John Spark is recovering from the disaster-plagued mission to Aemilia. Mars is reeling from the catastrophic attack of the Von Neumann ‘bugs’ that followed the Coromandel home.
Accompanying a friend and her child on the Great South Line, the train is hijacked by the enigmatic Knights of Great Enoch – the ‘Wreckers’, and Kaia’s daughter is kidnapped. Waiting for police assistance, they are stranded in a polar Martian town when the city comes under a terrible assault.
The Knights have a history of pilfering, vandalism and pirate radio, not kidnap and terror. Are they under a brutal new leadership, or are they patsies, as they claim?
John loathes coincidences, and searches for a connection when the bugs return, wreaking havoc. But something has changed. The machines are in possession of new tech, and tactics straight from the Martian Navy’s playbook. Onboard the Samarkand as ‘consultants’, John and friends are in the firing line.
John must decide if his enemy’s enemy is a friend, and just how to cooperate. The answers lie somewhere between the gleaming asteroid Psyche and the Cryptic geyser fields of the Martian pole. With friends and allies, John must find solutions before the next hammer falls.
John Spark is recovering from the disaster-plagued mission to Aemilia. Mars is reeling from the catastrophic attack of the Von Neumann ‘bugs’ that followed the Coromandel home.
Accompanying a friend and her child on the Great South Line, the train is hijacked by the enigmatic Knights of Great Enoch – the ‘Wreckers’, and Kaia’s daughter is kidnapped. Waiting for police assistance, they are stranded in a polar Martian town when the city comes under a terrible assault.
The Knights have a history of pilfering, vandalism and pirate radio, not kidnap and terror. Are they under a brutal new leadership, or are they patsies, as they claim?
John loathes coincidences, and searches for a connection when the bugs return, wreaking havoc. But something has changed. The machines are in possession of new tech, and tactics straight from the Martian Navy’s playbook. Onboard the Samarkand as ‘consultants’, John and friends are in the firing line.
John must decide if his enemy’s enemy is a friend, and just how to cooperate. The answers lie somewhere between the gleaming asteroid Psyche and the Cryptic geyser fields of the Martian pole. With friends and allies, John must find solutions before the next hammer falls.
Why, on an unremarkable stretch of track, was the train slowing to a crawl?
John Spark looked across at Kaia in the seat beside him, little Natalie nestled under her arm. Both were still asleep, unaware the chances of making their connections were fading. The day had been fraught with enough chaos and emotion, along with the tedium of hurrying to be somewhere, then having to wait. Let them sleep.
Watching them, slack jawed and still, had been more rewarding than staring at the endless flatlands outside. Crossing Mars by rail might sound romantic, but nobody took the Great South Line for the scenery.
Kaia’s hair was growing back, reaching her jaw now in a ruddy-blond fall. The muscles of her neck and shoulders were still defined, months after returning from Amelia. Graceful, from simply staying upright in the heavy gravity.
Natalie – ‘Tali’, was a small copy of her mother. Her other, biological mother, who John had only seen in a televised mug shot. Tali was brown skinned, with long lashes and a silky cap of dark hair, her dimpled limbs typical of a chubby three-year-old.
That Tali shared his coloration had garnered plenty of well-meaning comparisons from other passengers - comparisons John found painful. Because Tali wasn’t his daughter. A couple of hundred rems of cosmic radiation on a spacewalk had permanently ruled out fatherhood for him. He touched the little whorls of regrowth on his scalp self-consciously. The crew of the Coromandel had all shaved their heads in gratitude and solidarity for what he had done. Their hair had grown back. His remained a skull-cap that his best mate Kip described as ‘bull’s wool’. Which sounded masculine but was a borrow-word euphemism for ‘bull-shit’, courtesy of Mars' Australian expats, of which Kip was one. Insults were Kip’s way of making him see the funny side, he knew. Tough love, anodyne against self-pity.
Only it wasn’t pity he felt, it was something else, less defined. Self-recrimination, perhaps.
There was a screech, and a keening vibration came through the floor as the brakes bit the rail.
Passengers began to wake, as inertia pushed them hard against their straps. Tali began to protest, and Kaia opened eyes dark-rimmed from exhaustion.
“Are we there?” she asked, brows steepled in confusion. “What’s happening?”
He wiped ineffectually at the window; the outer pane thick with dust glued on by static. It revealed nothing but glimpses of dull, red rubble under a pallid winter sunset. Squinting forward, he saw the engine carriage had begun to curve around a raised crater rim. Theirs was a short train, just an engine, a single carriage and a restaurant car in a sleek projectile tube. Whatever blocked the way was out of sight around the bend ahead.
