The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN (33 page)

“Pretty…” Matthew purrs as the feedback gels into a
ghostly floor plan under the rocky surface. MAI begins to process
the images into a 3D construct.

“Incoming!” Lisa almost shouts. Missiles are flying
up out of the landscape.

“They figured it out,” Matthew agrees.

“Back home,” I order. “Now.” But the ASVs are already
burning retreat before I can give the order. Their aft turrets
spray back at the pursuing missiles while MAI directs
countermeasures. Then things get bad.

“Fuckers have coil-guns!” Matthew curses as a spray
of high-velocity projectiles comes flying after the retreating
ASVs.

“Low! Get
low
!” Lisa barks. “Evasive!”

Wilson has engaged Discs before, and Acaveda is sharp
enough to know the basics. They drop close to the ground to get as
much terrain between them and the anti-aircraft batteries Shinkyo
has apparently installed. Then they peel off sideways and weave to
defeat targeting. Alarms go off and I hear Acaveda curse.

“I’m still here!” she quickly confirms, not sounding
particularly relieved. “Punched a big-ass hole in my port wing.
Lucky I don’t need them to stay up.”

“I’m heating up a ship to meet you,” Lisa reassures
her. “You’ll risk coming back on vapors without the wings to reduce
your VTOL burn.”

“Sergeant Morales is gonna kill me…” she mutters.

“Smith?” I call into the Link.

“Here, Colonel.”

“MAI got a lock on their batteries. Let them know
we’ve become a little irritated with them.”

“Yes, Sir!” he agrees heartily. I watch the feeds as
his ASV locks and sends a pair of missiles back, skimming low to
avoid being shot down. MAI registers hits that look on-target.
“Message sent.”

“Escort Shadow Two home, Lieutenant.”

6 September, 2115:

Our prisoner is dead. 04:04 this morning. He never
regained consciousness.

It initially looked like a natural result of the
head-trauma that Simon accidentally inflicted on him, but autopsy
proved something more disturbing: Cause of death was a massive
brain hemorrhage triggered by what looks like an implanted
micro-explosive, something invisible to our initial exams, and MAI
detected a weak incoming signal at time-of-death. Someone executed
him by remote-control.

My initial thought: Why did it take this long? Did
his masters think he was already dead? (Why not just be sure when
he didn’t get out?) Or did it take this long for them to get a
trigger within range?

I expect the timing is the answer: Maybe this is a
subtle reply to our GPR foray. Or maybe the ETE’s prisoners made it
home with my message. (And why weren’t they remotely terminated
when they were captured?)

Once MAI makes us a good mapping of Shinkyo Colony
(or what it’s become in the last half-century), we refine our GPR
methods (for increased safety and decreased intimidation) and do a
similar run at the City of Industry.

The maps float on the Ops holoscreens by lunchtime.
We sit around the briefing table and no one says a word.

Shinkyo is by far the more impressive of the two: dug
down at least five levels and almost fifty meters under the
surface, the new “colony” is almost twice the size of the original.
Heat and carbon emissions that leak to the surface hint at
small-scale manufacturing, which the sonar mapping confirms spaces
and shapes for (about where the original above-ground fabs were,
only more extensive now). It explains the gear their Shinobi had,
and possibly also their structural expansion—the Shinkyo Corporate
Conglomerate had been working on pure nano-manufacturing, projects
designed to use nanobots to “grow” everything from raw materials to
entire buildings. They were also working on production of
engineered nutritive supplements to ease the devastating impact
their over-crowded home nation had been putting on local
fishing—these prototype labs now look like indoor farms on the GPR
map. The Shinkyo are apparently both well-fed and well-supplied in
cutting-edge nano-materials. And the now-visible living spaces and
life support plants could comfortably support a few thousand
souls.

The City of Industry isn’t nearly as cheery a story.
Where Shinkyo is elegantly ordered and efficient in its design,
Industry looks more like an ant’s nest. A vast system of tunnels
spreads like a twisted root system from the foundations of the
original colony domes. This likely gives Janeway’s snipers their
ability to surface in strategic ground all around the ruin.
Janeway’s “ant tunnels” would also provide many highly defensible
fall-back positions should any part of the network—or even the
colony itself—be taken or destroyed.

