Champion of Mars (34 page)

Suzanne nodded. “I will see to it.”

“
Merci, cherie
,” he said. He clapped his hands “Okay, people! Let’s go!”

The room started into life. Holland looked at Orson and saw his command of the situation drain away from him. His aura of authority had vanished.

They were in company hands now.

CHAPTER TWENTY

The Stone Hunt

Year 5, Post-War Period

I
T HAD BEEN
a long time since he was so far up the mountain. Not many came out here any more, truth be told. There was no reason to. All that was there before had gone, all those places up on Olympus. Wreckage and bones carpeted the land. “Dawn of a new age.” Who were they fucking kidding?

Olympus. So much had changed here, but that name has stood the test of time. Even in a society of immortals, language changes. Olympus would change with time too, eventually. People change the way they express themselves, people
forget.
He hadn’t.

He didn’t know why, maybe it was the many rebirths and fast-growths he underwent in the war – veterans who survived encounters with the Stone Kin with their minds intact were recycled quickly, the better to employ their experience against the foe – but he remembered more of his pasts this time round than was the norm. He knew this, because he remembered not remembering in other lives.

He’d tried to explain this in the bars in the camps, but not many got what he meant. People who had fought in the war in this life were getting old or dying, and those who’d come back were babes in arms, to be allowed a normal life now the war was over. But someone – who, he was not sure, for he spent his nights in a stupor – had said it was because the spirits had amplified the memory recall, so the veterans would remember how to kill the Stone Kin. Trouble was, it brought
everything
back, too much for many people to handle.

That’s why, the man had said (he was pretty sure it had been a man, he had smelled bad enough), a lot of the veterans of the Third Stone War were crazy. Rumour was that when they went back into the stacks next time, some would not be coming out again – too damn unstable.

He thought it unlikely. There’d been two other Stone Wars, and he’d fought in both, and he was here, wasn’t he?

He remembered bright eyes and winey breath as a face leaned in to confide this information. It was a strong recollection, that moment, sharp with sensation, but if it had occurred last week or five years ago, he had no clue.

Kaibeli would understand him, broken or not; she always had, no matter what life he’d had forced on him. That’s why he was here, up on the slopes.

Looking for her.

The mirror suns made the slopes of Olympus hot. His broad-brimmed hat kept the worst of it from his eyes. Prevailing winds were east-west – he used the movement of the clouds above to keep track of where he was. The clouds came off the ocean, hit the line of the Tertiz Mun to the east, dumped their rain, and that’s that, nothing left for poor old Olympus or the area around it. Desert. Hot as sin. It had been unbearably dry on the Tertiz before the war. With the Veil of Worlds made manifest around the base of the mountain, it was worse.

Tertiz.
Tharsis,
he remembered.
Tharsis
.
Thersis, Tersis, Taertiz.
That was a name that had changed. He saw it happen in his memories. The sweep of time made him dizzy.

He remembered so much. Remembering pretty much all of his lengthy and varied past meant that in this life, he hadn’t got a fucking clue who he was. Yesterday had as much weight as a breakfast he’d had fourteen lifetimes since, and he could rarely tell which came first.

Hence the drink. At night, not during in the day. In the day he needed to stay sharp. He was terrified – he wasn’t ashamed to admit it – that he’d walk right by her.

He wiped his forehead. Shattered machines and the bones of men littered the sand. The last battle against the Stone Kin, at the end of the Third Stone War, had been fought here, when the fuckers had come boiling out of the Stone Sun. The new sun had done its job all right, it had kept the Stone Kin locked into the Suul (
Sol
, he remembered) system, but they’d found some way to use it to their advantage, to root themselves on Mars. Man had won, but the lands around Olympus were lost to fuck knew what, the Veil of Worlds, billowing white up ahead of him, their boundary.

He was sure it was here, round here somewhere, where it had happened, where he had lost her.

He never made a promise to her, not like she’d made to him. She wouldn’t expect him to come back to find her, but a promise like that, it cuts deep, and it goes both ways, right? And how many years had it been? He thought back to that moment of hot pain, the hand holding his hand, hard metal so soft through his glove. Pain is all he remembers of that life, no matter how comprehensive his recollections of others. It could have been his first, he might have come out of a womb rather than a machine. Maybe he’d even had his genes shuffled the animal way.

