When the peace treaty was signed, Chase was sitting on a stool in a backalley bar in Watanabe’s foreign quarter, dog tags hanging down over his white shirt and khaki rucksack leaning against the bar. He was drinking a shot of whiskey bought with the last of his discharge bonus and watching the news on a screen mounted above the top shelf spirits. The crack of snooker balls and blaring of an antique pinball machine drowned out the sound, but the images marched on: stock footage of refugees fleeing through snowy pine forests, Alliance soldiers pushing through bombed-out, rubble-choked cities, a group of politicians and officers signing papers under the relentless onslaught of flash photography.
Chase had thought the treaty being signed would be a big deal, but the news only devoted a few minutes to it before cutting to the latest celebrity marriage breakup. He pulled a cigarette from his pocket, but his lighter only spat sparks, the fluid depleted. Chase kept flicking it, over and over, his thoughts elsewhere.
Less than a month ago he had been in that snowy wasteland, waiting for his life to be terminated by the sharp retort of a sniper rifle or the sterile odour of poison gas. Now he was home, and it felt as though he’d never left. The images on the screen were like segments of a film. The shrapnel scars on his leg were like mosquito bites.
There was a sudden flare in front of his face, and he flinched, but it was just a lighter – a trucker, sliding into the stool next to his and offering a hand. Chase leaned forward and lit his cigarette, inhaled deeply. “Little jumpy?” the trucker said. He was a stocky man, with a grizzled grey beard and moustache.
“Understandably,” Chase said.
The trucker nodded, and ordered a Seikouri Dry. “I was in the Marines, back in ‘40. Eighteen years old, signed up six weeks before the war ended. Never even fired my gun.” His beer arrived, and he flicked the cap off to take a long swig. “My youngest boy was in the corps too. Third Battalion. Died when the Sirenum went down. What about you, kiddo? You a leatherneck?”
“Army,” Chase replied, still feeling jittery from the shock of the lighter, fighting the urge to keep glancing over his shoulder, inwardly sneering at himself for flinching at nothing when mere months ago he was charging through grenade blasts and hearing bullets rip up the concrete around him.
The trucker grinned. “Well, I won’t hold that against you. So what are you planning now? Got a family to go home to?”
“Nope,” Chase said.
“Any work lined up?”
Chase gave a weak smile. “Nope.”
“Well, it’s good times for finding work, and there’s plenty of places’ll take on a returned serviceman. Wasn’t like that when I came back from war, ho no. Big depression kicking in. But you’ll have no trouble. Ain’t no time like it, when you’re young. Nowadays I got six kids to feed, got to haul yuppy shit up and down the mountains, just barely above the red. If times weren’t so good now I’d be robbing banks just to make ends meet. But when you got no dependents, no worries, just drifting from place to place following the work – well, life’s easy, then.”
Chase drained his glass. “Where you headed?”
“Kaizen, then Arc, then Ophira, then the north route back here. Looking for a ride?”
Chase shrugged. “This city doesn’t suit me.”
The trucker finished his beer, and idly swiped his wrist across the bartop, sparking the barely audible beep of a transaction. “Well, I ain’t said no to a fellow vet before,” he said. “Come on, let’s go.”
Chase picked up his rucksack and slung it over his shoulder, before following the trucker out the doorway into the bright afternoon sunshine. After picking their way through a few alleys and backlanes, they came to the Esplanade, a circular street running alongside the interior rim. Before them plunged the central city of Watanabe, sinking down into Pavonis Mons’ cylindrical caldera, a three-dimensional urban landscape of townhouses and skyscrapers, villas and towers, parks and maglevs, malls and mansions. They paused for a moment at the railing to take the sight in – a white flock of birds bursting from the foliage of a hanging garden clinging to the interior cliffside, the sun glinting off an upward-bound glass elevator, a sightseeing blimp chugging down towards Peacock Lake with tourist faces pressed against the windows. Chase craned his neck to look above them, where the space elevator loomed, a solid pylon a hundred metres thick at its base, stretching into the blue sky, becoming a thin silver thread before eventually disappearing entirely.
“This city doesn’t suit you, you reckon?” the trucker said, putting a hand up to shade his eyes as he gazed over the deep shaft. “If that’s the case, I don’t think there’s a city in the world that’ll suit you.”
Black Swan Story #01
HOMECOMING
When he first arrives in Watanabe three years ago it is dusk and he is sweaty, panicking and terrified. He visits Sareem in the Islamic Quarter and explains the situation. The old man sits there quietly on his stool, listening inscrutably. They go over his options together. They are few. All of them involve leaving the planet.
“Your new name is Chase Benson,” Sareem says a few hours later, handing him a fresh computer and netlinks, smelling of new electronics. “You were born on the 12th of Scorpius, 297, in Agassiz. The rest of the file is on there. I suggest you read it as soon as possible.”
“Thank you,” Chase says.
He leaves the incense shop and wanders through the streets, struggling with grief and disorientation, eventually finding a park near the Esplanade. He sits on a bench for the rest of the night, reading the new history of his life. Eventually he watches the eastern horizon glow golden and hears the muezzin’s call to prayer from atop a minaret. At eight o’clock, Chase goes to the nearest recruitment office and signs himself up for the Martian Army.
The trucker’s name was Zack, and as they corkscrewed down the Pavonis Highway in his three-carriage road train, he chatted incessantly: about his kids, about his six-week war, about his dead son, about his asshole boss. After some time Chase tuned out and watched the scenery pass.
