Champion of Mars (27 page)

“Yes, Yoechakenon. I understand. It will draw them away.”

We feel a twinge in our mind from the ship, a sensation close to fear. Underneath its Stone-brought madness, Tsu Keng understands. Yoechakenon pulls aside a wrinkle of metal, unearthing supplies from a cyst in the ship’s wall – a survival pack and particle pistol.

He places them in the couch, then reaches in and removes the armour. He does this slowly, whether from fear or reverence I cannot tell. He handles it like a priest would a relic. His fascination with it angers me.

Inert, the armour is a small looking thing, no thicker than a forearm and about as long as the span of two hands, lead-grey, dull. Two thick bands inscribed with words no one can read circle the top and bottom. He weighs it in his hand. He does not activate it yet.

The things scrabble closer.

“Yoechakenon, please; I understand your reasons for hesitating, but you must don the armour now!” I hate myself for saying it.

“It has been a long time,” he whispers. Then louder, “Above all things I longed for while I lay captive in the arena, the chance to wear this armour again was paramount. I cast it aside, and yet I yearned for it.”

“Yoechakenon, I hate the armour, you know this, and nothing would make me happier than if you were to forswear it forever, and live unclad until the end of your days. But, though I am loath to admit it, we need it now. We will both perish without it.”

There is a crash from outside. Yoechakenon looks at the case. He thinks of the power of the armour, of the protection it brought him, of the strength it lent his arm, yet still he hesitates. Images of the death that follows it wherever it goes fill his mind unbidden, images he can force aside only with difficulty. He sees faces, dying and dead, and tastes blood in his mouth that is not his own. The Armour Prime is far more than the scarab-harness worn by the palace guard and Praetorians. It is truly alive, one of only thirteen such armours ever to have existed. An army cannot stand against a skilled warrior so garbed, but there is a price, and it is this price that caused Yoechakenon to set it aside when confronted by the Spirefather of Olm.

The spirits that dwell within the armour are utterly malevolent, unlike any other of the Martian spirits, the Door-ward included. Its needs are vile, and they affect a man after a time. As much as Yoechakenon hungers for its power, he still fears it. The promise of death that it brings does far worse than sicken him.

It excites him.

“Very well,” says Yoechakenon. A shot of anguish makes him shiver, but his thumbs are already moving toward the hidden lock studs. He finds them by instinct, and presses.

There is a hiss as the capsule melts in his hands, pouring through his fingers like quicksilver, and wisps of super-chilled air rise from it. It splashes quietly into the muck on the floor and spreads as a slick of metal. A pseudopod reaches up, a single, freezing, probing digit. It moves tentatively until it brushes Yoechakenon’s hand, then it is tentative no more.

A flood of steaming, living metal pours at once from the floor, entwining itself about Yoechakenon’s legs. Streamers of it embrace his waist. Yoechakenon gasps as the armour flows, encasing his body from neck to foot, insulating his naked, muscular body from the cold with a repellent numbness all its own. His skin crawls as the armour wraps itself about him. As much as he craves the powerful symbiosis, he has never grown used to the moment the armour embraces him. Nor have I. I fear the day when the armour leaves him and his eyes snap open and something else looks out of them.

The armour’s tendrils seek out the control ports studded down his spine, bringing the mind that dwells within the armour into direct contact with his own, and through him, with mine. The feel of its being is like iced water flowing into warm bones, the touch of a dead enemy. His mind is lost for a moment, and I am exposed alone to the brutality of the armour’s ancient soul; memories of war and victory from times long gone smash themselves into my mind. It whispers its hunger to tell more such stories, and write them large in blood.

“Master,” says a voice, the smooth tongue of extinction itself.

Then it passes, and Yoechakenon has a skin of metal, and he is warm and invincible and feels complete for the first time in two years.

I am sad. When he is like this, in the armour, I lose him. “Hurry, the ship is dying,” I say. My voice betrays nothing. “It has but a few more moments. Go quickly.”

“Is the ship ready?” he says.

“It is.”

“Then prepare yourself also.” He moves to the rent in the wall, and tears at the viscous strands forming over the hole. Even in the face of death, the ship struggles to heal itself. “Farewell, Tsu Keng,” he says, and jumps to the ground below.

