Eicere Ad Finem

Their trip through the Charitum Mountains went poorly. The huge mountain to the east of Charis was a steep seven-thousand-meter vertical climb up a slope that was scree where it wasn’t sheer cliff face. A journey that they hoped would seem wholly impossible to any pursuers, and one that was nearly so even for themselves, as little as they would have preferred to acknowledge that fact. By daybreak, they’d climbed to a saddle upon the mountain’s vast shoulder, perhaps a thousand meters down from the summit. They could find no ground over which their truck could climb the rest of the way to the peak, and so decided this place would serve well as their pass to cross into the wild lands beyond. It was also in this place that Jack announced they should dump all of what he referred to as their ‘unnecessary cargo’. Nestor was happy to be rid of the bodies, as their presence haunted him, and hearing them jostle around in the compartment as the truck bounded over the rough terrain had been making him feel ill.

The first task before they dumped anything was to swap the shuttle GPS to the truck. Nestor removed the GPS from the shuttle quite easily, but installing that device into the truck proved impossible, as the connections were not perfectly aligned between the new GPS and truck, and even once Nestor spliced them, the shuttle GPS would not boot up, and nothing he tried seemed to fix it. Jack quickly tired of attending to Nestor’s futile troubleshooting, and told him they’d proceed without.

“But how will we find our way out of these mountains, then?” Nestor asked, looking out the window at the labyrinthine expanse spread below them.

“We’ll find our way. I will find our way. Plus, once we get clear of these here mountains, we jes need to head straight west to find the road. Once we have the road, we won’t need no GPS.”

Nestor opened his mouth to press his argument further, but his compatriot turned away and was already preparing to unload the shuttle. This proved a minor task, as they had been jettisoning pieces of that craft steadily throughout their entire ascent, and most of the smaller, looser parts had bounced off to mix heterogeneously with the dry slurry of rocks over which the truck had crawled. The main shuttle hull and bomb both remained, however, for the hull had been tightly strapped down, winched forward, and bolted in place by the crane arm, and the bomb had been placed in a large metal box that was of the platform itself.

The shuttle had rattled far enough back on the platform that the straps holding it strained under incredible tension, and they explosively undid themselves at the merest prompting from Nestor. The winch spun free with a simple button push, and the bolts attaching the crane to the shuttle came out when Jack, using only the crane arm, shoved the hull off the platform. The shuttle crashed to the rocks below, and eager to once again become an independent thing, it slid down the steep slope, for a moment tugging the huge behemoth of a truck to lean precariously in that direction, until those bolts whined away into the thin air like bullets. The craft began a slow roll and tumbled downslope until it settled, tilted against a large boulder some distance down.

Nestor tried to busy himself around the exterior of the truck by picking up small pieces of junk from the shuttle, folding and coiling straps, anything to avoid going back in to touch those bodies, but Jack would hear none of it. Nestor’s suit coms came alive with Jack’s annoyed voice, “Hey what you doin’ out there? I need you in here to help me.”

“They cain’t weigh no more’n thirty kilos. You can handle thirty kilos.”

“They are too much for any person to handle by hisself. It ain’t jes how much they weigh, it’s that they’re bulky and they’re stiff. You helped kill ‘em, and so you need to get in here right now to help get rid of ‘em.”

Nestor moped inside, declining to remove the bulky envirosuit, hoping perhaps the thick gloves might insulate him from all sensation of what would come next. The man with the exploded knee had stiffened into a pose clutching it, and Nestor insisted they get rid of that body first. Negotiating the doubled-over corpse into the single-person airlock proved especially difficult, as there was no way to occupy the airlock with him, and so having one person hand him down to the other person waiting in the airlock below was impossible. Eventually, they depressurized the cab and then opened both airlock doors and unceremoniously dumped the bodies out. They left them where they landed and pretended amongst themselves this was a sufficient burial.

Unburdened from their history, Jack seemed quite content as he took over the controls and began piloting the truck down the mountain. However, as he exited the saddle proper and began descending the eastern slope, it became apparent for the first time just how vertiginous their ascent in the dark must have been, and how precarious was their descent. The truck was so wide and heavy that it seemed disinclined to roll, but all the same Jack panicked as it lost traction, and began sawing the steering controls back and forth. At one point he had the truck pointed backwards at a shallow angle, the huge treads kicking up spumes of scree and fines as they tried in vain to gain some foothold. They continued to slide downhill.

Nestor could tell by Jack’s face that this was not the time for feedback nor criticism, but he so thoroughly lost his patience with their predicament that he yelled anyway, “Goddammit, you gotta turn into the descent, you dumb sumbitch. Stop fightin’ it like that before you roll us over.”

Jack rounded on him and let go the controls, losing all focus on driving. His cool demeanor evaporated and his face contorted into a seething anger that caused Nestor to recoil.

“Don’t you tell me a fuckin’ thing. You think I need truck drivin’ advice from some fuckin’ dust-farmin’ hick?”

Nestor’s hands went up in automatic defense from one so angered. He must have looked pathetic indeed, because Jack’s demeanor seemed to flip in an instant, his face falling into a slight frown. He stared at Nestor and shook his head and turned his attention back to the truck, which in the absence of his stewardship over the intervening few seconds had come around to face downwards. No way was Jack going to let that happen, however, no way was he going to implicitly acknowledge that Nestor had been correct in admonishing him, and he sawed the wheel hard to the left to stop the truck’s automatic correction.

The nose of the behemoth came about obediently at Jack’s touch, but physics felt no fealty towards Jack whatsoever, and the truck continued its downhill slide. Abruptly, the treads found traction on some rocky subsurface, and the contradictory steering inputs combined with this newfound traction caused a jolting screech followed by a series of rapid thumps, and then Jack lost all ability to steer. He eased off the throttle and fought with the controls, but neither action did anything to stop their slide down the mountain, and the nose of the truck once again came about by itself to face down the slope. The big truck began picking up speed as it slid, and would have continued to do so if it hadn’t tipped sickeningly over a ten-meter-tall cliff, coming down hard on its right side and tossing Nestor and Jack, unrestrained both, about inside the cab. Nestor instinctively put up his arms as he fell, trying to brace himself, and he jammed his left arm against some unseen obstacle as he tumbled. The pain was explosive and searing and seemed to emanate from shoulder and elbow and all points in between, and continued unabated by Nestor’s panic or by any other thing real or imagined in all the universe.

The slope below the cliff was perhaps close cousin to cliff itself and as such the truck didn’t stay on its side but now rolled sideways once, twice, before finding a gentler incline and settling back on its treads. The scree and dust on this new, gentler slope was several meters deep, and sinking into this mire, the truck came to a blessed stop.

They picked themselves up inside the cab and were much reduced from their state only seconds prior. Nestor’s arm was barely usable and painful to the touch, and blood kept running into his eyes from some source on his head. He palpated sore spots to find the cut, but could not locate the source of the blood, and so he sufficed by continually wiping at his brow with the back of his hand. Jack’s leg could bear no weight and his face looked as though he had lost a fight, being cut in multiple places and with two black eyes and a crooked nose.

Nestor went to find a first aid kit, and Jack sat at the controls in a wounded attempt at assessing what their damage was. He’d accept no aid from Nestor, and so the boy tended to his own wounds while Jack flipped through screens on the console and jockeyed at different controls and blinked his bleary, swollen eyes at what he saw. The truck would not move, though the engine seemed to work just fine. Jack, with a grimace upon his face, attempted to rise.

“Gotta be the treads. I’ll go check.”

Nestor tossed him the first aid kit and rose instead, “Fix yourself up. I’ll go take a look at the treads.”

“What you know about tread repair? You gonna tell me yer a long-lost truck mechanic now?”

Nestor looked at him for a moment and decided not to take the bait, “I ain’t no mechanic, but I did spend my entire childhood fixin’ things. And you ain’t gonna fix nothin’ if you don’t attend to that leg.”

The boy must have spoken with enough confidence to dissuade Jack from further inquiries, as he turned from Nestor and opened the kit and then said over his shoulder, “Fine then, but stay on the coms the whole time, and tell me everthing you see.”

Outside, Nestor found the truck buried to the axles. After exhuming enough tread to see what damage there may be, Nestor found a left track that was torn and bent sharply up and several dished out wheels on both sides, collapsed from the lateral forces during their roll down the slope. Luckily, the platform truck was well-equipped with tools, including a quite nice plasma torch, and so he set to work torch-welding the tread back into place and cutting loose the bent wheels. It was well into the night before he had finished, working stoically while Jack lounged inside and offered blind, unsolicited advice on his actions, and against his better impulses, Nestor felt quite at home. Once his repairs were in place, they resumed their track down the slope, at much reduced speed and with frequent stops to go outside to inspect the treads.

They spent the following days hiding and lost in those rugged mountains, playing a game of cat and mouse where the existence of either cat or mouse was speculative to the other. Jack used the sun and the stars to keep them headed east; he claimed going north would take them into Argyre, south to the plains, and west back to Charis, so east was their only option. They’d seen copters in the distance several times, each time under the cover of darkness, but the copters never came near and there was no other sign of man. They descended out of the mountains into a broad deep canyon, and following this canyon, found it emptied into a crater which itself partially overlaid another crater, which led into a third and final crater, the three sister craters relics of an ancient bombardment, perhaps a single larger meteor that broke into three on descent, or perhaps three coincidental strikes billions of years apart. They could not tell.

The travellers climbed out of the final crater to find a level plain, featureless in the predawn gloom but for the rock outcroppings of distant crater rims, and scattered with every size of boulder stretching out to the horizon in all directions. Nestor turned the truck west, and before long the sun rose at their backs, casting the platform truck’s shadow far before them across the playa. As they drove, that shadow slowly shortened, and as it disappeared entirely, they came to a long undulating beachhead of dunes running north-south, the entire mass of sand shifting in unison as if directed by some higher force, millions of tons of grit and dust hissing over the surface in a geographically-scaled sine wave.

Nestor drove to the beachhead and climbed that moving surface, crabbing the big truck up the shifting face of sand, the treads creaking and squealing in strain, and soon the truck crested on the merits of its momentum and naught else. On the other side of the beachhead they found an ocean of similar shifting dunes, some easily a thousand meters tall, with no end in sight. Nestor spent some time staring at them all moving out there and he wondered what to do now.

“I ain’t drivin’ through that,” Nestor said, visions of his marooned range truck back in the Valley welling up before him, “we’ll get lost in there an’ never find our way out. Plus this truck cain’t manage deep sand in the state it’s in, anyway.”

Jack shrugged from his position perched woundedly upon the passenger seat, “Well, guess we ought to find some other way then.”

They backtracked using the dune shallows and turned south, skirting the shores of the dusty ocean, driving for days more through a landscape that seemed to change little as they travelled, just the dunes to the west and the yawning flat boulder fields to the east, and the stretched shadow of the voyagers in their truck as companion.

*****

He watched the blizzard roiling over the plains towards them and mused that it looked like the strangest dust storm he’d ever seen. Rather than a towering wall of dust, capped by a voluminous and amorphous ceiling of orange and brown clouds, and arced throughout by tendrils of lighting, this storm was a stratospherically-looming gray cloud front, trailing broad white curtains behind, as if it were tugging them along, cautious not to jerk too hard and pull those curtains loose from their fragile moorings. The sunset cast beams of purple through openings in the curtains and refracted through the thicker veils to make them glow in motes that danced.

Nestor drove the truck into one of those curtains and found himself inundated by carbon dioxide snow. He had seen carbon snow before, but the snow on the high plains back home was rare and special, a fine-grained stuff that filtered down gently from a clear sky with rays of sunlight glittering through it and filled their drab amber world with crystals and rainbows. The snowflakes of this blizzard were different, large dense cuboidal clumps of dull white blown sideways across his path and obscuring the windows on the windward side of the truck with miniature avalanches.

It wasn’t long before drifts formed, which rose to the bottom of the huge platform truck and exploded in blooms of white when the truck hit them. Visibility dropped to nothing, which mattered little as it was already pitch dark, the wind, encompassing blanket of carbon snow, and the travelers in their ill-begotten transport the only things verifiable as existing anywhere. Nestor kept the truck bouncing forward, the treads hitting and mounting and dismounting myriad obstacles entombed in the shifting, blowing snow. The lights shone through the deluge of crystals and created a streaking tunnel shaped around their direction of travel, somehow making visibility worse, creating the impression of pushing through a soft cream blanket that malformed around them, clinging and dragging, refusing to allow them to see past it or through it. Nestor gave up on the lights and turned them off and slowed even further and drove on by feel alone.

Jack came up from where he’d been sleeping in the passenger area and leaned over Nestor’s shoulder and peered ahead to see something that Nestor couldn’t.

“Ain’t never seen it snow like this.”

“Been at it for a while. You shoulda seen it blowin’ in across the plains at sundown.”

“Times like this I wish we had a GPS.”

Nestor shook his head and said nothing in reply.

“You wanna switch out?”

“Want to stop and wait it out. It’s gotta blow over.”

“We cain’t stop here. They could still be behind us, for one. And for two, where we goin’, they’s gonna be a lot of snow and a lot of dark too. So consider this practice.”

Jack smiled a wolfish grin at Nestor, who looked at him for a moment with blank eyes, shook his head again, and returned to his task.

“Well, let me know when you wanna switch out. I ain’t seen you sleep in…in a while, you can always go back and take a nap while I take over.”

“Don’t want to switch out and don’t want to sleep,” Nestor heard himself say, while knowing deep down that neither statement was the truth. He was desperately tired and his head ached from the concentration he was putting into driving, but he didn’t want to see the bloodstains in the passenger area and didn’t want to think about anything other than keeping the truck moving vaguely in the direction-he-believed-to-be south. He definitely didn’t want what passed for sleep nowadays.

He drove all night in the indefatigable snow and the drifts, navigating by intuition and by accident and by little else. The snow kept packing into the treads and compacted there into ice and that ice covered over drive sprockets and return rollers, making the treads useless and bringing them to a stop. Thus waylaid, Nestor would descend from the airlock wearing one of the dead men’s envirosuits, his own suit’s backpack standing no prospect of combating this cold, and emerge into the blinding storm bloated and awkward as a mythical snow beast. He’d beat upon the ice with prybars, and if the wind allowed he’d wield the truck’s plasma torch upon the more stubborn ice, and free the truck. He did this so many times that his entire body ached and his hurt arm hung useless and spent and heavy from his shoulder.

At last the snow stopped falling from above, but the winds did not cease in the least and blew the fallen snow laterally, somehow becoming even more visibility-obscuring than before, and everything, the ground, the air, the windows, all became consumed in opaque white. When the sun rose mid-morning, the winds scoured away the remaining clouds and then themselves died, and in that nascent tranquility the world around them dazzled. All was white; boulders were vague lumps, gullies and ditches had become minor depressions, and the distant serrated ridges of craters had transformed into gleaming teeth within the open maws of geologic abominable underground snow monsters waiting for some small foolish creature to venture near.

They drove on blind from the glare. Nestor dug around in the side pockets of the cab looking for some sort of shades, but found nothing. He stopped the truck and looked through all the compartments and toolboxes, but still found little that could help him. Blinking his watery, tired eyes in their snowblindness, Nestor cut out the restraining belt from one of the jump seats, held the belt up to his face to measure, and then cut a slit for each eye. He tied the belt around his head and peered into the glare, and found his invention to work quite well. It worked so well, in fact, that Jack demanded one for himself, which Nestor fashioned from the other jump seat belt. So bandanaed, they drove on as strange, dirty, and reeking primitives, persevering on their arcane quest against all odds and all barriers.

As the sun rose towards its apogee, the carbon snow around them began steaming, and then sublimated back into the atmosphere whence it had precipitated. Their world became engulfed in fog and roils of it poured down every incline, the occasional frigid gasp of a breeze snatching a wisp and spinning it around into a ghostly dancer that dissipated and reformed and dissipated and reformed. Again, Nestor navigated by intuition alone, and he felt lucky as the blanket of snow disappeared, for at least he could now see the obstacles as he hit them.

The sun tumbled back towards the horizon in mid-afternoon, and as the surrounding land ceased steaming for the day, the black tarmac of the hidden road had still more steam left to give, having spent the meager daylight hours soaking up excess heat from the sun. So, in a world growing gradually more clear by the moment, it was easy to make out the river of fog in the distance, a strange ephemeral wall snaking through the plains before them. The travelers had found their route to the Great Seed Bank.

*****

They travelled for days upon the road before it disappeared. It seemed impossible, but the tarmac ceased in a near-perfect line, as if the road builders had stopped in their tracks here, perhaps after hitting some great invisible wall. The darkness had permanently enveloped them and Nestor wondered under his breath if he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere and had blindly turned off onto an unfinished spur, but he knew deep down that this wasn’t possible, and the road had been the road, and nothing had ever branched off it. It was simply gone. He reported as much back over his shoulder to Jack, who had been sleeping more and more since their adventure through the blizzard. Jack came forward and looked through the front windows. “Looks like someone jes decided to stop makin’ a road right there,” he said, his tone overflowing with amusement.

Nestor felt too tired to find much humor in their situation, “So what do we do now? How we gonna find the Seed Bank in the dark without a map or even a road to follow?”

Jack looked out the window quietly for a moment, his face expressionless, “We can still use the stars to find south, and that’s all we need anyways. Seed Bank’s at the South Pole. I reckon at this point we jes keep drivin’ south until we run out of south to drive.” He smiled at his cleverness, looking at Nestor to see if he got the joke. Nestor deadpanned back.

“But I don’t understand. I saw a road comin’ in to the Seed Bank complex on that schematic. There ain’t no road. So what road was in that drawin’?”

Jack shrugged, “Don’t believe everthing you see in pictures, I guess.”

“But that ain’t no answer. You sayin’ the road I saw was some sort of lie?”

“Look, I don’t know how old that schematic was, nor do I know why Nils let you see it, nor do I know why you put so much stock in it. A contact of ours jes found it in an old archive. You think a terrorist cell has access to current satellite imagery?” Jack chuckled in disbelief, shrugging again as he spoke.

“So you tellin’ me there once was a road, and that’s what I saw in the image? But then, where did it go? The road’s been fine all the way up to this point.”

“I don’t know what happened to the damn road any better than you do. It ain’t here, and us speculatin’ on its whereabouts is about the most asinine thing I can think to do in our current situation. Now, do you think you can drive this truck south, or do I need to take over?”

“But I jes don’t get it,” Nestor persisted, “You tellin’ me you all planned this whole mission jes based on the first image you found of yer target? You didn’t do no other research than that?”

Jack glared at him, and his face reddened. “Oh, now you’d like to criticize our mission planning, eh? You, a kid from nowhere who goes around peddlin’ some half-cocked, bullshit pilot story. I don’t think Linh or myself or anyone needs plannin’ feedback from some pathologically-lyin’ juvenile delinquent.”

Nestor felt shame bubbling up as Jack spoke and felt it curdling into anger. His vision smeared as his eyes filled with tears and he blinked them back and looked away from Jack, staring out the windows at the whorl of stars above shining crystal bright in the ceaseless frigid night.

“Jes nevermind,” he choked out, aware of the suppressed sob coming through in his voice all the same, “I’ll jes drive it south.”

Jack looked at him with a merciless, hateful stare for several moments. Finally, he gave up and turned from Nestor. “Don’t wake me again unless it’s actually important,” he said dully over his shoulder as he limped to the makeshift hammock he’d set up back in the passenger compartment.

Nestor did as instructed and kept the truck headed due south. It wasn’t long before the frost-covered rock, which had been their roadside companion for so long, was replaced by glacial carbon ice, dull white in the lights, starting off just a thin skein but thickening to several meters deep before they’d driven long at all. It was so frigid that the surface was not slick in the least and the treads bit into the hard carbon ice and groaned and squealed in the cold.

He crawled along, and blinked and rubbed his red-rimmed eyes and fought a desperate battle with the sleep that wanted to overcome him, and was not helped in his efforts by the featureless quality of the ice, for all that could be seen in any direction was a formless void rendered in monochrome shades, like a horizon drawn on an unfinished painting. He’d nearly dozed off when the truck tilted violently forward. The treads screeched under this new strain and his stomach felt the plummet before his tired eyes had processed that they were dropping down a near-vertical decline.

Luckily the fall was brief, but the truck slammed down at force on the front plow, bending it up and in with a thunderous crash. The truck then settled back, the treads at the rear coming to rest against the glacier wall. They were stuck in this position until Nestor gave the treads their all, and with them spinning and screeching and the engine roaring, he could sufficiently bend the plow up and out of the way, and the back of the truck came crashing down.

Jack had been tossed free of his hammock and came forward to demand that Nestor let him drive. Nestor said nothing in response, but sullenly moved over to the passenger seat and huddled up there with his eyes closed. It was not long before Jack began screaming a stream of swears. The truck would not respond to any of his inputs. Without saying a word to Nestor, he limped back to the airlock. Nestor sat hugging his knees to his chest in the passenger seat until he heard Jack exit the airlock, and sitting there in the silence, decided that he didn’t want to sleep anyway, and so he followed Jack outside.

Out in the frigid dark, they found that several more wheels had bent in their fall and were restricting the treads. Nestor cut these wheels loose and then they stood looking at the scanty few that remained.

Jack insisted over the coms, “We jes gonna have to take’er slow from here on. But it’ll make it. I’m sure of it. We makin’ history and ever step has led us to here. It cain’t have all been for nothin’.”

Nestor glanced over at him, unsure of Jack’s unaccounted-for optimistic tone, “These last wheels are gonna wear fast. And ever one of them is at least a little damaged. It’s only a matter of time before they fail, and then once that happens, we done. This truck’ll not move again.”

Jack limped over to the airlock, “We close. It’ll make it the rest of the way. C’mon, let’s get goin’.”

At the controls again, Jack found that they’d fallen into a sort of shallow depression, and coming to the opposite wall, learned that the truck in its present state could in no way climb up out of that place. He turned the truck and followed the wall, looking for egress, and found it in a sort of gully which they followed into another shallower depression, and in this one they found an incline that the big truck trudged up to the surface.

Stretched out around them in the dark as they left the depression was an entire landscape pockmarked with similar pits. Jack picked his way between those massive potholes, trying to keep the truck headed south, following a slow and circuitous course through that impossible icy world, enclosed in the never-ending night of polar winter. Their winding course made the truck rock back and forth in its track, and it was in this state that Nestor fell into a dreamless sleep.

*****

The wind tugged ceaselessly at Nestor and for a moment he imagined himself in a child’s fantasy, one in which the wind could pick him up and lift him above this frozen world and whip him over the South Pole before twisting, turning there and sling-shotting him away from the ice and out of the dark and free from all of this and it wouldn’t matter at all where he landed then because it would be so far away from here that he could never return. He sighed and shook his head in the helmet and looked at the wreckage that remained of the last wheels on the left side of the truck. There were exactly two good wheels remaining on this entire truck, both on the other side, not enough to keep going. The tread was also horribly ruined, a ragged scarf of metal all that remained. Nestor’s former repair had been quite good, in retrospect, but they had driven an incredible distance since then and in the worst possible conditions. It was those conditions that he suspected had taken the last three wheels on this side. He considered the cold as the primary culprit, for all the metal on the outside of the truck seemed to have become quite brittle in these frigid temperatures. The wheels had simply shattered.

The cold was also a problem in that the suit heater within his purloined envirosuit could not keep up. Coming outside for these repairs always left him shivering, and it was taking longer and longer for him to warm back up once inside. He wondered what it was going to be like to walk in this suit and he wondered where the nearest civilization could be from this wilderness and he knew that walking to wherever that place might lie would be necessary, as this truck was officially done moving, and could conceivably be considered a new permanent landscape feature, a landmark that future travelers would use to know when they’d ventured too far south. Those successive voyagers would amongst themselves tell the story of the two young terrorists who once stole a platform truck to bomb the Great Seed Bank and failed, a cautionary tale of hubris and ineptitude, and they would turn back here for no sane person would continue on from this point, no matter what may lie beyond.

“It’s shattered completely?” Jack asked over the coms. He didn’t sound as angry as Nestor had expected. Nestor hated these times more than when Jack was outright angry. It was the suspense. He hated not knowing what Jack would do next.

“Yep. Broke into four…wait, no five, actually, five parts. I don’t think torch-weldin’ five pieces back together is gonna hold at all. This truck is done, Jack.”

He left it at that, because he didn’t want to say what came next and hoped that Jack would have some better idea. Something that didn’t require them to walk through this murderous cold and dark.

“Ok, go on and get the box the bomb’s in opened on up. I’ll use the crane to lift it out and put it on the ground, then I’ll be out. Be thinkin’ about how to get that armor plating off it.”

Nestor didn’t move, “The bomb? What are we doin’ with the bomb, Jack? We cain’t take a bomb back to town with us.”

“Town? We ain’t never goin’ back to no town, Nestor. We takin’ the bomb with us to the Seed Bank, same as we always was. I woulda thought that was pretty obvious. But we don’t need that armor plating. It was for the impact, originally, to keep the bomb from breakin’ into a billon pieces ‘fore it could properly explode. But we don’t need that extra weight, not now.”

“You want to keep on to the Seed Bank?” Nestor asked with trepidation.

“We don’t have no choice but to get to the Seed Bank. We still have a mission to complete, and still have history to make, and that didn’t change when you wrecked the shuttle, and it didn’t change when you wrecked the truck, and it ain’t changed now that we got to walk the rest of the way, neither. Ever decision we have made has put us here and we ain’t got no choice but to go on.”

“We can choose somethin’ different, Jack. Maybe if we walked back a ways we might could find another truck to steal, and come back for the bomb in that. Or hell maybe we could jes leave the bomb behind and forget this mission. Have you thought that maybe we ain’t meant to complete it, and that’s why we been havin’ so much trouble?”

“If we wasn’t meant to complete the mission, we wouldn’t have made it this far. But if you don’t want to be part of this no more, after all we done, all we been through, then fine. Go on, walk out into that dark alone and see how long you last before you’re dead. Because we caught up in a tempest of destiny Nestor. It’s pushin’ us along to our destination, and if we try to force our way some other direction it’ll tear us up, sure as anything. And if you walk away now, I want you to remember that as you’re freezin’ to death out there.”

Nestor stood and stared through the dark at the lights of the truck and imagined Jack emerging from that truck alone and crippled to struggle against the bomb here in the frigid wind and he imagined himself walking forsaken and lost through the carbon ice and he could stomach neither image.

“But how we gonna take the bomb anywheres, Jack? It ain’t like we can jes pick it up and carry it, especially in the state we in right now.”

“We gonna have to figure out the how. I’m thinkin’ some sort of sled that we can pull with straps. We’ll need to see what works. Now, would you kindly get over to open up that box?”

Nestor heard the annoyance rising in Jack’s voice and decided not to argue any longer. He idly hoped, as he undid the box, that once Jack got out in this cold, he might change his mind. Jack hadn’t been out of the truck in days. He did not know what it was like out here.

Nestor had the entire front armor plate disassembled by the time Jack limped out to him with his helmet visor visibly frozen over at the edges, but he mentioned nothing about the cold or the dark or his injury, moving without pause over to the bomb to inspect Nestor’s work. The armor plate had come apart into a nose cone and four sides, which Nestor had scattered around the tundra, and Jack found one of the side pieces and held it up to the bomb, “Reattach this side to it. I’ll go get some straps and be back.”

Nestor did so and Jack returned at length dragging a strap from his shoulder and holding a large drill with a diamond bit and with considerable effort he drilled a hole in the plate and ran a bolt through this hole and attached both ends of the strap to the bolt, and using Nestor to do most of the pushing, rolled the bomb over to rest on this makeshift sled and pulled the straps taught and leaned against them, testing to be sure the straps would hold. Satisfied with their craftsmanship, he ordered Nestor back inside to retrieve one of the dead crew member’s packs, water, nutrient paste tubes, batteries, and the emergency survival tent.

By the time Nestor had gathered everything and returned outside, Jack had taken two of the large prybars from the truck and had torch-welded them together into a very serviceable crutch. He assumed position with the straps about his waist and the crutch draped awkwardly forward in front of them. He beckoned Nestor to stand next to him, and together like long-extinct draft animals that they only knew from pictures in storybooks they pulled the bomb forward, that parcel begrudging each of their steps over the sheet of frozen carbon ice and they pulled in defiance of this and the wind and the dark all in equal measure.

They pulled the bomb this way, slipping and falling on the ice, feet scrabbling for purchase, the ever-present weight behind them leaning perpetually in opposition to their efforts, until they both collapsed in exhaustion in the traces. They sat side-by-side in the wind and the carbon snow until Nestor rose like a frozen being coming unstuck to do some awful bidding. All he did was resume pulling alone. The bomb inched forward as Nestor’s thighs and arms and stomach and back all burned and vied for which was in the most pain and still yet Nestor pulled. Jack took up position behind the bomb and pushed, even though he moved quite pitifully, and notwithstanding his inability to place his one foot upon the ground at all. He leaned against the thing and shoved using a combination of his one good leg and the crutch, and could thus help Nestor further the bomb’s progress.

Their numb extremities began failing and then gave, and they slumped together on the leeward side of the bomb and felt warmer to be out of the wind. Jack suggested setting up the survival tent here, and so Nestor set it up and they both climbed inside and felt even warmer yet and both were asleep before long at all.

Nestor dreamt he was standing in the opening of a tall cave, bounded on all edges of the cavern by great square blocks that were spaced evenly from one another. He was looking from the cave’s opening to a grand green parkland spread like a carpet all the way to a horizon obscured by a white-capped mountain range. A thunderhead loomed above those mountains, an anvil in the sky arcing lighting down to the ground below it and the lightning formed many luminous temporary appendages that reached out to pull the cloud mass along and it crawled over the verdant fields and brought with it a deep gray veil that obscured all which the storm bestrode.

He was aware of someone coming up to stand at his side and he turned to see his father standing there surveying all in silence alongside him.

“Someday this will all be yours, son,” his father said with a smile that, as Nestor watched, extended out to his ears and trickled rivulets of blood down his cheeks. Nestor screamed in his dream and backed away from his father. The cave ceiling boomed above his head, and he looked up to see one of the enormous boulders fall from its position at the top of the opening to come crashing to his feet. Nestor jumped back and stared at it lying there in front of him and he realized the rock looked very much like a tooth, broken free from its root up in the old cave’s mouth. He turned and he looked at the rest and became aware how they formed lines extending back into the cave, and the floor beneath him writhed in a lingual motion and then from the back of the cave blood gurgled up and overflowed and poured towards him.

He turned and ran to the lips of the giant’s mouth and upon turning back, saw his father inundated by the blood already and Louis stared down at it as it rose above his ankles to his knees. Louis looked up at Nestor and screamed, “Nestor, run!” the same way he always did in Nestor’s memories of his death, but had not done in real life, and Nestor chose in this dream to not run but to save his father.

He splashed towards his father through the rising tide of blood and he reached out and grabbed his father’s hand, but Louis would not budge. He was looking down again and Nestor looked with him, but only saw the blood at his thighs and making for his waist.

“They got me trapped, son,” his father said to him, pointing down at his feet.

Nestor could see nothing through the crimson tide and so knelt down and in kneeling brought it sloshing up to his shoulders and about his neck and the blood was trying very hard to splash into a mouth which he kept closed so tightly he worried he might bite through his lips entirely, and he reached to feel down his father’s legs, his hands touching thick ropes wound about Louis’s feet that his fingers could barely enwrap. Nestor grabbed a rope in each fist and they came away quite freely and he hefted himself up out of the blood. As Nestor stood, he lifted the ropes up out of the blood to see veiny yellow intestines in his hands. He screamed again and felt every atom in his body vibrate with that same frequency and pain and outrage and as he screamed his eyes traced those long loose guts back to his father’s belly and from the gaping wound there, he could see the source of the blood engulfing them both. His eyes wandered up his father’s body and when they found his father’s face it was no face at all but nothing, null, a mask that distorted and bent and this was somehow the most terrible thing of all to him and it was in this horror that Nestor awoke.

He awoke to find Jack already awake and gazing intently at him. Jack said nothing to him to explain his queer look and, lacking any proper accounting of the passage of time in this permanent dark, they agreed to call it the next day and rose to their task. For what matter is a proper accounting of time when you are at the end of everything?

This day was more of the same, and they settled into a rhythm of pulling and resting that worked to keep the bomb moving along. They ended the day exhausted, yet agreeing that they’d made good progress, though neither man could have defined their progress if asked. Fortunately neither inquired this of the other. Nestor once again set up the tent, and inside they passed out and they awoke after further hours unaccounted for to find themselves buried in snow.

The snow that they dug themselves and their tent out of differed from the carbon snow covering the rest of this Antarctic world. This new snow compacted together much easier and had a translucence to it that glittered and shone in their lights. Jack identified it as water snow, and Nestor held it up to examine, deciding it looked quite like water ice after exiting the crushers in the melter huts back home.

Nestor went and kicked down a path to get them started and they resumed pulling the sled through the half-meter-deep water snow, struggling against this heavier and more binding mire, their helmet visors fogging up and the fog freezing in contact with the visors until they peered out at the world through the few small frost-free holes that remained.

They rested and slept and resumed pulling and rested and slept and pulled again. How many actual days this constituted neither knew or cared. Jack’s leg worsened until he was all but useless in matters of physical labor, and Nestor’s arm hung at his side, numb and dead from the cold, but still they pushed on, the pain and disability simply additional problems atop a pile of identical others that were all being summarily ignored. The stars rotated above them and they could at any point look back to see their drag marks stretching into the darkness and in these two things they assured themselves that they were indeed moving, and this gave them enough spirit to continue, if only just.

Their supplies ran thin and then ran out, and still they pulled. Their lips cracked in dehydration and their empty stomachs growled louder and louder until those growls subsided to cramps and the cramps continued until they too lost the battle against the men’s will and so submerged into a dull, empty numbness. Their heads pounded and then that stopped too, and they decided amongst themselves not to sleep again, agreeing that sleep was a waste of time, which was their only remaining resource and itself in quite short supply indeed.

So it was that neither man had slept in far too long when their lights caught the artificial hulk of a building poking up out of the ice field ahead of them, and in their sleep-deprived state they convinced themselves independently that they didn’t see the things that they were seeing. They nearly walked past the buildings entirely before Jack stated unprompted that the architecture towering above them on all sides was in fact the Great Seed Bank and not a hallucination born of exhaustion. It was here that they finally collapsed, sitting back-to-back and sore and stinking so much it almost wasn’t worth breathing for every breath brought more of their own stench into their mouths and noses, and they stared up at a goal now reached that had seemed entirely hypothetical until just that moment.

*****

After sitting for a while, just long enough that Nestor began to doze off, Jack with great effort lifted himself vertical again and announced that it was time.

“Time for what?” Nestor asked, knowing exactly what Jack had meant.

“You know what I’m talkin’ about,” Jack said with exhaustion, leaning upon the bomb for support, “it’s time that we met our destiny. We need to trigger the bomb. Now get on up here and help me.”

Nestor stood with some effort and stared at the cargo they’d been dragging. In truth, he did not know how a nuclear bomb worked, and all the wires and parts before him were a complete mystery.

“How do we trigger it?” he asked, genuinely curious if Jack knew the answer to that question. It was one he hadn’t taken the time to ponder, and now, as he stared at the complexity of parts assembled before him, it seemed unanswerable.

It turned out that Jack knew something about bombs. “There’s a number of safeties we’ll need to disable, and then it should jes be as simple as connectin’ a couple wires,” Jack said, already taking off the top panel of the bomb.

“So there ain’t no way to detonate it from a safe distance?”

“You mean with a remote or somethin’?” Jack chuckled derisively, “Nah. It was originally set to trigger when the accelerometer in here sensed it impactin’ the ground with sufficient force. That’s one of the safeties we gotta take out, in fact.”

“We cain’t set a timer or somethin’? Maybe run away while it counts down?”

“Ain’t possible to run a safe distance away from a nuclear bomb, Nestor. Not like I can run anywheres,” Jack said with exasperation, not looking up from his efforts inside the bomb.

“But I remember there were circles in that schematic…one of ‘em had to be for the safe distance from the blast…”

“That goddamn schematic again. I swear if I hear you mention it one more time, I’ll kill you first, before settin’ off this bomb. No circle on no old drawin’ matters now that we here. We ain’t gonna make it past this, Nestor. This here’s our ultimate act, and it’s one everone everwhere will remember for all time. You should feel lucky to die here, doin’ this. Makin’ history.”

“But I don’t know that I want to die, Jack. I didn’t ever want to commit suicide, and now that we’re here I still don’t. I’m colder than I ever been, my body is jes wrecked, and I got no idea what to do if I keep livin’. But I do know I don’t wanna die.”

Jack didn’t respond, and it was not clear to Nestor that he’d even heard as he dug through the innards of the weapon before them. Nestor could make no sense of what Jack was doing and found he did not even like looking at the bomb, and so he occupied himself by examining the nearest tower to them, a windowless black rectangle that towered over the ice field by several hundred meters. It seemed to sway in the wind. He wondered who was inside that building, and he wondered if he started walking towards it, whoever was within might venture out and perhaps stop him. Stop them.

He turned to gape at the other five buildings, all arranged in the semicircle he remembered from the schematic. The building they were by was at the apex of the semicircle and was supposed to be at the terminus of the conjectural road. Whether said road was entirely covered by ice or whether it existed at all was impossible to know, as Nestor could make out neither shape nor hint of it. The other buildings hulking in the gloom were smaller and boxier than this one, and yet…there was something off here, something Nestor couldn’t quite put his finger on.

After looking around for a few moments, Nestor decided that there was no one here. No maintenance workers, no security guards, no one at all checked on the two bizarre strangers dragging a device through the ice into their front yard. No alarm had sounded. For all they knew, the nearest human was thousands of kilometers away. Nestor thought about this extemporaneously while Jack worked at their destruction over his shoulder, and he concluded that this was all wrong. It was more than the buildings being abandoned. They seemed wrong, but at this distance the light from his hand torch couldn’t illuminate any of them, and so they were just looming shadows. He wanted a better look.

Jack had pulled some sort of module from the bomb trailing wires and tossed it unceremoniously into the snow. “Hey, how ‘bout we take a look inside one of these buildin’s before we do that?” Nestor tried, keeping his voice as positive-sounding as he could muster.

“You wanna look in the buildin’s? Why? All’s in them are cell cultures. There ain’t nothin’ interestin’ to see in any of ‘em,” Jack replied, not tarrying in the least from digging around inside the bomb.

“Well, how do you know it ain’t interestin’? You ever been inside a seed bank before? Besides, why ain’t there anyone here? Why ain’t we being stopped? Don’t you want to know?” Nestor asked diplomatically.

Jack looked up at him, “You want to go look, go on ahead. Ain’t like yer helpin’ me right now, anyway. But this bomb is goin’ off either way. I ain’t waitin’ on you to come back here before I trigger it. It must go off. You understand me?”

Nestor nodded, not sure if he truly did any longer.

Jack seemed unsatisfied with the nod, persisting, “And yer right. We ain’t bein’ stopped right now. Wherever they are, it ain’t here and we need to take advantage of that fact before they decide to show on up.”

Nestor shined his light up and looked at Jack, seeing him for the first time since they’d left the truck. His compatriot and adversary here on the tundra was haggard, with a patchy, greasy, unkempt beard, his eyes sunken to steaming red pits set in pale sallow skin, and mouth frozen in a rictus grin of constant searing femoral pain. In the referred light from Nestor’s torch he looked monstrous, a demon born of the ice and of the wind, come to destroy the hopes and dreams of all men, sent to encourage the straggling remainders of a once-proud race to defile themselves upon the altar of self-interest, of immediacy and of ignorance, forgoing all futures and all pasts, giving all to trade the hell of life on this planet for one eternal. Hoping the setting of hell eternal would be some better place. For Satan’s hell might have air you could breathe and water you could drink and both for free. That hell might have slightly less dust in it. It might even be warm.

“Why don’t you come on with me, Jack? Bomb ain’t goin’ nowhere, and we come all this way. You ain’t even a little bit curious to see what this was all about? What we actually destroyin’ here? Plus, they ain’t nobody here and I know you want to know why, jes as bad as I do.”

Jack looked at him with wild eyes, opening and closing his mouth as if he was trying to form words, but catching and stopping himself from doing so. His eyes met Nestor’s, and they stared at one another and in that connection Jack seemed to deflate, his shoulders slumping a bit and his mouth closing, his eyes looking perhaps slightly less wild. The evil running out of him.

“Alright, fine. I’ll go in this one,” he pointed at the tall building behind Nestor, “but that’s it. I ain’t goin’ on no damn tour of this place. And if it turns out we cain’t even get in, which is likely, then we comin’ right back here and you are gonna help me disable the other safeties on this bomb, alright?”

Nestor nodded his agreement and turned to walk over to the building. Jack limped behind on his makeshift crutch and after quite some time they arrived at the entrance. Nestor shined his torch all around what should have been the entrance airlock, and noted that it looked very much like an interior door, not an airlock door, for it was hinged, and sat flush with the wall, and contained within it a normal-looking doorknob.

“This seem much like an airlock to you?” he said over his coms to Jack.

Jack limped up to stand by his side and his own torch shone upon the strange door, “Not really, no. Why would you have a knob on an airlock? They jes let folk come and go from their pressurized environment?”

Nestor shook his head, “It’s hinged, Jack. How do you air seal a hinged door?”

Nestor reached out experimentally to turn the handle and found it moved easily in his hand. He turned it all the way and pulled gently on the door and it swung out. He turned to look at Jack, who met his gaze and slowly shook his head in amazement. Nestor stepped through the now-open door into a foyer that extended far above him. A platform occupied the opposite side of the room with a skeleton frame of a vast desk draped over it and the missing pieces necessary for completion of said parapet scattered all around. It gave the impression that the workers building the desk had taken a break, perhaps headed off for a long lunch, and would be back soon to finish their job.

Jack limped over and lifted a few pieces up to examine them. Everything still looked new, still wrapped in the plastic it had been shipped in. He looked over his shoulder at Nestor, who was shining his torch straight up into the complicated maze of girders and beams occupying the space above. Nestor followed one girder with his light over to the wall and found in doing so he could count the places where girders met the wall as “floors”. He counted up to fifteen before he could no longer make them out. Jack’s torch joined Nestor’s in shining upon the construction above them.

“Don’t look like it’s finished, does it?” Jack said, shining his torch all about the girders.

“Looks like they still buildin’ it,” Nestor confirmed, looking all around the foyer with his light. He found another door off to the side and went over to try it. It opened into an immense room that extended all the way to the exterior walls and was cut into sections by the metal posts and studs of walls framed out but never finished. Construction equipment of all manner lay scattered about the floor with writing on the tools that neither man could read, and all of it looking scarcely used, waiting for the crew to return and use their sundries. Jack walked into this room behind him and shined his light up through all the unfinished floors above them.

“I don’t understand,” he said, “why haven’t they finished this tower’?”

Nestor looked over at him and felt the same confusion, “Let’s go to one of them other buildin’s. Maybe we’ll figure somethin’ out by lookin’ at it.”

The building immediately beside the tall one had a very similar external door, but this door was set inside a partially-constructed external structure resembling a large tube that ran perpendicular to the entrance.

“Looks like this is how they get between the buildin’s,” Nestor said as they approached, shining his light on the tube, “that must be why that one didn’t have proper airlocks. I bet you they’s an airlock on the far end of this tube.”

“None of this looks completed,” Jack replied, limping over from behind, “or maybe it’s jes all decayed to this point?”

Nestor opened the door into this building and found an interior so filled with snow and ice that he could not walk inside. He could lean in and so he did, shining his light up to find there was no roof and the building was four walls and nothing else. He could see no sign that any roof had ever been attached to the walls and one of those walls did not itself look finished.

Jack leaned in next to him and seeing those same things, said with a tinge of what Nestor decided must be awe in his voice, “This buildin’ ain’t finished neither.” He turned and limped away, heading to the next in the row. Nestor followed beside him and noticed that Jack was moving much quicker now, with greater purpose.

They arrived at the third building and found this one had no door and seemed badly decayed. Nestor guessed the exterior walls had never been finished, and they were looking at the rusted remains of the building’s frame. Jack paused at this crumbling shell long enough to notice its decrepit state and then limped across the campus to the other arm of the semicircle.

Nestor caught him up, and soon they were standing in front of the building opposite. This fourth building looked to be complete in all ways, including the tube out front, which as Nestor had guessed, terminated at the very tip of the semicircle’s arm into an obvious airlock. The airlock would not open and so they followed the tube around to the building next door, where that corridor was still under construction. They entered there and walked back around to the fourth building and looked around in awe as they passed through a hallway encased in glass with once-stylish unpowered lights every few meters, hidden to not obscure your views of the outside, the whole thing filled with ice and covered in ice and in all ways crumbling.

Inside the completed fourth building, they saw a vision of what the foyer in the first building was supposed to be, with a high desk acting as a station for the building’s guards and the same indecipherable writing on all the walls. The wall behind the desk was covered in a huge and beautiful aerial-perspective painting of the complex itself, depicted ice-free but sitting within a cove of glacial walls, the central area encircled by the airlock tubes filled with a green parkland that seemed especially incongruous given the cold dark icy reality waiting for them just outside the doors. There was no power in this building, and the door behind the security desk seemed to use some sort of lock that would require power to disengage, and they could not pass it.

They found the same thing in the building next door and at that point, it was a foregone conclusion that they would also try the sixth and final building. This one was finished as well, but walking in, they found a completely unique design possessing no foyer but instead opening into a warehouse floor which was filled with row upon row of empty shelves. They paced through the aisles, looking for anything in this obvious storage area, but they found naught. At the back of this room there was a line of methalox generators, all unused for so long they were seized and impossible to turn over even with Nestor and Jack’s combined efforts about their respective crankshafts.

“What you think?” Nestor inquired, stepping back from the genny they’d been pulling on and looking around the empty storage room.

“I think no one’s been in here in a long time. I think that’s because it was never completed. And I think that even if there was at some point seed cultures kept in those two completed buildings, theys long dead because they ain’t been no power here to keep ‘em preserved.”

Nestor nodded, “Yeah.” He shined his light on Jack’s feet and recoiled at the haunting referred light on his face. “What you want to do?”

Jack looked at him, and his eyes looked cold and dead in the torch’s light. “I want to set off a nuclear bomb and wipe this place from the face of the planet.”

Nestor thought he was joking, “Ok, but seriously, though. They ain’t no mission no more. Ain’t nothin’ here to destroy except a bunch of old abandoned buildings, which are well on their way to destroyin’ themselves.”

“I ain’t jokin’. You say they ain’t a mission? No one, no one anywhere in this whole world, knows what we know right now about this place. Or maybe some people do know, but they ain’t tellin’. Everone thinks the Great Seed Bank is sittin’ out here at the South Pole quietly waitin’ to save all mankind once we complete the terraformation. They don’t know the truth, not about terraformation and not about this place, neither. They been told lies about it all, and the point of blowin’ this place up all along has been to destroy those lies, and make folk pay for bein’ so willin’ to believe the lie to begin with. They need they hopes crushed, so they can face the reality that terraformin’ this planet is futile. Only then can they ascend to embrace they future. We ain’t jes destroyin’ buildin’s and we never were. We are usin’ nuclear fire to cleanse this world of its delusions, and it turns out the biggest delusion of all was that our ancestors were lookin’ to the future. Lookin’ out fer us. They wasn’t; they give up their history and they give up their future and they give up on us and we all been livin’ that same way ever since.”

Jack’s face was red as he said this, working himself up to a scream at the end. He stooped over his crutch and seemed all the more dangerous for how he was hunched.

“But Jack, no one will ever know what we do here any more than they know that this place ain’t finished. The only people who’ll see a nuclear explosion at the South Pole are the same people who gain from makin’ sure no one knows the truth about this place. Makin’ the people of Mars face the reality of terraformation only works if we actually did something here that mattered, that folks couldn’t help but notice.”

Jack glared at him with pure hatred and betrayal. He was not properly armed and for that, Nestor was glad because for a moment he lifted his crutch and weighed it in his hand before seeming to decide that it would not work as a weapon. Nestor backed away, putting his hands up, and tried to aim his retreat for the door.

“I knew it,” Jack spit over the coms. Nestor felt he could hear the spittle hitting the microphone, “I knew when I saved you from the Edenites that you was a coward. You was a coward then when you stole that baby instead of savin’ its mama, and you was a coward in the bar in Juventae when I saved your stupid ass from starin’ at criminals like some fuckin’ git and you was always a coward in Calahorra too, questionin’ Linh’s plans like you was. You are jes the same as the people who abandoned this place, ignorant of where you come from and blind to yer place in history and desperate to believe any lie about yer future jes so long as you get what you want today. Right now. Too cowardly to do what’s right.”

Jack limped towards Nestor and for a moment Nestor braced himself for some attack, but Jack simply passed by, heading for the door.

Nestor spoke to Jack’s back as he limped away, “But that’s jes it, Jack. I don’t know my place in history. I cain’t know that. That’s for the folk who come after me to decide. Folk who won’t know me, any more than I know Olympus, or Ascraeus, or Young Nedrick. And what they know will be as much fiction as them legends are. Because the past ain’t real, and the future ain’t real neither. You been sayin’ the whole way down here that we cain’t choose no other way because our past choices have brought us here, and that jes don’t make no sense. We didn’t make those choices knowin’ they would bring us here, and we cain’t know where the choices we make now will take us. We jes gotta respond to what’s happenin’ in the moment, and that’s all we can ever do. And in this here moment, all we have to react to is the fact that this seed bank ain’t nothin’. Nothin’ worth destroyin’. Nothin’ worth dying for. We can go some other way, Jack. Maybe do somethin’ that really does matter. We can make another choice.”

Jack rounded on Nestor, standing in the door to the building with the wind whipping about him and scattering in a skiff of carbon snow from outside, “Ain’t no other way fer me. You jes a kid, and you don’t know shit, and I don’t care to hear yer cowardice and I don’t give a good goddamn what happens to you. Make yer other choice. I hope you rot in it.” He turned and left, and Nestor watched him go.

Nestor stepped out of the door and stared at Jack’s receding back, limping along at speed towards the bomb, which waited patiently in the center of all things. He looked up at the stars above him, bright in that pitch, more than any person could count. He looked at them and wondered if any of their ancestors, before coming to Mars, had ever considered going to any other stars. Travelling to any one of them would have required a tremendous level of effort, the sustained work of generations. The same as Mars. So why would anyone come to here? Mars couldn’t have been the best hope of them all. Looking up at the scattered jewels of shining stardust that filled the sky, Nestor decided each one, each star, best resembled an opportunity, a chance, a different destiny, and there were more of them than he could count.

He looked over at Jack’s light shining down into that pointless weapon, its owner tirelessly bent to a destiny of destruction that seemed very much to Nestor a thing of fantasy. Of story. Of myth. Ephemera subject to change at a wish, in a telling. He turned and looked along the imagined line of the road that should have led out and away from there. He wondered how far out lay his safety from the destruction unfolding before him, and he decided he wished to find it, and so he walked, and the road seemed to rise through the ice before his eyes to guide him. Overlaying his vision were the concentric circles of nuclear destruction. He walked up a minor rise at the border to the complex and watched in his mind’s eye as he passed the first of those circles. He walked more, and he looked up at the stars and he tried to decide which one he liked best for himself. For his home. Before long, behind him bloomed a new star, and that star knew what he did not and could not know, that whether by choice or fate, he was already home. Then there was no other choice to make.

Chapter 10 - The Backup Plan

They sat in the clear emergency medical tent that was serving duty as their jail cell, and stared obliquely across the crater to that incline on which perched the remains of their shuttle. It was surrounded by copters with spotlights trained on the crushed tin can of its hull. For the time being, the three copters arranged around the shuttle and the singular copter guarding them at the tower were all there was, but it seemed inevitable that more reinforcements would soon be en-route.

Initially, all four of the copters had overflown them on their way directly to the crashed shuttle, which they orbited for some time. Then they had landed and trained their spotlights upon that craft, and for a long time, neither Nestor nor Jack had seen any other activity at all from their vantage upon the crater floor. Eventually, a sole copter had lifted off and tentatively hovered over to spotlight them waving desperately at its approach.

Jack was positive they’d found the bomb, and that was why the other copters had stayed with the shuttle. He assured Nestor that the quadcopter hovering above them and then slowly landing a safe distance away whilst never once removing its spotlight from them had followed the emergency locator beacon to them. He used the fact that only one of the party had been dispatched on that mission as proof positive that they had much larger priorities than rescue at this point. He further insisted to Nestor that the shuttle was too heavy for any copter or combination thereof to lift and carry over any sort of distance. They’d need to use trucks to transport any of it.

While Jack talked, a man had disembarked and walked cautiously over to them. It became quickly apparent that he did not speak their language, nor they his, but his wary approach and brusque search of their persons at gunpoint made very clear that they were less patients or victims and more prisoners or at the very least suspects in his eyes. That guard, lacking any other way of detaining them, had set up this transparent medical stabilization tent and staked it down in a dozen places against the wind and had gestured them inside with his weapon and set up a small portable atmospheric generator and then had gone back to guard them from the comfort of his copter. At least, that’s what they assumed he was doing in there, as they could make nothing out through the canopy.

Now that they were here, Jack was fuming at the search party’s presence. He’d spent the hour since they’d arrived speaking under his breath, saying little but swear words in a never-ending litany of curses, a meditative chant of frustration. Nestor did not know if that frustration was because Jack had realized, only after seeing the copters, that there was no shooting their way out of the situation, or if it was because they were so far removed from the bomb as to have no chance of recovery from this position, or if it was because their guard now had his antique gun and so he was once again unarmed. Nestor could see no other choice before them and spoke up to this point, “We gotta jes do what we told, now, Jack. I understand you wanted to complete the mission, but it’s over now. They know we have a bomb, and you can bet someone in a position of authority is gonna want to talk with us about what we were plannin’ on doin’ with it.”

Jack didn’t look at him at all, and kept swearing in his continued prayer to whatever god would intervene to improve their circumstances. After a few moments of being ignored, Nestor looked away and stared instead through the gloom at the spindly framed quadcopter guarding them. It was black and yet it shone reflectively in the dark, its cockpit glistening prismatic in the referred light from the spotlight. The rotors were held high above its angular fuselage on segmented arms, and it perched lightly on gracile landing gear. It looked repulsive and alien in a way that Nestor couldn’t put to words. He tried Jack again:

“You hear me, Jack? We need to jes give in.”

Jack swore on and looked at Nestor, still not seeming to see him at all. At length he stopped, which somehow seemed worse once it happened, the constant soft white noise of his chanting gone and leaving nothing behind but an odd sense of foreboding.

“We ain’t leavin’ the bomb. You know how hard…how much had to come together jes right…to get that bomb? We ain’t never goin’ to get another one, and we ain’t never goin’ to get another chance at the objective, neither. It is now or never, and it will only be ‘never’ if I’m dead.”

“But what you propose we do here, Jack? Them copters is armed, and so is the men inside ‘em. We cain’t outrun ‘em, which is even if we somehow got past ‘em, which we also cain’t do.”

“When their reinforcements arrive, they’ll come with torches. With tools. They’ll have that shuttle open in no time, and the bomb loaded in a truck jes as quick. All we need to do is take that truck. It’ll be almost like they’s loadin’ it for us.”

Nestor looked quietly at Jack in the dark and Jack looked straight ahead, seeming to picture the crazy plan playing out in the theater of his mind.

“That plan is dumber’n smeared shit, Jack. How do you plan on takin’ a truck from someone who knows they jes loaded a nuclear bomb onto it? You think there’s anything in the world will stop them from recoverin’ their truck? You think there’s anything in the world will stop them from jes cripplin’ the fucker and killin’ everone in it and puttin’ their new bomb on another’n?”

“We will find a way. Our place in all this ain’t finished, Nestor, and as long as we keep goin’, we can still make our objective. You jes gotta be with me. Are you? With me?”

Nestor shook his head slightly, still looking at Jack, and Jack returned his gaze. Neither was certain they could really see the other in the dark. They sat like that for some time, until Nestor nodded, “I am.”

*****

There was nothing to do inside the little medical tent, and late into the night, Nestor reclined on the tent floor and closed his eyes. Jack was staring into the dark whilst sitting cross-legged beside him, and the only noise was the low hum of the atmospheric generator, keeping them breathing and warm. Occasionally the wind would gust through the crater, howling around the guy wires anchoring the tent to the ground as a perfunctory banshee wailing her warning only in fits and spurts before retiring back to warmer and more hospitable environs. It was otherwise quiet, dark, and boring, and Nestor hadn’t properly slept in days, and found himself irresistibly pulled until he gave in.

