviews,” Halley recalls, looking at the one remaining colony that hasn’t been marked as either inhabited or lost. Anton pans east, zooms in. The region—especially in the gorges and ranges closer to the Coprates south rim, are veined and dotted with green. Where the colony was isn’t even visible—the growth looks forest-thick, at least from orbit.
“And these maps are decades old,” Ryder reminds us.
“The plant life has spread significantly since these images were captured,” Paul assures her, then explains: “The Pax survivors abandoned their original colony site long ago—it was too compromised. They sheltered with us until the atmosphere began to thicken, then ventured out to make their own way. Their labors in bio-engineering and horticulture are one of the primary reasons the region is now so verdant. They now live free of our feeds, thriving here in the greenest zones where the air is thickest and there is a lot of bedrock water. We call this green region ‘The Vajra’ because it looks like the Hindu double-ended trident. The Pax have established a feudal system of agricultural villages. They defend their lands aggressively. We leave them be. They have everything they need.”
This is simultaneously very good and very troubling news—I watch my team digest the implications.
“Are they the only group out there?” I ask for more good news, noting five “dead” colony sites in proximity to The Vajra (but also numerous nuclear craters).
“The Pax are aggressive because they do have competitors,” Paul admits, “but they do not describe them to us, nor have we seen them ourselves. As I said, we leave them be.”
“Do your people have more current mapping?” Halley asks. Paul shakes his head.
“Nothing like this. The best we have are some observational archives, but nothing recent.”
I take over the map, trace back west, following the green that dots and clings to the Coprates South Rim.
“You said Tranquility was also dangerous,” I remember, moving the conversation along. I zoom in on the site, just over a hundred miles east of here on the south rim. Tranquility looks like what Paul described: The main structures consisted of three large pressure domes terraced (very aesthetically) up a V-shaped gorge in the South Rim. Now only the lowest dome and the wreckage of their spaceport are left exposed. The upper two domes and the rest of the facilities look like the Rim came down the gorge in a massive slide and buried them. The exposed dome—a massive multi-tiered greenhouse—has been broken open (likely indicating the fate of the buried sections). But scrub spreads from the ruin, heading outward and westward. The landscape looks a lot like the living deserts of the American Southwest I knew as child.
“We met violence when we tried to approach them,” Paul confirms. “The Nomads also describe similar experiences: No one approaches the ruin and returns. It’s likely an issue of protecting precious resources. The Tranquility gardens were impressive, and they were working on engineering renewable food sources as well as adaptive plant life. It may be that only a fraction of the colony’s bounty has spread wild into the valleys.”
I take a deep breath, sit back. No one says anything for awhile.
“Sounds like the rule is if we go where the people are, there will be shooting,” Matthew grumbles.
“What kind of weapons are we facing?” Carver chimes in, thinking practically. Paul frowns.
“As I said before, you likely outgun most of the survivor tribes,” he tells her heavily. “But that doesn’t mean they will not fight you to the death if they feel threatened. And you will likely frighten them more than any raider come to—as Colonel Burke put it—rape and pillage. They expect you would exterminate them.”
“Then probably best if we avoid direct approaches at first,” I suggest. “Explore. Recon. Let them see us. Keep our distance—remember: some of the colonies stocked surface-to-air weapons.”
“Where to first?” Tru asks.
I select northeast Melas.
“Might be a good first place to go,” I offer. “Hop the Feed Lines. Swing by Avalon, Mariner, then Melas One—look over the abandoned sites up close, see if we can get a sense of survivors and where they may have gone. Depending on how the ASVs hold up and how well the feed tapping works, we could go on and get a careful look at Industry.” Then I assure Paul: “From a safe distance.”
“While Paul takes you home to meet the family,” Matthew snipes, pointing out what Paul identified as his home Station, high up on the northeast Melas rim at the point where Melas opens into Candor. Matthew turns to Paul. “Anything else we should know before blundering out looking for our fellow humans?”
“Beware the Nomads,” Paul tells him matter-of-factly. “Their locations are purposefully changing, unpredictable, but they do effectively control the Melas Valley floor. And they survive by hiding, and by fighting off stronger competitors. They do not try to engage us because they fear our ‘magic’.”
“Great,” Matthew gives back sickly-sweet.
Paul gets up and walks out.
“I apologize, Colonel,” Paul tells me when I catch up to him in the short corridor outside, between Briefing and Ops. “I find myself in a difficult position. And it’s not just that I forget how much you do not know of what has happened in the past fifty years. It’s that I truly do not know how much I should be telling you.”
“Because of your Council?”
“More than that…” He looks away. “Please understand: it is not that I do not trust you. But we have established trusts of our own with peoples who in turn trust that we would not ‘betray’ them to an Earth that they so greatly fear. And I do expect violence when you encounter them. Lives will almost certainly be lost.”
“Which is why I need your intel,” I tell him. “I need to know what to expect, how to approach.”
“And what would you do if I told you about a certain group of survivors, and then insisted that you absolutely do not attemp
t to contact them?” he confronts.
I don’t have an answer for him, at least not one he wants to hear.
“Imagine Mars as being like Earth during the Dark Ages,” he tries. “Struggling, embattled, fearful, competitive, xenophobic peoples all vying for territory, dominance, resources. What became of that era, Colonel? What created civilization from chaos? Powers arose—nations with greater resources and technologies—conquerors. Civilization was built out of wars, order asserted by violence, even genocide. The most peaceful peoples were trampled underfoot first, the most warlike surviving to hopefully mature.
“Now you suddenly come into this world with your guns and your aircraft… And what happens when you call Earth back? How will they come? Now imagine what the various native tribes of Earth’s history suffered when the technologically advanced Europeans made landfall on their shores. And remember: not all Europeans came just to conquer and profit. Some insisted they had come to better the natives’ lives, to ‘save’ them.”
I digest that for a moment.
“Then we need to open talks with your people,” I tell him. “You talk about history. What went furthest to bring us out of the violence was when the superpowers struck a balance—that started people trying to understand each other, to cooperate. Communication was the key.”
I leave him to think about that—staring out of one of the slit viewports across our base and Marineris beyond—and I go back in to Briefing.
“So what’s the plan?” Matthew asks when I come back to the table.
“You hold the fort,” I tell him. “Lisa, Tru, Anton and I go try to meet with the ETE.”
“No guns?” He already knows the answer.
“No troops, not for the ETE visit. Just us.” Then I look back at the map. “Plot out some tap-sites on the Feed Lines between here and the City of Industry. Lieutenant Carver, I’m giving this to you, since you seem to have The Luck: take a few squads in one ASV. Heavy Armor and weapons, but defensive ROEs. Start with a sweep of Avalon and Mariner, then hit Base One. Look for supplies and signs of survivors, get us a good close scan. Any sign of human life, avoid direct engagement for now. If you have fuel, air and daylight—and the ship is still running smooth—you make the call whether to go on to get a look over Industry or come back.”
“Yes, sir,” she says without hesitation.
“You still taking the Flash Gordon Special?” Matthew prods me.
“As soon as I find a pilot.”
The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN Page 16