Prodigal (4 page)

“Thirty thousand meters,” Nathan reported.

“Leveling off,” the pilot said. He swung the ship around and lined up their course to intersect Olympus Mons. At that altitude, they were a scant three thousand meters higher than the summit. Pitch lowered the flaps a few degrees, the sluggish controls tightening a bit in his hands. “Looks like we’re hitting some convection. We might be in for a little turbulence.”

Right on cue, the lander bounced as it hit a column of rising air. The shaking gradually subsided as the lander passed over the scarp that marked the end of Settler’s Plain—a craggy series of cliffs that formed a boundary around Olympus Mons. From there on, the smooth, expansive surface of the mountain seemed to stretch out into forever.

“It’s so flat,” Kellean observed, “you could walk it if you wanted to.”

“If you had a couple of years,” Nathan added. “That thing is three times as high as Mount Everest back home—and a hundred times wider.”

“Sounds like a nice long honeymoon.”

“Tell that to the colonists,” Pitch muttered.

To the spacing community, this place was synonymous with death. In spite of that, it was easy to see how those people had lost themselves here. Olympus was, if nothing else, a well of secrets. You couldn’t just walk away from that.

Even when you should run.

The thought was brief and disconnected, effused by some part of Nathan’s subconscious. But Nathan was distracted by their approach, which he watched in glorious detail on the construct—fed directly into his cerebral cortex via the navigation interface. It was like riding the rapture, only this was no hallucination. As the lander dissolved around him, his mind projected on waves of sensor energy, the notion of reality was a constant; it was just a hyperreality, with himself at its absolute center. He was part of Mars, and Mars was part of him.

Refined intensity,
he thought.
It’s been a while.

“Target intercept in two minutes,” Pitch said. “You got something special in mind, Commander, or are you just getting off back there?”

“Can I help it if I love my work?” Nathan asked. He was only half-conscious of Pitch and Kellean, their voices distant and digitized. The human brain wasn’t very efficient at partitioning awareness, but with some effort Nathan managed to task enough of himself out to stay connected to them. “Our best shot is to make a single overhead pass at close range. I’ll do a general sweep and see if we can find anything that shouldn’t be here.”

Kellean turned back toward him, studying his face through the imaging mist. Bathed in colors and shapes, Nathan felt like part of the construct.

“What if that doesn’t work?” she asked.

“Either way,” Nathan said, “we go in.”

They continued the rest of the way in silence. Pitch took them down as the mountain rose to meet them, until the frozen lava flows that formed the shield volcano passed a scant hundred meters below. At the same time, Nathan reached out with the lander’s sensors, hoping to find a trace of the signals he detected earlier.

Come on,
he thought.
Don’t be shy.

A full minute passed. Nothing revealed itself. Nathan filtered ambient noise from the construct, laying Olympus bare of everything except neural impulses—but all he found was the weak output of their own nervous systems, stray electrochemical discharges like St. Elmo’s fire.

Then the bottom dropped out, and they were suspended in space once again.

The caldera opened up, sheer rock walls dropping over three thousand meters straight down. Within, a complex series of craters—formed long ago when the summit collapsed into empty magma chambers—radiated outward in irregular circles, intersecting one another to form a network of primordial violence. Fault lines spidered across the base of the pit, a latticework of striations that marked the edges of vast tectonic plates. For a moment, Nathan imagined what it must have been like when the mountain was alive, this cauldron full of boiling lava and plumes of ash. Perhaps this had once been hell, and mankind had just forgotten.

“Conducting broad sweep,” he reported, and opened the aperture of the ship’s sensors to the widest possible field. Nathan saw everything and nothing all at once, the readings a confused chorus of radiation, gas, and chemical compositions. The construct sorted it all out, rendering the most detailed model of Olympus Mons ever created—but nothing pointed him toward that one, inscrutable signal.

“Passing midpoint,” Pitch said.

Kellean stared deep into the crater.

“Commander?” she asked.

“Working on it,” he started to say, but stopped abruptly. It wasn’t anything he
saw
—just a vague impression, like the memory of a dream. There was a subtle shift, somewhere, as if a tiny detail in the construct had rearranged itself. Nathan held still long enough to rule out his imagination, until a fragmentary blip appeared near the east wall of the crater.

Gotcha.

Nathan jumped on the precise location. “Hard turn, course zero-seven-nine,” he ordered the pilot, and felt the ship roll over as Pitch responded to his command. “I’m feeding you coordinates now.”

Pitch studied the bitstream on his flight monitor, and watched it assemble into the image of a sheer rock face. The target area was near the base of the crater, marked with a blinking red dot. “Got it,” he reported back. “Any idea what the hell that is?”

Nathan could barely answer. The spot grew brighter and brighter, guiding them to some unknown destination. Nathan disconnected himself to keep the interface from blinding him—and still it lingered in afterimage, playing across the back of his retinas.

“Something powerful,” he whispered.

The lander spiraled down toward the floor of the caldera, its control surfaces fully deployed to maximize drag and slow the ship to intercept speed. Pitch then retracted the wing sheaths, thin titanium panels folding into the fuselage, revealing a hyperjet rotor embedded in the body of each wing. Designed to operate at high altitudes, the rotors forced air through their blades at extreme speed, providing enough lift to keep the lander up even in the thin atmosphere of Mars.

Pitch engaged the rotors, which fired off a scream that tore across the summit crater. Heat shimmers radiated from the wings of the lander, its control jets firing in computer-synchronized bursts to stabilize its flight path.
Ghostrider
then swung over toward the smooth face of the crater wall, coming to a hover next to a thin fissure that dropped into a rusty abyss. Like an arrow, it pointed directly toward the coordinates Nathan had provided. Pitch descended slowly, following the crack into the depths of the old volcano. It gradually widened, finally terminating at the base of a narrow ridge, about two hundred meters above the floor of the crater.