He dreamt he was running through the flickering tunnels and pedestrian corridors of Calahorra, or perhaps Poynting, for it contained elements of both. He ran from an unknown predator whose pursuit he could track by a cackling laugh that boomed in echo from the tunnel walls. He turned a corner and the tunnel before him opened to an endless expanse of opaque white ice beyond. A wind was kicking up off the ice, bearing with it the smell of water pouring over rock. The cackling was close behind him and he turned to face it. His pursuer shuffled around the corner, and he could see that it was Asa and she was not laughing but sobbing. He took two steps toward her, and she collapsed on her knees, hugging herself with her head bowed low. He paused to look at her, and she returned his gaze with fire in her eyes. He knew, without her saying, why she was sobbing, and he walked to her to cradle her chin in his hand, but she would accept no comfort. She bowed her head again, leaning it to the side, and her hair fell away to lay bare a giant gaping hole in her skull. From this wound emanated a great gout of blood which floated up above her head, and it ballooned grotesque before his eyes, looking very much like it might pop. He backed away from her, horrified that it would deluge him. She resumed sobbing, and in her cries, he felt he could almost hear the cries of the child which he had abandoned. Her child. He’d abandoned only hers. He kept backing until the ground of the tunnel disappeared from beneath his feet, and then he was falling ceaselessly.

*****

The sun was setting, having completed its truncated arc across the pink southern-winter Martian sky, when the two salvage trucks finally arrived. The smaller of the trucks was a range truck that could have passed for the old Creede Family range truck, except it was much older, with paint flaking to expose the bare metal beneath, already oxidatively crumbling into brittle orange lace. Its companion was a huge treaded transport rig with two massive cylindrical tanks seated behind the double-decker cab, and perched high above the ground sat a platform that overhung all sides. Attaching the bed to the vehicle below were trunks of hydraulic arms, bigger around than Nestor’s arm span, for tilting the bed so items could be dragged on. To the right side of the platform was a crane, its boom folded in on itself much like a slender spindly arm being held at rest.

“Those trucks’re methane powered,” Jack said, with a sense of minor awe, drawing attention to the tanks on each. He pointed out that it was rare to find anyone who ran methane trucks, as methane exclusively came from off-world, and wasn’t sold in the huge quantities of other off-world materials, making it much too valuable to burn without a clear plan for turning that burning into profit. To use it for transportation fuel, even in the efficient way these trucks did it, in a methalox generator that then powered electric motors, was incredibly wasteful. The margins on whatever you were transporting had to be substantial. Like selling a nuclear bomb and whatever can be salvaged from a downed shuttle to the highest bidder.

Nestor, knowing all this already, simply let Jack talk and then offered, “Don’t imagine that big one could run on solar.”

The trucks crawled through the crater and came to a stop beside the tower, and at this point their guard disembarked from his copter to gesture them from their jail tent with his gun. By the time they had exited, men had come from both vehicles and were conversing animatedly with their guard, with much pointing at both prisoners. Watching the silent conversation from afar, it seemed to Nestor that they could not agree on the proper way to transport their new captives. He guessed the challenge was that there was a shortage of space in the vehicles. The copters didn’t appear to hold more than a single person apiece, and while the range truck looked like it might carry four, Nestor could count six men arguing with their guard. Which seemed to leave only the truck with the platform.

Their guard paced back and forth, impatient with these proceedings, and it was clear to all in attendance that he wanted to join his copter friends, who were already spinning up their rotors for departure. By the time the group agreed to transport the prisoners with the shuttle and bomb on the platform truck, one copter had already lifted off, not waiting for its compatriots before passing over their heads, headed back north.

A man from the platform truck seemed to have drawn the short straw and was handed Jacks’s antique gun, which he shoved in his belt and then walked over to stand before his two unwanted prisoners. He examined them appraisingly, like the luggage they so clearly were to him, while the pilot clambered back into his copter and spun up his own rotors for departure. Those rotors whirled out a cloud of dust which obscured all, and then the copter was gone.

Their new guard was lightly armed with a handgun he wore on a belt of his bulky enviro suit. Fighting the suit considerably, he took their backpacks and inexpertly searched them again. He found nothing new, and he shackled them both with rope and gestured with an oversized hand towards the big platform truck. Jack couldn’t help himself but look pleased with these proceedings.

*****

They spent all the following day slowly crawling north, the platform truck carefully trundling along the smoothest ground its crew could find, the remains of the shuttle upon its back swaying precariously, and the metallic serpentine of its colossal tracks groaning over every berm and gulley of these midland plains. They did not stop that night, their captors instead electing to switch off driving duties continually all night long, and in the middle of that night they came across a road in middling condition that ran almost due north-south. Jack assured Nestor in confidential tones that this was the Great Seed Bank Road that ran from Argyre all the way to the South Pole. According to him, it had been maintained for centuries by the combined efforts of the citizens of Argyre and the Argentea Plains, in preparation for the day when traffic to the Seed Bank would require a reliable road for reseeding the entire planet with life. Nestor looked out the front windows at the eroded path, the fingers of sand poking across and the jagged crumbling shoulders and long potholes filled to the brim with dust ground to atomic powder rippling and curling as miniature waves upon microscopic shorelines, and wondered aloud where those efforts had been expended, but received no response. They saw no one else on the road, which was all the better as the giant truck took up the entire thing and left destruction behind as it crushed along the old asphalt.

Their guards soon tired of minding the captives’ ropes for every little thing, and midway through that first day upon the road had untied them, leaving them to their own recognizance in the back of the truck. The walls of the back of the truck were empty of weapons, or of any other device whatsoever, and so both dusty young men sat obediently unhelmeted in their envirosuits upon the uncomfortable jump seats. Being free seemed to make Jack more watchful, and he crouched upon his seat leant forward in the stance of his predatory forebears, ever at the ready to cast himself at dangerous megafauna to demonstrate his suzerainty absolute. Nestor watched Jack more than the road or even their guards, realizing almost unconsciously that here beside him was where the genuine danger in their situation lurked, nowhere else.

They traveled for two more days upon that road and saw little change in road condition and no indication of the existence of the rest of humanity at all. Near the end of their fourth day of travel, the road took them on a winding path through a shallow canyon and they departed that wash headed due east up an incline that led to a series of buildings nestled in the crescent-shaped drainage of a huge, wild-looking mountain, the entirety of which was filled with kilometers of garbage. Jack assured him that this must be Charis, a settlement that Nestor had never heard of, but which Jack seemed to believe held special importance. Charis did not look important from where Nestor sat, for besides being surrounded by detritus of every type, it was composed of only three major surface buildings. There was an enormous cube of a building that served as the surface airlock for the elevator down to the settlement below. There was a low rectangular building surrounded by maintenance vehicles in a fenced-off yard, that place comprising the only garbage-free patch of ground Nestor could see, and then there was the methane fueling center. The fueling center was a series of pods arranged in a loose row facing a small administration building, and a series of fifty-meter-tall aboveground tanks. It was towards these pods that the platform truck headed as the daylight faded.

Their escorting range truck pulled away at this point and headed over to the elevator airlock on some other mission. There was no traffic at the fueling pods, which was just as well for the platform truck didn’t fit inside any of them and needed to pull crosswise in front, blocking all but one. Having shut down all other fuel commerce, the truck’s crew clambered down out of its tiny airlock one at a time, passing through the trapdoor in the passenger area’s floor and putting on their bulky suits inside the airlock itself. The last guard to depart said something to them in his language with a fierce look upon his face, and the prisoners nodded their vigorous assent in complete ignorance of what was being requested.

As the trapdoor closed down behind that guard, Jack leaned close and whispered to Nestor, “This is it. This here’s our chance. Are you ready?”

Nestor stared at Jack, and then looked over into the front of the cab, “How is this our chance? I don’t think we gonna get far runnin’ through all this trash.”

“No, remember, the plan was for us to take this truck. I’m pretty sure I can start it. I been watchin’ ‘em since we left the crater, and I think the security protocols are broke.”

“But this thing is huge. They’ll jes follow us and take it back. Probably kill us in the process.”

“You know how to disable GPS on a truck like this? I think if you can do that, I can drive us up into them mountains, and then they’ll never find us. Once we’re up there, we can switch out the truck GPS for the shuttle’s GPS, and use that to navigate back to the road, when it’s safe. They’ll never find us.”

Nestor looked around the ceiling of the truck cab and found the panel he was looking for above the passenger seat. “I think I can get to the GPS, yeah. That should be the access panel for it right there,” he gestured with his chin to the panel, “But I still don’t know how you reckon on hidin’ this thing. It ain’t exactly easy to miss, even at a distance.”

“If this is Charis, that makes this mountain we’re butted up against one of the Charitum Mountains. It’s some of the roughest terrain out there. I don’t even think somethin’ that ain’t a full-track can make it in them mountains. No one’ll follow us. Trust me. Plus, what you wanna do, stay in this truck ‘till they decide to kill us or turn us in to whatever sort of authorities they got out here?”

Nestor thought about it for a moment, “But what about them men? Won’t they jes jump aboard as soon as we try to leave?”

Jack shook his head, “Them men’ll be dead. They left the antique gun in here with us. I saw the one showing it to th’other last night when they thought we was both asleep. He put it in the passenger side pocket there. He thought it was hidden, but I know jes where it is.”

“You gonna kill ‘em? How? Won’t they know yer comin’ as soon as you get in the airlock?”

“It ain’t me. It’s we. We gonna kill ‘em. It ain’t ever jes been me out here, you know. If you don’t have the guts to do it, then we jes gonna have to give it all up. So. Do you want to be free or do you want to be a prisoner? You gotta choose, and quick.”

Nestor stared at Jack for a moment, wanting to argue further, but not really seeing the point. Of course, he wanted to be free.

“How then? And I thought you jes said there’s only the one gun?”

*****

The platform truck crew chief climbed up into his vehicle’s cramped airlock, pressurizing it and then stripping off his bulky envirosuit and stowing that suit in the lockers built into the airlock walls, which although they had been designed for the purpose, always seemed too small for the suits. He fought against the unreasoning cruelty of three-dimensional space for a moment before finally stuffing his suit satisfactorily away, and then up the ladder he climbed and swung the trapdoor open to emerge into an alternative universe not of his own design. One of the young men he’d been inexplicably made warden of was standing beside the trapdoor, and the crew chief blinked in astonishment to see an antique pistol shoved into his face, and he looked beyond that weapon to see his compatriot knelt behind the main seats, hands atop his head.

“Go on, get the rest of the way up here,” Nestor said through his external suit speakers to this man who spoke no language that Nestor spoke. The man remained frozen half in/half out of the airlock, and Nestor leaned forward with his free hand to pull the man the rest of the way out, to which the man recoiled and replied with admonishing tones in his foreign tongue and clambered the rest of the way out of this wormhole between the world in which he was in charge and the one in which he was very much not.

Nestor kept the pistol pointed at his newest captive and disarmed that man and tossed the man’s weapon to Jack, who shoved it into his belt. Nestor flipped the trapdoor closed with his toe, and it fell sealed with a loud thump that made the man in Nestor’s charge jump involuntarily at that noise, for his attention had been on his captors. In fact, both captives were studying him and Jack closely, apparently drawn to the fact that they were wearing their envirosuits, helmets and all. Nestor pushed the barrel of the gun into the man’s forehead, and used his free hand to firmly place the man’s hands on his head, and then guided him over to join his kneeling friend.

Nestor stepped back to give Jack the thumbs up, at which point Jack sat down in the driver’s seat and depressurized the truck cab. Relief welled up within Nestor to replace all other sensations as the men in front of him began gasping for air, their eyes panic-stricken and feral. Relief because it hadn’t been him who’d had to kill them. He was thus caught by surprise when the crew chief made a lunge for the gun. A desperate, futile attempt at salvation during his final moments. Nestor’s finger automatically pressed down on the trigger, and the gun bucked in his hand, multiple shots loosed in the time it took his thinking mind to process his actions. He hadn’t been aiming the gun in any particular way, and wasn’t prepared for the stream of bullets that issued forth, nor for the gun to sweep down and to the left as he fought to bring the beast thrashing in his grasp under control.

The bullets that hit the lunging man killed him in his tracks, and he collapsed in a heap at Nestor’s feet. Several also whined and ricocheted across the cab between the front seats, and the final bullet caught the now-dead crew chief’s compatriot in mid-lunge toward safety. His knee exploded in blood and gore, and he screamed in what little air there was left, the very expression of his searing pain being stolen from him as the last bit of air exited the cab.

As Nestor’s brain caught up, he noticed the pool of blood spreading from the body at his feet and side-stepped to avoid it, his eyes locked onto the other man writhing in his final throes on the floor. The man’s knee was squirting blood in cardiac pulses, and it wasn’t apparent to Nestor then or at any point thereafter if it was the blood loss or the oxygen loss that ended his life, but either way he watched the last seeps of pale blood issue from the man’s knee as he went limp. He suddenly felt very ill and hot and itchy and nauseous and he stepped back, looking for escape, for a moment wishing to dive for the airlock and run from that place entirely, through whatever trash may surround them, for those environs could not possibly be worse than these.

Jack came through on his coms then, “Nestor, you hear me, boy? Hello?”

Nestor looked up from the body to Jack, who was now standing between the two front seats.

“We got to get goin’. There’s no way someone in that buildin’ over there didn’t jes hear that. Put them in the back fer now. We’ll thow ‘em out the airlock when we’re clear of the city. C’mon, get up here and let’s go.”

Nestor left the bodies where they lay and followed Jack up front, feeling a strange sense of déjà vu as Jack sat in the driver’s seat to pull the big truck away from the fuel pod. As they departed, the security guard from the administration building came running out to watch them travel into the darkness beyond the pool of lights cast from the pod itself. The guard watched as the lights on the big truck bounced the opposite way from the road and civilization, crawling through an effluvium of human waste towards the mountain that loomed out in the eastern dark. He watched forlornly as, a couple kilometers out, the lights went off entirely, and then the truck was consigned to the trash and to the darkness absolute.

Chapter 9 - The Old Man and the Tower

Author’s Note - This chapter is actually the first one I wrote of this book. I had this image in my head of a massive decayed tower set upon an alien world and a pair of travelers walking through glittering dust before it. I imagined that the tower, though falling in, was still populated by a solitary and quite insane hermit.

I started writing down what I was picturing and before long, I realized that this world was one I was interested in developing. A world that people had rushed to, or perhaps had been pushed to, develop. Those people had failed and disappeared from memory and time had gone on and new people came along to attempt to decipher what had happened there.

From that point sprang the rest of this book, and only once I’d finished did I realize that this chapter no longer precisely fit with the rest of the story. So, we have a slight tonal shift, and the plot doesn’t progress much, if at all, with the events below. I think of it as world-building, and I kept it in because I feel like the person who really “gets” this chapter will really “get” the rest of the story I’m telling.

Which isn’t to say that you must like this chapter if you like the rest of the story. Or that if you hate this chapter, you’re doing anything wrong. It’s mostly just to say that I had trouble “killing my darling” here, so to say, mostly because I hold out hope that others might like my darling as much as I do.

Nestor and Jack stood on the crater slope and stared down into the center at the tower that loomed there. It was a massive monolith, substantially taller than the largest building either had ever seen, vaguely conical, and topped with a dulled point beset by the askew spikes of antennae and instruments long since failed. The steeply sloped sides were covered in broken solar panels, and the remaining glass shards left in the panels on the side facing the sun cast rainbows of light crazily across the valley floor. The exposed surface behind the fallen panels was a burnished orange, impregnated with the ceaseless dust. One slope had buckled near the bottom, which caused the tower to lean slightly in that direction, giving the distinct impression of a giant bending over to peer at its shoes. The surrounding ground was littered with fallen solar panel shards, which had eroded into a kind of glistening spume that drifted across the valley floor. There was the suggestion of a road approaching the buckled-in side through this shining sand, which faded from existence as it crawled up and out of the crater to the east.

The ruined hull of the shuttle sat below them where it had stopped on its roll down the slope, and their footprints in the dust on this lee side of the crater waved and wandered up towards them from where they’d escaped that rapidly depressurizing craft. The shuttle rested upside down and its power systems were completely wrecked, and so there had been few options for egress. They had ended up kicking out the front windows, which was itself no simple task, as the one thing that spacecraft windows do best is resist pressure from the inside. They’d managed it all the same, assisted in their efforts by the myriad cracks through the two centimeter thick glass.

Jack was in a sour mood, not only because of the failure of their mission and the crash of their ship and their marooning here in this crater, but also because he hadn’t been able to find his gun. What he needed a gun for Nestor could not say, and in truth, Nestor felt little concern about improving his partner’s mood for their predicament seemed dire indeed. They’d spent the time since they’d exited the shuttle arguing about what to do next and could not come to an agreement.

Nestor asserted that the tower they were staring at contained within it civilization or some sort of help or if not that perhaps at the very least it may have some breathable air. Their suits were functioning, and they had extra batteries, but Nestor knew well how little assurance either of those facts should provide. He was adamant that they should walk to that building, for he was certain it was their only hope of survival.

Jack cautioned him that the tower they were looking at had to be abandoned, and in any instance if it were not abandoned, they wanted nothing to do with what people may populate that place, if those persons could even speak a language either of the travelers might understand. He instead preferred to stay with the shuttle, which had within it an emergency beacon that was at that second transmitting their location to search and rescue teams, who would be along shortly to whisk them away.

They’d been tiptoeing around the nuclear-powered elephant in their situation, and Nestor tired of that and asked bluntly in Tharsian, “What you think they gonna do once they see we got a nuclear bomb?”

“That’s why I need to find my gun.”

“You gonna shoot ‘em.”

Jack shrugged and stared off at the tower, “You even know what that thing is?”

“Tower of some sort. Does it matter? They’s people there.”

“No people in there. Ain’t been people in there for centuries.”

“Nothin’ stands like that for centuries. If it was centuries old, it’d be in pieces scattered everwheres. It’s a whole big damn tower, Jack. Someone has to be keepin’ it up.”

“It’s a terraformin’ tower. That is why it matters what it is.”

“Terraformin’ tower.”

“Ain’t even heard of such a thing, have you? See, if you had heard of a terraformin’ tower, you’d know they hasn’t been a one of those populated since way back at the beginning.”

“The beginning.”

“Yep. The central government here on Mars decreed them placed every two hundred square kilometers during the Great Migration. Each tower had a thousand settlers and a miniature factory, capable with the right resources of making any item you want. The idea was for each of these here towers to build a self-sustainin’ terraformin’ colony, all from scratch. Jes build the tower in a place near some mineable minerals, fill it with settlers, and watch the planet turn green.”

Nestor shook his head and squinted at Jack, trying to determine if he was being put on, “Central government. Like for the whole world. You want me to believe that? And besides, you got any idea how many folks you’d need on this planet to have a thousand settlers ever two hundred square kilometers?”

“Don’t care if you believe me or not. If you’d been to Oxia or Cydonia, you’d have seen more of ‘em. Jes as empty as that one there is.”

Nestor tried a new tack. “Might could be a new gun for you in there, if it is abandoned.”

“We might be all the way down there when the rescuers come. You think they’ll check the abandoned terraformin’ tower for us?”

“I would. Big damn tower like that. I’d assume any sane person’d walk straight there.”

“You ain’t search and you ain’t rescue.”

“Better chance of survivin’ in there. Better’n tryin’ to stay with a hull-ruptured, dead shuttle that cain’t make no air nor hold it.”

“You go. I’ll stay here. We’ll see who makes it.”

“Could be a rover in there. Maybe even somethin’ we could load the bomb into. Don’t need to wait for no rescuers then.”

“Go on, find it then. Find your rover. Bring it back,” Jack glared through his helmet faceplate at the boy.

Nestor stared at him and neither budged, and so he shrugged and turned with no comment and walked down to the shuttle and dropped to his belly and crawled through the marks he’d made in the dust minutes before, while escaping. He emerged again from the shuttle a short while later holding the emergency beacon, a small hexagonal box weighing perhaps a kilogram that fit nicely in his hand. He walked up the ridge to Jack and offered him the box and smiled, “Now they’ll know right where we are, wherever that might be.”

Jack looked at the box and then back up at Nestor and though his expression said that he would still very much prefer to argue, he said nothing at all. He also did not take the box. Nestor shrugged and shouldered off the backpack of supplies he was carrying and dropped the box in there and re-shouldered the bag and began walking down the slope towards the tower. After a few steps, he noticed Jack was not following and turned to beckon for him to catch up.

“Still need my gun,” Jack offered, while taking tentative steps to follow.

“Don’t need no damn gun. Now, c’mon.”

*****

The tower was deceptively far away, and once they descended the massive talus-ridden slope of the crater and found themselves upon its floor, Jack would not stop remarking on this apparent fact. Nestor had ignored his complaints during their descent, but was growing impatient with the grousing now that they were on the crater floor and were still not making much visible progress towards their actual goal.

Down here on the floor, the monolith looked more and more like it was solemnly watching their approach with interest, and Nestor could not shake the feeling that there was someone up there peering down upon them with a certain amount of animosity. By way of breaking up Jack’s kvetching, he mentioned this impression, and for at least a few moments, this seemed to stymy his compatriot into silence. Finally, Jack offered, “Maybe it’s an old man up there. Like in the story.”

Nestor paused and turned to look at Jack with an empty stare. Jack returned his look calmly and squinted at him, “You never heard the story about the Old Man and the Monolith?”

Nestor shook his head, for he’d not heard this one. Jack smiled and resumed walking, taking the lead. “It’s a Hellan story, I think. Heard it from a man who was from there, at least.”

Nestor said nothing in response and followed behind his friend. Jack seemed to wait for something from him, and eventually asked, “You do know about Hellas, don’t ya?”

“Big damn crater they tryin’ to make into an ocean?”

“Yeah, you got the gist of it. They got this dust fog there, lasts for weeks sometimes. Cain’t see ten meters in front of your face. Obscures the sun, so you live in this weird red twilight. Worst place on all this planet, you ask me.”

He turned as if he’d know Nestor’s thoughts on this opinion, but the boy merely shrugged at him. Jack turned back around and continued,

“Anyways, the story goes that way back in the times of Olympus and Young Nico and all that, there was this old man. He lived out where the Hellas crater is, right along the northeastern crater rim, ‘cept there wasn’t no crater when he lived there. Least, not yet. Now, lots of folks have stories about Olympus, and about what a problem he was in the early days of the planet, but in Hellas, Olympus ain’t even a main character. In Hellas, they got this range of wild mountains to the south of the crater, been a problem the whole time people been there. So in their stories, it’s those mountains that are the main villains, and they call ‘em the Hellespontus.”

“The Hellespontus were mean ol’ mountains, not cowardly bullies like Olympus, but cruel task masters who abused all the people in those plains. They asked for sacrifices from folk to not destroy their villages with mudslides and floods, they took up the best farmland for they homes, and jes generally ruled like horrible kings. The people hated those mountains, but they didn’t have no hero like Young Nico who could fight mountains, so they mostly jes took it.”

Nestor smiled and spoke up over his coms, “I was beginnin’ to think everone had themselves a version of Young Nedrick.”

Jack frowned back over his shoulder, “Nico. Young Nico.”

Nestor shook his head and smiled again.

“They didn’t have a hero, but they did have an old man. This old man jes positively worshipped Mars. He made her a shrine, and he prayed to her twice a day, and everthing he did was done in her honor. When he ate a meal, it was due to Mars’s plenty. If he had some good luck, it was due to Mars’s grace. If he had some bad luck, it was because Mars had better in store. All this prayin’ caused Mars to consider him the most treasured of her little people, and she heard all his prayers, especially the ones about those Hellespontus, but she was hesitant to get too involved because she didn’t quite know how to get rid of mountains neither.”

Nestor snorted at this, “Mars is always gettin’ involved in these stories. Hesitant to get too involved.”

Jack shook his head and did not take Nestor’s bait, “She consulted her old friend Jupiter. Jupiter tol’ her he could redirect one of his protoplanets to come crashin’ down on them mountains, which would wipe them clean off the face of the planet. Mars asked Jupiter if that would wipe out all the little folk who lived there too, and Jupiter told her yes it would, and Mars explained how she would prefer not to kill the old man and all his family and friends. Jupiter told her that was a simple enough problem to solve. What she should do, he said, was to tell ever creature she wanted to protect to build shelters underground, and gather there when the protoplanet fell through the sky. He told her that if she focused all her will on that underground place where those people were hidden, the impact would deflect away from that point, savin’ anyone who was beneath her surface there.”

“Jack, this is one dumb story,” Nestor put forth. The daylight had not lasted long at all, and as they walked, the sun had begun its downward course, and the crystalline dust from the shattered solar panels shone so brightly golden upon the ground they had to hold their hands in front of them at waist height to block the glare. “Focused her will? What the hell does that even mean?”

“I’ll tell you what it means, jes be patient. I swear you gotta be the worst person to tell a story to. Cain’t help yourself from interruptin’.”

Nestor shook his head at this, but said naught else. Jack continued:

“So Mars agrees to this plan and goes back and instructs the old man to do as Jupiter advised, and tells him to convince ever other little person to do the same, and to group all they underground shelters together, to make it easier for her to focus her will. The old man goes out and tries to convince all the other little people, but none of them will listen. They don’t want to build underground. They don’t want to have shelters so closely spaced. They don’t believe nothin’ will fall from the sky. They are afraid the Hellespontus will see them and assume they are conspirin’ and will punish them. Ever excuse you could think of.”

“That there is the only part of this story sounds believable to me,” Nestor interrupted. Jack cast a smile back over his shoulder.

“The old man don’t let any of this discourage him, though. He is Mars’s most faithful child, after all. So he digs him an underground shelter, and he hides in that shelter on the day and all the people laugh and laugh at him. They call him names. His family disowns him as a crazy old coot. And, of course, then the protoplanet falls from the sky and obliterates everthin’. The Hellespontus try fleein’, but are caught and are frozen in place by the rush of super-heated Martian surface from the explosion. It covers ‘em completely for millennia thereafter. All the little people die, exceptin’ the old man, and all trace they ever lived is wiped from the face of the planet. The only place untouched by the explosion is the little parcel of land the old man built his underground shelter in. That place becomes this tall tower of rock that is left behind as the explosion scores out an immense crater, the Hellas Crater, all around it.”

“That spire of rock is four kilometers tall and has these steep rock sides that prevent the old man from comin’ down. Since he cain’t come down, he stays up there and is looked after by Mars, and over time he goes insane. Some say he couldn’t take the grief from everone he knew dyin’. Some say it was bitterness drove him crazy, because no one would listen to him. And some say it was jes the isolation did it. But whatever the cause of his craziness, folk in Hellas say he’s still up there, and he guards that monolith of stone against any climbers or copters, for it is his sacred gift from Mars and it is no one else’s.”

“You think there’s another old man like that in this one? This tower that was obviously built by people, not by some Mars magic?”

“Not really. Don’t believe there’s one on that spire in Hellas, neither. But I’ll tell you this, I felt the same whenever I was anywheres near that spire as I feel being near this one.”

“Thought you said they was all abandoned. These towers.”

“Abandoned, but for the ghosts. Them ghosts will always remain, Nestor. And they can be more dangerous than you’d think.”

*****

The sun was welded to the horizon by the time they reached the tower, and though Nestor would not admit so, it was overwhelmingly apparent that Jack had been right. There was no trace of recent human habitation anywhere near the tower. No tire tread nor boot track in the glittering dust. They came to stand at its feet and they peered up into a looming face that stared back down upon them huge and saturnine.

Nestor had persisted, arguing that even if it were abandoned, they should enter the tower to explore its interior, and at least wait in what shelter it may provide for their prospective, and as yet completely theoretical, rescuers to arrive. They circled the spire in search of ingress, and as they walked Jack muttered into his coms, and Nestor knew his compatriot must be hitting his coms button in order to transmit these misgivings and thus was doing so performatively, but the boy knew better than to give in or engage with them or even acknowledge that he’d heard anything. About a quarter of the way around, they discovered a massive roll-up door rusted through into a russet Swiss cheese, and they stepped through the man-sized holes in this door to a gargantuan factory floor. The ceiling had fallen all throughout the room, and on multiple floors above them as well, and through those holes trailed conduits and wires and pipes that sagged as metallic and plasticine vines and foliage spanning up into the yawning void above.

Material printers, all decayed nearly past the point of recognizability, crowded the factory floor in rough aisles. As they passed through those rows, they walked through a singular mote of light cast from the ebbing sun that shone in through the buckled-in wall above. That former wall now lay in huge chunks about the floor and the bent and decaying superstructure poked into the room as if it were massive metallic ribs broken in by the beam of sunlight or perhaps so averse to its presence they would not touch it and had bent in upon themselves to preserve their impurity. Huge drifts of sand encroached through the door they had entered and flowed deeply throughout that place.

They found little that was recognizable and nothing that could be put to any sort of use amongst all the dead machinery. Nestor stared at the floor to see what items might be of interest there, and that was when he saw the hand. A withered and solitary thing. He picked it up for a closer look, for it was barely distinguishable as a hand. He found himself less revulsed and more intrigued by it, as it was quite light and felt brittle enough to crumble at a touch, and he carried it over like a fragile crystal to show to Jack.

Jack simply gazed at the thing and then back pompously at Nestor in lieu of outright stating that he’d told him so. Nestor shrugged and carefully placed the hand back where he’d found it and looked all around for the rest of the person and found her mummified beneath a sand drift perhaps four meters away. He dug all around to uncover her and noted she was wearing the few remaining tatters of an envirosuit that did not look all that different from the one he was wearing. Her helmet had survived, but for the faceplate, and looking at the wreckage of her forehead and right eye, he guessed that the glass must have been broken out by whatever bullet had caused the other damage.

“She looks like she was shot, Jack.”

“Imagine things got pretty desperate in these towers around the time they was abandoned.”

Nestor heard a screech and raised up to look across at Jack pulling on a door set into the far wall. With another hard tug, Jack got it open enough to squeeze through and disappeared inside. Jack laughed triumphantly over the coms as he walked into the room.

“It’s an old equipment storage room,” he exclaimed, “you gotta come see these old suits.”

Nestor walked over and squeezed into a room perhaps five meters per side that was filled with suits of every imaginable size. They were of a curious design, where the glass helmet was permanently attached to the torso section of the suit. They came in torso-helmets and pants sections, and had massive packs upon the back, and all gleaming white and stained about the strange articulated joints with umber.

“They kinda look like Edenite suits,” Nestor said with minor wonder. “But that woman out in the factory was wearin’ a different kind of suit. Ain’t that weird?”

Jack was running his hand down the line of suits, “Most of ‘em look nicer’n the ones we’re wearin’.”

Nestor shrugged, his eyes flicking carefully over the details of each suit, “Ain’t no dust nor nothin’ in here. It’s like a clean room.”

Jack seemed to lose interest in the suits and walked over to the only other door in the room and pulled it open. It came free much easier, and they walked through together. It appeared to have been a locker room of sorts, but was now filled with sundries, and there were beds cobbled together from pieces of other broken cots scattered all about, and upon each was a mummified person curled in variegated postures of agony. There were long dead medical devices beside each cot. Nestor noticed an empty bag with writing on it on hanging from one of those devices, but upon further inspection discovered he could not make out the alphabet in which it was written.

In the exact center of the room was an aged monitor system composed of five cracked screens dragged from some other part of the building and piled precariously upon one another and a ratty chair in which sat a man in uniform tatters with an ancient gun in his lap whose skull lay behind his chair in pieces. Jack noticed the gun and picked it up and pointed it at the far wall and pulled the trigger and found it still in working condition by emptying half the magazine in a cloud of dust and gun smoke. He smiled at Nestor and dropped the gun into his bag. He looked all around for an additional magazine or bullets, but found none.

There was little else in the room except another door, and they walked through this door into a stairwell that extended rusted and broken above them as far as either cared to see. Jack argued they should ascend this staircase, but changed his mind after putting his foot through the first decayed metal step. They walked back through the presumptive medical ward and the equipment room, and had in unspoken terms agreed to exit the way they’d come, when Nestor noticed the other roll-up door. It was perpendicular from their original entrance and of similar size, but was in much better condition. The door had been cranked up just enough to crawl under, and so they both did.

The room on the other side was an airlock. Its outer set of doors stood open and sand had drifted into this room as well. They stepped out from this airlock into the crepuscular darkness, which held within it several decayed rovers arranged in a rough square just beyond the airlock entrance. Most of their tires had rotted away, and they all had dead batteries and none would start.

“Here’s your rover,” Jack grumbled over the coms. Nestor did not respond and had turned to crane his neck to look up at the tower again in disappointment, for they’d found nothing of interest to him and only an old gun for Jack in this place. He was trying to decide what he would like to do next when the blinking lights of the copters passed over the northern rim of the crater, headed straight for them.

Chapter 8 - The Plan

Author’s Note - In this chapter we have three different versions of hero:

Anna is intrepid, stalwart, and highly competent. She has a moral compass that she follows and she is willing to give everything to follow that compass.

Jack is loyal to his cause to the end, and will to do anything to complete his mission.

Nestor is the unwitting hero, capable of rising to whatever the occasion might be, but hesitant and inexperienced.

Our three heroes do not see each other as such.

They arrived at the spaceport in the predawn dark, two groups in as many rovers, and easily cleared security using Anna’s credentials. Past the gate, they descended to the level below the surface, trying very much to embody the picture of innocence as they headed to the tiny hangar on the outskirts. Anna opened the pedestrian doors to the hangar and walked in to activate the overhead lights. As they came on, they could see that the single-ship building sat empty but for a meter-tall crate pushed against the far wall, next to the massive rolling ship-entry doors.

Nils gestured toward the crate, “That it?” he asked in Chrysean, looking at Linh. Linh seemed not to hear him, but Andres answered for her, “Yes, four hundred kilotons. We delivered it yesterday. With some help from Young Nestor there.”

Linh ignored the conversation, and instead looked at Anna, “I thought he was supposed to be here already. Where is your man?”

“He’s on his way. You don’t always get the de-orbit window you’d like, you know? Once he touches down on the pad and ground control gives him his final taxiing instructions, he’ll let me know on this com,” Anna held up the small square comsbox, showing it to Linh, “and by the way, you already knew that was the plan.” She smiled, but it only seemed to be with her lips, as her eyes and Linh’s were locked in some other unspoken ferocious battle.

Linh sighed with a certain amount of impatience and glared back at Anna. Nils stepped between them, his face all business, “How about you take us through the plan once he does get here, Anna? I think your copilot should hear it, if nothing else.”

Anna flicked her eyes to Nils, and then briefly back to Linh, her face contorting into a frown, “Well, for the record, and for what feels like the hundredth time, I neither need nor want a copilot. No offense, kid. Especially one who doesn’t know how to fly…”

“But I do know how to fly,” Nestor said in his halting Chrysean, trying to summon some outrage into his voice, “I’m just not…”

“You’re just not a pilot yet. You can’t solo a craft, you’re not a pilot. It’s just that simple kid.”

“But I have…”

Linh spoke loudly, her voice cold with authority and her gaze moving from person to person, “Stop it. The recruit goes because I wish for him to go. He has demonstrated his usefulness in other matters, which engenders my trust. And does so in a way that questioning my decisions does not. Perhaps allowing him some further experience will help us know how serious he is about creating a New Mars,” her eyes settled on Nestor, slight movements analyzing him. It felt like they were boring into him. They flicked back to Anna, “Or maybe not. Who knows. It does not matter. Nils has an excellent idea, as usual,” she nodded graciously to Nils, smiling warmly, “We should not waste our time, waiting for your friend, arguing. So let’s review the plan. We have nothing else to do.”

Anna passingly glared at Linh, then seemed to fade into calm professionalism. She addressed Nestor directly in Chrysean, speaking very slowly with eyes that didn’t seem to see him, “The plan, once our shuttle arrives, is to load the item from that crate over there, which is a four-hundred-kiloton nuclear bomb, into that ship. Then yourself,” she still didn’t appear to be seeing Nestor, though she was looking directly at him, “Jack, and I will launch from this spaceport into orbit. We will attain an orbit of one thousand kilometers, on a polar orbital inclination. We will then orbit to the appropriate location, close-to-but-not-directly-over the Great Seed Bank, where we will burn retrograde until our surface velocity drops to zero. At this point, I will align the ship with our new terminal descent. I’m sure, since you’re a pilot, you’ll know that that means ‘straight at the ground’. We will then burn full throttle for one minute. I will then angle the ship opposite our descent. Sorry - ‘straight at the sky’. We will release the bomb from the rear hatch, and I will then burn for ten seconds to clear it. At that point, I will recircularize our orbit, change our inclination to an equatorial orbit, and we’ll come home. The bomb will fall, unguided, at several-kilometers-per-second onto the Seed Banks, triggering only after its full impact. The force of that impact, combined with the subsequent explosion from the bomb itself, will obliterate the entire structure, as well as everything nearby.”

She looked away from Nestor, shifting her stare to focus upon Linh with unbridled insolence. Andres raised his left hand, fist in the air, “And with the Seed Banks destroyed, we will release Mars from the expectations of terraformation. We can create a new world that will be fully unshackled from the old!” They all raised their left hands with him. Nestor looked around the impromptu circle, his eyes coming to rest on Anna, who was blank-faced as she repeated “For the New World!” with the rest of the group.

Linh seemed to lose interest at this point and walked off at some other task on her handheld tablet. This seemed to be a signal dismissing the rest of the group. Andres and Nils walked off together, chatting about a ball game, and Jack wandered over toward the bomb, as if he were entranced. Nestor moved to take a step towards Anna, but she turned her back to him, looked down at her own handheld, and walked away. Nestor stood for a moment staring at her back, and then turned and followed Jack towards the bomb.

By the time he got there, Jack had already opened a side of the crate, and was kneeling to gaze into the box with an expression of awe. Nestor knelt to investigate with him for a moment, but could make little sense of what was there. Inside the box was a sort of metal tube encompassed in a series of exceptionally thick, slightly rounded plates, with caps on the front and back, the whole thing perhaps a meter in diameter. It sat in a circular external frame fastened to the walls of the box at its vertices. To Nestor, there didn’t appear to be anything else of interest inside the box, but Jack was reaching in to root out wires and trace them back to mysterious sources. Nestor stood back up and listlessly looked around the hangar. Andres had broken off from Nils and was walking over to them, and seeing Nestor staring at him from a couple meters away, he said, “Hell of a lot of work to get that. Especially getting it to this space port. Glad we were able to pull it off.”

Jack looked back over his shoulder at Andres, “Thanks to Nestor, we pulled it off.”

Andres smiled broadly, his whole face lighting up, the first time Nestor could recall seeing such a thing, “Thanks to Young Nestor.”

Jack frowned at the crate and reached out to pry the other sides off, exposing the bomb underneath.

From the center of the room, Anna yelled, “He’s landed on Pad Three and is taxiing right now. Let’s get those doors open. He’ll be here in a minute.” Nils jogged to the panel and hit the big circular button in the center with the palm of his hand, and the doors slid open, their weight in motion causing the ground to tremble. As they came open, several spotlights high in the rafters of the hanger came on to illuminate the threshold in the otherwise dark tunnel. It was only another moment before the ship appeared, being pulled along by a small robotic tractor hitched to the front wheel, a yellow strobe light flashing atop the little bot. The tractor backed the ship into the hangar and left unceremoniously, the small light ceasing its strobing as it pulled away.

Nils closed the doors behind the tractor, and as they clanged shut, the rear hatch of the ship opened with a hum. The shuttle was shaped like a slightly-rounded-at-the-edges brick, with the clamshell hatch at the rear and the cockpit windows at the front serving as the only visual identifiers of fore and aft on the entire thing. The top was clad with curved indigo solar panels, and the bottom with square black ceramic heat-shielding tiles, which all were graying and curled up at the edges. At the exact center of the brick, triangular support struts extended out to either side, holding at their apexes a massive engine apiece. The engines sat on swivels and were presently facing the ground, positioned for takeoffs and landings. A pair of heavy fuel tubes extended from the center of the swivel back to the ship’s sides, disappearing within. The ship rested on wheeled tripod landing gear.

“I still think it was a mistake to get such an antique,” Jack said to Anna, walking over.

She half-smiled in reply to Jack, but before she could further enumerate, a man emerged from the hatch at the back of the ship, saying in her stead, “She’s old, but she’s sturdy. Been serving orbital shuttle duty at the Hellas scrapyards for longer’n any of us has been alive.”

“Antique is good,” Linh said, appearing at Nestor’s side. “Antique might as well be invisible.”

The man from the ship looked at Linh as she spoke and then scanned the rest of the group before coming to rest on Anna. He walked over to her, addressing Linh as he walked, “She’ll be invisible enough, if that’s what you’re looking for. The solar and the heat tiles are both very low albedo, especially after all the hours she’s spent doing orbital runs. Ain’t no shine left on either, heh. Though anyone with a radar’s going to see these engine struts from a million miles away.”

Linh watched him carefully as he spoke. When he finished, she shook her head, looking back down at her handheld, “Yes, good. Anna, please pay your friend so he can be on his way.”

Anna handed a bag to the man. “Thanks Timothy. As far as I’m concerned, we’re even now,” she said with a warm smile.

Timothy smiled back at her as he took the bag. He looked at it for a moment, holding it closed before him, and then he looked back up to Anna and said, “I’m going to trust that it’s all here, Anna,” his eyes flicked dubiously over the rest of the group, “You all have a good one.” He turned, shouldering the bag, and left quickly through the side door.

The group watched him leave in silence, but as soon as the door closed, Anna and Linh shared a pointed look, and Jack said, “Ok, c’mon Andres, Nils, let’s go get this thing loaded.”

They walked over to the bomb, Jack grabbing the handle for the dolly, and Andres and Nils grabbing a back sweep of the external frame apiece. As they wheeled the bomb over, Anna looked at Nestor, “Come along, copilot,” she said this last word witheringly, “let’s get a request sent over to the control tower for refueling and departure.”

She walked up the ramp into the back of the ship with Nestor at her heels. The interior of the ship was low, so short that Anna, who was at least ten centimeters shorter than he was, needed to stoop. Nestor felt less like he was stooping and more like he was crawling as they passed through the tiny cargo area. The cockpit was small as well, with only enough room between the two seats for one person at a time. Nestor waited while Anna took the left seat and then slid into the seat on the right. The ship had been powered down and Anna began methodically flipping switches, turning systems on, screens and lights and unidentified hums all coming to life as she worked.

“You do know how to submit a tower request, don’t you?” she said, looking at Nestor expectantly.

“Yes, of course I know how to do that,” he lied, reaching out to the touchscreen in the center of the cockpit. He started randomly pushing buttons, hoping to luck onto the prompt for ground requests. Anna watched him for several button presses, then sighed and smacked his hand away, pushing the button on the lower left rapidly three times. GROUND REQUESTS appeared on the screen, with a series of different options displayed below. She glared at Nestor for a moment, shook her head, and then turned back to her preflight tasks. He selected the FUEL & TAXI option, and the screen switched over to show ‘REQUEST RECEIVED. FUEL TUG INBOUND–97s’. The number at the end began counting down the remaining seconds.

The dolly with the crate on it rattled up the ramp behind them, coming to a stop in the cargo area. Nestor leaned out and looked back at the men strapping the crate down, “Hey…uh…we have a fuel tractor on the way. Can one of you open the doors again?”

Nestor glanced at Anna after he spoke, and she glared back at him. Nils volunteered and jogged lightly back down the ramp and over to push the hanger door button. Seconds later, the fuel tractor backed through the open hangar doors, the hitch bar pivoting down as it backed, and locked onto the front wheel with a thump. It was larger than the former tractor, with two fueling arms held aloft on either side, attached to tubes that ran back to a substantial circular tank on top. The whole thing was capped with another flashing yellow light. Nestor couldn’t help but see it as a fat man with wheels for legs, lengthy arms, and a diminutive flashing head.

“Well,” Anna said, glaring at him again. He stared at her blankly and she sighed in response, “Look, are you going to attach the fuel arm, or what? The bot doesn’t know where our fuel slot is…”

“Right, yes. Sorry, just a lot happening,” he said, standing up from his seat and squeezing past her. He could feel her eyes on the back of his head as he squeezed past Jack as well, who was finishing up strapping down the crate. Nestor walked down the ramp and around to the bot and grabbed one arm and pulled it toward the ship, turning and looking for a likely place to insert it. A panel had popped open on top of the nose, and he assumed that had to be it and pulled the arm out, servos wheezing as he did so, and slid the nozzle into the ship. It locked into place with a click and the tractor beeped two short beeps and the strobe light on top began flashing faster as it dispensed the fuel. He looked up at the cockpit windows to see Anna beckoning him back inside. As he walked up the ramp, he heard it hum, lifting to close behind him.

Jack was sitting in a jump seat beside the door between cockpit and cargo area, leaning forward to tug on his restraints as Nestor squeezed by again. By the time he was back in his seat and fully restrained, the tractor was pulling the ship out, and then they were clear of the hanger and trundling along the taxiway towards the elevator airlocks to the surface launchpads.

A few silent minutes later, they came to rest in the launch area for Pad Four. The fueling tractor was still connected, and they’d been sitting quietly on the pad just long enough to cause Jack to start squirming. He yelled in Chrysean from his perch behind them, “What are we doing? It seems like we’re just sitting here?”

Anna glared back over her shoulder and replied, “I’m charging the capacitors, which uses the ship’s fuel cells. The normal batteries can’t discharge quickly enough to power up the engines, so we have to use the capacitors instead. We need to burn fuel to make enough electricity to charge them, and the fuel bot has to stay connected to backfill what we burn.”

Jack yelled back, “Well, can’t you make them charge quicker? I’m getting nervous just sitting here on the launchpad.”

“No, I can’t make anything happen any faster than it is,” Anna said back over her shoulder with exasperation. Nestor had been staring at the center touchscreen, and noticed CAPACITORS at the top of the screen, with three full bars displayed underneath. The system beeped once, drawing Anna’s attention, and she nodded to herself before saying, loud enough to be heard by Jack, “There. The capacitors are charged, and now we just need to top off our fuel…”

She punched a button, and with a hum, the fuel gauge rose all the way to full, “Ok. Nestor, disengage the fuel tractor, please.” She turned to flipping switches and adjusting screens, doing her final preparations for takeoff.

Nestor undid his restraints and moved to get up and go out to undock the fuel arm. Anna stopped what she was doing and glared at him. He froze in place; it was clear he was doing something wrong.

“What?” he said, shrugging slightly.

“Where are you going?”

“Out to disconnect the fuel tractor.”

“You don’t need to go out there to disconnect the bot,” Anna sighed and reached forward, cycling through screens on the center console until she got to the GROUND REQUESTS screen. A button that said DISCONNECT? appeared on the center of the screen, flashing. She hit it, and out front, the arm disconnected from the ship, retracting back to the tractor as the hitch came unhooked, and then the little tractor began moving briskly down the ramp away from the pad.

As Nestor moved to get back into his seat, Anna grabbed his wrist tightly and pulled him down to her level and glared hotly at him, her face maybe two centimeters from his, and whispered, “I don’t know what lies you told everyone else. I don’t care. It’s not going to matter, anyway. But just so you understand, I know you’re no pilot, and I know you’re not a student, either. It’s obvious that you’ve never even been in a cockpit before.”

Nestor opened his mouth to object, but she gripped down on his wrist even harder, her nails digging in. “Shut up. No more lies,” she hissed, her face bright red and her eyes flashing. “You’re not going to fool me. As far as I’m concerned, in that seat, you’re a liability. But I can’t kick you off this ship, and I doubt he,” she gestured with her chin toward the cargo bay, “would allow me to force you to sit back with him. Which is where you belong. So, you’re going to sit down in that seat, you’re going to buckle yourself in, and you’re not going to touch anything. Understand? Copilot?”

Her lips formed into a sneer as she let him go. He dropped back into his seat and buckled himself up and Anna returned to her preflight tasks calmly, as if he was unworthy of further attention. She began speaking with the control tower, securing approval to takeoff and a vector for departure.

Nestor’s mind was racing. He looked out the cockpit windows, trying to decide what to do next. All he wanted to do was run, to take off the restraints and open the cargo bay door and flee from there. On all sides of the launch pad, what had been ramps for accessing the pad were now pivoting vertically, becoming blast shields surrounding the craft. He wasn’t getting through those shields. They looked like they were each at least a half a meter thick, made of concrete and metal, five meters tall when fully vertical. He snuck another glance at Anna, who was staring at the controls before her as the very picture of stillness, her left hand on the control stick between her knees and right hand on the linked throttle levers for both engines.

“Brace for liftoff.”

She reached forward and flipped two switches marked ENGINE 1 and ENGINE 2 simultaneously. Nestor heard the engines ignite and could see the glow from the right engine out of the window on his periphery and could feel their rumble deep inside his core. Anna eased the throttle forward, and the ship trembled, becoming lighter on the pad but still not yet airborne. She looked around at the instruments, taking a final survey, and then pushed the throttles forward a bit more to bring them even with a small hashmark at the base of the throttle housing. The ship trembled a bit more and then laboriously floated up into the air into a minor hover. The nose of the ship began wandering slightly and Anna moved the control stick a tiny amount to keep it pointed in the correct direction. Satisfied it would drift no further, she pushed the throttle further forward, and the ship began accelerating up and as they cleared the blast shields, Anna reached forward and flicked a toggle switch up. The ship’s engines pivoted to face backwards and the ship’s motion lurched forward to match their orientation, but Anna eased the stick back, lifting the nose of the craft to match the engine pivot and their motion corrected back to upward as she found the balance point and Nestor’s stomach knew this without his mind being able to make sense of the instruments before him. As the nose settled on a satisfactory upward trajectory, she reached down and pushed the throttles all the way forward in a smooth motion that belied the ship’s actual response, which was less smooth and more drastic lurch forward, and the acceleration smashed Nestor violently back into his seat.

The ground fell behind them as they leapt towards the black sky above, but this was unperceivable to Nestor as the edges of his vision darkened and he peered out at the world before him through tunnels bored through his skull by the incredible pressure. He felt it hard to concentrate, hard to tell what was happening on the instruments in front of him, and resigned himself to simply staring straight ahead at the darkening sky through the forward cockpit windows. The ship shook so hard he worried it might rattle to pieces on ascent and the shaking and the acceleration pressure seemed to go on forever, and just as it felt like it might never end, he noticed Anna’s hand reach forward, grasp the throttles, pause a moment, and then pull them all the way back to closed. The roar from the engines ceased and was replaced by a low hum and the pressure ended and his vision swam at the edges for a moment as his eyes readjusted.

“Hey? It sounds like you cut the throttle. We can’t be anywhere near space yet,” Jack piped up over the ship’s coms from his spot in the rear.

Anna was sitting with her head resting back against the seat’s headrest and eyes closed, and without opening them she said calmly back over the coms, “We don’t need to use the engines all the way to space; we’ve established a trajectory whose uppermost altitude is one thousand kilometers. We’ll coast from here to there, then burn to circularize at one thousand.”

This was something Nestor knew, thinking back to innumerable conversations with Oscar, and he confirmed so over the coms while leaning out to look back at Jack, “She’s right, that’s how you establish orbit.”

“Thanks for the backup, copilot,” Anna replied, the awkwardness of her sarcasm silencing further questions.

The rest of the ascent passed in relative silence, but for the groaning and ticking of the ship’s hull as it cooled from their initial burn through the lower atmosphere. Gradually the nose of the craft came over, showing first the golden glow of Mars’s upper atmosphere, then the grand curve of the planet with a horizon split in two half black and half ochre by the dawn happening below, the light racing across the land to scour out the dark. Nestor took this as a portent of things to come.

Anna missed all of this and rode up with her eyes closed and a sad look on her face and hands loosely on her armrests. As they approached one thousand kilometers on the altimeter, a small blob of a tear floated away from her face, and then Anna opened her eyes to reach forward and flick the two engine switches to the ‘off’ position, the tiny movement of her fingers contrasting with the loud thunk confirming that she’d shut the engines down.

“What was that noise?” Jack asked over the coms, “And shouldn’t we be circulariz-aring or whatever sometime soon?”

“She shut off the engines!” Nestor screamed in panicked response.

Jack was suddenly floating in the null gravity right behind them, fury and terror vying for primacy in his voice. “What does he mean, you shut off the engines?”

Tears began streaming from Anna’s eyes, the malformed blobs moving at angles oblique and unpredictable as she looked up at Jack. She unbuckled her restraints so she could turn to face him more fully.

“I’ve turned them off. He’s right. I can’t let you bomb the Seed Bank. The Terraformation is too important, and I’m not going to allow any group of terrorists to destroy the hope…the future…of everyone on this planet. I needed to make sure this mission failed, and now it will. Engines off, we’ll just glide back down, and crash in the wilderness south of the Valley.”

“YOU’VE KILLED US?” Jack screamed, producing a pistol from somewhere at the small of his back and pointing it at her. His voice lowered to express a tranquility he could not have been experiencing. “No…no, you’re not going to do this. You’re going to fly this ship. You’re going to complete this mission.”

“You can’t shoot me into doing any of that,” Anna said with a dead, sad look, “And you don’t know how to turn the engines back on. Or how to fly this ship. Neither does he.” She gestured at Nestor with her chin.

Jack glanced at Nestor, paralyzed in his seat and holding his hands up, for some reason. “That true? You don’t know how to turn the engines back on? How can that be?”

“I’ll tell you,” Anna said, a smile appearing on her lips, baleful eyes locking onto Nestor, “My copilot there is not a pilot at all. He doesn’t know shit. He’s been lying to all of you.”

The smile disappeared. “You don’t have a choice here. We’re all dying, on this ship, in about,” she glanced over her shoulder at the display, “eight minutes.”

“No,” Jack said, who then grabbed the pilot seat to pull himself to float closer to her, pushing the gun against her forehead with his free hand.

“No. The only one who might die here is you. Unless you fly this ship. You say we’re all dead, anyway? I can make the next eight minutes worse than anything you’ve imagined.”

Anna glared up at him for a moment, and then threw herself forward, her shoulder slamming into Jack’s stomach, both floating backward towards the cargo bay. Jack lost the gun with the impact and it floated back to rest against the rear cockpit wall, but he did not see it there for Anna had wrapped her legs around his waist and was swinging closed fists down upon his head as he held up his hands to protect himself. Nestor felt a spark of courageousness overcome him and leapt forward at Anna, but she saw him coming and tossed up a singular elbow which connected hard with his nose and pain bloomed red before his eyes. The force of her elbow impacting his prow reversed the direction of his glide and he spun back against the seat. As his vision returned, he saw Jack get both feet up and kick Anna back, but Anna and Nestor’s shared impact had started them spinning, and Jack’s kick pushed her onto the floor, near the rear of the cockpit wall, to which the gun seemed pinned.

The kick pushed Jack too, and he thrashed as he floated, trying in vain to reverse his motion, to get himself moving back towards Anna. Then he abruptly stopped thrashing, his face frozen. Nestor had been watching Jack and turned to see that Anna had the gun now and was pointing it at Jack. Jack got his hands on the cockpit seats and finally arrested his motion and was watching her carefully as she bobbed back against the wall, both hands on the gun. Jack seemed ready to toss himself at her, his body tension complete and his voice still much too calm, “Anna, listen, just give me the gun, hand it over real slow and then fly this ship. You don’t want to die.”

Anna’s eyes flashed as she seemed to realize that having the gun presented her little advantage and there was nothing, nothing in the universe, to stop this man from coming for her. Nestor could see this realization dawn on her face, and he understood as she did what her only option was, and he began pleading with her, blobs of his blood floating freely out from his smashed nose, “Nononononono, Anna, nonononono”.

Jack, the only person in attendance who was confused about what was happening silently before him, looked at Nestor as the boy pleaded, and in this moment he missed Anna raising the gun to her temple. Upon turning back to face her, Anna smiled a morose little smile at him and pulled the trigger. The side of her head opposite the gun exploded in gore, bits of bone and brain and blood flowing out and floating up in a sort of horrible free-falling bloom, her hand snapped out with the gun and letting it go and then rising limply to the side of her head. Nestor stared with horror vibrating through his spine and his belly and his nightmares for whatever life he himself may have left, likely only minutes of it, and in this terror he watched as her lifeless body floated upward.

