The Martian Viking (17 page)

After an hour or more of silence, Johnsmith turned to Alderdice and cleared his throat. "I think I'm in love with Felicia," he said.

"Good." Alderdice nodded. "I hope you make it back to be with her, even if you have to stay on Mars the rest of your lives."

"She doesn't have to stay."

"No, but she'll never recant if you tell her you love her."

"Think so?"

"Yes."

Johnsmith had never known love that strong before. He had begun to feel more strongly about Felicia since they had been sleeping together. Her jealousy over Frankie Lee Wisbar, while misguided, had touched him. But they had made love last night, in spite of the complaints of those they had kept awake. After all, it might be their last time together . . .her last time with him, and his last time with anybody, like as not.

As the shadows shortened on the Marscape, Johnsmith began to notice a gradual sloping several kilometers ahead, creeping up the rilles on both sides of the carrier. It was only after some time that he realized this might be the first sight of Olympus Mons, the largest volcano in the solar system.

"Look at the size of that thing," he said to no one in particular.

Alderdice, perhaps believing Johnsmith's comment to be sexual in nature, was roused from dozing.

"I think that must be our destination ahead," Johnsmith explained.

Since he was not sitting near the transparency, Alderdice couldn't see what Johnsmith was talking about. He sighed. "I should have stayed awake the entire time," he said. "It seems to me as if we just left Elysium. Now my life is hours closer to the end, chances are."

"Don't be so negative," Frankie Lee Wisbar said, leaning across the aisle. "You'll come out of this all right, Alderdice. Take my word for it."

Johnsmith noticed that Alderdice wore a dubious expression, but neither of them argued with Frankie. Alderdice was fatalistic enough to be certain that nothing he said or did at this point could matter, there was no question about that. Johnsmith wasn't sure if his friend had a healthy attitude, but it seemed a bit late to try to change Alderdice's habits.

The carrier slowed, its high-pitched whine turning into a groan. It banked, and Johnsmith got a look at the other two carriers. One of them was turning northwest, and the other was still heading due west. The one they were riding in went southwest. They were fanning out, positioning their passengers to act as shock troops, about to pour into the lava tube mouths and through the Arkie den. Now the mountain was clearly visible. Its immensity was staggering—its summit was so high that the caldera seemed as far away as Earth, and its width could not be taken in with the human eye.

The carrier groaned to a halt. They were instructed to get into their pressure suits, which was rather awkward in the crowded, enclosed space. As soon as they were suited up, the carrier's back end popped open, forming a ramp.

"Get the lead out," Sergeant Daiv shouted.

The prisoners, soldiers now, got to their feet. Nobody spoke as they began to disembark. One woman ducked her head to avoid banging it against the low top of the gangway door, as Sergeant Daiv barked at those behind her to do the same.

And yet, when it was his turn, Alderdice managed to bump his head. His helmet absorbed the shock, and Alderdice kept moving. Johnsmith followed him, running down the ramp into the Martian daylight.

Torquemada was inside Johnsmith's helmet, shouting: "Go! Go! Go!"

Johnsmith didn't really know where he was going, but he kept running. He quickly caught up to Alderdice, who seemed to stumble along like a drunk. Frankie Lee Wisbar was up ahead, and Johnsmith thought it might be smart to stay close to her. She was a veteran of this kind of thing, after all.

Crouching, Johnsmith waited for the enemy to fire. Nothing happened, though. Other than the orders coming from Torquemada, the only sound he heard was his own heavy breathing.

The mountain loomed ahead, so vast as to be almost incredible. It seemed to stretch all the way to heaven, to rise forever from the surface of Mars. The prisoners scurried like ants in its foothills, advancing towards a snaking lava tube whose mouth seemed to open wide to swallow them.

"Inside! Get inside!" Torquemada bellowed.

Johnsmith followed Frankie, hopping over a rock and into the darkness of the lava tube's enclosure.

A light flicked on in the blackness. And then a second light. Photosensitive cells on their helmets were activated by the sublight radiation. Within seconds, the smooth tunnel walls were illuminated by dozens of circles of bobbing light.

A red beam swept across the narrow lava tube interior. Everything turned crimson, and Johnsmith flung himself to the tunnel floor. The enemy was firing on them.

