Champion of Mars (41 page)

Holland glanced around his helmet display, found the private channel he was looking for, and used his mental implant to activate it. “I hope you’re the only one hearing this, Dave.”

“I think so. You’re better at this than me already.”

“They’re all dead, Dave.”

Maguire stole a look behind him, to where Suzanne sat on the floor hugging her knees. “All of them?”

“All of them. Jensen, one of the mercs, I’m not sure. Everyone else is gone. The artefact came online when the Six tried to sample it. Me and Orson deactivated the fusion plant, but then the Six went mental. It killed half a dozen people before we blew its sheath away.”

“Only it has more sheaths.”

“Right. I’m taking this back.”

“Why? What’s that got to do with this? Sounds like the fecking Five Crisis again, so it does.”

Holland took in a deep breath. “Call it a hunch, okay?”

“Yeah, sure. Whatever,” said Maguire.

“I need to get to Wonderland, Dave.”

“There are two open tops down here. The one we brought’s hidden outside. There’s another one here all the time. Trust Jensen, he brought a new one here after Stulynow wrecked the other. Good job he is a pedant, isn’t it?”

“Dave, get Suzanne out of here. Get as far away as you can. Put Suzanne in your drone and have it take you to the People’s Dynasty base on the other side of the mountain. It’s not safe here. Delaware is going to come through here soon. It’s following me.”

In his helmet, face picked out by orange light, Maguire nodded. He clapped his friend on the shoulder. “I’m sorry I recommended this post to you.”

“Yeah, well, next time maybe I’ll tell you to piss off. Let’s get out of this first, okay?”

Holland didn’t stay to watch them climb out and leave. He disengaged the open top’s near-I and rattled down the lava tube, dangerously fast. The tube came out four hundred metres beyond Deep Two. When he got there, Cybele was waiting for him in her acid-scarred cave sheath.

He nodded to her. They hurried past the airlock leading into Deep Two’s cave, and began the descent.

Their journey down was swift and nightmarish; every shadow quivered with peril, every step seemed intent on tripping him. The lights, fed by power from above, were out. His suit maps wavered with his motion, casting monstrous shadows up the walls, and coaxing sinister, glittering displays from the fairy castles. The EM relays had barely enough energy to carry Cybele’s presence to the sheath. They did not stop. They did not talk. The noise of his own breathing was Holland’s only connection with life.

Five hours later, they were down at the entrance to the tube where they had found the artefact. The light and relay network had been extended down into it, but all were off.

“Are you still okay to proceed, Cybele?”

The cave sheath nodded. “There is enough residual energy here for the relays to carry my signal.”

“And Delaware, any sign of him?”

“Mine is the only signal.”

Holland felt emboldened by that.

By the crevasse, a blue-skinned girl waited for him.

“I am sorry,” she said. “I am sorry, it is the only way. This gate must be closed. Were it to open now, it would be the doom of everything. I am sorry.”

“Holland!” Cybele called.

Behind them came a sheath. As it passed, the drones and other sheaths used by the team to investigate and remove the artefact came to life. Lamps lit up, shining so bright they burst with gouts of glowing fluids.

“There is no signal,” said Cybele. “There is no signal!”

“Not all of my kind believe we should move on,” said the blue-skinned girl. “I do. I am sorry. One of the others got out. I did not intend this to happen. It has stolen your friend.”

Delaware advanced implacably, clad in a heavy cave sheath, a small cohort of lesser robots behind it. In its hands it held a pick-axe.

“The gate will remain open!” it shrieked, and its voice was not that of Delaware.

Cybele launched herself at the other machine. They fell to the floor, raining blows upon each other.

“Please, give me my form,” said the blue-skinned girl. “It will hold the gate until something better comes. But for now, it must not be found.” She held out her hand. Holland looked at the cylinder in his grasp, at her. Her eyes pleaded with him.

“Now is one of the times,” she said. “Now the universe is as it should be, but soon it will not be so.

“For now, you are free to choose.”

He held out the cylinder. She took it. Her skin glowed, lighting the cave. “Let me show you. Let me make you see. There will be a better Mars.” A window opened in the air upon a world teeming with life and people, aircraft coursing across a blue sky, blue seas and green grass and red trees. “I promise you that you will see it, and that you will be a legend.”