Jack’s face was suddenly nearly touching his. “Nestor. NESTOR.”

He turned to face Jack, who spoke to him in Tharsian, “It’s up to you. Pilot or no, you got to get those engines back on. NOW. Pilot or no, you had to’ve seen what she did before takeoff. Do that again.”

He looked at Jack and nodded. It was up to him if he wanted to live. He pulled himself down into his seat, staring out the windows now filled with umber and he felt a pang of panic when he realized what that implied and he faced forward and strapped himself in and stared blindly at the controls, trying to remember what Anna had been doing just a few minutes prior.

He knew he must turn on the engines, for that was what Jack was chanting loudly in his ear, and so he reached forward and flicked both thusly labeled engine switches up and then pushed the throttles full ahead. Nothing happened. There had been some other step he was forgetting. He could feel it, back somewhere in his memory, but he couldn’t think clearly, especially with Jack alarming loudly as he was.

As his eyes traced the edges of the central display, Nestor recalled the engines couldn’t power up without the capacitors. He needed to charge them and use them to start the engines. He pushed the button on the bottom left of the display, cycling through menus, and found the one that said CAPACITORS and began their charge. The bars began filling, almost imperceptibly slow.

The altimeter had dropped below fifty kilometers by the time the capacitors finally reached full charge, and with a sense of relief, Nestor reached forward to flick the two switches up. He heard them begin humming, a soft hum produced by the now-online magnetic fields and coolant system, and confirmed they were both now active by peering out the window at their blue-white glow. He shifted his hand down, shoved the throttles forward as dramatically as he could, and once again the acceleration slammed him back into his seat. Jack was tossed unceremoniously back into the cargo bay.

The ship’s nose had drifted into an aggressive downward angle, and all he could see through the forward windows was post-dawn desert blowing beautifully golden below, but he could not appreciate this beauty through his haze of terror. He pulled back on the control stick, jerking it all the way to the stops. The nose of the craft began to rise, bit by bit, to come level with the horizon, and did not tarry there, but continued rising. Nestor looked to the altimeter, and it passed below forty kilometers as the last snatch of horizon became obscured beneath the craft’s nose, and it was then that it bucked up aggressively, catching and being buffeted by the thin Martian atmosphere. Even with the nose rising and the engines at full throttle, the craft was still losing altitude. It seemed paradoxical to Nestor that their descent had sped up with the addition of engine power, and in panic he kept the stick all the way back against the stops, failing to notice the warning from his inner ears that said he was tipping backward.

What happened next would not have been a surprise to an actual pilot, or even a dedicated student pilot who had a bit of time in a simulator, but it was a surprise to Nestor when the craft’s bricklike nose finally caught enough Martian air to start it into an uncontrolled head-over-heels tumble through the atmosphere, the engines’ thrust combining with the overwhelming drag of the unaerodynamic shape of the shuttle at this relative angle to accentuate the craft’s spin. Disoriented and not knowing what else to do, Nestor slammed the stick all the way forward, trying to correct the spin, but rather than fix any of his problems this added a new one by introducing a rightward motion to the craft’s tumble, and its trajectory through the sky became complete chaos, the spin pressing him hard into the seat. It was all he could do to hold on to the stick, no longer able to keep it all the way forward, no matter how hard he pushed. As his vision narrowed once again to tunnels, it came to him to cut the engines, and he reached down with all the strength left in his arm, feeling for throttle levers he could no longer see. His hand grasped the levers right as he felt the deep pool of unconsciousness rising to meet him, and he pulled back on both, the feel of the levers hitting their zero stops his last conscious memory.

Nestor came-to overwhelmed by nausea. He opened his eyes for only a moment, just long enough to see the alternating view of ground-sky-ground-sky, and realize that they were still tumbling. Another wave of nausea swelled over him, starting as a buzz in the back of his head, then creeping down his spine to wrap an iron hand around his stomach and squeeze hard, his stomach muscles gripping down, vomit welling up and out of his mouth, and almost in slow motion flying out to curve down into a magnificent multifaceted arc before splashing on the control panel at his knees. He saw none of this, however, for his eyes were squeezed tightly shut, as if he could close them tight enough that it might change his circumstances.

He opened his eyes again. Every thought, every emotion, every instinct advising against this course of action for it felt truly insane. He read the altimeter and saw they’d fallen below ten kilometers, and he stared at it for several seconds to determine if it was falling any slower than before. He thought perhaps it might be. He was pretty sure he could still recover at this altitude, and he looked for his velocity, and he watched it fall just below three hundred meters per second. He knew this must mean that drag through the atmosphere was slowing him down, but he also knew he still needed to use the engines to stop the craft from slamming into the ground at too high a velocity, for drag alone would not arrest his descent.

He recalled there was a setting that pivoted the engines to fire forward, and from his experience watching shuttles come in to land at the Poynting spaceport, he believed this to be the typical approach to braking. He looked around at the controls, trying to find the toggle switch Anna had used right after takeoff, but his head was swimming and he felt so sick he could make no sense of the things he was seeing on the panel before him. He had stopped looking, his unfocused eyes staring at a random section of the control panel, his mind trying to fight the nausea and disorientation, when the image in front of him resolved into focus. It was a small, unassuming button labeled THRUSTERS.

Nestor stared at the word and recalled that the maneuvering thrusters were tiny jets positioned all around the shuttle, used for small motions in space, primarily when docking. If you needed to change your approach to another vessel in space, or slow down a bit, or match their rotation, or adjust your approach angle, you’d fire your thrusters in the appropriate manner.

He realized that could use the thrusters to stop this spin, and he pushed the small button and the control screen changed to two images of the shuttle, one from above and one in profile, both images surrounded by arrows with numbers filling in above each arrow to show the craft’s motion in each relative direction. Content that the thrusters were now activated, Nestor looked for a way to control them. There must be a pad of some sort. Inset partway back on his left armrest, he located a small pad with four directional arrows and two buttons labeled FOR and REV. He pushed the arrow pointing back, looking at the control screen for confirmation, and seeing there on the screen two small straight arrows under both nose and tail become highlighted with their accompanying thrust numbers, confirming he was firing the thrusters on the bottom of the craft, pushing it relatively ‘up’. This did not help to resolve his tumble, however, and so he pushed the other arrows to see if they would correct his spin, but none of the other arrows seemed to fire the correct combination of thrusters to do so.

Nestor began looking all around for a second button pad for rotational thrusters and found no such pad anywhere he looked. He grabbed the control stick and bent over to see if there were buttons he’d missed on the shaft of the stick itself. As the stick moved, he heard thrusters hiss, and he paused and tested it in a different direction and heard thrusters hiss again. He experimented further, watching different thrust combinations pop up on the display, until he could feel in his stomach that the spin was, in fact, slowing.

Only a moment more haggling with the control stick, and he had the shuttle tumbling lazily through the Martian troposphere. Nestor still could not watch the world spin around him through the cockpit windows, and so he stared at the instruments instead while he arrested the craft’s remaining rotation. He knew he was still headed straight towards the ground, and he knew the engines were pointed towards the back of the ship, for he could not suss out how to pivot them any other direction, and he knew he needed to fire those engines to slow down, and he concluded this meant he’d need to face the ship towards the sky, which sat well with him as he did not wish to watch the ground flying up towards him.

Nestor negotiated the ship into a backwards orientation with great effort, for the craft kept wanting to resume its chaotic tumble, and he had just passed four kilometers of altitude when he pushed the throttles all the way forward, slamming back against the seat yet another time. He looked at their velocity and it was falling quickly. He exalted his plan was working, feeling skilled, invincible, and he still felt this way as their altitude passed eight hundred meters and velocity bottomed out, falling to single digits and then finally to zero. Then the numbers began creeping up again and began accelerating towards one hundred meters per second. Nestor glanced at the altimeter to see they were now climbing, but Nestor did not wish to climb, and so he eased the throttle back until the ascent began slowing, and as velocity approached zero, he eased the throttles forward, bringing the craft into a momentary hover, and checked their altitude, seeing it just above one thousand meters. He looked back to the velocity, and saw with exasperation that it was rising again, and so Nestor pulled the throttle back more to slow down, but saw no change. Velocity was still continuing to increase, and so he tried pushing the throttle forward, and it increased more. Through the windows he could see only sky, and his altitude was unchanged, which he guessed to mean that he must be moving laterally, not down.

He tried to adjust by using the control stick, but could not arrest the ship’s motion, as every correction seemed to require its own attendant set of corrections, and with consternation he noticed that his velocity was still climbing and his altitude was now decreasing. He had no better idea of what to do and so he cut the throttle, but this caused the nose to dip aggressively to the right, the direction he’d been drifting. He tried to correct by pushing the left thruster arrow, but this only caused the craft to begin a gentle roll. He tilted the stick to correct out of the roll, which did indeed arrest the spin of the craft, and then looked out the window to see red desert rocks racing by barely two hundred meters below. His eyes scanned the control panel, desperate for something that would help him.

It was then that Nestor found the engine position toggle, unchanged in location from where it had been waiting all this time, and he flipped the switch down into “landing” mode, and was much satisfied to hear the hum of the engines changing position. The display beeped once, LANDING MODE appearing at the top to replace the thruster display as the ship’s computer turned the thrusters off.

Nestor eased the throttles back up, and the ship’s descent slowed, but not quick enough, and right as Nestor recalled the hashmark on the throttle body denoting the ideal hovering thrust, the craft belly-flopped down hard onto the Martian soil.

A deafening scraping sound filled the cockpit, and the nose slammed down with force for just a moment before the craft passed at speed over a ridge and twisted to the right, which caused the still-burning engine on that side to crash into the ground. It resisted the rocky Martian soil for one frightening moment before the struts holding it to the craft buckled. The thrust from the now-unmoored engine was enough to cause it to spin up and over, still perfunctorily attached to the ship via its fuel lines and slung around the hull by them. The craft continued rolling while the right engine rose to meet the left, and then both crashed together in an explosion of parts.

The spacecraft tumbled down the slope, away from the bloom of parts above, rolling once, twice, almost three times, before coming to rest midway down.

Chapter 7 - The Rebellion

Having little else to do to occupy himself in the back of the truck, Nestor daydreamed of the mural in the Market Plaza back at Poynting. He’d grown up staring at the mural, for it took up an entire wall of the main shaft, right above the government building, a testament to the progressive spirit of some earlier people than his own. It was titled, in fading red stencilled letters, “The Mars of the Future”, though in reality it only showed the plateau, with the Valley and Labyrinth drawn in shadow near the top and Ascraeus, Pavonis, and Arsia on the western borders as little white-capped mounds of plaster pushed horizontally out from this sideways miniature world. The bulge of the main plateau rose bulbous and misshapen from the wall, checker-marked by little brown roads, snaked through by blue rivers, and overflowing with green in between. Vignettes of the aspirationally unique qualities of the districts were scattered about the map, and the one he remembered best was an overall-clad man wearing a wide-brimmed hat, a long thin golden stalk hanging leisurely from the left side of his mouth. He was grinning with his presumptively-calloused thumbs tucked into the straps of his overalls, and was positioned almost exactly where the Creede claim was on the map. Nestor recalled staring at it, taking in freckles upon the man’s nose, the gaps between his teeth, the shape of his jawline and the turquoise color of his eyes, for only once every detail had been properly cataloged would Nestor’s silent invocation to arcane and diverse gods be complete and bring that thing there depicted into his lived reality.

He shook his head to clear his thoughts and stared out the truck’s windows at Chryse’s rock-strewn pockmarked death mask, trying to imagine what she looked like back in her prime, covered by deep blue waters with enormous waves cresting to the horizon. Back in the days when Ascraeus fell in love with her. The only image he could summon up was the sea in Juventae, the little blue teardrop at the tip of the tail of the Great Wyrm.

A few more hours on this road and they bumped to a stop in Calahorra, the sun long vanished and the stars twinkling meagerly above, and he and Jack stepped from this blessed night blinking into the harsh lights of the Calahorra main port of entry building. In this place Jack appeared much more dangerous than before. The slinky way he moved, the short, clipped way he spoke to others. It all felt like he was trying to hide, or they were trying to get away with something they shouldn’t. Nestor wondered what was in this new truck, which Jack had been so adamant upon using, even though any of the rovers would have been faster and harder to track. He felt it was a mistake to ask.

They were interviewed briefly by the customs officials, and all questions were briskly addressed and satisfactorily so using the answers Jack had drilled into him over the preceding hours on the road. Then they were back out the front door of the port and strolling mock-casually back to where Nils hid in the truck.

A short drive through the Calahorra tunnels brought them to a large underground warehouse where they left the truck and transferred to a rover driven by a short stocky dark man who introduced himself to Nestor as Andres and then proffered nothing further. They spiraled through tunnels into a part of the city that seemed to be composed of the condemned, both the decrepit homes and those who lived rough inside of them, in the upper portions of the excavation. There were entire sections of roof that had fallen in up here, and as the sort of temporary repair that inevitably becomes permanent, someone had bolted a thick metal mesh onto the adjoining walls to hold back fresh falls. The remaining rocks above were not truly being supported by anything and so had fallen to the metal mesh, which bowed deeply towards the center, straining the ten-centimeter-thick bolts from their anchor points in the walls. The roads appeared to have never been repaired at any point in their history, with some sections reduced by generationally uncleared rockfall to such thin corridors, the tunnel sides scraped the rover as they passed. Layers of graffiti covered the rock walls, using words in diverse languages that Nestor could speak none of and grotesquery mixing with beauty and depictions of variegated phalluses by the thousands.

They came upon a large flat, which was a repurposed storefront in all actuality, and was presently surrounded by a horde of dirty, bedraggled onlookers who peered through the windows and formed a rough, bulging, and transient line out of the door. A few turned to note their arrival, but most seemed taken by the proceedings within. All disembarked from the rover and Nestor and Jack fell into position behind Andres and Nils, who shouldered their way through this vagabond crowd.

They came into the main room of the flat and in the center stood an impossibly tall woman who was addressing the group in a way that was eerily reminiscent of the reverend back at the Edenite colony. She was slender, with long hair and dark skin that shone and dark eyes that did not focus on any object long, and she seemed to move in slow motion, her gracile arms and legs swooping through the air as if she were a marionette being masterfully controlled by a skilled and invisible giant hand as she spun and preached to her rapt audience.

She noted Nestor’s entry with only her eyes, not pausing in her speech, which was to Nestor indistinguishably Chrysean, and which seemed to be received by the crowd with a messianic fervor for all the gestures and ululations that accompanied her words. Nestor watched the rest in awe, not able to understand a single word and yet firmly grasping the revolutionary spirit. Eventually she concluded her speech and the entire crowd exclaimed all around him in a din that obscured all words, shouting glee and agreement and kinship at no particular target, and at this point Nils and Andres pushed forward to the woman and bowed their heads in temporary conversation with her. She glanced up at both Jack and him several times and then turned and disappeared into an adjoining room with Andres while Nils came back to bring the travellers to her.

They came into her room in a line with Nils at point and Nestor consigned to riding drag and Jack sauntering between his two outriders as if he were the one leading this herd. The woman was sitting cross-legged upon the foot of the room’s bed. Her attention was on the hand tablet she held in her left hand, and she did not acknowledge the men as they entered. Upon depositing them, Nils turned and left, at no point seeming to communicate with her in any sort of way. They stood there in front of her for some time with Jack looking like he wanted to say something and Nestor looking around the room and Andres staring at the two travelers with a bored expression. She looked up and put the tablet down and leant forward with elbows on thighs to address them.

What followed was a tense back-and-forth in Chrysean between the woman and Jack, every word and motion of the woman calculated to cause angst. At least, she seemed indifferent to the fact that they were having that effect. Their conversation drew to a close with her making a thrice-repeated assertion while Jack examined his shoes and nodded his affirmation and repeated the words with her.

She turned from Jack to Nestor and her focus shifted so completely that Jack looked around, as if he felt he should go. He was deeper in the room than Nestor was, however, and lacking an easy option for egress, he instead stood off to the side and tried to look like he wasn’t paying attention, not unlike how Nestor had been standing moments earlier.

The woman spoke now in clear Tharsian, accentless but structurally perfect, “Your name is Nestor Creede.” This was stated with the inflection of a statement, yet the woman paused all the same, watching him carefully. Nestor nodded and opened his mouth to affirm as much, but she interrupted to continue, “I am Linh Nguyen. I assume by the look on your face that you have not heard of me.” She smiled at this, pausing again. Nestor wasn’t sure if she wished for comment from him on this matter or not and returned her smile awkwardly.

Linh partially closed her eyes and glanced down at the tablet beside her. Without looking up, she continued again, “You are the young man who wished to spirit away an Edenite woman and child, is that correct?”

Nestor nodded and once again opened his mouth to speak, but Linh appeared to barely notice him and interjected yet again, “I wish to understand why you would want this.” Now her eyes flicked back up and met Nestor’s, making slight movements as she surveyed each feature on his face, waiting for him to speak.

“It jes didn’t seem right…” Nestor had to stop himself from finishing with ‘ma’am’, as it didn’t seem like a term this woman would appreciate.

Linh nodded, the corner of her mouth rising in a minor half-smile, “And what is right?”

Nestor shook his head, looking down at his boots, unsure how to respond to such a question.

“Well? One of two things is the case. Either you do not know what is right, in which case you abducted a woman and her baby because of some internal delusion. This would make you a very dangerous person, indeed. Or, you know what is right and acted to save them based upon that, in which case I would like to understand what it is you know to be right.”

Nestor looked at her and felt his cheeks grow hot. She swam before him and he couldn’t understand why he seemed to be crying, “It ain’t right to raise no baby as some sort of breedin’ slave. It ain’t right to have breedin’ slaves. It ain’t right to lie to innocent folks jes to keep it that way, neither.”

Linh nodded curtly, “Just so. But what if I were to tell you such lies are rampant and extend well beyond the simple Edenites out in their suicidal domes?”

“You mean little girls are used that way everwhere?” Nestor brushed his cheeks, trying to simultaneously look away and to look Linh in the eyes.

“I mean the lies the Edenite elders tell their oppressed are lies that have their mirror throughout our world. Lies that enable much worse than child exploitation.”

Nestor shook his head, not following, “What’s worse than hurtin’ a kid?”

Linh smiled a gracious, open smile, “It’s refreshing that harming a child is the limit of the pain and suffering that you can conceive. Where are you from, Nestor Creede?”

Nestor rattled off his well-practiced falsehood, “I was a student shuttle pilot, but my dad died back home in Tharsis. Left me nothin’, and now I don’t have enough to pay for school. I left Tharsis and got caught in a sandstorm in the Valley. The Edenites rescued me. Then, I met Jack here.”

Linh cocked her head at his strange tale and upon its conclusion, she leaned back on the bed, propping herself with her arms, “Your story sounds to be equal parts truth and fabrication, and it is fortunate for you I lack much concern about which parts of the story are which.”

She smiled again, her entire face contorted in a gesture of beneficence.

“We will allow fate to demonstrate to us what is truth and what is not. Of particular use to me would be any flight skills you possess. As I’m sure you understand, it is difficult to find shuttle pilots with…open minds. We’ve been lucky enough to find exactly one, but she is more of a hired gun than a true believer to our cause. I would prefer more of an ally, who is also a pilot, and I believe a young man, having gone through what you have gone through, might be such a person. Is that you? Do you wish to join our cause?”

“What is your cause? I don’t even know what you all call yourselves…”

“We have no name, we need only to refer to our comrades by their given names. Anything further would belie our cause, and our cause is the truth. Only the truth and encouraging the rest of our world to accept it.”

“But what is the truth?”

Linh looked at him levelly, her face grave, “There is much to learn about the truth, if you are interested in knowing it. We can teach you some. The beginning. The rest, Young Nestor, will be up to you to discover.”

*****

Nestor returned to the flat with a handcart full of supplies, the last of his chores for the day, the last from the list he’d awoken to that morning. The chores served as his rent payment to live at the flat, which was otherwise home to a never-ending rotation of scoundrels and wastrels. Months had passed, and yet Nestor still lacked a firm idea about who lived there and who was just passing through.

He was ignored by most in this place, but he came to realize that keeping to yourself was a survival trait here, for many he met had no qualms about confronting a stranger for the insult of acknowledging their existence, and Nestor soon discovered that he felt the same way. Invisible was better. He spent most evenings tucked into a corner of the common room of the house, knees hugged to chest, secretly listening to the few words spoken at volume about the place, trying to piece together the language. After all this time, he felt like he was beginning to understand, though he often struggled with finding the right spoken word.

Linh and her lieutenants, Nils, Andres, a vexish woman named Anna, and more and more so, Jack, were in the common room when Nestor walked in and were celebrating some unelucidated matter. They all cheered his name as he entered and held up drinks and wished him well in Chrysean. He looked around cautiously at their drunken faces and shuffled through to the kitchen and unloaded the supply cart there, being sure to refuse all assistance or libation offered along the way with a quiet shake of his head.

Nestor had grown quite meticulous in tracking supplies, ever since he’d witnessed Andres beat a man bloody over a single unsupported accusation of theft. A man passing through had accused another of taking a pack of cigarettes from his belongings, and though the cigarettes could be found nowhere, Andres had pounced upon the accused, a man who never defended himself in any way, a man who Andres beat until his hands were themselves bleeding, and a man who Andres then spat upon and cursed while he lay prone and sanguinary on the floor. That the accused did not defend himself in this trial by combat was agreed upon by all onlookers as proof of his guilt beyond a doubt, and Andres had left that room a hero pugilist. Nestor was determined for that not to happen to him, and so he kept a detailed running ledger of all things requested versus purchased versus used, and had thus become a formidable logistical powerhouse in this den of human refuse.

Totting up everything took quite some time and upon finishing his work, he went back out to the main room and found that all but Linh had retired elsewhere. She sat with a half-full glass in her hand and was leaning back on a couch with one leg up, arm stretched over her knee, looking off into the near distance. Nestor paused at the door and tried to decide what to do, for even crossing to the closet he shared with Jack would pass her line of sight and so disturb her. As if she might pounce upon him were he to pass near enough and the whim to strike.

Linh seemed to come out of her trance and nodded to him and lifted her glass and said in cheerful Chrysean, “Young Nestor. I’m told you are beginning to understand our language. How exciting for you.”

She gestured with the glass at the empty chairs next to her, using her slow measured movements. Nestor sat in a chair opposite, and Linh stared at him as he sat, her focus unwavering and her drunkenness seeming to slip off. She said nothing at all for quite some time while her eyes scanned each of Nestor’s features, then said in Tharsian, “You were a terrafarmer, no? Where in Tharsis did your people farm? And what?”

Nestor jumped at the sudden questioning and smiled very awkwardly and felt his cheeks redden, “Mount Ascraeus. We was hydrofarmers, been hydrofarmin’ since people come to Tharsis.”

Linh nodded serenely, almost appreciatively, “Ah, Ascraeus. Do you know the origin of that name?”

“I jes assumed the first people here named it that…”

“No…no, it was named long before any man set foot upon this planet. People back on Earth named it Ascraeus, which to them meant something like ‘rural’. They named it after Ascra, a place even more ancient. A place once referred to as ‘miserable in winter, sultry in summer, and good at no season’. Even looking through a telescope, our old-Earth forebears could tell what the future held for Ascraeus.” She smiled at her own wit, satisfied for a moment in the silence that followed.

“I guess maybe they jes figured no one would ever want to live there,” Nestor said, staring down at his feet.

Linh squinted at him, “I often suspect that the names we give things lay bare their true purpose. We think the name comes to us unbidden, but truthfully, it draws from details that we only subconsciously picked up on.”

“I think folks ain’t that complicated. Names is jes names,” Nestor shrugged.

“Do you know your Greek history?” The expression on Linh’s face said that she knew the answer to her question before it was given.

“Don’t even know what a ‘geek’ is, ma’am.”

“Grrrreek,” Linh smiled at him, “They were ancient people back on Earth. Their language is the origin of the ‘ascra’ in ‘ascraeus’. And the origin of your namesake, as well. Nestor means ‘he who returns home’, in the Greek. Have you pondered what sort of home you would prefer to return to?”

Nestor didn’t know how to answer her question and instead put forth, “My momma always said she really wanted to name me Nedrick, after Young Nedrick. Those was her favorite stories when she was little. But father wouldn’t let her, so they compromised on Nestor instead.”

“Fortuitous, wouldn’t you say? Your name was to be the one thing, but is now, seemingly at random, this different thing. Nestor, for your information, was a great Greek king, renowned for his wisdom, for giving the best advice to all the great heroes of his time. Grandfather to Homer, who was the greatest poet of all time. Which makes wisdom your true namesake. Perhaps your true destiny is to return home with much. To have greatness be your progeny. Perhaps you were chosen for more than you think, and perhaps your parents subconsciously knew it to be so, and perhaps that is why you are Young Nestor.”

Nestor looked up at Linh and studied her face, trying to decide if she was toying with him.

“I ain’t chosen for nothin’, Linh. I’m jes dirt poor and tryin’ to survive.” He looked away across the room and examined the qualities of the far wall and found there as many answers as he had upon Linh’s face.

Linh gracefully raised the fingers on her empty hand, signaling peace, “Young tempers do run so very hot. But turn not your temper towards me, young man. I’m simply trying to tell you a story of our ancestors.”

“Go on, then,” Nestor said petulantly.

“There is a connection between your homeland and your namesake. Ascra was the birthplace of a poet named Hesiod. Hesiod once took part in a famous contest with the grandson of your namesake, Homer. Homer was at this time acclaimed by all the Greeks, and Hesiod an unknown, who was quite jealous of Homer. The king of their country was holding a grand feast and asked both poets to contest their wits against one another for all to judge, promising the winner a glorious reward.”

“Hesiod stepped forward first, asking Homer, ‘It is known by all that you are blessed with wisdom beyond your years, inspired by the gods themselves, so tell us–what is best for man?’”

“Homer responded, ‘It is best for men to not be born at all. If they must be born, their lives should be lived with no fear of death.’”

Nestor looked up, startled at this. She smiled and winked at him, continuing while holding up her hands to denote each side of the discussion, “Next Hesiod asks, ‘And what do you think, in your heart, brings men the most delight?’”

“Homer responded, ‘When cups are full of drink and tables are laden with feast, and mirth flows through all in attendance, that brings men the most delight.’ The judges sitting in attendance loved his proclamations and tried to award Homer the victory then and there, but the king bade them wait until the contest was over.”

“Hesiod was very angered at this point and put more questions to Homer in rapid fashion:

‘How should men best dwell in cities, by which rules?’

‘By not taking advantage of one another, and by the rule that the good are to be honored and villains are to be brought to justice.’

‘Of what effect are righteousness and courage?’

‘To advance the common good by private pain.’

‘What is the mark of the wise man?’

‘To see the world for what it is and to march with the occasion.’

‘When should you trust another?’

‘Where danger and action are close brothers.’

‘What do people mean by happiness?’

‘A suitably long life of least pain and greatest pleasure.’”

“All the judges now agreed that Homer had provided better answers than Hesiod had questions, but once again the King bade them all to wait, for there was one final part of the contest. Each poet was to share the best passage from his best poem.”

“Homer was to go first this time and put forth: ‘For there the chosen best awaited the charge of the Trojans and noble Hector, making a fence of spears and serried shields. Shield closed with shield, and helm with helm, and each man with his fellow, and the peaks of their head-pieces with crests of horsehair touched as they bent their heads so close and stood together. The murderous battle bristled with the long, flesh-rending spears they held, and the flash of bronze from polished helms and new-burnished breast-plates and gleaming shields blinded the eyes. Very hard of heart would he have been, who could then have seen that strife with joy and felt no pang.’”

“The judges rushed to the king and demanded that he award the prize to Homer, they were so moved by his verse. But the king would not budge and called upon Hesiod for his own best verse.”

“Hesiod stepped forth and proclaimed: ‘When the Pleiades begin to rise, begin the harvest, and begin ploughing ere they set. For forty nights and days they are hidden, but appear again as the year wears round, when first the sickle is sharpened. This is the law of the plains and for those who dwell near the sea or live in the rich-soiled valleys, far from the wave-tossed deep: strip to sow, and strip to plough, and strip to reap when all things are in season.’”

“The crowd chanted to award the trophy to Homer, but the king instead gave it to Hesiod, declaring to all that the prize should go to the man who advocated peace and the growing of crops, not to the man who advocated war and death.”

Nestor interrupted, blurting out staccato, “That ain’t right. Homer won that whole thing. For most of it Hesiod was jes askin’ questions, and ever answer Homer give was a good one. So what if Homer’s best poem was about violence? His was the most beautiful, even if that’s what it was about. Plus, sometimes violence is the answer. Some folks only understand violence. The king shouldn’t’ve ever have given the award to Hesiod.”

Linh allowed him to finish and by way of response bowed her head and continued, “The prize was a golden tripod with the words ‘Wisdom’, ‘Prosperity’, and ‘Peace’ inscribed on each of its three legs. Hesiod accepted his trophy and told all in attendance that he would travel to Delphi to dedicate his award to the gods. But as he walked away from that place, certain members of the crowd came upon him and chastised him for accepting an award he so clearly did not deserve. And then they took the tripod from him, and beat him to death with it, breaking off all the legs, all except the leg that said ‘Wisdom’”.

She looked up at Nestor and leant forward to stand. “The crowd knew the truth of it, even if the king did not. And they rectified that which was wronged, Young Nestor. It was only their wisdom that survived; perhaps that was even the leg which struck the final, killing blow. If only we could all show such bravery.”

*****

Weeks passed with the same chores, the same routine. Time seemed to have as little meaning in this place as it had with the Edenites, and Nestor tracked the passing of the days, the different days of the week, the very hours of the day, by his chores. He had become expert at staying invisible in this place and in so being he’d witnessed a near-constant stream of deliveries into Linh’s room, mostly electronics and furniture. The combination of the deliveries and the furtive passage of Linh’s lieutenants in and out of the room caused Nestor to think of her room as the War Room. He monitored that place, desperate for a glance inside, or better yet, inclusion in its goings-ons.

Nestor was in the middle of his chores for the day. Today was cleaning day, and he was scrubbing the rock floor in front of the room’s largest couch, rubbing futilely at the tacky, furry residue accumulated there from countless spills caused by the unnamed horde that passed through this place week over week. He had paused to catch his breath, sitting upright on his knees and twisting to stretch his back, when he noticed in his covert way as Nils slipped from the War Room. Nils glanced around conspiratorially for a moment and, seeing only Nestor, nodded curtly to him from across the room. He appeared to be deciding something. His eyes seemed to change, to grow harder, and he stepped forward to loom over Nestor, kneeling on the floor before him.

“Do you enjoy cleaning this place?”

Nestor had been looking up at Nils and now shifted his focus down, staring at the sudsy floor before him and responding, slowly in Chrysean, picking his words with care, “Do I like cleaning? No, I do not. I do like living in a clean house, though.”

He looked back up to see if his answer was satisfactory, but Nils was looking towards the closed exterior door, as if he were expecting it to open at any moment and wished to be the first to greet whoever came through. The door remained inert, and Nils continued his vigilant stare towards it, saying to Nestor in Chrysean, from the side of his mouth, “I might need your help with something. Would you be able to pick up something for me? Something in another part of the city?”

“What do you need?”

“It won’t look like anything to you. A simple data stick. Needs to be handled with secrecy. Is that something you can do?”

Nestor considered this for a moment and rose from his knees, brushing them off as he stood, “Where would you like me to go?”

*****

Nestor had expected for Nils’s directions to lead him elsewhere in the shantytown upper excavation of Calahorra, and so was surprised whereupon following those same highly detailed directions he found himself standing in front of a Chrysean government building, all stone columns and balustrades, part of the expansive excavations in the posh deeper parts of the city. The city here was at a scale beyond reckoning for Nestor, as if someone had taken the Market Plaza back in Poynting and had stretched it by an order of magnitude in every direction. The ceiling spanned several hundred meters over his head, supported by massive concrete columns that three men joining arms couldn’t have circumscribed, spaced evenly throughout a cave that was many kilometers wide in any direction. Tall buildings crowded the cave center and thronged alongside the avenues, some buildings extending so high as to act as columnar support themselves, with lodgings peering out from towering walls that encircled the excavations. Artificial moss hung from every ledge, and spiky plastic grass thronged every unoccupied space. The air was thick and wet and smelled strongly of human habitation, an agrestal smell that clung about as a specter of the horde occupying the place.

He immediately saw his contact, a nervous-looking little man who was pacing by the water fountain in front of the government building. Nestor was otherwise interested in the fountain, having not seen such a thing before, and walked over to stand behind the short man’s pacing grounds. He looked casually between all this ridiculous, extravagant waste of water being used for nothing other than appearance and the anxious little man. The man soon noticed his glances and came to him in a quick, jerky manner, punctuated with darting looks over his shoulder that appeared in no way natural.

“You him?” Nestor asked in conspiratorial tones when the man was close enough to hear.

The man nodded. Nestor reached out with Nils’s package, which the short man aggressively grabbed from him, tearing it open to peer inside. He was satisfied with what he saw and seemed to become aware only after the fact that he was making quite the spectacle and stuffed the package inside his threadbare jumpsuit. When his hand reemerged, it was holding the data stick in his palm, and he reached out to shake Nestor’s hand with the stick thus palmed. Nestor nodded to the man and hurried away, afraid to look at anything other than what was in front of him, afraid to become further party to the short man’s illicit buffoonery.

Upon returning to the flat, Nestor found none of the normal vagrancy about the house, and the War Room door closed. He knocked upon the door and after a moment it opened, Nils’s oversize head poking out. Nils’s eyes seemed to light up when he saw Nestor, and he swung the door wider, to reach his grasping hand through the crack. As the door swung open, Nestor’s eyes were drawn to a large schematic projected on the far wall of a half dozen buildings grouped in a rough semicircle, with a long pair of parallel lines snaking down into the center of the buildings. A series of concentric circles had been overlaid onto the schematic. They were centered on the buildings and each circle labeled with numbers that incremented up by fives. Nestor was staring intently at this drawing when Nils craned up to block his view. Nils winked once and closed the door in Nestor’s face.

Just as Nestor was turning to go, the door swung back open, just wide enough for Nils to squeeze through, which forced Nestor to take a few steps backwards to accommodate him.

“You saw something just now that you will wish you had not seen,” Nils said in Chrysean, pausing and looking at Nestor patiently while he waited for Nestor to translate. “Do you know what you saw?”

Nestor spoke, in his careful Chrysean, “Nils, I saw nothing. A drawing, with some circles. That was all.”

“You do not understand. You saw a plan. It cannot be tolerated. For one so…outside…our group to know.”

“I can leave,” Nestor heard the words pass his lips, a step below a whisper.

Nils shook his head, and spoke just as softly, his words carrying a sort of finality, of resignation, “No, you cannot. You have nothing to take you beyond the airlocks of this city, no money, nothing.”

“You are going to kill me?” Nestor felt the blood rushing through his ears, his heartbeat seeming to make his entire body tremble.

“Kill you?” Nils chuffed, “No one is threatening to kill you. There is another way, if you are interested.”

“What way?”

“You become a courier for our group. No more chores, no more housework. You go out into the public and serve as the go-between in all our matters. Preserving the rest of our…privacy.”

“Say I agree. What is so secret about what you are doing? What secrets would I be transporting?”

Nils shouldered past and sat on the arm of a couch. He took off his glasses and cleaned them with the edge of his shirt in his strange, exacting way. Nestor watched him clean the glasses in silence, wondering if he should repeat his question, if he misspoke somehow in this alien language.

Nils looked up at him and pushed his glasses back into place, the lenses shifting from light to dark and then back to light again. In the same structurally perfect but unaccented Tharsian that Linh spoke, he said, “What do you know of Isidis? Anything?”

Nestor shook his head.

“Isidis is an ancient basin thousands of kilometers east of here. It was originally a vast crater, fifteen hundred kilometers wide at its widest, bordering the Utopian Ocean billions of years ago. The ocean carved an opening in the crater water and in-filled it thousands of meters deep. One of the lowest spots on this planet, as low as we are here, as low as the Valley. Only the Hellas crater is deeper.”

“The Isidians are very near to closing the throat of the Isidis plains with a massive project to remake the ancient crater wall. A man-made levy stretching a thousand kilometers, composed of trillions of tons of rock and dirt. The next step will be to fill the entire basin, all one-point-eight million square kilometers of it, with liquid water. The smaller, newer craters will be first, then the lowlands on the southwestern side of the crater, and eventually the rest. Apparently, the cities of Isidis will be shifted to the shores of this new sea.”

Nestor shook his head in disbelief, trying to picture what was being described, and failing because of the scale of the thing, “Won’t they have the same problems as Juventae? What will they do when it turns to ice in the winter? Where will they get all that water in the first place? How do you move a whole city?”

“All fine questions,” Nils responded soberly, a minor smile appearing and vanishing on his face in a flash, “But before anyone can consider those questions, there is another major problem. The high plains to the south and the low plains to the north of Isidis naturally create a downslope effect that hits nothing in the basin to redirect the current. In fact, the crater walls help with tunnelling the winds to gain velocity and dust. Those winds are truly incredible on the Isidis plains, much worse than we see here in Chryse. Gusts to three hundred kilometers per hour. Constant dust storms, the likes of which you have not seen. Because of those winds, Isidians struggle to preserve what little atmosphere they generate. Their atmosphere is quite literally being blown away. To make matters worse, Isidis has no nearby neighbors. No one terraforms around the crater. The nearest terraforming to Isidis is the hydrofarming on Mount Elysium, far to the north.”

Nestor’s head spun as he tried to keep up with Nils, grasping only some of what was being said. He raised his hands, saying in Tharsian without thinking, “Hold on there, I cain’t keep up with all this. What are you tryin’ to tell me?”

“I am telling you that the trials of the Isidians represent the trials of terraformation entirely. I am telling you that, although they have nearly completed a dramatic construction project, the like of which few others would even attempt, they are not any closer to recreating Earth than when they began. They have the same amount of atmosphere in Isidis that they’ve always had, and the atmosphere they have created, at great expense, the work of generations, all of it has ended up elsewhere. Where the Isidians cannot use it. With no atmosphere, they will have no liquid water in their new sea.”

“But don’t it benefit us all? All that oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide they pumped into the air, the wind blew it, but it had to blow it somewheres, didn’t it? Cain’t they use the air wherever it went?”

“Certainly, the atmosphere generated ends up elsewhere. It disperses into the lower-pressure atmosphere everywhere else. But Isidis alone could never hope to produce so much atmosphere to even make a dent in the planet’s atmospheric needs, as a whole.”

Nestor interrupted, “But everone everwhere else is makin’ atmo too. We have aerofarmers back home that are runnin’ their pumps day and night.”

Nils slowly nodded, “You are correct, atmosphere is produced all over this world. But if you were to see a map of all the aerofarming stations working on Mars today, compared to all the wild lands, with no aerofarming stations at all, you would see that not only are we nowhere near able to blanket this planet in atmosphere, but we are severely lacking. Every Martian, everywhere would need to work together on just this one problem in order to properly address it, and their efforts could never truly end, for a tiny portion of all atmosphere produced is blown by solar winds away into space, impossible for us to ever recover. Which all ignores the logistical difficulty of organizing that many people to such a shared task.”

“But if everone was an aerofarmer, who’d farm water, who’d work in the factories, who’d do all the other stuff that needs doin’?”

“Exactly, Young Nestor. You have hit the problem on its nose, as they say. There is too much to be done, and it is impossible to give any portion of the effort the attention it truly deserves. Even worse, successful terraformation would need to receive sustained attention. It could never waiver, never change. Today, there is no coordination of efforts; people simply do what is most profitable. This is true of people in all countries, though different definitions of ‘profitable’ may exist. The central problem, however, is that what is most profitable varies considerably from what would be best for terraformation.”

Nils paused and looked levelly at Nestor.

“So you’re sayin’ terraformation ain’t possible, that it?”

“That is the beginning, yes. Understanding how deeply flawed the process of terraformation has been, is today, and will always be, is the first step in your awakening.”

Nils stood up and walked back to the door, reaching his hand out to turn the knob.

Nestor watched him go, and just as Nils turned the knob, said to his back, “But what does that have to do with whatever secrets you all are keepin’ in there?”

“Because, in here, we are plotting its end.”

*****

Nestor soon discovered that being the group’s courier was very similar to his former job around the house, with the major difference between the two being that he was awoken more often from a deep sleep as the courier, expected to run packages across the city at a moment’s notice. He was allowed in the War Room, but found his admittance anticlimactic. Nothing ever seemed to go on in the room when he was in there. He never again saw the schematic projected upon the wall, nor did he see or hear anything else of interest in the room.

Nestor persisted in his duties, doing everything in his power to respond to the random and often rude nighttime awakenings with aplomb and not annoyance, difficult as that was most of the time. He told himself that it was a test, that this was Nils or perhaps even Linh evaluating his fortitude and character, and that he needed to respond appropriately if he wished to begin seeing and hearing things in the War Room, or better yet, taking part in them himself.

He’d been at the position for long enough to not be surprised when Andres woke him out of bed by shaking the bedposts violently. He’d been dreaming of babies crying in the dark and was happy to be roused, leaping out of bed to stand with eyes still pinned shut by sleep and hands running through his hair to stimulate some sense of wakefulness into his psyche. He pried open his eyes to see Andres staring at him dispassionately in the dark. Having been acknowledged as more than a waking fragment of a dream, Andres spoke to him in Chrysean at a speed which Nestor was not yet capable of translating. He was pretty sure he’d heard the word for “go” in there, somewhere.

Nestor answered in his own broken Chrysean, “Go where?” He looked at Andres’s empty hands, “Where is the package you want me to deliver?”

Jack spoke from the depths of his bunk, sighing in Tharsian, “He wants you to go with him, Nestor. You and him are goin’ somewheres together.”

Andres bent to peer under the bed at Jack, his eyes narrowing to slits in the gloom. He said something to Jack as well, which Nestor’s sleepy brain still could not be bothered to translate. Jack groaned and rolled out to sit on the edge of the bed with head in hands. Andres surveyed the both of them and grunted and left.

“Are we s’posed to follow him?” Nestor asked Jack, who glared up at the boy and then stalked from the room after Andres. After a moment’s pause, Nestor followed to where a rover sat waiting with Andres already behind the wheel, looking out impatiently at the two stragglers. Nestor had only just closed his door before Andres pulled away, quickly accelerating the little rover through the dilapidated tunnels, past the masses huddled around their meager electric heaters and grouped beneath tarps to find some respite from the water dripping and running down the tunnel walls or freezing in the colder sections into long icy stalactites. They dodged the trash and the rocks and the desultory fraudsters, who were all too happy to leap in front of a speeding vehicle, gleeful to accept whatever consequences may follow, for most of those might bear fruit and the ones that did not would likely kill them, which was not an altogether unattractive form of fruit itself.

They descended from the shantytown upper excavations, and they circumnavigated the posh lower caves, and they found their way back out to the warehouses, passing down a row of gigantic doors set back into the rock, each guarded by barbed wire and camera. Eventually, Andres brought the little rover to a stop before a rusted metal warehouse front with no such security measure. He exited the rover without comment, which Jack took to mean that he should follow, but when Jack opened his door, Andres looked back over his shoulder and said a few words, none of which Nestor could make out. Whatever he’d said planted Jack back into his seat, and they sat in silence watching Andres alone enter the building.

Minutes passed and time seemed to drag and Nestor spoke up, “Where is he? What’re we supposed to be doin’ here?”

Jack glanced back at Nestor in the rover’s rear seat and shrugged, “He jes tol me to wait with the rover. I don’t know nothin’ more than that.”

Their environs were quiet and boring, and the air here tasted metallic and vaguely of oil. It reminded Nestor of the stale, chemical-laden air in the huts back home. The only thing missing was the undercurrent of his father’s liquor-breath.

“I jes don’t understand why everthing has to be so secret with these folks,” Nestor said aloud but not quite at the volume of conversation, more to himself than anything.

Jack heard his complaint from the front seat and responded over his shoulder, “They plottin’ the downfall of terraformation, Nestor. Which’s a death sentence in most places, or life in jail. Of course it’s all a secret.”

Nestor shook his head, “From what Nils tol me, it sounds like terraformation jes ain’t workin’ anywhere. Why plot its downfall when it’s already fallin’ down on its own?”

“Because terraformation cain’t be ended by doin’ nothing’. Folks’ll jes keep tryin’ new things, hopin’ they’ll work instead.”

“But ain’t that a good thing? Wouldn’t you want it to work, if it could?”

Jack turned in his seat and addressed Nestor with a face twisted by anger, “No, I wouldn’t. It’s a lie that folk tell themselves. People been on this planet for hundreds of years now, tryin’ their damndest to believe they can recreate Earth on Mars. It’s delusional, is what it is. Mars ain’t Earth and couldn’t never be Earth and look how many millions of people have died on this planet tryin’ to make it that way.”

“But Jack, it’s folks’s livelihoods. It’s food in they mouths and it’s roofs over they heads. Even if it’s a lie, everone needs to feel like they ain’t jes scrapin’ by for no reason. It’s cruel not to let them have that.”

Jack leaned toward Nestor, his eyes alight in the rover’s gloom, “Cruel? Look around at how folks live in these cities. You ain’t seen what we drove past, jes on the way here? How is any of those folks’s circumstances not cruel? Some hydrofarmer wants to own him thousands of square kilometers of rocks and dust that he can crowd up with useless thermal pipe runs, and the folks in the streets here in Calahorra or Ares or Melas jes keep starvin’, jes keep freezin’, jes keep being grist for the mill of terraformation. All so he can have his hydrofarmin’ claim. It’s the lie, keeps it that way, and it’s a lie they all ain’t gonna stop believin’, not unless they don’t have no choice but to stop. Not unless terraformation is taken away from them all.”

“What you gonna do, though? What is anyone supposed to do without terraformation? Ain’t part of the problem that we cain’t live on this planet without it?”

“Not my place to make the right choices for no one. Lots of folk live all over this solar system. The only ones tryin’ to remake Earth is here. Everone else already knows it cain’t be done. Everone else knows that our ancestors back on Earth are what destroyed that planet, destroyed it by tryin’ to do the same things we tryin’ here on Mars, and that repeatin’ the ancients’ mistakes hopin’ for better results is jes plain crazy.”

“Everone else. You mean the Floatsies? Ain’t they jes a myth too?”

Jack turned and looked forward through the rover’s windshield, “Floatsies are jes a story for kids. But the Sitaaralog is real as you and me. Folk down here jes made up a bunch of bullshit stories about them poor folks and give ‘em that stupid ‘Floatsie’ nickname so they can avoid the truth, that the Sitaaralog live better lives than we do.”

“Ain’t it harder to live in space than on a planet, though? We need gravity and farmin’ and ground to walk on.”

“They don’t. They been up there in space the whole time folk been down here on the surface, and they been spendin’ all that time adaptin’ to live there. Adaptin’ to be the next step for all of us. All humanity.”

“The next step for all humanity.”

“Yup. In ever way you can imagine. They modify their children in the womb to develop internal organs differently. They change their feet and legs, cause they never need to stand, so they modify their hips to make their legs more useful for pushin’ themselves about in zero-gravity. They add robotics to their toes and fingers to grab any surface, so’s they can move around their ships without handholds or footholds. They have adapted themselves to they environment, instead of the other way around. All this stuff they do to change themselves, makes ‘em immortal. They do not die.”

“How you know all that, though, Jack? You ever been up in space? Ever met a Star-a-log or whatever? It sounds to me like you jes tellin’ another story.”

Jack grumbled an indistinct response and shook his head, staring out of his window disconsolately.

Nestor opened his mouth to continue to press his argument and promptly closed it again as the big warehouse doors rolled open, casting an ever-widening column of light before them. Andres walked through the enormous doors and marched over to the rover. He opened the driver’s side door and leant in and looked back at Nestor.

“You will drive the rover,” he said in careful, slow Chrysean to Nestor, then turned and spoke more quickly to Jack, “And you will come with me to drive the truck. The truck will lead the way and the rover will follow as blocker. Understand?” Andres glanced back and forth between Jack and Nestor several times, making sure they were both nodding, and leaving the driver’s door wide open, he turned and marched back to the warehouse.

Jack followed him, and Nestor moved up front to the driver’s seat. He sat and pulled on his restraints and ran his hands over his pants to dry them, and then he watched as Jack and Andres ascended into the truck in the middle of the warehouse. As Nestor watched, three police trucks appeared around the corner and bore down upon the warehouse, parking crosswise before the open doorway.

Four armed men disembarked from the middle car and fanned out to approach the truck Jack and Andres occupied. Nester could see his compatriots watching the approaching police officers, but neither Jack nor Andres had his hands in the air, nor did they seem to prepare to disembark. Thus far, everyone had missed Nestor in his rover, and he shrunk in his seat, trying to stay invisible.

Without warning, the big truck launched forward at the approaching officers, careening into their empty vehicle with a crash and shoving it off to the side. The other two police cars moved to pinch Jack between them, and Nestor saw the strategy unfolding as if in slow motion before him, and pointed his rover at the one nearest him on an intercepting course.

Nestor’s rover impacted the police truck on its left side, right behind the driver’s side door, and the force lifted that other vehicle wholly into the air a few centimeters before it came crashing back down in a hail of broken glass. Nestor’s restraints dug hot fire into his shoulders, and hanging in those belts, he saw Jack’s truck swing around behind his rover and accelerate away from the warehouse down the tunnel. The remaining police truck moved to pursue, and Nestor saw this as well and reversed towards this final quarry, spinning the rover around as he backed, and dodging directly into the police truck’s path. The police truck slammed into the back of the rover and now it was Nestor’s turn to be lifted into the air and come down with glass shards flying all around him.

Nestor could not convince his rover to move again, and was pondering what his next move could be when he noticed that the four police officers who’d dove from Jack had recruited themselves to move on him instead. He heard them yelling things in Chrysean, but could not force his mind to translate that garble, and in truth he cared little for what they were saying, as he had no intention of doing any thing they may ask.

The officers were all approaching from the left and so Nestor undid his restraints and bent to crawl over into the passenger seat on the right. He heard the volume of instruction from the officers increase as he crawled and opened the passenger side door, and then he was out. He did not pause to look back at his pursuers before taking off running, crouched over to avoid the bullets whining over his head.

Down the same side of the tunnel as him, only five meters away, he could see a small access door set into the wall of the tunnel. There were now at least two vehicles between himself and the officers and he decided escape was his best option and so he ran for that door. He heard no further shots and found the door unlocked and ducked inside and reached down to find it could not be secured.

He had entered into an access tunnel, with electrical cables and pipes running all throughout, which was quite poorly lit. He could see no deeper than perhaps a dozen meters down, and in the blind he took off at a sprint until he heard the door open behind him. He held his breath and faded into the shadows and crept along until he found a junction, taking a turn at random and running as silently as he could down this newest tunnel. He followed the warren of tunnels, taking additional arbitrary turns until he came out into a dark, abandoned plaza. He crossed the plaza and took a pedestrian side tunnel and then another, and only then did he realize the pain in his hands and face. He looked down at his hands and saw both were badly cut and by looking into a storefront window found much the same for his face. He staunched the wounds as best he was able with scraps he tore from his clothing and then he resumed moving, heading back to safety within the slum town of Calahorra.

*****

The city had bestirred itself by the time Nestor found his way to the shantytown flat. He avoided the busy central excavations of Calahorra and he avoided anywhere that a police presence might exist and he moved clandestinely through the city’s many underground boulevards. Just another dispossessed, unworthy of scrutiny by the city’s more illustrious citizens. Back at the flat, he walked into the War Room to find only Linh waiting for him there. Her eyes locked onto him the moment he passed the threshold, following him closely as he walked to her. Her expression was otherwise blank, unreadable, and while she clearly saw Nestor, she said nothing by word or gesture. Nestor came to an awkward stop a meter in front of her, and not sure what to say, he asked in Chrysean, “Did Jack and Andres make it back?”

Linh nodded sedately, her eyes holding his as her head moved, a predatory nod that unsettled Nestor deeply. “They did. Andres informed me you performed admirably,” she said in Chrysean. It took Nestor several moments to process those final two words, at first assuming that they were antonymic to her true expression. Linh watched him while he pieced together her speech, tilting her head in a way that did nothing to make her seem any less predatory. After some time spent puzzling, Nestor gave up trying to suss out the last word, and repeated it to her questioningly.

Linh switched to Tharsian, smiling graciously as she did so, “Admirably, is the word. You’ve likely not heard it huddled in the common room of this place.”

Nestor shook his head, and said in Tharsian, “Why were the police after us? Did we jes steal somethin’?”

Linh looked down to examine her fingernails, and not looking back up said, “Do you know my background? The real one, not the mystical nonsense told about me by the itinerants that pass through here.”

Nestor paused, caught flat-footed by her question. Her background? “Uh, naw, ma’am, I don’t think I do know yer background. I heard some crazy things, though.”

Linh’s eyes flicked up to him and dazzled for a moment, like she was holding back a smile, “I’m sure. Have I ascended to messianic status yet? Wait, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

She paused and looked down again, her cheeks blushing red for just a moment, “I’m afraid my real origin is quite a bit more pedestrian. I’m the eldest of twelve children. My father is a politician back home in the Ares Valley. We were more fortunate than most. Eight of my little brothers and sisters are still alive today. Do you have siblings?”

“Not anymore. All of ‘em died when we was young.”

“Please don’t take offense, but that’s about what you’d assume. Especially in the aboveground farming communities. My siblings and I were born to a life of luxury. Quite different from how you grew up, surely. Daddy employed a number of individuals to look after us, and we never wanted for clean water or good food. We had to pass through three separate airlocks to leave the main city area in Ares. A dust-free and fulfilled existence, or as much as is possible on this toxic world. My peers, the poorer of them, even though they lived in the same place, the same environment, had much…worse outcomes.”

She didn’t need to expand on that thought, and they both stood in silence for several moments, remembering the mystery illnesses, the kids who wheezed uncontrollably, who broke into rashes that bled and became infected, whose organs failed in novel and unpredictable ways. So much suffering for young children to watch their friends and families experience.

“Terraformation couldn’t have been further from our minds,” Linh continued, still examining her fingers and nails in mock detail, “It was something our parents talked about at the dinner table, or with other adults, but it was hypothetical, distant. It was real in the same way Justice or Truth are real. Real as a concept, but not tangible, not something…lived…like it was for you.”

Nestor nodded at this and looked down to stare at his boots, shifting his weight back and forth between his tired feet.

Linh pushed on, ignoring Nestor’s discomfort, “One of the most honorable professions the daughter of a politician in Ares can aspire to is Keeper of the Seed. Do you know what that is?”

Nestor shook his head. No, he did not know what a ‘Keeper of the Seed’ was, beyond being a fairly ridiculous name for something so supposedly honorable.

Linh read his mind, “Apart from being an embarrassingly horrible name, I mean. I suppose some people like it. It does sound very formal, in a religious sort of way. Most people just shorten it to ‘Keeper’, which I always thought sounds better. Keepers are molecular biologists, by training. In point of fact, all molecular biologist graduates are sworn as Keepers, taught the ancient ways of resurrecting the seeds from the Great Seed Bank, when the time comes. The Keepers would be responsible for turning this whole world green, if the preliminary goals of terraformation could ever be reached. The individuals responsible for taking the ultimate step in remaking Mother Earth. And I was…I am…one of them.”

Nestor looked up to find her studying him, little movements of her eyes taking in the cuts all over his face, all over his hands. Looking at his greasy, mussed hair and tattered clothes. She seemed satisfied with what she saw.

“I left the Keepers because I saw lies everywhere I looked. None of my fellow Keepers took their responsibility seriously. Almost all of them, except those who are now part of our little movement here, work in cellular manufacturing. Making vats of artificial cells produce biological goods that are constructed in factories into food for the masses. They all swore an oath about this grand notion of continuing life on a hostile alien planet. An oath to make a utopia here when our ancestors failed so miserably on Earth, and that oath means nothing to them. Why should it? It is only words. And so I left, I sought the truth, and I wish to help the rest of this world to do the same.”

Nestor watched her while she spoke and tried to determine whether she wanted his sympathy or his congratulations. She waited for neither, continuing on, “And that’s it. No godhead impregnating a virgin, no magical molding from the Martian dust. Just a rich girl who earned an esteemed position and then grew disenchanted with it. Of course, that’s a horrible story to tell others. Who would join the Spoiled Ennui Revolutionaries? No one.” She smiled at her own joke and looked imploringly at Nestor.

