Chapter One
When your suit red lines on three indicators you stop whatever you are doing and run for the nearest airlock. Jude Harrison knew that as well as anyone – so she didn't need Sam squeaking it through her earpiece.
"… elbow joint now, Jude. None of them critical, but you got the three. It's going to take you at least fifteen minutes to get out of there and back to the truck–"
"Christ, Sam. The construction records have been spot on so far, and I'm so close!"
She didn't listen as he answered. She was crouching, helmet beam full-on, and peering ahead. It was hard to remember that outside it was bright midday when you had been crawling under the rubble for over an hour clearing the last obstructions. Over an hour to finish the job, but about a month to get this far, digging, cutting, even some delicate blasting. It took one last push and suddenly she was in a space almost big enough to stand in, created as a girder had jammed at an angle halting the roof fall. There, where she had expected it, was a service hatch set into the floor of what had once been the biggest hydroponics control centre on Mars. The hatch looked almost unscratched.
"Jude? Jude? Oh hell, Jude, answer me? I'm still getting vitals from the suit telemetry… you there? Shit… coms failure… Jude? Can you–"
"Sam, just shut the fuck up. You'd wake the dead. I'm there."
There was silence at last, blessed static cracked silence whilst she got close to the hatch and ran her gauntlet-hands around its rim, brushing sand from out of its twin locking sockets.
"You can actually see the hatch?"
As she inched forwards something opposite her, something that she had taken for a slump of rubble, came within the shifting pool of light from her helmet beam. It was a body sitting against the wall. Its head was turned so that the blank eye sockets were looking straight out at her, desiccated skin stretched like shreds of leather over the skull. There was still enough dry flesh in place to hold the bones together, to give human shape to the grey overall it still wore, and like most of the dead it had a name tag – Lauren Pascal. Had she been young, friendly, full of life? Had she panicked about her children in a creche somewhere as the end came? Had she, like Jude, been just a bit too old, seen a bit too much, to not quite care as much as she should when she realised the world was falling apart? Had she been none of those things?
"Jude? You there, Jude?"
She broke gaze with the skull – the air was too still and there would be no ghosts today, but that didn't stop you conjuring up your own. "Yes, of course, I'm still here. The hatch is undamaged, and the construction records, bless them, were right about the key gauges as well as everything else. Would you believe I have exactly the right tool to open it?" She reached into the ridged thigh pocket gaping on the right-hand leg of her suit, pulled out a set of locking tools, and started slowly running them through her oversized guantlet-fingers.
"Jude, your suit telemetry…"
There was a boot connector issue, but there was no depressurisation risk. There was something wrong with the left air filter, but there always had been. Then there was the elbow joint, right arm. She grinned to herself, as, with a savage twist, she crashed her arm hard against the 'crete wall beside her. Pain shot up into her shoulder, dust trickled down from above glinting in the beam-light, and the ancient corpse opposite twitched slightly, but the red line sank back into orange.
"Happy, Sam?"
He didn't answer, uncharacteristically for him, but Jude took that as a positive, engaged the tool on the first hatch lock, and turned. The mechanism grated a little, but with just a bit of pressure, it clicked into the open position.
"First lock down. Moving to the second now."
It's always the way, of course. Always the second of two fixings that gives you trouble. The locking tool jammed after half a turn and, try as she might, Judith couldn't force it. She crouched low, twisting the tool, willing it to turn. Then she stopped – it was an ordered sequence, and she had opened the locks the wrong way round. She pulled free the key, re-locked the first socket, and returned to the jammed one which opened smoothly, sweetly. Within seconds the hatch was open and she was peering into a space just a meter by one half, and there it was. Treasure.
"Sam, you there? I found it! I only went and found it!"
"Jude, you gotta get out here. There's a scouter coming, an old two-man job. Need you–"
With a flick of her tongue, she cut the coms link. Below her, amongst a lot of wiring, circuitry, connections of one kind or another, was a black cube, a sealed, plug-in component small enough to fit into her gloved palm. It had taken her a year to track it down, a month to dig it out, and now there it was. She wiggled it free, sitting back with the cube in her cupped hands – simple as that. She nodded a quick salute to her companion in the shadows, mouthing 'sleep well', and retreated back down the rubble-tunnel.
Fifteen minutes, Sam had warned, to get back to the truck. In the end, it took Jude only ten, but the elbow joint was back to red by the time she emerged crawling into the open shell of a derelict loading bay. She rose stiffly, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the weak pink of early afternoon before glancing over at her truck.