Wind blew through the window in time: sweet, oxygen-laden wind.

Behind him, Cybele smashed the rogue sheath repeatedly in the face. It flowed and twisted beneath her, in ways that should not have been possible.

In the blue girl’s hand, the cylinder melted to a flow of quicksilver, and disappeared into cracks in the ground. “Now is not the time, John Holland, for such things to be known to mankind. But there will be a time, and we will meet again.”

Alarms trilled in Holland’s helmet, drawing his attention to the changing atmospheric composition of the cave.

Oxygen-rich air mixed with the cave’s methane.

“I am sorry,” said the blue-skinned girl. “I will make it up to you.”

Cybele’s fist, stripped of toughened plastic, plunged toward the head of Delaware’s suborned sheath. Whatever was riding it dodged.

Her fist struck the rock, dragging a shower of sparks from it.

The world exploded.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The Golden Man

W
E EMERGE FROM
the tunnel in the middle of the morning. Yoechakenon sickens. The armour has healed part of its damage and has turned to tending some of his hurts. His broken clavicle has been stabilised, but the venom of the Spirefather courses in him. It is beyond the ability of the armour to neutralise.

The creatures of the spire do not pursue us far. After several hundred spans, their noise dies away, and we are alone. We walk in silence dense with years, until there is movement in the tunnel’s air.

We arrive at a place where the tunnel has been breached. Harsh sky, rippled white with the Veil of Worlds, can be seen. The tunnel has been hit by some kind of weapon, taking a great scoop from it and from the earth above, and a hemisphere of fused sand and metal brings the passage to an end. Sand and debris have half-filled the crater, but it is still possible to see the glassy aftermath of a high energy discharge.

I urge Yoechakenon up. Wordlessly, we climb from the hole.

He falls into a deep sleep, and we remain there for the remainder of the day and all of the night.

The morning, when it comes, is like the dawning of no day I have seen. Sunrise on Mars is a haphazard affair. First, the true dawn brings slow light to the land. Then mirror suns bring parts of the land from darkness to full light in seconds, bright circles of noon upon the morning of the planet.

Here no mirror suns shine. The true sun, Suul, comes up a half an hour before the Stone Sun rises in the opposite half of the sky, from where it glares at its smaller twin. It is both larger and in a different place from where it would be seen outside the Stone Lands, but here, where two realities overlap, the rules are not the same.

Both suns shine together, both are shrouded by the Veil, and neither can bring their illumination to bear with any strength. The light of the Stone Sun, of the Stone Realms, is a curious unlight, whereas that of Suul is a pale yellow. Forced to mix, the light of the mismatched stars makes the landscape uncertain, doubling it with false images.

Yoechakenon groans and stirs. His bone is healing. Still he is weak.

“Kaibeli, how long have I slept?”

“Eighteen hours,” say I. “Are you well?”

He touches the wound in the armour. It is sealed along most of its length, but the skin has lost its elasticity and its lustre there, and bunches when Yoechakenon moves. “The armour fares better than I.”

The world is wrapped in a perpetual gloom. This is Mars’ true face revealed, old and worn and dead. We are above the city of Arn Vashtena, high upon the slopes of Mulympiu. In places, shattered landmarks thrust though the loess, marmoreal remembrances to brighter days.

“Can you run?” I ask him. I speak aloud; the silence of the steppe is oppressive.

Yoechakenon nods. I direct him then northwest, toward the summit of the mountain. He can hear the voices of my under-personalities, as they search for the right way, as echoes in his mind.

“I can find no definitive location for the Golden Man, in my own mind or in the information of the book. The book says only that the Golden Man wanders the heights of the mountain. We must place ourselves in the hands of fate,” I tell him.

“I do not have long,” says Yoechakenon. “The armour can keep me buoyed, but the poison of the Stone Lands works in me. When the end comes, it will be swift.”

I can think of nothing to say to this.

“Keep the Stone Sun to your right and the True Sun to the left in the mornings, and we will reach him. Keep running, Yoechakenon,” I say. “Keep running.” So that is what Yoechakenon does, and his steady footfalls speed us over the limitless prairie of Stone-caught Mulympiu.

