The God Mars Book Two: Lost Worlds (27 page)

No pictures of Mars. Not a single file.

“I love you, too.”

24 October, 2116:

“What the hell
is
that?”

Kastl tries to get better imaging from the surface
sentries, with MAI using radar and heat to enhance. But it’s still
dark with the sunrise only beginning to purple the eastern sky, and
the morning dust blow is heavy.

MAI manages to enhance the images of at least three
sizable aircraft, hovering less than fifty meters off the desert, a
klick west-northwest of the base perimeter. Their profiles become
quickly recognizable: Zodangan airships of the Dutchman class,
holding formation in an inverse triangle.

But then something else starts to show in the haze:
it looks like some kind of large, cross-shaped fixed wing aircraft,
larger than an AAV, with perhaps a thirty meter wingspan. As MAI
pieces the image together, this new ship seems to be kept aloft by
large rotors underneath each broad wing, and a pair of rotating
engine pods on the rear. The fuselage is wide and relatively flat,
giving the impression of a low-draft boat, and a few dozen warm,
human-shapes can be seen standing on its “deck.” And it hovers
surrounded by the three Zodangan airships.

“That looks a little too high tech to be a pirate
ship,” Metzger assesses from AirCom. “Shinkyo?”

“Your guess is as good as any,” I tell her.

“They used the dust to sneak in, minimal radar
profile,” Kastl explains. “They may have been hanging out there for
quite some time.”

“Just sitting?” Metzger criticizes. “The zeppelins
float, but that new hybrid craft must burn power staying up.”

“They’re within battery range,” Kastl lets me
know.

“I’m sure they know that,” I consider.

“We could send a flight to buzz them,” Metzger
suggests.

“I’ve got standing orders to avoid engagements,” I
remind her. “Still, prep our ASVs. Did Morales clear the Lancer
yet?”

“It’ll fly, sir,” I hear her cut in. “And it’ll
shoot. I can have it fueled and warm in twenty.”

“Get Captain Smith suited,” I order. “Then everybody
sits tight.”

“We’ve got another problem, Colonel,” Kastl tells me
almost immediately, sounding unsettled. He shows me the EM
signatures MAI has detected. “Discs. Lots of them.”

“Nothing on radar?”

“Signals seem to be clustered inside that new
bogie.”

We sit and wait. Anton rolls up to join us. Rick
comes in a few minutes behind him. Both look anxious, but Anton
looks pale. He’s anxiously kneading at his legs.

Nothing happens—the visiting airships just hover in
position—until the sun clears the valley rim.

The daylight reveals the new ship’s bright paint job:
black and red and yellow, like an exotic insect. The “crew”
standing on deck are all in some kind of black sealsuit and mask.
Closer zooms on the Zodangan airships show a similar uniformity of
dress in the crewmen manning the gun decks and flyer bays—no more
random wild pirate gear.

“What are
those
?” Metzger sees first,
indicating the new machines hanging from each airship where the
pirates’ primitive gliders once were: squat cylinders with short,
broad wings on struts that suggest the ancient comedy of a man
strapping two wings on his arms. A tail unit contains what looks
like a simple turbine and an “H”-shaped tail. Each fuselage appears
just barely big enough to hold one pilot.

“Someone’s been
very
busy,” Morales assesses
from her bays, sounding impressed.

“Is that consistent with what you’ve seen of Zodangan
tech?” I ask her.

“Definite negative, Colonel” she tells me. “They
tinker at an early twentieth century steam-punky level. I’ve never
seen anything like this, not even from the Shinkyo. There’s some
high-tech fabrication going on somewhere, and in production
quantity. And the guns…” She zooms in on one of the deceptively
simple hulls, showing where short, stout barrels protrude. “Those
look a
lot
like Disc guns. And here…” She zooms on the broad
wings of the large aircraft, showing us a somewhat larger version
of the familiar Disc turret mounted on each flank.

“Send this Earthside,” I order. “Best images you can
give them.”

“We’ve got another—Colonel, I’ve got no Link to the
Uplink,” Kastl returns within seconds, his voice edged with
frustration. “I’ve lost Link to Melas Three as well. We’re jammed.
We’ve got short-range only.”