It seemed outlandish, even faintly disgusting.

That hand, and that promise – he had no idea how long ago that was. But it was thousands and thousands and thousand of years. Thousands. Of. Years.
Obligation like that. It is...
He struggled for the word.
Mutual
.

He didn’t know why, maybe because his head was full of too many memories of other men’s lives, but he wasn’t so clever this time around. Maybe the Librarian didn’t think its grunts needed much thinking power, just experience. He wasn’t stupid, not by a long way, but he had been cleverer.

Maybe that’s why he wouldn’t give up, why he camped out in that shithole of a town that all the refugees from Olympus had finally left when they’d realised the Veil was there forever and their cities were lost to them. Maybe that’s why he sat there in the searing heat and dry wind, drinking himself stupid every night with a bunch of toothless madmen, coming up here every damn day. Looking. For. Her.

Finding a particular pebble on a beach would have been easier. Half a million men had died up here, and one hundred and fifty six thousand spirits were killed – their shattered sheaths, and those of a million more whose minds escaped, were tangled with the skeletons of the men. The bodies lay four deep in places. You could walk over them in a straight line and your feet wouldn’t touch dirt for a week.

Still he looked. Every day, from dawn until sunset.

He knew why.

His fork sang in his belt and he stopped. He poked about in the dirt for a while, until he unearthed a shattered robot carriage. He dug it out with his folding spade, and he pulled it onto its back. All its limbs were gone, half its head was missing. It was a similar model to one of those she wore in the fight (one; there were half a dozen types, at least, she’d ridden during the course of the war). He pulled the fork from his belt: grey, dull metal, two tines as wide apart as an outstretched hand. It hummed affirmatively.

He cracked the sheath’s buckled carapace with some difficulty, sitting with his legs spread straight out either side of it so he could work at it properly. He swore and coaxed it and hit it with a rock. After a time, the core reluctantly rose from the chest port. A glass bulb filled with blue luminescence. He fitted it into the fork. The note was encouraging. The spirit within was alive, and it was sane. The note changed, a name. His face fell, dropping from joy to resignation without stopping by to visit hope. It wasn’t her.

He had the urge to smash the core with a thigh bone and leave the place forever.

He didn’t.

He put the core in the bag with the four others he’d found that day – a big haul, sometimes he didn’t find anything for weeks. Some of the spirits couldn’t get out when their bodies were fragged. Not all of them died. Some of them were still trapped up here, unable to get into the Second World so close to the new Stone Lands and the Veil. The ones he took back paid with cash or favours. Their gratitude kept him in lodgings and drink.

He pushed the wrecked sheath away from him and stood. His knees hurt. He was not young any more, and was not as well made as he should have been in the first place. Fast-growth made for fast lives. Heat haze shimmered off the bones. He squinted, thought he recognised an outcrop. There were so many memories of so many lives ended rapidly, one after another, that it was hard to tell which belonged to which. The bluff, however, he was certain he knew, and that it had been important.

Impossible to find her, others might say. But the way he looked at it, when he died, he’d go into the stacks and come out again (or he might not, but the end result would be the same for Kaibeli). If he didn’t look for her now, his memories would only fade each time he went into the stacks and was reborn. He could afford to waste a lifetime looking for her. It was that, or lose her forever.

He shouldered his threadbare pack and walked up the bluff, duster flapping about his calves in the breeze. Yeah, he was sure he remembered it. He stood at its top, looked down. He’d died here. Skulls and crushed machine bodies, still garbed in dusty armour, were half-buried in the hot sand. One of them was him. He remembered gunfire rattling off the skins of horrifying Stone Kin war constructs. He remembered it had had no effect, and he remembered what had happened to him and his men when they’d crested the hill.

He rubbed at his stomach, the place where they’d pulled his guts out.

When had it happened? Who the fuck knew?

Behind him, the Veil of Worlds rippled like a curtain of white gauze across the sky. He had been up to it, once or twice, looked into the place beyond that was no longer a part of the same reality. The Veil would kill you if you so much as brushed against it, but it was safe to stand within touching distance.