There wasn’t much of it. The top half of Pavonis Mons was well above the atmosphere, and was the same bare red rock the whole planet had once been. The highway cut across the gentle volcanic slope, spiralling around the mountain, with nothing but featureless pink on both sides. It wasn’t a busy highway, having been built only for pressurised freight trucks. Chase leaned his cheek against the cold window, a virtual vacuum only a few centimetres away, watching regular emergency shelters swoop past on the left-hand side of the road. Occasionally they passed a truck coming in the other direction – roadtrains with ten, fifteen, even twenty carriages dragging behind them, corporate logos flashing past. 24-7. Redwood. Zodiac. Carbone’s.
He fell asleep while Zack was nattering on about the best restaurants in Watanabe, and when he woke up it was nighttime. The interior of the cab was dark except for the glow of the symbols on the windscreen – GPS position, altimeter, engine condition, exterior temperature. The truck was rolling into the town of Kaizen, a tiny little dot on the map at the highway interchange just below the breathable atmospheric mark. A few dozen buildings clustered around a railway station. Quaintly traditional, with a Bhuddist temple nestled amongst the fir trees at the edge of town. Snow was falling gently, and the streets were deserted.
“I gotta switch the tyres over for the haul downslope,” Zack said, expertly guiding the truck into a service bay with one palm on the wheel and the other on the gearstick. “It’ll take about half an hour. You might want to grab a bite to eat or something.”
Chase nodded, pulled his army jacket out of his rucksack, and jumped down from the cab while it was still moving. The air outside was freezing, and stung his throat and lungs. The stars above were those of low air pressure, untwinkling, silently fixed. The same stars he had seen on the voyage home, or coming down the space elevator.
He walked down the main street, tucking his hands into his armpits. A strange feeling, the cold. Less than a month ago he had been on Callisto, freely moving about in temperatures that would make this little mountain town feel like the Xanthe Sea. Those were the gifts of the Martian Army; heated body armour, and nanytes swimming in his blood, reinforcing his skin tissue, repelling the frost. No – not gifts. Loans. At the base in Watanabe they’d injected him with a solution that would dissolve those nanytes, the whole mix, including the ones that would repair his broken skin if he was injured, regenerate his blood, override his pain. And his weapons! How strange it felt, to be walking around with neither rifle nor pistol nor knife. He made a note to find a pawn shop as soon as they reached the lowlands.
He ducked inside a bar, brushing snowflakes from his shoulders. A handful of truckers hunched over glasses or cheap meals glanced up, then back down. Chase ordered a shot of sake and sat over by the heater, looking out the window at the service bay, where Zack was fiddling with his tyres. He’d been hoping for a view, hoping to see the night lights of Tharsis spread out below, but it was cloudy. There was just darkness and snow.
For the first two months he is stationed in Grozny, an airbase outside of Sarrakagrad, thousands of kilometres from the front. In the city there are car bombings and assassinations on a daily basis, but that is terrorism – nothing a soldier can prevent. His platoon guards the base and watches the supply ships come and go, come and go.
On the day the soletta is blown he is outside playing basketball in the light snowflakes, dog tags dancing around his neck as he ducks under an intercept and jumps to shoot. The ball bounces off the backboard and hops away over the asphalt, away from the hangar. Another private grabs it before it strays onto the tarmac into the path of a taxiing Red Cross ship. “Shit, Chase,” he says. “That almost went in – you could make the Jaguars with those skills!”
The others laugh, and Chase makes a lunge for the private with the ball, grinning, knocking it out of his hands. “And you could make…”
He doesn’t finish his sentence – the world is suddenly, blindingly bright. White light pours into his eyes, his mouth, his ears. He drops to the ground screaming.
When he wakes up he is in a military hospital with a patch over his eyes. He is very lucky, a doctor tells him – if he’d been looking at the sky when it happened things could have been much worse. Some of the other men in his platoon will have vision problems for the rest of their lives. Some people in Sarrakagrad will never see again.
He learns that Eikini rebels destroyed the soletta, the colossal orbital lens that magnified the sun’s rays, giving Callisto more heat and light than it could otherwise hope for, so deep in the solar system. A hijacked liner was packed with explosives and driven straight into it on kamikaze course. For a brief moment it was amplified to a level far beyond the norm, a huge tract of ground around Sarrakagrad subjected to that blinding light for a few seconds, like ants under a magnifying glass. Then just debris, raining down across the tundra.
Chase asked the doctor how long it would be before the soletta was replaced. Nobody knew. When the patch was taken off, sixteen days later, the view outside his window was one of permanent night. Darkness and snow.
They came down through the cloud cover the next morning, rolling off Pavonis onto the smooth, grassy highlands of Tharsis. Occasionally they passed over a mild chasm, only a few hundred metres deep, cutting through the plains like the furrows of a titanic plough. Walls of red rock ran across a land of green grass and blue sky. The bridges there were old, grimy black steel, for Tharsis was mining country in the pioneer days when the Terrans swarmed across it like greedy locusts, stripping the landscape for all the titanium and uranium and diamonds it was worth. But the minerals were all gone now, and Lower Tharsis had become herding country – cattle, sheep, yak, caribou. Chase watched the animal clusters roll past the window as Zack discussed the best solution to the wire epidemic, which was apparently capital punishment for everyone from drug czars to street-level addicts.
Service stations, highways, fences, farms, bridges, service stations… Chase fell in and out of sleep. The clouds raced across the sky like scudded spaceships. Zack shifted gears ruggedly, confidently, his shirt-sleeves rolled up to the elbow, slamming his hand down on the horn whenever a car full of family vacationers cut out in front of him. As the sun set, the truck chased its shadow into the east.
Zack shook Chase awake early the next day. The world filtered back in slowly – the clock on the windscreen reading 6:55, the rising sun out his window blinding him with golden light, the sound of Zack snapping the lid off an instant coffee. “Wh’s wrong?” he mumbled.
Zack handed him the coffee. “Nothing,” he said. “But we’re nearly at Arc. You’ll want to see this.”
