The God Mars Book Two: Lost Worlds (39 page)

“And it’s
huge
,” Dodds mirrors Paul’s concern.
“They could have built a whole colony with the minerals
extracted.”

“Or a fleet of those new ships,” I calculate
darkly.

“No,” Paul corrects. “We analyzed that ship Chang
built. It was surprisingly economical regarding materials. Much of
it appeared recycled, not fresh-mined.”

“Recycled out of what?” I ask for what Earthside
hasn’t been able (or willing) to tell us after we sent them
detailed scans of the wreck.

“Most of it looked like old colony metals.”

“I thought most of the abandoned structures had been
stripped long ago?”

“From the junkyard on the canyon floor, it appears
they may have been stockpiling,” Sakura surmises.

“Then why all the mining?” Dodds follows my
concern.

“What did they have to build in such a dangerous
rush?” Carter asks the next question.

“There is still no sign of habitation,” Sakura
reports.

“Perhaps they decided to relocate, strip the site for
whatever they could,” Paul considers.

“We need to take a closer look,” I decide.

We drop close to the western canyon rim and pick up
Sakura’s scouts, then carefully descend through the cable nets. I
remind the ETE to consider the likelihood that the Zodangans may
have booby-trapped their apparently abandoned facilities, or maybe
the entire canyon, expecting us sooner or later. This is a deep,
steep hole to get ambushed in.

The ETE “crew” scans intently as we slowly ease
towards what look like the most sizeable docks. Our maps steadily
become more detailed: The facilities appear to burrow deep into the
cliffs. Smaller branches and peripheral caves look like they may
have been set up for habitation, families. But the biggest caverns
could fit one of those new ships, or at least large components of
their frigate dirigibles.

This facility is much larger than the original
pre-Apocalypse colony that had been built into the Melas Rim. It
looks more like a civilization (and one of some age) rather than
the speculative startup of a brain trust of hotshot engineers that
scraped together enough backing to come to Mars in hopes of
creating a new industry of local-made transportation and gear for
the booming corporate-driven colonization.

(As I recall, the name for their endeavor was a
“second choice”: Another investment group had already legally taken
the name “Helium”, after the protagonist city-state from Edgar Rice
Burroughs’ classic
John Carter of Mars
novels. “Zodanga” was
the name of a competing city-state—the “bad guys” in some of the
books—and that came to appeal more than their original choice.
Besides, Zodanga sounded cooler than Helium.)

The best view—again—is through the new view bubbles.
The Zodangan stronghold looks both old and well lived in. It must
have taken them decades to cut this, even with heavy mining and
construction equipment. But the caves themselves are all dark, and
what we can see of them looks like they were stripped in a
hurry.

“No sign of explosives, unless they’re well masked,”
Carter announces (and I’m sure the ETE have invested themselves in
detecting such things thanks to their misadventures with the
Shinkyo). “Traces of solid rocket fuel all over the larger bays.
Nothing left in obvious quantity.”

“Set down?” Paul looks to see if I’m game. I nod.

“Land on one of the big docks,” Paul tells his
people, even though the caverns could easily accommodate it. “Let’s
keep the ship out of the cave hangars. I don’t want to risk a roof
coming down on it. And keep the lifters live in case the dock is
rigged to drop out from under us.”

The Lancer barely jolts as it settles onto what looks
like the main dock, which connects to the largest central manmade
cavern, which is big enough to possibly “dry dock” one of their
frigates (assuming all the masts were taken down first). Scaffolds
and rigging across the cavern ceiling seems to support its use for
working on something dirigible-sized. The cavern branches into
almost a dozen smaller tunnels, some of which look like they go
well back into the cliff.

Sakura’s two “scout” shinobi are out of the airlock
as soon as it opens, taking the large open “hangar” cave we’re
docked outside at a low, animal-like run, splitting and clinging to
opposite walls.

Paul and Rhiannon are out next, holding position like
statues between the cave and the ship while Horst’s squad deploys
into formation.

Sakura moves to the lock next, her large bodyguard
right behind her.

“You would be safer in the ship, Lady Hatsumi,” I try
to halt her, “at least until we can be sure the site is
secure.”

