‘Poseidon’s children,’ he repeated. ‘Is that supposed to mean something?’
‘We came through. That’s all. We weathered the absolute worst that history could throw at us, and we thrived. Now it’s time to start doing something useful with our lives.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Sunday’s boots crunched into Tharsis dust. This, she was startled to realise, was the first time that she had actually set foot on Martian soil. The strip of plasticised ground in the arrivals terminal hadn’t counted, nor the spidering walkway in Crommelin. She was outside now, hundreds of kilometres from anything that might even loosely be termed civilisation. Between her body and the dust and rock of this vastly ancient planet lay only the thinnest membrane of air and alloy and plastic. She was a cosy little fiefdom of warmth and life, enclaved by dominions of cold and death.
She was accustomed to wearing a suit, accustomed to being outside in the Moon’s vacuum and extremes of temperature. Mars was different, though. It lulled with its very familiarity. It didn’t look airless, or even particularly antipathetic to life. She had spent enough time on Earth to recognise the handiwork of rain and weathering. The sky wasn’t black, it was the pale pink of a summer’s twilight. There were clouds and corkscrewing dust-devils. The ground, its temperature and texture transmitted through the soles of her boots, did not feel unwelcoming. She felt as if she could slip the boots off and pad barefoot through the dust, as if on a beach.
This was how Mars murdered, with an assassin’s stealth and cunning. People came from Earth or elsewhere with the best of intentions. They knew that the environment was lethal, that only suits and walls would protect them. Yet time and again, men and women were found outside, dead, half-out of their suits. They weren’t mad, exactly, and most of them had not been suicidal. But something in the landscape’s familiarity had worked its fatal way into their brains, whispering reassurance, even friendliness. Trust me. I look welcoming, because I am. Take off that silly armour. You don’t need it here.
This was not the Mars that Eunice had first set foot on a hundred years earlier, Sunday reminded herself. She might be a long way from Vishniac, and Vishniac might be a long way from the nearest city, but, crucially, there were cities. There’d been none in Eunice’s time. No trains, no space elevator, no infrastructure.
If Sunday’s suit failed now, which was about as mathematically probable as her being hit by a falling meteorite, Dorcas and her crew were close at hand. And if Dorcas and her crew ran into trouble, help would arrive from other Overfloaters soon enough. Vishniac could send an airship or plane, and by bullet train nowhere on Mars was more than a day from Vishniac. She was plugged into a planetary life-support system no less capable than the one clamped onto her back.
Sunday’s courage wasn’t lacking; she did not need anyone to tell her that. But it was a different order of courage that had brought Eunice to this world, one that had no currency on this prosperous and confident new Mars, with its casinos and hotels and rental firms. Even here, in the Evolvarium, the risk to which Sunday exposed herself was measured, quantifiable – and if she didn’t like it, she could leave easily enough. And in the worst of scenarios, it would not be Mars that killed her. It would be the things people had brought to Mars, and set amok.
‘We start here,’ Gribelin said, nudging the drill into place. ‘If we’re off, it’s not by more than a couple of centimetres, and we should be able to refine our bore once we get closer.’
‘How long?’ Sunday asked.
‘To chew down?’ He shrugged through the tight-fitting armour of his surface suit. ‘Two, three hours, if it was solid Tharsis lava. But it’s not. It’s been shattered and poured back into the shaft, so progress’ll be a lot easier. Shouldn’t take us much more than an hour.’
The Overfloaters had lowered his truck back down from their ship, depositing it gently a few metres from the drill site. The truck had deployed bracing legs, and then Gribelin had swung a vertical drill out from the rear of the cargo bed, directing the heavy equipment into place with gestures, voked commands and the occasional shove from his shoulder. The drill was greasy with low-temperature lubricant and anti-dust caulk. He guided the bit into position, allowed it to rotate slowly as it chewed through the top layer of dust and reached rock. Then it began to spin faster, a tawny plume of digested rock arcing out from the top of it. Sunday could feel its grinding labours through the soles of her boots.