Chase sat up, rubbed sleep out of his eyes, sipped the coffee. Even through the tinting, the rays of the rising sun were harsh, and he had to squint to make out…
Beautiful. A white town, shining, green parks and treetops filling in the gaps between crimson tiled rooftops and high-level skyways. Clustering around the northern edge of an enormous bridge, kilometres long, stretching out over the five kilometre abyss that was Ius Chasma. Houses, villas and towers lined the bridge on both sides, their balconies and gardens hanging over a sheer drop. A titanic city, built suspended over nothing…
“A French engineering consortium threw her together in the 2080s,” Zack said. “Before that they had to run freight thousands of clicks to the west, when they were hauling it between the space elevator and the big southern cities. There’s more bridges too, further south, over all the little chasms. But this is the biggest and the best. Never forget the time I first laid eyes on Arc.”
Chase’s face was glued to the window as they drove up the skyway onto the bridge, an enormous ten-lane highway stretching across the structure’s entire length. A railway ran down the centre, and a bullet train rushed past with a sudden whoosh of air, pulling dozens of freight and passenger carriages behind it. “Where are we going?” Chase asked. “Aren’t we stopping?”
“Depot’s on the south side,” Zack replied, “but I’ll pull into a servo before that and let you out. Can’t have the boss finding out I picked up a hitchiker.”
Until they arrived, Chase kept drinking in the sights. The highway was transparent towards the middle of the bridge, so for a five minute stretch of the drive he could see straight down to the chasm floor, through the wispy rainclouds to where a river curled through tropical green foliage, lined with rice paddies and sugarcane fields. Blimps and airships floated by underneath, coloured in gold and red and blue, ferrying tourists and cargo and passengers to other ports. The Valles Marineris stretched across nearly a quarter of Mars’ circumference, four thousand kilometres of twisting canyons and chasms and gorges, splitting and splintering and relinking like the Amazon River, and all the towns and resorts and cities along her upper edges were serviced by the airships – they brought up food and water and the other fruits of the valley, and they took down people and labourers and money. The Valles were part of Tharsis, ruled from the capital in Watanabe, but everyone knew they had their own culture and their own ways.
When Zack pulled into a service station along the edge of the bustling highway, Chase knew he was ready to stay. “Here,” he said, offering the trucker a handful of bills. “Thanks for the ride, man. Good luck with… all that stuff.”
“You too, kiddo,” Zack said. “Hope you find some work. Nothing worse than having nothing to do.”
When he is released from the hospital, Chase is assigned to a new platoon, one operating in the heart of Eikini Catena. A sharp switch from Grozny Airbase, but Chase is happy with it. At Grozny they sat around all day, playing basketball or football, playing chess or go, doing pushups or reading magazines. It was not what he spent six months in basic training for. In Eikini there is no time for that. They are on patrol fourteen hours a day, hunting through the pine forests and farmlands and industrial sectors, optical nanytes switched to thermal to pick out hostiles in the eternal night. Doing what they were trained to do.
During his third week in Eikini, Chase’s platoon comes under fire while hiking through a caribou farm. Sergeant Grierson collapses into the snow with a hole through his head; then Corporal Berkovich; then Corporal Tanaka. Chase drops down into the snow with everybody else and whips his head around, trying to pinpoint the attacker. There is an orange-red herd of caribou and nothing else, and yet the silent bullets still drop into the snow around them. “The caribou,” Chase yells. “They’re in the herd!” His platoon opens fire on the animals, full automatic. At least fifty of them, collapsing in the snow, steaming guts spilling out, hot red blood melting through to the permafrost below. In the centre of the carnage are a pair of teenage Eikini boys, clutching Chiang-20 automatics in their dead hands. They are seventeen. Maybe eighteen.
Chase walked along the main thoroughfare of the east harbour rim, sipping a can of coke, reading the names of the airships docked along the pylons. The Alexandria, the D.B. Cooper, the Don Quixote, the Roc. He stopped at one ship where the captain was arguing with one of his crew, below huge red letters spelling the name out on the bow: Idiot Wind.
“You signed a contract, you useless cop-out!” the captain shouted. “You can forget about the rest of your pay!”
“Choke on it!” the crewman spat at him. He was wearing a heavy coat and beanie, and carrying a bag across his back. “I’d pay not to stay on this slave ship a second longer!” He stormed down the gangplank and pushed his way through the crowd, disappearing into the taverns and coffee-houses lining the harbourfront. The captain stood with his hands on the railing, shouting insults after his former employee.
Chase drained the rest of his coke and tossed the can over the railing, tumbling down into the abyss below, before walking hurriedly up to the Idiot Wind’s mooring pylon and calling up to the captain. “You looking for a new crewman?”
The captain turned to scowl down at him, face framed by a bushy black beard, hunched over underneath a thick blue aviator’s coat. “You ever crewed on an airship before?” he asked.
“No,” Chase called, beginning to walk up the gangplank, catching his breath when he saw the four kilometre drop below him.
“You know anything about airships?”
“No,” Chase said, forcing himself to walk, focusing his eyes on the captain.
“Can you cook? Clean? Medical training?”
“No.”
The captain laughed. “Well, what can you do, boy?”
Chase had reached the deck, and he stepped off the gangplank and put a steady hand on the railing.
“I can follow orders.”
The New Year’s Push is a turning point for the Eikini; Alliance troops are caught unprepared, and Chase’s unit is amongst the very worst of the fighting. When the general order goes through to evacuate to below the 12th parallel they abandon their equipment and flee south in a barely restrained rout, harassed all the way by guerillas and snipers. Their vehicles are bombed in equal measure by Eikeni artillery and friendly fire from Allied orbital platforms, or are lost to the ice and the snow, buried overnight under drifts or blundering through bad weather into deep crevasses. Before long, the most expensive, well-equipped Army in existence is wearily dragging itself south on foot, scattered across thousands of kilometres and divided into thousands of different groups, through the pine forests and across the tundra, looting abandoned villages for food and abandoning the wounded to be claimed by the wolves.
