The God Mars Book Two: Lost Worlds (44 page)

She doesn’t look at me now.

“We’ll be sending you home tomorrow. You’ll be
provided basic survival gear, then we’ll drop you in groups within
a short hike of your nearest known bases. What you’ve just seen…
You can confirm it yourselves soon enough. Or maybe you knew it was
coming, because it was part of the plan. I don’t know if you knew
any of those people. Maybe they were family, friends, people you
grew up with, people you knew—I can’t imagine there are too many
strangers in communities as small and intimate as yours. Maybe they
were just your slaves and cast-offs and undesirables, better off
done with, less mouths to feed, less lungs to draw air. No room on
whatever Chang is building for you, no room in his plan.

“For your parts, you have served well and bravely,
kept your honor, demonstrated remarkable discipline and strength. I
expect you will return home heroes. Or at least worth more than a
mass grave or left to die by freezing or suffocation.”

Straker still won’t look at me. The others give me
icy glares, stare through me.

I turn and leave like I don’t care, head across to
the pirates’ shelter to repeat my quick speech. But I watch Straker
on my flashcard. She chews her lip, ever-so-slightly shakes her
head, keeps her eyes on the deck. I watch her fingernails turn
white as she digs them into her thighs.

Promising. I hope.

26 December, 2116:

No one speaks inside the shelter of Abbas’ “tent”
until I’ve finished playing them the videos of Zodanga and
Frontier, and then for several difficult moments of silence
afterwards. The only sound is the ghostly scream of wind on the
shelter walls.

Abbas and Hassim sit stoic. Drake—less jaded by age
and experience—at least shakes his head, his lips going tight and
thin.

“We are not surprised by this, friend Ram,” Abbas
finally says heavily. “We have told you our tales of the Pirates
and the Keepers. They are not men of God. They do not value his
Creation, including their own people. This mercy of yours—sending
your prisoners free to come back and fight you again—I do
understand it but still I do not recommend it. They will not change
what they are because of your displays of honor and charity. The
bodies you have found prove what they are.”

I don’t respond to this, don’t argue my decisions.
(Nor do I prove his opinion by letting him know that Halley and
Ryder confirmed that at least three of the dead recovered after
Chang’s attack had been among our previous Zodangan prisoners.) I
glance over at Sutter, who says nothing, but I can see agreement
flicker in his eyes. His people likely hold similar opinions of the
Zodangans and the PK from their own experiences.

“The bodies at Frontier are probably their laborers,
some killed for insubordination, the rest weak, sick, aged;
mercilessly culled from the stronger workers,” Hassim guesses. “We
do not know if the Pirates have similar social castes, but we have
heard stories of slaving, and we have found bodies that appeared to
be sick or injured pirates that look like they had been thrown from
their airships like so much unwanted garbage.”

“But on this scale?” I try to find something
resembling reason.

“I saw something like this as a boy,” Hassim offers
darkly, “when my father drove the Pirates from one of their holds.
They took what they valued when they fled, but left the fresh
bodies of maybe a dozen of their own. Not killed by violence, just
left to the elements. I remember they seemed to be old and frail,
or crippled. My father thought it was because they had limited
space on their ships, or were limited in the weight they could
carry, so priority was given to the strong. I remember thinking the
dead looked like they had accepted their fates willingly. The
Pirates are fearless, even if they are Godless animals.”

“They live hard and violently, and high up where it
is thinner and colder than men should suffer to bear,” Abbas
excuses. “Even we made difficult choices in the years when the air
was so much thinner.”

“But they shouldn’t
have
to,” I think out
loud. “Not anymore.”

“The Pirates have always kept to the heights by their
own choosing,” Sutter speaks up, his tone moderate, nonjudgmental.
“It gives them strategic advantage in attack and defense.”

“’Zodanga is the sky’, that’s their bloodied chant,”
Abbas reminds me (and reminds me he’s speaking of generational
blood-enemies). “They believe that they would lower themselves to
live on the ground. Too bad that there is such limited room in
their sky that they must kill their own.”