He lands easily in the runnel created by the ship’s crash. The mounds of soil thrown up around the buckled hull are already solid with ice. Something grey and mottled, silhouetted high above him on the ship’s bulk, turns its long head in his direction, its saucer eyes those of a deep-sea predator, alive with their own illumination.

Now,
thinks Yoechakenon.

I reroute the ship’s remaining life to the broken cabin, and light flares within. The thing’s head whips around, away from where Yoechakenon hides. It lets out an awful cry, and is answered by others. The thing spreads corpse-grey wings and takes to the air, skimming the hull to the breach in the bridge. With raucous screams and a savage rattling of iron-hard claws on half-metal, others join it. We feel sharp pain, then I withdraw our minds from Tsu Keng’s. I slip my mind into the armour. Its spirit shifts, but does not trouble me.

Yoechakenon, the after-effects of his awakening held at bay by the armour’s devices, bears us stealthily away over the bitter steppe.

We reach a safe distance. Yoechakenon watches through the armour’s eyes as a flock of shadows rip into the still-living fabric of the craft.

His sorrow chokes me.

The creatures squabble violently with each other, sporting in the air over choicer morsels, engrossed in their feast. Yoechakenon powers down his armour to its bare minimum, trusting to its innate ability to warm him, lest the expenditure of further energies attract the monsters ravaging the ship. That he is wary of the armour’s influence also, he does not admit to himself. The sound of its voice has raised old terrors within him.

Yoechakenon watches awhile. As the night turned grey, he turns away, begins a slow run across the plains. The armour soothes the pain in his limbs, aids his legs to bear us over the frozen wastes, away into the ceaseless wind. To the east looms the vast bulk of Mulympiu, stretching into the sky.

I have the location of the ancient city of Arn Vashtena fixed in my mind. I direct him toward it, then I fall silent. I lie awake for a long time in the blood-dark of the armour. I cry myself into exhaustion, then sleep.

Yoechakenon pretends not to notice my tears.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Stulynow

G
AS WHOOSHED FROM
fire suppression systems, pure CO
₂
harvested from the atmosphere, as Holland half-ran, half-stumbled up into Mission Control.

Mission Control was a large, multi-sided room. Screens and consoles lined every wall, except the one occupied by the large window overlooking the atrium. In the centre was a round meeting table with inbuilt holographic projectors; most of the twelve chairs surrounding it were upset. A small fire burned up against a console on the wall furthest from the door, licking the wall with yellow flame.

The scientists, all bar Vance, Suzanne Van Houdt and Stulynow, were there, breathing masks over their mouths. Kick and Ito Miyazaki wielded a fire extinguisher, supplementing the base’s fire control, directing icy white clouds at the fire on the far side of the room. Red lights flickered. The fire went out.

“Shut that damn alarm off!” Commander Orson shouted, his voice muffled behind his mask.

The tumult ceased and the scientists came to a slow halt, looking for leadership from Orson. Quiet fell, but for the pervasive machine hum. A final plume of gas burst from the suppression system. Emergency lights painted the room red, black, red. The wind growled outside.

“Can we get some goddamned lights on in here, please?” said the commander. He had his fists on his hips, stood in the middle of the room like a statue of a small town sporting hero. Jensen did something at his console, and white light flickered on. “Holland, why the hell aren’t you wearing your breathing mask?”

Holland looked down at the mask, sweaty in his hand.

“I...”

“It doesn’t matter.” Jensen stood from the console he was at and pulled his own mask off. “We’re okay.” He hit a button and fans whirred, venting the fumes.

Orson took his mask off, followed by the others. “The hell it matters. You were lucky, Holland; follow procedure next time.” He turned on Jensen. “Just what the Sam Hill is going on in here?”

“Fire,” said the Swede, without a trace of irony. “Deliberate.” He pointed past Miyazaki and Van Houdt to a scorched pile of clothes wrapped round a gas cylinder at the base of the burned console. Scorch marks stained the wall, and the gelscreens there were shrivelled and dead, although the woven carbon plastic of the console was unaffected.

“If that had gone off...” Orson said. “Cybele?”

“Offline, I think,” said Maguire. “I don’t like this.”