Chase’s captain is killed; his lieutenant is lost in a blizzard; the sergeants are gradually picked off, and then all of a sudden there are only six soldiers left in his platoon and he is in charge. They are freezing, starving, running out of ammunition, agonisingly scared and completely lost. On the twenty-third day of the march they stumble into a village where the Martian flag is being projected. There are a handful of lavs and hoppers parked in the snow, and sentries posted on the rooftops. A sergeant detaches himself from the shadows and approaches Chase’s men, scanning their dog tags. “You from T Company?”
“Yessir,” Chase says in relief. Over the howling wind he can make out the faint rattle of gunfire, of shouts and yells. “We’re lost, sir – could you tell me where we are?”
“Kurshava,” the sergeant replies. “We’ve had your company trickling in from the forests all week. Pretty rough time, huh?”
Through the eddying snowflakes, Chase can make out dark shapes in the windows of one of the buildings – quick movements, a fight or struggle. “Is this village secure, sergeant?” Chase asks.
“Yeah,” the sergeant replies. “We’re having a little trouble with the natives.”
Chase’s feeling of relief is gradually replaced by something else entirely. “We need supplies – water and ammunition,” he says tentatively.
The sergeant points off to his right, where a line of beacons run off into the darkness, pulsing bright blue. “You’re only about a click north of the A5, and there’s an evac point at the end of that beacon line. I don’t know if you heard, I know there’s been a lot of chaff, but your company’s orders are to dust-off and regroup in Valigrad.”
Chase peers past the sergeant, through the gaps in the buildings, into the village square. He can still hear gunfire, but can see Martian soldiers now, laughing, shooting at things he can’t see. “What’s going on here?” he asks.
The sergeant moves his head in front of Chase’s view. “Nothing that concerns you, corporal,” he says sharply.
Chase doesn’t move. He is strongly aware of the five surviving members of his platoon directly behind him, fingers on their rifle triggers. He is also strongly aware of the hidden snipers on the building rooftops.
“Follow the beacon south and wait for evac,” the sergeant says. “That’s an order, corporal.”
Chase stares at him for a moment. Then he starts trudging south through the snow.
There was a certain romance expected in working the airship routes of the Valles Marineris, an expectation inherent after a handful of books and films and comics turned the aviator into a cult figure, ranking alongside the spacer and the soldier and the gangster as an idealised rogue, a figure of high adventure in Saturday morning cartoons. Chase found himself experiencing harsh reality, and not for the first time. While his childhood had led him to believe that aviators spent their time standing at the prow of their airships with the wind in their hair, or fighting bandits in Noctis Labyrinthus, or battling to stay aloft in high-altitude electrical storms, he instead found most of his time was spent scrubbing the crew toilet or cleaning the deck, and watching endless cliff-faces of red and maroon slowly drift past. With no aviation experience, he was the lowest-ranking member of a twelve-man crew, and they treated him accordingly, giving him the smallest portion of the meals in the galley and relegating him to a hammock in the noisiest part of the engineworks.
The crewmen of the Idiot Wind were all variations on a theme: twenty-five to fifty, mercantile, chip on the shoulder, prone to drinking and gambling in excess and caring about few things in the world beyond the next paycheck. Captain Berwald was the essence of these men distilled into one simmering, potent brew: a grumpy miser who was quick to lose his temper and scream at his crew for some task left half-finished or not up to his high standards. Chase quickly learned to hate him more than he had hated anyone in a long time.
The airship followed the wind up and down the canyons, taking cargo aboard in the chasm-edge city of Ophira – meats, furs, timber, electronics – and dropped down to the distant rivers and jungles below, four or five kilometres deep, offloading the freight in the little towns and plantations and orchards that dotted the river’s edge, relaxing amidst balmy winds and verdant foliage. Then they would take aboard fruits, textiles, wine, fish, and make the journey back up to the cold, high-altitude cities of the plains. There were thousands of airships registered to the ports of Arc, Ophira and Miraflores, but the canyon system was vast, stretching a third of the way around Mars, and outside of the busy harbours and air-channels Chase only ever saw a few. Once, as they were returning to Arc after depositing a special courier order at a tourist resort in the islands of Ius Chasma, Chase caught a glimpse through the port bow of a private mansion, carved into a terrace in the side of the cliff like a swallow’s nest clinging to a rockface. There was a manicured green lawn, a small garden, a white house and gazebo, flags fluttering in the wind. A private airship was tethered to the lawn, a sleek crystal cloud yacht with customised engines and wide, open decks. It was powering up, about to take off on a pleasure cruise. Chase thought about how wonderful that would be, to cruise the chasms and the world in your own ship, at your own time, with your own friends. Then the mansion slid out of sight as the Idiot Wind ascended, and he was interrupted from his reverie by Berwald screaming at him to scrub the aft decks. When they docked at Arc and the crew disappeared into the streets to visit their preferred brothels or bars, Chase broke into Berwald’s cabin, jemmied the lock on his safe and emptied its meagre contents. By sunset he was already hundreds of kilometres away from Arc, watching the landscape rush past the train window.
Later on, in the hospital, Chase expects to hear something about what happened in Kurshava. War crime allegations, Alliance troops uncovering mass graves, some kind of official inquest. He never does.
Chase arrived at the shores of Lake Argyre with a dwindling five hundred dollars to his name and a reasonably forged reference letter from Captain Berwald to assist him in finding a new job. It had been a month since he left the Idiot Wind and six months since he had been sitting in a bar in Watanabe. He still had his dog tags and Army rucksack, but had gradually replaced his military uniform with bits and pieces picked up living on the road; second-hand boots, jeans stolen from a clothes line in Seikouri, and a long, thick aviator’s coat.
