The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN (21 page)

“Explains why you didn’t just kill us while we
slept,” Matthew accuses. “You needed us around for whenever it
became clear that Earth would try a second coming. Are we supposed
some kind of intermediary? Or leverage—hostages?”

“No, Colonel,” Paul defends, sounding honestly hurt.
“Whatever my Council’s motives, you must believe me when I say that
killing you was never even considered. The ETE exist to bring life
to this world—it is all we live for. We do not kill—taking life is
our greatest taboo. And I know you have absolutely no reason to
believe me.”

“Perhaps we should do both,” I interrupt them. “Send
a delegation to meet with the ETE, while we use our ASVs to scout
for supplies and other survivors.”

“I still strongly urge caution on the latter
objective,” Paul warns again. “Most anyone you meet will see your
ships and your uniforms and think of the stories they still tell of
the Apocalypse and the world before the Apocalypse. They will know
you as Unmakers, come to kill them.”

“Then we will do what we can to avoid direct
confrontation,” I reassure him. “But we can’t just sit here. We
need to see what’s out there—if for no other reason than to tell
Earth what’s been happening here when we do manage to call
out.”

“So who goes to Oz?” Matthew wants to know.

“The Peacemaker,” I tell him with a grin. Paul smiles
at me.

Anton gets the Lancer communicating with MAI,
uploading its few remaining files. The updated maps and
pictures—even though they’re likely decades old—are priceless
intel. Command Briefing is packed by 0800.

“According to the Lancer’s orbital imaging, Melas
Three may be as intact as we are, assuming it survived the blast
and the slide,” Anton lays it out on the screens, zooming in on the
real estate in question: just beyond the prominence where the
southeastern rim of Melas meets the south rim of Coprates. But even
on maximum resolution, nothing is visible but rock and sand where
the base should be. “The lack of ruins or debris is actually
promising. I ran some quick structural models, and the probability
of the main facility surviving is high. But getting to it will be
more than we can manage right now. It looks buried deep, with no
surface markers—we could spend days digging before we find it.
Maybe weeks. And it’s a long way to go to come back with
nothing.”

“But Melas One looks gutted, abandoned and picked
clean,” Rick redirects, and Anton shifts the map.

“There are colony sites closer to Melas One than
Melas Three,” Tru points out. “That might be the better place to
start, promising or not.”

Anton zooms out a bit, selects the northern Melas
Chasma, and lights up the Melas One ruin and the five colony sites
in that region.

“Mariner is gone,” Anton tells us heavily, zooming in
on the mostly-buried ruin, the patterns of wreckage swept away by
rock. “It looks like it got hit hard by multiple close blasts
before it got swept by a slide. It wasn’t reinforced enough yet to
have survived—I ran the model a hundred times. There’s less left of
it than Melas One.”

He stops, realizing he needs to give Tru some time
and silence to process. There were three hundred UNMAC personnel
and a hundred-plus construction engineers at Melas One, but there
were almost eight hundred civilian colonists working to rebuild
Mariner, many of whom shared air with us here.

“What about the other sites?” Tru pushes us on with
little pause.

Anton hops the map zoom about thirty miles
east-southeast.

“Avalon,” he names the colony. The site from orbit is
mostly buried and broken, but show signs of what may be some intact
bunker structures, or at least that someone attempted to make
repairs, to dig out. “We had Special Forces there from the Eco
conflict.”

“Paul mentioned that some of our people survived, but
they moved elsewhere when they couldn’t keep their sites viable,”
Lisa remembers. Paul nods. “They might still be close, or they may
have left sign of where they went.”

“Where’s Zodanga?” I ask, scanning the north-eastern
rim of Melas. Zodanga had been built high up into the rim, above
the less-stable slide zones where there was good strong rock, and
mineral resources to supply their manufacturing efforts. Zodanga
was an on-planet support industry, refining fuel and building
vehicles and aircraft for the other colonies using native
resources. When I find the site, I realize why it was so hard to
spot: it looks picked bare, but very cleanly, like a thorough
salvage job—they took everything but the concrete.

“There were close nukes, but the colony was up high
and dug into rock,” Rick considers. “The sim model spares them in
most variations. Damaged, but survivable.”