"Down!" somebody shouted. "Everybody get down!"

But it was too late for one guy. Johnsmith couldn't tell who he was, but the beam seared his midsection, lancing out through his pressure suit's pristine white back amid a torrent of illuminated red smoke. His scream was deafening.

"Sandke!" somebody cried.

But Sandke didn't answer. He emitted a liquid gurgling, and then nothing more. He was dead.

"Let's get those sons of a bitches!" shrieked an unidentifiable, androgynous voice, distorted with rage.

"Yeah!" Somebody up ahead rose and fired a shot in the direction of the red beam. Somebody else rose and squeezed off a shot, too. Then everybody was up.

But not for long. More screams sounded as two prisoners fell. Johnsmith hit the dirt again, and three bodies fell on top of him. He heard the moans of the wounded through his helmet communicator, but he was powerless to move under the weight of the very people who needed his help.

More beam fire probed through the tunnel. He felt the movements of the injured people on top of him, muffled by their pressure suits, but nonetheless heart-breaking for that.

"Retreat!" Sergeant Daiv bellowed. The prisoners didn't need to be told twice. Johnsmith could see thick, white-clad legs moving back the way they had come just a few seconds before.

He struggled to get up, but to no avail. One of the bodies covering him cried and twitched for a few seconds, and then was still. Johnsmith knew that she was dead. Was it Frankie Lee Wisbar? Or Prudy? Or somebody else that he had spoken to in the months he had been at Elysium? Or was it one of the endless stream of prisoners who had ignored him every day? It didn't seem to matter much anymore. Whoever it was, she was gone now.

Somewhere in the midst of this morbid reverie, Johnsmith realized that the shadows deeper in the lava tube were moving. Somebody was coming.

He drew his .45, and waited.

Now they were coming into sight, two people in ragged pressure suits, a man and a woman painted in harlequin colors. One of them—a man, judging from his size and the way he walked—held an ancient AK47, and the other, a smaller figure, had a laser pistol in her gloved hand. The man's helmet had two horns protruding from the sides.

Johnsmith waited. They came closer, two cautious but ludicrous figures who stopped and prodded the bodies of their enemies.

When they were twenty feet away, he ran his thumb over the .45's safety, just to make sure it was off. He hadn't fired a shot yet, and the last thing he wanted was to be caught struggling with the safety in the moment before his death.

He wasn't going to blow this one. If he was going to die here, he was at least going to go down fighting.

The two Arkies came closer.

Bracing his elbow on the stone floor, Johnsmith took careful aim and squeezed the trigger.

A ragged hole opened in the man's pressure suit front, slightly to the left of center in the chest. A white tatter flew off from the back, red spraying the tunnel walls an instant later. His splayed fingers released the AK47. the impact lifted him off his feet and slammed him down hard onto the stone.

The woman turned from one side to the other frantically. She hadn't seen where the shot came from, since Johnsmith was hiding under the bodies. She must have assumed that he was dead, if she had seen him at all.

Terrified, she backed away, firing wild bursts from the laser pistol.

It was an easy shot. Johnsmith hardly knew that he had fired the .45 again. But she tumbled awkwardly backward, the laser firing. Its scarlet beam was deflected by the gleaming face mask of a corpse's helmet. A fiery L burned into the ceiling until her finger relaxed on the trigger.

Johnsmith didn't move. He knew that more Arkies might be nearby, and he didn't want to take any chances. With his elbow still resting on the floor, he pointed the .45 toward the back of the lava tube. The weight of the dead bodies and his pressure suit prevented him from trembling so much that he would be out of control.

He was alone for what seemed a very long time.

Then he heard the crackle of a helmet communicator approaching. A pair of columnar legs passed him from behind and approached the bodies. Whoever it was, unidentifiable from the back, had a pistol in hand. It seemed to be a man, but Johnsmith couldn't be sure. A gunshot cracked, and the fallen Arkie woman's body jumped, convulsed, and was still. Johnsmith had thought she was dead, but apparently not. The companion he shot was next, but the woman's killer must have believed him already dead. He didn't waste a shot. Instead, he turned toward the pile of bodies covering Johnsmith.

"Here," Johnsmith said. "On the ground."