As he pulled away from the wall, the pilot saw that the fissure opened into a series of caverns. The signal Nathan detected, whatever it was, had come from somewhere in there, though the ship’s sensors couldn’t even begin to gauge their depth.

Pitch turned his attention to the ridge below. It was a narrow space—only twice as wide as the lander itself, but flat and level enough to work as a landing zone. He circled the outcropping for a few minutes, nudging the ship back and forth while he jockeyed for optimal position. When he was ready, he throttled back the rotors to keep the airflow from pulverizing the ridge, using thrusters to compensate for the decreased power.

“Been nice knowing you,” Pitch told the others.

With engines screaming and dust rising, he took the ship down—hand resting on the throttle, ready to punch out of there at the first sign of trouble. He maintained that defensive posture until they were within a few meters of touchdown—and only then, when he had to make the decision to commit or abort, did he extend the landing gear.

Blue jets painted the base of a red cloud, as the lander vanished into an angry swirl of particles. Then the roar was gone, replaced by the fading whine of engine cutoff. The icy stillness of Olympus quickly rushed in to complete the silence, eager to swallow any traces of the lander’s presence.

And for the first time in ten years, humans were back on Mars.

Nathan rigged portable scanners and handed them off to his crewmates. Testing his own, he saw that it already jumped with intermittent readings—a confused ripple of conflicting signals, which bounced across the small viewing screen.

“You make any sense out of that?” Kellean asked, her words filtered and hollow. She had put her helmet on and was trying to lock it on to the collar of her EVA suit. Labored breaths steamed her visor as she spoke. “Looks like electronic interference.”

“It’s background traffic,” Nathan explained as he suited up. “Direct connections riding a neural interface—a lot like you see in the Axis.”

“Is that even possible?”

“Assuming there’s some functioning interface equipment nearby,” Nathan said, turning on his environmental controls. Cool, dry air filled his suit as he switched on his comm link. “If that’s the case, then this could get interesting. Everyone ready?”

Kellean nodded.

Pitch gave a thumbs-up.

“Good,” Nathan said. “Let’s go take a walk.”

Pitch vented the cabin to equalize pressure and flipped a switch to open the belly hatch. Nathan went first, climbing down the ladder until he reached the last rung. The thought of setting foot on another world should have made him feel giddy, but instead he hesitated. He couldn’t stop wondering what it had been like to die here.

Or how bad it must have been for anyone to retreat to this dark hole.

Nathan dismissed the thought and dropped off the ladder. In the reduced gravity, he drifted in slow motion, his boots barely making contact with the ground. He had to steady himself before he dared to walk, mortally aware of the precipice at the edge of the ridge. Even from here, Nathan felt it tugging at him—that enormous, empty space capped by a granular Martian sky. Shuffling toward it, he stole a glance over the side. The deep chasm stared right back at him, accelerating the pace of his breathing, the flow of his blood pounding in his ears.

Kellean appeared at his side before he was aware of it.

“Better watch your step, Commander,” she cautioned. “You’d have a long time to think about it on the way down.”

Nathan flashed her a wary smile and turned away from the ledge. Pitch made a quick visual inspection of the ship, crouching next to one of the landing struts. “Everything looks stable,” the pilot said, his tone measured. “I wouldn’t stay out here too long, though. This volcanic rock can get pretty brittle.”

Nathan patched the audio from his scanner into his helmet receiver.

“Here goes nothing,” he said.

Nathan took the lead, his first steps clumsy and uneven. He quickly got the feel of it and began hopping along, allowing his momentum to do most of the work. The others followed closely behind, all of them stopping at a wide opening in the face of the rock wall. It was like the entrance to a cathedral, an almost perfect triangle tapering into a long fissure that reached toward the heavens.

“Light ’em up,” Nathan ordered.

They switched on their helmet lights, which split the murky darkness just inside the cavern. In the settling dust, the beams slashed back and forth with each turn of their heads. Beyond, the craggy walls of the interior space quickly gave way to smooth, unnatural formations.

“Somebody’s been digging here,” Pitch observed.

Nathan moved in closer for a better look. Rock had melted and remolded itself sometime in the recent past. “Looks like a v-wave excavator,” he said, running his gloved hand across the surface. “Standard equipment for a combat-engineering battalion.”

“Solar Expeditionary Force,” Kellean said quietly. “Looks like they were here, sir.”

Nathan grunted in agreement, motioning his crewmates to move forward. Together, they entered the cavern. The large opening soon shrunk into a maze of tunnels—each one leading off in a different direction, each identical to the others.

“Take your pick,” Pitch said.

Nathan ran a concentrated sweep with his scanner. As he checked the results, he noticed that the active sensor pings bounced back, reflecting off the walls to create an interference pattern.

“Must be shielding crystals embedded in the walls,” he decided. “No wonder our scans were so garbled. This whole place was designed to be a sensor trap.”

“Camouflage,” Kellean commented. “Draped over these caves when the SEF dug this place out. It’s classic military. They wanted to be invisible.”

“Even after the rescue crews showed up,” Nathan said, shaking his head at the irony. “Their ships could have rolled over this bunker and never known anyone was here.”

“Must be in an advanced state of decay,” Pitch added, digging a chunk out of the wall with his hands. The porous rock crumbled between his fingers, bright flakes of shielding crystal flickering as they drifted to the ground. “Otherwise, we would have missed those signals from orbit.”

“Lucky us,” Nathan said, adjusting the aperture on his scanner. He tightened the sweep, focusing sensor energy and hoping to reduce the effect of the magnetic interference. It didn’t work. With readings coming back at him from all directions, it was impossible to get a fix on where they came from. “Damn.”