“No, we’re still a way out. I don’t know what’s happening. A rock-fall on the line, maybe.”
Kaia ran a hand over her face, then gave Tali a little squeeze and a kiss to the top of the head. Tali burbled something indignantly, but her whimpering subsided.
“As long as the sky’s not falling again.” She said it lightly, but her face was pinched as she peered out the window for signs.
He pressed his lips in agreement. Rocks on the track would be a hassle, but preferable to yet another shower of flaming space junk. Another legacy of the Von Neumann bug assaults four months ago, along with broken infrastructure, shortages, sky-high inflation and a decimated economy. Particularly for tourist businesses, like his.
The train lurched to a dead stop. Cups, tabs and hand-luggage flew. Tali started to wail.
Murmurs started up and heads lifted instinctively, waiting for an explanation from the speakers above. All that came was static.
Someone entered the inter-carriage airlock at the front end. For a moment, John expected the driver. Then he remembered there wasn’t one.
He felt Kaia clutch his arm. She’d seen it too. The silhouette through the glass door of a big man wearing an EVA suit and helmet, someone standing behind him in the shadows.
When the airlock opened, the big man barrelled in. The face shield on his helmet was tinted, giving no clue to the wearer’s identity, but John instantly registered aggression and purpose in the set of the shoulders, the big hands ready to grasp. The body language was familiar. Natalie shrank against Kaia’s side.
“Everyone stand up and get in the rear airlock. Leave your bags. Now! Except you,” the figure barked through his suit comms, pointing at Kaia, John and then Natalie. “Put her in there first.” He pointed to the child safety pod on the rack above John’s head. “Don’t give me any shit. I have a friend ready to leak the air from the carriage if we have to. Move.”
John stood without hesitation, as the other passengers rose like automatons and jostled down the aisle, wild eyed, heading toward the lock. His heart was pounding, with fury as much as fear, as he took down the safety pod. There was nothing he could do but cooperate as he wondered how the hell Daryl Silva had tracked them here.
“Get in, Tali darling,” Kaia said, keeping her voice steady with an effort, and kissing Tali’s cheek. She smiled stiffly. “You’re going for a ride with Daddy. I’ll see you later.”
Tali shook her head, and as her initial shock wore off, she began to cry. “No! Stay here!” She thrashed in Kaia’s arms, shrieking, as John took control, sandwiching the pod around her body and releasing her arms as he snapped it closed. Natalie stared at him through the clear lid with disbelief, the look of a new experience – betrayal - contorting her face. He felt a wave of anguish. It was a terrible childhood milestone to witness, and a terrible first for John, to become the betrayer of a child. His only consolation was that for all the man’s insanity, he believed Daryl Silva would never deliberately harm his own daughter.
“Good, leave her there on the seats,” said Silva. “Now go, get in the lock with the others.”
Kaia gripped John’s arm as though holding herself up, but she had the presence of mind not to say anything that would antagonize the man. Silva seemed oddly passive toward her in return. Kaia had said he had some strange code – thought he was a Jedi knight or samurai, or some crap. They shuffled to the back and joined the other half dozen passengers huddled in the airlock, along with an older woman employee from the restaurant car.
“Where’s he taking her?” someone muttered in a faint voice.
Kaia glared at Silva through the glass. She was visibly trembling.
Silva locked the door with a thump. John watched through the glass, horrified, as the man’s hand moved over the keypad beside the door.
“He’s going to purge us!” A woman at John’s shoulder hissed, swiveling to stare at the exterior hatch.
“No, he can’t,” the GSL employee said above the babble of fearful voices, shaking her curly head emphatically. She was tall and whippet thin, the motion catching everyone’s attention. “The safety system won’t allow that. I promise you. It’s okay.”
“I hope you’re right; he’s definitely doing something,” the passenger said through her teeth.
John saw the woman beside him was partly right. “I can see the gauge. He’s not purging the lock, he’s pumping the air out of the carriage into the tanks,” he said.
Silva’s accomplice had entered the car and was carrying Natalie’s capsule out. Beside John, Kaia made a strangled sound of rage and fear.
“Shit,” the GSL employee muttered, pushing forward until she stood with John and Kaia by the glass door. John glanced back and saw from her badge that her name was Gloria.