The new colony “center” consists of a number of
larger chambers dug out under the ruin proper. Most use some of the
original structural foundations as part of their construction, but
some are purely independent. The overall design appears hap-hazard,
or more likely an adaptation to the geology. Life-support equipment
is spread throughout the catacombs (again, it looks like they
wanted to be sure they could hold against even a severe enemy
incursion, or if large sections of their installation were
destroyed).

But the set-up doesn’t look purely military. It
reminds me of what
this
base looked like during the years it
became a makeshift refugee camp. MAI agrees: The City of
Industry—once a model super-corporate biotech pharmaceutical
manufacturer, a shining example of the Martian tech-boom of the
2050’s—is now likely a patchwork slum, a barrio of survivors (or
the grandchildren of survivors). I wonder if Janeway’s PK are
defenders or oppressors.

“Incoming signal, Colonel,” Kastl lets me know. Rios
shimmers onto the screens—he’s inside an ASV cockpit, and he’s
grinning ear-to-ear.

“We found it, Colonel!” he announces. “GPR thump just
gave us Melas Three, and she’s in one piece!”

11 September, 2115:

It takes Thomasen’s engineering crew two days to dig
down to the most accessible airlock, using the ASVs to shuttle
equipment and manpower.

Melas Three is misnamed: it isn’t actually in Melas
Chasma. It sits just inside of the Coprates Valley, where it joins
the broader Melas. The site was specifically picked to offer ready
air defense for Disc attacks that had been consistently coming out
of Coprates and the parallel Catena: Melas Two and Melas Three
effectively coordinated to cover all entry into Melas Chasma from
the east.

Melas Three sits on the valley floor at the base of
the foothill slopes of the Coprates South Rim (actually the Catena
South Rim at this point, as the two have merged). The Rim towers up
over fifteen thousand feet to the Datum-line Thaumasia Planum, the
upper mile of that rise comprised of cliffs that keep going east
into the Catena, almost unbroken for another two-hundred miles.

There is an ETE Station only two-dozen miles away
from the base site (but two miles above it), planted just inside of
Melas Chasma, around the west side of the “point” where the two
valley rims join. Paul shows us a tapsite on the valley floor
barely twenty miles from the base. This provides our salvage teams
with oxygen, water and fuel. Though it’s within rover range, or
even a brisk low-grav walk with extra canisters, we use the ASVs to
make the runs, vigilant for any potential encounters with Nomads
not of Abbas’ tribe (or other factions we haven’t met yet).

Having a tapsite so close to the base is a practical
blessing, but it also portends that there may be potential
“competitors” in the area. The base site is on the opposite side of
Melas from the PK colonies and Zodanga, and two hundred miles from
Shinkyo, but well within what Abbas says is Farouk’s current
territory. And Melas Three is within fifty miles of the Tranquility
site, which Abbas and Paul both cryptically warned us about.

GPR mapping told us most of the facility is still
intact, a testament to its design and construction. Almost all of
the structure was sub-surface and heavily reinforced. It’s only a
fraction of the size of Melas Two, being designed primarily as a
forward airbase. The main structure is a cross-shape of five
underground aircraft bays, complete with elevator launch and
landing pads, along with the shops, barracks, processors and stores
to support its operations. What surface batteries it had to protect
it have likely been sheered away, and the integrity of the squat
two-story Operations “Tower” (the only significant structure that
had been above the surface) is a concern.

