Return - Book III of the Five Worlds Trilogy (19 page)

Two men were killed, another badly injured, and the general immediately gave orders to abandon the hangar.

From the remaining of his undamaged shuttle escorts came a worried query: “General, are you sure? Look at it out there!”

It was raining rocks on the runways and landing pads outside; at that moment a second, smaller intruder entered the hole in the hangar the first had made and struck the rear of the already disabled craft.

“I order you to leave, now! If we stay here, we’ll die!”

“Yes, sir!” came the reply, and the two blunt-nosed wedges flew out of the hangar, Ramsden’s in the lead.

The second escort was almost immediately struck, and General Ramsden was serenaded with the screams of the dying men inside as the shuttle plummeted two hundred meters to the surface, already on fire. Even as the general queried for survivors, the shuttle has hit by a rain of boulders and exploded.

“Get us the hell out of here!” Ramsden shouted to his own pilot, who was greatly interested in doing just that, weaving the craft upward and at the same time away from the widening arc of the rock storm.

In another twenty seconds, after a close call with the largest fragment they had seen yet, which passed just in front of their viewscreen, they were free.

“That was close, sir,” the pilot said, allowing himself a grin of relief.

“What are you smiling for?” Ramsden snapped. “We’re dead one way or the other, aren’t we?”

The smile evaporated from the pilot’s face, but Ramsden softened his tone.

“Just continue the search.”

T
hey explored the area around Schiaparelli, before slowly circling back toward Noachis Terra later in the day. By this time the second comet had dissipated its force into the atmosphere; on the ground was a fifty kilometer-wide and two-kilometer-deep hole in the ground that Ramsden gave wide berth to, not only because he had no interest in it, but because anything nearby, especially the Machine Master of Mars, would no longer exist.

In a widening circle they combed the area, their Screen scanners open for emergency broadcasts. It was eerily quiet on the airwaves. As the day wore on, they found that dust, like insidious fog, was beginning to dose in around them.

“How long do you think we can continue to search, General?” the pilot asked. The front beams on the shuttle were on, their yellow light swallowed by the red gloom.

“Just maintain your sweep at fifty feet,” Ramsden answered. He had long given up looking out the window and was concentrating on a hand Screen with which he was writing.

“What are you writing, sir?” the pilot asked, intent on making conversation.

“I’m writing my will, son???,” the general answered. “And since you’re so damned interested, I’ll answer your first question also. We’re going to keep looking until we run out of fuel, and then we’re going to find more fuel. Then we’ll keep looking until we run out of food, and we’ll find more of that. And then, eventually,” he continued, looking up grimly from his hand Screen, “we’re going to run out of time and die. Unless, of course, we’re the luckiest sons-of-bitches on all the worlds and find that bastard Sam-Sei.”

He went back to his Screen, and when the young pilot asked another question an hour later, to further make conversation, General Ramsden ordered him to be quiet.

W
hen they quit for the night, they had nothing to show for their efforts but their weariness. There was a Martian Marine facility at Mare Serpentis, which they eventually found using instruments only. When they stepped out of the shuttle, the sharp dry taste of dust settled on their tongues. Visibility stood at thirty meters.

The mare??? bordering the base, which was little more than a wading pool in the best of times, was now a puddle of silty mud, to which the general gave only a cursory glance. After ordering the refueling of the shuttle, he tried to sleep in the officer’s quarters, but found that dust had already seeped in everywhere and covered the beds. The same was true in the bar. Eventually he fell asleep in the copilot’s chair of the shuttle; he slept fitfully for two hours, and dreamed of mushroom clouds of red dust, and far-off blasts of thunder.

In the morning, which rose nearly as dim as the night before and even foggier, he contacted the orbiting craft that would pick them up if they succeeded, and abandon them if they did not. On his Screen the placid face of the orbiting shuttle’s admiral confronted him.

“Just wanted to make sure you’re still there, Caf-Tel,” Ramsden said.

“We’re waiting as ordered, General,” the admiral answered, without cracking a smile.

