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.