The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades (13 page)

“It is much like this for the next fifty or sixty
kilometers. Open. But then are the Gate Mountains, the Teeth of
Coprates, marking the halfway point. Beyond the Teeth comes the
Throat, the Narrows, which funnel the winds, make them cut, for ten
kilometers. Then come the Badlands, for thirty kilometers. Hard to
traverse. The land is jagged, a maze of terraces. And higher.
Colder. Harder to breathe. The valley floor is raised up, thousands
of meters, before it finally falls into the Green Lands, into the
Belly of Coprates. Into the Pax Lands.”

“But the lands to that point are uninhabited?” he
asks to confirm. She thinks, as if replaying her long journey in
her head, then nods. The thought of a hundred kilometers of
available Coprates seems to appeal, even though none of those who
actually know this territory have chosen to live there, not even
the Silvermen who live underground.

But he wants to claim it in peace. So he offers:

“We can escort you home. As friends. Perhaps we can
help you against the Black Clothes. We have certainly fought them
ourselves, with some success. And we believe we may have stronger
allies somewhere in the region that may also help.”

“Then I will advocate for you with my father,” she
accepts. “But your presence in our lands will be at our
pleasure.”

“Of course, my lady.”

26 May, 2118.
Jak Straker:

We risk going outside again to visually check the
treads and the power train before we start moving for the day. The
morning cold and wind make the job as difficult as it has been any
other day for the last month-plus, though it’s been almost two
weeks since the last nocturnal attack, and nearly three since the
last “sapping” attempt to drop us into a hole. Rios thinks (hopes)
that we’ve made it well-past the territory of the tenacious
Silvermen, but he wisely won’t let us let our guards down.

While Wei and I do our checks underneath, Lyra heads
topside and adjusts our makeshift “camo netting”—her own idea,
after we realized that the rust and ochre paint job was no longer
blending so well as the terrain got greener. The girl’s made
herself a veritable garden on our roof, lacing the main hull with
sturdy Graingrass vines, keeping it green with a daily misting from
our condensation collectors (except on those odd mornings when we
get a free misting from the extra-thick Station clouds that build
up every few days down here, something Rios and the other Sleeper
Vets celebrate as “almost rain”). It manages to make our ride look
even more monster-like.

Jane has Wei triple-check the last field repairs we
had to make. The patched Starboard-Front Number Two caterpillar
tracks are holding together, but the bearing set on one of the
battered idler wheels is still squeaking, the wheel itself wobbling
visibly as we roll. Matheson is trying to scrounge us a replacement
or machine one to fit back at base, but we’d need to get his crew
out here along with a pair of ASV’s to lift the hull to repair it
properly in the field. The alternative is to turn around and limp
home, but Command says no, so we’ll keep moving until we break. And
we’re okay with that, because we’re finally getting somewhere
really interesting (though “interesting” usually means someone will
try to attack us pretty shortly).

Lyra calls what we’re heading into “The Belly.” And
it was a hell of a trip getting here.

She got the term from her own personal names for the
local map features, studying the geology of Marineris as she grew
up, the only child of an isolated spaceship crew. So the names have
a child’s whimsy, but they also make as good a sense as anything
Latin that got stuck to the planetary map from long before anyone
landed here:

The first five hundred klicks of Coprates—the western
half—is pretty straight, tapering mostly steadily from being a
hundred klicks wide where it connects with Melas, down to around
sixty just before Concordia. She says her parents used to call that
part “The Alley”, apparently inspired by an old science fiction
novel.

The eastern half still runs basically straight, but
the Rim walls are more varied in their sculpting by collapse,
erosion and possible ancient water flow: curved, widened,
scalloped, and finally the valley gets divided straight down the
middle for the final two hundred klicks by an almost Datum-level
mountain range.

Lyra points out that, to less scholarly eyes, this
half of the valley looks sort of like a man, though sideways (head
west, feet east). And I do see it: bulbous head, torso and two
legs; standing with a bad slouch and hands lazily in pockets, as if
seen from about forty-five degrees to his left.