He had come to Balboa, a pleasant town where the American Canal emptied into Lake Argyre, blessed with wide boulevards and parks studded with Norfolk pines. It was summer in the southern hemisphere, and as he walked down towards the harbour he took his coat off, slung it over his shoulder and rolled his shirt-sleeves up. Seagulls wheeled in the breeze, and stole chips from families picknicking along the grassy beachfront. The wharves ran out several kilometres into the lake, lined with ugly grey barges.
There was a billboard map at the waterfront, painting out with precision the three great Martian canals. Chase examined it, shoulder to shoulder with a crowd of Gannish tourists. The American Canal came down from Miraflores in Eos Gulf, cutting south-east through mountains and deserts to reach Balboa and Lake Argyre, marked with a helpful red dot. Somewhere far away to the east, beyond the barges and sailboats and summer home islands, across the great sweeping salt lake, was the town of Kirovsky on the eastern shore. From there, the European Canal ran straight as an arrow across Noachis, slighty north of east, until it emptied out into the land-locked Hellas Sea. And then the African Canal took water traffic north all the way to the ocean, to the glittering harbour city of Klysma, where ships and barges poured out of the canal and went their separate ways across the great stormy ocean of the north, taking cargo to the Arabian Isles, the Tartarus Archipelago, the shores of Elysium, the myriad port cities across Sabaea and Sirenum. They could even head west, charge across the waves into the Xanthe Sea and Eos Gulf, ride up the grand watery lock at Miraflores to the American Canal on the vertiginous plains, and begin the voyage all over again.
Staring at the map Chase felt an impulsive desire to sail the canals. He had worked aboard the airship fleet, and rode upon the thermals; now he felt like working in the naval fleet, and riding the waves. The sun was setting, the bright flare of Phobos rising to mark a new dusk. Chase wandered through the harbour streets until he found a motel, and rented a room for the night. He sat on the bed scrolling through his computer, scanning the GlobeTrotter, jumping from sattelite to sattelite and watching live feeds of ships grinding their way up and down the canals.
Out of curiosity, he flicked over to Agassiz, just across the plains to the south-west, and for a good half an hour sat entranced by photos and videos. An enormous metropolis, filling a crater more than a hundred kilometres across with skyscrapers like crystalline stalagmites. An observer beyond the curve of the horizon could easily see the glow of the lights, a blinding shaft shooting straight up into the night sky. Beyond that crater rim lay the greatest city in the world, the solid glass fortress of Aonia Tower, the gaudy nightclubs and parlours of the Rock, sunbathers in Phoenix Park, the leafy labyrinth of the Reeve campus on the western shores of Lake Griffin, the bazaars and medinas of the Foreign Quarter, the subway stations, the street vendors, the buskers… Chase held the screen up against in front of his face and pointed it in a south-westerly direction. He filtered out the highway markers, Balboa attractions, railway stations, all the thousands of GPS points, until all that was left was “state capitals.” The green pathfinder dot glowed on the wall of the motel room. “AGASSIZ City Centre: 4032 km distant.”
Closer than he had been since he left. He could board a train, cross the plains to the south-west, and be there in a few hours.
The next day he was working in the engine room of a freighter as it sailed eastward across Lake Argyre.
After the evacuation, Chase is sent to a hospital in Valigrad, to be treated for frostbite and malnutrition before being deemed healthy enough to be tossed back into the fray so that he can begin the process of dying all over again. The hospital is a converted building that was once a hotel, built in the classical style: frescoed ballrooms, wide fireplaces, grand dining halls. Through the windows he can see MPs guarding the streets, emergency beacons cordoning off piles of rubble, the drone of Callistan choppers overhead.
One morning another Martian soldier sits down next to him in the dining hall with his breakfast tray, a brash and burly Marine with his arm in a sling. “Fucking hospital food, am I right?” he says.
“Beats eating synth,” Chase says.
The Marine picks up on his accent. “You from Agassiz?”
“Yeah.”
“Me too,” the Marine says. “South Circuit, born and raised. Name’s Ryan Benson.”
“Chase Benson.”
“No kidding, man,” the Marine grins. “Maybe we’re related. What’s your grandpa’s name?”
“I don’t know,” Chase says abruptly. “I lived in foster homes.” He stands up with his tray and walks out of the room.
The ship was registered to Kanto Shipping, a freight company based out of Klysma, and as such it had no name but merely a registration tag: KANTO-155, which Chase found both very unlucky and fundamentally irritating. The other sailors didn’t seem to mind. There were twenty of them, a very different group from the rough-cut airmen of the canyons. These were family men, cleanshaven and well-behaved, working eight-week contracts with the Kanto Co. They all had families tucked away in Klysma or Kirovsky or Miraflores, and would speak often of their wives and children. Chase was the only free-roamer on the ship, and as they sailed eastward across the planet, making their way up the European Canal, this became a well-worn joke amongst the crew. They would urge him to find a nice girl and get married, or to go back to Agassiz and get an education. Do something to contribute to society, stop being a deadbeat drifter. Chase took it in good humour. None of them knew he was a veteran.
“Wandering’s good for a bit,” said Anderson, one of the deputy engineers. “I did Jupiter after uni. But after a while you need to settle down. You get tired of sleeping somewhere new every night. You need a home, you know?”
After two weeks they were expelled from the canal into the Hellas Sea, a glittering expanse of water flooding an old impact basin, nearly the size of the Caribbean on Old Earth. A few days across the heart of the ocean, crossing paths with fishing trawlers hauling up latticed nets of snapper and tuna, bright sailing yachts cutting across the waves, fellow freighters who would hail the KANTO-155 with a blast of the air horn. Petrels floated astern, porpoises splashed through the wake, and on one fine morning Chase could make out baleen whales spouting past the port bow. For a few days they docked at Kiejima, the small island at the centre of the sea that had once been the crater nub, and while the ship was resupplying in the harbour Chase went hiking up the trails through the pine forest, army rucksack over his shoulder and eyes stinging in the cold air, eventually arriving at a Shinto shrine overlooking the bay, where the sole monk offered him tea and chatted with him for a while in fractured English.
