The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN (27 page)

“It’s good news… Thank you.”

“I figured you could use a little
life-affirming.”

Baby Hope takes hold of my finger. Her grip is strong
even through the glove.

Abbas called shortly after the ceremony—against
Matthew’s advice I supplied him with a field Link (though
restricted to select bands). He’d just buried ten of his own people
the day before, and suggested we hold off on meeting again for at
least a month, to allow time for grieving and tempers to subside.
He also let me know that the other Nomad tribes had expressed mixed
interest in our presence, and that he’d be willing to arrange
meetings with their leaders on neutral ground.

“You keep surprising me, Mikey,” Matthew drawls at me
as we share some of what little remains of the Bourbon I smuggled
with us on the shuttle. “I didn’t think that was possible after all
these years.”

“Should I be saying the same of you?” I rib him.
“
You’ve
been sounding more like Richards.”

“Ouch,” he scowls. “Never thought I’d have to hear
that name again.” He grins and shakes his head. “Old bastard’s
probably been dead forty years now. He went on to become one of
those retired-general news-net consultants, didn’t he?”

“They were approaching him,” I remember. “I don’t
think he took it, though. Too eager to get out of the spotlight,
get down to being a grandpa.”

“Seven years as our CO, then another twelve stuck
between us—well,
you
—and the politics on the Committee?” he
remembers with a sad laugh. “I’m surprised he didn’t eat his
gun.”

“He would have shot
us
first. Well, me.”

“Yeah, he would have. But look at you: You’d make the
starched old fucker proud.”

“You can have the job any time you want, Matthew,” I
tell him, almost seriously.

“You know I don’t do speeches. Besides, I would have
splattered those neo-rag dirt-surfers. Come to think about it, not
long ago you would’ve done the same.”

“Brave New World.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Colonel Ram,” the Link interrupts us. It’s
Kastl.

“Go ahead, Captain.”

“Ahhh… Someone here to see you, sir. I think…”

He flashes me an image of a blue ETE suit, standing
outside the main gate. I check MAI’s internal feed: Paul is still
down in the repair bays.

“I’ll be right there.”

It’s Simon. He folds up his mask so I can see his
face, then resets it so he can breathe enough to speak:

“I bring no answers for you, Colonel Ram,” he says
with a formal flatness. “My Elders live in a world that does not
change as quickly as yours. They will watch, and they will
deliberate. But you have made an impression on them, in a way that
outsiders rarely do.”

“So, they won’t help us?” I conclude.

“
I
will help you.” Simon offers me his gloved
hand.

21 August, 2115:

“You think they know we’re out here, Colonel?” Rios
asks me over the Link, his 2
^nd
Platoon prone across the
low ridge line in Heavy Armor, ICWs and sniper rifles aimed
downrange at the apparently desolate ruin of The City of Industry,
500 meters away. The only thing moving is sand in the thin shifting
winds, kicking up intermittently into swirling dust devils by a
combination of thermals and the landscape.

“Very likely,” I tell him from where I’m sitting on
the slope just down from the ridge, keeping watch over the H-A feed
on my goggle HUD.

The City of Industry sits on the Melas Chasma floor
near the eastern tip of the massive Candor-Melas Range, a
hundred-mile-long chain of peaks—some of them three miles high—that
partially divides Melas Chasma from Candor Chasma, stretching east
from the Planum-level Northwest Melas Rim. More critically, it also
sits in the shadow of the ancient mega-slide that pushed through
the fifty mile wide gap between the Candor-Melas Range and the
terraced Northeast Rim, when Candor catastrophically collapsed and
flowed down into Melas, forming a slide-plain that’s eight-hundred
square miles and thousands of feet high. An earlier slide-plain
stretches further south into Melas, just to the east of the
Industry site, placing the colony in a V-shaped lowland.

Below these two overlapping county-sized slides,
Industry looks like it’s in an extremely high-risk location, but
the corporate geologists insisted that the mega-slides had been
stable for millions of years, since most of the surface water was
lost to space, and the cooling of the planet’s core precluded any
further seismic activity. Further overruling caution, the site
appealed to researchers because of its proximity to the mountains,
the slide-slopes and the deeper parts of Melas. (And giving the
colony a cutting edge science facility that provided the backing
corporations a public-friendly face to help offset some of the
fears of what they were working on in their labs.)

