The God Mars Book Two: Lost Worlds (10 page)

“What kind of weapons?” I press again.

“What we blacksmith,” he tells me with a shrug.
“Knives, crossbows, axes, throwers…”

“Given the quantities you’re trading them, do you
think the weapons are for their own use, or are they more likely
trading them in turn?”

“They don’t return with much of what they took,”
Abbas calculates thoughtfully. “And they’ve taken enough these last
few years alone to arm at least a small tribe.”

“Do they ask for any guns?” I probe.

“Guns have been far too precious,” Abbas muses. “A
man would rather give up his right arm than his gun if he has
one.”

“What about ammunition?”

“They always ask if we have any pistol rounds. Not
rifle or PDW shells. And only nine millimeter cased.”

“Your revolver is a .357 with a 9mm conversion
cylinder…” It isn’t a question. He’s let me have a good look at his
gun on more than one occasion. He nods anyway.

“Why do you ask?”

“I think we’ve just done something stupid.”

I click him off without saying goodbye and get back
on with Thomas.

“Back out of there,” I order. “Carefully.”

She signals her troops, and they start to rise.

“Hey…” Jenovic says.

Up on top of the hill stands a human-looking figure:
very thin, wearing an assortment of dirty and worn colony gear,
except for his jacket which I recognize as the black and gray
light-armor uniform of the old mercenary colony corporate security.
He also wears a floppy old outback hat and filtered goggles. His
minimal breather mask is down around his neck, showing his
weathered and boney features, his chopped rusty scruff of a
beard.

He got up there—up on top of a mound of bones—without
making a sound. He stands looking down at our team with his arms
hanging at his sides, hands open and hovering over the grips of
twin pistols—revolvers—slung on each thigh like a gunslinger.

A half-dozen ICWs lock on him. He stands like a
statue.

“We don’t mean you any harm,” Thomas tries to
reassure. “We come to help you.”

“Multiple contacts!” Regev announces frantically. MAI
is lighting up the greenery with motion blips. The jungle inside
the dome looks like it’s swarming with fireflies. The greenery
rustles as if a storm has hit it.

“We don’t mean you any harm!” Thomas repeats, backing
away. “We don’t want a fight!”

I think I see the gunslinger smile.

“Draw…” he says coolly.

I don’t really see him move. He pulls both guns and
fires in a fraction of a second. Jenovic and Park have their ICWs
shatter in their grip, and Park screams with the fingers of his
left hand shattered into meat. Regev and Wasserman open up
reflexively, but the gunslinger does a graceful back flip and
disappears from sight. Then Regev and Wasserman cry out.

“Fuck…!!”

On the feed I see homemade-looking knives sticking
through the elbow joints of their armor. Then Regev jerks back and
his feed goes skyward. Thomas’ view shows me another knife buried
in the gap between his shoulder armor and chest plate. I see him
convulse on the vine-carpeted ground, his gloves clawing to get the
knife out.

“
GO! GO!
” Thomas is shouting. Wasserman is
trying to spray into the green with his surviving arm. Something
big slams into him and he goes down flailing, rolling in the green
with whatever has a hold of him.

Suddenly everything we can see is a chaos of leaping
lunging creatures. It takes me several seconds to realize they are
people: Wild, dirty, dressed in rags, swinging clubs and axes and
spears. But they jump and fly through the air like monkeys. I get a
shot of the one wrestling Wasserman: a tiny thing, mop of red
dreadlocks with primitive beads woven in, bits of scrap-built
armor. When her round cherub-like face flashes at the camera with a
snarl, I can tell she’s a girl, big blue eyes and freckles,
probably a teenager. She gets Wasserman on his back and jabs him
savagely in the neck with an arm sheathed in metal, twin blades
welded to protrude from her fist. Thomas tries to shoot her off of
him, but the wild child leaps away. The way she moves reminds me of
Sakina, only much more brutal and simian.

There are dozens like her leaping and lunging and
stabbing and swinging and throwing things at our team. We get off a
few shots, but hit nothing. They seem to coordinate their jumping
so that they constantly cross each other, making it too visually
confusing to track a target. It strikes me that they have
specifically practiced this tactic because they’re used to someone
shooting at them.