“They don’t want us calling for help,” Rick
calculates uncomfortably, while Anton tries to punch a signal
through to anybody to no avail.

“Or they don’t want Earth to see this,” Metzger
offers.

Which also means I can’t clarify where my orders
stand.

“They’re just sitting there,” Anton says needlessly,
sounding impatient.

“Standing,” Kastl considers, zooming in on the crews
on the decks. “At attention. At station.”

“The pirates weren’t that disciplined before,” Rick
agrees.

“The pirates didn’t have Disc tech either,” Anton
almost snaps.

“Do they expect us to make a move?” Metzger asks.

“Not planning to,” I let them know. “Let’s see if
they blink first.”

We wait almost another half an hour. Then we get
visual confirmation of what MAI’s EM scans warned: A half-dozen
Discs drop out of the big flyer’s underbelly, hang in midair for a
few seconds, then fly straight for us.

“Firing solutions, Colonel,” Kastl offers.

“Hold fire,” I order, then watch the screens as the
Discs buzz the mostly buried bunkers in formation, clearing past
the landing bays, then turn and fly back. They do not fire. They
spread out and form an aerial perimeter, a line of pawns between us
and the big ships.

“My new friends told me you would impress, Colonel
Ram,” a voice comes over the Link, smooth and cultured and not at
all threatening. “Not that I didn’t expect you to live up to what
the histories say you were.”

MAI confirms an ID signature as coming from what
should be PK gear. I don’t reply.

“I assure you that you are very completely
out-gunned,” the voice comes back in a few moments. “But despite
what I have made happen, I do not actually wish to be a mass
murderer. On the contrary: I do this to
save
you. All of
you. Or as many of you as can be saved.” I hear the smoothness
crack just a bit at the end—a hint of stress. Regret, maybe. Or
madness. I’ve heard too many similar speeches from terrorists about
to commit atrocities. “The outcome is not inevitable. The future
can be rewritten, believe me:
I’ve done it
. Hear me out,
before you choose.”

“The signal origin just moved,” Anton announces.
“It’s…”

“I see it,” I tell him. There’s a single figure
standing just outside of our perimeter gate. Playback confirms no
trick of the eye: In one frame, empty space is suddenly
occupied.

The figure itself defies description even with the
best optics: It is man-shaped, but it’s a perfect silhouette, an
outline of a man filled with the purest black, absolutely
featureless.

“That doesn’t even look real,” Rick agrees.

“Some kind of high-tech digi-camo?” Kastl considers.
But not even the dust is sticking to it. It looks like someone cut
a hole out of space in the shape of a man, just standing there.

“Let’s get a closer look,” I order. “Small. H-A
squad. Bring him in through Airlock 2 if he’s willing.” Then I call
down to Medical and ask Doc Halley to ready an Isolation chamber
like we used when Paul first visited.

Captain Thomas gets the honors. Her armored suits
circle our un-seeable guest. Even on her helmet optics up-close,
there’s nothing to see, no detail, not from any angle, not even a
sense that he’s three-dimensional. He looks bald, and in profile
the lines of his face show no mask. He also looks like he may be
wearing a snug-fitting body suit, like a diver, though without
detail it’s hard to tell. But there are no obvious outlines of
weapons.

The shadow man doesn’t say a word, just gives Thomas
a polite little bow and gestures for her to lead him where she
will.

It’s no different in person, up-close through the
plexi of Iso One. He’s still a perfect silhouette, a hole cut in
reality, no matter how much light is shone on him.

“I can’t even get reading one to tell me he’s alive,”
Halley tells me aside. “No heat. No vitals. Sensor pad in the floor
says there’s a hundred and fifty-two pounds of
something
standing on that floor. But when I tried to reach in and get a
sample with a remote exam probe, the tip went right through him, no
resistance.”

I’ve brought Sakina with me, and I ask her the
obvious question:

“Have you ever seen or heard of anything like
this?”

She shakes her head, then seems to reconsider. “My
father. When he left us, he said he had learned of an old evil,”
she repeats what she told me once upon a time. “I think he called
it a shadow. I assumed he was speaking in metaphor.” Her eyes begin
to glare into the perfect darkness with the intensity of a
predator.