A few days later they crossed beneath the Gate of Gulls in Manakh and began cruising up through the African Canal, the decks hot underfoot and the air growing humid as they drew closer to the equator. Resupply ports and fishing villages fringed by olive-green palm trees slid past with steady progression; the banks on both sides of the canal were bordered by scorching red desert, and birds of prey circled in the blue sky far above. When he closed his eyes, Chase could still picture the cloying darkness and the chaotic blizzards that had been a daily feature of life on Callisto.
The desert gave way to savannah, to wheatfields, to rice paddies and verdant forest. The glittering towers of Klysma appeared on the horizon as the freighter reached the end of the canal, confronted with the wide expanse of the Boreal Ocean. A few hours stop in the harbour, a bleak landscape of shipping containers streaked with bird shit and wharves stained with seawater, and then they were taking a fresh cargo across the straits to Elysium, the island continent.
They sailed into Aaru on a fine spring morning eight weeks after having left Balboa, and Chase stood at the bow of the ship, gripping the railing and relishing the briny spray that sprinkled across his face with every wave the vessel charged through. Aaru was a hilly city built around a drowned river valley, the largest natural harbour on Mars. The huge bulk of Arbor Tholus sat at the harbour entrance, a great red mountain with greenery clinging to its lower slopes and distant snows peeking out from under the clouds, the breakers of the artificial ocean trying in vain to drown it. It very nearly blocked the harbour; ships had to squeeze through a narrow entrance to the north-east, creating one of the busiest traffic lines in the Boreal Ocean. Tiny hydrofoils and hovercraft darted around the looming, leviathan bulk of oil tankers and cargo ships and navy vessels, while spotter planes and ultralites swooped down from the mountainous heights above. To the north he could catch a glimpse of the city itself: buildings shoved onto steep hills and crowding into valleys, like a crumpled piece of paper, with skyscrapers and roads and bridges peeking out from forests of eucalyptus and pine. Beyond the city loomed the great bulk of the Elysium Montes, their flanks blanketed in enormous tracts of redwood forests, cloned trees from Old Earth that had grown to colossal heights in the weak Martian gravity. Chase had heard Earth veterans compare Aaru to Sydney or San Francisco, but scanning over photographs on his computer to learn something of these old dead cities, he concluded that they didn’t even come close to the Elysian harbour’s magnificence. Watanabe had been impressive; Balboa pleasant; Kiejima picturesque. But so far this was the only city that even began to compare to Agassiz – and it was as far away from that forbidden realm as possible, on the exact opposite side of the planet.
The next day he declined to renew his contract, and set out onto the streets of Aaru with his rucksack over his shoulder.
The voyage home was on a bulk shuttle, carrying about a thousand servicemen, taking off as part of a staggered fleet of several hundred from Valigrad spaceport. The other soldiers – or veterans, now – were all excited, talking about friends and family, about the creature comforts of their home country, about the foods they missed and the places they wanted to visit. Chase found that every day, as the number of kilometres between himself and Mars grew smaller, the nauseating feeling in his stomach grew larger.
Aaru was an expensive city to live in. He took a job as a bouncer at a nightclub, and rented an apartment above a bowling alley. It wasn’t a good job, but work was hard to come by in Aaru. His coworkers were huge men with messiah complexes and biceps bigger than their brains, and watching them intimidate women and beat up drunkards was the rule rather than the exception. Violent patrons were just as bad, costing him regular visits to the medico to replace teeth or eliminate blood infections. Then there was the stink, the vile mixture of piss and vomit and booze found in any bar, that hung around him for days on end.
There were times that weren’t so bad, usually on his days off. He could walk through the markets and arcades that lined the harbourfront, visit the theatre or concerts, hit on women at the bar after work. Aaru was a nice city, and a good place to live. But there was still something missing, something that kept him awake at night. Though he tried to avoid it, he knew exactly what it was: a sense of security, of safety, of living without the constant nagging fear in his stomach.
He ignored it, told himself that he was being paranoid, told himself that he had been back on Mars for nearly a year, told himself that nothing was going to happen. He was wrong. He had been working at the nightclub for four months when, shouldering his way through the crowd one night to reach the bar, he came face to face with Teichmann.
With every passing day the signals from the home planet grow stronger: television stations, radio channels, and a steady trickle of rationed megabytes widening into a flood of gigs. Video from family members, phone calls, even limited access to the metaverse.
With it all comes the news. The soldiers are shocked by it. They had expected footage of servicemen returning home, of bulletins on the peace treaty process. What they see instead are the same stories they were seeing when they left: economic analysis, train derailments, political scandals, sporting events. Nothing to indicate there has even been a war. Chase and a group of other soldiers watch an MBC feed in the cafeteria one evening with a general consensus of disgust.
“It ain’t important to them,” one private says, a Cimmerian prairie kid. “They don’t give a shit.”
“Why not?” another soldier asks.
“Why should they?” Chase says. “What did we accomplish?”
“We ended the war,” someone said.
“And who won?” Chase asks, lighting a cigarette.
“We did.”
“Did we really,” Chase says. “Tell me, what did Mars get out of it?”
“Callisto’s our friend,” the private says. “We helped ‘em out.”
“Nations don’t have friends,” Chase says. “Nations have interests. Martan Pearse said that.”