It was parked about a hundred meters away, six big balloon tyres that made the crew cabin stand high. It was like a ship, or like Jude imagined a ship to be. Rolling out over the sand sea, the huge suspension coils creaking continuously, her at the wheel, looking out as she navigated across The Deep Empty, or stopped for the night between dunes, the wind gently rocking her to sleep in her bunk.
Alongside, dwarfed by the scored flanks of her sand-ship, was the scouter that had spooked Sam – small, three-wheeled, no more than a two-man day-tripper, which meant that the main caravan was closer than she had realised. She recognised it from the worn away paint job, still bright blue in little angles of the bodywork where it had survived time and sand storms. It was so like Sam, though, to have panicked and to have missed the essentials: who it actually was that had arrived.
Crunching over the 'fall out', the pebbly mix of cement shards and sand that surrounded most collapsed buildings, Jude approached the two parked vehicles. The scouter was empty, but looking up through the angular transparency of the truck cabin she could see Sam, or at least the back of him, sitting in the co-driver’s station talking, arms waving. She would probably have stayed standing there but for a sudden pinging, quiet at first but growing louder, that started to fill her helmet. Suit autonomics were losing patience with three red line status indicators and another two creeping into dark orange. Even Judith decided it was probably better to get into shelter, and she slouched round to the rear.
Clang of boot and scrape of gauntlet on metal rungs competed with the pinging in her ears as she climbed the ladder up to the rear lock. It was one of the great routines of Mars, even on a world where you survived by routine after routine after routine. Open the outer hatch, haul yourself in, close the hatch, trigger pressurisation. All done subconsciously, of course, hands moving, unlocking gauntlets, disconnecting her helmet. Strip off the outer suit, open the inner lock, and you were home… you could relax, just a little.
A short corridor ran through the upper deck with crew quarters either side and a door to the control area at the far end. That door was ajar, and she could hear Sam shouting. He was sandy-haired, and though he was tall, thin, water-starved like them all, he was somehow ruddy looking with it – red when he got angry. Her sandy-haired, red-cheeked, blue-eyed Sam. A nervous wreck half the time, but get him angry and he could be more reckless than she was, though he'd never admit it.
"…claim you care! You never did, Gideon. Never! You come out here with this… bullshit. If you did care, if you understood, you'd protect her. Not be here now!"
Gideon. If he was responding at all, he couldn't be heard from where she was standing. She could imagine him, sitting there, answering back in that quiet, measured tone that told you more than the actual words ever did – that it didn't matter what you had actually said to him, because you were a child, silly, wilful. Maybe favoured, maybe not, but you were still a child. She could feel the anger rising at just the thought, and there was only one way of dealing with it. She strode down the corridor, flinging the door wide open.
In the silence that followed she suddenly felt aware of herself, her dirty blonde hair cut to stubble, a face a little too heavy with life, eyes never quite untroubled, never sharp and clear – though that might be the water deprivation. The green under-all of her surface suit wasn't really enough to hide in, wrinkling awkwardly over the playing card-sized flat plate of her chest filter. A tired, middle aged woman to whom too much had happened. Perhaps that's what she looked like to Gideon, perhaps not, but it was how she felt, how he made her feel, and she did the only thing she could think of: she let her anger loose.
"Hell, Sam! You called me back here like it was some sort of fucking emergency. But it was for him?" She jerked a thumb at the presence to her left, sitting relaxed and casual in a passenger seat, just as she had imagined.
"Jude, you were red lining on three! He did you a favour getting you back here before you got yourself killed. What good is it going to be to anyone if I have to drag you out to lay you under the sand?"
"Well, we're done. Get the drives warmed, and we'll get out of here–"
Gideon's quiet voice cut her off with the simple brevity he had always had. "I agree, Jude, especially if you've got what you came for. Very much time to leave." A scavenger, a survivor, a bean pole next to those who were Earth-born, but merely average height amongst 'locals'. Somehow, though, he always contrived to seem taller than the rest of them. Even with him sitting it felt like his hawkish face was looking down at her. Was it that he was some years older than her, because he was her ex, or just because he was an arrogant prick? Any or all of them. It was just Gideon: superior in all circumstances.
She faced him with hands firmly on her hips. "Fuck off, Gideon. Go join the corpses."
The tight little smile he twitched at her was mechanical. "It would be my pleasure… once I'm sure you've understood. The main caravan is on the North Road. Clan gathering, and Ruth is ordering you to attend. No ifs, no buts, no 'I have more important work to do'. Do you understand? Your sister absolutely requires your presence.”