You could not see through it.

He held up the fork. It warbled unsteadily. No spirits alive around the bluff.

He moved on.

“S
AY, YO
M
ODEN
Pic?” a man sitting on a pile of wrecked robot chassis asked him. He was ratty about the face, a dirty round hat crammed onto his head. His skin was filthy, hair greasy, but the armour he wore was expensive, and he leaned on a long energy gun that gleamed with oil and active maintenance gels. The man looked like scum, but he knew his type – the dangerous type.

“Who wants to know?”

“Ah, does it matter?” said the man. He jumped up off the wrecked war droids. “I know it be yo, spirits tell me.” His hands were crossed over the trigger assembly of his gun, like he was shooting the breeze outside a bar.

Moden turned his head. Everywhere was the dead landscape of war. “There are no spirits here,” he said.

“There
weren’t
no spirits here,” corrected the man. He was an islander, judging by his uncouth speech; way off his home patch. You saw an islander without his fishing skiff it was nearly sure he was a sell-sword, or a pirate, or both. “But they’s coming back. Second World’s growing agin. I work for a man, big man out of Kemyonset. He wants to talk to yo.” Somehow, the man’s gun had contrived to point itself at Moden. Casually, like, but it was pointed at him nonetheless. “Ain’t nothing bad, don’t you worry yoself ’bout that. Fact, might be to yo advantage. He got sometin’ yo might be interessed in.”

Moden looked at the gun muzzle. His gaze slid slowly up the man’s dirty wargear to settle on his face. “I got a choice?”

The man spat and gave an unpleasant smile. “Now I think about it, I don’t suppose yo do.”

The man – Moden never did learn his name – took him down the side of the mountain. The volcanoes of Mars did not feel like mountains, despite their immense size. From a distance they dominated the landscape, but their slopes were so shallow that it was hard to accept you were standing on something that forced itself into the marches of space. After an hour they came to an area alive with activity – men, sheathed spirits and lesser machines working the land, collecting the dead. Piles of stacked bones and armour, heaps of broken sheaths made macabre sculptures on the red mountain. They were being catalogued. Men worked, genotyping the bones, or held forks similar to his own, testing the ruined sheaths for stranded spirit life.

“This way,” said the rat-faced islander. His gun had never left Moden’s back, no matter how diffidently he held it. It was like they were gentlemen wandering the desert for a morning’s shooting. It was like nothing of the sort. Ratface jutted his chin toward a cluster of tents.

“Which one?” said Moden. At the centre of the tents was one that was much richer than the others, embroidered with a living tapestry that occasionally took flight from the fabric, swooping around the worksite and singing sad songs of the dead Erth.

“Which do yo think?” said Ratface.

Moden paused. His eyes narrowed.

“Git goin’,” said Ratface. The gun wandered closer to Moden’s back.

They walked to the tent.

G
UARDS STOOD AT
the end of a covered walkway leading to the tent’s entrance, stiff-necked city sorts, all shiny armour and ego. They stood stock still, eyes locked forward, as Ratface herded Moden between them toward the colourful tent flap. Ratface gave them his nasty smile, and tipped his dirty hat.

“In there,” said Ratface. “Yo go in now.”

Moden faced him. “Not going to guard me?”

Ratface spat into the sand. “No need. Be seein’ yo, wastelander.”

He sauntered off, leaving Moden by the tent entrance. He let off a long fart as he walked out past the guards, shouldered his rifle, and whistled his way out of Moden’s life.

Moden looked around the camp. Wind cracked at the canvas. The tapestries murmured sad tales. The guards paid him no attention whatsoever.

He’d be dead within seconds if he turned and walked away. There was something on the air here, intangible eyes watching.

He lifted the heavy flap, and went into the tent.

It was heavily decorated inside. The fabric of the tent was thick, blocking out the sun, and the inside was lit by a variety of oil lamps. Carpets covered the dirt. The poles were decorated after the school of Menlo Kar. At a desk of alpine mertzwood sat a man writing by candlelight. He scratched a pen across paper. A spirit-inhabited putto at the corner of the desk, half a Marspan tall, whispered the words he wrote into the records of the Second World.