The corporate geologists were proven right when the
new colony was spared by the slides that wrecked Mariner and Melas
One in ’57 (both of those colonies had been built
atop
the
ancient slides, ground that proved lethally unstable when one of
the Northeast Rim terraces broke loose). The edges of the ancient
slides mostly stayed put, and the sections that didn’t did not
reach the colony.

Now it looks like those geologists failed to take
into account the effects of nuclear bombardment. Industry was
spared a direct hit, but there are bomb craters in proximity: One
in the valley floor to the southwest, close enough that Anton’s
reconstructions predict structural damage to the main domes and
fabs from the blast wave; and another just up on the slide plain to
the north that sent the thousand-foot wall down and at them.

(Though the radiation bloom of the slide crater made
Anton suspicious: It’s slightly hotter than the other blast
craters, suggesting the nuke was set off some time
after
the
main bombardment, and did not airburst as the Ares’ Shield warheads
were designed to. Anton suspects the warhead was carefully planted
and detonated to create a controlled slide that partially buried
the colony to make it look more ravaged than it actually was. I’m
reminded of the apparently fake crater that may be hiding Shinkyo
Colony.)

In its heyday, the City of Industry was comprised of
three large domes, four industrial fabs, and two shuttle facilities
(one on the dome side to the south and one on the fab side to the
north). Today, all three domes are broken open, ragged skeletons,
partially buried. The fabs have been almost completely covered—only
the one on the far west side of the complex is visible, broken open
and gaping like a cavern. (Rick points out this fab was for
bio-nanotech culturing—it may have been “staged” like it is to
scare away the curious: the structure looks like it’s been eaten
through, not crushed by blast or slide.)

I check in with the ASV crew, still standing
uneventful watch where we set the craft down and hid it in a
depression a klick back. We flew in low, using the lower
slide-ridge to hide our approach. Unfortunately, this didn’t give
us a good line-of-sight to the colony either, not until we
approached on foot. And, I expect, our VTOL jets kicked up enough
telltale dust to announce us anyway. But so far, the colony has
done a convincing job of playing dead: no heat, no gas emissions,
no noise even on our best parabolics.

I turn to our “guide”: Abbas’ adopted son Jonathan
Drake, AKA Ishmael, who sits on his haunches on the loose slope
next to me, looking half-boy and half-armadillo in his heavy
scrap-metal scale armor and bulky rust-red cloaks. (He tells me his
people wear all that mass not just for protection but also as a
traditional mandate from their tribal forefathers to keep strong
and stave off bone degeneration). He’s engrossed by the images on
his own loaner Link-gear HUD, tech he’s easily admitted to
coveting, thinking it would go far to aid him and his tribesmen on
their raiding sorties, or to defend them from competitors. I’m
tempted to let him keep the toys for his trouble. Abbas said he
chose the boy as our guide because of his intelligence and
curiosity for other peoples, but I suspect Abbas offered family to
reinforce our budding relations. (It’s also quite a gesture of
trust that we’ll keep his son safe going where many others have
failed to return from.) Quiet and polite but inquisitive and eager
to serve, Jon—Ishmael—makes a good emissary. I am reminded of the
Zen adage of someone who comes with an “empty cup”, open-minded to
the company and ways of the demonized “Unmakers”.

“What do you think, Mr. Drake?” I ask him.

“If they’ve optics like these, they’ve seen us,” he
confirms with only the slightest edge in his voice—he sounds like a
seasoned squad leader. “I’m sure they’ve sentries dug in up in the
rocks, away from the visible Keep—same thing we would do. They
won’t move until their main force has you where they want you.”

“Your people have exchanged fire with these men
before?” I want him to clarify—Abbas had only admitted to anecdotal
contacts.

“Not in my time,” he tells me. “But there’s reason we
walk far around this place: we keep the old stories fresh. Now,
Farouk’s tribe—he’s a hungrier Sharif—we heard his scouts got
pinned in a crossfire when they tried creeping in from the east,
over the Lower Slide and down the deep gorges that run from the cut
where the big floes overlap. Farouk was probably sure he was
invisible, and he picked a smart path, but they still knew he was
coming. He didn’t go on the raid himself, of course, but he lost
six good fighters out of twelve before they could get away. It
would have been all of them if it wasn’t for his Zauba’a.”