“What the hell,
again
? Stulynow? Is he behind this?” asked Orson.

Jensen inclined his head. “Maybe. He’s the only one not accounted for, him and Vance, and she isn’t going anywhere.
Someone
did this.”

“How is Vance? Anyone know? And find Stulynow, for Christ’s sake!” demanded Orson. For all his eugene poise, he was close to consternation, trying to hold it back for the sake of his crew. Tinkered genes didn’t stamp on fear, not entirely. Holland had heard of some cybernetic trials that removed it altogether. Not an experiment that had ended well. If you remove fear, you remove humanity. Orson had been antenatally altered, expensive and exclusive. His genes were flawless, his advantages many, but he was still human, and the situation was veering way off normal. “Where’s your wife, Kick? She okay?”

“
Ja, ja, ik ben okay
.” Suzanne came into the room, face streaked with sweat and soot, mask still on. There was a rip in her sleeve and she limped.

“Are you all right?” Kick said. He and Ito moved to her, supporting her. “If that bastard has hurt you...” He lapsed into strained Dutch.

She shook her head, trying to regain her breath and her English. “I said I’m fine. I haven’t seen Leonid. I fell. I twisted my knee.”

“Vance? What about Vance?” said Orson.

She looked up, pale blue eyes moving from one face to the next. “Dr Vance is dead,” she said.

J
ENSEN GOT THE
system mainframe back up quickly, although Cybele remained down. Once the place was running again, he brought up the last ten minutes of station camera data.

“Look,” he said. “West entrance airlock. A suit is missing.”

“Leo’s gone outside? In
this
?” said Maguire.

“It appears so,” said Jensen. “That’s not all.” He brought the science package online. “I’ve a massive spike of energy here, thirty-three minutes ago. That’s when it starts.”

They watched as Stulynow, viewed from above, walked from his room. Holland followed, coming out of his own room and staggering from wall to wall like a drunk.

“What were you doing?” said Suzanne. “Are you a sleepwalker?”

“Never in my life,” said Holland. He watched himself stumble along a corridor and fall, neck crooked against the wall; the way he was, he remembered, when he woke. Jensen speeded up the footage. They followed Stulynow from camera to camera as he set the fire in Mission Control, watched him walk into Cybele’s chamber with a fire axe.

“He smashed up the AI?” said Suzanne, holding tight to her husband’s arm.

Orson shook his head. “No. He’d never be able to get through the casing with a freaking
axe
. This energy spike, it’s similar to what we saw when the cylinder was uncovered. That took her down then, it’s done the same again. Looks like he was trying to finish the job.”

“And Stulynow? Has it fried his brains as well?” said Kick.

“We don’t know that,” said Jensen.

“It’s not a bad hypothesis, though, is it?” said Kick tensely. “Tell me, Vance went down when this energy spike occurred, didn’t she?”

Suzanne nodded. “Not right away, but there was some weird activity on the EEG, not enough to trip the alarm, not until... Well.” She shrugged, disconsolately.

“Weird like what?” growled Orson.

“Like she was dreaming. She went into arrest about five minutes after the spike was logged.”

“And how are you feeling, Holland?” said Kick, a little too hard for Holland’s liking.

The others looked at Holland with unguarded suspicion.

“Oh, no,” said Jensen, and the catch in his usually steady voice drew them back to the screen. They watched as Stulynow went into the stores in the atrium. He went for a box plastered with hazard symbols.

“That’s not what I think it is, is it?” said Orson, passing a hand over his thick hair. “Holy shit.”

When Stulynow left the room, he was carrying five bundles of hi-explosive.

“How much is there in each of those packs?” breathed Maguire.

“Half a key,” said Orson. His mouth hung open.

“Half a... Feck!” said Maguire.

Stulynow went to the west entrance airlock, the footage jiggling along at five times normal speed. He suited up. Before he put his helmet on, he stared at the camera for several seconds.

“Jimmy, what’s he going to do with that?” asked Maguire.

“Let’s find him before he gets to show us. You got a lock on him?”

Jensen shook his head. “There’s no signal coming from his locator or his implant. Could be the storm...”

“Or it could be that energy spike,” said Orson. He stood up. “Don’t tell me, it centred on the fissure.”

Jensen nodded.