The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN (34 page)

Lisa is looking at both of us like we’ve turned some
unnatural color.

“I went to Roanoke one summer as a kid,” Matthew
excuses. “The story is a tourist draw.”

“And I just like weird shit like that,” I remind
her.

“So is this a code?” Rios asks over the Link.

“Not in any of our records,” Lisa confirms.

“Did we have a fall-back plan if we lost the base?”
Rios throws out the next possibility.

“They were supposed to come
here
,” Matthew
tells him. “Or the nearest viable colony.”

“But what about worst-case?” Anton tries. “What if
all ground facilities were lost?”

“Then they would have tried to call home,” I remind
him. “If there wasn’t a more viable site, they would have dug in
and made do.”

“So they either found better real estate or had to
leave,” Rios concludes. “Doesn’t explain the cryptic bullshit.”

“Somebody knew the story,” Lisa considers. “And was
driven enough to do some cutting.”

“Might have just been going stir-crazy,” Matthew
tries to lighten. “Left a bad joke for whoever came looking.”

“
Spooky
,” Anton mutters. I see him tracing the
cut letters with his gloved fingertips.

“Or maybe the message isn’t for
us
,” Rios
offers. “Maybe they made plans with someone else, sometime after
the bombing.”

“Another surviving faction?” Anton plays, but the
thought can go no further.

Anton managed to get the power back on within another
twenty-four hours. That got us lights and heat. The recyclers were
left intact, and after a good overhaul were back online at partial
efficiency by the end of the day, enough to support Rios’ platoon
and our teams of tech and construction engineers.

While Anton kept busy bringing Melas Three back to
partial life, Rios’ troopers (at least the squads not on sentry
duty) started taking inventory. There wasn’t much left behind of
ready use. Whoever survived here took (or used up) all the food
stocks and small arms, as well as the survival gear, emergency
shelters, and the more portable tools. They left behind what they
couldn’t carry and probably considered unusable: Two damaged ASVs,
and one mostly-stripped AAV, as well as two of the tank-like mobile
gun platforms we’d fielded against the Discs (one with wrecked
suspension and another with a shredded transmission). Morales
eagerly moved in with one of her mechanic teams as soon as we could
get a flight out the next morning.

I made the one-hundred-and-twelve mile trip out on
Day Five, prompted by a call from Anton that he had something he
wanted to talk over with me in person. The base site was still
mostly buried when the ASV took me over it in a slow circle, the
aircraft pads and bays inaccessible under the rock and sand. Only
Thomasen’s excavation team camp, his digging equipment, and a wide
trench dug down to Airlock One (on the “post” of the cross, closest
to Ops) were visible on the surface. Anybody watching us from a
distance would probably be wondering what the hell we were doing,
digging a hole so earnestly in the middle of nowhere. And I’m sure
such odd behavior will likely generate “aggressive” curiosity soon
enough.

I’d been to Melas Three a handful of times before the
Bombardment. It was a Spartan facility even in its heyday. Its
biggest tragedy was its lack of a proper medical facility. The bays
and corridors became makeshift field hospitals after every
engagement, the wounded waiting hours until the skies were safe
enough to evac them to Melas Two or to the Orbital Station.
Officers’ quarters sometimes became operating rooms if the delay
was unacceptable. I expect to see the dark traces of old blood
stains on the cast concrete walls and steel decks, but everything
is a dusty gray. The place is stripped bare as if being prepared
for decommission and salvage, but the staleness and dust (worse
than Melas Two when we woke up) makes it feel like I’ve descended
into an ancient archeological dig.

Up in the Tower, Anton has the guts of the Command
Deck consoles pulled out and spread all over in his version of
ordered chaos. The cryptic inscription—freshly dusted—presides
silently over his work. Rick is with him, having arrived the
evening before, and he shoots me that look that tells me (again) he
can’t understand how anyone can work so maniacally and sloppily and
still get delicate tech working. Anton takes a moment to extract
himself from the com-station he’s been digging into, wipes his
dirty brow with the back of his hand (only managing to re-arrange
the grime), and grins at me like he’s found some treasure.

