Prologue
Sparrow stalled just inside the orbit of Deimos. A ghostly blue shockwave of Cherenkov radiation marked the ship’s fall from hyperspace. Mars lolled in front of her like a battered harvest moon, its pockmarked face bloodied by war. Sunlight caught on ragged burns in her skin, then flared on diamondoid viewports at her bow.
The little vessel could carry two, but the seat beside her pilot was empty. Commander John Gray considered it with a haggard gaze. His lover had cast her lot with the tharks. There was a line that could not be crossed even in war, she had said, and now it felt like his heart was being torn apart by that very line.
Another flash of Cherenkov radiation cast blue shadows across the flightdeck. Gray’s mouth tightened. The tharks had followed him after all. His only weapon was a standard Space Force cutlass. If it came to using that, odds were good he was a dead man and this whole desperate mission a failure.
“All right my little bird,” he said, “time to find out if you can handle atmosphere.”
Sparrow responded to his touch like a living thing, pitching around with a staccato burst of her vernier thrusters until her rocket engine faced forwards. Her turbopump spun up and the ammonia in her tanks boiled through the reactor core with a shriek, felt more than heard.
They decelerated onto a trajectory that would take them down into the atmosphere, and the ship spun back around of her own accord. The first faint traceries of incandescent plasma began to dance across her triangular viewports. Mighty Olympus rose in front of them and the ancient rust of the Tharsis highlands gave way to the brilliant white of fresh snow.
Plasma sheeted back from the bow like fire as they dropped deeper into the atmosphere, washing over the viewports until all Gray saw was a green inferno shot through with pink and deeper shades of red. The ship began to shudder.
Then the inferno that danced upon the capsule viewports flickered out. Three more volcanoes loomed in front of them like blunt teeth – Ascraeus, Pavonis, Arsia – all smaller than Olympus, but the ship was dropping fast. Sparrow made a lousy airplane; all drag and no lift. At this rate they were going to make another crater on the slopes of Pavonis.
“Let me help,” Gray said, taking the ship’s manual controls in hand.
Sparrow resisted his input. She had been trained in orbital and hyperspatial mechanics. She knew nothing of aerodynamics except what could be inferred from taking an integral of the hyperspatial equations.
Pavonis was dangerously close; he could see the space-elevator terminal at its summit.
“You need to trust me on this,” he said.
Sparrow relented, and none too soon. The trick was to make drag work for them. Turbulence buffeted them as they skidded into a shallow turn. Gray was afraid they would lose the outboard stabilizer, but she held together.
Then the ground fell away as they left the Tharsis plateau behind. And fell away again, as the plateau stepped down into the enormous chasm of Valles Marineris. Snowmelt formed silver ribbons of water. Ahead on the left was the cleft that led into Candor Chasma. That way led home, to sunlit rooms that looked out over iceboat races and skating parties. And to the squadron of Sturmoviks based at Thunderbird Falls that might still save him, if they only knew he needed to be saved. Which seemed unlikely now that Sparrow had descended below the level of the base’s radar sweeps.
The bottom of the canyon drew near. Gray pulled the ship’s nose up away from their line of descent. The buffeting increased until his vision blurred. They were almost vertical now. He throttled up the nuclear engine, giving Sparrow enough head to let her balance on the exhaust while he worked the problem of getting them down in one piece. Or at least alive; the ship did not have planetary-style amenities like landing gear, so ‘one piece’ was not on the list of possible outcomes. The best he could do was set them down on the stabilizers that tipped the aft spars.
The buffeting eased as their airspeed diminished. He backed the ship down, eyes darting between the view outside and the rapidly dropping propellant gauge. Dust billowed below them, tracking their motion across the floor of the canyon.
They settled down into the roiling cloud. Gray could no longer see the ground. Two of the aft stabilizers made contact. Their wrist joints sheared. Sparrow pitched over, spars buckling and hypervanes shattering. She screamed as the myriad sensors built into her spars tore free. She tried to twist away from the impact, but there was nothing she could do. She plowed head-first into the ground and slid to a shuddering stop.