“Well, I don’t know. I ‘spose it matters more what you believe and what you do than it does who you are,” Nestor offered, as a conciliation. Linh didn’t appear to have heard him.

“It’s that way with history, too. There’s an old saying that ‘history is written by the victors’. My father used to say it all the time, growing up. That has not been my experience. I think that history isn’t written at all, unless it’s interesting. The victors are the writers because who would not be interested in her own victory?” She smiled at him. “Did you ever learn any history in your farm schools?”

“Not really, no. I know some history, but it’s jes stuff my father taught me, growin’ up. And of course I know the legends.”

“I can assure you that your experience is everyone’s, at least in that way. Children are not taught our history anywhere. School administrators will tell you that, as a subject, history is too esoteric, too impractical to teach to children who only have so many hours to learn all the important concepts they need in order to survive in this terrible place. Too esoteric, and yet people everywhere have these little informal folk histories they learn from their parents and their friends. I always wondered which of those legends is true. If any of them are. After I left my profession, I searched for anyone to teach me real, actual history. I found only more stories. I came to realize that our people have lost our history. Humanity fled Earth en masse, came here to build a new home, and on the journey forgot our old one. They left their history behind on Earth, consigning it to the stewardship of whatever remains there. If anything does.”

Nestor watched her grow more animated as she talked, and as she spoke it felt to Nestor less like she was addressing him and more that she was addressing a crowd, and he wondered while listening to her speak if a crowd needed to all exist in the same place at the same time in order to so be. Or if a speech is repeated enough times one-on-one to enough individuals across time and space, do not those people also constitute a crowd, a movement?

“But there are all sorts of charlatans out there who have invented new, interesting histories they would like to sell to you. I think my favorite is that Earth was invaded by many-armed monsters who enslaved mankind until our intrepid ancestors fought their way free, coming here to start anew, and leaving Earth to the monsters. Of course, the man who told this to me was also selling alleged trips to view those monsters, originating from a launch pad that does not exist.”

Nestor smiled at this, “I knew someone once who tol me old Earth had been covered over in metal. The ancient people apparently couldn’t stand the sight of the natural world, and so they made their whole world artificial.”

Linh shook her head in amazement at this story. “I’ve heard that one, too. They’re all…the stories of Earth, and of our travel away from there…all slightly fantastical. I think that’s how you know a story is not real. Authentic stories are rarely all that interesting. Do you wish to hear the story of old Earth that I believe the most? It’s the story of an Earth destroyed accidentally by our ancestors. They wanted to change the environment, to hone it, and in trying to do that, they ruined it, ruined it forever, ruined it in some horrible way that we can never even dream of remediating. I believe that’s what happened because it’s boring. There’s no monster, no unavoidable disaster, no horrible dramatic tragedy, or evil scheming villain. Just people failing at being the gods we imagine ourselves to be.”

“I don’t imagine myself to be no god,” Nestor objected, looking back down at his feet.

“No, I suppose you do not. Which is to your strength, my young friend. But surely you grasp my point, don’t you? Actions, people, our very history–they draw the greatest attention when they are interesting. When they are dramatic. When a grand story can be told involving them.”

Nestor nodded, trying his best to follow along with Linh, trying to understand where she was going with all of this.

“I’m sure Andres or Jack or perhaps even Nils has by now informed you about our goals. That we seek the end of terraformation. You asked if you stole something last night. You did not. The police were after you because we obtained a device that they believe no person should have. A device that loomed large over ancient Earth, and a fitting one to bring about the end of terraformation, to do so with the appropriate amount of drama. We must make a dramatic statement, because, like all other things, people will only care if what is to be done is done in an interesting and horrifying way. The story of the end of Martian terraformation must be a grand story, one which our children and their children will pass down through the generations, and that grand story requires the absolute destruction of all hope for our people. Nuclear weapons are our most despicable legacy from our ancestors, and using one such weapon to destroy all hope, to reset humanity and prepare us for our true future, is pure poetry. It is how this must be done.”

“You’re tellin’ me we stole a nuclear bomb? From a shitty warehouse in Calahorra?”

“We procured one, yes. But it was made specifically for us, not stolen. Which is not to imply that this makes it any more legal to possess.”

“Where is it now? Is it somewheres around here?” Nestor asked with a shaking voice.

“It has been delivered to a staging area. Tomorrow at dawn, you will help deliver it to its final destination.”

“What do you mean? Linh, I don’t know nothin’ about bombin’ stuff. You ain’t included me in any of your plans. How am I supposed to deliver it?”

She raised her fingers in the graceful way she had of requesting silence. “You shall go on a shuttle tomorrow with Jack and Anna. We shall test your piloting abilities, as you’ll be Anna’s co-pilot on this mission.”

“But Linh, I don’t know nothin’…”

Linh motioned him towards the door with her arm held out, bringing it around to hover just behind his shoulder, turning him about with an invisible force that guided him from the room.

“You know exactly as much as you need to know to be Anna’s co-pilot. Which wasn’t even a position on the team until I created it. For you. But do well in your bespoke role, and it will erase any suspicion that I and others may have about your allegiance to our cause. Do well enough, and there may be more opportunities for you to contribute in the future. You will not fail.”

The door to the War Room closed on Nestor. He stood there for a moment, unsure what he was supposed to do now. Eventually, he turned and walked through the empty house and climbed into his bed. He was asleep the moment he stretched out on that thin mattress.

Chapter 6 - The Escape

Author’s note - Not to get too on-the-nose regarding theme, but one theme I spent this entire book mulling over is the futility of ‘help’. It’s easy to offer help when it’s just words. Everyone wants to abstractly help. Where word becomes action is usually where it all goes wrong. It’s interesting to me all the many diverse ways that we can fail to rise to the occasion, fail to meet our intentions squarely, and it’s interesting to me how we continue on, after we fail. This chapter is several thousand words ruminating upon all of that, upon many diverse character’s failures, their reasons for failing, and how they managed to pick themselves up and address their failure afterwards. Of course, some just leave it for others to step around.

Asa’s baby girl was born a few days later, in the bedroom the fillies all shared, delivered by Eagan himself. Nestor was not permitted in the room nor the house, but everyone was aware when the delivery was completed, as every living creature on the property could hear the baby’s cries. But other than persistent crying, there was little clue that a baby existed there at all, for none mentioned her, no visitors came to call, and the baby herself remained sequestered in private rooms. Asa reappeared a couple of days after the birth and went back to her normal tasks with much apparent pain. Nestor tried to speak with her one day when she appeared outside to hang laundry upon the house’s clothesline, but she would neither meet his eyes nor respond.

Then the day came when Ester formally presented the baby in a miniature celebration hosted in the house’s large family room. Eagan made a point of going around to every person under his indenture and personally requesting each of their attendance, and they filed into the house in an orderly and quiet line, washed and preened to perfection to welcome the new family member. Asa was nowhere to be found, nor were the other fillies. The baby herself was adorable, a tiny old person compacted down to infant size, with red cheeks and bleary eyes, and all were given an opportunity to hold her, including Nestor. Nestor took the baby from Ester and he cradled her in his arms and he asked her name.

“She ain’t got one, not yet at least.”

“Why not?”

“Babies here ain’t named until their christening in the church.”

Nestor nodded, being familiar with a similar custom back home, “It’s too difficult…with the ones who don’t make it…if they have names.”

Ester met his eyes with a kind look and nodded.

The baby cooed and Nestor could feel her warmth in his arms, and was quite amazed at how small she felt, how her weight was practically nothing, and at how so little could grow into so much more. Looking into her beatific face, he wrestled with the thought that she looked like her mother, the real one, and how that likely meant she wouldn’t have much trouble finding a man to take her as one of his fillies when she was older. His gut wrenched at the thought. He shoved her back to Ester and excused himself from the room to ponder alone all the things in life that were not fair, and all those that should not be allowed to happen.

*****

Jack climbed up the ladder to the barn loft and crouched through that low space to the corner in which Nestor had sequestered himself. The wood-grained plasticine in this part of the barn had splintered, and over his time here, Nestor had peeled away splinters to make a hole that looked out over Eagan’s wheat field. He was peering through that hole to watch the wheat gracefully bowing in the artificial breeze, and glanced over his shoulder as Jack approached. Jack dropped heavily beside Nestor and craned slightly to see what Nestor was looking at through the hole.

He gave up and leaned propped upon his left hand and looked at Nestor somberly, “Interestin’, ain’t it?”

Nestor returned his gaze and squinted in confusion and then shrugged, “What’s that?”

“How it’s so much sadder happenin’ in the baby’s future than it is happenin’ to the momma right now.”

Nestor vaguely shook his head, “She’s an adult, she made her choice to live the way she wants to live, by now…” Nestor struggled to go on, his mouth opening and closing around unsaid words.

Jack squinted at Nestor a moment and cocked his head slightly towards the young man beside him, “You know what a filly was?”

“Horse, I think.”

“That’s right. Back in olden times. On Earth. A filly was a female horse, too young to breed yet.”

“Then why do they call them girls fillies? It don’t make no sense.”

“Because of when they take ‘em on. They’s still little girls when they fathers sell ‘em off. But they’re too young at that point. At least, too young for ‘em to get pregnant.” Jack stared at Nestor, allowing his expression to finish his thought for him.

Nestor felt his face burning, “It ain’t right, Jack. It ain’t right to…to do that to them girls. That little baby in there, she don’t have no chance, and she don’t have no choice. One of these Edenite perverts will get her as a child…child slave and then force her to carry his children once he can get her pregnant. Someone’s gotta help that baby.”

Jack leaned forward to Nestor, his eyes not breaking contact, “I agree.”

Nestor snarled, “But that’s the problem, ain’t it. Who can do anythin’ about this? I been sittin’ here thinkin’ how much I’d like to kill Eagan, but even that wouldn’t fix nothin’. I’m sure all his property would jes go to another one.”

Jack held his stare upon Nestor, watching him calmly. He whispered, “I can get the baby out of here.”

“You gonna steal that baby? How in the world you gonna do that?”

“I got a plan to get myself and a fair number of the other boys, even the ones on other farms, out of here. It wouldn’t be nothin’ to bring a baby, if her mother would come too.”

“You told Asa about this plan of yours?”

“Nah. Most them fillies ain’t allowed to talk to us boys out here. I’m surprised Eagan ain’t said anything to you about all the cavortin’ you been up to with her.”

“Cavortin’.”

Jack shrugged and smiled a wry smile, “Jes sayin’ it the way the Edenites would, is all.”

Nestor peered back out the barn wall hole and watched the evaporation shimmer in the midday sun. Today was warmer than most, and he knew if he could see the dome right now it would be fogged with the collected condensation and running in rivulets down the curved walls to collect in the outer moat to be recycled for tomorrow’s irrigation. Not looking back at Jack, and trying his best to keep the quiver out of his voice, he asked, “What if I was to ask to be part of your plan?”

“You actually askin’, or is this a hypothetical?”

“Dunno.”

“What would you do once you left?”

“Dunno that either.”

“Why you want to leave?”

“Same reason as you, I imagine.”

“Why ain’t you askin’, then?”

“Maybe I am.”

Jack stared at him silently and said nothing for several moments. He sighed and said flatly, “I wouldn’t be talkin’ to you about my plan if you wasn’t welcome to be part of it, Nestor. But if you don’t want to come, I cain’t have you goin’ to Eagan and tellin’ him I’m out here workin’ up somethin’. Understand?”

“’Course. But what exactly is your plan?”

“It don’t work like that. You need to be with me if you want details.”

“Ok, say I’m with you.”

Jack shook his head, “No sayin’ nothin’. You want out of here or not?”

“I do.”

Jack squinted at him again, and after several moments nodded, “Plan is simple. I got a truck’ll be waitin’ on us in a little gully north of here. Full tractor-trailer, with a motorized trailer. Can haul us out of here, even go overland if need-be. And it’ll fit all of us in that trailer. ‘Course, momma and baby could ride up front. Wouldn’t want them back in the dusty ol’ trailer.”

“How you gonna stop these people from findin’ it and ‘salvagin’’ it?”

“Truck is bein’ dropped off the night-of.”

“By who?”

“By a comrade of mine. I’m part of a group of folks who do this. Come out to these domes, and help folks get free of ‘em.”

“You done this before?”

“First time inside. We cain’t do a lot of repeats in these domes. But I been the guy droppin’ off the truck a couple times before.”

“You jes gonna sneak everone out once it’s dark?”

“Yup.”

Nestor nodded and stared at the loft’s floorboards for several moments. He could feel Jack’s gaze upon his cheek.

Jack spoke again, “You gonna try to talk Asa into comin’?”

“Gonna try.”

“Twelve days until the truck is dropped off,” Jack said as he lifted himself up to stoop away to the ladder.

*****

It was a full week before Nestor could have any sort of conversation with Asa, as she always seemed busy attending to matters about the house, and shooed away every rhetorical foray he made. He found it ironic that none of her house duties seemed to involve the child; even nursing was consigned to Ester and the other fillies, using Asa’s bottled milk. Nestor decided to force the conversation with her one lunchtime, during which Eagan and his family had gone off to visit at a neighbor’s farm, having abandoned the indentured with the baby back at home.

Nestor entered the Maries’ home and tried to creep through to the kitchen, where he imagined Asa might be. He found no one there, but through the windows could see the other two fillies out behind the house loitering and pretending to be hanging up sheets on the clothesline to dry. Nestor watched them chatting silently through the windowpane and wondered where else Asa might be. Where the baby was. He listened to the house and at a great remove heard someone moving about upstairs.

He went up the stairs towards the bedrooms on the second floor, and after opening doors to several empty rooms, found the door to Eagan and Ester’s room already cracked open. He peered through the door as he approached, seeing at first only their enormous bed and a small cradle off to one side.

Asa stood before the cradle, her back to the door, nursing the baby. She must have felt the air in the room change as he entered, for she turned halfway and cocked her head curiously at him standing there on the threshold.

What are you doing? She mouthed at him. Nestor took a step forward with his hand out and could not make an explanation come to his lips and instead stared dumbly at the baby, who detached from her mother’s nipple and cuddled to her bosom, eyes closed serenely. Asa shrugged up her dress, laid the baby in the crib, and padded over to Nestor.

“You need to leave before someone sees you in here,” she whispered urgently to him.

Nestor shook his head, “I need to talk to you. You ain’t let me say a word to you since…that night.”

Asa looked at him coldly, “I said all that needed to be said to you, Nestor. Eagan ain’t comfortable with us talkin’, and so I ain’t comfortable with it, either.”

“He don’t get to decide these things, Asa. It’s yer choice how you live yer life, not some…not Eagan.”

Asa opened her mouth to argue and Nestor could already foretell what that argument would be and he did not wish to rehash its finer points and by way of abridging her he blurted, “Jack’s got a plan to escape. We could leave. Get away from Eagan. We would bring her.” He nodded to the baby asleep behind Asa.

Asa shook her head, “Where would we even go, Nestor?”

“Does it matter? Away from here. Anywheres else. You could go anywheres in the world, at least there you could be with her.”

“I’m with her here.”

“No, you ain’t. You ain’t even allowed to interact with her here. Why you think that is? You had to sneak in here jes to nurse her…”

Asa stared at him and her eyes brimmed with tears and she blinked them back and they ran down her cheeks all the same. She shook her head and looked down and away.

Nestor persisted, “And what you gonna do when Eagan sells her off? You ever gonna see her again after that? And how you gonna look her in the eye, if you do? Knowin’ you coulda saved her.”

Asa glared furious fire at him, and he forestalled his argument and looked imploringly back. She wiped away her tears. She stared out the window at nothing for a long moment. Finally, she sniffed loudly, and with that same fire in her eyes said, “OK, then what’s Jack’s plan?”

*****

The dark barn brooded before them as they crept through the adjoining bean field. It was a similar design to Eagan’s barn, and along with the house next to it, had been abandoned following a tragic familial collapse, the cause of which Nestor did not know. This farm was the only empty one in the entire dome, as far as Nestor was aware, and so it was a reasonable choice for a meeting place. There was no indication anyone was inside as Nestor and Asa approached it that midnight, no light nor sound emanated from within, and Nestor questioned if Jack had put him on by requesting they rally here for the night’s escape.

Nestor adjusted the bag on his shoulder, which held every bottle of Asa’s pumped breastmilk, as she’d been adamant that no part of her be left behind at Eagan’s, and he opened the door to the barn to see a group already gathered there, including Jack himself. All eyes turned to him and Asa as they entered. It was hard to tell in the gloom, but several seemed to frown upon seeing these newest additions to their party. Jack must have been waiting on only them, for as soon as Nestor closed the door, Jack leaned forward to turn on a small, hooded lantern positioned before him, and cleared his throat.

He spoke at a volume just barely above a hoarse whisper, “You all ready to get out of here?” He smiled and the shadows on his face changed that smile into a ghastly, threatening expression. Heads around the room nodded. Nestor saw more than a few necks crane to look at him and the girl. The baby cooed in Asa’s arms.

Jack continued, “Those of you who don’t got a suit, I have emergency suits over here.” He lifted the lamp and pointed the unshaded portion at a line of silvery single-use emergency envirosuits draped over a crate. “For those of you that brought yer own, I got extra batteries on that table next to the emergency suits.”

Nestor shifted uneasily inside his old envirosuit and fidgeted with the battery. He was so preoccupied with memories of dune crests and decaying battery terminals that he jumped when Asa nudged him, trying to hand him her child so she could go don a suit. He took the child from her and watched her walk over to join the crowd who had gathered before the emergency suits. No one had yet put anything on. Jack seemed to notice their reluctance and spoke up, louder than before, “We do got a schedule to keep, folks. Let’s try and move with purpose, here.”

One man by the emergency suits cleared his throat and said, at regular speaking volume, “Uh, Jack…,” he cleared his throat again and continued, “Uh…look, I’m jes gonna come right out with it. I didn’t agree to be part of…takin’ away some man’s wife and…and baby.”

Heads around the room were nodding agreement, and an indistinct murmur rose as men mumbled their assent. Jack raised both hands, “Asa here ain’t no man’s wife. She’s a filly, and this child of hers is a girl. Doomed to be a filly as well. Who among you wants to be part of bringin’ that to pass?”

The murmur became a din, and several voices from the crowd spoke out:

“How you gonna take that baby outside?”

“Can she even run?”

“Ain’t nothin’ gon’ stop ‘em from comin’ after that baby and her momma.”

Jack raised his voice over the din, “Everone, please. We gotta keep it down in here. Now, I got a baby bubble stashed out by the airlock. Baby’ll be jes fine inside there. Her momma there can handle herself without any of you needin’ to worry about her, and in any instance it ain’t no man in this room’s responsibility to worry ‘bout whether or not she can make it. Or what happens after.”

Old Nate’s voice spoke from the door, whose threshold he’d covertly come to occupy, “Now that ain’t true Jack, and you know it.”

The attention of the room swiveled to the door, and Old Nate took two steps into the building, leaning heavily upon his cane as he entered and allowing the door to swing partially shut behind him.

“You’ll find they ain’t no trespass greater’n what yer up to in here, men. Takin’ a man’s filly. Takin’ his child.” He shook his head. “The Edenites’ll put to death anyone who is part of that.”

Jack argued back from his position at the opposite pole of the crowd, “They cain’t put to death who they cain’t catch, Nate. And it ain’t like these people ever leave this Valley anyways. We jes need to get clear of the Valley, and then everone’s safe.” He looked around at the faces before him, “Hear me? Everone.”

“Boy, you know well as I do, there’s thousands of kilometers of Valley ‘tween us and anyplace that might be safe for that filly. Thousands of kilometers that the Edenites been spendin’ generations learnin’ like the backs of they hand. You ain’t gonna make it to nowheres safe,” Old Nate persisted, both hands upon his cane while he argued, giving him a wizened demeanor that helped to place a full stop to his words as he spoke.

The men began backing away from the emergency suits, and several turned fully about and walked towards the door. Jack’s head swiveled back and forth between them all as the crowd seemed to disintegrate before him, and with a panicked look upon his face he yelled at full volume, “Any man who don’t come this time likely ain’t gonna get another chance. Ain’t no way to get someone else back in here to try again. You all understand? This here’s yer only shot at freedom.”

A few men paused at his words and looked around, but by this point the crowd had convinced itself of the futility of their escape and was steadily filing past Old Nate through the door. Jack put forth no further arguments and merely watched them leave with an exasperated look upon his face. After the last of the indentured men had left, Old Nate turned to look at Asa and Nestor, the only two remaining in Jack’s escape party, and said, “You two still ain’t seen reason?”

Asa looked terrified and Nestor walked to her and placed his hand upon her shoulder and she gazed at him and then at her child in his arms and then at Jack. Jack shook his head at her, “Don’t believe him, Asa. That old man don’t know nothin’ about what yer goin’ through. And he don’t have yer interests at heart, neither.”

Nate shook his head and looked down at the ground and then looked up and opened his mouth to speak, but Jack suddenly seemed through with humoring the old man and he walked quickly to loom over the codger.

“Get out of here, Nate. You already convinced the rest of them to stay. Couldn’t stand to see no one else get what you were never brave enough to try, that it?”

Old Nate looked up and met Jack’s gaze calmly and this seemed to infuriate Jack further, but then Nestor stepped between the two men, still holding the infant girl, “Old Nate, jes get on out of here. Asa and I are leavin’ with Jack. We takin’ the baby. It ain’t right what these people do to women, and it ain’t right fer you to stand here and try to convince us to stay. Jes go. Before Jack here hurts you.”

Nate looked between the three remaining escapees with a sad look upon his face and sighed and then turned with much effort and paced slowly from the barn. Jack moved to follow, but Nestor put out a hand to stop him and Jack glared at Nestor momentarily and then looked at the baby and back to her mother, whose terror seemed unabated. He shook his head and turned from the proceedings. Nestor watched the old man disappear into the dark down the gravel road before closing the door to the barn.

“What now, Jack?”

*****

Nestor pounded through the field. Asa’s baby girl held tightly to his heaving chest, his hand locked behind her little neck to support her lolling head. The baby was wailing, her cries drowning out everything, the sound of his breath, the wheat slapping against his envirosuit, every doubt and fear he’d had about this plan, all subsumed within the high keening being screamed mere centimeters from his left ear. He stopped for a moment and knelt to readjust the blanket swaddling the baby, laying her there in the ochre stained dirt and slightly unwrapping it and then pulling the sides taught again. Asa came from behind and dropped next to him and fussed about the blanket as he pulled it tight. She picked up the little girl and held her close and hummed in her ear and the baby seemed to deflate and nuzzled against her mother. He looked all around and could see only wheat, but he was sure there were pursuers somewhere.

The entire dome was looking for them, after Old Nate had gone and betrayed them. Or perhaps one of the others had let Eagan know they were escaping. Or maybe no one had told, and they were merely unlucky. Unlucky the baby and Asa’s absence had been noticed, or perhaps unlucky that the baby had cried the moment they’d left that dark abandoned barn and had not stopped and the cries could be heard throughout the confines of this cramped and yet still massive dome. Nestor considered all these options while he let Asa catch her breath and calm her child. It seemed most likely to him, in this moment, that they’d been betrayed, and he wished for revenge while he crouched and listened to hear if there were pursuers running through the field or voices calling out to them.

The weird, doped stars bent and shifted above him and his lungs burned and he wondered how much further it was to the airlock. Jack had taken a different route, had assured them both that he would lead off any pursuers and meet them there, and though Nestor had deep misgivings about this assurance, he had few other options and so he believed Jack. The baby was now merely whimpering. At a look from him, Asa handed her across to Nestor, and he lifted a bit to confirm there were no heads of pursuers out anywhere in the field and, seeing nothing, he rose fully.

He hugged the baby back to his shoulder, and he took off running through the field, his helmet swinging on its strap and slapping his hip as he ran. He crossed a dirt road and distantly down the road he saw approaching lights and he ran through the next field, this one farrow, hoping that he’d get across it before those lights got close enough to illuminate them. He kept turning to see where they were as he ran, and in doing so, he failed to notice the irrigation pipe, but his foot made no such error, and he tumbled over it at full speed. He twisted as he fell, his body curling around the newborn in his arms to protect her, and came down in the dirt hard enough to knock the wind from him. The fall scared the baby, and she somehow screamed even louder than she had before, her scream vying for primacy with the ringing it introduced in Nestor’s ears.

Asa came up from behind and knelt to ask him if he had been injured and he told her he was not. The lights on the road came to a stop out there and Nestor knew they’d seen him cross the road and could hear their voices indistinct but still quite identifiable as Eagan and his boys. Others he didn’t recognize. He knew they could hear the baby, but they didn’t seem to run at him. He suspected they hadn’t seen exactly where he’d gone, at least not yet. He pressed her mouth to his neck, and she fought him futilely and thrashed in anger, and her mother looked at him with an expression most of the way to a snarl and with the baby as muffled as he could manage, Nestor rolled and crouch-ran the final few meters to the next field over, a green bean field, hoping to fade into the beanpoles there.

He ran through this field and was afraid to look behind him again, the fear equal parts caution at tripping again and not wanting to see how much they’d gained. The voices had once again disappeared, obscured by the blood pumping through his ears and the partially muffled howls of the naif in his arms. He ran and felt like he ran forever in a universe where time was no thing, running in a featureless expanse where there was naught but his burning lungs and the baby’s laments, and it was in this state that he came upon the airlock.

He hit the button for the door and it whooshed open and inside stood Jack, fully suited and holding the strange baby bubble contraption before him in both arms. It was vaguely egg-shaped, with top doors that slid open to either side to expose a white, bare plastic interior. Nestor carefully lowered the baby girl into the bubble, no easy feat with her thrashing like she was, and he paused while her mother bent to kiss her forehead and then slid the doors closed and heard the contraption hiss as it pressurized with atmosphere. The baby’s cries faded and relief crowded in and then was ruthlessly shattered when Eagan’s shouts took their place. He turned and saw Eagan upon them, and he hit the interior button for the door and the doors jerked to close, but before they could move much at all, Eagan had reached out and arrested their motion with both hands. His sons were behind him, and they took up stations on the sides and wrapped their hands about the closing doors like claws. Eagan reached through to grab Asa by the wrist and pulled her hard towards him. As exhausted as she was, it was nothing for the much larger man to jerk her wholly out of the airlock and off her feet, and she tumbled to the ground as she exited. Eagan was not done pulling, however, and dragged her through the dirt while she used her free hand to pound about his wrists. He did not let her go.

Eagan yelled instructions to his sons to recover the baby, and they both let go the door to come into the airlock after her. Jack lunged forward and shoved one boy hard enough to lift the adolescent off his feet and throw him briefly through the air, which stunned his partner. Nestor took advantage of his opponent’s confusion and firmly guided the second boy backwards by the shoulders, out of the airlock and off to the side. The airlock door resumed closing behind him and Eagan was still dragging Asa and Jack was crouched upon and thrashing the other son, and Nestor saw no option but to pull his combatant down to his rising knee and then dash back into the airlock to set the baby bubble upon its threshold to prevent the closing of the doors. He turned and saw the boy had already recovered his breath and was moving towards him again when Eagan let out a yelp and all turned to see blood rivuleting down his wrist from a semicircle of Asa’s bite marks.

Asa scrambled away from Eagan on her backside, and the boy turned from Nestor and intercepted her and lifted her off the ground, kicking the air. Nestor moved laterally, trying to get an angle on Asa’s assailant when his eyes met hers. Asa’s expression had a strange cast to it, and Nestor felt he could tell what she was going to say before she yelled to him and Jack to save the baby and leave her and then she worked her hand over to grab the boy holding her by his crotch and twist enough for him to yelp and let her go. Nestor remained crouched for a moment looking for an opportunity to help, but Asa remonstrated him loudly once again to leave her behind and then she sprung upon Eagan himself with a rage that caused all in attendance to recoil.

Nestor was still staring when he felt a hand enwrap his shoulder, and he turned ready to fight whoever it was, only to see Jack pulling him back into the airlock. He allowed himself to be so guided and he watched as Asa beat her lifelong captor about the face with clawed hands and he watched in amazement as she drew long ragged red lines through that man’s face with her nails and then she was working her thumbs behind his eyes and his boys were moving around to grab her and the airlock doors slid closed with a hiss and then it was just him and the baby and Jack.

*****

They arrived at the pueblos cut into the stone of the north face of the Valley only a few hours later. Jack told Nestor that he knew a place where they could hole up, where no one would find them. Certain that the Edenites could track him across both the Central Valley Highway and the sands to the south, he had cut a zigzag course for the north canyon wall the second the dome had faded from sight.

The airlock closing upon it had damaged the baby bubble, and nothing Nestor could do would open the sliding doors on top. The bubble must have operated at a higher air pressure than Jack’s truck cab, as Nestor could hear the hiss of air escaping it. He could not locate the leak itself, even by moving his cheek all along the surface. He could hear the baby wailing inside the bubble by holding his ear to it, and this plus the fact that there was air inside to escape convinced Nestor that the baby was still fine. This did not change the fact that they needed to find some place where he could take a pry bar to the bubble, and sooner rather than later.

The portion of wall they headed for was in actuality a twenty-kilometer-long-incline composed entirely of loose scree, piled in a steep ascent that terminated into a tear drop made of kilometer-tall rock walls. All around the teardrop was an entire city built into that vertiginous rock face, thousands upon thousands of dead-eyed windows looking out into a crowded forest of industrial decay in the center. From a distance, as they’d climbed the scree slope, the pueblos had looked occupied, and Nestor had said as much, asking who lived there. Jack shook his head in that distinctive noncommittal way he had, and said, “No one lives there, nor has lived there for decades. Maybe centuries. But it was originally an Edenite city.”

“The Edenites had cities?”

“Before they was farmers. You’ll see. I’ll take ya on a tour when we get there and get this truck hidden.”

Once parked, Nestor discovered the truck had no pry bar, nor anything that could be substituted to that purpose. They left the baby in the truck and explored the pueblos, under the reasoning that there had to be some length of metal inside they could purloin to their purpose. But once inside, the state of the pueblos surprised Nestor. The rooms were still there, cut from the porous rock, but had not been tiled over with metal or plastic or concrete or ceramic, like back home. These rooms were just bare rock, and the few remaining doors were composed of loose plastic, not designed to fit with air seals.

He glanced at Jack as they passed a threshold and asked, “How you think they kept all the dust out with these doors?”

Jack only shrugged.

The windows facing out were immense picture windows, and the thin glass that had occupied them was mostly broken out, scattered in shards all about the floor. Nestor picked up a piece and was examining it in the light of his torch, when Jack noticed and walked over. He looked all around the gaping window hole, running his fingers along the rough rock of the sill, and said to Nestor, “Can you imagine growin’ up in a place with a window like this?”

He looked back over his shoulder at Nestor, who shrugged and went back to his glass shard.

Jack turned around, looking at the rest of the room, “I think this here was the main livin’ space, too. Growin’ up with all that sunlight pourin’ in to yer main room…” He paused and shook his head, looking around the room.

Nestor tossed his piece of glass down and looked at Jack. Jack looked back at him and smiled inside his suit helmet, “’Course, that little glass there don’t protect you from radiation. They didn’t dope glass back then. They were cookin’ themselves in these rooms and didn’t even realize. Or maybe they jes didn’t care.”

The rooms sat empty but for the little piles of rock fallen in from the ceilings and walls. Some of the bigger spaces were totally collapsed-in, seeming to foretell the destiny of the rest. As they walked through the abandoned caves and imagined the city that must once have bustled there, Jack pointed out that these cities were never truly finished, for the people who had started the construction works had given up midway through, and that some of the decay they were seeing may very well be half-finished work.

What astounded Nestor the most was simply the scale of the thing. They walked through wide hallways that seemed to stretch back into the rock endlessly, apartment door following apartment door into the gloom. Most of the doors’ hinges had given out, leaving the plastic husks of the doors fallen in an orderly line. Nestor imagined some beast must have come through this place and torn all the doors from their frames looking for victims before crawling back into the deep recesses to slumber, and he wondered what it might take to wake such a creature and dreaded that he might inadvertently do so.

By way of clearing this thought from his mind, Nestor remarked, “There had to’ve been millions of people livin’ here.”

Jack nodded, “I believe you’re right. This here city’d match Calahorra or Simud or Maja or jes about any of the cities in Chryse.”

“Where did all those people go? They ain’t any other big cities in this Valley is there?”

“Oh, they’s Mensa, that has maybe a hunerd thousand livin’ there. And Capri, Eos…they’s some bigger cities in the Valley, but none of ‘em are Edenite cities. They give up livin’ in cities at some point, and moved to the domes. Someone once told me they left the cities because their religion was losin’ too many folk. Too many excommunicates in a setup like this; it’s easier to keep people in line in more…confined environments.”

“Do you think that? They left the cities and made those domes jes to keep folk under control better?”

“Nah, I don’t think that’s why they left these cities. I think they left ‘em because livin’ aboveground in ‘em was too hard. Too full of meaningless death. You surely know what it’s like. How many of the kids you grew up with are still alive?”

Nestor shook his head, “I dunno. I ain’t been around any of ‘em for a long time. But I’d venture not many. Somethin’ always gets ‘em. Radiation poisonin’. Perchlorate Flu. Lotta cancers. Rashes that bled. We didn’t even have names for those. Jes knew that once they started happenin’, gangrene wasn’t far behind. My daddy always said that’s why we gotta complete the terraformation. Once it’s done, all the diseases’ll jes go away.”

Jack looked around him, raising his arms to shoulder level and spinning slowly, “That’s it. Aboveground, we are surrounded by death, all the time, everwhere we go. The radiation, the dust…everthing on this planet is hostile to life, and these folks, this first generation of people come over from Earth, they knew less than even we do now about how to live here. Ain’t none of this crap in this place sufficient to keep you safe from the hazards we live with. Someone tol me once that the first generation that come over, they had a one in ten replacement rate. For ever ten folk you had here making kids, only one of them kids survived to adulthood. I think that must have meant their whole damn society collapsed in a single generation, collapsed from dust poisonin’ and radiation and bad water and cave-ins. And the folks that survived jes…left…gave up. Tried livin’ somewheres else, where they might have a better chance.”

Nestor’s head swam with questions, “Why would they do that? Wouldn’t they keep tryin’ to survive here? Try and make it better, make it more safe? Why go somewheres else on this same planet and start all over again?”

Jack shrugged, “I ‘spose there weren’t enough left to stay here. It ain’t like you can keep a place like this runnin’ if there’s only a few of you. Or maybe the folk who’d survived the apocalypse back on Earth, and found themselves smack dab in the middle of a new one, jes made decisions based on different things than you or I do. No one knows. I asked someone that same question once, and she tol me ‘don’t concern yourself with the actions of those proven inferior to you.’ I think about that a lot. I wonder if they really were inferior.”

*****

They eventually gave up looking for a usable pry bar in the pueblos for there was none to be found, and once the morning sun had crested the wall of the box canyon, Nestor convinced Jack to pull the truck back down the scree slope to the teardrop’s center. They descended into a nest of huge rectangular buildings, ten-meter-high tanks, and interconnecting pipes, all rotted and slumping in on each other as if being drawn inexorably towards some black hole at their center. Nestor poked around this heap of decay for a short time and found a metal strip that was only partially rusted and carried it back to the truck to free the baby. He couldn’t find a place to wedge it anywhere on the bubble to prise the doors open, and so he resorted to pounding on them with the bar until one bent in enough that he could jam the bar in and lean on it to break it open. By this time, the baby was simply howling at an intensity that drove Jack to exit the truck through the rear, and he paced out there amongst the corroded industrial brambles, looking frequently back at the truck in consternation. Nestor wondered if he could hear the baby all the way out there.

Having extricated her from the bubble, Nestor cradled the baby and clumsily jammed a bottle of formula into her yowling maw, which at first merely muffled her cries. She eventually gave in to the indignity of being fed food she most desperately wanted, but had been too angry at the world to receive, and fell to sucking. Before long, the rhythm of the baby’s suckles coaxed both Nestor and the little girl to sleep.

They left a few hours later, as soon as the final bit of blue in the sunset had gone to indigo, the last wedge of the sun’s feeble light projecting up over the edge of the western wall. The baby had eaten two of the four bottles of formula that Asa had pumped and had messed herself three times. Asa had been carrying the diapers, and so they scavenged the bedsheets from Jack’s sleeper bed to serve this new duty. Apart from eating and shitting, the baby mostly preoccupied herself with bawling, a noise which Nestor, and eventually even Jack, felt simply numb to.

Jack pulled the big truck out of the box canyon expertly in the dark, and the slight rocking motion of the truck’s traction breaking as they slid down the kilometers of scree lulled their charge to sleep. Once free of the scree, and in blessed silence, they hugged the north wall of the valley, winding in and around dozens of gravel bluffs and landslides, their path obscured by a maze of ten-meter-tall loose hillocks that could not be driven over. Eventually, they cut across a high, wide rock fall, and after a long climb up, they crested upon a makeshift and kinetic hilltop overlooking the Valley.

Nestor dazzled at the sea of lights pouring throughout the Valley below. The domes of the Edenites. He’d never before seen clusters of surface lights with such density. Back home, the solitary homestead lights were tiny stars winking out of the vast black of the Tharsian high plains. The lights of the Edenite domes ran in a nearly unbroken line along the Valley Road, spaced evenly every twenty kilometers, with a web of other domes arranged further back, extending across the entire valley floor. He pointed to them and mentioned how dazzling they were.

Jack looked over at the lights and slowed the truck as he looked and said, “They shore are. It’s nice, at night, when you can only see the ones’re still occupied. There’s a whole lotta abandoned ones you cain’t see right now.”

Around midnight, the ground in front of them abruptly dropped away into a steep, loose slope that fell a thousand meters down to a broad basin floor. Out in the basin, and almost at the limit of what could be seen, the surface lights of Mensa glimmered. Nestor traced the line of lights marking dome settlements along the Valley Road out of Mensa, cutting through the basin and climbing up towards them.

Jack brought the truck to a stop and reached over to turn it off.

“There’s the road to Mensa. Why ain’t we pickin’ it up and followin’ it on in? That still the plan?” Nestor whispered, desperate to not wake the baby.

Jack shook his head silently in the dark. After a few moments, barely loud enough to be heard, he whispered, “Cain’t go to Mensa. We need a new plan.”

“Why? What’s wrong with it?” Nestor’s eyes flicked back and forth between Jack and the distant lights.

“We’ll stick out in Mensa. Lots of Edenites trade there, too. And by now, every Edenite in this valley knows about us stealing one of they babies.”

“So where then? Don’t you have no one waitin’ for you in Mensa to pick us up? We only got two bottles left for her. We got to get more right away.”

“We got to go north.”

“What the fuck is north of us?” Nestor said, temporarily forgetting the baby and speaking too loudly.

The baby answered in Jack’s stead by awakening and immediately resuming her wailing.

*****

“A long time ago, before humans come to this world and brought their new gods, before this world looked much at all like it does today, many of the gods of old strode about her surface. The largest and most powerful of these gods was Olympus, and he knew he was the most powerful, and he abused all the other features of Mars at will.”

Nestor had begun talking into the face of the screaming baby, and something about his tone while telling the story temporarily short-circuited the child’s brain. They’d been slowly climbing through the gargantuan rift valleys north of the Mariner Valley, and going overland in these wild places had been slow. She stared at Nestor cross-eyed, her weak blue eyes trying their hardest to focus on his, only a few centimeters away. He continued:

“There were only four others on all of Mars that could stand up to Olympus. There were the three lazy Tharsis brothers, and there was lonely old Alba. The Tharsis brothers had long taken up residence on the eastern shore of Utopia’s seas, and they were much displeased when Olympus drove Utopia from her regular basin, for while the seas do all they can to ignore the happenin’s upon land, the opposite is not true, and the land is often very much concerned with all the things goin’ on at sea.”

It was a common story from his own youth, and he told it in the memorized words and tones of his mother. The childhood storybook characters emerged from the deep recesses of his memory fully formed, and they danced for him as they always had, and in their dancing attempted to pull the strings of apocryphal rituals that might telepathize themselves into the nascent mind of his audience, who was at that moment trying her damndest to focus upon the tip of his nose, dipping and waving hugely before her face as Nestor spoke.

“The Tharsis brothers decided amongst themselves that it would be best if someone else were to deal with Olympus, and that person should be Old Alba. He was known to be quite partial to Utopia, and the brothers told him they’d support him in any fight against Olympus, and these matters combined to stir Alba’s sense of justice to go and attempt to put Olympus in his place.”

“Old Alba came across Olympus tormentin’ a village of the small people, by droppin’ lumps of molten rock on their houses, and each time he did so, he’d laugh boisterously while watching the little people’s homes burn to ash. Alba told Olympus to leave the villagers alone, and Olympus told Alba if he felt such great sympathy for those small bein’s, he should use more than words.”

Jack interrupted to point out that as the story was told back in Aram, Old Alba confronted Olympus with the Tharsis brothers in tow, but the brothers abandoned him at a look from Olympus. Nestor looked at Jack and shrugged, not seeing the difference. The baby did not take well their mutual silence, and yowled briefly to assert that she would still like her story. Nestor continued on:

“Olympus attempted settin’ several more houses on fire, but Alba swatted away each attempt. Olympus could not seem to figure a way around his wise opponent, and grew angry with the proceedin’s and turned away from the village, claimin’ that doin’ so had always been his intention anyways, and left Alba there to guard the village.”

“Olympus was beside himself with anger at Alba for confoundin’ him, and so as he retreated, he moved uphill from the village. Once he was high above them both, Olympus produced a great many gasses from his caldera, and they gathered into huge rainstorms, the like of which have not been seen since. The storms flooded everthing in that country, and wore many drainages and rivulets through those lands.”

The baby burbled at Nestor’s expressive face, her eyes shining with delight. Relief crowded into Nestor’s voice as his mind flashed through the preceding day. The truck tipping and scrabbling upon thin rock ledges in the chaos north of the Valley. The baby screeching as the walls of the Candor Chasm brooded over them. The vertiginous ridge of Baetis Mensa, an unbroken wall of rock that stretched for hundreds of kilometers to the north, which they followed while discussing in detail every feature they saw. For at least while they talked, she did not howl.

“Alba responded by releasin’ his lava to make levies to hold back Olympus’s floods. The grand volcano did not pause in the least, however, and continued roilin’ up more storms to fling at the wise old mountain. Old Alba released even more lava, and the more he released, the more Olympus drove in rains to wash it away, in a cycle that seemed like it may never end. Eventually, Alba released so much lava and spread it so far and so wide that it glued him to the ground, and he was prevented from ever movin’ again. Seein’ Old Alba stuck in his own lava, Olympus laughed and ceased his torrents and taunted Alba while the poor old mountain struggled. To this very day, Olympus may occasionally send a storm Alba’s way, to remind him of the folly of stickin’ your nose in where it don’t belong.”

The baby wrinkled her nose at this, her whole face reforming into a scream. Nestor sighed and looked over at Jack, who was no longer paying attention. He looked back out the window at the broad drainage spread beside them as they climbed and imagined her cries echoing over the vast distances there, and what rockfalls it might inspire in those distant horizons. He laid his head back against the seat’s headrest and closed his eyes and let her cry.

*****

Nestor shook the empty baby bottle and stared at it and questioned if the tiny amount still coating the bottom was safe to feed to her. The infant girl was shrieking with what he guessed to be hunger and had been doing so since they’d awoken that morning. He’d done his best to ration out the final two bottles on the prior day, which they’d spent climbing out of the rift valley, winding up and down mountain slopes and through the meter-deep dust that accumulated on the lee sides of those ranges, a featureless canted expanse that so dampened any optimism as to leave even their emotions coated with and entombed beneath that self-same dust.

They had made the surface, and spent the night there, giving the baby her very last bottle so she would go down. Nestor passed out with exhaustion when she fell asleep in his arms, while Jack moved about the cab, sucking on a tube of nutrient paste for his supper and throwing out the fully messed scraps of his former bed. When Nestor awoke with the baby in the middle of the night, Jack was still up and was staring off into the darkness, and both of them had stayed awake telling the baby stories and jokes to distract her from the fact that she very much wanted a bottle, of which there was none.

They had left at first light, and Jack’s eyes were so red and bleary from lack of sleep that he seemed blind, and using this as evidence, Nestor convinced Jack to allow him to drive instead. At first, the movement of the truck coaxed the baby to sleep in Jack’s arms, and for a while, Jack appeared to be dozing as well. Nestor followed the northern rim of Candor Chasma, a huge irregularly shaped rift valley that glowed bluely off their shoulder, a deep pit in which any manner of monster may lay waiting, and they avoided all such beasts by sticking inland just enough to find the good hard ground, and Nestor kept them moving quickly along. Transit was difficult to mark against the pit, as its size minimized all notion of movement, no matter how substantial said movement may be, and Nestor despaired at the absence of tangible progress. Shortly after noon, both baby and Jack had awoken, and Jack had advised, barely audible over the baby’s screams, to strike out across the vast and featureless plains to the northeast.

That had been a couple of hours ago, and both men had been taking the baby’s verbal barrage in silence since. Nestor held the mostly-finished bottle out to Jack.

“Want to give her this?”

Jack looked skeptically at the bottle, “Looks old.”

Nestor nodded, “I believe this here bottle was the one I give her yesterday noon. But if there’s germs in it, they’ll only be her germs.”

Jack didn’t look like he agreed with this assertion, but after a few moments of loudly attended consideration, he took the bottle from Nestor and offered it to the howling child. She readily sucked away, but soon finished the splash of milk remaining and loudly demanded more from a world that was ill-equipped to have given her even the small amount she had just received. Jack looked earnestly at the scrunched red face thrashing about in his arms. He began speaking, in an eager and booming voice, made for concert-hall recitations:

“There were many strange creatures on Mars during her early days, a consequence of having so much of Jupiter’s fire placed inside her. One such creature was a great Wyrm, a creature that needed neither food nor slumber to survive. Instead, the Wyrm fed on fear. The more afraid it could make the small creatures of the surface, the fatter and stronger it grew. The Wyrm was quite frightful, miss. It possessed a long tubular body of massive size, with hundreds of spindly legs growin’ from each side which ended with great gaspin’ claws. Its face was covered in long, prehensile tentacles, and the Wyrm was otherwise blind, but had excellent hearin’. It preferred to live underground, where its hearin’ and its tentacles could be most useful.”

Nestor looked skeptically at Jack, who shrugged in his own defense. The baby seemed to agree that he should continue, scrunching her face in displeasure at his brief silence. Jack short-cut her screams by continuing in his oratory tones:

“The Wyrm’s favorite thing to do was to dig under villages, occasionally creatin’ earthquakes or comin’ to the surface at night to snatch young children who stayed out after sunset. Eventually, however, the Wyrm would grow bored with the village and dig all around it, creatin’ a sinkhole into which everthing, village and villagers alike, would tumble. Once captured in his underground lair, the Wyrm would then terrorize the survivors until they died of fright.”

“The Wyrm did this for centuries, destroyin’ thousands of villages and developin’ a frightful legend that preceded him and caused him much pleasure. Over all of those years, he became quite fat, and quite lazy, and quite slow in his diggin’ and in his thinkin’, but he remained terrifyin’ to all. He decided that what he really wanted was to find a village big enough and easy enough to terrorize that he would never have to move again, and could just stay and get fatter and fatter forever. He found his ideal village on the plains northeast of the Valley, in a bustlin’ hamlet by the name of Juventae.”

Jack paused and peered at the baby dramatically, “We’re headed right to where that ole town once stood. Do you want to see it, miss?” The baby gurgled and rolled her eyes, lolling her head about.

“Juventae was a peaceful and prosperous town, and was no stranger to mystical happenin’s, bein’ so close to Olympus’ favored stompin’ grounds. But what made Juventae famous was the natural spring that rose from the ground south of their town and flowed thousands of kilometers north to the Chrysean basin. The spring’s waters were healin’ waters, and people came from far and wide to experience its benefits, and the residents, who grew up drinkin’ from those waters, found themselves particularly strong and healthy and long-lived.”

The ground before them fell away into a gargantuan box canyon, easily over a hundred kilometers across and thrice that distance in length. In the center ran a spine of mountains, themselves dwarfed in height by the walls of the canyon in which they resided. They wound along in a fetal bend near the southern canyon wall, descending in height until they faded into hills and then into a beach beside a large, shallow sea of liquid water. Jack seemed to not notice.

“One particular resident, a boy named Young Nico, loved the spring waters so much that he would scarcely part from them. The waters made him incredibly strong and wise, even for his young age. He was known throughout the village for minor feats of beatin’ up thieves, helpin’ matronly ladies with their small chores, and speedin’ along construction efforts by doin’ the work of many men. So Young Nico found himself compelled by duty when the town was plagued by many minor earthquakes, and young children out after dark went missin’.”

“The legend of the Wyrm was, of course, known to Young Nico, and so he knew what these happenin’s foretold. His only problem was that there was no way for him to locate the Wyrm until it surfaced to spread its terror. Young Nico could not bring himself to use a child as bait, nor the entire town itself, and so he needed another plan. The only thing Young Nico could think to do was to find a place near the center of the town and begin diggin’, straight down, until he found some sign of the Wyrm.”

The sea glimmered majestically down below them, and even at this distance, Nestor could make out waves moving along the surface, with white foam on crests stretching wide and pearlescent through the canyon’s southern tip. He looked over at Jack and then looked back down at the miniature sea below him. Jack’s attention was still on the baby.

“So Young Nico dug. He dug for many nights and days, diggin’ a deep hole in the center of the town, but never once findin’ the Wyrm. Young Nico eventually gave up, and was sittin’ on the edge of his hole, lookin’ quite beside himself with his failure, when a wise old man stopped by to encourage him. The wise old man told Young Nico that the Wyrm feasted on fear, and that even though Young Nico was very brave to try to take on that Wyrm, his bravery was itself founded on fear, and it fed the Wyrm just as effectively as screams of fright, and the only solution to the Wyrm was to banish all fear of it.”

“Young Nico took the old man’s words to heart, and he tried many things to diminish his fear of the Wyrm, but none worked. He went through the hamlet and explained to ever person he met how important it was to become less fearful of the monster beneath their feet, and asked for suggestions on how to give up their fear. No person could tell him how to become less fearful, however, until he met Lucius. Lucius was a comic, a funny man who most of the other villagers avoided, even though he frequently made them laugh, for it was his tendency to bring joy at times of seriousness that people disliked most of all.”

Nestor felt tears welling up in his eyes. He tried blinking them back, the blue pearl in the box canyon below smudging and smearing out as he blinked. He squeezed his eyelids together to clear his vision. A tear trickled down his cheek. He wiped it away and tore his eyes from the sea, the real sea filled with real water below him, tracing instead a thin black line of a road that snaked its way through the canyon from the north, extending as far as the eye could see in that direction. The road was packed with a long and evenly spaced line of tiny vehicles moving in both directions.

“When Young Nico explained his predicament to Lucius, Lucius knew exactly what the answer was. Lucius began craftin’ different jokes about the Wyrm, and began drawin’ crude graffiti on walls, featurin’ the Wyrm, and did everthing in his power to make the Wyrm a laughin’stock in Juventae. Over time, his plan worked, for people spoke about the Wyrm in diminishin’, condescendin’ tones, rather than fearful ones.”

“The Wyrm was infuriated that his source of sustenance was bein’ cut off, but he had grown so slothful and fat that he couldn’t quite convince himself to find another town where he wasn’t a laughin’stock. Instead, he did the one thing he knew would most terrorize these villagers. He would kill their favored son, Young Nico. The Wyrm located Young Nico’s deep hole, and he rose through it, and at the surface he called his challenge to Young Nico, who responded immediately.”

The baby’s eyes were growing heavy, and Jack’s oration decreased in volume as each blink grew longer. He had been holding her up to address as a bundle between his hands, and now he lowered her down to cradle in his arms. She snuggled back, trying to get comfortable in the scrap of blanket within which she was swaddled.

“The Wyrm tried throwin’ his mighty girth at Young Nico, but Nico deftly leapt away, and slapped the Wyrm lackadaisically as he did so, and the watchin’ villagers all laughed at Nico tormentin’ that ridiculous fat Wyrm. The Wyrm tried usin’ his many arms and graspin’ claws to snap at Young Nico, but Nico leapt about, always just outside the Wyrm’s grasp, usin’ what small metal items he found lyin’ about to wrap around the Wyrm’s claws, renderin’ him crippled. The villagers laughed even more at the stupid Wyrm in his diminished state, and feelin’ weakened and humiliated, the Wyrm fled back down into his hole.”

“Young Nico would not allow his quarry to escape, however, and grabbed the Wyrm by his tail as he fled, holdin’ tight. The Wyrm’s many feet worked rapidly against the walls of the hole, and scrabbled out dirt until it became super-fine dust that was ejected high into the air beyond. Young Nico still refused to let loose. The Wyrm thrashed about in the hole and expanded it until the entire town square had been atomized and launched great distances across the plains. But still, Young Nico held fast. The Wyrm thrashed further and dug up the entire town while Young Nico laughed away at it, and still the Wyrm whipped about until it had burrowed all the way down to the water table whence the healin’ springs flowed.”

The baby’s eyes were almost fully closed now, only opening briefly during Jack’s dramatic pauses. She snuggled her little head back into the crook of his arm, sighing deeply.

“Upon diggin’ into the springs, their water was let loose in a great flood, which drowned the weakened Wyrm where Nico held him. And that Wyrm’s great spine still occupies the hole he dug, and you can see it all the way down there in Juventae Canyon.”

Nestor stared at the chain of mountains, the Spine of the Wyrm, and could picture the creature there now, laying defeated upon the floor of the canyon.

Jack, still looking at the sleeping babe in his arms, whispered, “It really is pretty, ain’t it?”

Nestor sniffled, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands quickly and nodding, “I cain’t…how do they have water here?”

Jack looked over to him and smiled sanguinely for a moment and replied, “Summer daytime temperatures down in that canyon sometimes top out at twenty degrees, and they pumped enough atmosphere down there that it stays above freezin’ at night. Still cain’t breathe the air yet, and it gets cold enough that it freezes over in the winter, and they still have to use melters to convert ice to water, but it’s liquid water some of the year, and it’s on the surface. Which is somethin’. They haul the atmosphere and water ice down that road, a couple thousand kilometers from the ports in Chryse. Eventually, the whole damn canyon will fill with water, and the Highway will become the Juventae river, which’ll flow down to make a new sea in Chryse. At least, that’s what they say.”

“Why do they haul everthing so far? Why not jes build a spaceport down there? Or at least somewheres closer.”

“Well, they once had a port up at Stege, is my understandin’. Problem is, they’s not much to do out here in the winter. When it stays so cold, the water don’t never melt. Cooler temperatures hold in the atmosphere better, too, so even pumpin’ air slows down a lot over those twelve winter months. Without jobs that pay, folks don’t stay out here. This whole place runs seasonally. Lotta the huts’re automated. Robots and such. Only humans ever even see Juventae are the ones drivin’ the ice trucks. Ain’t a whole lotta civilization between here and Chryse, neither. We gonna stop at Stege tomorrow and you’ll see what livin’ out here in Maja is like.”

*****

They’d picked up a thin, single-lane blacktop that serviced the atmosphere pumps spaced every few kilometers along the canyon rim, and took this road north toward Stege. The only other vehicles they saw were automated road graters coming along to push the dust drifts off to the side and the occasional road train laden with ammonia or carbon ice. Drawing upon some unenumerated experience, Jack confirmed this was the expected amount of traffic for the road. The drive passed quickly, with the baby quiet for once and Jack dozing and a good smooth road beneath them, and they arrived at the intersection of the Rim Road and the Maja Highway before noon. They came upon Stege an hour later.

Stege was set in an ancient impact crater, the entire western wall of which had been eroded away by the river that had once flown out of Juventae Canyon, or perhaps by the flood caused by the death of the Wyrm, either seemed likely. The road into the crater followed this primeval channel, and massive rounded rocks bounded there along the smooth surface blacktop, forming a new channel funneling a different kind of water opposite-wise from the original course. Other than the road, which seemed to disappear near the middle of the crater, there was no sign of human habitation here at all. As they approached the place where the road disappeared, Nestor realized that before him stood a huge, open mine in the crater center, and that the road ran into the mine, spiraling along the edges all the way to the bottom. Jack opened his eyes as they came upon the crater and requested Nestor to pull over so he could drive. Nestor complied, with much effort because of the steady flow of vehicles all around him and the deep dust comprising the road shoulder.