"Biberkopf." Johnsmith recognized Sergeant Daiv's voice. "Biberkopf, are you okay?"

"Yes." His own voice sounded oddly thick and foreign. "Yes, I'm okay."

He felt the bodies being moved, and he could see Daiv's gloved hands. A moment later, he was being helped to his unsteady feet.

"Good going, Biberkopf," Sergeant Daiv said. "You got two of 'em."

"Yeah." Johnsmith didn't feel as if this were really happening, but he knew that it was. He had just shot two people without giving it a second thought.

Sergeant Daiv slapped Johnsmith's helmet, not maliciously as he had done so often in training, but rather in camaraderie.

Johnsmith reeled, nearly stumbling over one of the bodies.

"You're blooded now, kiddo," Sergeant Daiv said, and his hard face crinkled in a grin through the polarized plastic of his face mask.

Johnsmith had never seen Daiv smile before. He wasn't sure he liked it. There was something wolfish and dangerous about the man, and his savage grin made him seem even more unsavory than did his usual grim manner. Daiv was just too damn happy about seeing a lot of people get killed.

"Move in," Torquemada's electronic voice said from inside Johnsmith's helmet. "You've got the initiative now, so keep advancing on the enemy stronghold."

Johnsmith wondered briefly where Torquemada was. Probably back in the carrier, watching the whole thing on a 'gram monitor. Most likely the camera was in Daiv's helmet, maybe even implanted in one of his eyes.

Johnsmith was stalking the lava tube alongside Sergeant Daiv now. The tunnel curved gently to the left, and they came to a place where a second lava tube bisected it. One tube had lain over the top of the other as the igneous rock cooled millions of years ago, but the Arkies had chipped away the rock to connect the two tubes. As a result, Johnsmith and Daiv now faced three tunnels instead of one.

"Get your asses up here," Sergeant Daiv commanded the others.

Johnsmith turned to see the prisoners reluctantly approaching from behind. He was relieved to see Alderdice's sweating face through a face mask.

But where was Frankie Lee Wisbar? Was she one of the bodies littering the lava tube floor? Maybe she had been one of those who had fallen on him while the prisoners were trying to retreat. He hoped not. She was one of the few people at Elysium who had treated him like a human being.

But this was no time for sentimentality. The battle was just beginning, and it seemed that he had been thrust into a leadership role as a result of killing those two people. He reminded himself that he had only actually killed one of them. Sergeant Daiv had gleefully done in the woman.

"You," Sergeant Daiv called to the nearest prisoner. "Come on up here."

The woman hesitated, and then stepped forward.

"You take that tunnel," Daiv said, pointing to the left. "Let me know if you see anything."

He turned to Johnsmith. "You take the one to the right. I'll go straight on through this way."

Johnsmith nodded. He didn't want to do this, but he knew there was no choice. Maybe if he was lucky, and careful, he would survive this madness.

He went into the connected lava tube on the right, and got as close to the near wall as he could. He went forward for a few seconds, listening to his own breathing.

He stopped to load the two empty chambers of the .45. His gloved hands were shaking badly, but he would need all six bullets, in case he ran into more Arkies.

Dropping a bullet, he squatted to retrieve it. It rolled away, glinting in the light from his helmet beacon. He didn't want to waste any ammunition, and so he followed the bullet on his hands and knees.

It rolled down an incline, and he scrabbled to catch up with it. At the bottom of the incline, it landed in a depression. Johnsmith picked it up, and slipped it into the chamber. Before he loaded the second bullet, he sensed that something was moving behind him.

Johnsmith turned abruptly, in time to see a massive gate closing. He got to his feet and ran toward the gate, but it was completely and seamlessly sealed by the time he got to it.

He banged on it with the butt of his .45, but the only result was a queer knocking sound. The gate was apparently made of some very tough polymer. Well, there must have been some other way out, he reasoned. It wasn't a good idea to stand here making a lot of noise.

A cavern stood in front of him. Overlying lava tubes had been cut away, until quite a large space had been created. In it was an array of archecoding machinery. There weren't as many machines, and they were older, but they were similar to those at Elysium. Torquemada was wrong—they did manufacture onees here.

No one seemed to be tending this onee factory.