“At the very least he’s stealing the air. But see what he’s doing now? I reckon the bastard’s going to uncouple the car,” she said. “He’s stranding us here.”
“What?” a man said from the back. “Why the hell…?”
She shrugged, seeming more annoyed than perturbed. “Could be taking the carriages and engine down the track to strip the parts, I’d say,” she answered. “They’d need to let the air out to do that, so they might as well siphon it off.”
“They’re stripping trains for parts out here?” a voice at the back said.
Kaia shook her head in disbelief. John could imagine how trivial stripping the train must seem to her.
“I’m only guessing,” Gloria said. “Or they could be just putting distance between us. I hear there’s a bunch a nut jobs living to the south. Some commune or cult or militia, I don’t know details, just that they’re crazy assholes. They thieve from shelters and emergency services vehicles, allegedly, but the cops can’t find them. Vandalism’s more their thing. Snatching a freak in’ train – that’s a big step up from pinching tools and meds and a bit of water.” She made a noise of disgust.
John saw her frown at his and Kaia’s reflection, then realize something. “God, I’m so sorry, they took your kid. You recognized them, didn’t you? Was it your ex?” she said to Kaia, her tone suddenly gentle.
“My ex-wife’s- ex-boyfriend,” Kaia said, voice breaking up in flats and sharps, like the landscape outside. “The court granted me custody of Natalie from her mother and that toxic dickhead this morning, after the two of them broke up. We crossed the whole damn planet to collect her, then lose him. Yet here he is.”
There was a lull in the airlock as people momentarily reflected, then some comments of sympathy and outrage on Kaia’s behalf before they returned to being self-focused. John saw in the reflection that Kaia was silently crying. He put his hand on one shoulder and an older woman stood close to her other in supportive proximity.
“We should call for help,” the vocal man at the rear said. “Come on, before they get away.”
Gloria gave a short, bitter laugh. “I’ve already activated the emergency beacon. But unfortunately, without the engine carriage, we don’t have a comm link for anything more than a couple of k’s range.”
The woman beside John held up her tab and waggled it. “Are you shitting me? So, this won’t work? Aren’t there any damn networks out here?”
Gloria shook her head. “It’s not like the North. We have a tenth of the population, most of them in McMurdo, and the communication networks to match. Or had. There are still satellites, but we lost a heap when the bugs attacked. As I said, without the engine carriage…”
“For crying out loud. But the beacon will work, right? Do we have enough air to last?”
“The beacon is regularly tested,” Gloria said. “The air is fine.”
“Yeah, but that wasn’t what I asked,” the woman said, the pitch of her voice rising. “You’re sounding like a company handbook.”
John became aware of the sweaty stink of stress intensifying in the lock, as Gloria pursed her lips and put up her hands in surrender. “We’ll be okay. At worst, there’ll be a freighter along in another hour or so and they can help us. So please, calm down.”
The floor shuddered. Passengers grabbed instinctively for any support. Someone took a handful of John’s shirt back, yanking him sideways, but he kept his feet. The same someone was apologizing as John looked up to see their former carriage detach and slowly draw away, the sheathing that had connected the segments of the vehicle neatly retracting into their recesses. The decoupled train picked up speed, tilting as it rounded the crater rim ahead and was gone. Cold sunlight filtered through the lock door, and John had his best view of the landscape all day: endless red desert shrouded in long shadows, boulders rimed with frost, and to the south, low ridges of dirty-pink carbon dioxide ice.
“Can we go through to the restaurant car?” John repeated, trying to penetrate Gloria’s incoherent state.
Finally, she looked at him, and shook her head to clear it. “Yeah, of course. Good idea.” She nudged her way past the other passengers to the door at the rear and punched the release button. The lock opened with a soft puff of equalizing pressure that popped John’s ears.
The restaurant was empty of passengers and staff. It was mostly automated. Banks of slim-line hot and cold vending machines displayed backlit sandwiches and sushi, piroshky, steamed buns and cakes. Every kind of drink imaginable took up one wall. They wouldn’t starve. Booths lined the opposite side under the windows. Beyond, racks of emergency EVA suits flanked the entrance to another airlock. John eyed these as he shepherded the shell-shocked Kaia to the furthest booth. She sat, as heavily as the gravity would allow and it seemed to jar her to pieces. Her face crumpled. John offered her a table napkin as he slid into the booth opposite her. “It’s going to be okay,” he said, feeling dishonest.
She took it, scowled at him like he was an idiot, but was too choked-up to say anything and just shook her head. She scrunched the napkin in her hand instead of using it to wipe her eyes and nose.
