In the Hall of the Martian King (7 page)

Therefore they stayed on the loop until they were on the side moving against Deimos’s orbital direction, but they coupled
lightly, so as not to completely kill their forward velocity relative to Mars. As they released from the loop, they were pointed
in the direction of Deimos’s orbit, but moving much slower than Deimos’s orbital velocity; they rolled over, and the great
bulk of Deimos, a vast flying mountain, shot forward in the upper viewports, gone on ahead of them in the blink of an eye.
The warshuttle’s cold jets fired in a whoosh of white noise, as they course-corrected for their approach.

“I hate taking off backward,” Captain Adlongongu commented. “Just seems undignified. A spaceship ought to take off on its
tail, self-propelled, like in vid and viv.”

For most of the four hours of free fall as they approached the Martian atmosphere, Jak and Pikia did little but float weightless
and take in the view. All of the lower planets of the solar system had been drastically altered by the Bombardment a thousand
years before, but none more than Mars. The softening-up rain of light-speed projectiles that had begun the First Rubahy War
had pockmarked Earth with lakes and started a new ice age, battered the Venerean surface into gravel with sonic damage, and
honeycombed Mercury with fracture tubes, but it had accidentally done what no Old Martian Emperor could ever have mustered
the political will and the budget to do—it had terraformed the fourth planet.

Effectively, the Bombardment had restarted a case of arrested development. Because Mars had been too small to develop plate
tectonics to recirculate volatiles, eventually, after a billion years or so of being a wet world with abundant life, Mars
had lost its water and CO
₂
into the pores and cavities of its thick crust. As its internal heat had retreated toward the core, the kilometers-deep beds
of groundwater had frozen solid, leaving the planet with a slush-mud “permafrost ocean” underlying a thin smear of almost-vacuum
desert.

For fifty years before the Rubahy invasion ships arrived from Sigma Draconis, the Bombardment, a spray of tennis-ball-sized
chunks of quartz moving so close to lightspeed that only precision instruments detected the difference, had whacked each of
the four lower planets with fifty impacts per day. On little, dense, heavily cratered, airless Mercury, the effect had been
like rifle shots fired into a ball of soft clay, leaving a tube of shattered and melted rock right through the planet, a deep
round pit at the entry point, and a shallower pit at the exit, with thousands of rocks raining back for the next few hours.
This had meant little, except the occasional accidental losses of unlucky miners, habitats, or pieces of machinery. On Venus
the thick atmosphere had absorbed much of the energy into immense shock waves that traveled around the planet several times,
battering the surface to gravel, and heaping the gravel into dunes and ridges; in the millennium since, the howling, lead-melting-hot
winds had reshaped the dust and gravel surface into one vast dune field.

Earth’s atmosphere had absorbed most but not all of the force of each projectile. Ocean impacts had put enormous quantities
of water into the atmosphere, darkening the skies, spreading blankets of snow on the adjoining land, and filling northern
rivers with freshwater that had stopped the flow of the great warm currents in the oceans. The impacts on land had left kilometer-wide
circular pocks, averaging a few kilometers apart, all over the northern hemisphere north of twenty-one degrees north, their
frequency falling off until, below twenty-one degrees south, the body of the planet had shielded it. Earth was now the planet
of pocks and glaciers, a pretty place if you could avoid knowing that it was also the grave of seven billion people and about
three million species.

But Mars had become another world entirely.

The frozen ancient oceans, with much of the atmosphere dissolved in them, underlay most of her northern hemisphere. The thin
atmosphere provided little shielding. Every impact had broken through the thin, weak soil and rock of the surface and plunged
deep into the honeycombed ice, giving up its kinetic energy as heat, leaving an open channel to the surface for the great
blasts of steam, methane, carbon dioxide, and ammonia, the greenhouse gases needed to warm the planet back to life.

The Bombardment had not been easy on the Martians themselves; the planet had started with two billion people and finished
with three hundred million, fifty Earth years later. But during those twenty-seven Mars years, as the Old Empire collapsed,
as all the nations of the solar system seceded from the Empire and convulsed in war and revolution, as the League of Polities
seized control of the Imperial Fleet and Army and prepared to meet the oncoming invasion, and as refugees poured back and
forth over the face of Mars in bewildered, helpless, and ever-dwindling hordes, day after day, year after year, the ancient
volatiles had poured out onto the surface again.