Looking into his cold, authoritarian eyes, of course she did. "Thanks, messenger. Now get out of my truck."
Unfolding himself from the chair like he was telescopic, Gideon rose. "You get to the gathering, and you report straight to her, even before you get drunk with your friends. I cannot express these instructions clearly enough, but to drive the message home, there is something else."
"Oh?"
"I had to fight for it to be me that came. Ruth did want to send Tara – which would have been a very different message, I'm sure you'd agree. So, you might think about saying 'thank you' some time." He shifted his gaze abruptly. "Make sure she listens, Sam. Make really sure, okay? For her own sake." Then he was gone, the control cabin silent as he walked away down the connecting corridor. The inner lock door at the far end of the truck clanged shut behind him.
Tara. The worst of the killers.
"Oh God, Judith, you know what that means? They were going to… Oh God, why? Why would they do that now? What are we going to do?" He started slow, deep breathing, something that was supposed to help him with his anxiety attacks. It might work, it might not. Either way it irritated her.
"We're not going to do anything." From where she stood, she could see a panorama of wreckage. At its heart was the rubble where she had been crawling, a great heap of shattered concrete, twisted support struts, and tangled cable, all surrounding the stub of what had been a vast control tower. She wasn't really looking, though. She was thinking of family, of lovers and ex-lovers, and all the madness it represented. "They had their debate, Gideon won. I imagine they debate killing me almost as often as they talk about me at all. It's just Ruth's way of telling me it's time I checked in."
"I should have spotted him, but the bastard sprang up from nowhere. His dust must have been visible for miles–"
"Forget it, Sam." She spoke more sharply than intended. "Just forget it. Plot us a course back north."
With a grunt, he nodded. "I'll get those warm-up cycles running, but we don't really know where they are…"
"Four hours he said. Only ever thinks of himself, so that will be at scouter speeds. About six hours cruising for us — junction 36 at a guess. I need a proper wash and time to think."
"We're down to minimum on the last tank – have to be an air-wash."
She walked out, heading back towards her cabin, too tired for another 'had this fight fifteen times before' set-piece. When they had first been together it had felt like he needed her, and that had been everything. Strange how it all just felt like prattling and nagging now.
***
The truck grumbled northward, faint jolts echoing up from the broken road surface. Judith hadn't touched the controls since they had got the vehicle moving – they had just set the autopilot for the North Road route – but she sat on the control deck at the pilot's position, looking down at the world outside. They were driving through the old farmlands, an ancient network of interconnected hydro-stations. Some were just a few acres, others, once, had been rank after rank of pressurised polytunnels. The whole complex, hundreds of individual installations across Langtang Crater, had all been regulated from the control centre that she had been burrowing into. Skeletal remains, their metal ribcages open to the sky and the intimate caress of the Martian winds were visible as far as the eye could see. It was all blown now, dead for a century.
Suddenly, she remembered the look of sightless eye sockets staring at her as she had opened the hatch, back in the ruined control centre, and pulled a swing board into place over her lap. A screen popped up on the dash, and she tapped away at lit keys.
“Problem?” Sam had appeared in the doorway, having taken his turn in the air-wash, its slightly aromatic smell still clinging to him.
“No, no problem. A little job I owe one Lauren Pascal – found her by the hatch. Just logging her with the guys at Elysium.”
“Oh.” He slid into the navigator position, glancing automatically over the safety indicators as he did so. Routine, routine, routine. “Gideon’s changed position.”
“About half an hour ago. He pulled off the road far enough to be out of sight, waited 'til we passed, then rejoined the road behind us." Always close enough to be picked up by the truck’s surface radar, she thought. Gideon had once been familiar enough with the truck to know well enough the exact range of its instruments.
Sam cloned her control readouts and busied himself checking her readings. No offence, no lack of faith. Just more routine… check, double-check. "All systems seem to be operating normally."
They drove on in silence, Sam busy at something on his swing-board, keys clattering, the odd snort. Jude kept focused on the distant, saw-toothed horizon rapidly resolving into a low range of crumbled rock and sand choked ravines – the outer edge of the crater. If you looked hard, you could see a cluster of buildings, a tower and coms facility sitting at the base of the eroded slopes of the crater wall, a rocket jack running up the cliff face.
Langtang Point, a cargo lifting and logistics junction, a base for thrust-landers and agri-trucks. There was a confluence of roads and a main torus track line, once you were outside the crater. Thousands of tons of food a day had moved through 'The Point', once, and North Road led there, and through. The route down into the crater had been cleared back in her father's time, but it was starting to choke with sand again now.