“I’m sorry,” Gray said. There was no reply. The silence was broken by a crash of thunder. A wave of sand washed across the viewports. He took off his multifaceted flight helmet and retrieved his cutlass.
Outside, the sun was almost down. Its last rays caught the bow of the ship that had pursued him. It looked like a tetrist’s vision of a carpenter bee, a nightmare rendered in black carbon and stainless steel: six crystalline hypervanes, three landing legs, and nestled between them, a triad of thark soldiers.
Take a terrestrial leafcutter ant, atta cephalotes. Size it up a couple orders of magnitude. Replace chitin with ceramic armor, put high-carbon steel on the cutting surfaces, and endow it with intelligence. Make it indifferent to vacuum, needing only the warm glow of fissiles in its gut to stay alive, and you have the general idea of a thark soldier.
Gray hesitated. There was no way to spare his ship from what would come. Sparrow did not have an off switch any more than he did. She would live or she would die, and either way there would be pain and fear, and there was nothing he could do about it.
“I have to go, little bird,” he said. “I’ll do what I can to hold them off. Thank you for taking me this far.”
The tharks dropped from their niches. Gray loped away at a right angle to their approach, making them choose between him and Sparrow. The triad swung to follow him. His ship was not going anywhere, after all.
He set off for the nearest hill. How far would they follow him? How much time could he buy? The tharks increased their pace as he struggled up the hill. He gained the top only a few seconds ahead of them. He stood there, his ragged breath fogging the inside of his skinsuit’s facemask, his cutlass whining angrily as their leader crouched below him, just out of reach of its chainblade.
Then a pair of Mars Guard Sturmoviks roared overhead like avenging angels, the blue diamonds of their exhaust vivid in the failing light. The leading thark made a sound like a band saw and leapt up at him. Gray sprang to the side, slashing downwards with his cutlass. Sparks flew as its chainblade took an arm below the elbow. Two hundred kilograms of angry thark landed where he had been a moment before.
Gray charged the nearest of her followers. The thark lunged at him as if she meant to snatch him from his feet. He went low and jabbed the chainblade up into her thorax. The cutlass caught on ceramic armor and nearly seized. He shoved it in and rocked it viciously back and forth inside her.
A middle limb whipped sideways against his chest. He heard more than felt his ribs break. He jerked the cutlass out of the thark with a scream. She stumbled and fell, mortally wounded. Gray tried to catch his breath. His chest was on fire. He straightened up with an effort. His ribs grated with every move.
Geysers of dust erupted in straight line that marched up the hillside and bisected the trailing thark, which came apart in two untidy pieces wreathed in lightning. The Sturmoviks ripped overhead, banking to make a pass at the ship that had brought the tharks. It lifted off on a pillar of fire. Its rocket engine was deafening. Gray turned away from the blast of sand and small rocks, shielding his faceplate with his free hand.
The first thark was on him in a heartbeat. It felt like he’d been punched in the gut. His knees buckled but he did not fall. The thark’s forearm was inside him. A bubble of blood expanded from the juncture where it pierced his skinsuit, popped, and was followed by another.
She pulled her arm free. Electricity snapped where he had cut off her hand. He staggered, dropped to his knees. Blood welled up in his throat. He swallowed reflexively.
The thark seized him with her middle limbs and lifted him until they were face to face. She tore his facemask off with her good hand. A cold wind sucked the breath out of his lungs. Iconji flickered across her enormous eyes. The only thing he understood was the question mark in a yellow triangle. But what was the question?
He looked past her to the setting sun. It had been a long time since he had seen a sunset from the surface of a planet. He had forgotten how beautiful they were, how extravagant, how utterly indifferent to the lives of men and all their works.
A dark spot detached itself from the dazzling blue inferno and raced toward them, preceded by a line of dusty geysers. The thark dipped her head towards him. There was tremendous pressure around his neck as her mandibles closed. Then he rolled free and was laying on his side. He wondered for a moment why she had released him. He tried to get up but could not move. Nothing seemed to work but his eyes. Sunlight dopplered from blue to violet to something that was so brilliant he could see nothing more.