One of Abbas’ wives brings fresh hot tea, which is
very welcome right now.

“What about the PK? Have they ever been known to
massacre their workers like this?”

“We have heard tale of uprisings put down,” Sutter
tells me, sipping from his old metal cup. “But this seems more like
a lesson learned from the Pirates: kill the least valuable when
it’s time to move in a hurry and space is precious on your
airships.”

“They wouldn’t have had to move at all if they hadn’t
built whatever Chang designed for them,” I point out. “There would
be no reason to. They’ve been entrenched in their colony ruins
since the Apocalypse…”

“They hurried to move it because they needed to keep
it hidden from
you
,” Abbas considers. Hassim nods his
agreement. Drake looks uncomfortable, like he’s afraid this meeting
will become adversarial.

“But what
is
it? And where did they take it?”
I voice the pressing questions, knowing none of us have
answers.

“Something else troubles me,” Abbas mulls. “The
Pirates and the Keepers both have better ways to hide, to move.
Building something so big… It makes no sense…”

“It would be visible, impossible to hide,” Hassim
concurs.

“Chang brings science, technology, power,” I tell
them. “He lacks tactical skill and experience.”

“But the Pirates and the Keepers are excellent
fighters,” Abbas argues, allowing his enemies some fair praise.

“But they’re not used to this level of technology and
firepower,” I calculate. “If someone gave you weapons like this,
made you believe you would be unstoppable, would you keep to your
usual defensive strategies?”

“I would never accept such a gift from the Devil,”
Abbas denies, “but yes, I understand your point.”

“Any of us would be at least tempted by such power,”
Hassim admits. “We have always lived in deadly competition. I could
see how such advantage could make a man forget what he holds
dear.”

“You have your faith against temptation,” I praise
them.

“The Pirates and the Keepers have only their lusts
for power,” Abbas condemns.

“The storms…” Drake suddenly speaks up like he’s been
struck by something cold. I think I see a realization take shape in
Abbas’s eyes.

“Tell him what you are thinking, my son,” Abbas
gives.

“New stories from the food traders, Colonel. Strange
dust storms moving through Coprates, sometimes when there is no
wind. Great thick clouds with lightning. Coming back from their
last trip, they said one of their carts had lagged and was
swallowed by such a cloud. Two runners went to help them. When the
cloud passed—and it passed without breaking up or fading—the men
and the cart were nowhere to be found. They said they had heard
similar tales from Aziz’ tribe.”

“When did this happen?” I need to know.

“The last food run arrived here only days ago.”

“The ETE have been looking north, in Candor and
Ophir,” I realize. And then I think about how easy it was for us to
hop over the top of the valleys to get to the Zodangan base, given
a good enough ship, pressurized to hold atmosphere in the
near-vacuum above the valleys.

“You’ve been looking in the wrong place,” Abbas comes
to the same heavy conclusion.

Smith flies in to pick me up within twenty minutes of
my call. I don’t wait to get back before I start making more.

First I call Mark Stilson, pass along the Nomads’
tales of mystery dust and lightning storms, tell them to try
looking in Coprates. Then I send a message out to General
Richards.

“If we can get eyes in orbit, maybe you can read this
thing from above,” I tell him after I repeat the story. “We need to
look for a weather anomaly, probably with a serious EM signature.”
And now I’m suddenly hoping they decided to send satellite weapons
as well as satellite eyes and ears.

One more call I need to make. But then I decide to do
it in person—I ask Smith if he’s got fuel to make it to Melas
Three.

Buried (like it was actually designed to be), the
base looks like a cross-shape of square stepping stones in the
regolith: six landing pads, with the much smaller rectangular
bunker of the Ops Tower poking just above ground on the long stem
of the cross. Lisa gives us Pad 2, one of the two closest to Ops,
and the elevator starts lowering us underground as soon as we’ve
touched down on the pad deck. Down inside the bay, things look very
much like they did pre-Apocalypse. Everything mostly works. The
shutters close above us, the spots light up the square cavern of
the bay, compressors cycle in some thicker atmosphere, deck grunts
pull us fuel lines to get the ship ready to launch again as soon as
needed, and one of Morales’ crew chiefs starts the routine
checks.

