The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades (7 page)

I get to where her helmet should be, but it’s just
more dirt.

“She’s underground!” I figure the obvious. But as I
say it, the tags on her suit and gun go dead.

Shit.

Melas Two sends an ASV to pick up Horton, even though
he stubbornly insisted on waiting until we find Sharp. Rios sends
him anyway. The projectile that hit him had a sharp-edged
triangular cross-section, making for a messy wound that’s tough to
staunch, compounded by spring-loaded razor-sharp fins (like
stabilizers or arrow fletchings). We couldn’t even safely get it
out of him, so we had to pack it in place and evac him with the
two-hundred centimeter long thing still stuck through his
shoulder.

Jackson decides to waste precious fuel doing flyovers
with heavily armed AAVs, while Rios keeps booming polite but firm
requests over the PA to return our personnel, promising we’ll leave
the area as soon as we get her back.

“The Cast leader told me stories about some of the
outsiders they’d faced,” Rios remembers as we suffer the wait,
glued to the screens and ports for any sign of movement. “He
described a rocket-powered lance.”

He locks eyes on Lyra, then hits the uplink.

“Leviathan Three to Station. This is Captain Rios. I
need to speak with General Richards.”

He gets on in impressive time. (The General actually
strikes me as a good officer, true to his men, and trying his best
to do what’s right over all the fear-politics spewing from
Earth.)

“What do you need, son?”

“Restricted access, General. The files we got from
the Circe. The exams they did on the locals. I don’t need the
sensitive material, just the anthropological and medical reports.
Any subjects carrying a weapon like the one that hit Sergeant
Horton.”

We get silence. But then we get fed.

Pictures. Videos. Exam logs. Clinical reports. (Just
none of the experimental records, the atrocities the crew of the
Circe—including Lyra’s parents—had been ordered to commit.)

What we see is an almost unreal form: Human,
certainly. But short, thick-limbed, broad-chested, heavy lids over
deep eyes. The skin is sickly-pale, worse than our tunnel dwellers
(but we had medic-ordered doses of UV). The exams report thick,
calcified bones and joints (in this gravity,
de
-calcification is the major risk), enlarged lungs and
heart, peripheral signs of mild frostbite and severe capillary
rupture from years of exposure to low pressure. And geometric
scarring from many years of healing pressure sores, on the limbs,
torso and waist, that the onboard medic attributed to the heavy
steel plate armor each subject wore, almost twice their own body
mass of metal. Thick enough to stop small-arms fire.

Lyra recognizes some of this. She was privy to the
early exams, the Circe’s initial catch-and-release studies of the
local population (or at least the locals that wandered by,
entrapped by basic curiosity). She even got full disclosure on
everything they managed to take from the one ETE they managed to
catch. But she got kept in the dark about the experimental phase,
when her family was ordered to try cultivating and implanting the
ETE nanotech in other bodies.

“Silvermen,” Rios mutters. “Two Gun called them
‘Silvermen’.”

The heavy layered armor is bare polished metal.
Apparently they don’t have anything to paint it with, or don’t care
to, relying on their cloaks for surface camo.

“It looked like they lived underground,” Lyra tells
us what the reports do. “They also carried heavy digging tools. And
cutting tools. They had old mining gear on under their armor, but
all the colony tags had been removed. But no pressure suits. Just
basic masks. Some not even that.”

“They’ve acclimatized to the thin air,” Rios
figures.

What we don’t see: any interviews,
interrogations.

“We kept them unconscious, drugged so they wouldn’t
remember,” Lyra explains.

So we don’t know where they come from, how they live,
how they get around. Numbers. Fortifications. But apparently, they
can dig.

Two more hours pass. Doctor Mann has a relief flight
bring us a present: It drops a GPR charge on the colony site. In
minutes, we can see the ghosts of tunnels, but more random than the
ones I grew up in. And not contiguous. Just sections.

“It looks like they use cave-ins to keep anyone from
following them,” I suspect, remembering what we had to do to slow
the Bug that Chang sent after us at Industry.