Ramsden told Caf-Tel of the previous day’s search. “We’ll continue with Noachis Terra today and move northwest to Margaritifer Terra when we’re done.”

The admiral nodded slightly. “We’ve been monitoring you—as ordered.”

“I take it there have been no … changes in those orders?” Ramsden asked, trying to make the remark sound offhand.

“None whatsoever,” Cal-Tel answered, after which the Screen went blank.

“Which means we’re still dead men,” General Ramsden said to himself.

T
he dust had thickened during the night, with visibility at a bare ten meters. Under any other circumstances, they would be grounded; the worst dust storm Ramsden had ever seen had produced conditions four times as favorable as the present ones. Still, the general gave the orders to go up.

The pilot began to object, laying out his arguments; but, seeing the look on the general’s face, he followed orders.

“Fly at a hundred meters,” Ramsden ordered.

They did so; but still, nothing on the ground was visible. Before them, the dust seemed almost liquid, pushing away from the craft in flowing waves. There was very little light; what they drove through was more black than red.

At midday, the captain reported a signal on the Screen scanners.

“Amplify it!” Ramsden ordered, listening to the faint beep-beep-beep.

“I’ve already done that. It’s weak, but we can use it as a homing signal. That seems to be what was intended.”

“Do it, then!”

“It’ll take us twenty minutes to get there.”

General Ramsden nodded briskly; he thought,
My God, I think we’ve found him!

F
ifteen minutes later the shuttle developed engine trouble. For a moment the engines went off line altogether, before stuttering back to a rough whine.

“What’s wrong with them?” Ramsden shouted.

“Dust!” the pilot said. “By now it’s probably coated everything and pushed past every filter. I told you this would happen if we went up!”

“What choice did we have? Can you get her down?” The transport lurched suddenly sideways; there was a grinding roar, which turned to abrupt silence.

The pilot fought for control; tried to restart the engines; shouted, “We’re going down!”

The shuttle gave a blurt of engine whine, straightened, hung in midair for a moment, then rolled over and nosed straight down.

General Ramsden, clutching the bottom of the copilot’s seat with both hands, listened to the screams of the men around him, felt his stomach turn over, and thought,
We came so close
—

S
am-Sei, Machine Master of Mars, his face covered with a jerry-built visor adapted from a clear plastic tarp affixed to a wire frame that conformed to his face, his nostrils plugged with two lengths of plastic tubing that met in a Y-adapter joined to a single tube forced into the exit of an oxygen tank strapped to this back, made his way in darkness up the cut stone steps of the underground lab and activated the irising door to the surface. A flow of red dust like fluffy snow cascaded down around him; he put up an arm to shield his face and plowed upward, closing the iris behind him.

The device in his hand was already coated with a layer of crimson silt; the Machine Master brushed it clean, noted the angle of the glowing green arrow on its dark flat disk, and turned in that direction. The wind howled, blowing him momentarily sideways, but he straightened and pushed on, switching on the bright beam mounted on his chest.

T
he wreckage was a half kilometer away; it took Sam-Sei an hour to reach it. By then it was covered in ash, though the wind had swept the engine ports in the rear clean.

It was split open in the middle. The front had been crushed flat, the rest of the craft thrown forward over it with the impact. In effect, there were two sections.

The Machine Master examined the front section, looking for a way in. He found one, but it was tight and looked unfamiliar until Sam-Sei realized that the craft had been turned over and he was actually walking on the ceiling. There was a clutch of dead bodies to one side, hanging from their seats, arms dangling where they had been strapped in; the Machine Master turned to the opposite side, pulled himself halfway up the wall, unhitched the beam from his chest, and shone it upward.

What he wanted was there, intact.

It took him another ten minutes to build a stairway from loosened shuttle parts; as he swung around at one point, the beam of his light fell on two more bodies in the forward cabin. One was suspended from his chair, the other had either not been strapped in or was thrown loose and was a tangle of partial limbs. The uniform was that of a general.