“I did everything I could to get Tali away from that fucking lunatic,” she eventually ground out.
John knew it. She’d fought Daryl Silva in local court, and though a doctor’s income was hardly small, she’d emptied her bank accounts to beat him, because Martian law favoured biological parents. And she thought she’d won, because by the end, he didn’t seem to care that much about Tali, leaving his lawyer to represent him in his absence.
At the last possible hour, after the Coromandel mission’s publicized discoveries promised Kaia a replenished bank account, he’d appealed. John gathered that like other narcissists, Silva didn’t like being bested, but Kaia’s change of fortune was an obvious opportunity. Tali was the means.
He looked at the set of Kaia’s jaw as he handed her another napkin from the table behind him. It spoke of unyielding ferocity.
“When they catch him…” she said but couldn’t finish the sentence. Instead, she shredded the napkin.
Kaia was not beyond playing dirty. On the Coromandel, she had toyed with industrial spying to bolster her legal funds. She hadn’t gone through with it, but it was her efforts to deflect suspicion that were truly ruthless and had cost her the trust of her friends. She’d thrown IT guy Boyd under the proverbial bus. It led John to question what it said about her character, and he was still conflicted. Remarkably, Boyd, with family problems of his own, had been the first to forgive her. But as things turned out, that may not have been a purely altruistic move.
Kaia had told John just days ago, that she’d had a reason for singling out Boyd. What she’d said was plausible.
“He may not have been a spy, but I did catch him using the computer to design that bloody game,” she’d said. “Exaflops of navigational power being harnessed for that, at the risk of corrupting the machine. Jesus. No wonder the graphics were amazing.”
John had to concede that he would not have liked being stranded 98 light years from home or flung into a star by a dodgy nav computer. Boyd’s VR game had risen to the top ten on their return to Mars. He must have made millions.
Her rationale left him no less uncomfortable though.
No one could doubt Kaia had been a caring ship’s doctor and was courageous. Almost everyone on the Coromandel owed her some skin. John owed her his life.
That had been the clincher. It was why he was here, haring across hemispheres. However disloyal Kaia had been, John was not, and he didn’t want her kid growing up in some cult out here.
He looked at her again. So funny and warm sometimes, now she was fire and ice.
If John’s mother had been there, she’d have rolled her eyes and told him that if he had shit-for-brains it would be an improvement. Because here he was, stuck on a train in the bad lands of a terrible planet, with a lot of questions and the image of a crying child branded across his mind.
The Possession of Metal is a sequel to The Strange Taste of Metal, itself a cracking good read. John Sparks is back from Amelia, an alien world where a university expedition discovered organic life and, much more dangerously, self-replicating bots that feed on metal. It’s a few months after the defeat of a bot break-out into our solar system when Sparks, on Mars and still getting over his previous adventure, gets caught up in a train hijack perpetrated by an insurgent group. It doesn’t take long before events spiral grippingly out of control.
Burgess has a real skill in sketching characters - and Sparks is fleshed out and realistic. Whilst the book focuses on a few main protagonists, we also have so great ‘supports’, with the reappearance of some old friends from the Amelia expedition (Phelps, a pilot who loves vintage music makes a welcome return), but there are new ‘friends’ too. I like Captain Freya Hallet of the courier ship Nadira, captured in a sentence: ‘her mouth rested in a smile - the muscle-memory of someone naturally friendly’. Burgess excels at this: running a large cast of side characters, giving the adventure we’re on depth, even as it twists and turns towards a great climax.
This book has parallels with Any Weir (in this instance Artemis, as disaster follows disaster), and like James Corey’s The Expanse saga, the canvas of Possession is our solar system. There is a dash of Alastair Reynolds in the world-building, and the nature of the basic meta-narrative - mankind under threat by unstoppable alien tech. Burgess’s realisation of Mars has the grounded feel of Kim Stanley-Robinson’s Red Mars. If you like any of those authors you’re liable to like this, but this is a sequence well worth following in its own right. With plenty of character intrigue, some good hard science fiction thinking on display, side references to classic SF to make aficionados smile, and action bubbling in every scene, there is surely enough here to keep anyone hooked.
As the second book of John Sparks’ adventures, and although it stands alone, it works best if you read Burgess’s first book. See the review of it here: https://reedsy.com/discovery/book/the-strange-taste-of-metal-karlee-burgess#review
Really, why just read one good book when you can read two?