At first the projectiles had arrived with almost no atmosphere to penetrate, giving up all their energy in the permafrost
layer. The water and carbon dioxide fell out as snow, forming glaciers over the old collapsed surface. But under the thickening
blanket of greenhouse gas, the surface of Mars grew warmer, and the pressure climbed. Algaes and lichens, all the microbiota
of Earth whose spores had carelessly strewn the planet for centuries before, bloomed on the rocks; other living material leaked
out of abandoned habitats and wrecked cities.

Photosynthesis liberated oxygen; chemical reactions and the explosions of the quartz projectiles broke down ammonia to liberate
nitrogen, and burned the methane and oxygen together. Near the surface, water deposits began to melt and flow; dirt and rock
collapsed to the bottom of the new sinkholes.

Due to Mars’s great scale height, each year the projectiles reached the surface with less force, but still they raised dust
and grit into the atmosphere, dirtying the ice, preventing the albedo from rising too high. A wet, warm world began to come
back together on top of the sunken ruins of the old.

In the tenth Martian year of the Bombardment, water stood in small lakes on the hitherto dry bottom of the Boreal Ocean; in
the twentieth Martian year, the Boreal Ocean did not freeze over, and the first hurricanes blew. Just after the Bombardment,
when Ralph Smith, and the last remnants of the Grand Army of the League of Polities, battered the desperate Rubahy into submission
on Titan, the backup plan relied, in part, on submarines beneath the Martian seas. And when Ralph Smith’s grandson accepted
the imperium of the Second Empire, at Chrysepolis, the Imperial Sea Guard swore its loyalty to him on the docks there.

Earth has a worldwide ocean interrupted by a scattering of continents; Mars, a worldwide continent surrounding a small ocean,
with only two inland seas to help moderate the climate. Large parts of the planet broil and freeze, far from any moderating
water, the thinner atmosphere responds with much greater violence to the differences, the Coriolis force per kilometer of
north-south difference is about twice what it is on Earth, and the high-viscosity atmosphere delivers more of its force to
any exposed surface. Martian hurricados—savage spiral thunderstorms, fifty kilometers across— rip across the Martian desert,
their sticky almost-Mach-1 winds flinging gravel and mud. Waterspouts deposit whole lakes onto surrounding land. Double-length
seasons bake grass dry for prairie fires in summer, and bury the black land deep with blizzards in the winter.

Jak and Pikia could see all these things from the viewport of the warshuttle: violent tight swirls of hurricados, bouncing
and weaving ice clouds above waterspouts, streaks of black smoke from grass fires, big white feathers of blizzards.

Jak’s purse tingled again; he glanced down, mentally preparing to tell Pikia to cut it out, but it wasn’t from her. He slipped
on his goggles and earpieces.

Hel Faczel looked sour. “Hive Intel has won two concessions. The first is that two stringers for Hive Intel, Sibroillo Jinnaka
and Gweshira Byeloaibari, are accredited to join your party when you land. Reeb Waxajovna assured me that you would be less
than pleased. I hope you can come up with something clever to keep them sidetracked and harmless.”

That’s a forlorn hope,
Jak thought.
Oh, well, I tried to keep Sib out of things.

“They will shortly be joined by a regular Hive Intel agent. He’s low-level probationary, in his third year of probation—I
am trusting you to dak the implications—”

Most Hive bureaucracies either took new officers off probation, or fired them, within ninety days. Jak’s own probation had
been thirty days, and Dujuv’s less than two weeks.

“—and he is the Hive Intel open agent in place for the Harmless Zone. An agent’s prestige, in that organization, is much higher
if he is secret rather than open. Prestige also depends on the importance of the nation in which an agent operates. So Hive
Intel has bounced this heet as low as they can bounce him without bouncing him out. You’re getting a heet who has a knack
for antagonizing the powerful and for failing his superiors.