I turn and address the man that is and isn’t
there.

“What do I call you?” I begin, stepping up to the
plexi wall between us.

“If I still have any name, it is Syan Chang, though I
am not truly, not anymore.” His voice is still smooth, but his
sentences have a lost, rambling quality. Looking beyond the
impressive visual effect, the outline reminds me of a dancer in a
leotard: lean, muscular build. Even his posture, the way he carries
himself, is essentially casual and unthreatening. Relaxed. Even
lazy.

“You said you’d heard about me,” I ignore the riddle
of his introduction, hoping for some kind of clarity.

“From the Captain Bly. From the Colonel Janeway.” He
says it like he’s thinking of something vaguely amusing. “I needed
current intelligence. They were quite happy to tell tales,
considering my generous gifts.” He steps closer to me, and I
suddenly feel like I’m staring down into a bottomless pit when I
look where his face should be. The edges that define him are
incredibly sharp, even close up.

“You’ve made some kind of alliance with them?” I ask
him to clarify what seems apparent from the gathered forces
hovering just beyond our perimeter.

“They are still pure,” the black hole—Chang—tells me
earnestly, “and willing to aid my cause. I offer them strength and
purpose—
my
strength and purpose. The Zodanga are already
using what I’ve given them to construct more of the simple but
effective ships you see in the sky beyond your base. Very soon,
they will be more powerful than your UNMAC ever was in its heyday,
before my drones—what you succinctly call ‘Discs’—drove them away
home. And the Peacekeepers, they serve me for their own protection,
to be strong to keep their homes theirs, because they fear you, and
because they fear the contaminated.”

“’The contaminated’?” I have to ask, keeping my
patience.

“Those that have given up their humanity, infected
themselves, to be something they should not be.”

“The ETE,” I assume.

“And others. But yes, they are the primary threat to
us. To all of us.”

“And what about us?” I probe. “UNMAC. This base. My
people.”

“I know you,” he changes the subject after a moment’s
hesitation. He steps back, leans casually against the exam table
like this is a conversation among friends. “Well, a later you that
probably no longer exists and never will. But then my allies told
me that you were
here
, earlier you, old man you, in this
time, the victim or beneficiary of some hibernation mishap. You can
only imagine my joy, to find someone even remotely familiar in this
timeline, even though we were not friends. But I knew you,
Destroyer. Not well, though. And not yet—perhaps never, in this
now. But I can already see a lot of what I knew—not the god, but
the man underneath the mask of the god—now that we talk here
together. And I always respected you, no matter who you stood with.
You inspired me, you see, at least partially. I think we value the
same things… valued… will value… Anyway: It’s actually quite novel
to see the
man
you were before you became the god I
knew.”

I’m not sure if he’s trying to misdirect me,
manipulate with bizarre flattery, or just rambling nonsense.

“You called me ‘Destroyer.’” I pick out.

“A juvenile epithet, don’t you agree?” he says like
he needs to apologize for saying it. “But that’s what you were and
what you will not be, not now. Or at least that’s how others knew
you. Would have known you.”

“You seem to have an issue with verb tense,” I pick.
His head tilts, as if he’s thinking. He is truly unreadable, with
no face or eyes, but by habit I keep trying to read him, which only
brings on a sense of vertigo. So I stop looking directly at him.
Now he’s more like a shadow on the periphery of my vision. I
suddenly remember a scene from
Peter Pan,
featuring a
runaway shadow.

“Your studies of my drones, according to your own
transmissions, revealed that you’ve considered the possibility of
sub-atomic reverse-causality, even though you do not understand it.
But then, nor do I, certainly not as fully as I should having used
it. Time-Splicing is a technology I was forced to
steal
,
because there was no other way left to me, and I was out of time,
at least in the conventional sense. I tried everything to reverse
the damage we had done to ourselves, to stop what was upon us, but
I failed. I failed and I became what I am in that failure, which is
what you see now before you and will never see. So I seeded
myself—or at least a facsimile of myself—and what I needed to save
us all, back across time.”

Seeding. Paul had used that word to describe how the
Discs could have self-manufactured from a molecular start. Or how
matter could be manipulated backwards through time.