Warrior Chronicles 2: Warrior's Blood Read online

  Rhodes nodded. “And if Atlantica ever does send something to the other sites, those fixed railguns the design people put together will keep them from even landing.” Rhodes paused as he remembered the day he first saw a railgun in action. To have seen something the size of a freighter module simply cease to exist was still incredible to him. “Do you really think they will come here?”

  “No, I don’t. But that’s why we’re putting satellites up. I think they will try and land somewhere remote. If they establish a foothold, they may or may not interfere with us. I hope they don’t. I hope they realize that I was serious. This is our planet now. Every single hectare. So if anything enters our orbit that Dar didn’t send, I’m going to destroy it. No exceptions.”

  “Just a minute,” Cort said as his comm unit chirped. “Addison here. Go ahead.” He listened for a minute then said, “Okay, Wynn. We’re headed there now.”

  “What’s up?” Rhodes asked as they backtracked and headed down a different corridor.

  “That was Wynn Black. Do you know him?”

  “Only the name. One of your family right? He’s been here a couple of months, I think,” Rhodes replied.

  “Yeah, that’s him. He’s a geologist. He heads that group. Well, he heads Planetary Sciences, but geology was his specialty on Earth. He found water.”

  Rhodes stopped dead. “Water? Here? How much?”

  “Let’s go find out,” Cort said.

  --

  Wynn Black was a small man with thinning hair. Because of his olive-brown skin and enormous eyes, he reminded Cort of Gollum from the old books by Tolkien. Adding to the effect was his perpetual hunch. He had been injured in a fall while exploring a cave on Earth as a young man. With three separate fractures along his spine, synthetics kept him from being paralyzed, but the trauma was so extensive that his spine didn’t heal properly. As Cort and Rhodes walked into his lab, he looked up and introduced himself to Rhodes before Cort could. Then he bent back down to his ‘natural’ posture to pet Zandra. She knew Dr. Black well, because Wynn often dined with Cort in the park.

  “Cort,” he said while pointing at a map of the Tharsis region, “This is where the water is. Right between Tharsis and Amazonis. It’s about five-hundred meters down. I think it’s liquid, based on projected temperatures at that depth, but I can’t be sure. It’s much more accessible than the water at the northern polar cap. There, the environment prevents us from being able to settle. And the annular cloud storm is too harsh for colony modules to last very long.” The man looked at Addison hopefully.

  “How much water do you think is there?” Cort asked.

  “I don’t think there is water there. I know it is. And I know it’s a lot. There are only two things I don’t know. Number one, as I’ve mentioned, is that I don’t know if it’s frozen or solid. Number two is that I don’t know if it’s fresh or mineralized, such as salt water. Although if it is mineralized, that would be a huge boon for us. We need the salt as much as we do the water.”

  “How much?” Cort asked again.

  “The micro satellites indicate it could be as much as say, oh maybe the Memorial Sea back on Earth. But I could be off by as much as thirteen percent. How soon can I test drill?” Black asked.

  “Patience, Wynn,” Cort said to the consternation of the bent little man. “It’s not like Earth here. If you strike a gusher, most of it will evaporate off and bleed into space. Let’s get Kim Point in on this. Once she has a way to contain it if necessary, then you can drill. But not before, okay?”

  “Oh, yes. Of course. I hadn’t considered that. And it could very well be under pressure. I believe it was originally contained by an eruption of Mons Olympus. That is, I don’t think it’s groundwater. I think it’s truly an underground sea. If it was liquid at that time, but is frozen now, it may be under stress. So we do need a containment system.” Wynn looked back at his map.

  Rhodes had been silent during their conversation, but he spoke now. “Cort, if this is right, it changes everything. Everything.”

  Cort reached down and scratched Zandra’s head. “Yes it does, Chief. It changes all of our resource needs. Wynn, you probably just made the whole planet’s day. Nice work. Let’s call Kim. Then we need to have a meeting of the administrators.”

  --

  After the administration meeting, Kim Point and Kay Gaines joined Addison and Rhodes in the wolf park. It was named after John Wills and every afternoon, the two ladies and their wolves joined Cort and Zandra there. Larger than the first open area at Aeolis, the park was nearly one hundred meters square with a Formvar-M ceiling that, combined with Mars red sky, gave the park a feeling of perpetual dusk. It had four evenly space pillars to take part of its weight off the surrounding colony modules, and each pillar was designed to look like a tree trunk. There were also more than thirty live trees arranged in a copse at the center of the park. At one end of the copse was a small pond the animals swam and played in. the grass was sparse and unkempt in keeping with the preferred habitat of the wolves. There were several small sitting areas around the park, large and small, and there were usually a dozen or so colonists lounging or watching their wolves play.