So all we can do is keep broadcasting our deal: Give
us back our trooper and we’ll go.

We don’t get a motion alarm until 23:20.

The spotlights go live, washing the terrain blazing
white. There’s one figure coming toward us in the icy night,
staggering. It’s Sharp. She’s got her hands up over her eyes. The
light is blinding her. She’s moving slow, like she’s drunk or
drugged. All she’s wearing is the jumpsuit she had on under her
armor, though it’s hard to tell because she’s completely crusted in
dirt, like she’d just crawled up out of her own grave. Then I
realize she’s barefoot.

And she isn’t wearing a mask.

“Go!” Rios orders. Wei and I are already at the lock,
cycling.

We grab her and drag. She fights us, weak,
disoriented, confused, dirty. But she doesn’t seem to be hurt.

Lyra’s on the other side of the hatch to help drag
her in. We pressurize the lock, start vacuuming all the dirt off,
check for wounds. She’s shivering, coughing, hyperventilating. She
won’t open her eyes.

“Check her!” Rios insists, expecting treachery, but
she isn’t booby-trapped.

We get her through the lock and into our tiny medical
bay, get her oxygen, strip her out of her dirt-packed clothing, get
hot packs and a saline IV started. She’s hypoxic, hypothermic, and
she keeps trying to cover her eyes, won’t open them for the
exam.

“…
dark
…” she rasps out. “…kept me in the dark…
total dark… I couldn’t
see
…”

We try to comfort, but it takes a shot to settle
her.

Outside, there’s no more sign of movement.

Rios orders Jane to honor our part of the deal. We
roll out. Retreat.

We get a hundred meters, and there’s an explosion. We
can feel it through the hull, through the suspension. Grit rains on
us seconds later.

Satellite confirms, even in the dark: Where we were
parked is now a hole, and it looks big and deep enough to have
swallowed us up.

6 May, 2018.
From the Diaries of Jonathan Drake, when he was still known as
Ishmael Abbas:

We come within five klicks of Concordia just as the
evening winds begin battering our backs. Hopefully this is far
enough away from their territory to camp for the night in relative
safety.

We’ve made it around the east end of the Lesser
Divide Range, to a point where the Coprates Valley suddenly widens
out about a dozen klicks south, due to the combined ending of that
secondary ridge of mountains and the Divide’s own recession from
ancient slope-fall. But we’re sure to stay well away from the
highlands. If the established pattern holds, we’re less likely to
come under attack down here in the belly-lands.

We find the next Tapsite easily enough, right where
the map Paul Stilson gave us said it would be. It’s not a Nomad
Tap, certainly not this far out, so it proves the place is (or had
been) routinely visited by some local population. Thankfully, the
gas fixtures are still universal. From the age of the welds and
tool marks, it’s probably been here since just after the
Apocalypse, just like the taps in Melas, when the original
survivors scrambled for necessary resources as well as viable
homes, their colonies destroyed. (And the colony sites we’ve passed
so far look just as burned and blasted as any in Central Melas,
including our own Uqba and Baraka.)

We’re initially thankful that it doesn’t look
recently used, unvisited long enough for dunes to shift across all
the obvious approaches. But both Ambassador Murphy and The Ghaddar
agree on closer inspection that the appearance is deceiving. They
note signs of soil compression that could only have been made by
heavy boots—complete with the distinctive cleat-marks we’ve become
too-familiar with. Carefully covered, but they were made shortly
before the last “wet misting” (a disturbing phenomenon that occurs
every few mornings in this region, when the sky gets thick with
Station emissions and the water vapor partially condenses out of it
as a super-fine chilly spray over everything, lasting for up to an
hour). So that means people have been here anywhere from several
days to a week ago. We are not out of enemy territory. Not here.
Not yet. And that news is disheartening.

But then her eyes find other covered prints, these
much lighter, smaller, and without cleats. My father initially
wonders if our new enemies ever travel the surface with their
children, but the Ghaddar insists that these tracks occurred at a
different time, and more recently—since the last misting.