‘See now why we held off until sun-up?’ Dorcas said, angling her head back to track the plume’s trajectory, making sure it went nowhere near her precious airship. ‘Machines hunt with vibrations. Would’ve been a very bad idea to be sat here at night, practically inviting them to come and take a closer look.’
Sunday nodded: she could see the prudence in that, but she could also see the sense in being done with this as quickly as possible. The drill was already making tangible progress, its cutting head a hand’s depth into the solidified lava.
There were five of them in suits: Gribelin, Jitendra and Sunday, Dorcas and one of her senior crew, another Martian woman who Sunday had gathered was called Sibyl. The Overfloaters had their own suits, very sleek and modern, with Neolithic and Australian aboriginal animal designs embossed on them in luminous holographic inks. Jitendra and Sunday made do with the units Gribelin carried on his truck for emergency use. They were clunkier, with stiffer articulation and no fancy ornamentation, but they worked well enough, and there was sufficient comms functionality to facilitate a sparse local aug. Tags identified the other suited figures, and a simplified version of the tactical map hovered in Sunday’s upper visual field, ready to swell and assume centrality when she needed it. There had been no significant alterations to the map during the night, but in the morning the Overfloaters had acquired intelligence from their fellow brokers, and the positions of the Evolvarium’s chief protagonists had been updated.
There were shifting networks of rivalry and cooperation, favour and obligation. It wasn’t transparently clear that all this intelligence was reliable, but Dorcas was used to applying her own confidence filters. Her high-value allies had reported that the golem was on the move again, heading their way after spending the night immobile. ‘But it’s taking a big chance,’ Dorcas had explained, while they were suiting up.
‘Aren’t we all?’ Sunday asked.
Dorcas tapped a version of the map. ‘Two C-class collectors moved into this sector since we passed through. A pair of hammerheads. Not the worst, but bad enough. If your golem carries on, it’ll pass within two or three kays of their present positions.’
It’s not my golem, Sunday thought sourly. ‘Is that going to be a problem for him . . . I mean, it?’
Dorcas nodded sagely. ‘He won’t automatically be ambushed, not in daylight. But then again one or both of the hammerheads may decide to have a go at him, if it thinks the likelihood of reprisal is small. Which it would be – the golem’s not even a warmblood – but the hammerheads probably don’t know that.’
‘Probably?’
‘Don’t put anything past these things. Sniffing comms traffic, distinguishing between a human pilot and a chinged proxy – that’s within their cognitive bound, just as it’s within ours.’
Sunday brushed a gauntleted finger against the largest icon on the map. ‘The Aggregate?’
‘Yes,’ Dorcas said.
‘Maybe it’s me, but it looks closer than it did yesterday.’
‘It’s covered some ground overnight. It probably doesn’t mean anything.’
‘Probably,’ Sunday echoed once more.
‘It can’t know what we’re doing here,’ Dorcas said. ‘It can’t know, and even if it did, it wouldn’t be interested. I told you, it’s like a city-state. We’re nothing to it.’
Sunday watched the drill bite deeper, its progress plain to the naked eye – it had reached at least a metre into the ground, perhaps more. That there was something down there was now beyond doubt. The radar and seismic profiles had improved
since Dorcas’s first detection, and now revealed what appeared to be a purposefully buried box, not so very different in size and proportions from the container Chama had uncovered on the Moon. A rectangular shaft must have been excavated, the box lowered into it lengthwise and the waste material dropped back over it, before being tamped down. With better equipment, they might even have been able to peer inside the box without bringing it to the surface. Not that it mattered: they’d have the thing in their hands before very long. Gribelin was digging a circular shaft slightly wider than the original bore, and he would stop short of the item itself, for fear of damaging it or triggering some destruct mechanism or booby trap. To be sure, they would send in the proxy Gribelin carried attached to the front of his vehicle.
‘When do we hit it?’ she asked.