“Is Stege…inside a mine, Jack?” Nestor asked, craning up to see the bottom of the mine as they switched places.

“Stege is the mine,” Jack replied while he pulled out onto the road, without looking for oncoming traffic, “or, I should say, Stege was once a mine. All this infrastructure you see here? This road, the stuff back at Juventae, the huts and all that machinery? It was all mined from here. Hell, most of it was manufactured here, too. There used to be quite a factory on the floor of this pit, is my understandin’.”

“So they mined everthing and then built a city in the mine?” Nestor asked as they descended into the pit, seeing little corridors branching off into the rock, dozens of them, all leading back to parts unknown.

“They mined what they needed, but this whole place held hunerds of thousands of folks, at one time. All them folks needed somewheres to live. What better place than in the mine itself? You’d have to dig out any other place to use as a city, they’d already dug out this one…,” he shrugged, clearly sold on the practicality of this idea, “so the city jes kind of built up with the mine.”

They pulled off into a corridor of Jack’s choosing and left the steady flow of traffic behind. The truck’s lights illuminated an otherwise dark corridor, and there was no sign of habitation or of any human settlement until they came upon a massive indentation carved in the tunnel wall to the right, large enough to hold many vehicles, the hollow itself lighted lackadaisically and mottled throughout with gloom. It was full of parked trucks of differing designs but similar industrial purpose scattered loosely about in no apparent order, and set into the far wall of the hollow was a twin airlock with a glowing sign above in a language that Nestor could not read.

Jack parked the truck into an opening capable of accepting its bulk, and Nestor couldn’t help but notice how many denizens of this cavernous parking lot appeared from the ether or perhaps from unseen hovels built into the very walls, all watching the parking job with much interest.

“What are all them people looking at?” He questioned Jack, as the truck came to a stop.

Jack’s head didn’t move, but Nestor could just make out his eyes moving about in the gloom, taking in the scene before them.

“Those are the locals. Or some of ‘em, at least. They’re sellin’ things, mostly. A lotta drivers come through here lookin’ to trade for this or that.”

“You’re expectin’ for us to buy baby formula and diapers from one of these people?” Nestor goggled all around him, as the veritable crowd of people wearing mismatched scraps of different worn-out envirosuits gathered about the truck.

Jack shook his head. “That ain’t what they sellin’. But I’m bettin’ someone inside can help us get what we need.”

Nestor looked over at the distant airlock and had opened his mouth to point out that this didn’t look like the kind of place that any sort of baby item ever came within ten kilometers of, when Jack spoke again, “Put on yer helmet, we’re goin’ in. Lay the baby down in the sleeper, we’ll pressurize it and leave her in there while we get what we need. Inside ain’t no place for her anyways.”

Nestor grabbed his helmet and pushed it down into the seals and the suit filled with air. He lifted the baby and took her back to the sleeper and made a sort of nest of the remaining blankets and laid her down in this. He backed out of the sleeper and slid down the partition. Jack, satisfied that everything was in order, reached down and hit a button, depressurizing the interior of the cab, then opened his door and deftly dropped out of sight. Nestor did the same, dropping easily down the steps on his side, and reached up to close his door behind him. By the time he turned back around, a small group of different mismatched exosuits had crowded in on him, each holding up a unique item, most of them in small plastic baggies. Their mouths worked in their helmets, but Nestor apparently wasn’t on the same channel as they were calling their wares over, as his coms were completely silent. He guessed that he probably wouldn’t understand their language, anyway.

He shoved his way through the crowd, holding up his hands in a gesture that felt very much like surrender. The proffered baggies slapped against his helmet as he pushed his way through and dispossessed hands reached out to tug on his wrists, and one even groped his crotch through the suit. He cleared the crowd, which once cleared decided that there was no convincing this mark and faded away like a desperate black-market smoke. He looked about for Jack and saw him already almost to the door and rushed after, noticing as he ran how the parking lot now seemed abandoned of people, returned to some virgin state.

They passed through the airlock seamlessly, simply closing the exterior door behind themselves, walking to the other side of the room, and opening the interior door. The room they walked into was large, with low ceilings, and so felt oddly confined. It was filled with haphazardly arranged tables encircling a central pod that looked part bar, part book-making business, as patrons seemed to place both orders for drinks and for bets to the men behind the bar. There was a constant din of people talking, a hum of indistinguishable gruff voices only broken by the occasional screamed protestation or guffaw.

They took off their helmets and made their way over to a long wall filled with others hung on hooks. Nestor placed his helmet amongst this coterie and had not taken more than two steps away when he noticed a man nearby glaring at him over a glass. The man was enormous, easily a head taller than anyone in the place, with broad shoulders and tattoos tracing their way up his neck and onto the back of his shaven head. Nestor froze in place and looked at the man and tried for a neutral expression on his face, not wanting to appear either weak or threatening. The man stood and walked over, placing his face mere centimeters from Nestor’s, and said something in a language Nestor had not heard before. Nestor took a step back, raising his hands, “I don’t know what yer sayin’, mister.”

The man seemed angry about this response and took back the distance Nestor tried to put between them, edging up even closer now, his pock-marked nose nearly touching the boy’s. He growled something else in his strange tongue and bathed Nestor in the smell of his liquor breath. Nestor looked around, trying to locate some absolution or escape from what this man portended.

Jack, seeing what was happening, pushed himself between them and said something in that alien language, using a not-exactly-conciliatory tone with the big man as he intervened. The giant growled a low, guttural sound that made the hairs on the back of Nestor’s neck stand up. Jack reached over and grabbed Nestor’s helmet from the hook and shoved it into Nestor’s arms and made a sort of sarcastic-looking bow and stared impudently at the giant. He glared back at Jack for a moment, his eyes flicking back and forth between the two of them, and then out of nowhere, his friends were behind him, guiding him back to the table, whispering things to him in their language. Jack turned around and gestured with his chin toward the bar. “Let’s get ourselves a drink. What say?”

Nestor’s eyes followed the man and his friends back to their table. “I don’t drink,” he said absently, still not looking away.

Jack’s response was silence, and Nestor could tell out of the corner of his eye that Jack was still looking at him. He glanced over and Jack pointed with his chin once again at the bar. “C’mon with me anyway,” Jack finally said. Nestor nodded and followed him, still stealing glances at the man at the table, who had not once stopped glaring fiercely at them.

At the bar, Jack ordered a shot of some liquor that Nestor didn’t recognize. Nestor merely shook his head when the barman looked skeptically to him.

Nestor held his helmet up to Jack, “Why cain’t I hang my helmet up with everone else’s?”

Jack leaned close, to avoid yelling over the din in this room, “Look, I reckon you ain’t been in a lotta rooms like this, but them hooks is for people have earned one. Which you ain’t. And you cain’t jes stare at people like yer doin’, neither. Ever one of these men is armed and won’t think twice about killin’ ya jes fer lookin at ‘em.”

Nestor looked at Jack and squinted, “But I ain’t tryin’ to provoke ‘em. How would that stand up with the law? Them shootin’ an unarmed man fer lookin’.”

Jack nodded to a pair of men walking by, sharing a meaningful look with them as they passed.

“They ain’t no law to speak of out here, Nestor. Chryse technically owns the water and pays by the ton delivered for both ice and air, but this whole Maja Valley area is free range. No government out here, not yet, not until the water starts flowin’ down the river and folk start livin’ here permanent. Then, I imagine there will be a whole lotta government come in here, likely some fightin’, too, seein’ as Tharsis, Chryse, and the Mariner Valley all could make a valid claim for this here land,” he chuckled, looking around, “But fer now, this land is wild. There ain’t some lawman keepin’ you safe out here, it’s jes yer wits.”

“But I didn’t do nothin’ to that man back there. We jes walked in the place.“

Jack downed his shot and puffed out his cheeks in a sigh and then looked patronizingly at Nestor. “Lotta folks, it don’t matter all that much what you do. It matters what you are, and what you are to these people is an outsider, a kid, not anyone who should be casually walkin’ into a place like this and jes hangin’ up his helmet. Like you was gonna sit and shoot the shit with the other blokes about drivin’ the trail. It’s insultin’ to them, is what it is.”

“Well, look Jack, I didn’t ask to come here with you. Why are we here, anyway? Jes so you could get a drink? Ain’t we got any other priorities than that?”

Jack turned and leaned back with his elbows on the bar, looking casually around the room.

“We got two thousand kilometers to go till we get to Calahorra, and the highway is dangerous, all the way from the Xanthe Mountains down to here. Stege is all there is for supplies, and those supplies come down the highway in armored caravans. Anything less might as well have a target painted on it. We got to find us some passage on one of the caravans that’s on its way back out of here. And the folks on those carvans’ll be the ones to have baby supplies they’ll be willin’ to trade for.”

Nestor looked around theatrically, “Jack, half the people in this bar look like they’d be the ones tryin’ to rob any armored caravan, and the other half look like they’d be more’n happy to help the first group. Who we gonna find to help us here?”

“Look, maybe you should have a bit more faith in me than that. I happen to know some folk out here, and soon as I see ‘em, we’ll be set.”

“So we’re meetin’ someone from the group you’re with here? Is that it?”

“I used to drive this trail, before I got…involved with the group I’m involved with now. Alot of those I knew back then, I still know now, and they’ll be the ones to help us out of here.”

“We just sit here and wait then? You don’t have no way to contact them?”

Jack shrugged and didn’t otherwise respond, but to call the bartender back over for another shot.

*****

They’d departed the bar having met exactly zero of Jack’s alleged acquaintances, and after several hours of loitering inside, Nestor had grown eager to check on the baby, afraid that she’d wake up alone in the truck cab. Jack agreed to leave with him, and as the truck resolved out of the parking lot’s shadows, they noticed both doors hanging wide open, and broke into a mutual run to cover the final few meters.

Nestor came to the passenger door and vaulted up into the cab and noticed immediately the partition between cab and sleeper had been slid back. Leaning into the sleeper, he saw only Jack coming in through the rear access door.

“Where’s the baby, Jack? Where’s the baby at?” Nestor kept repeating over his coms, pulling up the final few scraps of sheet, finding nothing there, and lifting the entire bed up to peer under it. Nestor’s breakdown culminated in his standing in front of the truck, hands on his helmet, a scrap of blanket still in one hand, draped down and behind the back of his helmet like the veil of a bride left at the alter, spinning in a circle and staring into the gloom, looking for an obvious villain lurking there with the bawling baby cradled in his arms. Some foe to defeat. Only darkness crept in those shadows, however, and no matter how many times Nestor spun, the murk never presented him with any tangible foe whatsoever. A most dramatic display, that Jack sat back and calmly watched.

Nestor slumped back to the truck, which Jack had already closed up and repressurized, coming in through the back and collapsing into the passenger seat in a defeated heap.

“What you think happened to her?” Nestor looked imploringly at Jack. Jack didn’t seem to hear and stared out of the front windows into the dark.

“They steal anything else?” Nestor looked all around the inside of the cab.

“They took some other small stuff. Anything that’d be worth anything. They left us the nutrient paste, thankfully. Guess they got enough of that stuff already. You cain’t trust these people. Any of ‘em. They could be inside right now sellin’ any of our things,’’ he grimaced at the callousness of the term, “they stole from us.”

“You think they inside? Well, let’s go back in, then,” Nestor leaned forward in his seat to stand.

Jack shook his head. “That ain’t what I mean. I mean they could be anywheres, and we cain’t trust no one to help us get…anything…back.”

“None of the people you know would tell you if someone had a baby they hadn’t had before?”

“Nope. Most of the people I know wouldn’t be against sellin’ babies they own selves.”

“So what we gonna do, then? We cain’t jes abandon her here.”

Jack shook his head again and laid it back against the seat, closing his eyes. “We all out of options. We still need to get on up this road. We cain’t stay here, that’s for sure. I think you oughta face facts, Nestor. We’ve lost that baby, and we won’t get her back.”

“We gotta keep tryin’. I’m gonna go inside and ask around. A baby has to stick out to these people.”

Nestor left, brooking no further argument on that matter, and Jack did not acknowledge his departure. He went inside and he asked every bar patron who would look vaguely in his direction if they’d seen a baby. None seemed to speak his language, or perhaps they did, but would not let him catch on to that fact, and all shook their heads and glared in the universal language of dismissal. He ignored this and pantomimed cradling a baby and made baby crying noises and they responded to his attempts at further clarification with outright derision, spitting responses in their language that clearly showed, even to one as dumb in that tongue as he, just what they thought of a man-child outsider making noises at them, no matter the purpose.

Eventually he wandered back out to the truck and found Jack asleep leant back in the driver’s seat as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Nestor lay on the bare mattress in the sleeper and stared at the ceiling, trying in vain to come up with some sort of plan to locate the little girl that was based on anything other than blind fantasy.

After a while, possibly minutes or possibly hours, Jack rose and pulled closed the partition and left the front cab, all without comment. He was gone for some time, and upon returning, pulled back open the partition and bent into the sleeper and looked at Nestor, his eyes glowing in the dim light cast by the sparse lot lamps.

“I asked around, and no one knows nothin’. And no one is willin’ to take us on for a trip up north, neither.”

He waited for no response and turned and sat heavily down in the driver’s seat, once again closing his eyes.

Nestor dozed fitfully and dreamt of robbers creeping into the truck, opening the front door and grabbing up the screaming baby and absconding with her from the rapidly depressurizing interior and running with her hiked over their shoulders into a gaping maw hidden just beyond the shadows, intent upon using her as fodder for some greater evil than even his imagination could reproduce, but which waited for him all the same. He came awake in fright and he stared at the ceiling for a while and then he headed back in to try some more.

Days passed in this way, neither man acknowledging any broader purpose or plan, both robotically repeating the same actions, the same inquiries. Little changed in the quality of response, except for one individual, an arachnidan man with lanky hair and steady, if slightly clouded over, eyes who had offered in a language that Nestor did not understand and even Jack seemed to struggle with to sell them a baby girl, of any age they wished. Jack responded seeking clarification, and the man recoiled with his long arms in a way that very much looked like pedipalps drawn back from some disgusting thing, and he looked skeptically at Jack and inquired something back in his skittering alien tongue. Jack apparently responded appropriately, as the man brought his long hands and arthropod’s fingers together in a gesture of imperiousness. He turned and left, and Nestor asked Jack what that was all about.

“Apparently baby girls that age are hard to come by. He didn’t think we could pay. Least not as much as he wants.”

“So what’d you tell him? That we could pay?”

Jack nodded, not taking his eyes from the man’s retreating back.

“We cain’t pay, though.”

Jack glanced over at Nestor with a distinct lack of patience showing through, “It don’t matter. He ain’t got her. Tol me it’d take two weeks at least for him to find such a baby. I tol him I’d wait, and he could keep me in mind if anythin’ else shows up in the meantime.”

They received no other word beyond this, not until the day they left.

*****

They met the man in the bar, and it seemed very much to be the case that he was who Jack had been expecting. He was a wiry man of below average height, more than a head shorter than Nestor, with a semicircle of thinning hair backing away from his gleaming bald pate. He seemed to have too much head for his face, and that he had no identifiable hairline intensified this effect, almost as though his face had been drawn on but then smudged down to make room for something, which the artist had then forgotten to draw. He wore glasses that changed color with the light level around him, but always lagged present conditions, turning dark in the dark, light in the light, and as such he was constantly fussing with them. Jack introduced the man to Nestor as Nils.

Nils spoke the same language as everyone else in this place, which Jack had advised was a regional dialect of Chrysean, and he apparently had no knowledge or desire to speak Tharsian, and so Nestor was excluded from their exchange. It must have had much to do with him, however, given the number of times both men looked and otherwise gestured in Nestor’s direction. Eventually, Nils walked away at some great purpose, leaving Jack and Nestor to stare at one another. Jack seemed much pleased, and Nestor asked him why.

“That was good news. Nils says he heard that a caravan carrying a baby in a cage headed out from Stege jes this mornin’. He’s gonna get some supplies and meet us up at the truck.”

“He’s gonna ride with us? What about a caravan? We gonna be safe on the road by ourselves?”

“Cain’t afford to wait around no longer. We leave now we might could catch ‘em up before they get to the Chrysean border. And trust me when I say Nils is worth at least as much as any caravan,” Jack smiled a wry smile at Nestor and cuffed him on the shoulder, “Now c’mon. Let’s get out to the truck.”

Less than an hour later they were on the road, the mine and Stege disappearing behind them. Apparently, the ‘supplies’ that Nils had needed were an enormous gun of a make not familiar to Nestor and twin bandoliers of ammunition worn crosswise upon the chest of his envirosuit. He presented a contradictory vision thus armed, simultaneously frail and dangerous, bookish and violent, sitting in the passenger seat of Jack’s truck.

They took the main road north and Jack opened the throttle on the truck all the way and they careened around the caravans of huge haulers, finding long stretches of empty road in between those nodes of relative safety. Nils’s head was swiveling about, checking the bluffs that rose on each side of the ancient river in which the road had been built. Nestor could understand the paranoia, as the bluffs seemed to crawl the moment you looked away and yet be abandoned the moment you looked back, a sense of impending attack prevailing. Despite the paranoia rampant inside the cab, no bandits rode over the crests of the bluffs, no traps were sprung upon the road, and the only genuine danger was from Jack’s insane driving. Nestor dozed as they drove, and a few minutes later, he was fast asleep.

The truck awakened him by slowing to a stop. As he sat forward to peer through the front windows, he could see a line of five trucks and rovers, parked sideways in two rows across the road to barricade it, several armed men standing in front.

Nestor moved up to crouch between the two men in the truck cab, who were conversing using confidential tones in Chrysean. Nils was the first to look at him and instantly looked away, seeming to dismiss him entirely. Jack saw him then and upon meeting his eyes, Nestor spoke first.

“We bein’ robbed?”

“Naw. This here’s the caravan we lookin’ for. They were kind enough to pull off once I ast ‘em nicely.”

Nils said something out of the side of his mouth that made Jack grin.

“What are we gonna do against that many men with guns, Jack? We got one gun between the three of us.”

Nils seemed to respond to this, too, though still in Chrysean and still not acknowledging Nestor. Nestor spun on him, “Look, if you understand what I’m sayin’ you could jes talk in my language. Or is there some big secret you’re keepin’?”

Nils looked Nestor up and down and bounced his shoulders in a small shrug, responding in clear Tharsian, “I keep no secrets.”

“Seem to be talkin’ my language jes fine now,” Nestor mumbled. Nils shook his head faintly and went back to studying the line of men pacing forward towards their truck.

Jack was staring ahead as well, “Look, Nestor, jes go on back to the sleeper for now, OK? Nils and me got this handled.”

Nestor looked at Jack for a moment, but Jack just stared at the men. Nestor looked back out the window, counting seven prospective combatants, who had now formed a rough semicircle encompassing the front of the truck. The truck’s coms system crackled with static for a moment, then a voice came over in Chrysean. It had the tone of a command. Jack and Nils looked at each other, seeming to psychically communicate for a moment prior to Jack keying the coms and responding. No one moved.

The voice came back over the coms, this time dripping with impatience. One man had detached from the semicircle and was walking with an air of importance towards Jack’s door. Jack and Nils reached down to grab their helmets, Nils placing his gun on the floor between the back of his seat and the sleeper. Nestor took this as a signal to put on his helmet as well. He went back to the sleeper to grab it, and by the time he had it seated, the man outside was pounding on Jack’s driver’s side door. Nestor considered leaning forward into the cab again, to see what was happening, but decided against it when Nils glared back at him in a clear signal to stay where he was.

Jack had turned to face the door, and Nils faced that direction as well, their hands in the air as the truck cab depressurized, and Jack reached tentatively forward to open his door once the air had cycled out. No instructions were broadcast over Nestor’s coms, but clearly Jack had been commanded to disembark, as he leaned forward out of the door and disappeared from view. Nils was still leaning forward as well, hands in the air and body a live wire, his focus on the man on the other side of the opening.

Several moments passed with Nestor staring at Nils, Nils staring out the door, while imperceptibly reaching his hand down towards the hidden gun. Abruptly Nils dove towards the sleeper, a line of holes drawing across the front windows where he’d just been standing, and for a moment Nestor puzzled at what they could be, and what the loud popping noise echoing into the cab from outside must be as well. Then Nils had his gun up, and braced himself against the driver’s seat, using it for support as he fired burst after burst out the open door. He ran out of ammunition and dropped into the passenger seat, kicking his feet to push the shattered window up and out of the cab, while feeding bullets one-by-one from his bandolier into the gun. Gunfire from outside was constant, a rain of windshield shards flying throughout the air all around them. Nestor lay flat on the bed, trying to crane up to see through the gaping hole where the window had just been, yet saw nothing.

Then Nils had his gun reloaded, and he came up over the dash, propping his elbows on the windowsill and leaning against it aggressively to steady himself, firing bursts down over the hood, pivoting for a new target, firing more bursts, and then he was out of ammo again and dropped back down to shield himself while he reloaded. Nestor watched him reloading and became aware that the only noise was the blood pumping in his ears. No more gunfire. He lifted himself up to look out the windshield, but could see only the blockading vehicles. Nils popped back up and swiveled, not firing. He swiveled back, then leaned over and slid like liquid out the open driver’s door. Nestor sat in the sleeper for a while, waiting for some resumption of violence, but only heard the occasional pop of single shots outside. Then nothing. He pushed open the sleeper cab access door and decanted himself, afraid to move too far from the truck lest he need to dive back in to safety.

A body lay on the ground by the open driver’s door, wearing the exosuit of the man who’d been giving commands. There were two more laid before the truck, but of the remaining four attackers, Nestor saw no sign. He crept forward, taking a moment to look down at the dead man by the driver’s door and upon seeing the shattered and bloody faceplate, he wished to examine the body no further. He paused at the front corner of the truck and he looked all around and he still saw no other person, living or dead or crossing the liminal space between.

Nestor detached from the truck and dashed the few meters of road to the first of the barricading vehicles, an off-road rover, avoiding looking at the two motionless bodies as he passed. The door to the rover stood open, and he peered inside and he saw nothing but baggage. He turned and walked to the next rover to his right, this one a larger four-door variety, which had the entire front windshield broken out. One of the missing barricaders lay in the front, his face obliterated, body draped over the steering wheel, spent rifle laying in his lap. Nestor avoided the body and opened the back door of the rover instead and found nothing there.

He stood up and was looking over the roof at the third, most distant of the first row of vehicles, weighing whether he wanted to bother walking over to it, given that all its doors stood open and there was nothing inside from his vantage, when Jack walked up to his side from the second row of larger trucks.

Jack’s voice came over the coms, “They all dealt with, Nestor. And there ain’t no baby here.”

“You checked everwhere?”

Jack stared granite at him, not deigning to respond.

“I thought Nils said this was the one.”

“Guess he was wrong.”

“So, what did you kill these people for?”

Jack looked at Nestor through his helmet faceplate. “Because they’d’ve kilt me first. Kilt all us. Besides, Nils did most the killin’. Yer welcome to try askin’ him what he did it for.”

“Cain’t you jest have told ‘em this was all a big mistake?”

Jack shook his head and looked down and resumed walking, passing by Nestor with no further comment. Nestor peered after him and then followed. He caught Jack up at the truck, and Jack was already up on the first step on the driver’s side and had reached in to pull out sundries and toss them on the dusty blacktop at Nestor’s feet.

“Go on, get back in the sleeper and get whatever you wanna take. We need to be out of here.”

“We leavin’ the truck?”

“Truck’s dead, Nestor. But that big truck over yonder’ll serve us jest fine to get goin’. Don’t look like it took no damage.”

Nestor looked over to the new truck and noted that Nils had materialized next to it and was already tossing a few purloined articles into the cab. His gun seemed to have been replaced with another, smaller weapon of which Nestor could only guess at the provenance. Nestor walked back to the sleeper of Jack’s truck and stepped up and looked in, wondering if there was truly anything left in this world that he’d wish to take with him. If there was anything that he felt was his.

Jack appeared by his leg, tapping it firmly and crackling over the coms, “What you doin’, Nestor? There anything you wanna take or not? We got to get goin’ before someone comes along.”

Almost as if he’d bidden it to happen, a road caravan came upon them from the south, a low bass whirr preceding the huge leading four-car road train as it engine-braked to a stop behind Jack’s former truck. At the noise, Nestor came out of his trance and then raced Jack, who was carrying his few meager possessions in a pair of canvas bags upon his right shoulder, to their new transportation.

By the time they arrived, Nils was already at the wheel, and had backed the truck around in a reversing turn, pointing the nose in their future direction of travel. He merely paused before he began crawling forward, leaving Nestor and Jack no choice but to run alongside before leaping up onto the steps on the passenger side. Nils floored it before both of Nestor’s feet had left the ground, and sped away north along the road, leaving the destruction in their wake for the innocent bystanders to reckon with.

Chapter 5 - The Last Tribe of Men

Author’s Note:

Valles Marineris, what I call in this book either “the Mariner Valley” or just plainly “the Valley” is the deepest canyon in our solar system. In places it is ten kilometers deep, which is similar to the depth of the Mariana Trench here on Earth. It is over one hundred kilometers wide along practically its entire distance, a distance which is roughly equivalent to the distance from New York to Los Angeles. On a planet with a very thin atmosphere, one that you’re trying, via liberal application of engineering, to thicken to Earth pressures and raise to Earth temperatures, a canyon with those starting characteristics is the ideal place to start. For any realistic colonization of Mars, Valles Marineris is “the good land”, and the best property overall.

A rational first step in colonizing a planet like Mars would be to use domes. The idea of a dome is to have a nice little self-contained Earth that you bring with you and plop down wherever you’re going. Nothing escapes the dome - you have plants, ideally ones you can eat, that recycle the air and you bring a soil biome that maintains the nitrogen cycle and the dome lets through sunlight and can even provide a considerable amount of warming via the greenhouse effect. It’s really a perfect idea. But it hinges on one simple precept - nothing can ever escape the dome, and really, nothing should ever enter the dome. All of those cycles that you depend upon to run automatically in the background, they can’t really bear drastic changes in inputs or outputs or in the contexts within which they run. Any small change can produce cascading failures that arise down the line from that.

I think any civilization attempting to colonize another planet via dome would inevitably run into this central problem of isolation. I think there are many rational responses to this problem, but the easiest and cruelest, and therefore most obvious solution that people might fall upon, is to draft religion to the cause. After all, life in a dome, when things are working, is pretty much guaranteed to be better than practically any other option on the planet. You could live in a stark habitation module, basically a tube with windows. You could dig deep caves. You could try to live on the surface, wear a spacesuit everywhere, passing between tightly-sealed homes. Or you can live pretty much like we do on Earth, possibly even an idealized version of such, with lots of space for crops and sturdy, cozy farmhouses and kids running and playing in the mud. Living in a dome is going to look like heaven.

It is a small thing to say “hey, look - God gave you heaven here on Mars. But He wants you to maintain it.” This is an innocent request, a reasonable one. A Noble Deed. Except the reality of the request is that you cannot leave. You can’t bring stuff in. Any change to the system must be compensated for. And, once you have people thinking that way, then it’s easy to isolate them further. Those outside the domes don’t deserve our outputs and can’t be allowed inside because they aren’t like us. They’re worse. Of course, Us and Them is a constantly shrinking circle around Us, and as it becomes smaller, the atrocities we’re willing to visit upon Them become all the greater.

Nestor sat at the long brown table surrounded by a battalion of Eagan’s children, ranging across the full spectrum of childhood. A few looked even older than he was. They had lined up elbow-to-elbow about a table laden with mounds of food, with green vegetables that Nestor had not before seen and diverse piles of meat and bread and pastries and fruits. More food than he could remember seeing. The only sounds in the room were of people eating and wheezing, for every resident of this house wheezed a bit when they breathed, and for a few it was loud and labored, like they were breathing smoke. Eagan sat at the head of the table, buttressed across the expanse of false wood by his wife Ester, a brittle-looking woman matching Eagan’s age but with much grayer hair and a face chiseled through with dourness.

Around the table floated a triumvirate of women serving food and drink, who attended to the younger children’s messes and took away emptied plates. All three serving women were pretty, roughly the same age as Nestor himself, and one of them was in the advanced stages of her pregnancy and waddled about the table with her back arched to keep her distended belly’s weight more evenly over her center. Eagan had introduced all the other members of the household in a litany of names, of which Nestor could remember none, but had not introduced the pretty servant-women at all, and seemed to avoid acknowledging their very presence.

He was watching the pregnant one clean the face of a young boy who had somehow doused himself with gravy when Eagan spoke. Nestor turned to look at Eagan and found that his host was speaking to Ester at volume across the table, telling her the same story Nestor had told him on their way in:

“Nestor here is a terrafarmer, from up on the Thaumasia Highlands. Headed in to Mensa, to finish up his studies to be a shuttle pilot.”

Nestor nodded and tried to remember all the details of his on-the-fly lie from earlier, “Yessir. We’re hydrofarmers up there, but I always jes dreamed of bein’ a shuttle pilot instead.”

Ester nodded sagely at him, her face still stone. Eagan seemed to not be paying attention, and was instead looking meaningfully up and down the ranks of his children.

“Leaving the family farm to go fly ice shuttles instead, eh? Pardon my bluntness, but that don’t seem to honor your father’s efforts very much,” he said, ostensibly directed at Nestor, though his attention was still very much on his children.

Nestor, unsure how to respond, sat in silence. This seemed to draw Eagan’s attention, as the older man now looked directly at him, bushy eyebrows raised in question.

“Don’t you think such a thing is important? He surely worked long and hard, and sacrificed much to carve out a stake for his family, and to have his son leave like that…don’t you think he finds that disrespectful?”

“Well, sir, like I said, my daddy’s died, which is why I went back. To attend to matters of his estate.”

Now Ester spoke from his other side, “He died with his son far away, having abandoned his legacy? Oh, what a horrible shame.”

All eyes around the table were now fixed on Nestor, pinning him to his seat and demanding an accounting of his morals.

Never one to be quick with a lie, Nestor faltered, “I…uh…well, ma’am,” he turned from Ester and faced Eagan, “…sir…I don’t know if he saw it that same way. In any instance, he always encouraged me.” Nestor shrugged the last few words out, hoping his desultory gesture would help to sell the falsehood.

“Well, no parent wishes to squash their children’s dreams, young man. I suppose he did encourage you. But I’m willin’ to bet seein’ you leave like that wounded him all the same,” Eagan remonstrated, leaning back in his chair and folding his hands upon his stomach.

“I surely hope I didn’t hurt him, sir,” was all Nestor could think to respond, which seemed to do little to help his cause with the audience around the table, as all eyes shot back to Eagan.

“I’m sure you do hope for that, son. But the Lord knows the truth of the matter. The real truth of it. I’m certain if you pray on it, He’ll show you the proper path forward from here, too.”

Heads around the table were nodding in agreement that this was the best course of action. He worked his mouth around several aborted responses, his cheeks pits of fire upon his face, before settling on meekly apologizing, “I’m afraid we don’t have much religion where I’m from, sir. Cain’t say I’ve ever prayed on…well, on anythin’.”

Eagan leaned forward now, “Not surprising, and I’m sorry to say it. There ain’t many left that know the ways of the Lord. Folk everywhere in this world choose to live lives of sin, not knowing all that the Lord has for ‘em if they just follow the path He has laid out for ‘em.”

“I don’t follow, sir. What path are you talkin’ about? Prayin’?”

“Well, praying is part of it. Knowing his words and his deeds as laid out in the Good Book is another. But mostly it’s about livin’ a proper life. Rebuilding his garden here anew.”

“You said that a few times, now, sir. Are these domes the garden you’re talkin’ about? God has helped you grow plants on the surface in ‘em?”

Nestor had been dying to ask more about the domes ever since Eagan had pulled through the airlock into this one. The huge, clear structure was many kilometers across and soared high above the Valley floor, which was reason enough for awe, but what had captivated Nestor on the way in were the row upon row of green plants growing throughout, interlaced with thin gravel roads leading to freestanding houses, of which the Maries’s was one. He’d not seen real plants before of any kind, and he desperately wished to understand how they’d come to be in this place.

“You truly don’t have religion, do you? Son, Eden’s Garden is much more than just domes and crops. Though they are very much part of it. But you do speak truth, in your ignorance. It has only been through Him that these things have been made possible.”

Nestor was unsure how to respond and sat again in silence while Eagan looked at him and seemed to size up some quality of his.

“I wonder if your ignorance in all this ain’t the reason He sent you to us.”

“What’s that, sir? What would God want me to come here for?”

“The Lord often directs his wayward children towards those who can best help. Maybe he saw how far from his path you’ve strayed, but felt like you could be saved, and that’s why he caused you to become lost, and that’s why he sent a sandstorm to waylay you until I could find you. Maybe he intends for you to learn his ways from us, his last tribe of men.”

“What does any of that mean? His ways? You mean growin’ crops? And how can you be the last tribe of man? There’s lots of folks alive all over this world.”

“We are the Lord’s last tribe, son. He punished the rest of mankind for their many sins, but he spared us. The angel Gabriel intervened during the Lord’s Apocalypse on Earth, and convinced the Lord to allow us to travel here, to Mars, to try again anew. We’re his last tribe, the last of the true sons and daughters of Adam, and our salvation came when we recreated the Lord’s Garden, the Garden of Eden itself, here on this terrible world.”

“But the rest of the folks here on Mars,” Nestor asked, cocking his eyebrow at Eagan across the table, “were we spared too?”

“Everyone else has moved away from Him, everyone but us. That they cohabitate this world with us does not make them of our kind and does not extend the Lord’s covenant to them. They are no longer mankind, they are something else. They fail in their efforts at terraforming this world and will continue to do so until they accept the Lord’s word into their hearts. Until they join with us in recreating the Garden, and earn back their humanity.”

“Yer sayin’ God is punishin’ us? And he don’t punish you?”

“Exactly that, son, yes. We prosper in our domes. We grow food, real food, when everyone else has failed. Our children don’t die of horrible diseases like they do elsewhere, and we live long, happy lives here. Can you say the same for the Tharsians? The Chryseans? The Hellians? No. They all reject the covenant we’ve broached with the Lord. They all disdain the humanity He offers them, and they deserve their fates.”

Eagan seemed to work himself up as he spoke, and Nestor watched the older man gesticulate before him and leaned back in his chair. He sat for some time after Eagan finished, still unsure how to respond.

Finally, he offered, “Well, sir, I do have to say I never seen as much food as you all have here, nor plants nor domes such as these. So might be yer on to somethin’. But I ain’t never heard of no Apocalypse and I ain’t never heard of any sort of covenant with God to reject. I jes don’t understand why he’d punish folks for somethin’ they didn’t even know about.”

“The Lord asks that you help yourself, son. He doesn’t need to make you aware of his rules. It’s your responsibility to know them all the same. Just like you cannot steal and then claim ignorance of the law against theft as your defense, you cannot claim ignorance of the Lord’s covenant as defense for your sins.”

Nestor shook his head and tried to reason through what Eagan was saying to him, “I jes don’t know how I’m supposed to have known any of this, sir,” he finally responded, while Eagan gazed upon him with holy beneficence.

“You’d learn it by living a righteous life. Every child sitting at this table knows about our covenant and how they contribute towards it in the eyes of the Lord. Every person in this dome and every other Edenite dome in all this Great Valley knows as well. It is only the outsiders who are blind to it. Do you wish to remain an outsider, or do you wish to know as well? Are you human or are you less-than?”

“Sir, it shore does sound interestin’, but I cain’t stay here. I do have to be movin’ on. Which, speakin’ of, when can you all take me on to Mensa? Is it too late to go tonight?”

“No, no…we cain’t make it to Mensa tonight, son. We all have work in the fields tomorrow, enough to last us a couple days at least. It wouldn’t be fair to leave the boys here to do all the work themselves. Besides,” he squinted down the table at his two eldest sons, “they won’t get nothin’ done if I’m not here to watch over ‘em.”

The boys were shaking their heads, opening their mouths to protest, but at a stern look from Eagan, they said nothing.

“Of course,” Eagan continued before anyone else could speak, “an extra pair of hands in the field will get us done all the quicker, if you’re interested.”

Nestor bit back his anger and frustration, staring at the now-bare brown table in front of him, measuring the grain of the fake wood for a few moments while he collected himself.

“That’s not what we agreed to at all, Eagan. You made it seem out in the dunes like we could figure somethin’ out while we ate, and now I’m here and yer tellin’ me I cain’t get to town for at least a couple days? I cain’t help you in no fields. I don’t know nothin’ about growing food. I work on machinery back home, sir.”

Eagan smiled a beneficent smile, “I know what we agreed upon, son. But I never did say I’d take you anywheres tonight. If I’m to drive you to Mensa, that’ll take the better part of a day. We should call it a whole day, because I gotta come back, too. Which is lost labor, wear on my skimmer…all of which costs. Don’t you think it’s fair for me to be made whole? Surely, I shouldn’t be put out all that just to give you a ride?”

“I thought you salvaged my range truck as payment?”

“There wasn’t hardly anything worth salvagin’ on that truck, son. Some computer hardware for us to recycle. The lead radiation shielding is worth something, maybe the batteries, though they’re plenty old. I’m sorry to say, but that truck was barely worth our time spent salvagin’ it. Plus, this food you ate here is another burden on this whole family.”

“So yer gonna keep me here, and make me work off some sort of debt you jes made up?” Nestor’s head swam with déjà vu, “like some sort of captive?”

“You’re free to leave whenever you’d like, son. You have your old envirosuit, with a few dead batteries. You are welcome to go face the dust and the desolation outside the doors of this dome whenever you would like. No one is keeping you. But if you wish for me to help you, then I need some help in return. I promise you, as a man of God, that I will take you to Mensa, just as soon as I’m able. Just as soon as I’m made whole for my end of things. If you know machinery, it might could be pretty darn useful around here. We have a horrible time with our irrigation pumps. Keepin’ ‘em running. I’m sure you could help with that, if nothin’ else.”

*****

After dinner, Eagan escorted Nestor out to the barn next to the Maries’ house, which he proclaimed was to serve as Nestor’s lodgings for the night. Nestor held his envirosuit bunched up in his arms and watched while Eagan grabbed one of the thick metal handles on the main barn door and slowly trundled it open. Nestor looked inside the building to see several other men already there, men who had not been at the evening’s dinner table, and who were at work cooking their own dinner in a pot in the corner of the singular barn room, and who seemed very disinterested in their new visitor.

Eagan seemed unconcerned with personally introducing him to the others, and shouted to the room at large that this was Nestor, and he would stay with them for a while. Few in the barn seemed to hear, and all turned their backs on the boy and returned to their tasks as soon as Eagan exited. Nestor walked forward and held out his hand in greeting to the man nearest him, but that man just stared blankly back before turning away to attend to his bed. Nestor stood self-consciously for a moment watching the man dress a small folding cot and then looked around the room, counting the other remaining cots set up lackadaisically between the boxes and crates and machinery otherwise occupying the barn. He counted one cot for every man, and could see no more. He wondered silently where his own cot was, or if he was going to be expected to sleep on the floor as an ultimate insult to his difficult day.

He noticed a man staring at him from the corner, who was wearing only the pants from an envirosuit and a jumpsuit underneath. The man looked to be perhaps a few years older than Nestor, with dark skin and hair, and he towered over the other men in this place. Nestor nodded to this potential comrade, and the man broke from his leaning support of the wall to walk over to stand before Nestor and offer a hand to shake.

Nestor shook the man’s hand, “Howdy.”

The man firmly shook once, “Hello there.”

“Nestor Creede. Nice to meet you.”

“Jack Patel. Nice to meet you, too, Nestor,” he looked at the strange boy in front of him with a certain cautious amusement.

“Say, any idea where a guy could get a cot?” Nestor squeaked, a deferential tone in his voice.

Jack leaned back against a crate on his hands. He squinted at Nestor for a moment, then said, “Cot? Nah, there’s no extra cots around here. You might could sleep up in the loft. They’s some old blankets up there.” Jack gestured with his chin towards the ladder dead-center in the room, which led up to the partial second floor of the barn.

Nestor followed his glance, “That where you sleep?”

Jack shook his head and pointed to a cot and chest wedged between two pieces of machinery, “My cot’s over yonder.”

Nestor looked up at the loft and then looked all around the room again, before bringing his eyes back to rest upon Jack, “You all live in here? Why don’t you have rooms in the house?”

“House is for the family,” Jack replied with a shrug.

Nestor looked Jack up and down, “You ain’t family?”

Jack shook his head, but said nothing else.

“What are you, then? Because if I can be honest, you don’t look much like the rest of the people here.”

“Well, yer right that I’m no Edenite. Wouldn’t want anyone to make that mistake,” Jack smiled hugely at Nestor, “I’m Chrysean, originally from Aram. Ever heard of either of those places?”

Nestor shook his head, “I’ve heard of Chryse, but never heard of that other place.”

“Aram’s on the far eastern edge of the Mariner Valley. It’s a great crater that filled with water back in ancient times. The water left behind a chaos of mesas, and the original Aramaen settlers excavated those mesas. Used the drainages between them as city streets. Aram is one of the only open-air cities on Mars. You never heard any of that before?”

Nestor shook his head again, “I don’t think so, but I been out of school for a while. Maybe I did learn it and forgot.”

It was Jack’s opportunity to look him up and down, now, “You been out of school for a while? How old are you, Nestor?”

Nestor told him the same lie he’d told the Edenites, “I’m ten. I know I look young. But I’m already a year into my studies to be a shuttle pilot.”

“That so? How’d you come to be here, Nestor? This place is about as far from any pilot school as you can get, I imagine,” Jack said, looking theatrically around the inside of the barn.

“I had to head back home to the Sinai Plains to take care of my pa. He was dyin’ and I wanted to be with him in his last moments. After he died, I was drivin’ back and got caught in a helluva sandstorm. These folks rescued me.”

Jack looked at him for an uncomfortable several moments, “Bet they stole your truck, too? Claimed it as salvage?”

Nestor blinked, “How did you know?”

Jack smiled a knowing smile at Nestor and shook his head, “They do that all the time. Claim outsider’s vehicles as salvage. They done it to me, too, ‘cept I wasn’t broke down, I was jes parkin’ for the night.”

“How in the world did they justify that? They claim it as salvage with you in it?”

“Outsiders ain’t people to ‘em, is how. They come out to my truck and knocked on my door while I was fixin’ dinner. Tol me I couldn’t stop there, and tol me they couldn’t let me drive on the roads at night neither. Said it was unsafe to be out. Offered me a meal and a bed in they dome, which I took ‘em up on. Then, next morning when I went to recover my truck, they tol me they’d confiscated it as salvage.”

“When was this?”

“’Bout a year ago, now. Wasn’t even at this dome, neither. They sold me couple months in, to Eagan.”

“Yer tellin’ me they made you a slave?”

Jack nodded, with a gleam in his eyes, and said nothing else.

“How can they get away with somethin’ like that?”

“Who’d stop ‘em? They whole economy runs on slaves and on kids. Which is in a lot of ways better’n slaves. Surely you noticed how many kids Eagan’s got…”

“What about the authorities? In Tharsis, or in Chryse? Cain’t they do somethin’ to help?”

“No authorities want to deal with these people. They cain’t even get in these domes if the Edenites don’t want ‘em in here.”

“So they jes made you a slave, and you didn’t do nothin’ about it? Jes stayed and worked?” Nestor heard a couple of snorts from the other occupants of the room, who had been overhearing their conversation. He looked around to see who it had been, but all eyes were on other tasks.

“Where am I gonna go? Where are any of us gonna go? We walk out those doors and it’s a thousand kilometers before you find someone who ain’t an Edenite. Or at least, to find one who would be interested in rescuin’ an Edenite slave. Walkin’ out of these places is either death or bein’ brought back. It’s why they don’t have none of us chained, and why the door yonder is unlocked. This whole damn dome is a prison, and we jes inmates within it, and those like Eagan are the guards and wardens.”

Nestor felt a sense of self-important justice as he replied, “When Eagan takes me to Melas in a few days, I’m gonna find someone who can come out here and fix this. Ain’t right to have slaves, no matter how much your economy depends on it.”

There were more snorts and a few suppressed chuckles about the room as Nestor said this, and he looked around again, puzzled at the faces that were now staring incredulously back at him. Finally, Jack leaned forward with a devilish grin and said, “What makes you think you ain’t a slave too?”

*****

Nestor set up a nest of blankets in the barn loft that night, and found a place for his meager sundries, and he lay in that pile of ratty cloth and pressed his eyes closed. But sleep would not come in this strange place. His mind raced as he replayed the night’s dinner, the bright faces all pointed towards him, hanging on every word, the food which even now strained his belly, and what Jack had said to him, but mostly he lay there thinking about what to do next. He knew Jack was right about some elements of his situation, namely that he had no transport, no money, and no idea of where to go. He’d been on the run for only a few days, but as he laid in this strange barn in the dark and listened to the men below him snore, it felt to him he’d been running much longer, and if he left this place would continue to do so forever, never tarrying, finding no solace in all this windswept world.

He nevertheless convinced himself to confront Eagan about Jack’s assertions and to question his prospective captor closely about his status in this place. By the time the sun’s rays came streaking through the cracks in the barn’s wallboards, Nestor had prepared all his arguments to the finest detail and had argued them inside the confines of his head innumerable times, each time with great merit, and was feeling quite confident that he would be no slave in this place. He would be different. He would argue for his freedom and be granted it by virtue. Assuming Jack hadn’t been lying to him entirely.

He climbed down from the loft and demurred eating any of the porridge the men offered him for breakfast and marched out the main doors and left them open for all to bear witness to his impending rhetorical success. He walked up to the house, and he knocked on the door and the pregnant serving-girl from the night before answered, wearing a thin housedress that clung to her extended belly and supple breasts like film, stretched nearly translucent. She noticed Nestor staring, and she reached and grabbed a housecoat from a hook by the door and covered herself with it, smiling an embarrassed sort of smile while she beckoned him inside.

Nestor looked at his shoes, “Morning, ma’am. I come over to talk to Eagan. Is he up and about yet?”

“Oh. Well, I believe just about everone’s up, just waiting for breakfast. You might could find them in the dining-room,” she turned from him with an air of dismissal and moved towards the back of the house.

“Eagan didn’t introduce us last night. I’m Nestor,” Nestor called out to her receding back.

The girl looked over her shoulder, a thin smile upon her lips, “Eagan didn’t introduce us because he don’t need to introduce us. But it’s nice to make your acquaintance, Nestor. I’m Asa.”

Nestor jogged a couple of steps to catch up with her, “It’s nice to meet you, too, Asa. Why don’t he need to introduce us? You’re a member of the family too, ain’t you? He introduced everone else that’s in his family.”

Asa stopped and looked at Nestor, stretching her back a bit as she did so, “Well, it’s complicated. I really ain’t a member of Eagan’s family, no. Menfolk call girls like me ‘fillies’. But we do stay in the house and take our meals with the same food as the family, if not at the same table. So I guess there’s that.”

“You a kind of servant?”

“I keep the house and cook and serve the meals, sure. But I ain’t exactly a servant, neither.”

“I don’t understand,” Nestor shook his head, trying to reason out the riddles that Asa seemed dead-set on telling.

“I ‘spose you don’t. You’re an outsider to us, Nestor. It ain’t your place to understand,” Asa turned and began walking again towards the back of the house.

Nestor followed her, choosing to ignore her dismissal once again, “Well, I think it’s cruel to make a girl as preg-…as… as you do all the work I seen you do last night. Is there anythin’ I can do to help you out?”

Asa grinned at him as they passed into the kitchen, where the two other ‘fillies’ were busy cooking strips of bacon and mounds of pancakes. “Oh, I like keepin’ busy. What you can do for me is let me get back to it. You’ll be helpin’ out plenty. Trust in that, Nestor.” With that, Asa shoved Nestor gently back out of the kitchen and closed the door in his face.

He turned and walked to the dining room, and Eagan saw him darkening that door and excused himself from his cup of coffee and backed Nestor out of the room and closed the dining-room door behind them and looked domineeringly at his charge, “What you need, Nestor? Them boys out in the barn not offer you anything to eat?”

Nestor shook his head perfunctorily and jumped right into his opening arguments, “Nah, I wanted to come talk to you. I’m wonderin’ about the terms of our arrangement.”

Eagan nodded and looked at the boy with a half-smile and replied, “Our arrangement?”

“About you takin’ me to Melas. About me payin’ you back fer what you out.”

“Ok,” Eagan responded with a deliberate tone, “I thought we understood each other just fine last night, but what questions you got?”

“I’m wonderin’ if there’s an amount or a tally or somethin’ to help me know when I’ve got you paid back.”

Eagan shook his head and with the same slow manner as before responded, “No, there’s no ledger book, or what have you, trackin’ anything like that. I’ll keep track, up here,” he tapped his temple twice with his index finger.

“I’m jes to take it on faith, then? How will I know when I’m paid up and can leave?”

“We all take the whole world on faith, Nestor. This ain’t no different. I’ll let you know when you’s paid up. But you ain’t done a lick of work yet, son, so how’s about we focus on getting some work done…any work done, really…before we talk about you bein’ square with me?”

Nestor had other arguments prepared, but Eagan’s nonchalant approach to his young captive so angered the boy that he bluntly blurted out, “Am I a slave, Eagan? Do you think you own me now?”

Eagan cocked his head and stared at Nestor for a long time and finally responded, “You ain’t no slave, boy. Who been tellin’ you that? One of them boys out in the barn?”

Nestor didn’t respond, for in that moment he felt danger radiating from his host in waves and instinctively knew that offering Jack’s name carried unforeseeable implications. Eagan didn’t wait long for a response and his face reddened as he continued, “Well, fine. Don’t tell me then. Whoever said that to you didn’t give you the whole story, Nestor. It’s our custom to ask strangers to work to repay their debts. We don’t really use money, you see. Not the way you’re used to, at least. It does get tricky, with those who owe us bigger debts, because we take on a certain amount of cost to keep ‘em fed and clothed and sheltered. Some folk never do get clear of their debt. But most do, eventually. A couple of them boys out there have been clear of any debt to me for years, and they choose to stay on even now they are clear. You understand? I ain’t holding no one captive and I ain’t got no slaves, nor would I accept one if one were offered to me.”

Nestor scrunched up his face in confusion and asked, “You mean some of them men are free and they still stay out there in the barn? Why?”

“Everyone don’t have a home, son. Nor a place to go back to. Nor a way to get there. And what would they do if I took ‘em into a city and just left ‘em there? Call it whatever you want, but a lot of folk would much rather stay and work for me and live in my barn and eat my good food than sleep rough on the streets of some hole in the ground eatin’ whatever passes for food in those places.”

Nestor felt a sting as Eagan uncovered his deeper angst and looked down at his feet for several moments while he tried to compose himself or mount some new rhetorical charge, but he felt so deflated nothing came to mind. Eagan seemed to lose patience with him and leaned down to put himself in Nestor’s view line and drew his gaze and asked, much like a disappointed father, “Can I go back to my coffee, now? We got ourselves a busy day and we need to get ready for it. Seems to me you got some reckoning to do with your situation.”

Nestor did not reply and after only a couple more moments of his silent stare, the older man spun on his heel and walked back into the dining room with nothing further said.

*****

Days so similar they ran together into one shared memory followed, days of ceaseless manual labor where the passage of time was only marked by meals taken and work performed, where both meal and labor consisted from day to day of so little variation that past, present, and future were indistinguishable. Nestor found the work novel, and he found he quite liked the open-feeling environs within the dome, and he formed a quick friendship with Jack, and he felt guilt towards all matters equally.

The other laborers in Eagan’s indenture were not at all friendly to Nestor, nor to their companions in this place, with the only exception being a man known to all as Old Nate. Old Nate was so aged that little manual labor was requested of him, but he seemed to serve duty as a sort of elder slave statesman and go-between of Eagan’s, and in this role he shone. Old Nate looked to be composed of little more than bones, and preferred to sit cross-legged upon a large box in the barn that Nestor never once witnessed him ascend, but which served adequately as a lectern from which he could dispense his wisdom.

One evening, after a day spent coercing a belligerent person-sized ‘automatic’ tiller through a barren field, Nestor fell to sit beside the cookstove within the barn, and with exhaustion questioned Jack why the Edenites didn’t use some other form of technology for the task. He’d been at it all day, and had at least another day of tilling waiting for him, and could not grasp at all why a person was necessary for this job and not a robot of sorts. Or at least a larger piece of machinery that could be sat inside and driven.

Jack smiled at Nestor and shook his head and shrugged, “Don’t know where they’d get such a thing, personally. These people don’t really manufacture stuff. They’re farmers. The only ones, really.”

“No one else lives in domes like this?”

Old Nate interjected from his station above them, “There are others, but not many. Mostly lowland countries. Hellas uses some domes to grow food, and Isidis too. But these domes ain’t ‘xactly reliable. They fail pretty regular.”

“Fail?” Nestor asked the old bald head protruding over the edge of the box and gazing down upon him.

“Yup. Seen more’n a few of these domes fail in my time. Usually when that happens, everone inside dies. No other domes’ll want to take ‘em on. Fair amount of superstition about that. Plus, it’s a drain on resources wherever they go.”

“How does a dome fail? Why cain’t they jes fix whatever goes wrong and recover?”

“They fail lots of ways. I seen soil go bad in some. Couldn’t grow nothin in it. Storms’ll sometimes cause domes to crack and leak air. Sometimes crops jes won’t produce. No one really knows why.”

Jack piped in, looking back and forth between Nestor and Old Nate, “Worryin’ about tryin’ to recover is why they don’t trade much. Ever one of these domes is jes full of folks who are deathly afraid of a failure, and are stockpilin’ their food to wait one out. Cain’t hardly get ‘em to even trade for water ice.”

Old Nate nodded, “It’s sacrilege to trade foods. And that’s why. A man trading food for anything else is givin’ away his family’s chance of survival during a failure, for somethin’ he likely needs less.”

“Plus, they’d rather steal any tech that comes through here,” a man sitting against the far wall offered, to a round of snickers from the others.

Old Nate smiled and nodded at that, too, “Salvage’s a heckuva resource, that much is true. Helps to motivate all the ice delivery comp’nies to offer steep discounts for leavin’ they trucks alone, too.”

The others picked up the conversation here and began speaking of all the Edenite fairytales, both witnessed and recounted, and Jack gave Nestor a hooded look and led him out of the barn to stand in the building’s foreyard. Nestor looked at Jack questioningly, and Jack leaned forward and gestured Nestor closer.

“Might want to be a bit more careful what you say around Old Nate,” Jack whispered, “you cain’t be sure that none of it’ll get back to Eagan.”

“Ain’t Old Nate in the same situation as the rest of us?”

“Old Nate’s been livin’ here longer’n any of us. Includin’ Eagan. He been here so long, whatever debt he owed was paid off ‘fore Eagan took over.”

“Eagan tol me some men here have paid off they debt,” Nestor whispered in reply, nodding his head as he spoke.

“Some? Nah. Jes Old Nate. He might could live in the house if he wanted. You should ask yerself why he’d choose to live out here with us instead.”

Nestor looked at Jack, hoping he would clarify his implication, but Jack held his gaze for a moment and straightened and turned and wandered off down the driveway into the dark.

*****

The only thing that broke the monotony of Edenite life were the sermons, which were mandatory for all. Nestor was assured by Jack and the other indentured men that the sermons occurred on a weekly basis, and Nestor agreed with this only begrudgingly, because to him they seemed much more frequent. Nestor enjoyed the sermons, even if he understood little of the settings or morals of their subjects. He enjoyed them as stories of another world, one populated with ancient people more blessed than his who, though primitive, lived a life of inconceivable abundance and comfort. It was a wonderful fantasy.

At first Nestor walked with his indentured brethren to the church, and on those first few walks he noticed that Asa and her compatriots were nowhere to be found, but were present at the sermons themselves, sequestered at the back corner of the building amongst others with whom they seemed kin. He decided they must come by covert routes, and on the next church day he feigned nausea and told the others that he’d be along shortly and waited until they disappeared down the road and watched the house through the slits in the barn wallboards to see when the bondmaids would emerge, which they did after no time at all. Asa’s compatriots were the first to leave, shouting assurances over their shoulders to Nestor’s subject herself that they would save a seat for her when they got there.