We move well out of sight of the Tapsite, covering
our own tracks. The Ghaddar finds us a depression deep enough to
set up our shelters, with enough open flat around it to be
relatively defensible. As we unpack and inflate our meager homes, I
take another silent inventory: We’ve lost a third of our number
since Tyr, since we crossed into this invisibly occupied land, two
hundred and fifty klicks and nearly five months ago.

I watch my father as I go about my ritual duties. He
still tries not to show how much he favors his right leg, though
his insistence on walking on it all day, as he has since the one
day of rest he allowed himself after his calf was run-through by
the enemy spearhead, has made the wound slow to heal. At least the
bleeding has stopped. The triangular cross-sections and razor fins
of the enemy weapons make messy wounds that are difficult to close.
Thankfully Ambassador Murphy is a skilled field surgeon. And
Ambassador Murphy insists we are blessed by being out in the
sterile air rather than inside a crowded colony that could breed
infection—my father’s wound is clean.

Unfortunately, my second step-mother Sarai has not
been so lucky. Her gut wound, though relatively small, supplies its
own infectious matter. She remains feverish, too weak to walk, so
must be carried on a makeshift stretcher. My father will not give
up hope.

Nor will he give up hope that we can cross this
hostile territory, find respite somewhere beyond it. But the reach
of our tenacious opponents has been unexpectedly long, spread
across both the north and south rims of the valley. We have managed
to go no more than a week between nocturnal attacks, though they
usually come when we approach within a few klicks of the foothills,
an intermittent necessity because that’s where most of the edible
plants cling (though the bounty in the lower lands gets richer as
we progress eastward). And always our enemies vanish into the rock,
closing their tunnels behind them, burying themselves like
corpses.

Silvermen. That’s what Ambassador Murphy calls them.
Though he had never seen one himself before he joined us on our
journey, he knew them from old video records of attacks on his
colony. Squat like boulders, wearing armor thick enough to waste
too much of our precious ammunition trying to penetrate. We don’t
even know if we’ve killed any of them, because they are sure to
carry off their wounded.

And they are very strong and skilled with short
swords and axes and bows and arrows and lances—lances that can fire
their arrow-like heads long distances if we back out of reach.
Conversely, our edged and non-firearm weapons can barely find any
flesh in them for satisfaction. It’s like stabbing and hacking into
piles of scrap metal.

I must check my journal to count our dead. We have
lost twenty-seven, buried with honor along our course. Six more are
significantly wounded, Sarai being the worst.

I see Ambassador Murphy re-check his remaining
ammunition. He’s down to four spare speed loaders for his revolver.
He has taken to carrying a sword—a stout double-edged blade we
managed to take from an enemy—hoping to conserve what he has
left.

I look back west, back home, into the wind. I think
of the rest of our people, waiting for us, waiting for word. We
could go back, take the straightest route through the center of the
valley floor, best to avoid the armored burrowing enemy. Go home,
to Melas. Ride out the twin disasters of atmosphere loss and
nuclear fallout brought by the Unmakers, hold onto our ancestral
lands, maintain the Food Trade with Tranquility. But it’s not only
the loss of air, and territory to radiation. We would be in the
shadow of the Unmakers, too close to their base in Northeast
Melas.

But it’s more than fear and hardship that drives us
on: Many of us, my father included, have been seduced by these
greener lands; the richer, warmer air; the hope that we can simply
get past this enemy and find a new home, still far out of Unmaker
reach (and let the Unmakers deal with the Silvermen).

I admit this is a tempting dream, and I do hope my
father and my people find what they need out here. But I still have
my own private hopes, a desire I will not speak of to anyone
(especially not my father).

I hope to find out where I came from. I hope to find
out about my birth parents, about Samuel and Caroline Drake.

I already know the story they told me was a lie, I
just don’t know for what reason they did so. I was told we came
from Tranquility, driven out by the Cast, moving west (why not
east?) until we joined a group of refugees from the Air Pirates,
those who refused to take up their brutal ways. Unfortunately,
their humanity made them prey to their former fellows, and my
parents with them.