F
OR TWO DAYS
and nights we travel. I keep myself alert, searching for signs of further Second World fragments, but there are none, and the evidence of Man’s habitation dwindles to nothing. We pass a village of rude huts, little more than hollows in the ground, roofed with the ribs of great animals and turf. The turf is dry, the bone rafters sunken in. Skeletons of men and hyenas lie around in abundance, tatters of dessicated flesh stuck to their bones. There was a battle here, a long time ago.

It is the last sign of men we see.

Yoechakenon grows weaker.

Sometimes I feel something fell upon the earth nearby. On these occasions, we stop. At night we lie in rips in the peat, under skies streaked with cankerous aurora. The stars are masked by the Veil of Worlds. It is bitterly cold. The nights are foreboding. Noisome stenches drift over us. The menacing silence is broken rarely, by bloodcurdling howls and shrieks. I remain alert. Yoechakenon leaves his armour half-powered, only waking it when cold or danger threaten, for its soul and mine are bright lights to those of the Stone Realms.

The days are never brighter than twilight. The suns, pure and corrupt alike, are pale discs burning from opposite sides of the universe. They do not rise and fall in concert, and there are periods of the day when one or the other is ascendant. When the True Sun, Suul, shines alone, the land is lit as if it is minutes before daybreak. When the situation is reversed, and the Stone Sun stands solitary, the land is stark, the shadows oily and brooding. Its eerie non-light plays tricks with depth and distance and hurts the eyes.

We head always upward, and all the while the temperature drops. The days darken, the True Sun fades as we approach the centre of the Stone Lands; the Stone Sun is funereal in its splendour. The dimmed glow of sinking Suul glitters feebly off the glaciers on the mountain. Not a soul do we see, nor a mortal beast, and only once the terrible things of the Stone Realms.

They are like this. We see them through a pall of dust; they march under it and it moves with them, against the wind. They are fixed, more or less, to our perceptions. Their shapes are solid, but they do not move smoothly. They stand, motionless, for seconds at a time, then, in an eyeblink, they are fifty spans further on, or further back, or to the left or the right, or there are fewer or more of them. The dry steppe around their procession trembles, it loses its singularity of purpose and vibrates from one state to another. The rocks move, then there are fewer rocks, then only sand, then lush grass. Where they have passed, the earth is blackened and cracked, the matter of our domain discohered by this quantum forcing. The Stone Kin are roughly bipedal, sometimes. Sometimes they are not, but always, whatever their form, they are angular and cruel, weapons and armour like none I have ever seen, helms faceless, banners fluttering in a wind that does not blow in our world.

They pass on, silent and unheeding of us. They go down, this band of fifty or so, toward the base of the mountain. Close to the Veil, there is evidence of many more. An army gathers at the edge of reality.

On the second night, Yoechakenon is brought to alertness by a terrible lowing. There is a lengthy silence, then another cry, long and drawn out, a bass song full of melancholy. A third follows, far off to the right of us.

Tripedal creatures, taller than a town-spire, prowl across the night. At first they are silhouettes on the unnatural sky. They come closer, and I see they are as smooth as the armour, and as metallic, the witchlight of the heavens reflecting on their skin in disturbing shapes. They sweep the landscape endlessly with what I take to be their heads. They move with an unsteady gait, their skin quivering repulsively. The ground trembles at their approach. All the while they sing, and their heads swing. They draw closer yet, and we realise that one is to pass over our hiding place. Its song rocks the earth. Yoechakenon huddles down into the deep ditch we occupy. He shakes with the poison, but he grips the glaive as tightly as he is able, ready to will it to life, although he does not reckon his chances to be good against such things.

A blast of pestilential vapour precedes the approaching Stone Beast. A ponderous foot sweeps over and beyond our hiding place, planting itself fifteen spans further on, and dislodges a rain of peat into our trench. The Stone Beast’s bulk momentarily blots out the sky, and then it is gone, carrying its mournful song off into the night.

What manner of creature they are I do not know, nor do I care to find out.

Soon after this encounter, we come to a place where the Stone Sun is brilliant in the sky, and Suul no more than a worn coin of light.