“Actually, Palmerston did,” says another soldier, a corporal with an Elysian accent. “And we had our interests in Callisto. We were preventing Saturn from getting a foothold in the Jovian system. I can’t believe people…”
“Would you all shut up?” a sergeants growls. “I’m sick of hearing about it. Ooh, it’s a proxy war against Saturn, ooh, we’re just there so the corporations can make money, ooh, Klein is a racist bitch who just wants us to kill some Slavs. I’m fucking sick of it. I’ve been listening to this shit for three years. It’s over. Just shut up about it.”
Deferring to higher rank, the young men disperse, gathering breakfast trays and departing for the gym or the rec room or the observation deck. Chase stays where he is, smoking and rocking back in his chair.
The Elysian corporal pauses with his breakfast tray in one hand. “Interests might come first,” he says, “but nations still have friends.”
“If they’re really friends,” Chase says, tapping his cigarette over an ashtray, “then interests should come second.”
They both froze. Around them, time slowed down: the movement of the crowd, the dancers up on the stage, even the pace of the techno rock blaring from every direction. The look on Teichmann’s face was one of sheer astonishment.
As he began to snarl, and reached into his suit jacket, Chase brought a sharp blow down on his neck and grabbed the man’s wrist in his hand. But Teichmann had already pulled the gun out, a Webley 50 cal, and as they struggled he squeezed off a few rounds. Bullets thudded into the floor, the muzzle flare blinding in the dark nightclub, and suddenly there were screams. A circle began to widen around them as women in cocktail dresses and men in suits scrambled to get away from the scuffle.
Chase slammed Teichmann’s hand into the bar and the pistol clattered to the floor. He caught a glimpse of the other bouncers wading through the crowd towards him before Teichmann grabbed a glass from the counter, smashed it against the edge and slashed Chase in the throat. Blood splattered onto the dance floor, and Chase staggered backwards, stumbling to the ground. Teichmann kicked a bar stool out of the way and approached him, hair mussed and tie askew, gripping the broken glass with an expression of sheer fury. “I’m gonna kill you, you son of a bitch, and this time you’re going to stay dead!” he yelled, barely audible over the roar of the music.
Chase swept his legs around and kicked Teichmann’s feet out from underneath him. The man landed hard on his hip, and Chase rolled over on top of him, seizing his head and slamming it into the floor, once, twice, three times. The music was still playing, the sound overwhelming; it felt like they were fighting in silence. Chase saw Teichmann’s hand reaching for something – the gun – and he slammed the man’s head into the floor one last time and felt his skull crack. Teichmann’s eyes went blank, and his fingers went limp around the gun.
Chase stood up, blood running freely into his black SECURITY T-shirt, reeling with adrenaline. The music had finally stopped, and the crowd had left a gaping hole around him. Somebody turned the lights on. The DJs, the bar staff, the dancers and drinkers that hadn’t already fled, were all staring at the scene, murmuring quietly in disbelief or clapping hands over their mouths in shock.
One of the bouncers arrived and laid a steady hand on Chase’s shoulder. “You’re okay, buddy,” he said. “You’re okay.”
The other knelt down and put a finger on Teichmann’s throat. “He’s dead,” he said.
“Pulled a gun on me,” Chase gurgled.
“I know,” the first bouncer said. “We saw. It’s okay. Just calm down, and sit down for a second…”
Chase was already pushing away from him, a tsunami of panic and hysteria welling up inside him. He stumbled through the crowd, blood dripping onto the floor, towards the door. Someone called after him, but he ignored them. He burst out onto the street into the cool autumn night, a light rain sprinkling down over the city, stumbled through the people gathered outside. Sirens were blaring in the distance – he could see the lights reflected off a store window further up the street. He lurched down an alleyway, and started running.
Past the closed bowling alley, up the stairs, shoving the door open and stumbling into his filthy studio apartment. Blood dripped onto the carpet. He started shoving his belongings into his army rucksack, took the cash from the hollowed-out bible on his windowsill, tried and failed to douse the firestorm of panic engulfing his mind. He had been an idiot, a stupid vile fool, for believing that he could come back to this planet – anywhere on this planet, it didn’t matter whether he was in Agassiz or Aaru – without them finding him. A chance encounter. That was all it took. And now they’re coming, he thought. He could hear loud voices downstairs, and his heart seized up for a moment before he realised it was just drunken tenants stumbling through the front door after a typical Friday night. The people he feared wouldn’t make any noise at all.
He swayed for a moment, blood dribbling down his chest, and wondered how many minutes he had before they really were downstairs. Then he grabbed his rucksack and left through the fire escape.
Time and space blended for him, drenched as he was in adrenaline and fear. They’re coming, he thought. They’re coming. He ran through streets, along highways, across parks, in a zig-zagging path dictated by delirium and exhaustion. All coherent thought had abandoned him. The light rain became heavier, and soon he was drenched. Even without that he wouldn’t have noticed the blood soaking his shirt, the pain in his neck, the light-headedness and odd warmth. He was so hopelessly lost to fear that he didn’t realise his carotid artery had been severed.
The constellations twirled above him. Headlights flashed past in the rain, leaving highlighted traces on his eyelids. He vomited, but kept staggering on down the curb of a freeway. He remembered collapsing in the gutter. He remembered seeing, through glazed eyes, many cars passing him by.
As he heard one stop, and saw boots splashing through the rainwater, and heard soothing words as someone picked him up, he found the strength to say, “No hospitals.”
“Don’t try to talk,” his invisible saviour said.
“No hospitals!” Chase gurgled. “Let me die first! No hospitals!”
Then he blacked out.