As The Point edged closer, Judith reached for a battered old pair of binocs that always lived by the pilot's position, and she scanned the ruins ahead. The main array stood out against the red rock face: a rising gantry of metalwork, the dark discs of data antennae clustered like dead beetles at various points up its length drawing her attention as they always did. Every time she passed this way, she tried to work out how best to get up there and get one or two down undamaged.
Neither of them spoke as the truck approached the crater wall. Then, looking casually at the scanner readouts, she tensed. Had there been something? She waited, and there it was again, a faint echo on the starboard edge of her forward sensor sweep that her navigator should have spotted. Someone else tracking them, someone who thought they hadn't been noticed, thought they knew exactly where to sit to not be seen. What they clearly didn't know was that she had replaced the truck's starboard radar array a while ago and boosted the range, just by a little.
The echo was to the side of the road that Jude was most likely to leave by if she was going to make a bolt for it and vanish into the crater floor ruins. She tweaked the port sweep, wondering if there might be a third out there – a team bringing her in. They had always operated in threes in the days when they were working down the kill lists. The port sweep was already at range, though, and it stayed blank.
Scanning The Point through the binocs again, Jude followed the line of the road up an approach ramp, then snaking back and forth as it climbed the cliff face. It was then that she saw the other flanker — a pressurised passenger buggy parked on the crater rim. Next to it was a suited silhouette standing against the Martian mid-afternoon sun, standing at the edge of a cleft the road passed through. The figure was making no effort to hide – quite the opposite, in fact, standing on a pinnacle of rock, gas rifle held casually ready. Jude breathed deep, trying Sam's exercises as she fought thoughts of shallow graves. It looked like Maali, which meant the flicker on the scanner could only be Tara.
"Sam, this is a setup – they've been waiting for us."
"I know… I've just been reviewing the scanner records. There's another out there too, on the starboard side. You seen it?"
She almost smiled – the thought that Sam could miss anything that important suddenly seemed absurd. "Yes, seen it."
"It's been there for days."
They were hitting the approach ramp to The Point, a half-mile incline to the base of the first hairpin. "Days?"
"It appears and disappears. Fluctuations in scanner strength, but that's how I missed it – we've been staked out. Oh, and Gideon – he approached us very slowly when he came. Explains why I never saw the dust plume as he drove in. The bastard got as close as he dared and then just sat there for a good few hours."
"Then he appeared just as we were ready to leave..."
"We're in trouble." Sam looked around at her, his face pale. "They're going to kill us, aren't they?"
"Go take something." She met his eyes, panic, almost terror, looking back at her. "Plenty of good pre-fall stuff for stressed workers in that med cache we found."
"That's to sell…" his voice trailed off and she could almost see his thought process. What good was any of it if you were under the sand?
"We won't miss a few packets. Take something quick-acting. Diazepam, maybe. Take a good few."
He nodded, leaving his station without a word, and she carried on watching the sensor scans: for all the world the picture of a wolf pack running prey to ground. The kill lists… all that was in the past. Even so, a knot tightened in her stomach and she almost called to Sam to bring her a few of what he was taking. She resisted – whatever was coming, she'd face it better with her head clear.
The truck was nosing upward now they were on the approach to The Point, Gideon still way behind them. Tara had vanished, falling back to make the ramp too – it was the only way up out of the crater. Jude started to slow the truck, imperceptibly at first, as though it was straining on the incline.
Looming beyond, little more now than a concrete lattice, was the main tower. Every window, door, and interior wall had long since been blown or removed. Beyond the tower was the cliff, metal tracks up its face – the rocket jack for shifting bulk goods up to the rim.
She opened the vents for the starboard heat sinks just a little too much, and slowed again, careful not to overdo it. She was watching the coms board, waiting, waiting… then a ping. She took a deep breath. Be clear, be calm.
"You okay?" It was Gideon, and on their private frequency from the old days. Or one part of the old days. One of the better bits.
"Minor trouble in the starboard power feeds. Nothing a bit of maintenance won't cure."
"Will you make the hairpins okay?"
"If I don't rush." There was crackling in the air – all the tension of two people separated by static. "What's this about, Gideon? That's Tara out there, isn't it? And whoever's on the rim doesn't look like my friend. Maali, at a guess."
They were driving past the tower now, and she saw how much the concrete supports had been sandblasted by storms, reinforcing metalwork showing through. She wondered how long it would be before it collapsed. Ten years? A hundred? Thin atmosphere, weak winds, low gravity. That made for some pretty precarious-looking structures standing well after all reason said they should fall.