  Kim’s wolf was the youngest of the three and only half the size of most of the animals in the park. Kim had named him Coke because of his unusually dark gray fur. The two older wolves were trying to rest while Coke harassed them. Kim was mostly thinking out loud when she said, “If Wynn is right, and there is water, containing it won’t be a problem. We can consider storing it on the surface, but I recommend we pipe it directly to the colony sites. It’s more work, but will use fewer resources. I also recommend we put a small occupied station near each well site so we always have someone on hand in case of a problem. And with one well site for each colony site, we also have better redundancy if something does go wrong.”

  Kay asked, “What about putting a new colony site right where the water is?”

  Kim said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. It would be fine in the short term, but if there was a collapse like what caused the Memorial Sea back on Earth it would be catastrophic. Not just for the site, but if we didn’t have an atmosphere when it happened, we would lose the water too. Keep in mind; we have plenty of water here. It’s just too inaccessible. If it were as simple as moving to where the water is, we would just need to move to the polar regions. They have incredible amounts of water right on the surface, but the environments in those areas are so harsh that we can’t build a colony module that will survive more than a season there. What would make this special is that it is in an area that is reasonably temperate.”

  “That’s another thing I’ve been thinking about,” Cort said. “We need an atmosphere, and if we are really going to be self-sufficient, we can’t wait for air. We need to make and contain our own. The question is how do we do it?”

  Rhodes spoke. “The reason we don’t already have one is several fold, but Mars is smaller than Earth, so it basically just boiled away.”

  “Really?” Cort asked.

  “Well, he’s sort of right,” Kay said, “but for the purpose of this conversation it works. What it comes down to is we can’t sustain an atmosphere, not even long enough to make one.”

  “Then we have to contain one. So we need to redesign the colony structures. Let’s think about for a while.”

  “We need better defenses,” Kim said.

  “How many gravity plates are floating around up there?” Cort pointed to the sky. “Could we use them to mount defenses?”

  “Several hundred at this point.” Rhodes realized where Cort was going. “But that won’t work. They are out of fuel.”

  “Can we make the fuel? Or buy it from Earth?” Kay asked.

  “We should have talked about this earlier,” Kim said, “with the whole team.”

  “Yeah, but we didn’t. So if Rhodes and I, being the scholars that we are, can imagine this, why can’t you smart people make it happen?” Cort grinned.

  Coke had finally
irritated Zandra enough that she was chasing him as he ran back to Kim. Cort stepped between the human and her pup. Coke whined as Zandra growled. “Nope. You aren’t running to Momma after pissing off the big dogs.” Zandra picked the smaller dog up by the neck and dragged it away.

  “That was mean,” Kim said to Cort.

  Cort turned to her. “No. It was smart. The wolves have to know how to fight. Period. Don’t forget that. If you ever need him, you don’t want a wolf that you have to protect. You want one that will kill for you. And to do that, he has to know how to fight. You of all people here should get that.”

  Cort’s words clearly hit home as Kim’s eyes teared up. “Understood.”

  “Good. Don’t spoil Coke. He is your guardian, not your child. And don’t forget, you’re his too. I’ve killed dozens of men on two planets to keep Sköll safe. He’s killed for me too. You have to love to Coke the same way. If you don’t, give him up now to someone who will.” Cort pointed at Kay and said, “With Sköll beside her, I’m probably the only person on this planet that could harm Kay.Not even Clare could get that close to her. And I have no doubt that if Kay sensed he was in danger, she would use that sidearm she carries to kill any person alive. Including me. If you don’t have that relationship with your wolf, you shouldn’t have one.”

  “I said I understand.” Kim was defiant now.

  “No Kim, you don’t.” Kay rested her hands on her round belly as she turned to Cort and said, “And that’s okay for now, Cort. Leave her be. But he is right Kim. It’s symbiotic. You have to depend on each other. It’s not like being owned by a cat. Clare and Rand and Cort aren’t why I am okay after losing everything John. And I was nearly catatonic after my husband died. It was even worse after Rand was taken from me. I used to think Cort was how I found my way back to sanity. But it was Sköll. You have to have that relationship with Coke too. If you don’t, you won’t ever heal. Trust me, I know.”

  Zandra and Sköll had sensed the tension and returned to their people. Zandra was clearly alert to Kim, even though Coke was trying to bite her foreleg.

  “You see this Kim?” Cort pointed at the two adult wolves. “Until you have this, you won’t understand. And if you coddle your wolf, you’ll never get here.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Cort turned the page. “So will our idea for the gravity plates work?”

  “We need to talk to the physics people to find out,” Kay said, “but it seems reasonable.”

  “Start talking to them, then. And keep me updated. Come on, Chief. Let’s finish your tour. Zandra, come.”

  As the three of them walked through the airlock, Kim began to cry openly. Kay sat her down on a nearby bench and cried with her.

  --

  “Are you sure about this Kay?” Cort asked the next day. “Once you do this, you can’t change your mind. It’s not like throwing away old clothes.”

  “That was a horrible analogy. But yes, I am sure. I’ve been thinking about it for months. I have no business being a mother at my age.”