“The uplink outside is scrap, of course,” he begins,
sounding like he’s getting punchy from exhaustion. “But they left
the transmitter gear—probably didn’t think anyone would ever use
it. It’s no good here, not with the static shield overhead, but
that doesn’t mean we have to use it
here
. I think I can pull
it out whole, fly it back home, make a new dish array out of my old
‘Tower’ with Simon’s help, and get a portable transmitter cobbled
together, maybe in a week.”

“Portable?” I ask him.

“I’ve been thinking about this, Colonel…” He’s almost
breathless. “This gear won’t pierce the ETE static shield any
better than the gear I burned trying it before. But now that Paul’s
helping get us back our wings and Simon can help make us a new
antenna, we could use the ASVs to shuttle the equipment out
beyond
the range of the net—going up into Candor would be
the closest option. The atmosphere would be thin and it’d be damn
cold, but it still beats Datum-level conditions. We would need to
work in pressure gear, set up an outpost with shelters. Work on the
surface to assemble the dish, then use one of the ASV power plants
to juice it. It would require keeping an ASV on the ground to act
as our working outpost, at least until we could build something
more permanent, but Morales says at least two of the three ships
left here look no worse off than the ones we started with. If we
set up a relay system—we could use other ASVs or even troop Link
gear—we might be able to patch back to base. It would be snowy and
there’d be delay as the signal crawls back and forth between the
two planets, but you could make a call out by next alignment, clear
enough to get a verbal report through, maybe even a compressed data
stream, convince Earthside to send relief.”

Rick shrugs in semi-agreement, but doesn’t appear to
be nearly as optimistic.

“January?” I estimate the next time the two planets
will be coming close.

“Or sooner,” Anton tries to encourage.

I don’t answer him for a few moments. I’m suddenly
struck by an irrational impulse to tell him no, to delay him, to
give him some excuse to shoot down his plan, to put off contacting
home. But I also know it will be another two years before the two
planets’ orbits bring them close on the same side of the sun if we
don’t take this opportunity. I feel nauseous, cold.

Do I really
not
want to call home?

“I know you’re worried about leaving a team and
probably at least two ASVs planted hell-and-gone for the time it
will take,” Rick allows me, knowing me long enough to catch my
ambivalence (though misunderstanding it).

“Candor isn’t close to a Station or a feed line,”
Anton admits, pulling up a topographic map on his workpad. “And the
geography sucks. It’s all slide-plain. And we’d be sitting out in
the open if anyone did try to attack us. The other choice would be
flying west into Ius, but that’s a longer stretch.”

“I’m less concerned with the distance than who’s
likely to be sitting between us and the transmitter,” Rick argues.
“If we take the Candor option, we pass right by all three of the
so-called PK Keeps, as well as where Zodanga supposedly raids from.
The Ius route takes us past both Industry and Shinkyo and who knows
what else. Most of it is Nomad territory, but your friend Abbas is
only king of the closest wedge of that.”

Rick is making my excuses for me. It would be easy to
agree with him, delay this attempt. I’m wondering what Matthew or
Lisa would say; if they would share Anton’s hope or Rick’s concerns
or both. But what I’m feeling is neither hope nor practical concern
for the safety of my people.

“Colonel?” Anton tries to bring me out of my
brooding.

I realize what I feel: I
am
afraid of the same
thing the survivor factions are. I’m afraid of what will happen
when Earth hears about what’s really been transpiring here these
last fifty years. And I’m the one who has to make the call that may
result in genocide instead of rescue.

“Get on it, Anton,” I tell him instead, making myself
smile. “You’ll get whatever you need.”

I get out of there as fast as I can without looking
like I’m running. Back onto the surface. Back under the dusty sky.
Hide my face under a mask and goggles and cap shroud so no one can
see me doubting.