“Are
you
so content to wait here and miss this
experience?” she challenges lightly.

I gesture for her to go before me.

Even through my mask, the Zodangan caves smell stale,
musty, almost like the makeshift prisons where we’ve kept captured
pirates. But there’s also the smell of metal, fuel, machinery.

It was probably worse when the caves were closed.
Answering the question of how they lived and worked in the low
atmospheric pressure, we see signs of old sealing material and the
telltale grooves and bolt-holes that say, until recently, each
section of these caverns, including the big hangar-sized openings,
had some kind of light makeshift airlock, probably the fabric type
usually common to emergency shelters. They could have pressurized
the big spaces while they worked on their ships, then sealed the
smaller sections whenever they had to open the hangar “doors”. But
it’s all been stripped.

“Waste not, want not,” I hear Rhiannon mutter, her
boot kicking at the cut in the stone deck, gunked with old sealant,
where one of these “airlocks” used to be.

There are tubes—probably for feeding and removing
precious oxygen from different work spaces—bored through the rock
near most of the connecting tunnels, but any gas lines they held
are also gone.

The floors are littered with random debris. Broken
machines and tools have been left behind. Empty crates. Pieces of
pressure suits and environmental gear—some obviously marked with
pirate art—all well beyond usefulness. Even the working scaffolding
looks like it had been much more extensive, that they’d taken
everything they could manage.

“Only junk left,” Horst comments. “It looks like they
packed up and left in a hurry.”

“Left to go where?” Rhiannon wonders in her
helmet.

“We’ve been keeping an eye on the Rim,” Paul
explains. “We haven’t seen more than the random frigate. And
nothing since they attacked you. There’s no other way out of this
canyon.”

“Except the way we came,” I look up at the sky
through the thin cable net.

“Their dirigibles couldn’t fly up there,” Paul
argues.

“That new ship might,” I counter. “Assuming they did
build more.”

“Or something newer,” Rhiannon follows, then
considers: “That ship that hit you wasn’t big enough to carry what
they probably took out of here.”

“Something weird here,” Horst calls on the Link. Some
of his men have found the Zodangan version of cave art, though
possibly more functional: Some of the big cut-stone hangar walls
have been decorated with fairly detailed illustrations of their
ships. The older-looking drawings are sail-dirigibles, powered
gliders. But some fresher work includes drawings of the new ship
Chang designed for them.

“That’s not good,” Horst points out what I hope is a
fantasy scene (or maybe a long-term plan): it shows a formation of
sailing frigates led by
three
of the new ships.

“Then this is worse,” Baker, one of Horst’s troopers,
calls us to another drawing. It has a similar shape to Chang’s
flagship, but in this illustration, it seems to dwarf the frigates
portrayed flying with it. It’s hard to tell, because it looks like
someone took a sandblaster to it, tried to erase it, but didn’t get
the time to finish.

“Something newer?” Rhiannon repeats her concern.

“Hopefully it’s still on the drawing board,” I try,
though not terribly hopeful.

“It would explain all the mining,” Rhiannon goes
worst-fear.

“No,” Paul denies. “We would have seen something like
this.”

“Not if it they took it out over the Planum,” Sakura
joins the debate, her big bodyguard standing close behind her. (Her
scouts have disconcertingly vanished from easy sight.)

“Then why haven’t they attacked again?” Paul doesn’t
buy.

“Maybe they aren’t ready,” I let myself admit what
I’m also fearing. “Maybe what they’re building isn’t ready. But
they wanted to move it knowing we’d try to stop them.”

“Where would they go?” Sakura asks the next critical
question.

“Somewhere we haven’t been watching,” Paul allows
heavily. “Candor. Ophir. Tithonium. Ius.”

“They’d be living and working in near-vacuum…”
Rhiannon starts to discount. And get’s interrupted when the caverns
echo with a laugh that sounds like a bad Halloween effect: a
barely-human cackle. And then an amplified voice:

“
Ya dead cold an’ shit stupid
...”

Female. Childlike. Or insane. But I know the voice.
(And so does Sakina, who immediately steps in front of me.)