Thomas manages to grab hold of Jenovic and shoves him
past her back toward the exit. Then she fires a spread into the
leaping, jumping storm of bodies, giving Chen cover to fall back.
Park is trying to follow, but I can see the shaft of a spear
sticking out of his lower back just below the edge of his torso
armor, and he begins to stagger and drag. Chen grabs hold of him to
pull him on, and Park manages to tear a grenade free of his belt
with his intact hand and toss it behind him. It bangs and smokes,
pouring out a cloud of thick red fog. Thomas throws another one to
add to it. It seems to drive the enemy back, but I doubt it will
hold them.

“Snipers!” Matthew barks.

“Still no target,” Sergeant Masters replies, his
voice shaking with frustration, from their position on the
ridgeline, their rifle optics confirming only a shot of the
shattered dome, a wisp of the red smoke now beginning to bleed out
of it.

Jenovic has point on retreat, his sidearm taking the
random pop at anything he can see move. I watch him stop dead as
his exit gets blocked by a swarm of wild humans. His pistol manages
to find flesh, and two of the wild humans fall in his path, but
there are dozens more. He has to tuck in to close his armor as much
as he can against the storm of sharp metal they’re throwing at him.
His view jerks and Chen shows me he’s taken a knife in the back of
the left knee. It flew from about the same direction as the blades
that so accurately spiked Regev and Wasserman. Someone is as good
with a knife as their gunslinger is with his revolvers.

“Jane! Acaveda! Flash bang!” I order. “Light ‘em
up…”

Each ASV launches a rocket in a lazy arc at the
dome.

“Hunker!” Thomas shouts, an ax bouncing off her
shoulder plate as she covers their retreat. Those of our team that
can get into a fetal crouch as the two rockets airburst just inside
the open dome. The warheads were designed for stunning
pressure-suited Ecos during ground fighting. Anyone not suited
would wind up deafened and concussed.

“Go!” Thomas doesn’t wait for the effect to pass. The
blasts have shattered and dislodged some of the remaining dome
panels, and debris is raining down on them. As she gets up, her
view shows Regev and Wasserman, both down and not moving. Another
two of her team—Park and Jenovic—are too badly hurt to get out
under their own power. MAI coldly tells her that Regev and
Wasserman have lost vital signs.

Bullets smack the dome overhead, punching holes in
the multilayer plexi shielding at random as the snipers make an
effort to distract.

“Lieutenant!” Masters shouts over the Link. “You need
to get back through that hatch before we can cover you!”

“Get out of there, Lieutenant!” I confirm, making her
decision only somewhat easier.

“I’ve got men down!!” she protests, breathless. The
wild people are beginning to advance again, to close in around
them. Thomas empties her ICW in one final sweep, then turns and
runs. She catches Jenovic under the arm and half-carries him for
the exit, Jenovic still popping with his pistol. Chen already has
Park through the hatch, the spear still stuck in his back.

As soon as they’re clear, Thomas lobs a pair of frag
grenades back through the hatch. The blasts throw dirt and mulch at
them. No one follows them out.

“Watch the dome, Lieutenant,” I prompt her, expecting
some kind of fire to follow them. “Get distance.”

Park has collapsed from shock. Chen can’t pull the
spear out of him without risking even worse hemorrhaging. The shaft
is metal—it won’t simply break off. She has to carry him as is.
Thomas has Jenovic limping on her arm as they back away from the
dome. Still, nothing follows them, nothing flies at them. Except
for the remaining red smoke rising up out of it, the dome looks
just as silent and deserted as it did as they approached it.

“Regev and Wasserman?” Thomas asks despite what MAI
has told her, her voice cut with rage.

“They’re gone, Lieutenant,” Ryder confirms heavily,
watching the flatlines on their feeds.

“Nothing you could do, Lieutenant,” I excuse her.

“Never leave a man behind,” she grumbles. And I’m
tempted to order the ASVs to blow the crap out of that place just
to recover our dead. Instead I watch Regev’s and Wasserman’s Link
feeds, and chew my lip as I see a brace of those wild things
descend on their bodies and start stripping them.

But then I hear a howl of warning, and the wild
things all scatter from sight. All except one: a male who looks all
of ten years old, big eyed, rotten teeth, filthy. He stays to try
to pry Wasserman’s magazines out of his belt.