It was quite some time longer before Asa waddled forth from the house, so long that Nestor practically burst from the barn with impatience to assert himself as her willing chaperone when she finally appeared. Asa seemed to understand implicitly what the boy was about, as she responded to his sudden and awkward emergence with little more than a stern look.

“Were you waiting for me in there, Nestor?” she asked bluntly, a wry smile upon her face.

Nestor felt his cheeks redden and shook his head, neither wishing to repeat his nausea story nor acknowledge the outright truth to her. She cocked her head at Nestor while he struggled, then shook her head in apparent disbelief and forged ahead on her own, “I don’t mind the company, if you were.”

Nestor looked at his shoes and after brief moments of this, Asa tired of his timidity and began walking down the road towards the church. Nestor fell in beside her, still not daring to look at her. After a while, he muttered, just loud enough for her to hear, “Jes noticed that you all don’t get to come with everone else, is all. It didn’t feel right to go with them, and…”

He could see her staring at him from the corner of his eye as he tried and failed to put his thoughts to words. Finally she tried, with a questioning tone, “It didn’t feel right to make the pregnant girl walk by herself?”

Nestor looked up and caught her eyes and they glistened, “I do appreciate it, Nestor. You are a thoughtful young man. Even if you seem to go out of your way to avoid understandin’ how things work here.”

Nestor looked at her, but didn’t have time to annunciate any question before Asa continued, seeming to read his mind, “It’s adorable. Don’t take offense, please. You’re so earnest, and you just want to help, and that’s so special. But hun, I’m a filly. You shouldn’t feel…any of the feelin’s you have for me. You understand?”

“It ain’t romantic…” Nestor lied, but Asa raised her small hand to silence him.

“It don’t matter if it is or isn’t. Like my momma used to say - ‘young men form they intentions first and give reason to ‘em afterwards’.” She smiled at Nestor.

Nestor smiled back, and they walked in silence for some time down the road. “She around still? Your momma?”

Asa shook her head, “No, she died some time back. How about yours? She still back on the farm?”

“No, she died a long time ago, now,” Nestor stared at the verdant fields around them, bowing in the breeze blown from the dome’s giant recirculating fans held suspended high above, “was yours a…a filly too?”

Asa nodded, “She was, yeah. She come from outside, just like you, except she was just a little one when the people here found her. No one knows what happened, and she couldn’t never remember neither. They said they found her by some smoking wreckage out in the dunes, just her, her whole family burnt to a crisp in the truck they’d been in. How she ended up outside and them in…I think it had to’ve been the Lord done that.”

She was looking at Nestor meaningfully. He tried for a sage nod in response, “It would take a miracle, and another one to find her before she ran out of air.”

They walked for a short time longer and listened to their feet scrape on the gravel.

“She grew up and became a filly and then that made you a filly too? That how it works?”

“Not quite. The elders in the community decide those kinds of things, and it just ended up the way it ended up.”

“They decided for you? And for your momma too?”

“Everyone’s got a role, Nestor. And all them roles are necessary to keep our tribe thriving. Look around you. You ever seen anything like this back where you’re from?”

Nestor shook his head, “I ain’t never seen a single plant, let alone anythin’ like this.”

“That’s it. We…these people in this dome and in the other Edenite domes, we’re all of us doing things that no one else on this world is capable of, and the reason why we’re able is that we each do our role and the Lord blesses us in accordance with that.”

“It’s incredible, it truly is,” Nestor said, looking around them, the din of the pre-sermon crowd inside the church growing in volume as they approached, “but don’t you ever wonder if they got somethin’ even more wonderful someplace else? They’s a lot of planet neither of us has ever seen out there.”

Asa gave him a stern look, “No, never. That would be doubting the Lord’s blessings and I won’t do it and no one here will stand for such a thing either, you understand? In fact, a lot of folk around here would take that question as sacrilege, and would want you out. Gone. And there ain’t nothing out beyond these walls, Nestor.”

*****

Nestor bent over the pump, trying to fit the motor housing back on while the wind whipped off the dome and stirred up the fine grained sand into a miniature vortex all around him. He worked at a frantic pace to prevent any of it from blowing into the motor itself. The pump motor was a mess of purloined parts from other, better devices. Some even looked as though they originated from vehicles, and nothing seemed to fit with any sort of precision, which did not help Nestor’s anxiety. He finally seated the housing, and he tightened the screws and then he straightened himself out of his awkward bend, feeling the muscles of his back stretch and burn at being allowed to move. He craned back to take in the multiple-kilometers-wide crystalline latticework structure made of doped glass and tiny conductive wires looming up and away from him, and imagined that it must join the sky itself at the unseen vertex.

Even after all this time here, he still struggled with the scale of the Edenite domes, especially from the outside, as they looked both part of the landscape and alien, both geologic and plastic. He twisted at the waist and stretched out his muscles more and looked at the many other domes, tiny in the distance, with black lines of road snaking between them all. He quelled a fleeting thought that he could run, take off across that expanse to find his freedom out there in the dust, and test the truth of Eagan’s repeated assurance that he was no captive here, but looking out to the horizon he saw nothing but other domes, and knew that there was no salvation in this entire Valley for him.

Nestor picked up the toolbox Eagan had lent him and walked over to the small airlock set into the wall half a kilometer clockwise from him around the dome, and he passed through at this point to see Eagan waiting for him on the other side.

Eagan looked sternly at him as they met, “Get that pump fixed, Nestor?”

“Yessir. Jes a bad stator. I was able to get ‘er workin’ though, without replacin’ it.”

“You sure? We have the parts. It’s no problem.”

“It’ll hold, trust me. We did this kinda fix all the time back home.”

Eagan nodded and looked distractedly away, “Ok. That’s fine. Nice work, Nestor. Listen, you been hanging about with one of my fillies, have you not?”

Nestor tried to look Eagan in the eye, but found it impossible, as Eagan was staring at something in the distance, or maybe nothing. It was hard to tell.

“You mean Asa? Yeah, we been goin’ to sermons together ever once in a while. She moves slower, bein’ pregnant as she is, and it seems to make her feel better to have someone stay behind and walk with her.”

Eagan looked back at Nestor and met his gaze and squinted, “You cain’t be doin that, Nestor. To other folk, folk who don’t know you like I do, it looks like you two are courtin’. Which cain’t be, because she’s my filly, you understand?”

“Nossir, I don’t think I rightly do. You all ain’t married, are you?”

Eagan winced, “It ain’t ‘xactly that simple, boy. A man is allowed some fillies, beyond his marriage, his wife consenting, of course. So few children make it, it’s a man’s duty to spread his seed, and it shore is hard on women, being pregnant. We need to till di-verse fields, if you catch me.”

“Yeah, I believe I understand that. I ain’t courtin’ her, sir, and I jes don’t see why anyone would care if we go to meetin’s together. But I didn’t mean to cause no trouble, Eagan, and I can stop walkin’ her, if it’s a problem.”

Eagan nodded curtly, “Good. See that you do. Speaking of meetings, you coming to service this afternoon?”

Nestor smiled, “I wouldn’t miss it for anythin’, Eagan.”

*****

Over the weeks, Nestor and Asa had developed a sort of post-dinner habit whereby they would sit in the chairs set up alongside the far barn wall after dinner and chat about their day. On this night, he’d been sitting in his usual seat for some time before Asa arrived and had spent his time alone, staring up at the stars. The cells of the dome, designed to focus the sun’s meager light enough to raise the temperature inside the dome to acceptable levels, crazily distorted the stars, magnifying some while disappearing others, and Nestor decided in that moment that he hated how wrong it made them all look, how it broke up the whorl of the Milky Way into twisted chunks. He tried to find Phobos or Deimos, but could make nothing out through the distortion. After several minutes of silent astronomy, he heard the crunch of Asa’s heavy footsteps as she approached. She eased down next to him and sighed heavily, and said naught else.

After a few moments of peaceful companionship, Nestor looked over to her and said, “Eagan come out to talk to me this mornin’ before service. He don’t want me walkin’ you to meetin’s no more.”

Asa looked at Nestor in the dark, “He don’t? Well, he is allowed to decide that. Cain’t have folks thinking the wrong thing.”

Nestor curled his lip and looked down, “But why, though? I jes don’t understand why he’s allowed to choose what you do and what anyone does with you. It don’t seem fair.”

Asa turned and looked up at the insane stars above them and without turning away said, “I’m carryin’ his child, Nestor. I agreed to let him choose to do what he wishes when I agreed to be his.”

“Yeah, his ‘filly’. What does that word even mean? I ain’t never heard that word before comin’ here.”

“Don’t rightly know. It has somethin’ to do with horses, I think. Back on Old Earth.”

“You ever even seen a horse? I only ever heard of ‘em in real old stories.”

Asa shook her head, and thought for a moment, finally offering, “I hear one of the domes has ‘em, but I ain’t never seen ‘em.”

“So then what does it have to do with you? What makes you a filly and not Ester?”

Asa glared at him in the dark and her eyes shone and she held her finger to her mouth, “Now just you be quiet. They’s a world of difference between us. For one, she’s his wife, the mother of his children. ALL of his children, you understand? Even this babe inside me right now. She is its mother, too. I am just a field for his seed.”

“Don’t that bother you, though? You won’t get to raise your own child, be a mother?”

“It don’t bother me at all. I was born of a filly too, and both her and my mother raised me up just the same as all the other kids. That’s what’ll happen with this one, too, with Ester.”

“But what if this one’s a girl? You gonna be fine with havin’ your baby girl traded off to some man to be his filly, jes somethin’ he gets to fuck and get pregnant and don’t owe nothin’ to?”

Asa spun in her seat and in the dark he could see that her eyes were glossy with tears, and then she reached across and slapped Nestor hard.

“You watch your mouth, Nestor. Eagan provides for me, and everone else in this house, too. Just as a man should. Eagan even provides for you, ungrateful as you’re bein’. He don’t owe me nothin’ because what he owes me, he been payin’ since he took me on. And I’m lucky to have him. A lotta girls ain’t so lucky to even be fillies, and I’m grateful to be here. As should you be.”

*****

Nestor stayed sitting in that chair beside the barn for a long time after Asa waddled away to the house. Jack appeared in the fan of light cast by the open barn doors and stood there as a shadow and looked at him before sauntering over.

“Nice to be out in the open like this, ain’t it? Almost makes it feel like you livin’ in a real environment.”

Nestor shrugged and stared up at the crazy stars, and Jack dropped into the chair next to him with a groan.

“Your parents ever tell you the story of Ascraeus’s love?”

Nestor shrugged, “I think my momma use to tell it ever once in a while when I was little. Why?”

“Want to hear it again?”

Nestor shrugged again, “What for.”

“Maybe it’d help.”

“Help?”

“Yeah,” Jack directed a meaningful look at Nestor in that gloom.

“Go on then.”

Jack adopted a theatrical tone, and turned to face his young friend, “Well not many people know it, but Ascraeus is the eldest of the Tharsis Mountains, and is even older than Olympus, who himself has caused so much turmoil over the eons. This also makes Ascraeus one of the eldest mountains on the planet, surpassed in age by only old Mount Alba. In the early years of his life, Ascraeus felt quite alone. Sure, he had Alba to keep him company, but old Alba was already quite the crank, even in those days, and while Ascraeus enjoyed his presence ever once in a while, he could only take so much complaint.”

“Ascraeus took a journey to see if he could find anyone else to be his companion. Ascraeus journeyed long and far, criss-crossin’ the surface of young Mars many times, hopin’ against hope that he would find some other geology who would love him. But Mars was still quite young, and her surface was mostly flat and empty, but for Ascraeus and Alba and her primordial oceans, and so Ascraeus could find no one to be his friend.”

“Ascraeus fled the highlands and headed north, thinkin’ that perhaps at the North Pole he might meet someone. He’d never been to the North Pole before, and it seemed like just the place to meet someone new. But as he traveled north, he came upon a vast, impassable sea. The ocean Chryse. Chryse was young at this time, havin’ just been formed from the waters that settled from Mars’s early clouds, and she was curious about this huge fiery mountain that had appeared on her shores. Ascraeus called to Chryse and asked if she could part her waters for him, explainin’ to her he wished to venture to the North Pole in search of a soul mate, or at least a new friend.”

“Chryse found the huge volcano intriguin’, if fairly naïve, for while Chryse was much younger than Ascraeus, her waters touched many things and she was very wise in the ways of the world, as all oceans must be. Chryse told Ascraeus that there was nothin’ for him at the North Pole, and that her waters extended to and covered the Pole entirely. Ascraeus was crestfallen to hear this, and Chryse felt pity and empathy for him, for she often felt alone as well, and she asked him if he would like to stay awhile on her shores. Ascraeus eagerly agreed and, practically unprompted, he told her all about his journeys, and Chryse asked him many questions about them, for she liked hearin’ him speak and liked that he seemed to grow happier as he talked to her.”

“Ascraeus had never told his story to anyone, as few others in those times had bothered to ask him, nor had they even seemed to care, and he rattled on over every detail, afraid to come to the end and stop speakin’. Chryse was enthralled with his story too, and makin’ him happy made her happy, and so she let him speak. Eventually, they both noticed that Ascraeus’s huge bulk was pullin’ down the beach lands where he’d settled. Chryse warned him that, if he didn’t move soon, a depression would form there that Chryse could never fully remove her waters from. So, with great reluctance on both parts, Ascraeus left that place, and wished Chryse well.”

“Over the followin’ months Ascraeus thought more and more about Chryse. He decided he was in love with her, for no one else had ever been so interested in what he had to say, and no one else had made him feel so wanted. And so he went back to the beach where he first met her, and he proposed he would settle his bulk strategically, creatin’ a broad drainage that Chryse could safely backflow into and out of, so they could be together. Chryse could see that the young volcano had fallen caldera over slope in love with her, and while she didn’t wish to break his heart, she could not love him back, no matter how much she otherwise enjoyed his company. Chryse begged Ascraeus not to follow through with his plan, for fear that he might do all of this only to come to the truth of the matter, that she would never love him, but there is no reasonin’ with volcanoes.”

“Eventually Ascraeus was done with his works, and had created a broad alluvial plain for Chryse to flow her waters onto, and so she did. Ascraeus chose a perch on the cliffs above that plain, and from here they found they could communicate quite comfortably. But upon settlin’ on his perch, Ascraeus quickly ran out of new things to say to Chryse, and Chryse became bored of hearin’ the same stories from Ascraeus, and soon they fell into an awkward silence which made plain how big of a mistake Ascraeus’s efforts had been. Chryse grew very uncomfortable with the shallow waters of the plain, and informed Ascraeus that she needed to return to her normal basin, to stretch herself into someplace deep and cool and dark.”

“Ascraeus panicked at the thought of bein’ left alone again, and grew possessive and begged Chryse to stay, but Chryse didn’t want to lead the poor mountain on any further, and told him she was leavin’. To convince her to stay, Ascraeus explained his undyin’ love to the ocean, and demanded that she stay, or risk breakin’ his heart. Chryse told Ascraeus that sometimes a broken heart is a necessary part of life, and that he couldn’t love her, for he did not truly know her, and that once she was gone for good, he would come to his senses and be the better for the experience.”

“Ascraeus refused to hear it and explained to Chryse that volcanoes only survive through their passion. It is what keeps their magma chambers hot, and it is what allows them to rebuild those parts of themselves that wind and water wear away. He told Chryse that leavin’ him now would quell his passion and would break his heart, and then he would cool and surely die.”

“Chryse felt great sympathy for the volcano, but she explained to him she couldn’t love him, and there wasn’t nothin’ that could change that, and then she left those plains forevermore.”

“Ascraeus’s prediction came true, for her leavin’ broke his heart and cooled his vast magma chamber, and so Mount Ascraeus began to die. His lava could never again gurgle up past his caldera, and he could never again hurl pyroclastic flows down his slopes, and after many eons he eventually froze, in the place we find him today.”

“One day, far into our very own future, he will erode away, and the wind will blow all his dust into the basin that Chryse once occupied, and will make a new ocean there, composed of only Ascreaus. In this way and this way alone will he finally be able to join his true love.”

Nestor looked at Jack as he finished, “You think I got a broken heart?”

“Don’t think that. Is that the only thing you got from that whole damn story?”

“That’s about it. And I guess you think I’m pretty naïve.”

The boy looked out at the field of wheat in the dark and listened to it rustle in the false wind.

“Don’t think that neither. What I do think is that folks get stuff in they heads all muddled up, and sometimes others are happier to let them be muddled if it means not hurtin’ ‘em in the present. Which jes makes everthin’ worse. A little pain now can prevent a lot later.”

Nestor nodded and looked at the stars. “You got any stories about preventin’ pain altogether?”

Jack smiled in the dark and shook his head. “None of those.”

Chapter 4 - The Ocean of Dunes

Author’s Note

Have you ever deeply considered being lost at sea? Your ship was wrecked by a horrible storm, and it’s just you alone on an inflatable raft, bobbing in the waves and baking in the sun and wondering how long you’ll last before you starve, or die of dehydration, or are capsized by a wave? How desperate might you feel for rescue, and how willing might you be to accept any offered, no matter how questionable the person rescuing you might be?

What an interesting concept. Why, I bet a person in that situation would be willing to overlook any number of “red flags”, any number of suspicious activities or language. Sure, the person who just picked you up might be a monster, but better the monster who might hurt you, than exposure to the elements, which most definitely will.

It’s hard to consider the many things that are worse than death, when death is the problem staring you directly in the face.

Nestor awoke to a bleary world flashing red. He blinked a couple times and reached to wipe the sleep from his eyes.

Something was beeping. A warning alarm.

He could not tell what the purpose of the alarm was. ‘ATMO’ flashed on the console display, which made little sense. He could breathe just fine. In fact, he could breathe well enough to go back to sleep. He felt an overwhelming urge to ignore the alarm and lay back down. His defiant eyes closed and he could feel himself sinking back, to float on clouds that would enwrap and support him and carry him off.

At a great remove, he could still hear the alarm beeping. Its insistence urged him back, and he struggled, held fast by the swirls of the cloud on which he floated. It pulled him down towards a deep abyss below, and he wished only to enter the abyss, and he knew this was wrong. This was all wrong.

It was right there, just outside his perception. He could feel it stopping him from drifting down. Echoing out to him from the void was his father’s muffled voice, suppressed in the way of a person trying to speak to you through their helmet, rather than using suit-to-suit coms. He giggled at the idea of his dad speaking through a helmet. Nestor pictured him mouthing words, waving frantic hands. Why was this such a funny idea? What was wrong with his face? It was…angry? No, not anger…fear? No, that wasn’t right, it was more like…urgency.

A memory floated up in his vision. From long ago, before his mother’s death. Years before Eric had passed, and out on the range for the day with his father in one of the huts. It was ancient and crumbling and wheezed out air and smelled of oil and methane and burnt toast. In the center of it was a rectangular pit into which water ice was fed by a conveyor from the outside, surrounded by a meter-high wall to prevent accidental falls. Inside those walls was a metal funnel with a pair of spinning rollers in the center for pulverizing the ice prior to heating.

Nestor remembered lifting himself up onto the walls to look down at the ice crushers, the massive metal rollers unpowered and unmoving while his father bent to work on their drive motor. He could feel the wall top digging into his belly as he leaned forward to look further down. He wished to see the rollers better, for they were loud and shiny, and he wondered what would happen if he threw in various items. In his hand, the wrench his father had given him so he could ‘help’ by pounding on various things around the hut. He considered what might happen to the wrench if it were put into the crusher. Could that crusher crush the device for fixing the crusher? He decided the crusher could not crush the wrench, and to test this hypothesis from the top of the wall.

He dropped back down, setting the wrench carefully on the wall top next to where he planned his ascent, then placed both hands flat on top, level with his chin. He pushed down hard with both arms. He rose to waist level and leaned forward, bringing his leg up to the wall top, yet struggled to pull himself the rest of the way. He adjusted his knee forward a bit more, he almost had it. He pushed even harder, finally getting up, but still his other leg was hanging down. To get it up he pivoted to the side, and his knee brushed the wrench, which fell into the unmoving crusher with a crash.

His father asked from his station by the motor, “What was that?”

“Nothin’ daddy, I just dwop the wench.”

He lay on the wall top, looking down at the wrench. It had landed crosswise of the two metal rollers, and he considered it would not enter between them lying this way. It would need to be repositioned. It was just there, so close, and he reached down with one arm, but was well short. He stretched further, holding the wall with one arm tightly while he bent out over that chasm.

The crusher abruptly came to life as his father finished his repairs, and the wrench hopped and skipped on top of the rollers, and he reached out thinking that he could grab it when it bounced, but each swipe missed. He needed to be further down, and he reached out as far as he dared, his leg slipping off his perch atop the wall. Then his father screamed, a booming sound that echoed loud inside the tiny hut, louder than even the clatter of the crusher, “NESTOR WHAT ARE YOU DOIN’?”

Hands gripped his shoulders hard, and pulled him away from the wall and turned him, lifting him to his father’s eye level. His father chastised with terror in his eyes, “WHAT WERE YOU THINKIN’?”

His father’s face smudged into blurs as Nestor’s eyes filled with tears, not from the danger nor being rescued therefrom, but the expression on his father’s face and the volume of his father’s words.

“That was very dangerous, Nestor. You could have fallen in.”

Louis hugged him tightly.

“I couldn’t stand to lose you, son. You have got to be more careful.”

Louis lowered him to the ground, keeping his huge, powerful hands still tightly on Nestor’s shoulders.

“Don’t go near those crushers, Nestor.”

His father’s face lowered to his level, still smudged out with tears. The tears cleared and his father’s face resolved sharply into focus, but this was not that younger version from all those years ago. This was the face ravaged by grief and drink. The look of panicked fear overwhelmed this much older father’s face. “Nestor. NESTOR.” The powerful hands shook him, hard. “NESTOR PUT ON YER HELMET RIGHT NOW.”

Wait, that didn’t happen.

Nestor sat forward, his head swimming. He was so dizzy. Why was he sitting up? He just wanted to sleep. To dream. He smiled, thinking of his father. He wondered where father was right now. He’d be checking the lines today, driving out in the old truck. Wait, no he wouldn’t. Nestor was in that truck now. What was he doing in the truck? Was he supposed to be checking the lines? No, father checked the lines. Father. His face welled up again in Nestor’s mind, with that same look. What was that look? What was he saying?

PUT ON YOUR HELMET RIGHT NOW

His helmet. Where was his helmet? He looked to the passenger seat beside him. His helmet was there. He should put it on. His father wanted him to put it on. He reached over and lifted it experimentally. It seemed heavy, much too heavy to wear.

The alarm was still beeping. What was that alarm for? He paused, the helmet in his hands, looking blankly at the alarm screen. ATMO was flashing there. ATMO. Helmet. He grappled with the confusing fact screaming out at him from every angle that he was out of breathable atmosphere in this truck. He needed to use his suit to breathe and needed his helmet on to activate the suit. He leaned forward and slid the helmet over his head and clicked it down into place. His suit beeped and his visor briefly fogged as his helmet flooded with fresh air. His head swam for a moment and he closed his eyes. He was still so sleepy, but it felt as if he were truly waking up now. He blinked his eyes open again, confusion beginning to fade as he looked around the interior of the truck.

He reached forward and hit a button beside the warning panel, changing the screen to pull up the truck’s atmospheric status. CO2 was dangerously high and O2 was virtually gone. The atmospheric scrubbers must have failed. He pushed the button again, cycling through status screens to determine why the scrubbers had failed, until he got to the power screen, finding there that he had no battery charge remaining, and no power generation from the truck’s solar panels. The only power left in the entire vehicle was the emergency microvolt batteries that powered alarms, screens, and door access.

Nestor attempted to peer outside the truck to see if he could determine why the solar panels weren’t working, but could not see through the layer of orange dust filtering only shaded umber light through. He pulled the door lever and the emergency door access servos whirred to life and the door wheezed as it slid up and back on its tracks. The dust shaken loose by this movement cascaded in rivulets down and off the exterior panel. The wind caught it as it fell and billowed the curtains of dustfall out. Nestor watched the last of it trickle down and then stepped gingerly onto a slope of accumulated sand that had drifted against the vehicle, rising just over the bottom door sill and entirely engulfing the truck’s huge knobby-tired wheels. He sank in the sand to his ankles, and he waded down the slope and away from the truck until he came to the bottom of the sandwave and there stepped free. He turned slowly, taking small steps, to look back at the truck’s solar panels.

The one solar panel Nestor could see hung limp upon its retractable strut with the wind spinning and slapping it against the side of the truck, its cracked blue-black face casting negative image rainbows of those fissures upon the sand as it twirled. He walked to the other side of the truck to find both panel and strut stolen by the wind, and he turned to see where they might have blown but saw no clue of their travels or their continued existence.

He looked at the waves of dunes surrounding and he looked up at the sun in its low angle on the horizon and he determined which way was south. He believed in that direction should lie the southern wall of the Mariner Valley, and he shaded his eyes and looked out and strained his vision until it felt his eyes might pop from their sockets entirely, and he still could not see that wall. He walked to the back of the truck, pulled down the ladder, and climbed up to stand on the roof to get more height. He spun in frustration, trying to see something, anything, that could help him reconnoiter where in the Valley he was, but saw only rolling dunes breaking and forming and cresting and stretching to eternity.

Nestor dropped into a squat there on the roof of the truck and tried to decide what to do next, tried to remember any factoid he might know about the geography of the Valley, but the only thing that entered his awareness at all was of the sands skittering all about him, and the wind pushing impatiently at him, and the stark sun glaring down upon him from her perch above. He lowered himself to sit on the edge of the roof and tapped the back of his heel against the side of the truck while he thought.

He mentally multiplied his best guess of his average rate of speed by his estimate of how long he’d been driving, and he decided this must place him perhaps eight hundred kilometers at best from the place where the Labyrinth and Valley met, and he assumed this must mean he was close to the settlements of the Valley, which he believed to occupy its eastern half.

He knew the truck to be dead for he had no other way to provide it with electricity, and he knew he could not stay with it for now it was little more than a useless cave of metal, and he knew within the truck he had a good supply of batteries to power his suit and enough water to keep him alive for days and a couple spare tubes of Sour Apple nutrient paste somewhere, and he knew these items combined were enough to keep him walking for a good long time indeed.

He decided to load up with supplies and walk east, and he decided to believe that he might come across someone who could help him out there, and he decided that even if he stumbled and fell and died lost in that ocean, it could not be worse than sitting here on this island and feeling his air slowly leave him knowing he’d had the chance to save himself and had not taken it.

He walked out over a kinetic landscape. He trudged up and over the dunes, attempting new strategies with each new dune and finding them all similarly difficult. Near noon, he crested the tallest dune yet and turned to look back at his tracks. As he traced them down the dune and up the slope of the prior one, he caught a glint just beyond, far behind him. He shaded his eyes from the sun and hoped for the briefest moment it might be some rescuer, before realizing that the glint was his own truck, and he’d walked, at most, three kilometers since leaving it behind. He collapsed in the sand with exasperated tears rolling down his cheeks, his visor fogging with the extra moisture for a moment before the suit’s scrubbers dutifully removed it from his air. He’d been walking at a rate of less than one kilometer per hour, which meant that even if he were to walk all day and all night, he would only march perhaps a hundred kilometers before his final battery would give up its last bit of charge, and he would then suffocate while still climbing through this endless erg.

He sat at the crest of the dune for a long time and hugged his knees close to him with the wind ceaselessly blowing skiffs of sand up and over that peak, covering his boot toes every few minutes. His mind alternated between racing thoughts about what to do next and a melancholic and hopeless numbness, a psychic distance between his reality and what he wished it to be. The sun arced through the sky, falling lower and lower, and as it dropped the temperature fell enough that a ground fog rose in the valleys and slip faces of the largest dunes. He stood up, knowing that he had to get moving, feeling certain that darkness and night exposed outside was a death sentence. He had to find some sort of shelter.

Nestor slid down the face of the dune upon his rear, and at the bottom found he lacked the will to climb another. He looked at the shifting valleys around him. He picked one at random, and he walked for hours more. The sun fell behind the dunes, and the mist rose as the shadows grew and filled the little valleys between the dunes such that the entire sea appeared bestilled, and submerged Nestor entirely, and he navigated that subnautical place listless and blind in the fog.

As night spread, it grew even colder, and the fog crystallized and fell all around him in a super-light flurry of carbon dioxide snow. The sky shifted from slate blue to purple above, and the first stars pierced through the dark, and shy Phobos peeked above the horizon, hanging low in the sky, appearing and disappearing behind the dunes as Nestor walked. His suit started beeping as the battery neared its end, but Nestor demurred changing it out for fresh as swapping batteries in environs exposed to the sand and dust suspended in the air was guaranteed to end with sand and dust around the battery terminals, causing that metal to oxidize and short and reduce both battery life and rechargeability. He needed to find shelter first. He turned off the alarm and resumed walking and hoped while he walked that the next turn would provide an answer.

He walked for some time longer, the purple sky turning black, and he tried to make out Earth above him but soon gave up as nothing could be made of the riotous stardust pouring out as a river through the sky that offered to carry him along inverted over this caustic ocean of surface dust to a place distant on the horizon where both classes of dust would meet and would eddy there to pull him to places unseen and unknown by anything living or dead.

Phobos rose high enough that no dune crest obscured her, and she stood in service as his polestar to help him reconnoiter a track through the snaking valleys. No shelter appeared, no cave nor hut nor abandoned sand skimmer. He trudged along and tried to decide whether to dig a sand shelter here in a valley somewhere, or to climb a dune and spend the night at the crest. The notion that a wind might come up and bury him alive in his sand shelter pushed him instead to climb the nearest dune crest, and thereupon he sat and gazed out at the swells shining all about him.

Nestor waited to change batteries until his air tasted stale and he was pulling harder and harder with each subsequent breath and he shivered all over uncontrollably. He shouldered off his bag, retrieved a fresh battery, removed the old one, and peered at both batteries through small holes in the frost covering his visor. He slotted the new battery by feel and the suit powered back up and the visor ice disappeared and his body was bathed in warmth. He glanced down at the suit status display on his wrist, and he swore at the message displayed there advising a poor connection. Dust was on one of the battery terminals, just as he had feared might happen. This battery and every battery after it was going to have a drastically reduced lifespan. Assuming the dust didn’t fully corrode a terminal during one of the next hot-swaps. He’d be lucky to make it till tomorrow night, in that instance. No stopping tonight. He had to keep going. He couldn’t waste the air sitting.

Nestor walked the rest of that night. He swapped out batteries three times as he walked, and grappled with fresh existential horror as every new battery lasted less than the one previous. As he walked, the dunes seemed to shrink, and in this easier country his pace felt like it was picking up. When the sun crested the pygmy dunes in front of him, he was swapping in his final battery. This one seemed to have trouble staying in the slot. Not like it mattered now that he had no further batteries to sacrifice to the dust. He ascended a dune once again to reconnoiter and for this purpose he chose the largest one he could find and by the time he had scrambled to the top, the sun had risen enough to heat the snow between the dunes and sublimate it into a new fog that filled in the depression he just left. He spun a slow circle at the dune crest and came to a stop when he saw his savior sitting atop a dune perhaps a kilometer distant.

It was a sand skimmer, of a different design from those he was used to seeing back home, wider and lower upon its massive dull black balloon tires, with articulated struts connecting those tires to an aerodynamic body atop which stood dual vertical solar panels that projected up in a “v” and rotated about much like long ears triangulating the sources of distant sounds.

The skimmer must have noticed him, for it launched forward, shooting up dual tails of grit as it began its descent down the dune face. It appeared to bob up and down over the dunes as it approached, and it came to a stop in the dune valley below him with the last traces of fading ground fog wisping about its wheels. At first Nestor slid down the slope eagerly, and he was most of the way down, perhaps ten meters away from the skimmer, when he froze in his tracks, becoming acutely aware that he did not know this person who’d just arrived in a strange vehicle. A stranger who had apparently been looking for him.

The top hatch of the skimmer opened, and a man appeared through that portal and raised a hand in greeting. Nestor could not see much of the rest of his suit, but the man’s helmet was itself a curiosity as it appeared very much like an inverted clear glass bowl, transparent, bulbous, and affixed to the suit. The man inside was middle-aged, with graying temples and leather skin. He was wearing a flat-brimmed hat, which was big enough that the edges folded up slightly against the helmet worn over it. He had a full, long beard, with the collar of a shirt poking up into the helmet.

The stranger gestured bizarrely to Nestor, and the boy came to realize after much cryptographic decipherment that the stranger wished for him to communicate over Channel Two of his coms and he complied and cautiously asked, “Hello? Can you hear me?”

“Ah, there you are, brother. Wasn’t sure you understood me.”

“Sorry, sir. I understood you. I’m jes…surprised to see someone out here.“

“Hohoho. Yes, I can understand why one’d be surprised. This dune sea is extremely dangerous to travelers. We found your vehicle some ways back and found some of your tracks in the lee side of the dunes. Figured it was my duty to at least locate your body and bury it, as the Good Lord requests. I’m so glad I found you alive. These dunes have killed more than I care to count. God bless them all.”

Nestor looked at the strange man, standing there with his torso sticking out of the skimmer, “You found my truck? Do…do you live out here, mister?”

“Live? Just live? Boy, we thrive here in this valley. Why, we’ve recreated His Garden here, proving that we’re the chosen.”

“Garden? Chosen? What are you talkin’ about, mister?”

The man smiled broadly, his white teeth gleaming through the strange helmet, “I’m just speaking the good word.” He pawed at his helmet, like he was trying to push back his hat only to realize he could not reach it. “In any instance, yes, we found your truck.”

“Would there be any way you’d help me repair it?”

“Your vehicle is buried to the axles in the sand. I’m sorry to say we’ve nothing can pull something that heavy out of such a quagmire. Perhaps in Coprates City they might have a crane, but it’d take a good bit of convincing to get such a thing transported out here. I truly am sorry to say this to you, but unless you’re richer’n you appear, your vehicle, in its current state, is lost. But the Lord always makes trades for those things that are lost. We’ll salvage what we can carry out, and as payment, I will offer you food and shelter, as much as you want of either, at mine own home. How does that sound?”

“Well it don’t sound great, mister. I need that truck. I cain’t stay with you. I gotta be movin’ on. All’s that’s broken on my truck is the solar panels. I jes need some help gettin’ those panels replaced, and I can figure out the rest myself. Might could dig it out. I have an emergency shovel in my pack here. It’s jes the panels, sir.”

The man’s face contorted. He reached up and ran his hand over the top of his helmet in that same hat-pushing motion, “Well, see now, here’s the thing, those panels aren’t your only problem. My boys are back there right now, stripping the whole truck down. Most equipment that gets abandoned out here, no one ever comes back for. We just assumed, you know, until I saw your footprints down in the sand, well, that is…” he trailed off, looking at Nestor imploringly.

Anger roiled up within Nestor, “That’s theft, mister. That’s my truck. You ain’t allowed to jes find it and take what you want from it. It ain’t right.”

“Well now, hold on. Salvage ain’t theft, my boy. And no one in all this valley is gonna see it any different than how I’ve laid it out for you. You walked away from that truck, and you cain’t do nothing with it anyways, and the law of this here land is finders keepers. Now, I’ve offered you a fair trade for what we’re taking from that truck, and if I were you, I’d take that offer. No one survives walking on foot through the dune seas, and you won’t be any exception. I’d just as soon not leave you out here to die. You come with me, and get some free air and food and rest, charge up your batteries, and if you want to leave on foot then, at least you’ll do it on hardpack, where you might have some sort of chance.”

“Can you jes take me to the nearest city, then? As payment for you takin’ my truck?”

“I might could, but that’s a bit of a drive, and I cain’t drop everything to do it. Cain’t leave my sons back there at your truck, to drive hours and hours away with a stranger. But tell you what. You come back with me, we’ll feed you supper, and we can talk about transport while we eat.”

Nestor nodded slowly, his hunger and his thirst and his exhaustion overruling his caution. He walked over to the skimmer, climbed up the ladder, and dropped into the top hatch behind the man. He crawled over to the passenger seat up front, while behind him, the man reached up to pull the hatch closed. The man flicked a pair of switches and, with a whoosh, the interior of the skimmer pressurized. They both took off their helmets, the man’s requiring a half-turn to unscrew it from the base. Finally un-helmeted, the man reached out a gloved hand to Nestor.

“Eagan Maries. Nice to meet you.”

Chapter 3 - The Labyrinth of Night

Author’s Note - A thought experiment: Try, right now, this very second, to picture an alien landscape, without comparing to or modifying an existing nonalien one.

What did you come up with? Anything?

It’s a difficult assignment, like “describe a color no one has ever seen.” You just fundamentally will end up resorting to comparisons to other more familiar items. This is the challenge I faced in attempting to describe the Martian landscape. Mars is, after all, an alien world. Yet, if you look at pictures sent back from our various robots on the Martian surface, all you can think of is “Hey, this looks like Arizona.”

If you’re an aspiring author, one who has a story set on Mars, you’re kind of stuck in this bind, of just describing Earth, then at the end, changing all of the “earth” placenames to Martian placenames. This does not do the Martian landscapes justice. And, more fundamentally, it fails to actually describe Mars. You’re always stuck in this place of describing your significant other via comparisons to your ex.

Noctis Labyrinthus is a real network of canyons on Mars. Technically, they’re grabens, but that’s an important bit of geology semantics that matters little to our story. It’s a real labyrinth. It’s right there in the name. Labyrinths, mazes, are interesting story elements, in that they can serve as fairly on-the-nose metaphors for being disoriented, adrift…lost. They’re also unnatural and spooky - there’s the notion that one might venture into the maze and never again find your way out. The maze may come to metaphorical life and consume you, if you’re unwary.

Mazes, from a certain perspective, are alien to us. They are self referential. The maze can only be compared to itself, to the concept of “mazes”.

So, the Labyrinth of the Night is a kind of metaphor nesting doll. A metaphor for alienness and one for disorientation, all anxiously bundled together.

Nestor runs into Noctis seeking refuge by becoming lost. He hopes that no one would ever find him there. He is wrong, of course, because beasts inhabit this maze, and they wish him harm with weapons that he finds indecipherable for reasons he does not fully grasp. How alien it must all feel to him. If we could only feel what he’s feeling, we might begin to understand how a true alien landscape might feel. A Martian one, perhaps.

Darkness came on quickly inside the sunken maze, and Nestor Creede was lost. Throughout his trip amongst the outlying canyons of the Labyrinth, he’d doubled back and taken smaller offshoots, trying desperately to make it difficult to track him here. It seemed to have worked, for he’d seen no other living soul. He knew he needed to stay close to the canyon walls, where the shadows would obscure the bulk of the truck, where an onlooker would need just the right angle to see him, but doing this seemed to interfere with his GPS, and the computer placed him in a canyon that looked nothing like the one before him. Matters were made worse when the floor of the canyon ahead became completely encompassed in late-day shadows, obscuring any detail that might help him narrow down his position. He didn’t want to turn on the headlights, for he was sure they would give him away in this wild and empty place. He eventually reckoned that there was nothing for it, and he needed to stop for the night and pick it back up in the morning.

Beyond trying to outrun whoever might still be in pursuit of him, Nestor had also been attempting to work his way to the south, under the assumption that perhaps he could use the Labyrinth to circle around Pavonis and approach from a safer direction. What he’d really have liked to do was go back to Poynting and kill Vincent, balance the scales of justice, pain for pain and horror for horror. But Nestor had no plan for that, and beyond not having any idea how he might go about such a thing, he found himself overwhelmingly nauseated at the mental images of the action itself, for it was too real, too close, and too horrifying.

He parked the truck in a shallow depression that cut back into the western canyon wall. The depression extended up and back about three hundred meters, with a large overhanging section along one side, which looked ripe for collapse, but not likely on this night. He looked around in the dark and decided that the truck was only visible from one angle and getting to such an angle would require driving up into this dead-end, which he hoped no one in search of him would attempt. The GPS lost signal here, but he could keep the map up, and he scrolled idly through it, trying to locate some route to get him out of here. Some route to safety. He was pondering what safety might be left for him in all this world when he fell asleep.

*****

Nestor dreamt that night of things he’d never seen, things which preceded his place in this world or the place of any human or trace of humanity. He dreamt of Olympus brooding in his prison by the sea and he dreamt of that great volcano glowering over all the space between them and he dreamt Olympus saw him and wished him ill.

In his dream Olympus formed thunderheads that towered over that great mountain’s head and sent those squalls east towards Nestor where he slept. The storms hit the Tharsis mountains and there they let loose their great gouts of water, which ran in flooding rivulets down the bulge and carved an impassible warren of omni-directional ravines there. The flood found its way to the Valley, which it filled all the way to the rim and scoured it and drained out into vast oceans to the east.

The flood of waters caught Nester, and they washed him into the tangle of grabens. He found a large rock there and held onto it while the rains fell and the water gushed all about him. All night he clung to that rock, battered fiercely by the flood. In the morning, the rains had ceased, for Olympus believed that no small creature could have survived such an onslaught. Nestor lowered from the rock and realized he was quite lost, for he could see no surface features inside those empty canyons, and could locate no way out. In his dream, he wandered long through the maze and he retraced his steps again and again and he found many dead ends along the way. He attempted to climb the walls, only to find they were too loose to support his weight and would crumble beneath him dangerously before he could make much height at all. After many days lost in the warrens, Nestor gave up and sat down upon a small bluff and pled with Mars to tell him what he had done to deserve such a fate as this, for he had only ever tried to help his kin.

In his dream, Mars heard Nestor’s plea, and he knew she felt great sympathy for him. He dreamt Mars went to Jupiter and asked if he would help Nestor find his way, and since Mars was Jupiter’s most treasured child, the great planet agreed.

Jupiter changed his orbit around the sun and chose a new one in which he could hang above the horizon on the route that Nestor should follow through the maze, and in his dream Nestor could see Jupiter’s brilliant light over the horizon at night and he followed it and it became brighter as he walked and then the light spoke to him and he awoke.

*****

He woke to a light shining in his face. He squinted and held up a hand to the hot white orb floating off his right shoulder, instinctively pulling back. There was something sticking out from the top of the orb, something that was round and black. A gun barrel. Someone was pointing a gun with a light on it at him. The light spoke, with a voice full of gravel, “He’s alive. Wakey wakey, sleepy head.”

He tried to scrabble back away, but hit the side of the truck cab, the driver’s seat-arm digging into his back as he leaned.

“Ah ah ah. There’s no getting away. Now come on. You need to put on your suit. We going outside.”

The light backed into the space in front of the passenger seat, lowering as its owner squeezed himself sideways in. Nestor paused for a moment, trying to understand what was happening.

“UP, NOW,” the light yelled, clearly not feeling much patience with his charge.

“Okay, okay,” Nestor almost instinctively put his hands up and came around the driver’s seat and walked to the back of the truck. He took only a couple steps before he felt the barrel of the gun pressed between his shoulder blades. He stooped into the cargo area to see two other men crouching on either side, both armed and wearing strange envirosuits that were form-fitting, pack-less, and designed for cramped areas. He grabbed his own suit and sat down to pull on the legs. The man with the light was pointing it at his chest now, and he could just make out a scruffy helmetless face peering at him from behind the light.

“Where you takin’ me?” he tried, hoping that asking questions wouldn’t get him shot.

“You’ll see. You ain’t stayin’ here, that’s for sure.”

“Are you the law?”

The man chuckled and shook his head. Nestor could see the others smiling as well. It was obvious, looking at any of them, that they couldn’t be further from any sort of law. They were ragged, bearded, and scarred, with scuffed suits and scoped, short-barreled guns that had folding stocks and long magazines, guns that looked like something a soldier might have carried in some long-ago conflict and then thrown away for trash upon its resolution.

“What do you think? You think the law comes out into the Labyrinth?”

Nestor looked around, “So what are you all then?”

“Us? We’re not anybody, kid. Did someone tell you to stop puttin’ that suit on? Come on, already. I’m already tired of waitin’ on you.”

Nestor pulled on the torso portion of his suit and pressed the seals into the waist, “How did you get in the airlock? It was locked up.”

The man sighed with much melodrama and then squinted at Nestor sarcastically, “Any one of us can crack a lock like that in less than thirty seconds. These range trucks are all the same, anyway; most the time the locks use the same maintenance override.”

Nestor dropped the helmet over his head and snapped it into place. The backpack kicked on and he could feel the suit filling with air and pressure. The man sat his gun to the side, put on his own helmet, then picked up the gun again and squeezed past Nestor to depressurize the cargo area. Then the man opened the door and dropped down to disappear from sight.

One man who’d been crouching off to the side stood up and gestured with his gun for Nestor to get out of the truck as well. Nestor climbed down the short ladder, dropping lightly to the ground below, and found the first man already standing there, his rifle at the ready. It was still very dark. Deimos hung directly overhead, and Nestor reckoned it the middle of the night.

The men’s truck was infested with spotlights facing every conceivable direction and all of them lit, a garish star that cast long bent shadows all about the little cove. Nestor could make out little else of that vehicle. It appeared much the same as the other truck he’d run into at the entrance of the Labyrinth, but he could not be sure.

As the other men dropped from the truck, they detached and moved off a few meters to join four others who were setting up a massive survival tent. Nestor had heard of tents like this all his life, but had never seen one. Tents rarely fared well in the Martian wind, were difficult to keep warm in the Martian night, and were worse to use than virtually any other option. Good only for emergencies, where no other option was available. But in this canyon there was no wind, and it seemed a fair bit warmer than usual. Here it seemed like a tent might work. This tent was an incredible one indeed, for it looked to be five meters per side and tall enough to stand up in, with an included fabric airlock and atmospheric generator, double-walled for insulation, with a large spindly structure of lightweight poles to keep it rigid.

The man with the lighted rifle noticed him staring at the tent and said over his coms, “Don’t even bother lookin’ at that tent, boy. You ain’t stayin’ in no tent. You stayin’ in there.”

He gestured toward a stubby box at the back of the modified range truck. It looked barely big enough to hold one person. As he pushed Nestor inside, he came back over the coms one final time, “Don’t take off yer helmet, understand? This box don’t have no air, no heat, and no pressure. I find it helps to keep folks nice and calm, knowin’ that if they tear a hole in their suit tryin’ to escape, they’ll be dead before anyone even thinks to check on ‘em.”

Nestor wasn’t sure, but he thought he could see a smile on the man’s face as he closed the door.

*****

Nestor jolted awake at the sound of someone fooling with the lock on the door. The fumbling went on for long seconds and then the entire box shook when the door was finally jerked open. Outside he could see it was just after first light, and the sky was gunmetal gray above the far rim of the canyon. In this faint light, he could barely make out the face of the man who’d opened the door, recognizing him as one of the men from his range truck. He looked different, more disheveled, his eyes glassy and red, and Nestor knew this look well, for his father had looked just like this for the last few years. The man fumbled with his coms button and finally found it and slurred at Nestor, “C’mon, git outta the box…Cricheck wans to see you.”

Nestor stood up and banged the top of his helmet against the roof of the box. He recoiled and stooped down and carefully disembarked. The man was no longer carrying a gun and was swaying slightly. Nestor considered for a moment that it would be quite easy to ram the man off his feet and make a run for it. The man frowned back at Nestor and seemed to read his mind and then shoved him hard, forcing Nestor to take a couple of steps back to catch himself.

“Go on, git movin’. The tent.”

He grabbed Nestor by the left shoulder with enough force that the boy could feel the man’s fingers digging through both the suit and the layer of air underneath. Nestor complied and walked the short distance over to the tent. He arrived at the flimsy tent airlock, its outer flap pinned up, and looked back at the man behind him.

“What’re you waitin’ on?” the man said, giving him a push forward, “Go on, git in there. Why are you so fuckin’ slow about everthing?”

Nestor bent under the flap and the man followed, turning around to seal them inside.

“Turn on the air generator there by yer foot,” the man said, gesturing to the small silver box. Nestor reached down and flipped the little toggle switch on top of the box and it roared to life. The man didn’t wait for the box to finish fulfilling its singular purpose and reached past Nestor to undo the inner flap while the airlock was still filling with breathable atmosphere. Nestor took this as his sign to continue moving and stooped through into the inner sanctum of the tent, taking off his helmet and hanging it by a strap from his belt as he entered.

As his helmet came off, the overwhelming reek of piss and sweat and liquor assaulted Nestor. There were three men sitting in their beaten-up envirosuits with helmets off at a folding table in the center of the tent. No one had bothered to set up any other sort of furniture whatsoever, and the other men of the party had sprawled passed out on the fabric floor itself. Bottles of liquor were scattered everywhere, with some propped half full inside helmets, and other emptier bottles strewn about the floor haphazardly. The men’s guns had been similarly tossed around the tent and seemed to have been dropped wherever each man had lost interest in carrying his.

The man who’d woken Nestor up in his range truck, who Nestor guessed must be the aforementioned Cricheck, was sitting at the table and gestured for Nestor to come sit in the one open seat in front of him. Nestor complied, avoiding the detritus on the floor as he walked over to sit in the flimsy folding chair. The man who’d escorted him to the tent went to a corner and dropped heavily down and laid his head back against the thin fabric wall and closed his eyes. Of the three men sitting at the table, only Cricheck was sitting fully upright. The man to Nestor’s left was sprawled on the table, his face in a puddle of drool, and the man to his right had slumped back in his seat, his chin to his chest. Cricheck looked as drunk as his friends, but there was a quality to him sitting there that conveyed a sense of coiled tension. He leaned forward to rest his elbows on the table and face in hands as Nestor took his seat.

“How you enjoyin’ yer accommodations, boy? Are they to yer likin’?” he slurred, grinning contemptuously at his prisoner.

Nestor shrugged, the bulk of his suit mostly eating the movement, “They fine, I guess.”

Crichek’s grin faded, “They’s about as good as you gonna get, here on out.”

Nestor stared at him and wondered where this was going.

Crichek leaned back in his seat and put his hands behind his head and then squinted at Nestor in half-lidded drunkenness, “Who are you, kid?”

“I ain’t no one. Name’s Nestor.”

“I know yer name, Nestor. What I don’t know is why anyone would want to pay a bounty on you. From what I can tell jes sittin’ here, yer nothin’ but a starvin’ dust farmer’s kid.”

Nestor shook his head and shrugged again.

“Dunno, huh? I don’t believe that fer a second. This bounty on you from the mob over in Poynting is a fortune. Enough that ever man in this tent right now won’t need to work for some time, once we turn you over. If they don’t drink it all away, that is.”

Crichek winked conspiratorially at Nestor and grinned in that weird contemptuous way again. Nestor noticed that the eyelid for the eye that hadn’t winked seemed to not fully open, and was permanently stuck at half-mast, which made Crichek appear to be unimpressed no matter what the rest of his expression conveyed.

“Seriously, mister. I ain’t no one, and I don’t think I’m the person you lookin’ for. Ain’t no bounties on me.”

“Bounty said a kid in a beat-up ol’ range truck out in the Labyrinth, who answers to Nestor. How many of them you think there are, kid?”

Nestor shrugged again and looked down and to the side. He tried his best to hide that he noticed one of the men’s guns laying at most an arm’s length away from his foot.

Crichek persisted, “Yer him. I don’t much appreciate bein’ lied to, normally, but this time I’ll let it slide. Know why?”

Nestor shook his head and looked back up at Crichek again. Crichek met his eyes and beamed.

“Well, see, here’s the thing. We found you after dark, and I hate drivin’ in this place in the dark. So’s we set up camp here till mornin’, and I turned on the law enforcement band on my radio over there to keep me company, because it’s always a good idea to know what the law is up to. And what do I hear on their band? Why, I hear that they’re lookin’ for some kid in a farm truck who’s tied up somehow with the mob in Poynting.”

He stopped to look at Nestor meaningfully. Nestor simply looked back at him and tried to keep his expression mild. This was apparently not what Crichek wanted, as he shook his head and stopped grinning.

“I’m an honest man, believe it or not. Like fer everone to know where they stand. Always been that way. I’d like you to understand that, too. I think you are that kid who the law’s lookin’ for, and I know yer the one who the mob is lookin’ for. And I been thinkin’, sittin’ here and drinkin’, waitin’ on the law to get back to me with what they’ll pay fer you if I take you that way instead of t’other. And what I’m thinkin’ is this–why in the world would anyone care about you this much? You don’t look like nothin’ to me. Some gutter trash. No offense, I was gutter trash, too, of a time. But if you are that, then the only thing you’d have, that anyone’d want, would be if there was somethin’ you know that’s a secret.”

He paused again for a long time, so long that Nestor began to wonder if he’d somehow passed out with his eyes open. Finally, he pierced the silence again, his voice a low growl.

“Well? What do you know that’s so interestin’? Did you stumble on some mob dealins or somethin’?”

“I don’t know nothin’, mister. I don’t know why anyone would be after me.” Nestor looked him fiercely in the eye.

Crichek shook his head, slowly and methodically. “Nuh-uh, that ain’t goin’ to work. I’m no fool, and I know a lie when I hear one.”

“Seriously mister. I don’t know nothin’.”

Crichek ceased leaning back and pivoted his body forward in a weird, stiff motion that ended with him on his feet and looming over the shaky table, holding the edges with his hands. His voice was still a growl, but now it was very low, almost a whisper.

“You got yerself a choice now, boy. You can lie to me again and I’ll kill you right here. It won’t be nothin’ to me. Hell, Vincent might even pay me better to deliver you dead. You can bet that’s what he intends for you anyhow. Or you can tell me the truth, and maybe if what you know is worth somethin’ to me, you don’t have to go either direction, to the mob or to the law.”

“Yer sayin’ if I tell you what I know, you’ll jes let me go?”

Crichek smiled a glaring smile, one that seemed to only involve his mouth, “Of course. You tell me what you know, and I’ll set you free. You can go live in the dust till yer heart’s content.”

Nestor considered this for a moment, “I know where the mob stores their…their stuff.”

Crichek let go of the table and looked at Nestor skeptically and began to pace slowly back and forth. He produced a large folding knife from a pocket on his suit and he began absently tapping his bottom lip with the point of it as he paced.

“That so? And where is this? What kind of ‘stuff’?”

“Smuggled food. The fancy stuff. On my family’s claim. In our huts. I know which specific ones they usin’ right now. If you let me go, I’ll write down the locations for you.”

Crichek paused and stared absently at Nestor for a moment. Then some small manner of his face changed slightly, almost as if it had grown darker where he stood. He nearly sprung to Nestor’s side, and he leaned over and whispered in Nestor’s ear, “No need to write ‘em down. You can jes tell me now. I have a real good memory.”

Nestor tried looking at the man off his shoulder and had to crane his neck in a strange uncomfortable way to see him. “I…I think I need some sort of proof you’ll let me go once I tell you.”

Suddenly the knife was at his cheek and Crichek was slowly drawing the point down along the flesh, not pressing hard enough to cut, but enough to leave a sensate trail behind as he drew it along, “Tell me now and if I believe you I promise I won’t slit yer throat right here.”

Nestor froze, his mind flooding with the crystal-clear image of his father’s cheek laid open. Jaw working grotesquely in full view. His throat bubbling out a curtain of blood. A wave of dizziness and nausea bubbled up from Nestor’s belly and he worked his throat to fight the sickness, struggling against the spasms in his abdomen, but his horror overcame his panic and he jerked forward and retched. Crichek stepped back away from him and from his prospective vomitus and stumbled drunkenly over an upside-down helmet behind his heel and pratfell hard, letting go of the knife as he fell.

Nestor stayed doubled over his knees and tried to suppress any further sickness, spitting several times to clear the taste of bile from his mouth. He opened his eyes, looking directly at the gun. Crichek was laughing for reasons beyond comprehension from his place upon the floor off on the other side of him, and Nestor realized this was his chance and in a single unified movement reached out and grabbed the gun and spun himself about and stood, his chair tumbling backward as he rose. He pointed the gun at Crichek, who was himself fumbling about in search of the dropped knife, which had bounced across the floor to come to rest by the tent wall. Nestor could see in his periphery where the knife lay, but his eyes did not shift from Crichek.

Crichek looked up at Nestor with a strange sort of arrogance and brought his legs under himself and leant towards Nestor, looking for all his efforts like he was about to pounce, “You still ain’t gettin’ it, is you boy? That gun in yer hands ain’t gonna make the least bit of difference. You cain’t get away, not even if you run. I’ll find you wherever you go, and if you kill me, one who’s worse’n me will find you instead. Maybe even one of these boys here.”