His stairway built, the Machine Master gingerly mounted it, halting when one of the “steps” sought to loosen itself from the pile. It shifted but held, and in a moment Sam-Sei had reached his destination.

The cabinet opened easily; holding his beam, the Machine Master hunted around inside, searching for the part boards he needed. Withdrawing one, he examined it more closely and discovered that he had forgotten that everything was upside down and chosen the wrong component.

In a few minutes, he had retrieved what he needed and withdrew from the craft.

Without even a cursory glance backward, the Machine Master trudged back through the ever-growing storm to his secret laboratory; once at the iris, he activated it, stepping back as the twenty centimeters of dust that had accumulated on it since he had left fell inward, onto the descending steps inside.

The dust made the steps slippery, and the Machine Master proceeded slowly downward. There was another iris at the bottom that served as a door, and he opened that; it stopped halfway with a protest, whined halfheartedly, and froze.

The very last of the auxiliary power
, the Machine Master thought.

He would have to use the generator to power his tools.

Bending to enter the lab, he went immediately to one bench and pulled out the ancient fuel generator that squatted beneath it on casters. It came to life with a roar. Pulling it over to his main worktable, he rigged the table’s entire power line into it, blinking as the table’s own work light flared on above. Nearby was the outline of the stasis web from which he had been freed when the power had gone out two days before; the containment field was gone, but the web’s inactive lines glowed darkly, a useless net strung between two metallic walls.

Still wearing his visor and breathing his depleting oxygen, the Machine Master pulled up a stool, sat, and bent over the component boards he had pulled from the downed craft.

Hours may have gone by, or minutes; then he was done. A drift of dust had found its way down the steps and over the rim of the half-opened iris; when the Machine Master removed his visor and oxygen tank, there was a push of hot dusty air at him from the opening.

The Machine Master activated the device in his hand.

There was a swirl of counterclockwise energy around him.

He disappeared.

Chapter 25

Snip.

In between the working of his shears, Wrath-Pei talked animatedly to the figure on the operating table before him.

“And I don’t mind telling you, dear boy, that what I have planned is the grandest of all possible worlds. I’m sure you had something similar in mind—only with a different head of state. Ha!”

Wrath-Pei paused to laugh, then continued.

Snip.

“This is only natural, of course. You had your plans, I had mine. Where they intersected—boom! I win!”

Again Wrath-Pei began to laugh, so heartily that he had to place his shears carefully into their holster and wave at Lawrence to pull the gyro-chair away from the operating table and the object of Wrath-Pei’s lecture. Lawrence, his face as always impassive, did so, a flow of data streaming across his visor. It seemed that since he had come back on line that the data rushed across Lawrence’s face at a greater rate than ever, as if he were catching up with lost information.

“Bring me over … there,” Wrath Pei said to Lawrence, pointing to the mirrored vanity set against the room’s opposite white wall.

“Yes, Your Grace.”

“You know, Lawrence, it’s good to be back!”

“Of course, your Grace.”

“Ah!” Wrath-Pei said, as the gyro-chair hummed to a halt before the vanity. On the open makeup area were arrayed a mass of bottles and stainless steel vials, all opened in a jumble. Wrath-Pei reached for one, drew a line of thick, pure white cream out of it, and drew it across his face, from one cheek, under the chin, to up across the opposite cheek.

“Better?” he asked.

“As you say, your Grace.”

“The implants are so slow!” Wrath-Pei complained, a touch of anger tingeing his voice. In the mirror his face was still a copy of his brother Sam-Sei’s beneath a bizarre slather of makeup, a map of different hues, parrot green beside startling yellow, his nose bright blue, his eyes circled in black. His unhealthy yellow hair, lank and waxy, was pulled back into a ponytail, which made the red color of his high forehead even more startling.

“What do you think, Lawrence! Is it me?”

Wrath-Pei turned around in his chair to regard Lawrence, then turned farther around to address the figure on the operating table.

“What about you? What do you think?”