“’
Zowbah
’?” I try to pronounce.

“Old Muslim legend. Means ‘whirlwind demon.’ Farouk’s
personal bodyguard and killer. Very fast, very quiet, moves like
she can fly.”

“She?”

He nods with a little grin. “They call her Zauba’a
Ghaddar. A Ghaddar is a girl demon that ambushes men in the desert,
bites off their… well…” He discreetly points to his groin.

“Is she a Jinn?”

“Maybe. No energy-magic, though. Not like the
Eternals. But many believe she can’t be human, at least from the
stories. Not many close looks at her in action—most don’t live to
tell.”

“But the men who hold this place—you called them
‘Keepers’—they wear suits like ours?” I get back to the subject
more at hand.

“Farouk wears the shell of one that his Zauba’a
brought back for him. I saw it at a tribal meeting. Just like your
big plastic suits, only no helmet because he likes people to see
who he is.”

“Matthew?” I call into my Link.

“Listening,” he admits, sitting back in Command Ops.
“I don’t know—we’re still not picking up any ID tags from UNMAC
gear. From Junior’s description, you’d think the place would be lit
with tags.”

“They’re easy enough to disable, especially if you
don’t want to be found,” I consider. “Have MAI do another signal
sweep. Go outside the normal Link bands this time. They may still
be using interface gear to keep in touch, just not where we’d hear
them.”

“I’ve got it, Colonel,” I hear Kastl come on a moment
later. “Live channel, but no chatter. If they’re on, they’re
keeping quiet.”

“Patch me in,” I tell him.

“You’re going to do something stupid again, aren’t
you?” Matthew complains.

“It’s either that or waste air sitting out here.”

I crawl up to the ridgeline, poke my head up over the
top. Dunes have shifted up onto the broken domes, obscuring the
original foundations and the ground-level airlocks. The domes
themselves look like convincing victims of a nuclear-grade
blast-wave. I expect the jagged ruins give them lots of excellent
cover. There is no sign that anyone has been active on the
surface.

“This is Colonel Ram of UNMAC Base Melas Two calling
the City of Industry,” I call into the Link. “I repeat: this is
Colonel Ram of UNMAC Melas Two calling the City of Industry.” I
give them a few seconds to digest my greeting before I continue.
“No doubt you have seen us out here, been watching us since we
arrived. We only wish to make contact with you, and I would very
much like to avoid bloodshed.”

Answering me, a high-vel round bursts off a rock
three feet from me—I feel frag hit my armor. MAI’s graphic display
tracks its trajectory back all the way to a hole in one of the
domes. The shooter isn’t visible, not even to MAI’s enhancements.
He knows how to hide from us.

“I’m going to assume that you
intended
to miss
me,” I return. As if confirming this, another round hits the same
rock. And then a third. Only MAI says they came from
different
locations in the ruin.

“You have remarkable resolve, Colonel Ram, even for a
dead man,” a voice comes over the Link: strong, older, arrogantly
authoritarian.

“Long story there,” I say back. “Love to share it
with you. I’ll even bring the bourbon.”

“And if I decline your generous offer?” the voice
comes back after a moment.

“I’d at least like to know who’s turning me
down.”

More silence.

“Janeway, Samuel. Colonel. Second Generation PK.”

“Which means what, Colonel Janeway?” I pry.

“As far as you know, it means I’m just an eccentric
hermit with a lot of guns.”

“I’ve heard otherwise, Colonel.”

“Been talking to the wildlife, Colonel Ghost?” his
voice goes even more sarcastic. “Not advised. Just saying.”

“I’ve got a
Captain Maxwell
Janeway listed as
CO of the Industry UNMAC Peacekeeper garrison,” Lisa chimes in
discreetly on the main channel to tell me. I vaguely remember him
as MAI flashes his dossier on my heads-up: Multigenerational
military family, top of his class at the Academy and through Ranger
School—the kind of eager, squared-away unquestioning patriot that
Matthew and I always hated.