And we’ve been through the top of his head and down
his throat.

The last human trouble we collided with was back at
his “forelock”, where sits the ruins of Concordia in its narrow
side-canyon, stripped bare and long-buried like every other colony
we’d surveyed in the Alley, a testament to the devastating power of
the “sterilizing” nukes that fell on us all (well, on those of us
that lived here—our grandparents) fifty years ago. And a testament
to the greater resilience of human kind, no matter what culture and
shape it might need take to survive.

Assuming we don’t run into them again, the
still-mysterious and universally unfriendly Silvermen appear to
control the entire eastern half of the Alley, almost two hundred
and fifty klicks worth, all from underground tunnel systems that
defy GPR scans because they seem to be in constant flux. As far as
we can guess, they’re a society of extremely proficient diggers,
miners (they certainly have a lot of metal and the necessary
chemicals to make explosives). Rios started calling them “mole
men”, a reference to something from his pre-service youth on
Earth—Old Earth. (A “mole” is apparently some kind of small
burrowing creature. The file references showed me a freakish thing
that looks like it can barely see or move, much less fight. I
wonder if such things still exist on New Earth. The only
definitions of the word I know are a chemical measure and the name
of a popular model of mining digger.)

Once we got past Concordia, the journey down through
the “head” was mostly uneventful, and that respite let us get more
time safely outside to make proper repairs and put together the
living camouflage. It also let us gather some of the local wild
bounty, officially for scientific analysis, actually to supplement
our rations. It’s such a badly-needed treat in our routine of
cloistered monotony (broken only by those moments of mortal terror)
that not even the gung-ho new Upworld Cherry replacements we’ve
been running through chose to protest or report the defiance of a
still-standing order to abstain from eating anything made of local
produce, as if it’s all infected with some unstoppable nano-plague,
of which there has never been a single sign.

We did see a few signs of recent travelers, carefully
masked to disguise their numbers, but at least the footprints that
we could make out did not bear the signature cleat marks of the
Silvermen.

Then we hit the “Teeth”: Almost conical mountains
between one and two thousand klicks high, forming a rough frown
across the narrows of the “Neck,” where the valley closed in to
only thirty-odd klicks wide. The Neck brought intense winds, and
low visibility. The sandblast scoured our paint and tore at our
camo net, gummed our sensor ports and kept the blast shields down
over the viewports. Thankfully it only lasted for a dozen klicks,
but it was a slow dozen klicks, taking the better part of a day
even though we didn’t linger.

But past the Neck, Coprates started to digest us,
physically and mentally.

Thirty klicks of what Rios called “bad lands”: a maze
of terraces rising thousands of klicks up, thinning the air, making
it cold. Even with satellites trying to guide us from orbit, we
spent four days lost, frustrated. Getting stuck, our way blocked by
sharp rises or deep ravines. Backtracking. Trying to find another
way. The ground almost giving out under our treads when we
miscalculated its ability to take our mass. The terrain so
bone-jarringly rough even at a crawl that we all felt battered, our
spines and everything aching, by the end of each day’s drive.

We wound up taking the southern route, though it made
us hug the foothills of the Rim. Thankfully, we had no trouble from
Silvermen, or anyone else.

And now, today, we’re looking forward to a reasonably
survivable decline. Things are already getting green again, and the
view ahead is spectacular. From here, from the heights, the torso
of the “Coprates Man” looks like a blanket of green almost from
Rim-to-Rim and as far east as the eye can see.

And even better: if we hold course, in ten easy
klicks we’ll be entering the legendary “Vajra”, where the
Terraformers told Colonel Ram that the green was thicker and taller
than in the Tranquility gardens. It’s the abdomen and right arm of
the “Coprates Man” figure, and down to his pelvis. And within it
lay the presumably lost colonies of Pax, Eureka, Liberty, Alchera
and Iving.

The Terraformers have told us the survivors of Pax
still thrive somewhere in there, having relocated from their
compromised colony at the westernmost tip of the double-ended
trident. And they’ve suggested that at least one other group
competes with them in that deep, lush land. Perhaps the Silvermen.
Perhaps someone else yet.