Nestor shouldered the gun and pointed it at Crichek and pulled the trigger to earn his freedom. The trigger didn’t fully depress, and the gun sat mute and motionless in his hands.

Crichek glared his contemptuous half-lidded grin at Nestor, “’Course, you need to know how to use the gun if yer gonna try to kill me with it.”

He pivoted himself forward, rising first to his knees and then to his feet, moving methodically, his eyes never once leaving Nestor and the gun. Nestor stared back down the sights of the weapon at his captor and felt blindly with his index finger all around the trigger, trying to find the safety and failing.

Crichek had begun circling the table with that same slow, methodical movement, every step purposeful. Nestor backed away and circled the opposite direction, trying to keep the table between them. The tent was deathly silent, the snores of the other men suddenly gone, though none in Nestor’s view had yet moved. Nestor wondered if any were truly still asleep and decided not to chance it and backed further from the table. He noticed movement on his periphery to the right. He flicked his eyes that way to see the man who’d come to get him from his box earlier moving laterally towards Nestor in a kind of protracted pincher movement with Crichek.

Nestor still could not find the gun’s safety and was unavoidably aware of how little room he had to maneuver within this cramped reeking tent and yet how far away was the entrance. He brought his other hand back down the barrel towards him and searched blindly with it, desperate to feel any button that might make this hunk of useless steel in his hands into a weapon. Right above the gun’s long curved magazine he felt a tab and tried pressing it. It didn’t move. The man to his side was very close, nearly close enough to reach out and grab him, and he ran his finger back and forth over the button, trying to work out what it was supposed to do, and found a lateral groove behind it. He tried sliding the button back, and it moved with just a slight bit of tension and then with a click the magazine dropped from the gun.

Nestor barely had time to process what had just happened when the man to his side leapt forward and grabbed the barrel of the gun and jerked it hard down and away from Nestor. Nestor might have otherwise fought him for the weapon, but it was at this point that Crichek charged him. Nestor leapt away instead, letting go the gun and falling and landing hard on his shoulder by the tent wall. Crichek was standing right where Nestor had just been and spun about and pounced and landed on top of the boy. Nestor rolled and spilled Crichek loose, and then on his side kneed his attacker hard in the gut, knocking the wind out of the bigger man. His eyes flicked around the tent and he noticed the other men coming to their feet now, turning to face him, and the man with the gun stooping to pick up the magazine and slide it effortlessly back into place.

Nestor rolled again and then scrabbled on his back towards the far wall. He looked all around, searching for another gun. Crichek was drunkenly righting himself and looked to be preparing for another pounce, and the man with the gun had swung it to point at Nestor. Nestor looked up at the tent wall above him, then to his side, once again seeing the knife, now sitting by his left hand. He grabbed it and held it pointed at the men approaching him and they smiled at his futile gesture. He looked back up at the tent wall and swung his arm up in a broad arc and felt the knife bite into the double-walled plastic and felt it slip through and felt it tear as he dragged it down to him.

The men froze as the meager air inside the tent gusted out, the fabric flapping with the wind escaping from all about them. Nestor took advantage of their surprise and flipped his helmet up to snap it on and then dove through the hole as if being birthed to a new frigid, dusty life of freedom on the other side. The men had fallen to fighting each other over whatever helmet they could find and had temporarily forgotten their quarry and the flapping of the fabric was already subsiding as the last air inside the tent seeped away.

He scrambled to his feet and ran for his range truck, covering the distance easily, and hauled himself up the ladder, not bothering with the airlock at all. As he sat in the driver’s seat, he looked back through the open truck to see one man climbing through the hole in the tent wall, already helmeted and armed. He turned on the truck and bounced up out of the landslide and then down the draw and he heard bullets thunk as they burrowed uselessly into the lead radiation-protecting plating on the side of the truck as he fled.

He kept the truck going as fast as he dared over the loose gravel of the canyon floor, taking every turn he came across, keeping his lights off in the deep dawn shadows. He drove this way for a long time, monitoring the faulty GPS, trying in vain to mentally draw a course through the warren of canyons around him, the wide rift valleys, the deep draws that dead ended suddenly. He kept the rear view camera up on his console, in constant dread of some sign of the bounty hunters in pursuit. Nothing appeared.

He spent the next several hours carefully picking his way through the network of canyons, lost in the task of thoroughly evading an enemy that he’d not actually seen in pursuit of him. He’d have gone on this way forever if his suit battery’s warning hadn’t suddenly gone off, incessantly beeping in alarm that his battery was nearly exhausted.

Nestor didn’t bother finding a spot to hide; he simply brought the truck to a stop and parked it. He sat for a while and listened to his suit beeping and watched the rearview camera. Occasionally he peered behind himself, out through the distant open airlock doors, checking to confirm that there was not some dread pirate lurking back there. Still nothing came. No matter how hard he tried, he could not shake the feeling that he was still being hunted and was still at a loss because of some unforeseen advantage of his pursuer.

Eventually he convinced himself to break away from the camera and got up and stooped back to the rear of the truck. He grabbed a replacement battery and walked to the open airlock and looked out at the canyon behind him. He popped out the discharged battery, the suit suddenly falling silent, and the air in his helmet almost immediately tasting stale. He popped the new battery in, and his suit whirred back to life, everything back to normal. His eyes wandered out of the open door, along the canyon walls behind him, and he marveled at how they waved and wandered and how truly incomprehensible this place was.

He’d grown up hearing stories about travelers who booked dubious passage through the Labyrinth, only to disappear, never to be seen again. He absently wondered, if the Labyrinth was so hard to navigate, so dangerous to try to callously cross, then what made the bounty hunters so special? What did they know Nestor couldn’t? There had to be some other advantage they had.

He wondered if it was possible to track his GPS. It had to connect with a satellite to work, and so that satellite surely knew where he was. If the bounty hunters could access those satellites, then they’d know where he was, too. He stared at the canyons behind the truck for a long time mulling this over, trying to decide what to do. Finally, his mind made up that he was being tracked by the GPS, he decided it must come out.

He stooped forward to the cab and reached up to undo the access panel on the ceiling. He unscrewed the module’s mounting screws, unplugged two wires, and stood there, holding it. He looked at the console screen, which now read NO SERVICE. He looked down at the module, not sure what to do with it. If he kept it, he’d want to use it, and he was sure that it would immediately give away his position the moment he plugged it back in. No, he had to get rid of it.

Nestor carried the module to the back of the truck and threw it hard at the far canyon wall. The module landed well short and bounced to a stop in the dust. He closed the door and repressurized the truck and took off his helmet as he sat in the driver’s seat again, and then he stared at NO SERVICE on the console screen. He sat there for a few moments and tried to convince himself to go back out and get the module, for it was such a foolish idea to leave it behind. He had no plan, no idea how to get out of this place, no ability to keep himself safe. It was suicide to drive away from here, and a pointless one at that, for he was not certain the bounty hunters could even track his GPS. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath and reached out to turn off the screen. He reopened his eyes with them pointed outside and they traced a crack up the canyon wall, following it all the way to the top, hoping that some other notion might come to him while he tarried here. He looked down at the rearview camera. Still nothing arrived. He looked ahead again, pressed the accelerator, and bounced away.

*****

Hours of directionless driving passed before he came upon a vaguely star-shaped valley. The western pair of the valley’s arms dwindled back into steep canyons anew, leading away in their respective directions. The northeast arm of the valley had collapsed in a titanic landslide dating back across the eons and still ongoing, with kilometer-long-mounds of dust slowly sliding down the grade, pushed by the wind howling in from the surface. To the southeast was a wide terraced rift valley, the terraces of stone dispassionately pulled out stepwise from the slope in variegated ways by some primordial giant. Perhaps by Olympus himself. Nestor decided to go this way, preferring the apparent rock of that surface to any of the other options.

The terraced ridge he chose extended perhaps thirty kilometers along the rift valley and travel was much slower going than he’d hoped. The rock of the terrace was crumbling and brittle and the big tires of the range truck scrambled for purchase within it for the weight of the truck caused the rock to pulverize to thick mire. After hours of carefully picking his way along, he reached an end of the terrace on a promontory that looked out over the broad, broken valley below. Bluffs jutted up everywhere and tiny ravines and trap canyons wound all around, a minor chaos of geology spread before him like an imaginative child’s sandbox. He paused and looked around the prominence, following its edge to the far wall, up and into a plethora of shallow surface canyons that spread like crows’ feet about Mars’s great squinting eyes, marking her death mask with pain and gaiety and wisdom, all long past but not yet forgotten by the landscapes in which those feelings had been marked. He looked down the slope into the valley, mining his experience on the slopes of Ascraeus to evaluate the grade. He thought he saw a way down, for to the left there was a long steep slope, the result of some past erosion of that wall, fanning all along and down the foreland’s face.

He crabbed down this landslide, outright sliding down some portions. It was a three-kilometer descent, taking at least an hour to fully complete. In truth, he’d stopped tracking time long before he got to the bottom. Finding a better surface on the valley floor, he roared away from the landslide and followed the first drainage he came across. Steep bluffs with pebbled gravel surfaces quickly surrounded him. He evaluated them each on merit and decided each time he did not wish to attempt the climb. The drainage he was in wound serpentine and directionless about the landscape, never quite finding its way anywhere, and after hours more of travel he realized he had circumnavigated the rift valley entirely and had returned to the foot of the initial promontory, which now jutted out thousands of meters above him. At the top of that overlook sat Crichek’s truck, its windows shining brightly in the sunlight. He wondered for a moment if they saw him down here, and as he pondered this, the truck above him began to move. Probing for a way down.

Nestor stared at the cliff and then looked all around him futilely and wished for some better alternative. He focused upon his tracks descending to the side and watched them wind away into the loop he’d just made, and he sat back in his seat and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands to keep himself from weeping in frustration. He sat a long time just staring at the face of the cliff, not knowing what to do, waiting to see the bounty hunters bouncing down to come and capture him, wishing he had someone here who could tell him what step to take next, what path to follow that would not lead to ruin.

On some heedless impulse, he turned the big truck around and drove out across the middle of the valley floor, scanning the country to his south and east for some exit. He saw nothing there but bluffs and ravines, and he found a bluff that looked suitable on the eastern edge of the valley and headed up. The truck bogged down in the deep loose gravel, spinning rocks out behind, each centimeter of progress hampered by constant backslides. He beat the wheel in aggravation and he cursed the scree and dust and he continued on nonetheless for this was no place to flag and no place to stop. It was late afternoon before he emerged at the rounded top of the bluff and paused and looked out behind him to see the glint of his pursuers upon the valley floor. He immediately began descending the opposite side, sliding on the loose surface into a twin of the valley he’d just exited, this new rift valley also running north-south. He came across a granite intrusion that wound bizarrely about the slope on his way down and followed that, practically luxuriating in the hard, smooth surface.

This river of granite eventually wound to the southeast across the valley until it ran beneath the eastern wall. Nestor’s intention was to travel east, but he could find no way past the thousand-meter-tall walls blocking that direction. He followed the wall down the valley as it broadened and deepened until he found a sharp ravine with a steep incline heading up to the surface to the east and he begrudgingly climbed up this slope, for lack of a better alternative. The truck and Nestor’s stomach both groaned at the angle of his climb and through the front windows Nestor could see only sky and he persisted until he crested the top of the incline just as night was falling. Below him the shadows stretched through the maze of deep canyons that seemed to run beyond infinity into the gloom. He knew out there prowled men in pursuit of him, and he despaired for he could no longer see where they may be. He watched the gathering dark below him and hoped that the bounty hunters would turn on their plethora of lights so he could locate them, but no lights came on and nevertheless he stared until he fell into a restless sleep.

The next morning he descended into that geomorphological madness and immediately lost all sense of direction and fell to picking routes at random upon gut feelings that were as much starved indigestion as they were inspiration. Bitter with his situation and exhausted, he came across a climb back to the surface and took it, hoping for a better chance at reckoning his location up above. He crested to see the bounty hunters upon the surface at a distance of several kilometers. Between them were many canyons and he could see no route his pursuers could take to get to him, but he saw them see him and turn and begin searching to find just such a path.

He drove aimlessly and panicked, and found those lands broken and impossible to follow in any one direction. Regretting his decision to ascend, he began looking for a way back down, but could find nothing, and near dark on this day he decided to attempt to switch back crudely down the vertiginous slope into the canyon directly to his north. He made it safely down the slope shortly after dark and stopped his truck at the feet of that wall and collapsed in exhaustion. Off his bow he could see Jupiter hanging over the horizon, and remembering his dream, decided to travel that way when he awoke the next morning.

He would spend much of that next day holding this course through canyon after canyon, trying to find a new route east and constantly thwarted. By luck alone he came upon a canyon that widened into a valley, the walls fading to the horizon, the center seeming to gather sand until it coalesced into a miniature dune sea. He saw no hint of his pursuers on this day, but exposed as he was, he felt sure they would find him at any moment and so he drove out recklessly to skirt that sea of sand, and he stayed at this task for the remainder of that day and much of the following morning.

Around noon of the subsequent day, he came upon towers of rock jutting from the valley floor, a lost city of geologic ancients whose skyscrapers of weathered stone were hidden deep in this maze, far from any living man’s prying eyes. The dune sea washed upon the feet of the monoliths and spread further and deepened and filled the entire valley to the very limit of vision. No valley walls were visible in any direction and the air here was thicker and held a pink-green light not familiar to Nestor, and as he paused at the final terminus of rock jutting into that ocean of sand, he watched the sky all about him change from pink to black when the stars made their sparkling arrival and the sun fell to its rest behind him.

*****

The next morning, Nestor started across the dune sea. Going was rough in the sand, for the range truck’s exceptional mass sunk deeply in, bogging him down. He tried to climb exactly one dune in the truck, making it less than a third of the way up its hundred-meter-tall face before giving up and allowing the truck to slide limply back down. He couldn’t go over the dunes, but he found it easy to follow the minor valleys between the dune crests, and so he stuck to these low areas as they shifted and blew in the unabating Martian wind.

It took him most of the morning to cross the sea this way, trying to avoid the biggest dunes, which seemed to concentrate to the south of the great valley. He traveled robbed of direction or purpose by this place inimical to landmarks, and as time wore on his only goal became to escape the dunes. It was in this state that, around mid-morning, he came upon the north wall of the valley, and he exalted as the dune sea fell away behind him. But as he approached the wall, he saw he couldn’t continue on this way, for in his path lay a canyon-within-the-canyon running to the east. He chose instead to reverse and take the gentle slope to the south, winding back down to trace the edge of the sea.

He emerged into the broader Mariner Valley in mid-afternoon, and carefully hugged the north wall of the canyon to keep away from the dunes that spilled down the center, and drove in a torrent of grit that perpetually poured down the wall above him. He spent that night in a sort of cove carved in towering walls that seemed to define the very edge of existence, and as the sun set and temperatures cooled, clouds formed to wreath their middle heights in a kind of transient white canopy.

The next day, Nestor started to come across the aboveground settlements. They were centuries old and decrepit from the scouring they’d received from the wind and sand. The first one he came upon looked like it had been violently disassembled, and pieces of metal and plastic were scattered for kilometers around the apparent center of the town, with no standing structures to speak of. All that remained of that place was a grid of rapidly disintegrating roads and the skeletal remains of buildings. This town had a road that departed to the east, and he followed that line of slumping concrete until it disappeared into the dunes. He circumvented the blockading dunes and drove on, coming across settlements every so often as he drove, each and every one of them a little cluster of dead dreams blown apart and away by the wind.

In one abandoned burgh of spindles and spikes he came across a field of meter-high rounded stone platters jutting up from the ground covering the small hills in every direction. He had seen no hint of the bounty hunters in days, and feeling secure here, he stopped the truck and walked among the stones for some time, hoping to come across some explanation of what he was seeing. The stones themselves offered few answers as the sand had worn most smooth and the few that were not told tales in alphabets he’d not seen before and could make no sense of whatsoever.

In his walkabout through this strange place, he came to a hillside eroded by the wind and collapsed in a minor landslide and the resulting flow peppered throughout by the strange stones and two-meter-long boxes. He crab-walked through the friable incline to a box and he found it to be made of some thin material that had cracked and splintered, and peering inside he saw the mummified body of a small child, still clutching some toy or trinket in its withered hands. He could not help but see his brother Eric in that box instead and decided he wished to see nothing further and mounted back up into the truck and drove on.

Of living people he saw none. He refused to stop at any further settlements, for he no longer wished to know what tales they still told. Near sundown, his path took him up a steep slope along the northern wall, lifting him thousands of meters above the valley floor, yet still thousands more from the surface. He looked down at the country below him and could see spread throughout that place hundreds of little clusters of eroded human refuse, each one a settlement, each one abandoned to the wind and the dust. The metal and glass that hadn’t fully oxidized yet sparkled like forgotten jewels all throughout, as if a handful of the gems of humanity had been nonchalantly tossed into the chasm, and where they’d fallen, they’d stayed to erode away.

The storm hit midway through the following day. He was nearing the end of this branch of the chasm and towering above him was a headland defining the edge of a massive ridge that ran down the middle of the valley proper. In front of him stood a new and vast dune sea. He’d been sticking to the wall of this valley, and as that wall vanished at the headland, he could see only dunes. He knew by now that he must be in the Mariner Valley, but said valley was thousands of kilometers long, and he had no way of knowing which of those multitudes he occupied. Out in the distance, on the ocean of sand before him, a wall of dust towered, seeming to extend up to space itself.

It was a tremendous haboob, the opaque front billowing with red and orange dust, the entire enormous mass racing across the sand sea unimpeded. Purple and white lightning arced before it as the storm reached out to touch with stellar plasma those things it found most detestable. Nestor tried to hide the truck between rises, but the storm poured over him unabated, obscuring everything. He drove for a short while in the blind searching for better protection, while the dust scoured every surface and somehow found its way into the truck to filter lightly down around him. The wind howled in anger at his audacity and shoved the truck around with fury. He ultimately gave up and stopped the truck where it stood and peered out at the riot of grit swirling around him as it formed ephemeral shapes that flared and morphed and faded. In them he saw his father and he saw Victor and he saw Crichek and he saw his mother and she looked sad, and he wished momentarily to go out and comfort her. He decided this was a trick of the eye or perhaps a trick of the storm itself to tempt the lost traveler to abandon his ship and walk away, sacrificing himself to a mirage that might shift into something wholly more horrifying once the traveler was sufficiently away from safety. As the truck rocked, and the visions through the windows continued unabated, he found himself lulled into a sleep that he hadn’t experienced in years. He closed his eyes, and he dreamt of the shapes outside coalescing from dust into dirt and then from dirt into flesh. Fully formed into his forlorn friends and foes and family, the shapes gathered around to gaze upon him serenely while he slumbered.

Chapter 2 - The Run

Author’s Notes - It’s been a little while since I’ve posted a chapter. I have a new book I’m working on, and between that and holidays and a general feeling of malaise about the project of posting chapters here, I’ve found it challenging to keep up with the schedule I set for myself. It’s a worthy project, however, so here’s the next chapter, and hopefully I’ll get the others posted soon. I might just do a run on them and post several over a period of days. A sort of catch-up, if you will. We’ll see.

Louis Creede is an optimist. He has no good reason to be one. His family is all-but-gone, his birthright is as well, and he now works for a dangerous man. Yet still he thinks things can turn around.

I hope all of my readers have had the chance, or someday get the chance, to know a Louis. Every real version of this character I’ve known has been far from a saint, though one may certainly describe them in saintly terms. Louis is no saint either. He’s stupid. He’s a drunk. He puts himself into situations with no clear plan of what to do, and he does so in fealty to a sense of ethical burden, of protecting and growing and inspiring the family he has left. Noble causes. Asinine actions.

Of course he fails. Of course his lack of planning, and his sense of duty, leads him to ruin. Nestor sees it, gets to really wallow in the consequences of his father’s virtue, and one need wonder what Nestor makes of it all. Does he feel of sense of virtue as well? Of vengeance? Does he learn from his father, or does he feel a need to mirror him?

He’s still a child, after all.

They had no choice but to remove everything from the back of the range truck to make room for Vincent’s smuggled goods on their first-ever pickup. They left the cookstove and bath and toilet and water purifier and Nestor’s hammock and Louis’s bed, all piled as forsaken monoliths upon the lava plains between Poynting and Olympus, and were much the worse for their absence. They spent each day transporting Vincent’s goods, instructions for where to go and what hut to use next delivered at daybreak by a lackey pounding upon the door of the hut to which they’d completed the prior day’s delivery. The hut they’d slept in the prior night. The hut that was, most often, not working, in dire need of repair that it would not receive.

All this driving wholly prevented the Creedes from attending to any other item in their lives whatsoever. It was often a challenge to make it into town for groceries and basic supplies, and having little choice in the matter, Louis stopped drinking entirely. Entire lines failed on the claim, and the transportation jobs paid nothing, as Vincent remained steadfast that they were still paying him back. They went to sleep most nights hungry and dirty and forlorn in their debtor’s poverty.

The weeks passed and while their material conditions deteriorated, Louis’s fingers healed and so too did his psyche, and he grew more brazen and recalcitrant to continue meeting Vincent’s demands. Eventually, on a day when they were expected to make a six-hour-drive out to the borders of Noctis Labyrinthus in only four, Louis declared loudly while his son watched him with careful eyes over a crusty and partially finished tube of Nacho Cheese flavored nutrient paste that he’d had enough, and they could not continue living like this. He turned from their course and headed up the slope of the claim, straight for the terrace wall thirty kilometers distant.

As they approached it, the ‘wall’ dissolved into a series of extremely steep hills, stacked dozens high, the surface of each covered in cracks and faults and flows and slides where weakened portions had broken off and careened downhill. The incline seemed anxious in anticipation of its next landslide, and the chaos of cracks made it impossible to track any consistent course up. All travel looked impossible here. Nestor said as much to Louis, to which Louis grumbled, “I know a way.”

Nestor looked at him questioningly, finally getting up the courage to ask what they were doing.

“We goin’ to the summit. You never been to the summit, have you?”

Nestor hadn’t and said as such.

“So that makes it worth doin’ then,” Louis replied.

“But what about Vincent? What about the claim? We got his deliveries, and more work to do on the claim than we can get done. We cain’t jes leave it all behind.”

“Everthing will wait. We been out here two years since yer momma…with no break…it’s time we had ourselves one.”

“Vincent ain’t gonna like that we missed that pickup. What we gonna tell him?”

“It don’t matter what he wants, boy. We get down from here, we’ll work out what’s next with him. Way I see it, we done paid him back in full, plus some. We cain’t keep runnin’ like we been.”

He looked up at Nestor with a sadness in his eyes that Nestor had not seen since his mother’s death. Nestor said nothing in reply and looked evenly at his father. Louis reached up to wipe at his eyes with his thumb and blinked and looked back at Nestor.

“We need to get away. Get our heads right. And I cain’t think of no place better’n the summit of Mount Ascraeus.”

Nestor nodded, although he was hard-pressed to understand, and Louis did not demur any longer and proceeded forward into that chaos. They spent the remaining hours of daylight slowly picking their way through the cracks, working their way patiently up the hills. The sun set while Louis tried to find a level place to stop on this tilted world of cracks and slides, finally settling in the canted depression left by an ancient lava flow. They shared a tube of nutrient paste for dinner, and while they ate, Louis asked his son if he remembered the story of Olympus the Coward and Nestor nodded and Louis asked if he’d like to hear it again and Nestor said he would.

Louis squeezed some of his nutrient paste onto a spoon and flipped the spoon upside down and examined it and then licked it off and leaned back and stretched his legs past Nestor in the cramped space of the back of the truck and gazed theatrically across that meager space at his son.

“A long time ago, long before you and I, Mars was a very different place. While there were people who lived here, they lived with many gods of old, who all eventually died and became the landscape all around us. The biggest and cruelest of the old gods was called Olympus. His girth was so massive that, as he moved about the surface of Mars, she would wobble and drift, her very gravity warped by his movements. Olympus was no fool, and it was evident to him that all things, even Mars herself, bent to his will, and so he controlled all he laid his eyes upon, everthing and everwhere happened only at his behest, all the way down to the seasons and the weather.”

“The Tharsis brothers, Ascraeus and Pavonis and Arsia, each a great volcano in his own right, were much vexed by Olympus, for he ruled callously and seemed to have no qualms about hurtin’ any of the other old gods. But the brothers were cowards, and for a long time they merely sat and watched as Olympus behaved terribly to all things on Mars. Alone, none of them could match Olympus in size or strength, and while they often discussed how workin’ together might grant them an advantage, they also all believed it likely that one or more of them might get hurt in any such row, and every Tharsis brother lived in fear that they themselves might be the one injured. So, the brothers did nothin’ while Olympus ravaged the world around him for his own petty reasons.”

“It came to pass after many years that a hero rose from the ranks of the many small creatures, and this hero was mighty, and had perpetrated many great feats. He was so mighty, in fact, that it was rumored by many that he could move the very mountains and gather up the seas. The hero’s name was Young Nedrick, and the Tharsis brothers, upon noticin’ his many feats, sought him out to do somethin’ about Olympus.”

“Young Nedrick, of course, was already very much aware of who Olympus was, and had been puzzlin’ over what to do about him for quite some time. So, when the brothers approached him, he was ready with a plan. His plan, he informed them, could not be undertaken by only hisself. He would need their help, too.”

“The brothers agreed to help him, and they all went together to ask Utopia the ocean to help as well, for she had been so abused by Olympus in his younger years. She agreed, and with his team assembled, Young Nedrick walked to the foot of Olympus and challenged him to a duel. Olympus was amused at the tiny thing challengin’ him, and bein’ oblivious to Young Nedrick’s reputation, laughed and swung up his tectonic foot to stomp it down upon the hero. Young Nedrick caught that great rocky root as it came down and pushed it away like it was nothin’.”

“Olympus tripped back, and in fury he lifted his great arm and swung it down at Young Nedrick. Young Nedrick was expectin’ this, and he signaled Pavonis, the most incandescent of the three brothers, to launch a gout of molten lava through the air to cover Olympus’s hand when it came down. The lava spattered over the hand, and the foot closest to it, while Olympus watched and laughed boisterously.”

“Now Young Nedrick called upon Utopia to toss her waves overland so as to rapidly cool the lava into a nigh-unbreakable cement. Olympus laughed at this as well, and pulled hisself free from the arm and foot both, leavin’ those gargantuan appendages to fall where they lay. Then he reached down within hisself, to draw up sufficient lava to reform both, and at this moment, Young Nedrick signaled to the brothers to begin makin’ and tossin’ boulders into Olympus’s caldera. They filled the caldera to the rim, and Olympus drew up even more lava from deep inside Mars, in an attempt to melt through the boulders blockin’ him from healin’.”

“The ground beneath them welled up massively with the magma that Olympus drew to hisself, but he could not quite put it to use because of the blockin’ boulders. So he drew up more magma, and the ground swelled even more, and he drew more still, and a great bulge formed on the Tharsis plains, stretchin’ far and wide. But no matter how many boulders he would melt with the magma, the brothers would make enough replacements to keep him blocked up, and this enraged Olympus. Since all bullies are cowards at the end of the day, Olympus decided to flee. He shifted his great bulk and began hoppin’ towards Utopia’s eastern shores on his remainin’ foot, hopin’ to find some relief from the never-endin’ bombardment there. As Olympus’s bulk shifted precariously on the massive bulge of magma now underneath the Tharsis plains, Mars’s surface was stretched until it ripped open in a wide rift valley, the biggest canyon there is anywheres. The Mariner Valley.”

“The ground jolted as the rip formed, and Olympus on his singular foot tripped and fell down the bulge he’d created, tumblin’ caldera over slope until he ended on the shores of the sea. The Tharsis brothers followed him and formed a line between him and the huge magma-filled chamber behind theyselves, guardin’ the magma from Olympus. Olympus sat crippled upon those shores and watched the brothers and brooded. He attempted to spread his massive bulk through the sands, and tried to reach down into Mars’s core to recover some magma for his healin’. However, no matter how deeply he delved within Mars, he could find no more magma, for he’d pulled it all into the chamber below the Tharsis plains, which was now behind the brothers, where he could not quite touch it. It was only then that he realized that he’d spread himself too widely and too deeply to ever again be able to rise from the spot where he’d settled. He remains in that place to this day.”

Louis looked meaningfully at Nestor and the boy returned his stare blankly. After waiting several moments in silence, Louis asked in a voice beset by impatience, “Even the biggest bully of ‘em all couldn’t stand up to folk who were determined, and who worked together. Worth thinkin’ about, wouldn’t you agree?”

Nestor shrugged and looked down at the floor of the cargo area. Louis persisted, “Encourage your enemy to defeat hisself. That’s the way we can get out of this, I think.”

“How we gonna convince Vincent to do anything? He jes does whatever he wants,” Nestor said, shaking his head while he spoke and not looking up at his watching father.

“Well, maybe that’s what we oughtta figure out,” Louis replied with the definitive tone of an answer. Nestor sat again in silence, still unsure how to respond to his father’s unaccountably optimistic outlook.

Louis seemed to have no further pronouncements, and announced that it was time for bed and that they were starting before daylight tomorrow, and went forward to sleep in the driver’s seat, leant all the way back.

Nestor slept poorly that night upon the floor of the cargo area, the sensation of the truck creeping laterally waking him every time he started to drift off. When they rose the next morning, he peered out the window on the uphill side of the truck cab and noticed two new wide gashes in the loose scree which extended perhaps ten meters uphill as proof of their overnight downhill descent.

They made the second terrace wall by sunset and slept at the foot of that wall, and spent the next day working their way through the maze of cracks and landslides they found there. Upon climbing their way free, they found that they’d climbed to an altitude where the air was too thin to suspend dust, and so all that had been blown up by billions of years of dust storms had fallen here as poisonous ochre snow, piled meters deep. They bogged down in the dust, the huge knobby truck tires digging dual deep furrows in it and kicking up high curving tails of spume behind them.

The mire slowed them so much that their climb up the final terrace to the caldera took as long as the rest of the trip up to that point, and after nearly a week of climbing, they arrived at their destination shortly before sundown. They were on a prominence in the caldera complex, jutting out between a shallow depression to the north and the three-kilometer-deep pit of the main caldera. The sky above them had faded from steel to deep purple, and the sun glared through a halo of lower-altitude dust out on the horizon.

Louis brought the truck to a stop on the edge of the outcropping, right where the ground fell away steeply into the caldera, the bottom of the pit so far below they could only see it by looking out many kilometers. They could just make out the other side some twenty four kilometers distant, a thin line of rock in the gloom. Louis got up and moved to leave the truck, and Nestor followed.

A few moments later, they were perched atop the range truck, looking out to the west and watching the sun as it melted into the horizon. Louis pointed to the south, where they could just see the peak of Pavonis Mons catching the last rays of sunlight and shining gold all those hundreds of kilometers away.

“That there is Mount Pavonis, our brother volcano. And if you look west, on the right day, they say you can see Olympus as well.”

“Have you ever seen it?”

“Nah, I personally don’t think you can see it from here, but your grandaddy use to say he saw Olympus once when he was a boy.”

Nestor watched the country below arrive at the terminus of its day. Just on the horizon to the west, he could see the surface lights of a city coming on in anticipation of the encroaching darkness. Down on the intervening plain, a pair of late day dust devils, each easily a thousand meters tall, pirouetted around one another with the last rays of light shining alternate yellow and red patterns through them each, locked in a dance that could only ever bring them close to one another, but never touch. When one would get a little too close, it would twist and spin chaotically and then the other funnel’s vorticity would cast out it at a random angle, only to be inexorably drawn back to spin and pivot. Nestor watched this dance happen below him for some time before he decided it wasn’t a dance at all, but a battle to determine which devil was worthy of surviving to meet the impending frigid night racing towards the western horizon as they fought. He could not help but feel pity for them, locked in a tragic battle of which they lacked the basic awareness necessary to facilitate their escape, rushing towards a finality beyond their comprehension that would render all their efforts null, worthless.

The frail high-altitude wind whipped at him. Nestor pointed at the lights on the horizon and touched his coms button, “That Poynting’s lights over there?”

“Yup, that’s Poynting. And ‘tween there and here is our claim. Your birthright.”

Nestor nodded, taking it all in. “If we don’t lose it all. Seriously, dad, what’re we gonna do? We been away for days climbin’ up this mountain, and I been watchin’ the alarms pile up on the console in the truck. Vincent’s gotta be plannin’ both our deaths. What in the world we gonna do now?”

“We gonna fight fer it.”

“You think we can fight Vincent?”

“Think the target of our ire matters less’n the fact that we fightin’.”

“What does that even mean? Vincent’s a dangerous man. Next time it might be more’n yer fingers…”

“Boy, some men only know violence. I think that’s where I went wrong, before. I went in thinkin’ he’d talk. Negotiate. Shoulda stood up fer myself more. Fought harder. He’d have understood that.”

Nestor turned to look at his father, whose face was the deep purple of the setting sun, and was working over some other sentiment, and so Nestor said nothing and just looked at his father and waited. Finally Louis spoke, turning to point at the broad sweep of the plains between the slopes of their home and the slopes of the distant Pavonis, “Someday, son, that will all be green. Can you feature it?”

Nestor nodded, but wasn’t really able to imagine what his father was describing. He said nothing in response.

Louis seemed to grasp this fact and described at length all the lifeforms that humanity brought to this desert planet from Earth who, according to him, would spread across the surface once its atmosphere was ready. He described trees and flowers and grasses and crops to Nestor, and cataloged in detail animals domesticated and wild, crafting out of the dubious air of that summit a fairytale world in no way resembling the one that yawned in the spreading dark all around them. The frigid winds howling across bleak expanses laid out lifeless below, and the wind pushing weakly upon the truck on its overlook to the crater, that wind made all the more real by both men’s steadfast determination to believe in the existence of any other thing inhabiting their world but that wind, which was it’s only true fauna.

Thoroughly distracted by Louis’s fantasy world, Nestor asked his father, “Where will all of this life come from? We don’t have any of these things now. How will we get them?”

Louis smiled a wise smile, “When we’re ready, we’ll open the Great Seed Bank and grow everthing we need.”

Nestor scrunched up his face, “How though? From seeds? Everthing don’t grow from seeds, though, does it?”

Louis’s smile faded slightly as he leaned forward and whispered into his coms as if dispensing some great hidden secret, “The Great Seed Bank don’t have no actual seeds in it. The ‘seeds’ I’m talkin’ about are seed cultures; before humanity left Earth, we took cells from ever livin’ thing, and brought those cells here. We keep them frozen at the South Pole, where they’ll remain until we’re ready. Then, scientists will thaw them out and grow anything we want.”

Nestor’s head spun at the idea, “How, though? How do you grow anything you want from cells?”

Louis frowned, “The scientists will do it, of course. They know how.”

“What scientists?”

“There’s scientists at the Seed Bank,” he said, leaning back to prop himself from behind on the truck’s rooftop, “they dedicate their whole lives to knowin’ how to grow back any sort of livin’ thing we want. Shame I won’t live to see it.”

“Me neither,” Nestor said with a fatalistic shrug that was obscured by his enviro suit. Louis pivoted forward to stare at Nestor, and looking at his father, Nestor could see he still hadn’t said what he’d intended.

“Why wouldn’t you live to see it? We closer to it’n you think.”

“It sure don’t feel like it, pop. Everthing around us is jes dust, and it jes don’t feel like we’re makin’ that world you always talk about. It feels like we barely survivin’.”

“I know it.”

“Ain’t no one comin’ to help us, neither. Not now.”

“Know that too.”

“We needed somethin’ new, dad. Somethin’ to get us out of this rut of neverendin’ breakdowns and repairs. Fact is, everthing we have is old, real old, and it’s all jes gonna keep on breakin’.”

Louis said nothing and Nestor blurted out, “I really thought I was helpin’ out. With Vincent.”

Louis seemed similarly disinclined to respond to this, and they sat in silence for some time. Nestor watched as the last curve of the sun dropped below the distant horizon, and the dark seemed to rush in behind it, the dam of light removed to allow the swelling gloom to flood over them.

Louis broke the silence over the coms, “We ain’t gonna find nothin’ new in doing the same ol thing. And I don’t want to repeat the mistakes of so many others in our position, and I do believe they’s mistakes. But I don’t know what else to do, son. We hydrofarmers and that’s all we can ever be.”

“Why though? Why cain’t we be somethin’ else, somethin’ that’s maybe worth doin’ more’n all this?”

“We’ll always be hydrofarmers, son. It’s in our blood. It’s in our bones.”

He paused, clearly for effect, waiting for a reply from Nestor. Finally Nestor spoke, “We ain’t hydrofarmers even now, dad. We barely got a claim, and after all this, we’ll be lucky if Vincent don’t jes take the whole thing. Or kill us both. We oughta jes run away. We don’t got nothin’ holdin’ us here anyways.”

The last bit of glow on the horizon was fading fast, the dark nearly absolute. Nestor looked down the slope, watching as homestead lights all came on and thousands of stars blinked into existence from the frozen desert below. The dark felt insulating, secure, and in that safety Louis spoke with assurance, “We don’t run, boy. Don’t never run.”

*****

They stayed the night on the summit and ventured down the next morning. Travel down the slope was easier than going up had been, if only marginally so, and several days later they arrived in Poynting to confront their racketeer. Nestor in tow, Louis sought Vincent out at the same restaurant where they’d originally met.

They came upon Vincent holding minor court in the tunnel in front of the restaurant, surrounded by a chorus of lackeys and sycophants who were all joined together to assure him of his greatness in all aspects. Upon seeing Louis, Vincent stopped talking and gestured towards them with his chin and the circle opened itself on one side and formed into a sort of funnel of muscle that Vincent quickly passed through on his way to Louis.

He shouted angrily, “You’ve finally decided to show up? Where have you been? Who do you think you are?”

Louis raised both hands, trying to placate the angry man stomping at speed towards him, “Now, we need to talk about all that, Vincent.”

Vincent came to a stop with his face nearly touching Louis’s. Nestor stepped back from both of them, raising his hands defensively.

“You want to talk? Let us talk. We can talk about how you abandoned your last several deliveries without notice. About how all of those deliveries remain unperformed. About all the other arrangements I was forced to make because you decided you would like to renegotiate terms that you did not negotiate to begin with. Where should we start?”

Louis seemed astonishingly unintimidated and remained so even as the crowd of men slowly filtered over, all of them glaring at him hungrily.

“I don’t want to renegotiate nothin’, Vincent. I think we done paid you back, plus some, with all the drivin’ we been doin’, and way I see it, we got to be square by now. We ain’t goin’ to do no more of it.”

“Oh, you have decided we’re square, have you? I have decided no such thing. You are not square, and you will never be square, do you understand? You will drive for me until I decide that it’s no longer to my benefit for you to do so.”

Louis looked at him blankly, clearly not sure how to respond.

Vincent glared back, “Why are you looking at me like that? Don’t you understand that desperate, broke dust farmers…they are not missed? That people in your situation do as they are instructed, or they simply disappear? You fucking fool.”

Louis’s expression still did not change, as if his mind were simply overloaded, a tabula rasa that seemed to infuriate Vincent further. A look of disgust spread over the dangerous man’s already-contorted face and built until Vincent leant back and spat on Louis, the blob of mucus spattering onto Louis’s reddening cheek.

The next moments were a blur to Nestor, for action seemed to explode all around him. He saw his father swing at Vincent and he saw the punch connect with Vincent’s nose and he saw the gout of men around them fall upon his father in an instant, bunched into a ball of elbows and fists and knees. He tried to join the fray but a pair of arms locked under his armpits and hands wrapped behind his head and lifted him wholly off the ground, held kicking in the air while he watched the wall of backs dog pile his father.

Vincent yelled something, which Nestor could not make out over his own screams of protestation, and the pile of men backed away from his father, who lay motionless on the ground with his hands up to cover his head. A pair of men lifted Louis up by his arms and sat him on his knees into a crouch before Vincent. Vincent produced from his person a knife and walked forward to loom over Louis, whose face was already several shades of blue, whose eyes were so swollen it was questionable whether he saw Vincent approach at all.

Vincent said something else to his father, which Nestor still didn’t hear over his own voice yelling profanities at Vincent and the crowd and the very universe that would allow this injustice to happen. Vincent reached a hand down and prized Louis’s mouth open and delicately with thumb and forefinger pulled out Louis’s tongue and the very moment it was out he slipped the knife under it and then pulled it up and lifted that limp pink bloody mess from Louis’s now-screaming maw and tossed it nonchalantly to land before the man’s son.

Nestor screamed louder now, thrashing within the grasp of his assailant, barely able to move at all for the tightness of the grip, spittle flying with every expletive he hurled at his father’s foe. Vincent smiled a perfunctory smile at the boy and then turned back to his victim, shoving his knife into the man’s screaming, bloody mouth and turning it sideways opened Louis’s cheek to the ear, seeming to take pleasure in the new inchoate scream this produced. He flipped the knife around and did the same to the other cheek, Louis’s teeth and gums and his screaming open jaw laid bare to his son who stopped screaming now, his young mind overloaded with the horror he was bearing witness to.

Vincent detached from the wailing man and walked over to stand before Nestor, “Do you see now the consequences of resisting my will? Do you see that I do this in public, for all these people to see, and to know what I am capable of? Do you see that no one, no one at all, will stop me?”

He turned and walked to stand behind Nestor’s father, whose keening had fallen to a hoarse sob. He returned Nestor’s furious look, and grabbed a handful of Louis’s hair and wrenched his head back and slipped the knife as if it were nothing across Louis’s throat from ear to ear and then pushed his victim forward, who tumbled face-first onto the floor of the tunnel and held his bleeding throat as if this act could possibly prevent his life from slipping away.

Vincent stepped over Louis and blocked his body from Nestor’s vision and nodded at the man holding the boy. Nestor was lowered to the ground but still held tightly. Vincent leaned all the way forward, wiping the blade broad-edged over Nestor’s envirosuit, leaving thin trails of his father’s blood behind.

“You have a delivery to pick up, boy. Go now. Head towards the Labyrinth until five kilometers out, then south-southeast until you come to the depression between two bluffs. A shuttle will be there, waiting for you. Leave him. What will happen to you, if you don’t make my deliveries, will make what happened to him look like a kindness.”

With that, Nestor was let go. He paused for a moment, wishing desperately to rush to the side of his motionless father, but Vincent saw the pause and made a “TSSH” sound. Nestor looked up at his father’s murderer, who shook his head and gestured with his chin down the long and emptied tunnel. Nestor haltingly backed away, watching as two men lifted his father’s body up and disappeared with it into the restaurant. The circle of men closed back around Vincent, and Nestor’s vision contracted as well to countenance only his father’s murderer, who was enjoying himself profusely.

*****

Nestor rubbed his eyes and sat back in the driver’s seat of the range truck, staring blearily at the GPS map, trying to make sense of where exactly he was supposed to go. The wind rocked the truck gently back and forth, and for a moment Nestor closed his eyes and enjoyed the motion, so eerily reminiscent of long nights spent on the range, his drunken father snoring below him. But never again. Not now.

He shook his head and opened his eyes, leaning forward, his face mere centimeters from the screen, and tried to make out all the little topographical features on the map. It was no use. The map showed featureless plains here terminating into the headlands northwest of the Noctis Labyrinthus, the thousand-kilometer-long network of grabens that connected the Tharsian mountains with the Mariner Valley. The Labyrinth had always been a children’s story to Nestor, a mythical setting for heroes to get lost in, before being tested by one monster or another. He’d never really looked at it on a map, and he felt he was truly seeing it for the first time, and saw now that it was a huge, impassable maze. He could understand why no one lived out here.

He considered turning back to Poynting, but rejected the idea out of hand. He couldn’t go back there empty-handed. His stomach bunched up into a knot and for a moment he was midway between retching and sobbing. He took a few deep breaths and tried to concentrate, but could not escape the persistent urge to flee. He stared out his window at the distant canyonlands and could not convince himself to enter that place which forebode only encounters with what minotaurs may still haunt the crevices therein.

After staring at the GPS for quite some time longer, Nester decided he would flee to Pavonis. He knew nothing about that district, nor did he know if his villain could reach whatever those places may be, but he knew definitively of no other place to hide. Pavonis was quite south and west of his position, and in this featureless place he determined he’d be best-served by keeping the Labyrinth to his left until he came abreast of Pavonis on the map and could then head due west to reach his destination.

The sun set on him still pointed south and eventually he could see so little that he gave up and stopped the truck in its tracks and slept the night leaned back in the driver’s seat in case he might need to depart at speed. He woke at first light and proceeded until the sun was high off his left shoulder. He was squinting through the rays filtering in from his side window when he noticed a billow of dust out on the horizon headed towards him. He slowed and held his hand up to block the sun to see the other vehicle better, but could make little out.

He met the approaching vehicle in a drainage between two bluffs into which Nestor had guided his own truck to hide it from that other traveler’s view. Cresting over the bluff came a single vehicle, a sort of heavily modified version of his range truck. The opposing range truck crabbed down the bluffside and came to a stop next to Nestor’s. A voice came over the coms, “Nestor Creede. Stay where you are and turn off yer truck. Vincent would like a word with you.”

Nestor looked out at the bluff ahead of him and conjecturally plotted a course up and away, for there was no one blocking him in that direction. His mind raced with paranoid fantasies of what Vincent might do with him. He tried to picture any other outcome but could not. His foot depressed the accelerator pedal and the big truck lunged forward. He hit the foot of the slope and the front wheels briefly bounced in the air before coming down hard on the scree and the knobby tires dug up rocks and pelted the underside of the truck with them as they grasped desperately for purchase.

In the truck’s rearview camera, Nestor noticed his pursuer coming around to follow, but that truck seemed to struggle to turn within the cramped confines of the draw, providing him a considerable lead.

Nestor crested the bluff with the electric motors of the range truck whirring loudly as the ponderous beast briefly caught air and then came down hard on the good lava hardpan. Perhaps ten kilometers distant, he could see the entry canyons to the Labyrinth spread as sloped fingers beckoning him. A solution to all his problems. He aimed straight toward the closest one and mashed the accelerator once again and behind him a massive dust cloud roiled up into the desert updrafts and rose as a thunderhead of doom hounding his progress toward freedom.

At length, the pursuers topped the bluff crest and immediately saw the huge transient cloud of dust escaping over the plain and sped after their quarry. Their smaller truck came into its own on this nice hard surface and they gained on Nestor at the forward tip of the cloud.

Nestor could see only dust in the rearview camera, but he knew the pursuers were still back there, a phantom biding its time before reaching out from the doom to strike him down. He drove on and had made quite a good bit of distance, and when the headlands of the Labyrinth’s grabens loomed barely two kilometers away, the other truck resolved from the dust cloud and caught him up and appeared for a moment as if it might try to spin him. Nestor braced himself for he was not sure if the lighter truck could truly force a spin on something as massive as his range truck and clearly the pursuer had the same misgivings for after a moment of easing in they swung wide, speeding up to overtake and disappearing from the purview of the rearview camera.

The range truck had side-view cameras, but Nestor could not remember the last time either had worked and found as he flicked through their displays that neither had decided to start. He leaned forward and tried to peer back behind him through the passenger side window, but could see nothing. He looked ahead again and noticed now that he was much progressed upon it, the canyon he was currently pointed at seemed to dead end a few hundred meters back into a steep slope that led to environs unknown. Most likely to a steep decline on the other side, a horrific crash, and his capture. He brought up the GPS map of the area on the truck’s console, and picked at random a canyon that extended sufficiently back into the Labyrinth, to his right. He craned to peer through the passenger window again, trying to see where the other truck was, but saw nothing visible but his own dust.

Nestor slammed on his brakes and fought to hold the wheel steady as he slid along, and the cloud he’d created behind him caught him up and enveloped him in a deep red twilight. He craned and looked for his pursuers yet again, but still saw nothing. As he slowed enough to not roll the truck, he hauled the wheel to the right and used the GPS to point himself at his destination canyon. He could see nothing out the windows, not even the front of the truck itself. The entrance to the graben should be less than a kilometer away and he floored the truck in the blind and the dust curled up and around the hood, almost seeming to part a short distance ahead and with a blast of concomitant grit he exited the cloud and then he saw where the others had gone.

The smaller truck was parked perpendicular to the canyon entrance before him, and fully blocking it. A man stood in front of this truck with his rifle at the ready. Nestor bore down on the man at speed. He aimed at the front section of the other truck in the desperate hope that that part might be lighter and thus easier to ram out of the way, and as it became apparent Nestor would not stop, the other man raised his rifle. It bucked up in slow motion once. Nestor ducked as a white circle with a slug wedged firmly inside appeared before his face, stopped by the thick windows. A surprise to both parties. It was then that the two trucks made contact with a crash, and the slug tumbled down the windscreen, leaving as proof of its failure only a small white circle.

The smaller truck spun with the impact and toppled to its side and then completed the roll to land on its roof. The rear whipped around behind the man, catching him and tossing him perhaps twenty meters to land and lay motionless and spreadeagled upon the dust with his helmet cracked and his sightless eyes staring up at the pink sky. Nestor saw none of this, however, as the range truck bounced away to conjectural safety within the Labyrinth.

Chapter 1 - The Range

Author’s Notes - So, we begin our story. We pick our protagonist up as a late-adolescent, angsty youth, living with his father as impoverished yeomen terrafarmers out on the surface. Mars, as it turns out, is a tough place to live, and terraforming isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. It’s fairly common knowledge, at least amongst space nerds, at this point that Mars is basically the most-inhospitable-place-in-space, next to the hard vacuum of space itself. A lot of crazy ideas have been tossed out about how to make Mars a more hospitable place, and none of them really strike me as very sound. So, terraformation in our story is failing. It’s more interesting if it does.

I see a lot of parallels between attempting to terraform Mars and what the early homesteaders in the American West went through. No infrastructure, inhospitable, a wild climate that is actively trying to kill them, a future that depends on their steadfast ability to persevere. Nestor’s father understands what’s at stake for both himself and the planet as the whole, and through his haze of self-destructive depression at the loss of the rest of his family, is trying his best to pass that on to Nestor. Nestor is dreaming of the stars, and (due to the aforementioned paternal haze) is busy struggling with the practicalities of their life. Along the way, he makes desperate, but all-too-understandable errors. Errors that have some painful consequences.

Really, it’s that latter part that I was most ruminating on when I wrote this chapter. About how its so much easier to be optimistic for your future, when you don’t have to wrangle all the sticky realities of your present. About how wrangling with those sticky realities can create a desperation for escape, for relief, for some other way out. And where the dysfunction of both perspectives can lead to horrible outcomes.

The Creedes both awoke to the horn of the overland ice train honking its arrival. It was predawn, and Nestor opened his eyes and silently traced the pipes running throughout the hut in which they’d slept, and listened to those pipes tick and hiss with the superheated steam being pushed through them. Steam used to provide heat to Mars’s tentative atmosphere. Steam produced from melting and then superheating the very ice being delivered. The truck was dumping this hut’s delivery into the great hopper set behind the hut, and the clatter of Jupiter’s tears pouring down seemed to make the walls themselves shake.

“There’s the ice delivery,” Nestor said as he pivoted to sit on the edge of his shaky cot. Louis was still sprawled upon his very own bed, barely a meter away, with his eyes closed. Nestor could tell he was not asleep, however, because he was not snoring.

Nestor cut to the point he’d been angling for. “I went ahead and canceled the delivery for later in the week. And for this load today, she’s only deliverin’ to the runs that’re up right now.”

“We’ll get the other runs up, don’t worry,” his reclined father slurred from his bed. He lifted his arm and draped it across his head as he spoke.

 “At the rate we been cannibalizin’ the huts that’re down, we ain’t never goin’ to get those runs back up.” Nestor looked at his father while he said this, smiling at the flash of anger he saw Louis repress.

“We jes got a few runs down,” Louis responded gruffly as he pivoted to sit upon the edge of his own bed. “We’ll get ‘em back up here soon. We goin’ to the market today and you’ll see, I’ll find the money for some extra parts.”

Nestor rose and stretched and peered through the singular window in this hut into the predawn gloom glowing with the first hints of crimson outside. “If we goin’ to Poynting we need to leave,” he said, as he stretched again, “it’ll be mid-morning before we get there, if we go right now.”

Louis rose from his cot with a grumble and spent several seconds rooting around in his bedding, looking for a liquor bottle to drink from. He found naught and grumbled further.

“Gotta get this hut cleaned up,” Louis said aloud to the room at large. He had turned from Nestor, and seemed to no longer be aware of the boy’s presence. He squeezed past the machinery surrounding his bed and shuffled over to piss into the portable toilet they brought with them into the huts, itself a reeking technological marvel capable of recycling all their waters into something drinkable, and incinerating any solids to fine ash. At least, it did those things when it worked. Nestor could see as he glanced at that spattered device that it was not working this morning. He wondered to himself if it needed to be cleaned, and felt his mind recoil at the notion.

If Louis had been looking at Nestor, he’d have noticed the boy turning in a slow circle to survey the various tools and garbage the two of them had left scattered about upon finishing the prior day’s repairs. The hut was quite small, and with all the machinery and pipes, there was barely room to move in any direction. Nestor squeezed sideways through spaces between the heaters and crushers and generators to retrieve tools, nutrient paste packages, and empty liquor bottles, and he did so with a mincing gait, careful to not disturb the dust. The floor was technically concrete, but enough dust had intruded over the decades since its construction to thickly coat that surface, beginning the long and unavoidable process that converted all man-made objects into Martian terrain. Mars brooks no intrusion on her surface, and Mars makes all things dust, for Mars herself is poisonous, corrosive dust and nothing more. He produced a facemask and a glove from his pocket and donned both to retrieve a wrench that had fallen in a drift of that dust, and for the briefest of moments, a waft of sulfur rose from the bare patch of concrete left below the wrench. He wiped the wrench clean with a damp rag and appraised it for corrosion and found none.

“Toilet’s busted, Nestor. You gotta fix it ‘fore we leave.”

Nestor glanced back at the device on the floor and sighed, “Need to get parts in town. I cain’t fix whatever’s wrong with it with what I got.”

“It ain’t comin’ in the truck full,” Louis said as he turned from the toilet. Nestor only shrugged in response from his position on the far side of the hut.  

Louis looked forlornly around himself, as if he were having a moment of clarity about the cramped state of their lives, splitting time between the various huts scattered all over the property, midway up the slopes of Mount Ascraeus, and the range truck. Louis would go nowhere near the homestead, and so those were the only living options available.

Nestor watched his father gaping around the hut while he finished tidying and then walked over to his burnished ochre envirosuit piled carefully in the corner of the hut by the door. He lifted the scuffed helmet with its permanently-fogged-around-the-edges faceplate and he checked the seals at the neck for dust or debris and wiped them with cleaning solvent on a cloth and set that helmet on a shelf above the floor. He hefted the large backpack that recycled his air and provided his heat and recycled his waters, and he opened the flap at the top to fill the cargo chamber with their spare tubes of nutrient paste and liter bags of potable water, and closed the flap and ran the system diagnosis on the small screen on the side of the bag. Satisfied that all its systems were working today, even the heater that always seemed to be failing, he hung the backpack upon a hook by the door. He lifted the torso and pants sections and boots and cleaned all their seals with his rag and carefully put everything on, starting with the boots.

His helmet clicked into its seals and his suit filled with air and he looked over to his father, who had spent the intervening minutes pacing around and touching various items Nestor had already addressed in an act that very much looked like he was blessing the work. He sighed inside his helmet and took it back off. For the briefest of moments, Nestor considered remarking upon Louis’s ecclesiastical behavior, but on further reflection realized that Louis was merely…behaving. He was never very clear or intentional on these sober days, and it had been getting worse as time went on. Nestor decided this time, as so often before, to let it go, and quietly watched his father pace around the hut.

Louis finally deigned to put on his own envirosuit, but cleaning and putting all the various articles together took him so long that by the time he had fully dressed, Nestor had arranged the bag of tools and bag of garbage and toilet all about the entrance to the hut and was practically tapping his foot in frustration at being so waylaid. The moment Louis gave him the thumbs up to confirm that his suit was making air, Nestor depressurized the hut and walked out to deposit their waste upon the frozen pile of its antecedents behind the hut.

The ice train was already gone to wind its way through their maze of pipes to other empty huts. Louis walked over to inspect the hopper, saying over his coms with disbelief in his voice, “Amazin’ where this all come from. To think my grandaddy use to talk about how they’d harvest ice right here on Mars.”