“He will be under your orders theoretically but you will not be able to punish or fire him, because his name is Clarbo Waynong.
That
Waynong family. He will arrive in a day or two—he had to meet with friends at the Patridiots Association expats banquet.”

Jak felt sick. The Patridiots were a reactionary student movement; it was the shorthand combination of patrician-patriot-idiot,
young men and women from the Hive’s traditional political families who favored the abolition of the Republic, the creation
of a hereditary aristocracy, and an enforced loyalty to a list of conventional ideals. They proudly described themselves as
“too loyal to be smart” and declared that “Leadership isn’t what you do, or know, it’s what you are.”

Faczel shrugged just as if he could actually see Jak’s shudder. “Sorry to be adding all these complications, Jinnaka, but
the Assembly Steering Committee ordered this directly, and since four of Mr. Waynong’s cousins were voting on the subject—”
He shrugged again. “Good luck to you, sir.”

The vision clicked off. Before Jak could even decide to take off his goggles, there was another signal; an incoming call from
Hive Intel’s Deimos office.

Doctor Mejitarian’s big warm eyes had never looked so troubled before. “Hello, Jak. You’ll be happy to know that for once
this is not about the Princess. I wanted to let you know that we intercepted Hel Faczel’s message and he is correct in
all
particulars. Clarbo Waynong really is a fool and had no business passing the PSA, let alone being taken into Hive Intel.

“But in our business, we work with what we have. We are keeping Waynong in Hive Intel because he wants to be in Hive Intel.
We give him what he wants because he is the oldest son in the senior branch of an important patrician family. He is highly
electable and appointable, and therefore certain someday to be very powerful.

“We want him favorably disposed toward us.

“We need him to succeed at the present business, and we need his name to be all over the success when the story becomes public,
you see.

“Engineering his success is not going to be easy. (I assure you that you will get no help from
him.
) Nonetheless, if somehow he succeeds, we will know who engineered it. So, by way of incentive, direct from Dean Caccitepe:
if Hive Intel obtains control of the Nakasen lifelog through your efforts, in such a way that the public credit goes to Clarbo
Waynong, then we will at once completely decondition you from your attachment to Princess Shyf, terminate your double-agent
mission, and transfer you out of PASC and into Hive Intel. Make what we want happen, and everything you want is yours.

“Any questions?” The kobold’s grin was surprisingly warm.

“None at all, sir. It’s a deal,” Jak said. “Thank you for the opportunity.”

Mejitarian’s expression went flat. “I have been working with Clarbo Waynong for most of two years, and I would say, don’t
thank me for this opportunity until you’ve had some firsthand experience of it. Good luck.”

“Thank you.” Jak took off his eyepieces and his headphones. Pikia was looking at him curiously.

“Bad luck, not of our making, but we’re going to be cleaning up after other people’s messes,” Jak said to her. “We’re getting
three backseat drivers. Two pushy zybotniks and a probable incompetent.” He gave her the truth about Sib and Gweshira, and
a highly edited version of the Clarbo Waynong problem. It was a chance to practice his cover story with a less-experienced
person.

When he finished, she made a soft click with her tongue.

“What?” Jak asked.

“Well, at least I’m not the most useless person on the team anymore.”

A
n hour later, they were back on the acceleration couches, comfortable enough in slightly more than two g, as
John Carter
slid down into the atmosphere. The Martian scale height is large (pressure falls very gradually with increasing altitude),
and much of the post-Bombardment atmosphere is far above the surface, since the planet does not “hold it down” very hard.
Martian air is sticky so that it exerts great force on any airfoil, but its thinness and high heat capacity dissipate aerobraking
heat rapidly.

Thus the risk in coming into Mars’s post-Bombardment atmosphere at too steep an angle was not so much of burning up as of
being squashed flat; the danger of coming in too shallow was that the terrific lift of the sticky air could fling one away
from the planet all too easily.
John Carter
entered shallowly, and moved rapidly down to a hypersonic glide at very high altitude. The relatively short distance around
Mars—half that around Earth—the great velocity, the shallowness of the glide, and the great distance to be descended meant
that they would glide right around the planet almost three times during their reentry.