Gribelin stared at the drill for a long while before answering. ‘Sixty, seventy minutes.’
‘When I asked you before, you said it wouldn’t take more than an hour.’
‘I said it wouldn’t take much more,’ he snapped back at her.
‘Golem’s fifty kays out,’ Dorcas said levelly. ‘If the hammerheads are going to do anything, we’ll know about it soon enough. Maybe luck’s on your golem’s side.’
‘If we didn’t have to drill here, maybe we could drive out and meet the golem halfway,’ Jitendra said, stamping his feet nervously, as if the cold was starting to reach him through the insulation of his suit.
‘And then what?’ Dorcas asked. ‘Use reasoned persuasion?’
‘I was thinking more along the lines of a reasoned kick in the teeth.’
‘There’s no Mech to stop you, but you’d still be in a world of trouble once news got back to the Surveilled World. And we don’t know that the golem doesn’t have a human or warmblood guide with it.’ Dorcas nodded at the whirring drill. ‘We’ll see this through to the bitter end. It’s not as if it’s likely to be anything worth fighting over.’
‘You still don’t believe we’ll find anything,’ Sunday said.
‘If that box has been down there for a hundred years,’ Dorcas said, ‘then everything I know about the Evolvarium is wrong. And I’m afraid that’s just not the way my world works.’
‘Much as it pains me to agree with the good captain,’ Gribelin said, ‘she does have a point.’
There had been days that seemed to pass more rapidly than that hour. Watching the drill was like watching a kettle. Eventually Sunday gave up and walked away from the site, as far as she dared. Even when she was two hundred metres from the truck, she could still feel the vibrations from Gribelin’s equipment. Other than the rock plume, the sky was clear and cloudless, darkening almost to a subtle purple-black at the zenith. Pavonis Mons was a gentle bulge on the horizon – underwhelming, or would have been were she naive enough to have expected anything more spectacular. She was already on its footslopes. The mountains of Mars were simply too big to see in one go, unless one was in space.
Give her Kilimanjaro any day. At least that was a mountain you could point to.
The vibration stopped. She looked back just in time to see the plume attenuate, the last part of it bannering through the sky like a kite’s tail. She watched Gribelin push the drill back out of the way, nothing in his unhurried movements suggesting that there’d been a fault with the machinery.
She walked back to the drill site. By the time she got there, Jitendra and Dorcas were leaning at the edge of the fresh hole, hands on knees as they peered into its depths.
‘The good news,’ Dorcas said, ‘is that one of the hammerheads took the bait.’
‘And?’
‘It wasn’t a clean kill. The vehicle is still approaching, although not as quickly as before. But it’s damaged, and the other hammerhead may be taking an interest.’
‘Will there be repercussions?’
‘Reprisals? Probably not. Your golem resumed movement before sun-up, which is asking for trouble in anyone’s book.’
‘I hope no one else was hurt.’
‘Their fault if they were,’ Dorcas said.
Sunday took care as she neared the freshly dug hole. It was only about sixty centimetres across, but easily wide enough to become wedged in if she lost her footing.
‘About this much to go,’ Gribelin said, spreading his hands the width of a football. ‘We’ll back off and let the proxy dig out the rest.’
‘Sifters,’ Sibyl said, pointing to two pink plumes on the horizon, sailing slowly from left to right like the smoke from an Old-World ocean liner. ‘We’d best not hang around.’
The truck and the airship backed off a couple of hundred metres. Gribelin’s robot had detached itself from the prow of his vehicle and was now striding across the open terrain. Gribelin had gone into ching bind, otherwise immobile as he drove the proxy to the edge of the hole. It was the same kind of skeletal, minimalist unit that Sunday had chinged on the Moon, constructed from numerous tubes and pistons. It squeezed into the hole effortlessly, folding itself into a tight little knot like a dried-up spider, and vanished down the shaft. A few moments later, gobbets of rubble began to pop out of the opening. If there’s a booby trap, Sunday thought, we’d best all pray it isn’t nuclear.