Nestor gathered up the other bags and lugged them to the range truck. “Been a long time since anyone’s been able to do that.” He hefted the bags through the door in the back and then climbed the short ladder and knelt through that cramped space to stow them amongst the pots and pans and cookstove and bath, all squeezed together from the collapsible sides. As he passed it, he tapped the screen on the water purifier to run a quick diagnostic. Several errors came back, and after checking the logs, he found it hadn’t been working since the prior evening. Yet another repair, this one fairly urgent, as they only had the five liters in his bag and the 2 liters that the truck had purified.

He shook his head as his father climbed up the ladder and closed the hatch behind him and hit the button to pressurize the truck. They crouched, nearly touching in that tiny area while the surrounding space hissed full of air. The light on the airlock control changed to green, and they both took off their helmets, Louis saying the moment his came off, “Good long time. But jes you wait, maybe in yer lifetime, we’ll get a water cycle restarted here, and we’ll be gettin’ Mars-harvested ice once again.”

Nestor looked his father briefly in the eye and, saying nothing, turned and opened the door to the front of the truck. He ducked under his hammock, hung crosswise there and crawled over his father’s bed directly below. “Boy, you gotta get that hammock stowed proper,” his father yelled as he swatted the blanket infested net away and crawled through himself.

“What about your bed? It could be folded up and stowed,” Nestor said, lowering himself into the driver’s seat. He powered up the solar panels and checked the air recirculator status and engine status and found both working today and smiled at his first good luck. Louis dropped into the seat beside him.

“My bed don’t hang you up. Walkin’ through.”

Nestor shook his head and chose not to argue with his father. He shrugged, and they pulled away from that place in the dark, leaving behind only their dust and their waste and nothing else at all.

*****

The Creedes bounced across their property line, though in this place there was minor distinction to where such boundaries lay. The outflow pipes from their claim ran parallel to them, blinking red lights atop each section of pipe, keeping silent time as they passed. Looming out of the predawn dark before them was the huge collector pipe that ran past all the claims on Mount Ascraeus, a massive tube held suspended on pillars, for all its appearance harkening back to ancient aqueducts built by a culture long extinct on a world all-but-forgotten in this place. They passed under the collector pipe and Nestor pointed the truck towards the road to Poynting.

His father was huddled in the passenger seat looking down into a cracked tablet that glowed bluely back up at his face. Nestor knew without being able to see the screen itself that Louis had their last month’s market sale prices for water and heat on the screen. Louis held the tablet up to the side of Nestor’s face and pointed his finger at a line item there. “See? This one here is a good example. The Board come in a full two hours after we started producin’ heat on the Derby line and cut they rates in half. Ain’t no way of justifyin’ that. This one’s a winner.”

The terrain here beyond Ascraeus’s slopes was hard and flat and covered in all manner of rock, and Nestor careened around the larger of those boulders, his attention on the driving. He glanced briefly at the tablet and pretended to see what his father was trying to show him, and shrugged. “Ain’t it suppose to be that if everone starts producin’ in the same areas at the same time, the Board is allowed to reduce the rates?” He asked as he straddled the truck over a smaller rock.

His father shook his head and snarled, “They claim it’s to ‘disincentivize’ folks from only producin’ when rates are high. But I’ll tell you, boy, it’s really about power. They cain’t let a strugglin’ guy get too far ahead.”

“Then why they let you dispute the adjustments at all?”

“If we weren’t allowed disputes, boy, we wouldn’t make it. With the cost of ice and methane bein’ what they are. Cain’t have that. Let me win on jes enough of ‘em to keep us scrapin’ by.”

The sun broached the eastern horizon, and the saffron sky dazzled off Nestor’s left shoulder. He squinted through the dawn at his father, who had resumed scrolling through the line items on the tablet, “Well, as many disputes as you make at your Board hearin’s, they probably feel obligated to jes let you win on a few.”

“Only doin’ what a man needs to survive on his own, boy. Somethin’ you need to be learnin’. If they’d let me bring you into the hearin’ with me, you’d be learnin’ by watchin’ me in there. As it is, I gotta teach you out here. If you’d jes listen to me ever once in a while.” He looked meaningfully across at Nestor, who was at that moment busy guiding the range truck over the berms bordering the road. He finally managed it, and found on the other side a road that was flat and straight and featureless, and the truck’s six wheels bit into the good asphalt and they sped away.

Louis shook his head and returned to his tablet. “Not like you learnin’ anything. I oughta start makin’ you go in and argue a few disputes yourself here soon to start practin’, instead.”

By way of conciliation, Nestor looked over at his father and offered, “We oughta hire someone on to help. Wouldn’t need to worry so much about disputes if we had more of the lines runnin’.”

“We cain’t hire no one on, and you need to quit askin’, Nestor. We barely survivin’ out here. How we gonna pay someone new?”

Nestor stared straight ahead and said, faintly, “Family will sometimes work on credit. To help each other out.”

Louis looked up from the tablet and glared briefly at his son, and then looked out the window. The sun was finally above the horizon and had drawn long bold lines of shadow from each of the many boulders in the fields surrounding them, and he seemed to be measuring each of those lines mentally, as if the answer to Nestor’s statement may be out there amongst the wind and the rocks. Nestor continued his stare forward, images flashing through his mind of his father ejecting his uncles from their family homestead. A fight. A brandished gun.

Louis finally spoke up, his voice plumbing through the depths of grief and isolation welling up within his son, “Wouldn’t know where any of them was now anyways. It’s been years since…”

“Wouldn’t be no one you could ask? They cain’t have gone far, dad.”

Louis shook his head. “And what then? You think they’d jes come back and work fer me again? Wouldn’t want to try to steal it out from under me all over?”

“They was jes tryin’ to help.”

“Help. Help break the family claim into five pieces, maybe. Yer great-great-grandaddy didn’t buy him the largest claim on Ascraeus to have none of his descendants break that up, son. To have them brothers of mine come to me and try to destroy that legacy. Reduce it. Parcel it out. No.” His voice was breaking and Nestor could see Louis staring at him from the corner of his eye and remained looking dead ahead.

After a while, Louis looked back down to the tablet, though he was no longer scrolling. Finally, at length, Nestor put forth, “My great-great-grandad bought him a claim that is fifteen hundred square kilometers. He knew jes as well as you do that no one person can hydrofarm that much ground. You ask me, he intended for his descendants to share it. Not fight over it.”

“Wasn’t me who was fightin’, son. All four of them brothers of mine come out with a plan that day. After your momma…they saw a weakness in me, and…and they tried to exploit that. Tried to take from me what your grandaddy willed as mine. Had no choice but to defend myself. Defend our legacy. Wasn’t no other way.”

“I jes think they didn’t like how much you was drinkin’.” Nestor chose this moment to look over at his father, who now would not meet his eyes, and glanced back out his side window.

“Man’s allowed him some drink. Of a time. Ain’t nothing wrong with that. As if any of them is any better. Ain’t any of their place to say when they eldest brother is drinkin’ too much.”

“You can surely see how they might have been worried, though, cain’t you?”

“Worry is one thing. They was more than worried, Nestor. You don’t know them. Not like I do. You was still jes a boy back when they was in our lives. I knew what they was up to months before they tried it that day.”

“I was seven. Plenty old enough to remember. They was only ever kind to me.”

Louis shook his head and his face flashed red and he rose and stooped to the back of the truck. Nestor heard him drop into his bed back there with a grunt. Enough time passed that he’d thought Louis must be asleep, when from the back his father spoke, just loud enough for Nestor to hear over the truck’s tires upon the asphalt, “You don’t know them like I do. They wait ever day for their chance to try and take it again. It’s up to you and me to make so they cain’t. Don’t know what it will take for you to understand that.”

*****

They arrived at Poynting in mid-morning. The city of Poynting was buried beneath the central uplift of a complex impact crater bearing the same name, and sprawled underground six kilometers in all directions, with grand artificial caverns and tunnels that extended all the way out to the breccia of the crater floor. However, as they crested the rim of the crater, all that was visible below them was the city’s spaceport in the center and the solitary black line of the road winding its way down to meet it. 

Traffic had picked up, and they found themselves in a long unbroken line of delivery trucks that plodded their way towards the spaceport to pick up the day’s deliveries. The road forked as they approached the four immense cuboidal terminals of the spaceport, and the Creedes took the branch that led down a long ramp to the city’s main airlock and elevators, set just underground. Louis had come back to the front a few minutes before they’d arrived at the crater rim and sat in the passenger seat of the range truck grumbling to himself about the traffic, the sunlight, and Nestor’s driving for all these were subject to his review and none rose to his high standards. Nestor pretended he didn’t hear and instead focused on negotiating the truck into the crowded airlock. 

Nestor eventually cleared the airlock and proceeded through the wide primary tunnels to the Market. Poynting’s Market Plaza was an artificial expansion of a natural magma cave and the largest open-air space in the city, and endeavored to be all things to all farmers, offering anything a Tharsian terrafarmer could need. The Board didn’t start hearing disputes until after noon, and so they were quite early as Nestor pulled the range truck into a parking space cut into the Plaza walls. 

“I’m gonna head on over to the café,” Louis said over his shoulder to Nestor while he opened his door, “why don’t you go on and get a couple dozen tubes of nutrient paste and, say, ten gallon of drinkin’ water from that store yonder. And get some flavors of paste other’n Flaming Hot, hear?”

“Cain’t. I got somewheres to go,” Nestor responded, not looking at his father as he opened his own door. 

Louis paused on the truck’s step and turned back to look at his son, “The only place you have to go, boy, is over to that store to get groceries. What else do you have to do in this city?”

Nestor knew that the truth would not make his father happy and stared at the blank space between them for a moment and tried to decide whether to lie. Louis noticed the pause and shook his head and looked down and away.

“Jes do it, son. I don’t want to know what else you git up to in this city when I’m not around, and I don’t want you to lie to me about it. I got some errands to run myself after the hearin’s today, so you can do whatever it is you want to do then. But fer now, jes get the groceries, do it first.”

Nestor said nothing and nodded to his father and they locked eyes and then he looked away and hoped the nod would be enough. Louis grunted once and dropped heavily down from the truck’s single stair and plodded over towards the café next to the main Board building, that business already encircled by a line of waiting farmers snaking out its open door.

Nestor dismounted the truck and detached towards the grocery store across the Plaza, but as soon as his father disappeared into the crowd in front of the café, Nestor took a hard turn to a small offshoot tunnel. He was headed to the spaceport and followed a familiar route there, one he’d used every market day for the past year, ever since his first exploratory trip, pulled along by the current of the crowd to find himself spit out in front of the massive doped-glass windows of the passenger terminal, and had goggled as their radiation-protecting chemical treatment bizarrely distorted the shapes of the landing passenger shuttles. He paused in that same place today and watched a shuttle take off in a cloud of ochre dust which boiled out to briefly encompass the windows. He waited while the wind blew away the dust and watched the shuttle rise until the glare of the engines winked out and it became one with the granite sky above.

Nestor loitered and watched the lithe passenger shuttles come and go. He cast his glance across the dozen passenger pads and adjoining field of surface hangers draped over the top of the central crater uplift, beyond the control tower jutting a hundred meters out of the very center, looking to the distant side of the spaceport, where the huge cylindrical tankers and bulky ice haulers were coming in for landings at the cargo terminals, using a grace that seemed impossible for such large craft.

A man across the terminal made eye contact with Nestor and shared a meaningful look. Nestor bowed his head and hurried through the terminal all the way back to a nondescript and unlocked supply closet. He slipped inside and felt around behind the wall-mounted electrical box and produced a thin tablet from the space between the box and the wall. He opened the tablet and typed the locations of several of their huts into that tablet, and then replaced it in its hiding spot and slipped back out of the room, as unseen as always.

He saw no one as he exited the terminal into the tunnel that connected it with cargo terminals across the spaceport. Technically, this tunnel was restricted access, but Nestor knew from experience that no one would see him here and no one would stop his travel. He’d learnt a lot since the first time he’d taken this tunnel, ten months ago. 

*****

Nestor had decided on his first day in the passenger terminal that he needed to see a shuttle up close. He’d imagined sneaking out to a landing pad while the shuttle was loading, and once there he would admire all its details in a way that would draw the attention of the pilot, who would see in Nestor a comrade and who would offer to take Nestor up for a flight. He would offer the controls to the boy, and as soon as Nestor would touch those controls, it would be evident that flying was the boy’s destiny. The pilot would offer him a chance to be co-pilot, an offer that Nestor would immediately accept, and thus his destined life of adventure would begin.

He could get near no landing pads, nor could he gain access to the cargo terminals or hangars, but he had found this ignored and wholly abandoned maintenance tunnel, and had followed it all the way back to a small building that stuck off the cargo terminal like a boxy wart. The inside of the building was organized into a kind of common square, with doors all around for different businesses, mostly hotels and restaurants, all of which catered to the gypsy pilots who passed perpetually through. 

The busiest of the shops had no sign showing what services were offered within, and it was this shop that had intrigued him the most. He’d stood to the side of the square, invisible as all the other feral children of Poynting, and watched the people coming and going, and noticed the strange suits they wore and the way they carried themselves, and overheard the pseudo-technical way they spoke. He’d decided that they must all be pilots. 

Nestor chose a lull in traffic to surreptitiously slip into the full pilot’s lounge and chose a place along the back wall and tried to make himself look small. He was wholly ignored in these efforts, for at the center of the room stood an old, disheveled man before a half-circle of bored-looking patrons, in the midst of fending off heckles from his audience.

“I tell you, he was three meters tall, and he could write his name with his left foot as well as he could with his right hand. He come aboard my shuttle in orbit, and crawled along the ceiling, using both his hands and his feet equally!”

The circle of men erupted into a chorus of guffaws, the sarcastic among them adding to his tall tale:

“…and he had two thumbs on the heels of each foot!”

“…he navigated by making a set of clicks and hums!”

“…he steered his ship by sittin’ with the control stick up his ass and floatin’ about. Said it give ‘im finer control!”

The old man looked around at his hecklers with an awkward smile pinned to his face and then searched out to the broader crowd for a suitable distraction from this not-so-good-natured ribbing. He saw Nestor in the corner and their eyes met and Nestor knew what was coming and tried to flee but could see no way out.

“You there! Have you ever met a Floatsie?” The crowd quieted and heads and shoulders twisted to look back at Nestor. He shook his head.

“Neither have any of them,” the old man gestured around at the crowd with a frown upon his face.

“And neither have you,” someone from the crowd yelled back, to peals of laughter.

Nestor felt himself relaxing as they all looked back at the old man, when an enormous pair of hands grabbed his shoulders and lifted him from his seat and pulled him towards the door, the man attached to the hands looking down at Nestor with a frown.

“This ain’t no place for kids, you hear?” The giant admonished as he not-so-gently pushed Nestor out the door. 

Nestor stood at the lounge’s threshold and looked around the now-abandoned square, wondering what to do next. He had been at it for several minutes when the old man walked out. The man glanced around momentarily, and he noticed Nestor and examined the filthy adolescent boy dressed in a tattered jumpsuit before him and nodded.

“Saw you get kicked out. Why’d you want to come into such a place as this?”

Nestor shrugged and looked across the square. “Dunno. Jes wanted to see what was in there, I guess.” He took half a step away, uncomfortable at how intently the old man was staring at him.

“Not much in there, but a bunch of drunks, sadly,” the old man said with a wistful tone. “This new breed of pilots don’t get the romance of flyin’, nor of space. They’re jes workin’ for a wage. Hired guns. Used to be, you could go into this here pilot’s lounge and hear all manner of wisdom. About flyin’. About livin’. Direct from the mouths of the greats. Legends, all of them. These new pilots jes want to drink.”

The ceiling of the square was doped glass, and through its wavey panes they watched a tanker shuttle pass overhead, its engines casting long jets of blue and white and red behind the behemoth ship as it tilted to the east.

“Why do they all tilt like that right after takeoff?” Nestor asked the air above him as he stared without pause at the great ship rumbling away.

The man replied and puffed out his chest minorly, peering over at Nestor like a prospective pupil, “You cain’t just fly straight up to space and float there, is why. Ships only stay up there in orbit by movin’ so fast that gravity cain’t pull ‘em back down quick enough.”

They could just make out the engines’ streak against the steel blue sky as it moved from their purview.  

“What would happen if they flew straight up?” Nestor asked as he leaned and strained his eyes to see the tiny dot of the receding ship.

“Weeell, they’d come right back down,” the man smiled paternally at his young charge, “you see, gravity’s always pullin’ you back down to the ground. So if you go straight up, as soon as you stop acceleratin’, gravity starts pullin’ you back. Slowin’ you down until you stop movin’ up at all. And when that happens, then you’ll start fallin’ back.”

Nestor gave up trying to follow the ship and instead scrunched his face at the old man. “So flyin’ sideways makes it so you don’t fall?’”

The old man chuckled in a friendly sort of way, “Nah, not ‘xactly. Like I said, gravity’s always pullin’ you down. But if you go fast enough, you miss the ground.”

Nestor must have looked lost at this response because the old man smiled wisely and gestured with his hand to come stand next to him. Nestor sidled over, his eyes meeting the old man’s with suspicion. The man knelt with a labored grunt, and in the dust of the square he drew a large circle and then drew a curve coming up from the surface of the circle.

“Imagine you takeoff in a shuttle, but you only run the engines for a couple seconds. Your trajectory will look like this,” he completed the curve, bringing the far edge of it down to reconnect with the circle, “you go up for a bit, but eventually you run out of enough speed to overcome the planet’s gravity, and so she pulls you back down, until you hit the surface.”

Nestor nodded, “So you’d crash.”

“Uh-huh, and if you burn the engines for longer, the top of the curve gets longer, too. This is because you develop more speed…more velocity,” he drew a second curve out from the circle, much larger than the previous one, “once the top of that curve is at the altitude you want to orbit, you cut your engines and coast to the top.”

Nestor interrupted, “Why not jes run your engines all the way to the top of the curve?”

“You could do that, but it’d be wasteful, because the whole time you’re burnin’ you’re extendin’ the top of the curve of your trajectory, makin’ it higher and higher, which is a waste if you don’t wanna go higher and higher.”

“But how do you not crash? If you cut your engines, you’ll jes get to the top of the curve and then fall back down, won’t you?”

“Ah, but that’s it. Once you get here,” the old man pointed at the peak of his larger curve, “you burn your engines again. When you do that, you start pushin’ out this descendin’ part of your trajectory…”

He drew a line out from the peak of the curve, extending it around the circle, “…and if you burn long enough, you push the descendin’ part out and out and out until it loops all the way back around, makin’ a circle. You’re in orbit now.”

He beamed up at Nestor, who stared at the man’s drawings for quite some time, putting all the pieces together.

“Why couldn’t you jes go straight up and then burn facin’ the direction you want to go? Wouldn’t that do the same thing?”

The old man’s smile grew even larger. “You’re right, you could do that. ‘Cept, when you get to the top of a straight up-and-down trajectory, you have no velocity. Mars’s gravity has stolen it all. So you gotta burn real hard to develop enough speed to orbit. But, if you climb at an angle…”

Nestor interrupted, “You’ll still have some velocity at the top of the curve?”

“Right again. Which makes it easier to build enough speed to orbit.” The old man stood up and brushed his hand against the leg of his burnished envirosuit.

 “I’m Oscar, by the way,” he said, offering his hand. 

Nestor took it and shook once. “Nestor. Good to meet you, sir.” 

Oscar scoffed at the ‘sir’ but smiled a crooked half-smile back.

Nestor, who’d looked away as soon as he let go of Oscar’s hand, turned back and squinted at the old man. “Can I ask you somethin’?’’ He leaned towards Oscar slightly, who nodded an encouragement to go on, “… what is a Floatie?”

Oscar smiled a gracious smile. “I dunno what a ‘Floatie’ is, but a Floatsie is a man who’s adapted to live permanently in space.”

He paused for effect, looking closely at Nestor, who stared blankly back. He continued, “They change their bodies for zero G. You don’t need legs to stand when you’re on the float, so they change their legs to be more like arms, and they move around by graspin’ with both their feet and their hands. They have long necks they can bend all the way back, makin’ it comfortable to look ‘up’ constantly.”

Nestor craned his neck back, jutting his chin up, feeling the muscles stretch taut, and wondered what it’d be like to live like that. Oscar noticed and smiled to himself, seeming to enjoy the boy’s naivety.

“Their organs and blood vessels are adapted, too. They say if you expose a Floatsie to a full G for more’n a few minutes, you can paralyze them permanently, or even kill ‘em. They’re frail and are all limbs and they are just…off. Not human any longer. They’ve become somethin’ else entirely.”

Nestor stared at Oscar and tried to picture what he was describing, but found it impossible to picture such fantastical creatures.

“You met them flyin’ a shuttle?”

Oscar’s face became serious. “Floatsies control pretty much all the interplanetary shippin’ that goes on. Mars will only become terraformed with the help of ‘em. They go out to the asteroid belt, to the moons of Jupiter, even all the way out to Saturn, and they load up with methane or ammonia or water ice and bring it all back to the orbital depots. They live their whole lives in their ships, you know. Crazy ships that don’t use engines like our normal ships do. They use special engines, which require huge amounts of electricity, which they generate with these beautiful solar panel arrays all around their ship. Works of art, those ships are. The way they build their arrays, all sharp angles and swooping lines.”

He paused again, looking faraway, seemingly lost in fond memories. He snapped out of it and squinted at Nestor briefly, “Most folk never meet a Floatsie. They never come off their ships. Lotta pilots will swear there is no such thing as a Floatsie, and those ships are just piloted by AI, entirely flown by a computer.”

“But I know that’s not true. That’s the tale I was tellin’ back in there. Orbital Control give me a departure orbit one time that intercepted one of their ships. I was oriented for an inclination change burn, so I had my nose pointed up relative to my ship’s motion, and so I couldn’t see ‘em through my front windows. Radar started beepin’ a collision warnin’ and Control wouldn’t give me a safe avoidance vector quick enough and my starboard engine clipped one of their panels. Wiped me out. Spinnin’ like crazy. Couldn’t maneuver. Nothin’. I thought I was going to full-on-collide with their ship, but they flipped that big ole thing around to match my spin perfectly, our two vessels movin’ in sync there in orbit with a cloud of their shattered PV panel all around us.”

Nestor looked at Oscar, his eyes wide, and Oscar looked back at him with a satisfied smile, “Then they pushed in and used these great metal arms that cold-welded to my ship, and like it was nothin’, they stopped both our spin. And then one of ‘em come over to my ship and offered to help fix it, or at least fly me to a port. I told ‘em to fly me to the depot we’d jes left and so they dropped me there. Didn’t invite me on their ship, but I got a good look at the one that come over to my ship. He didn’t wear a spacesuit at all. Just a breather and what looked like normal clothes, at least normal for a Floatsie. I have no idea how he didn’t freeze.”

*****

Nestor blinked out of his memories and looked down at the spray of parts in front of him. He’d made no progress on fixing the disassembled sensors on the cloth. He was barely seeing them. He looked around the dilapidated hangar, then at Oscar’s old orbital ‘runabout’ shuttle, whose original lease on life had been ferrying parts and minor supplies between orbital depots. It had long since left service as a runabout, and sat before him in at least a dozen different pieces, the result of a morning spent chasing ghosts through the ship’s electrical system.

Oscar sat across from him on a stool, bent forward and shakily hefting spoonfuls of nutrient paste from a nearly-empty tube while he watched Nestor.

“Boy, you too thin. Young man like yourself needs to eat somethin’ more than nutrient paste.”

Nestor looked up and watched the old man methodically licking his spoon clean, “That right?”

“Get you some real food. Why don’t you use some of that money Vincent been payin’ to get some roast beef slices? At least some chicken chunks.”

“Real food? Ain’t it all made from the same thing?”

“Not exactly, not exactly. The fancy stuff is stitched together from what the real thing was made of. Jes no actual animals or plants involved. This here nutrient paste is different. Most efficient foodstuff known to man, nutrient paste. Has everthing yer s’posed to need.”

“That true?”

“It is, my boy. The original colonists invented it to use on they trip over from Earth. Those ships had thousands of souls on ‘em, and ever gram needed to be accounted for. Food weighs a whole lot. So does all the stuff you need to store it and make it into somethin’ worth eatin’. Nutrient paste was designed to provide ‘em the best bang for ever gram of it they brought.”

Nestor looked blankly at Oscar, and the old man smiled crookedly in return.

“Worked so good at keepin’ ‘em alive, they kept eatin’ it when they came planet-side. And here we are, still eatin’ it today.”

“It’s so great, but you want me to go buy the good stuff.”

“Well, you gotta live a little.”

“Maybe I’ll live a little once we get the rest of our runs back up. Which may never happen if Vincent keeps shortin’ me for each list of huts I give him.”

“Nestor, you know the agreement you all made. He needs your huts for storage. The ones you give him last time were too small to store anything in.”

“What is he storin’ that he needs so much space, though?”

Oscar shook his head and squeezed out another spoonful of paste and looked at Nestor over the heap upon his spoon and said naught else.

Nestor returned his stare for a few moments. “I cain’t change what’s already in the huts, Oscar. Of course there’s machinery in ‘em. That’s what they’re for. Not… whatever it is Vincent wants to put in ‘em.”

“Well, he was happy with t’other ones. Maybe jes give him those again.”

Nestor looked at the parts piled between his knees and shifted himself carefully forward to rise. “I can only give him the huts that are out of commission. Which is always changin’ as we get repairs done upstream. If we were a normal operation, I couldn’t give’m any huts to use. It’s only because it’s jes the two of us that I can do this at all.”

“Maybe it’s time you tol’ your daddy, son. Maybe he’d understand. Help you find some better huts to let Vincent use more permanent-like. You cain’t keep this secret from him forever.”

Nestor shook his head, “He wouldn’t like it. I cain’t tell him.”

“You also cain’t back out of a deal with someone like Vincent.”

“Why not? He didn’t seem so dangerous to me.”

“You only met him the once, Nestor. Do you think dangerous people walk around lookin’ that way? Would you’ve only known he was dangerous if he was covered in blood? Or threatened you with a weapon?”

“Well…”

“Danger lurks deeper’n that, son. Trust me when I say you ain’t likely to ever meet someone as dangerous as Vincent is.”

“Why’d you ever introduce us, then? I don’t know nothin’ about dealin’ with people like him, Oscar.”

“Thought I was helpin’, I guess. How many of your huts you been able to fix with the money he’s paid you? Plus, I needed some way to help pay you back for all the work you do for me. Repairin’ my shuttle like you do.”

“Aw, Oscar. I didn’t never ask for nothin’ from you. We could always figure somethin’ else out, you know.”

Oscar shook his head and looked far away. “Don’t have nothin’ else to give you, boy. Seems all I ever been able to do is make mistakes. This time ain’t no different from all t’other ones. I wish I’d done somethin’ else. Believe me when I say it.”

Nestor looked at the clock and Oscar followed his eyes and then they looked at each other and Nestor shrugged and shook his head. He stepped gingerly over the parts strewn everwhere. “I’m gonna have to finish these all up next time, Oscar.”

“They’ll still be there next time. You can bet on that,” the old man said, with a crooked, deferential smile.

“We really needed that money, you know. I don’t know what my father’s gonna do when he finds we don’t have enough money for all the groceries he wanted.”

“It’ll get better, son. Jes think about how to get Vincent the huts he needs, and I think you’ll be eatin’ real food in no time.”

“What am I supposed to do until then, though? Jes keep livin’ this way?”

Oscar smiled and walked the boy to the door, carefully stepping around the mess of parts scattered on the floor, “At least you’re still livin’. Which is about the best any of us can expect. I’ll have a talk with Vincent. Try to keep him calm while you figure out what you should do, boy.”

*****

Nestor crouched with his welder over a corroded-through section of pipe and listened to his father yelling over the coms. Louis had long since taken to drunkenly installing himself upon the roof of the range truck with his gun so he could “keep watch” for his brothers, and over the previous week this watch-keeping had devolved to his broadcasting over the coms screamed and incoherent rants at the desolation completely enveloping them both, raging against the wind and the grit and the very sun that shone down upon him with daggers of radiation bound cheek to cheek with light and life-giving warmth, life and death entwined and dappling upon a drunken face contorted with fury against all of it. While he welded the repair onto that pipe, Nestor wondered to himself if his father raged using the just right words at just the right level of inebriation, Mars and all the things within her might take notice of him and grant him reprieve, finally agreeing to make life fair. He decided, as he finished his work on the pipe, that he doubted it very much.

Louis was not yet aware that he was now out of liquor, though Nestor had been aware of this fact since Louis had opened the final bottle of the lot he’d purchased at the market a week prior. The hut Nestor was repairing was far enough up the claim that no resupply mission could easily be commissioned, and Nestor silently dreaded his father realizing these two facts over the coming hours. His repairs complete and his father completely inebriated, Nestor chose to hide inside the hut, pretending to be at work therein, and spent his time daydreaming a separate existence for himself, one where he was miraculously rescued, perhaps by one of his estranged uncles, and delivered to a youth spent recklessly optimistic for the future.

Sobering up from his bender left Louis wrathful, and he seasoned his wrath with dollops of anxiety and threw that stew upon Nestor at every occasion over the following evening, every minor slight rebuked, for he imagined even the merest of looks to foretell clandestine ridicule. As he sobered up overnight, Louis huddled up in the back of the truck and refused to allow Nestor to enter the truck at all. He claimed any motion of the truck would make him sick, including the motion of Nestor moving about inside. This was just as well for Nestor, who slept blessedly alone in the hut overnight, and further avoided his father after the sun rose on the next day by attending to the never-ending list of small repairs needed on the range truck’s exterior, this morning focusing his efforts on the GPS module, whose connections to the truck were corroding and required him to solder new.

When Louis emerged, it was past noon, and while he still had the access panel to the GPS module open, Nestor’s repairs had been finished for the better part of an hour. Louis would not meet his glance and had apparently been attending to his appearance, for his hair was greased and combed and his face was shaven and the only evidence of his crapulence were his sagging red-rimmed eyes and the network of burst vessels covering his nose.

Louis came abreast of where Nestor perched upon the truck and, looking down the expanse of the slope spread beneath them, said over his coms, “Come on, get down from there. It looks like yer done anyways. We goin’ to Hut 251. It’s been down fer too long, we gonna get it up. Today. Right now.”

Nestor considered this for a moment, trying to remember which hut that was, and if it was a hut he’d given to Vincent to use.

“That one of the bigger huts?”

“Yeah, it’s one yer grandaddy and me built when I was about yer age.”

“It one of them that has three runs out of it?”

“That’s right. Yer grandaddy always said we coulda fit a fourth pipe run in but we couldn’t never deal with the heat, the machinery bein’ so close together. We shoulda added an extra couple hunerd square meters when we built it.”

Nestor nodded. If it was the hut he had in mind, he knew there was no way he’d given it to Vincent to use. He swung out and dropped effortlessly down from the side of the truck, and together they picked up the tools and parts Nestor had scattered about as he’d worked and climbed up into the back themselves and pressurized the truck and departed with Louis bleary but cogent behind the wheel.

As they pulled out, this week’s ice delivery arrived at the hut, the overland train driver honking his horn and waving. Louis raised two fingers from his grip on the steering wheel in reply and looked over at his son and said, “Don’t those trains always amaze you?”

Nestor shook his head, “Shore are big.”

“They used to have bigger back on Earth. You know that?”

“Ancient Earth had trains like this?” Nestor asked, momentarily distracted as the dozen huge self-powered cars bounced in a linked and jointed manner before them much like a behemoth metallic caterpillar, a grub from the old world who had come to this new one and become a nigh-unconscionable beast in these harsher environs.

“In a way. Back on Earth, in the olden days before anyone came here, they covered the whole planet with steel. Can you imagine it?”

Nestor shook his head.

“Picture it, mountains covered in plates of steel borderin’ vast steel plains, perfect flat metal shinin’ in the sun,” Louis said in a smooth, calm voice, almost hypnotically.

“Did they really do that? Why’d they cover everthing in metal?” Nestor asked skeptically.

“It’s how we ended up here, son. They hated the natural world, wanted to make it more perfect, and thought they could coat everthing in metal to achieve that. And that’s what killed they world. What drove our ancestors here.”

Nestor looked at his father skeptically, and Louis continued, “They steeled over everthing, and then they built grooves in the steel and used these great trains with special wheels to travel along them, to deliver all the goods that they needed.”

Nestor scrunched his face. “What kind of special wheels?”

“Metal ones, which fit perfectly into the grooves, so perfectly they’d have thousands and thousands of cars in a single train. It’d stretch for hundreds of kilometers, so far you couldn’t see the end…”

*****

The hut was quite far away, and travel through their myriad pipe runs circuitous. It was nearly sundown when they arrived. Louis had spent what little energy he had in driving, and upon pulling the truck up next to the hut, climbed into the back seat and stretched out. He claimed he would only be a few minutes, but Nestor doubted that assertion very much. Nestor climbed over his father and through the small hatch to the truck’s rear, and closed that hatch to put on his envirosuit within those cramped environs. He depressurized the back and he considered taking the collapsible airlock over to the hut with him, if the wind wasn’t too bad.

The wind was, in fact, quite bad and so he abandoned the airlock at the truck. He opened the hut door a crack and squeezed inside while the wind tried to steal the door from his grasp and found himself face to face with a stack of crates. He reached around the crates and turned on the interior lights and blinked in confusion at the floor-to-ceiling rows of boxes, all labeled with their respective foodstuff. Just in front of him was a stack of crates of ‘Harvestland Leg-o-lamb’ shelf-stable roasts, beside it a stack of ‘Harvestland REAL GRAPE’ wine. He knew this was the expensive stuff, still made in a factory, but manufactured to appear as though it hadn’t been. Made to look like the real thing, even though none of its consumers had ever once in their lifetimes, or the lifetimes of grandparents thrice removed, ever smelled the real thing. There was a small fortune held in the crates in only this hut. He stared around for quite some time and tried to calculate just how many fortunes must be stored in other huts around their claim at that very moment.

Nestor backed slowly from the hut and attempted to think of a lie to facilitate his escape from this place. He knew he hadn’t given Vincent this hut, and yet Vincent was clearly using it, and he needed to get his father away from here. He could come up with no ready excuse and was given no time at all to contrive one as he rounded the rear corner of the truck to find his father fully besuited there and exiting the back door. Louis turned to look at him.

“There a problem? Why ain’t you at the hut?”

Nestor merely opened his mouth silently and shook his head. Louis cocked his own head at his son and walked past and fought against the wind gusts all the way over to the hut, while Nestor followed behind and wondered if tackling his father would save him. He decided that it would not.

Louis opened the door to the hut the same way Nestor had earlier and held it open for his son only momentarily before calling to Nestor over the coms, “Did you see all this stuff in the hut? Why didn’t you say nothin’?”

“Dunno.”

Louis exited the hut and looked appraisingly at this son. “Why do you look like that?” 

“Look like what?” Nestor replied, knowing the moment the words left his lips they would not be sufficient.

“Like yer guilty. There somethin’ you want to tell me about those crates, boy?” Louis leaned forward to see his son more clearly in the deepening early dusk shadows.

“I got somethin’ to tell you, and you probably ain’t gonna like it. But you do need to know, even if it makes you angry. And I hope that comin’ out and tellin’ you now will mean somethin’.”

Louis continued his even stare at Nestor, his expression hidden inside the gathering gloom of his helmet. 

“I been rentin’ out the huts to someone from Poynting. Ones that ain’t in use. I didn’t know what he uses ‘em for. I’m not allowed to ask. Seems like he’s smugglin’ food. As you can see. But he pays me…us…one hundred per hut.” Nestor noticed how quickly he was talking and forced himself to stop, hoping the amount paid might catch in the wind and blow away and take with it all consequence. 

Louis’s voice came over the comms in a remarkably even tone, stating with no question at all in his voice, “This is what you get up to on market days.”

Nestor nodded inside his helmet, saying nothing, not sure if his father could see the nod in the shadows, but afraid to say anything else.

Louis sighed over the comms, “Well, son, we ain’t doin’ that no longer. We goin’ over to Poynting and I will have a talk with this…person, and we will back out of it. I cain’t believe you’d do something like this without tellin’ me.”

“We cain’t back out of it, dad. Oscar says that he’s not a man you break deals with.”

“Oscar? That the one rentin’ out the huts?”

With vehemence, Nestor interrupted, “No. No, Oscar is my friend. It’s Vincent that is rentin’ out the huts.”

Louis waved Nestor off, “Look, any deal this Oscar…or Vincent…or whoever…any deal an adult makes with a child ain’t no real deal. What kind of man thinks he can take advantage of a child that way? We ain’t breakin’ a deal ‘cause no deal was ever made. Not one that should be honored.”

The sun had just dipped below the horizon and the last rays of light shone blinding between them and in that luster Nestor could almost believe the things his father was saying were true and was glad. 

*****

They met Vincent at a small restaurant on the edge of the city, so close to the breccia that the walls had been reinforced with three-centimeter-thick steel mesh to arrest the ceaseless demands of gravity upon a substrate that was closer to liquid than solid rock. There was no one in the restaurant but their subject and one other man who stood silently in the corner. Louis strode into that place with the confidence of a man coming to do business with an equal, and he nodded at the big man in the corner and at Vincent as well. He took the solitary open seat in front of Vincent without being asked and looked the man squarely in the eye. 

With no seat for himself, Nestor stood just inside the door, and trying not to look around, stared at the floor instead. He heard Louis speak first, in the manner of his agricultural peers, “How’re you doin’? How’s business treatin’ ya?”

Vincent didn’t respond. Nestor glanced up to see the man casting at his father with a hard stare that clearly indicated that Louis was wasting this man’s time and needed to rush to the point.

Louis cleared his throat, “My understandin’ is that you made some sort of deal with my boy there. And we come here today to talk to you about that deal.”

He cleared his throat again, and Nestor got the sense, without looking, that he was squirming in his seat. “And, well…he’s jes a kid, you see. He don’t know nothin’ about runnin’ our claim, and he ain’t in any sort of position to make deals with you.”

He stopped there, waiting for some sort of response. None came. “So what I come here to talk to you about is you removin’ any…any of your materials, or what have you…from our huts. We don’t want nothin’ to do with your business, and we won’t involve no law, neither. Jes want to be freed of any obligations, if you catch my drift.”

Still no response. Nestor stole another look and saw Vincent’s expression had changed to a hungry stare, a predator who has cornered his prey and is toying with it for his own amusement.

“No,” Vincent said curtly, after another several tense moments, “the deal is the deal. It does not matter if you think your son there isn’t capable of making such deals. He has made a deal with me and it cannot be broken. We will continue using the huts on your property for our storage needs, and you will provide us with your largest huts for this purpose. In addition, because your son has not provided suitable huts for my use in quite some time now, you owe me what I have lost by needing to make other arrangements for storage.”

“Well, sir, please. That don’t seem fair at all. You jes been usin’ whichever ones you want. How am I to be held responsible for any of this?”

“Fair?” Vincent chuckled menacingly, “That is your problem, my friend. You think that I am concerned with what you think is and is not fair.”

Louis’s voice became harder, more assertive. “We cain’t have you storin’ things in our huts. I hope you understand why, but even if you don’t, I jes won’t allow it. If this is about the money you say we owe you, I promise you we can figure somethin’ out, if you give me some time to put somethin’ together.”

He paused, the awkwardness of his pause hanging in the air. Nestor looked up again to see that Vincent was holding up a hand in a clear ‘stop’ gesture.

“I don’t want your promises. Your promises are worth nothing to me. Something you can do for me? You can allow me to use your huts as I wish. There is nothing else you can do.”

“W-what if we did involve the law? It don’t seem like you’re leavin’ me much choice…”

Silence again. Nestor peeked up to see the big man had lumbered over to loom over his sitting father. 

“You are threatening me now?”

Louis vigorously shook his head at the question.

“Yes, yes you are. That was a threat.”

Vincent’s eyes shifted up to the big man, seeming to send some covert signal, because abruptly and with no effort at all the big man had his father facedown on the floor, Louis’s arm wrenched up behind him, his fingers in the man’s palms. Nestor watched in horror as the big man methodically broke each finger, bending them back until they touched Louis’s wrist, seeming not to hear the screams, impervious to the man thrashing in pain beneath him.

His task completed, the big man stepped off Nestor’s father, leaving Louis sobbing on the floor. Vincent stood and walked over to Nestor, ignoring his father completely.

“Do you see what happens to those who threaten my business?” He said to Nestor, his nose nearly touching the boy’s, his breath bathing Nestor in hot reek.

“You will give me a list of your biggest huts, and I will use them indefinitely to whatever end I wish. Because you owe me, you will pay me back by handling transportation, from locations we provide to huts on your property. And transportation from those huts to other locations. I will pay you fifty per delivery. You will begin paying back what you owe on your first delivery.”

Prologue

Author’s Notes:

A warning, right out of the gate - some folks haven’t really liked this prologue, and have argued that it doesn’t fit or really have much of a place at all in the rest of the story. I, of course, intensely disagree, and while I hope you do too, please know that this prologue may not be for you, and you may not miss anything if you skip it. That out of the way, I’ll just briefly hit on what motivated me to write this, and what motivates me to keep it in.

I love origin stories. I love having a succinct bit of writing that lays the groundwork for where your hero is coming from, what made them “what they are”. A lot of authors and editors and reviewers will tell you that origin stories are cheap, or are unnecessary, and they’re probably right. That is probably why I hid my origin stories away in this, the prologue. I do quite love them, however.

I have a kind of interesting problem here, that in that this story technically has two protagonists. We have our ostensible protagonist, Nestor Creede, a naive young man who’s lived a hardscrabble life and is propelled forward into the darkness with the hope of finding some light somewhere out there. This prologue attempts to hit all the things that will inform who he is, as we begin our story officially in the next chapter. But there’s another protagonist in this story, a secondary protagonist, whose story mirrors our Young Nestor’s story, and hopefully helps to inform it - the planet Mars.

I can feel your eyes rolling, but stick with me here. Mars has lived her own life out there amongst the stars, while we humans have lived our lives here on Earth. While Earth has lived its own life. Mars (very possibly) once had oceans, and possibly even had life of its own. Mars is covered in volcanoes, mostly extinct. Mars has canyons and valleys and dry rivers and vast plains and seas of dust and has her own sky and her own stars. I want to tell the story of Mars. Of course, not I nor anyone alive truly knows the story of Mars. Scientists have some very good ideas, and where possible I tried to pull those ideas in, but the story of Mars remains unwritten. So, I created one, using as inspiration the “classics'“, and Native American stories and Norse sagas. I cribbed from them where I could, and I added new spins where I thought it made sense, and I approached the story I was telling of Mars as being the stories the characters within my story tell themselves about their world. This prologue tells the first of those stories, the story of the birth of Mars, and of her death, and of her rebirth.

THE HOMESTEAD

The line of mourners wraps around the Creede homestead’s small living room. They each pump Louis’s hand and share a sad look with him, but suppress their tears, for Louis is not a man who knows how to comfort a cry or how to cry at all. They pass by an empty spot next to Louis, and they picture there the sobbing ghost of his wife Martha, haunted by the loss of so many children, too many to recall in this moment when she can grieve no further. The mourners pause for a moment here, perhaps remembering Martha or perhaps hesitant to move to the next and final spot in the line, occupied by the last living Creede child, a gangly adolescent named Nestor who stands a diminished smaller mirror image of his father. Nestor stares into the middle distance and his eyes are glassy and catatonic and he stands stock still with no expression, a mannequin propped here for the mourners to tussle the hair of or offer unreturned hugs or cast sepulchral, awkward smiles at his expressionless face.

A memory of the last time he stood in this line, when his little brother Eric died, consumes Nestor’s mind. Eric had been a bit older than five in Martian years, 130 months of age all told, when he passed. Nestor pictures Eric’s body in his miniature casket, a wasted husk of what had at one point been a chubby, happy child, but who in death appeared so much less, dressed in a simple brown church-going suit, the only one the Creedes owned that would fit his diminished form. His skin stretched like leather over young bones. His head hairless and face sunken. A victim of one of the many ailments that preyed upon children this age. A victim of Mars.

Nestor recalls being forced by his parents to reckon with this thing in the coffin. It did not look like his brother and was no longer his confidant and was just a horrible dried out mummy which contained within it none of Eric’s memories or personality or anything recognizable or real. He had stared at it, and unable to express all that Death had taken from him, had broken from his parents and ran. He ran for his room, but as he passed down the hall, the thought came to him it was Eric’s room too, or at the very least all of Eric’s possessions still remained in there, persisting when their owner no longer did, except now they were all owned by that thing lying in state in their living room, and being unwilling to grapple with their very existence he had sought safety in the little storage cabinet beside his parents’ room instead.

It was a strange cabinet. He’d always thought that. It was tall enough for a small boy to walk into, but too short and deep for an adult to store anything of consequence within, because it’d be too much of a pain to recover. It was the perfect place for children to have adventures, however, and all the Creede children who’d made it past infancy, Nestor and Eric and even little toddler Emily and Lia, had found it to be an ideal refuge. It was dark and it could still fit him and, most importantly, was away from any tangible proof of the impermanence of his cohort. This had made it ideal, and so he ducked in and closed the door and sat in the dark and covertly cried while his parents walked by calling his name. They didn’t find him in his bedroom or in their bedroom and were walking room-by-room calling for him, voices trembling with anger while the polite whispers from the crowd in the living room rose to a din.

His uncle Kent found him there. Kent had opened the door, already crouched at Nestor’s level, clearly expecting him to be in there and unsurprised at finding him so. He was a massive man, nearly as tall as Louis, but quite broader; a holotype of all those whose every feature seems slightly enlarged. He shared his brother Louis’s taciturn personality, and he looked in at the bawling young boy hidden in the closet before him with an expression neither caring nor uncaring, neither empathetic nor antipathetic, simply seeing the boy for what he was and the need to recover in whatever way possible the boy from that place. Preferably before the boy’s father found them, as Louis was likely to react angrily at the embarrassment Nestor was causing him, and that was the last thing any sobbing young boy needed.

“Boy, you gotta come outta there,” Nestor in his memory can still hear Kent saying with a gentle rumble, “we cain’t hold all this up because you’re hid. All these folks are waitin’ on you, and it ain’t right to expect them to stand out there while you cry in here.”

Nestor had sniffled a few times, and then mumbled, “But Uncle Kent, I cain’t look at…at it. That cain’t be Eric.”

He’d started sobbing again at saying his brother’s name aloud, his whole body spasming with each sob. Kent reached in and grabbed the boy, his huge hand encompassing Nestor’s entire shoulder, and pulled the young boy out to envelop within his embrace, his face in Nestor’s ear. 

“Now you know that is Eric, Nestor, and don’t keep up with this ridiculousness,” Kent had whispered in Nestor’s ear, his hot breath and painful words making the boy’s ear burn. “We all lost so many folks we love, and we lost them in such horrible ways. But once they gone, boy, they gone and they cain’t come back. We’re left here without ‘em. The best thing we can do fer them, fer their memory and fer their legacy, is to make sure others don’t have to suffer like they did. Someday we’ll terraform this whole planet and then maybe that’ll end all this…grief. But until then, you cain’t run and you cain’t hide. You gotta be strong because you the only boy yer parents have left, and you have an important job…a duty…that you need to be ready fer. You understand?”

Nestor wonders, standing in this room now, if that same proscription applies, if he is still required to be strong for a family that is no longer, for now it is just him and his father, hardly a family at all. He certainly does not feel strong, not when the last of the mourners passes him by with their sad empty smiles and not when his father and he about-face and walk to stand before his mother’s frail body, asleep forevermore in her coffin. In fact, he does not feel much of anything, not on the long drive into town to the incinerator, nor when he watches through the glass window as his mother’s body is fed into the flames.

As he imagines her feet moving beyond the incinerator door, he can hear her voice hovering over the foot of his boyhood bed, telling him and Eric her favorite bedtime story, and as she passes from thing of substance to thing of ash, he tells himself that story for the final time.

A long time ago the Sun was born. She was a late child and was born into a universe where she already had many other siblings. Sun was born at the edges of our galaxy, so far away from her siblings that they could not hear her voice when she spoke, nor she theirs. Sun was a warm and friendly star, and she refused to allow such great distances to come between her and her siblings, so she would wave at them and then patiently wait for them to wave back across the gulf of time. But none of her siblings ever waved back to her, and she felt so very much alone.

After many millennia by herself, Sun decided to take matters into her own rays. There had been a lot of leftovers when the Universe made her, and she put them to good use. She spun together some gases swirling around her, and she formed them into a ball that rivaled her in size, and she put into the ball her brilliance and her desire to not be alone, for she wished for her creation to want to be with her for all time. She named her creation Jupiter, and for eons she and Jupiter danced together and marveled at the beauty of her distant siblings. 

Jupiter was brilliant and bold, but also quick to anger, and his fear of being alone made him covetous, and after eons had passed, Jupiter came to wish to find another like him. A planet with which he could dance as an equal. He began experimenting at spinning together some rocks that naturally orbited him, and soon learned how to build asteroids and moons and planetoids. He created many of them, all of which he treasured dearly, but the things he created were just inanimate rock. They could not speak with him nor experience the wonders of creation with him, and he felt no less alone with them. 

Sun noticed Jupiter creating his moons, and felt pity for him in his loneliness, for she too knew what it felt like to be alone. She realized she could make him another planet friend, so she gathered up the rest of the gases in her orbit, and she put into them only her warmth and love and she named her new child Saturn. Saturn and Jupiter danced together, and Jupiter showed Saturn how to craft her own moons, and for a while, all was in harmony.

Saturn eventually grew sad, however, for though she had a friend in Jupiter, he was neither warm nor loving and it was warmth that she most desired. Jupiter saw her sadness and knew he could never be what she truly wanted. Jupiter and Saturn went to Sun, to ask if she could make a third planet, one for Saturn to love, but Sun told them that there was no more gas in her orbit to make another planet, and she had no more of herself to give. If they wanted another planet, she advised, the only way would be to give some of themselves for that purpose. So Jupiter gave up some of his gases and Saturn gave some of hers, and into this they poured some of Saturn’s warmth and love and some of Jupiter’s brilliance, and together they made a child, smaller than them but still mighty, and they named this child Uranus.

Saturn dearly loved Uranus and doted over him endlessly. Uranus loved her too and chose his orbit to be closest to hers, so that they could always be near one another. Eventually Jupiter grew jealous of their closeness and demanded that Saturn make yet another planet with him, determined that this new planet should be closest to him instead. Saturn dearly loved her compatriot, even though he could not love her back, and wished to console him in his loneliness, so she acquiesced, combining some more of her atmosphere with Jupiter’s, giving what little warmth she had left to give and spinning it together with Jupiter’s boldness, and together they created a second child, who they named Neptune.

Neptune was made of too little warmth to care much for either of his parents and preferred to orbit alone at the edges of Sun’s influence and over time out in the black he solidified into pure ice. This crushed Jupiter, for he knew he had given so much of himself that he could not create a third planet. He orbited for eons, sullen and distraught at his involuntary solitude, jealously watching Saturn and Uranus dance together and experience the wonders of the cosmos in each other’s presence. His sullenness deepened until upon his face a great welt developed, which remains to this day as permanent evidence of how deep a despair he felt.

Sun saw her former companion in his pain and desperately wished to help. One day, Jupiter came to her and begged her to help him create further planets, by any means necessary. Sun told Jupiter that the only way to create a planet would be from the gases within him, and that he had precious few to spare, certainly not enough for even one new planet. Jupiter was adamant, however, and Sun was so determined to help that she agreed to use a tiny amount of Jupiter’s atmosphere, the bare minimum, really, to create a companion for him. But to make up for the gas Jupiter couldn’t provide, she would need rock, which would serve as a barycenter and core. She asked Jupiter to provide one of his moons for this purpose, and Jupiter offered Mars, a small ball of rock into which Jupiter had poured his boldness and brilliance, and he preferred this rock especially because her fires burned so bright. The Sun, upon seeing this luminescent ball of magma for the first time, informed Jupiter that there was no way to make her into a planet, for her internal fire would begin to extinguish the moment she left his orbit, and outside his orbit, she would soon die. Jupiter was determined to dance with his beautiful Mars, if only for a short while, and told Sun that a short time with one so bright would be worth much more to him than an eternity with any other, and so Sun made Mars into a planet and placed her closest to Jupiter, hoping that being close to him would be enough to keep her alive.

Mars and Jupiter danced together for a short time, even less than Sun had warned, and as predicted, Mars’s fires cooled, and she withered there in her orbit. Jupiter was so distraught at her decay that he openly wept, as only a planet can, his tears solidifying into a ring of icy asteroids between their two orbits, which remain there to this day, and forever document Jupiter’s great grief. 

But little did Jupiter know that humans, orphaned from their homeworld, would come along some day, and would gather up his many tears, and would take them all to Mars, to bathe her surface in his waters, and in so doing would resurrect his most cherished child to be their home forevermore.

Nestor and his father exchange no words on their way home, and upon passing the airlock to their meager homestead, Louis stops and turns to Nestor and says, “Go get your things, boy. Ain’t nothin’ here for us no more.”

“Where we goin’?”

“We goin’ out on the range, boy,”

Nestor does not want to go, and refuses to pack, until his father stalks back to his room and dumps his tiny dresser drawer full of clothes into a backpack and grabs Nestor firmly by the hand and hauls him hastily besuited out to their waiting range truck. By the time they pull away from the family homestead set in that draw on the slopes of Mount Ascraeus, it is full dark and ghosts of dust pass through their headlights as they drive and Nestor lays in the back and sobs. Sobbing for his lost siblings and his lost friends and his lost mother and his lost childhood. Sobbing with no consolation offered. Sobbing until his mind can take no more pain, and he simply drifts off to sleep. His father sits in the driver’s seat hunched over the wheel and makes no noise and moves no muscle not otherwise required to operate the vehicle and pays no attention to the boy in the throes of grief behind him until eventually his own shoulders begin to shake and he hunches fully over, head upon the wheel, letting the truck coast to a stop while spasms of grief that can no longer be suppressed wrack the body of a broken man.

An Experiment

Well, it’s been three months since I published my first novel, From Dust and Desolation. Those three months have been…underwhelming, to say the least. I wasn’t expecting immediate success, nor was I truly expecting to earn enough on my novel to recoup what I’ve spent in book design and website hosting and book review sites and (mostly fake) awards entry. I was hoping that a couple hundred, maybe a thousand, readers might give my book a try. Might enjoy it. Let’s just say even those (relatively tame) goals seem unachievably high, now. To quote one of my writing heroes - “So it goes.”

The one place where I’ve seen a mild amount of success is in readers picking up my book for free. Some folks might be offended by that, might be offended that their work has no monetary value in the Holiest of Holies, the Free Market, blessed be its name. I’m not offended. I’m actually OK with giving away my work for free. After all, I’m not a starving artist, and I’m not trying to support myself or my family on what I make from my writing. If people will read what I write for free, my stance is - OK, let’s let them read it for free.

After all, I get it. Book readership is way down, and yet the number of books published, especially in the self-published market, is high. You don’t know that my book is any good, and honestly it’s a big risk, and one I shouldn’t, in all fairness, be asking you to take. First time writer, in an incredibly niche market, with a depressing-sounding title…not many people are lining up to throw their hard-earned dollars at that.

So, from this point forward, From Dust and Desolation is now free to download from this site. Head on over to the store to download your free version, either in .pdf or in .epub format. I represent that the file you will download is completely safe, and should work in your specific e-reader of choice. I do not know how to make it work on your e-reader of choice, so please refer to other resources for troubleshooting assistance.

If downloading a file from a random website doesn’t tickle your fancy, that’s great. I can’t make this site work perfectly on your e-reader, but I’ll tell you what I will do. Beginning this week, and continuing every week until it’s done, I will post one chapter per week here, in my blog. I’ll add a little section of author’s notes a the beginning, formatted to make it easy for you to skip, if you don’t really want to read my notes (I know that I wouldn’t). Feel free to leave comments and I may (or may not) respond. I try to avoid online engagement, and I don’t want to seem ungracious, but I’m probably not going to re-litigate items I’ve already written down. If that makes any sense to you. But maybe other people will add comments, and you can fight (nicely, please!) amongst yourselves.

In any instance, I hope you enjoy. I do have a patreon that you can find here, if you’ve liked what you’ve read and would like to throw me a few bucks. I also have a paid version of my book in my store, you can pay for my book there, too, if that’s your thing. But no hard feelings if you don’t.