It takes Thomasen and Anton the better part of
another day to get the doors open. Whoever was last to leave wanted
to make sure no one else got in after: once we cut our way in to
take our first look, Anton reports that all the relays to the
reactors had been blown with hand-set charges, killing all power
and rendering the coded hatch locks unresponsive. Then they used
portable arc-welders to fuse the manual locks to all the external
hatchways—all but one from the inside—so that no one could get in
without cutting away the two-foot-thick blast-grade outer doors,
assuming they could even be reached under a slide-mass that’s over
twenty feet deep in places. The hatch that wasn’t sealed from the
inside—the one they must have used as an exit—was welded shut from
the
outside
, and then had several tons of stone piled over
it. Whoever left the base this way must also have had no intention
of returning.

The damage done means that every airlock hatch—once
cut open—will need major retooling before the base has any
atmosphere integrity in the adjacent sections. In the interim,
temporary shelters have been modified and sealed to each open
external hatch to serve as fragile replacements. (The most
uncomfortable drawback is the lack of security that the heavy
hatches would provide, especially in territory that may be
hostile.)

The main bunker structure checked out as mostly
intact; some minimal breakage and a few cracks, but it looks like
it will hold pressure once the atmosphere recyclers can be
restarted.

The Tower did show structural damage severe enough to
cause depressurization, likely from the near-miss blast wave or
when the subsequent slide rolled over it. Someone did a rough job
of patching all the ruptures—the work is old, but it tells us that
there were survivors, and that they tried to keep the base viable
after the bombardment, tried to restore their operations
center.

But we found much more calculated sabotage when Anton
got his crew in to examine the Command Deck in the Operations
Tower. The base AI—MAI’s counterpart—has been surgically gutted:
the processor core and all of the file hardware have been removed,
and are nowhere to be found. That means no records, no logs, and
also (the likely reason for the act) no intel that could be taken
by enemies who might break in. The fact that the gutting also
leaves no useful intel for any Earthside rescue makes me wonder if
it was simply unavoidable or purposeful; that they didn’t want
anyone to know who’d survived, what they’d been up to, and—perhaps
most critically—where they had gone.

The only thing resembling any kind of message for
potential rescuers was as meaningless as it was chilling, and Anton
was the first to see it after they pried open the Command Deck
hatches. Someone had carved eight neat square letters, each a foot
tall, deep into the concrete above the “forward” set of
pillbox-slit viewports:

“CROATOAN”

“Okay, so what is this supposed to mean?” Rios asks
first, his helmet light playing over the letters while we watch his
feed back at Melas Two Ops.

“Somebody took some time on it,” Anton observes,
appraising the neatness of the carving.

I feel a chill go straight down through me. Matthew
gives me a look like he either recognizes the reference too, or
maybe I’ve just scared him by how pale I’ve gone.

“What is it?” Lisa asks, her concern edged with that
look that says she thinks I’m keeping something from her again, but
MAI manages to dig a brief snippet from what’s left of its
historical files.

“Late fifteen, early sixteen hundreds,” I tell her
before she can read it. “The English tried three times to establish
a colony on Roanoke Island, Virginia. First try, the colonists
begged to come home after a few months. So they left some soldiers
behind in a picket fort they’d built, but when the ship got back
the next year, the locals had killed them all. This time, they
leave over a hundred men, women and children when the ship goes
back for supplies. But when the ship gets back to England, it gets
waylaid in the latest conflict with Spain, and doesn’t make it back
for
three
years.

“When they do get back, the colony is deserted. No
sign of attack, just empty. And carved into a post is that nonsense
word: ‘Croatoan’.”

“One of the great spooky stories of American
history,” Matthew remembers.

“So what happened?” Lisa asks. “What did it
mean?”

“The colony leader—who left his own wife and kids in
the colony when he took the boat back for supplies—apparently told
his people to leave a message if things got bad and they had to bug
out,” I continue. “One plan was to fall back to Croat
an
Island, but there was no sign they made it there. There was also a
tribe called the Croatan, but no evidence they’d had any
contact.”

“Years later, Chief Powhattan—Pocahantas’ dad—bragged
to John Smith he’d killed the colonists himself, but there was no
way to back up his claim except a few random trinkets,” Matthew
adds. “But decades after, there was this one small tribe that
seemed to have an unusual grasp of the English language and a
predisposition for Caucasian features.”