But after a few minutes’ further excavation, the proxy had unearthed the box. Deeming it to be safe, at least for the moment, Sunday returned to the shaft and looked down. The proxy had extricated itself, allowing her a clear view of the object. About two-thirds of the upright container had been exposed, revealing it to be of dull, anonymous-looking construction. The size of a picnic hamper, the grey alloy casing was scratched and slightly dented. Sunday made out the seam of a lid, and what appeared to be a pair of simple catches in the long side.
She nodded at Gribelin. ‘Bring it all the way out.’
They retreated again and waited for the proxy to haul the box from the shaft and deposit it on the ground lengthwise, with the lid facing the sky. In all the red emptiness of Mars, it looked like something painted by Salvador Dali: a tombstone in a desert, maybe.
Sunday was the first to reach it. She sent the proxy away, not willing to let anyone else open the lid now that she had come this far. Different on the Moon, when Chama had been the one who had that privilege. Then, she’d barely known what she was getting involved with. Now it was as personal as anything in her universe.
Sunday knelt next to the box. Jitendra was behind her, but the others were still keeping their distance. Let them, she thought as she worked her gloved fingers under the catches and applied pressure. They flipped open obligingly, and Sunday had her first real inkling of disquiet. She’d never been entirely persuaded by Dorcas’s argument that a box could not have been under the surface all this time and not be found by the machines. But catches that had been snapped shut sixty or more years ago and then exposed to six decades of Martian cold ought to feel tighter than these.
The lid swung open just as easily. It was only then that Sunday realised she should have considered the possibility that the box had been packed and sealed under normal pressure conditions rather than in the thin air on the face of Mars.
Too late . . . But no: it either hadn’t been pressure-sealed, or the air had leaked away over the decades.
She looked inside. The box contained another box: a lacquered black receptacle with a flower pattern worked into its lid. There was just enough room around the outside of the smaller box to get her fingers in. She reached for it.
And felt something touch the back of her head.
‘It’s not a weapon,’ Dorcas said. ‘We need to be clear about that. I am not holding a weapon against your helmet. I would never do that. What I am doing is holding a non-weapon, a tool, a normal part of our equipment, in such a way that harm could conceivably come to you if I were careless. Which I won’t be, provided you do nothing that might . . . distract me.’
Sunday was surprised by how calm her own voice sounded. ‘What would you like me to do, Dorcas?’
‘I’d like you to let go of that box, the s
maller one, and step away from the big box. I’m right behind you, and I’m going to stay right behind you.’
Sunday removed her fingers from the gap between the boxes. She’d budged the small box just enough to feel that it was light, if not empty.
‘I don’t understand what’s going on,’ she said, standing and moving away from the box as she’d been told to. ‘Other than the fact that it feels criminal.’
‘Not at all,’ Dorcas said. ‘Quite the opposite, really. I’m intervening to prevent the execution of a criminal act. In the absence of an effective Mechanism, I’m obliged to do so. Now kneel again.’
‘If there was a Mechanism,’ Sunday answered, lowering down as she’d been ordered, ‘I doubt very much whether you’d be holding something against the back of my helmet.’
‘That’s as may be. But as I said, what we’re trying to do here is stop a crime, not create one.’
‘The crime being . . . ?’
‘The removal of artefacts from the Evolvarium without the necessary authorisation. I’m afraid everything here that isn’t geology belongs to the Overfloater Consortium. You should have realised that before you came blundering in.’
From her kneeling position Sunday looked around slowly, careful not make any sudden movements. She had walked perhaps twenty paces from the big box when Dorcas ordered her to kneel again. The woman was still behind her. Sibyl, the other Overfloater, was holding a kind of pneumatic drill, double-gripped like a gangster-era machine gun. It was heavy and green and wrapped in a gristle of cabling. Gribelin and Jitendra were kneeling on the ground before her, their hands raised as high as their suit articulation allowed.