“…
an’ late…I been waitin’ a week… Glad ya foun’
yer way…”

“Nina Harper!” I call out into the caverns, stepping
into the middle of the big hangar, Paul and Rhiannon keeping close
while Horst points his guns into the shadows down the branching
tunnels.

More laughing, like I’ve said something really funny.
Then, clearer, calmer:

“Glad ya ‘member a girl, Cap’n Colonel Ghost… Only I
ain’ Nina Harper, or even
girl
anymore thanks tah ya n’
yers… Time ya get yer favors repaid…”

And I do remember: Harper was Bly’s chief gunner, and
apparently his mate. I also remember slicing her hand off when she
tried to shoot me in the face, right before Sakina kicked the crap
out of her and left her standing at zero for one of her own cannon
barrages. The last we saw, Bly was dragging what was left of her
back toward his damaged ship, just as the ETE declared there would
be no more shooting under their benign supervision.

My goggle HUD goes live as Horst shouts:

“Incoming!”

I hear popping and whirring that I realize is a

“Grenade launcher!”

Sakina knocks me to the deck as what look like 40mm
grenades fly over my head at the ship. The blasts get absorbed by
whatever shield the ETE throw up around it.

“Ya can protect yer shiny dick of a ship, but can ya
take my dish on yerselves?”

A grenade blows inside a field not three meters in
front of my face as I try to get up. I realize Paul has thrown up
protection around me. But then I see Rhiannon—trying to advance
into the deeper caves with a Sphere for a shield and a Rod for a
weapon—slammed back off her feet like she was hit by a truck. A
second and third grenade fired in quick succession kicks her back
further, out of the hangar onto the big dock. A fourth blows the
dock out from under her before she can get up, and I see her
struggle to keep from falling through the hole, losing both of her
tools in the process.

“
Tetsu!
” Sakura shouts, and her big bodyguard
gets in front of her. (I realize Paul has either inadvertently or
purposefully failed to shield her.) I watch her eye Rhiannon’s lost
Sphere as it rolls across the stone hangar floor, but then more
explosions distract her.

“Fan out! Get cover!” Horst is barking orders to his
troopers. “Fire for effect!”

I see one of our H-A suits slam the deck as a grenade
blows just behind him. Another is already down, two more suits
rushing to drag him to cover out of the hangar. I try to calculate
the kill radius of whatever Harper is popping at us. We still can’t
see her, and the grenades keep coming at us from different parts of
the cave network—she’s mobile.

“Flares!” I remind Horst to light up his target.

It takes the troopers three seconds to load flare
rounds into their own grenade launchers. Blazing self-oxidizing
magnesium flies into the shadows. I think I see something moving
back there, maybe seventy-five meters into the cliffs, popping at
us from different tunnels (they must be interconnected deeper in).
But it doesn’t move like a person. It…
bounces
…

Horst’s people are shouting directions, trying to get
a shot. They start popping random bursts back at whatever is
bombarding us, throw back a few grenades of their own, lighting up
the maze of Zodangan caves, only to fill them with smoke and
dust.

“I can’t see her!” Horst complains. “Not even on
heat/sound or motion detection!”

He’s right: MAI’s showing me nothing but empty caves
on my visor, and then the random warning of more incoming.

Sakura is crouched down behind her big bodyguard,
still out in the open. I think I hear her whisper commands into her
dedicated link, and she suddenly dashes sideways as her human
shield takes off running toward where the grenades are coming from.
A grenade flies past her head and blows against the Lancer’s
shields, and I realize she’s running to get herself behind the
personal field Paul has put around me.

“Fire discipline! Don’t hit our own!” Horst warns,
watching Sakura’s “Tetsu” run right into the line of fire like
we’re not even here. And I don’t know where her other two shinobi
went.

Or Sakina. She’s gone, too.

Rhiannon has crawled out of her hole, and gets
another Sphere out just in time to block a grenade, but it almost
collapses the deck she’s clinging to. She rolls, draws a Rod, and
uses it to propel her across the deck like some kind of torpedo,
trying to get herself between Harper and Horst. Behind us, three of
the other ETE—Orange, Purple and Yellow—literally fly out of the
Lancer’s upper airlocks and throw themselves between the
“vulnerable” and Harper.