On a well-settled Mars, the five major city Council regimes
struggle to meld into a stable, working government. Embracing an official
Unified Faith In Humanity, the Councils are teetering on the verge of pogrom
directed against Christians, Molesters, Jews, Rapists, Buddhists, Murderers,
Muslims, Thieves, Hindu, Embezzlers and Artificial Humans – anyone who
threatens the official Faith and the consolidating power of the Councils. It
makes good sense, right – get rid of religion and Human divisiveness on a
societal level will disappear? An instrument of such a pogrom might just be a
Roman holiday...To see the rest of the chapters and I’m sorry, but a number of
them got deleted from the blog – go to SCIENCE FICTION:
Martian Holiday on the right and scroll to the bottom for the first
story. They are HanAH, the security expert (m); DaneelAH, xenoarchaeologist (m); AzAH, language
expert (f); MishAH, pattern recognition (f).
QuinnAH had stopped both talking and taunting,
hurrying through shabbier and shabbier corridors. Dust changed to debris, then
became real garbage, accumulating into a grinding grit beneath their feet the
closer they got to the razor-thin barrier separating the interior of the Domes
from the thin, suffocating atmosphere of the surface of Mars. Ongoing
terraforming and the increase in atmospheric pressure had raised it to something
like a tenth of an Earth atmosphere after the addition of Krypton and Xenon
gases from several comet strikes. The end point of a habitable surface was
still a century in the future – and then there’d only be exit with complete
environmental suits rather than hard spacesuits.
In other words, if anything happened to the Dome, everyone
directly exposed to the Martian atmosphere here on the surface would die. Just
as they had when FirstDome had been breached during the initial unrest. After
that, the Unified Faith in Humanity had gained a strong foothold.
QuinnAH stopped at a hollow lift tube, slapping the
activation pad. The floor glowed a dim red as he stepped onto it.
“I’m not riding on that!” HanAH said. “It’s so old
it’ll quit halfway up!”
The boy shrugged, “Suit yourself. The stairs are
down the corridor and to your left.” AzAH, DaneelAH, and MishAH stepped in with
the boy.
DaneelAH waved. “See you upstairs.”
HanAH strode forward, muttering, “Someone in this
pod has to use their head for something more than a battering ram!” He squeezed
between the boy and his vat mates as the gMod lift tube started up to the
surface.
There was a moment when the lift faded and they
slid back down a meter or so. HanAH said, “I told you…”
They started moving up again. QuinnAH said, “They built
stuff to last in the olden days, huh?” AzAH smiled faintly as the lift stopped.
“Let’s go. Next stop is up!” He darted out of the lift and they four vat mates
followed, longer legs meaning shorter steps.
“I should have brought my stunner,” HanAH said.
“You’d have lost it by now to a v-born,” said
DaneelAH. HanAH only grunted. The boy took off down an alley and they had to
pick up their pace to keep up. He stopped and turned into a recessed doorway
that they found had a ramp leading another meter down.
AzAH said, “This is an old part of the Dome. It’s
sunken into the permafrost here. Not supposed to, but it has. Who knows how
weak the infrastructure is here…” She stepped into the darkened interior of a
huge, abandoned warehouse. A few breaks in the roof and a shattered window high
up let wan, red light in. “Spread out a bit. I don’t want all of us to fall
into Mars if the floor collapses.”
“Ain’t gonna collapse,” said QuinnAH, suddenly
appearing in a cross beam of light full of dust they’d raised with their
passage. “He’s up on the roof…or…I don’t know…”
“Where was he when you last saw him, son,” asked
DaneelAH. Quinn described what his master had been doing when he’d vanished.
HanAH said, “We need to get up on the roof?”
“I don’t think so – Stepan said that the stairs
were leading down, into the building. Like in an lift shaft or something that
had been boarded over; except he said there were stairs and there was like a
room that went into the wall.”
They went to the roof first and met QuinnAH’s
friend, the man he called Pastor.
HanAH was stood and was staring at the hole in the roof
of the warehouse as he said, “How do we know he found them here?”
DaneelAH, AzAH, and MishAH all looked at him.
MishAH finally managed, “Where would he get something like he’s just described?”
“He could have…” HanAH opened his mouth, knowing
that he looked like an idiot and closed it before he could get himself into any
more trouble. A moment later, after QuinnAH had tossed the gMod disk down to Stepan
Izmaylova, he rose up slowly, a geological sample bag tucked under one arm.
The four Artificial Humans
from Malacandra stepped forward. Stepan looked at them then pulled something
from the bag. He set the bag down and lifted what he’d found. It was a bag, narrowing
half-way down then flaring at the bottom; four meters long and obviously ancient.
Darkened, it was obvious even so that there had been metallic parts that
pierced the strangely shaped bag.
They stared, uncomprehending
until suddenly AzAH said, “I recognize this.”
“You’ve seen something like
this?” HanAH said.
“No,” she said.
HanAH looked at her,
scowling.
“Not something like this.
Part of this.”
“What?” said Stepan, AzAH,
and DaneelAH in unison.
She shook her head. “I can’t
even begin to speculate how they’re related, but I can only state that Mayor
Turin, in his personal collection of Martian geological artifacts, has
something like this. It has more metal and what were once four protrusions,
though two have been torn away. Seeing this, I can only come to one conclusion:
the two halves together would make a spacesuit.”
Pastor Stepan shook his head,
“It can’t be. No one could fit into anything like that.”
“Not one of us, people. Not
something Human.”
No comments:
Post a Comment