I hear a single shot, and the boy’s head explodes in
close-up all over Wasserman’s Link camera.

“Who…?” Matthew starts. When MAI clarifies the image
in a few seconds, I can see another set of figures come into
view:

Three men. They walk upright, with cool grace. They
wear the black and gray light armor uniforms of corporate security,
clean and in pristine condition. They are well groomed and fit.
Their hair is cut military neat. They all wear enhanced goggles,
likely with heads-up imaging like our Link gear. They all carry
custom sport revolvers like Abbas, like the gunslinger.

Two of the men keep watch to each flank while the
third comes close to examine Wasserman’s body. I see his
thin-lipped mouth curl into an amused grin. He takes aim at the
camera array with his big pistol, and the feed goes dead. Regev’s
feed goes equally blank ten seconds later.

No one in Ops with me says anything. We just stare at
the dead feeds.

“Send the mission file to Earth as is,” I finally
order Kastl.

7 March, 2116:

“What was that call to Abbas all about?” Matthew
breaks the silence as he picks at the meal I brought him in his
rack. “Asking him what he was trading for food?”

“We fucked up,” I tell him numbly. “We thought about
the tactical. We didn’t consider the economic.”

He’s not feeling well today. Again. Halley gave him
orders to rest, keeping further details confidential. I could pry
using command privilege, needing to know for practical reasons
about the fitness of my second-in-command, but I don’t. I don’t
want to know, not yet—I don’t want a clinical label complete with a
terminal prognosis. But he looks drawn, pale. He hasn’t been
keeping up his spin-time—I’ve been checking the logs. And he’s been
spending more and more time in his quarters.

“You planning to clarify that?” he grumbles at me,
sipping at a glass of cold water, propped up by pillows while I sit
in his desk chair.

“The trade routes,” I try to make sense of my belated
revelation. “So dangerous only a small group dares it—no one else
who tries makes it back. I’d assumed what the Nomads bartered was
to re-supply the runners and make it worth their while. But,
economically speaking, what’s worth the risk, especially to do it
regularly? The runners obviously have all the food they could
possibly need for themselves; it struck me that trading Coprates
crops for the pickings of humanitarian drops just for the sake of
variety in your diet wasn’t worth that kind of effort or risk.”

“Unless you’re so sick of fresh produce that you’d
rather eat non-perishable rations,” he plays. His smile is heavy,
weary.

“So what’s worth them doing it?” I prod. “Weapons and
gear just supports the trips. It’s not a reason to keep going year
after year. I’d see it if you were willing to do it for the good of
your own tribe, but Abbas says the food runners are free agents. I
could also see it if they just supplied themselves and then brought
back a little extra to trade for whatever else they needed. But I
checked with Abbas: they carry back enough to feed his band,
Hassim’s and probably Farouk’s as well. And they get paid in
weapons more than anything else—more weapons than they could
possibly use. How do they profit?”

“Running the weapons to Tranquility,” Matthew makes
my conclusion. “Supplying those cavemen against the better-armed
security suits that seem to be hunting them.”

“That would take a lot of the risk out of the game:
The traders don’t take the food under fire; they buy it.”

“And probably have a deal to eliminate any potential
competitors,” Matthew takes it further. “Did you clue Abbas?”

“I figured I owed him some kind of explanation,” I
admit. “He said he’d been suspecting something similar since the
‘market’ shifted from food and gear to weapons and armor about a
decade ago. I doubt he’ll challenge things, though. The system
works for everyone. The Nomads trade salvage and scrap and the
sweat of their craftsmen for enough to eat for a whole tribe until
the next load...”

“And it feeds a war in a terrarium…” He tries not to
cough in front of me. Then changes the subject like he’s trying to
keep me distracted from his condition.

“At least trade implies the Tranquility faction can
be negotiated with.”

“Assuming you have something they want and approach
the deal carefully,” Matthew takes it. “Still no new marching
orders from Earthside?”

“Nothing since Richards confirmed receipt of the
mission file and expressed his professional regrets over Regev and
Wasserman. Satrapi called in a similar condolence, but at least she
sounded
like she was upset. Richards just sounded frustrated
in a way that reminded me of his grandpa, stuck passing down orders
he isn’t fully behind.”