  “Okay. For what it’s worth, I agree with you. Have you decided how you’re going to handle it?”

  “Yes. I’m going to Oxia Palus. I’ll have the baby there and I’ve been talking to a couple from the family. They aren’t able to have children. He had his pelvis crushed when he was a teen. He didn’t mend well because the damage was too extensive. They also have a wolf pup, soI know the baby will be safe with them. They are very excited. I’ll be staying with them while I am there.”

  “How do Clare and Rand feel about it?” Cort asked.

  “Rand is okay with it. Clare isn’t. She wants the baby. I told her no because it would be too close to me. I don’t think I could stand to see it every day and not be its mother. I don’t go to Oxia Palus normally so that isn’t an issue this way.”

  “Do you want me to talk to her about it?”

  “Not unless you are willing to give her one of her own, Cortland. She loves you. So you lecturing her about it would only hurt her worse.”

  “Okay.” How the hell did I get myself into this? “I’ll let you handle it then.”

  --

  “Okay, Rhodes,” Keen said, “tell me what the physics people said.”

  “They’re pretty upset that it didn’t occur to them. They have to make some minor modifications to the gravity plates and refuel them, but then they can move them into place.”

  “Move them into place?”

  “Yeah. Right now most of them are in orbit around the colony sites. The scientists want Dar to send some freighters with the new fuel. Once refueled, they can be spaced out evenly over the planet. We can have a fully functioning defensive network in a few months.”

  “Damn. That’s fast,” Keen said.

  “Yes it is. I’ve already talked to Dar. He suggested sending two plates with every launch. The big problem is fuel. By the time they get here, they are usually nearly empty. They weren’t meant to be used after they dropped their payloads. He suggested launching future refueling missions from here. We can make the fuel, so there’s no reason not to.”

  “Okay. Let’s do it. Or at least talk to our people and find out if we can.”

  “There’s one more thing. I’m a voyeur of sorts. Surveillance is my specialty. That’s why I’m in charge of security. I want to put electronics packages on the gravity plates when they are refitted. Surveillance, communications, and navigation. I want full defense network.”

  “You’ll have to talk to Cort about it. I think it’s a good idea though.”

  “Okay, thanks Dave. I’ll keep you updated. By the way, Kay arrives in about two hours. We’re meeting for coffee if you want to join us.” Rhodes stood and walked out of Dave’s office.

  Earth

  “Doctor Pan, the decision has been made. We are taking Oxia Palus back. It’s not up for discussion. The sale of Addison’s weapon technology is the final straw. Our assets are nearly in place. Once they are ready, I will give the order.”

  Pan was stunned. “Mr. President, this is a mistake. If we attack the Ares Federation, they will never trade with us again.”

  Arn Beards had been the leader of the Atlantic Alliance for only three months. It seemed like a lifetime. But he was in a corner. If he didn’t regain control of Mars, both the Southern and Asian alliances would leap over Atlantica in terms of science. Science was the one area where his people led the world. He wished he could go back in time and stop General Taps from his unauthorized assault on the Martian colonies. That series of attacks was what started Atlantica down this road.

  “Then we need to make sure we break them.” Beards regarded the scientist. He stood and said, “And Doctor Pan, you do understand that this meeting is not to be discussed elsewhere. If Mars were to find out our plans, it would be disastrous.”

  Pan had only met the President three other times, but he knew the man well enough to know that he had been dismissed. “Yes, Mr. President.” Pan rose and left the room.

  1200 Light Years From Earth

  Pagztay entered Speral’s office. “Sir, the new system analysis schedule is ready. A standard schedule except for the accelerated examination of exterior system 432.”

  “Why is that examination being accelerated?” Speral asked. She had forgotten that ten orbits ago, a transdimensional beacon had been activated in that system. Pagztay reminded her as she closed her eyes and reread the information. “Okay, I remember now. We do not think the beacon was activated intentionally. And it was not fully activated. Only magnetically. It was an X series beacon. Okay. When is the mission scheduled?”

  Pagztay closed his own eyes. The scheduled was projected onto the inside of his eyelids. “It’s third in the queue. One season, sir.”

  “Thank you Pagztay. Keep me updated.” Speral closed her own eyes and began reading another report.

  Eight

  Planum Boreum, Mars

  Mars’ northern polar region was a desolate and stormy place. Every night, a meter-thick layer
of dry ice formed over the water ice lake on the polar plain. Every summer day, the dry ice evaporated violently. In the winter, it remained solid for months. There was also the annular storm. It wasn’t cyclonic like most storms, but rather it was static. The storm pulsed up and down instead of laterally, remaining in one place for its entire existence. For a portion of each day, the colony was inaccessible due to dry ice crystals acting like a sandblaster, abusing anything it attacked. The structures Cort was looking at were like standard colony modules but they had layers of ice nearly a twenty centimeters thick on all their exterior surfaces.