“Still, it looks like they stripped everything and
relocated,” Anton theorizes.

“So where’d they go?” Matthew wants to know. I look
at Paul. He frowns, looks like he doesn’t know what to say.

“We register draws off our lines in the rim area, too
high for the valley Nomads. And we’ve heard stories of a raiding
tribe that uses homemade aircraft, but we haven’t seen them.”

“Have you
looked
?” Matthew criticizes.

“We have kept our distance from the survivors, more
so as the years have passed.”

“And let them rape and pillage each other?”

“You would prefer we controlled them by superior
force?”

“Not at all,” I try to defuse. “As you’ve said:
you’re scientists, not soldiers.”

Matthew doesn’t seem the least bit soothed. Paul
looks away, ignores him.

Anton moves south, across the open valley.

“Arcadia Colony also looks like a total loss,” Rick
admits, seeing only twisted scrap scattered in the rock and sand, a
fresh crater more than close enough to have put the colony in the
nuclear blast wave. Foundations aren’t even recognizable.

Freedom, near the southeast rim, looks like Avalon:
Like someone may have tried to dig out, rebuild, then stripped and
abandoned it.

“Another colony we had Special Operators in,” Lisa
remembers.

Anton moves west, across the valley.

“This is weird,” Anton points out three sites that
run roughly in a vertical line through the center of Melas. “Okay:
Uqba and Baraka—the UME sites—look similar to Arcadia: blasted,
ripped apart and picked clean. But look here:” He zooms in on the
southern-most site, sitting just east of a promontory ridge that
stretches fifty miles into the valley floor from the south rim.
“This is where Shinkyo—the Japanese corporate that made so much
money on tech toys—was. And it’s gone. Just gone.”

“That’s a big crater dead-zero,” Matthew concludes
from the image.

“But that’s the weird part,” Anton explains, “the
other craters have residual radiation signatures—and this is an old
map—but this one is
cold
. And the larger blast-pattern
doesn’t look right, not compared to the other craters.”

“It’s a
fake
?” Lisa realizes, incredulous.
“Did they bury themselves?”

Anton brings up a pre-Apocalypse image: four heavy
pressure domes almost the size of stadiums, connected to big blocky
manufacturing fabs, two reactors and a large landing facility.
There’s no sign of any of it on the newer map.

“There’s never been a draw off our Feeds, so we
assumed there were no survivors,” Paul insists, then apologizes
like the error his own: “But we didn’t look closely.”

“Still, burying a site that size would be an amazing
piece of engineering,” Anton doesn’t believe. “Same with relocating
it.”

“But it’s another long way to go for potentially
nothing,” Rick de-prioritizes our curiosity.

“Or to look for folks that don’t want finding,” Tru
agrees.

“Maybe not this trip,” I decide. “What else is in the
neighborhood—close to Melas One?”

“City of Industry, Pioneer, Frontier,” Anton moves
the map north, lists the northern Melas and Candor US corporate
colonies out beyond Melas One. “These are weird in a different way:
Wrecked and apparently not viable, but they don’t show the same
signs of scavenging as anything else that’s left above ground—it’s
like they’ve remained untouched since the bombing.”

“And all of those sites had UNMAC garrisons,” Matthew
recalls, his brow lowering.

“They
do
draw off our Feeds,” Paul admits,
“but all of our attempts at contact have been met by gunfire. The
Nomads also say getting anywhere near them means death. We decided
to give them their space—they didn’t seem to want or need anything
more from us than air and water and fuel. We’ve never seen any
surface activity. No idea what the population might be.”

“They’re still
populated
?” Lisa asks for
clarification. Paul nods lightly, like we’ve asked about something
obvious.

“Explains why they don’t look scavenged,” I
calculate. “Maybe made to look destroyed from orbit.” Law of the
Land: Hide from the sky.

“How sizable is the drain?” Anton asks.

“Significant, but draw is not a good estimator.
Conservation efficiency is too variable.”

“They could be a few with leaky seals and bad
recycling, or hundreds with good seals and recyclers,” Halley
agrees.

“What about Coprates?” Ryder asks. Anton shifts the
map east into the long, narrow canyons.