“This is a great place for old farts like us,” I
remember what Matthew had said shortly after we’d first arrived on
this world. “Low grav is easy on the joints. Air’s clean even if it
ain’t fresh. So’s the water. No crowds. Lots of space. Lots of
young, lean bodies bounding around all over, all annoyingly
bright-eyed and charged-up with hope for a better world. A few
nut-jobs, of course, but I’d rather have these Eco hippies
protesting than the endless sea of kill-babies-for-God extremists
we kept slapping down back home—at least these boneheads up here
don’t want to kill everybody rather than give an inch. Place is
fucking heaven, Mikey.”

(And then we killed everybody—or almost everybody,
and abandoned the rest. We might not have pulled the trigger
ourselves, but we pointed the weapon.)

I try to convince myself that this is normal,
expected: I jumped straight into doing my job, my duty. I paid
lip-service to what everybody else was feeling—fear of never seeing
home, fear of what was out there in a newly-unknown world, fear of
how we would survive, fear of how Earth might treat us if and when
we managed to call for help, fear of what Earth had become in the
last half-century that passed for us as one long night’s sleep,
fear we’d lost control of this world and would never have a place
in it again.

Fear we had become—and now always would be—the
villains.

I didn’t let myself feel anything. But now I have to.
There’s no more putting it off.

I want more time. I
need
more time to make
things right, to pull this world together enough that Earth won’t
be terrified of it.

I walk. I walk out beyond the salvage work, set my
boots to the task of climbing a low ridge, sending loose gravel
pouring down-slope behind me like liquid. And I get up where I can
see better: I look east down the Everest-walled parallel canyons of
Coprates and the Catena that disappear unending over the horizon,
side-by-side gateways to what those I’ve met so far assure me is
even more untenable than what we’ve encountered in Melas. I am
reminded of an old story—a puzzle—about a pair of doors: one leads
to treasure, the other to certain death. But here, each path leads
to both.

It’s greener that way—Abbas and Paul (and the
outdated mapping we got from the Lancer) promise. But it’s also
more deadly. And that frustrates me: If there’s
more
food
and resources, it would reason that there should be
less
violent competition. Even Abbas (apparently my most candid ally)
can give me little intelligence to explain why—the food-runners who
make the journey are notorious for telling only tall tales and
keeping the details of where they go a well-guarded secret to
preserve their monopoly on the trade. It would be easy to write off
the stories as a smoke-screen to discourage competition, but Abbas
insists that the food caravans return with wounded and with men
missing who are never seen again. And then I get vague tales about
the descendents of Pax and the survivors of Tranquility and others
the ETE insist they don’t even know. All brutal, primitive,
xenophobic. (But
enduring
.)

I turn west: look back across the open basin of
Melas, almost three hundred miles across, and home to an
inestimable number of human beings, all living in fear of each
other, but living in greater fear of the planet they came from (and
very likely with good reason).

And where did our own people go? They survived the
bombardment in these bunkers, made repairs and lived here for
months, perhaps years, then took significant resources with them
when they left. To go where? (CROATOAN?) To assimilate into some
other tribe? Or to some prepared fall-back position? I scan the
foothills and cliffs like I expect to see them, or some convenient
sign of them, but our ASVs have searched…

My eyes are getting lost in the endless desert-scape
when I see her—and I can tell she’s female, despite the bulk of her
camouflaged cloaks rippling around her in the wind, just from the
way she stands—just standing still, perfectly still, watching me,
balanced on a fragile ridge-crest not a hundred yards away. She
wears the cloaks and mask of a Nomad, but lacks the bulk of
equipment they carry with them. Instead, her lean body shimmers
with polished blood-red armor, making her look almost reptilian. In
her right hand is some kind of large black-bladed knife. I remember
what Jon Drake said about the “desert-demon” that serves
Farouk.

We stand there like that, neither moving, for several
moments. Then I use the greeting, the signal that I come in peace
that Abbas taught me: I draw my pistol slowly, hold it by the slide
and raise it over my head. Then I set it down on a rock at my feet,
and hold my open hand high.

She doesn’t move, doesn’t acknowledge the gesture.
Then all of a sudden she makes a little leap and vanishes from
sight, leaving only a ghost-like wisp of dust.