Jude tweaked the controls as the incline increased sharply. They were heading for the cliff at an increasingly oblique angle and were close to the first of the two switchbacks. She dumped a bit more heat, slowing still more.
"She just wants the cube. It's valuable, you know that. You must have known when you went after it. More than valuable – and she wants it for the clan."
"She told me to come hunting for it. I'm doing this for the clan. No more water shortages, what's more valuable than that?"
"Depends on who controls what water there is, Jude. Tread carefully, give her what she asks for, and I'm sure you'll be fine."
The connection died, but it was just as well. Sam had reappeared, taking his place back at the nav console. "Why are we on reduced–?"
"Drive array power feeds overheating. Won't interfere with our ascent, keeping speed below twenty-five klicks per hour." She saw him glance at the maintenance data on his swing board, knowing she was lying.
"Acknowledged, Pilot."
As the truck negotiated the first switchback, turning through 180 degrees, there was fallen scree scattering the road surface. As they ground over the debris, Jude momentarily ramped up the visible heat leaking from starboard. The corner taken and the rubble passed, she eased the heat dump down and allowed the truck to pick up a little speed.
Crackle. "Jude, you there?"
"Got you loud."
"That damage to your drive linkages…"
She almost grinned – relief again – but managed to sound annoyed instead. "Well aware, thank you. We're perfectly capable of keeping on top of our own telemetry. Small rockfall – getting over it shook something loose. We'll stop for a check at the top, but we'll be fine once we're on a straight run." This time she cut the link. She was glad Sam had popped a few pills: he wasn't going to like what was coming. "Navigator, I need power balanced between starboard and port drive arrays – we need to keep the traction even!"
"Yes, Pilot." Sam was looking at the instrumentation showing traction already perfectly balanced.
They hit the second switchback swinging onto the last leg of road up to the cleft through the crater rim. Maali was clearly visible, looking down at their progress. Jude tweaked the heat dump up higher. "Navigator, getting a persistent problem again to starboard. Traction holding up?"
"Just about."
The road bit hard into the cliff and they turned past the outcrop where Maali was positioned. Then they were in a steep-sided gorge, running away from the crater's edge, the ascent over.
"Keep it steady, Nav."
"What for?"
"This!" With a sweep of her hand, she rammed the drive controls to their upper stops. The truck jerked, protested for a moment, then started to accelerate through the gorge, spewing dust and grit behind them. They bumped, hitting a sand drift, but momentum carried them on.
There was squawking from the coms channel and some swearing, Maali probably. Something pinged – a shot hitting the truck hull? – but they were through and in the open, North Road running across the landscape like it had just been drawn with a ruler on some giant surveyor's map. Jude was running the odds through her mind – Maali's truck was nothing much. An eight-man short ranger, built for tourists on Mars safari. Tara's was built for range, not speed. Gideon was the only one with something fast, but he was way back down amongst the switchbacks and would take time to get through the rubble, scree and sand in his buggy.
"Pleased with your cleverness, Pilot?"
"Very, thanks." After that, she typed, pointing at the small screen. Sam peered at what she had written: They knew when to come. Think the truck might be bugged – keep it non-verbal.
Sam tapped at his own keyboard. You really think they bugged us?
Maybe.
So what are you playing at now? We run off into the desert? They'll catch us, and when they do, they'll kill us.
Only Gideon's fast enough, and by the time he's up out of Langtang, we'll be well away. Besides, we're heading for the clan, just as I was told to do… the only difference is we're going to get there first, by ten minutes, quarter of an hour if we're lucky.
He didn't respond for a moment, then typed back, shaking his head. We're dead.
She hammered at the keyboard: An hour ago you were shitting yourself about being called back to the clan. A few pills later and it's 'what a mess you've made of things by not doing what you're told'. We need to jettison as much crap as we can find. Waste canisters, broken components, anything.
Sam snorted out loud. What, you think losing a few kilos will add to our speed? We ought to focus on finding that bug.
Paranoia surged and she found herself looking across at her bunkmate, suddenly wondering whether she could trust him or not. If they'd been bugged, someone had placed it, but perhaps they hadn't been bugged at all and she just had someone on board reporting back on her? This morning, life had been normal. Now suddenly everything around her felt like the past. The fucking good old days.
Junk on the road might slow the bastards down, she typed. Then I've got some e-mails to send.
The truck ran on, continuing to pick up speed.