Mars blossoms in the windows of the observation deck. Ragged clouds across the Boreal Ocean, a thunderstorm bearing down on the Sabaean coast, the polar icecap extending probing fingers south with the approach of winter. Herds of whales criss-crossing the waves, maritime towns drifting with the currents. The three canals cut sharp, straight lines through the red plains and green forests of the southern states. The Hellas Sea is a clear blue iris with the sharp point of Kiejima as a pupil. The Valles Marineris system looks like the claw marks of some titanic monster, raking across the planet’s flank. Phobos swoops past, a tiny rock with mansions and estates and gardens clinging to her, then disappears around the planetary curve again. In the east, past the terminator, darkness is descending and blobs of light mark out the great cities: Aaru, Manakh, Klysma, Zutphen, Jornstad.
“Home,” one of the soldiers breathes softly.
Chase says nothing.
Chase woke up in a bunk, staring at the ceiling. For a moment he thought he was back on the KANTO-155, or the Idiot Wind, or even the military shuttle that had carried him back from Callisto.
He lay there for a while. There was a bandage around his throat, and someone had undressed him. His jeans and shirt were folded at the edge of the bed, but he was still wearing his underwear, his dogtags and his computer. He lifted his wrist to see how long he had been out. It was 11.78 pm on December 20. More than forty hours of unconsciousness.
His panic began to subside. If they hadn’t found him yet, they weren’t going to.
He got himself out of the bed, and pulled on his jeans and boots. His army rucksack was sitting in the corner, stained a little with his blood, and he tugged a fresh shirt out of it. While buttoning it up he peered through a porthole set in the steel bulkhead. Outside was a row of other ships. Beyond them, in the distance, a forest of redwood trees was outlined against the stars.
He walked out the door, down a long and silent corridor, passing other cabins. The ship seemed old, very old, with grimy rivets and rusting bulkheads He went down a stairwell, passed through a galley and living area. Old, perhaps, but lived in: there were dishes in the sink, clothes flung over the couch, books lying face-down on the coffee table. “Hello?” he called out. It echoed around the ship.
He descended down to the lowest deck, a large cargo bay. The loading section was open, and outside, in the dirt, a campfire was burning. A jeep was parked nearby. A single chair sat by the fire, and a man was sitting in it reading a book, his eyes glowing green with optical night-vision nanytes.
“Hello,” he said, glancing up as Chase approached through the open cargo bay, stepping out onto the weed-covered dirt. “Welcome back to the land of the living.”
Chase walked over to him slowly, and sat down on a pile of firewood. They were in an open space inside a long row of ships – old ships, rusty and derelict, lined up along the dirt like stalls in a marketplace. No noises but the chirping of crickets and the wind rustling the leaves of the trees. It wasn’t a port at all. It was a junkyard.
“Thank you for not taking me to a hospital,” Chase said.
“I regretted it,” the man replied. “You’d lost a lot of blood. Lucky you had those dog tags, and lucky we’re both B-type.” Chase noted the cotton wool bud taped to his elbow. “You nearly died, y’know.”
“If you’d taken me to a hospital, I’d be worse than dead,” Chase said. “So, thank you.”
The man nodded, and lowered his book, keeping a thumb where his place was. “You’re welcome.”
“My name’s Chase. Chase Benson.”
“Keiji DuVal,” the man replied. He was in his mid twenties, around the same age as Chase, and had a Eurasian complexion. Chase guessed he was half Japanese or Korean. Dark eyes and hair, sharp cheekbones, all emblazoned in the red firelight, and the nanytes still glinting a catlike green in his pupils.
There was a long silence. Chase was expecting Keiji to ask the obvious question. He didn’t, and eventually Chase decided to ask his own. “So… where exactly am I?”
“Johan Smith’s Vessels, Parts & Assorted Machinery, Lot 412,” Keiji smiled. “It’s a junkyard. Home sweet home. We’re about five k’s up the coast from Aaru. This is the boneyard. There’s about a hundred derelicts here, and this one’s mine. Old Smitty’s compassionate enough to let me live in her while I’m fixing her up, as long as I buy him a bottle of Redwood every now and then.”
Chase turned his head to gaze up at the ship he had just emerged from. She was large, for a light freighter, five storeys tall and maybe a hundred and fifty metres from bow to stern. A row of bow windows crested above the forward cargo port, with a small nub of a flight deck protruding above them. At the stern were two huge spoked solar collectors that almost looked like paddlewheels. Long streaks of rust dripped down her meteorite-pitted hull, splatters of seagull shit coated her windows, and trees and bushes were clustered around her lower hull.
“How long have you been working on her?” Chase asked dubiously.
“Three and a half years now, I think,” Keiji replied. “It’s a big job.”
“And what are you going to do with her when you’re done?”
Keiji spread his arms wide. ” What do you think? Put a crew together and take off. Fly around. See the system. Do some trading, make some money… you ever been off Mars?”
“Yeah,” Chase replied, walking closer to the ship, scraping a finger along the hull. “I fought on Callisto.”
“What was that like?”
Chase thought about it for a while. “Complicated question,” he said. “Jury’s still out on that one.”
“And how do you like being back on Mars?”
Chase didn’t say anything.
“I want to see things,” Keiji said. “I want to see the moons of Jupiter. I want to see the flying cities of Venus. I want to see the asteroids, and the rings of Saturn, and the oceans of Ganymede. Solensan, New Rheims, Xianjing. I want to see the stars. I want to get out there. I want to get off this rock. And I want to do it in my own ship. Didn’t you ever dream about that when you were little?”
Chase stood back, folded his arms and craned his neck to stare up at the ship again. “Every kid does. Most of them grow out of it. You really think you can get this thing off the ground?”
“Absolutely. You should have seen her when I first bought her. There was a goddamn bear living in the engine room.”
Chase laughed, and realised that it was the first time he’d done so since returning to Mars.
“What’s her name?” he asked Keiji.
“The Black Swan. I got to paint that somewhere, actually, after I get everything else done.”
Chase glanced over at him. “You said you needed a crew. Is first mate taken?”