What I can’t see from here is our most pressing
problem: the other five launch bays are all empty, except for two
gutted wrecks that Morales still hasn’t managed to get flying (she
had to leave that project to the team she left onsite when she went
back to Melas Two to try to work any kind of miracle with the scrap
Chang left us with).

I’ve considered re-enacting the “Croatoan” protocol:
abandoning the base, sealing it back up, because we’re just spread
too thin. One flying ship between two sites, and this base still
doesn’t have any ground-based defenses except a platoon of
troopers. I’m honestly afraid Aziz could overrun us if he knew how
badly we got hurt. Chang easily could. And that means I’m leaving
the nearly one hundred people stationed here to a likely massacre
(including Lisa), for the sake of what’s become a mostly useless
facility: an unarmed airbase without aircraft.

But now I may need some kind of eyes out here.

We climb up three decks from the bay level to ground
level. Lisa meets us on the other side of the A-Deck airlock hatch.
She doesn’t quite mask her annoyance when she sees I’ve got Sakina
with me, though it shouldn’t be any surprise by now (especially
since she knows I’ve just had an informal summit with the leaders
of two Nomad factions). So Sakina gets ignored as Lisa leads us
down the corridor to Ops.

“I heard your outgoing brief,” she lets me know as
she pops the hatch into Ops-3, the slightly roomier auxiliary
command center on A-Deck directly under the actual Ops tower. She
already has holo-maps pulled up on the tactical table in the middle
of the room, which means we’re being spared the two deck ladder
climb up into Ops-1, probably for the sake of expedience (or
possibly she herself gets tired of going up and down ladders all
the time). “Chang—if it is Chang—must know our effective scanning
ranges. If he’s moving in this end of Coprates, he’s staying out of
sight. But we could set up a series of listening posts between here
and Melas Two to catch him if he passes between us.”

“I’d rather catch him creeping up on us,” I tell her.
“Early warning. For whatever good it will do.”

“Big ship, big guns?” she gets to what I’ve been
worried about. She highlights a few valley-floor pathways from
Melas to Tranquility, then the estimated territory controlled by
Aziz in southeast Melas.

“Too bad the traders weren’t more specific about
where they had their close encounter,” she complains. “But these
are our best guesses on the food routes: Given the likely
timeframe, they would most likely have seen the mystery storm
roughly
between
our bases.”

Then she points out the obvious blind spots: First,
the big mountain range that runs between our bases, eventually
merging with the South Rim of Coprates, dividing it from the much
narrower Coprates Catena. The Catena’s chain of collapsed canyons
would make a good hiding spot: unstable, prone to slides, but
narrow and shear-walled, with tight “choke points” in several spots
along its length, making it easy to defend and disappear into. This
had been a likely choice for the location of the Discs’ “home base”
pre-Apocalypse, allowing them to get in and out of Melas, or creep
up on the Coprates colony sites, without being detected. The
crenellated Catena would mask them from radar. And that’s exactly
why Melas Three was build here, covering the exit out of the
Catena.

But the food routes (we assume) go to Tranquility, on
the South Rim of the main canyon—there would be no reason for the
traders to enter the Catena—so the storms would have been seen in
Coprates proper.

“The Coprates Catena Range effectively blocks our
view of the main canyon,” she points out the obvious frustration,
“we’d have to put sensors up on the crest.” Then she points to the
short range of mountains southeast of Melas Two. “And these block
your
view of the straightest route to Tranquility—we’d need
sensors up in both these heights. Otherwise, he could pass between
us, slide up on Melas Two from the south-southeast. He could get
within twenty klicks of you before you see him, come at you over
the mountains.”

She’s been working this out since I made my call to
Richards.

“Chang’s probably thinking that very thing,” I admit
darkly. “Or one of his local cronies figured it for him.”

“We have a painfully big blind spot,” she doesn’t
soothe.

“Same problems we had with the Discs,” I
remember.