“Too far,” Morales shoots down. “We might be able to
make Tranquility. The next nearest colony is over two hundred miles
away.”

“And gone,” Anton shows us Tyr, out on the Coprates
north rim: It’s all slide, close strike. He moves another hundred
miles further east: Nike is also gone. And fifty miles beyond
there, Gagarin and Concordia have been erased.

“No Feed draw,” Paul confirms the likely worst. “Not
that I’ve ever seen.”

“How many sites
aren’t
drawing off your
lines?” Ryder asks. He turns from the view and considers the
map.

“Shinkyo, Uqba, Baraka, Mariner, Arcadia, Tyr, Nike,
Gagarin, Concordia, Alchera, and Iving…” he rattles off the names
as he points out more than half of the colonies.

“That many…” Ryder shakes her head.

“Remember, Doctor: Just because a colony site is
destroyed, it doesn’t mean there are no survivors,” Paul gives her.
“The Nomads left their colony sites almost immediately after the
Apocalypse, and they subsist: living in the deeper Melas floor,
using a number of small taps in our Lines to feed their traveling
camps. And in some of the deeper canyons in Coprates, there is
enough free air and water now to live
without
tapping our
Lines.”

“So they could have just relocated,” Lisa
extrapolates hopefully.

“But four sites
are
likely occupied,” I
refocus, pointing to Industry, Liberty, Frontier and
Tranquility.

“And we have promising draws from the regions near
Avalon, Zodanga, Freedom, and Eureka,” Paul encourages.

“You mentioned Pax in your first interviews,” Halley
recalls, looking at the one remaining colony that hasn’t been
marked as either inhabited or lost. Anton pans east, zooms in. The
region—especially in the gorges and ranges closer to the Coprates
south rim, are veined and dotted with green. Where the colony was
isn’t even visible—the growth looks forest-thick, at least from
orbit.

“And these maps are decades old,” Ryder reminds
us.

“The plant life has spread significantly since these
images were captured,” Paul assures her, then explains: “The Pax
survivors abandoned their original colony site long ago—it was too
compromised. They sheltered with us until the atmosphere began to
thicken, then ventured out to make their own way. Their labors in
bio-engineering and horticulture are one of the primary reasons the
region is now so verdant. They now live free of our feeds, thriving
here in the greenest zones where the air is thickest and there is a
lot of bedrock water. We call this green region ‘The Vajra’ because
it looks like the Hindu double-ended trident. The Pax have
established a feudal system of agricultural villages. They defend
their lands aggressively. We leave them be. They have everything
they need.”

This is simultaneously very good and very troubling
news—I watch my team digest the implications.

“Are they the only group out there?” I ask for more
good news, noting five “dead” colony sites in proximity to The
Vajra (but also numerous nuclear craters).

“The Pax are aggressive because they
do
have
competitors,” Paul admits, “but they do not describe them to us,
nor have we seen them ourselves. As I said, we leave them be.”

“Do your people have more current mapping?” Halley
asks. Paul shakes his head.

“Nothing like this. The best we have are some
observational archives, but nothing recent.”

I take over the map, trace back west, following the
green that dots and clings to the Coprates South Rim.

“You said Tranquility was also dangerous,” I
remember, moving the conversation along. I zoom in on the site,
just over a hundred miles east of here on the south rim.
Tranquility looks like what Paul described: The main structures
consisted of three large pressure domes terraced (very
aesthetically) up a V-shaped gorge in the South Rim. Now only the
lowest dome and the wreckage of their spaceport are left exposed.
The upper two domes and the rest of the facilities look like the
Rim came down the gorge in a massive slide and buried them. The
exposed dome—a massive multi-tiered greenhouse—has been broken open
(likely indicating the fate of the buried sections). But scrub
spreads from the ruin, heading outward and westward. The landscape
looks a lot like the living deserts of the American Southwest I
knew as child.

“We met violence when we tried to approach them,”
Paul confirms. “The Nomads also describe similar experiences: No
one approaches the ruin and returns. It’s likely an issue of
protecting precious resources. The Tranquility gardens were
impressive, and they were working on engineering renewable food
sources as well as adaptive plant life. It may be that only a
fraction of the colony’s bounty has spread wild into the
valleys.”