I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.

Morning maintenance done, we take the time to gather
edibles from the nearby growth (for scientific purposes, of
course). Then we get back inside so Rios can give the order for
Jane to start driving.

After a few hours, we realize the terrain is no
longer our primary barrier.

There’s been no avoiding crushing some of the wild
growth under tread since we passed Concordia. Now it seems to be
exacting its revenge. As we roll downhill, the Graingrass gets
steadily sturdier, growing more upright; and other species that had
been small shrubs are now meters tall and wide, with thick primary
stalks. The Old-Earth vets start using the words “tree”, “trunks”,
“forest” and “jungle”. (Again: I know the terms and have seen file
images to have an idea what they’re talking about, but like oceans
and animals, I have no personal frame of reference—this is all just
too unbelievable, fantastic. And, I have to admit, as disturbing as
it is totally thrilling.) We can hear plant life crushing and
snapping even inside the pressure hull, and we keep hitting density
that we can’t push through, so we have to keep reversing, trying to
find a way around. We’re in a green maze.

More unsettling, we can’t see more than several
meters around us at ground level. Topside cameras only show us the
leafy tops of the growth that form a lumpy blanket over
everything—what Rios calls a “canopy” (like we all should know what
that means)—not what could be hiding in there. And looking back
behind us, we’re leaving a path of smashed growth that can probably
be seen from orbit.

Heat scans show nothing above ambient, but the
layered cloaks of many of the surface groups defeat the scans
readily enough. And motion sensors are useless: If our own momentum
didn’t shove and shake the growth all around us, the winds keep it
rustling.

Satellite eyes don’t do any better, blocked by the
“canopy”. We could be surrounded by an army and not know it.

“The forests on Earth were scary places for early
peoples,” Rios tells us, as if to reassure us by validating our
growing dread. “It was easy to get lost, fall prey to predators,
get ambushed by enemies. Even modern armies…”

“
Whoa!!
” Jane suddenly screams, jerking in his
chair, and we grind to a full stop. There’s movement outside our
forward viewports, right up close to the hull. Darting, flapping,
jerking about randomly in the air. I see what looks like a long,
narrow body that may be made of some kind of metal or carbon
composite, perhaps half a meter long, propelled and held aloft by
even longer wings that move so fast all I see is a blur. (On
high-speed freeze-frame, I count four of them, looking like they’re
made of fine wire mesh, almost transparent.). There are six short,
thin, jointed legs sprouting from the thing’s underbelly. The
“head” is dominated by a pair of bizarre fist-sized round faceted
eyes that scan us mechanically.

“Is that… Is that at
dragonfly
?” Rios stares
back at the thing in wonder. I’m wondering why we aren’t shooting
at it.

“Some kind of drone?” I assume, thinking we may have
just found Chang, or whoever may have succeeded him. And he’s just
seen us.

“No. It’s a bug,” Rios names, still all wonder and no
panic.

“A new bot?” I’m trying.

“An
insect
,” he clarifies patiently. “A living
thing. From Earth.”

“Except they’re not that
big
…” Jane, at least,
sounds shaken (which is saying something).

“How big are they supposed to be?” I ask the obvious.
He holds up his forefinger and thumb, the tips maybe five or six
centimeters apart.

“Wow…” Wei says, coming forward to squeeze in with us
for a look. “That is a scary looking beasty…”

“They’re harmless,” Rios insists.

“But they
are
predators,” Lyra joins us, with
the measured awe of a scientist. She’s scanning a flashcard. “It
looks like they eat smaller insects—at least the ones on Earth did…
Maybe they’d ignore us… It looks like it’s just being curious…”

“We’re sure it’s not some kind of machine?” I try to
hold the line of reason.

“T-Wave scan shows organic,” Jane reads, sounding
like he’s believing this only slightly more than I am. “No EM
signature. No signals.”

We watch, mesmerized, as the thing continues to dart
and hover around us for several more seconds. Then it flies off on
its nearly-invisible wings, vanishing into the green.