Climbing Olympus. Kevin J. Anderson
stillborn, like a breath held in fear.
“Run!” Boris Tiban said at last in a hissing cough. Beside him, Nikolas put on an extra burst of speed, doggedly keeping up with him.
The thick air of these low altitudes pulled like shackles on Boris’s legs. It weighed him down. It clogged his lungs like soup. But the bloodlust was on him. He wanted to be part of the wind, a storm striking the helpless dva puppets. The sooner he and Nikolas got down, and attacked, and saw the bright, wet blood of the dvas freeze on their hands, the sooner they could go back home in triumph. After striking out and proving that he was not after all a weak and insignificant man, Boris could sit satisfied in the adin caves, content for a time, his hooded eyes half-closed in euphoria, with the feeling of having done something. A feeling of power. If this action didn’t make his mark, he would have to try something worse.
“Faster!” he gasped.
Boris swung the titanium staff as he ran, using it to lever his body forward. Nikolas stumbled, his breathing labored. He seemed dizzy and disoriented, trembling with the effort, but Boris would not let him slow the pace. They were adins and they were strong. They needed to sprint down, strike, and escape back to higher altitudes where it was safe. Where they could breathe.
For hours they scrambled down the steep slope in darkness, descending the sprawling apron of lava that had long ago oozed out of the shield volcano. Nikolas stumbled on a loose rock, but pushed ahead without a word. Before them, Boris could see milky wisps of steam from the pumping station, boiling into the thin air with a whispering, crackling noise that was muffled by distance. Tiny lights seeped through windows in the dva shelters.
The dvas were alone and insignificant. They had endured augmentation surgeries as well, but the dvas were not strong enough for Mars. Boris would make short work of them.
Phobos skittered across the sky like a bright artificial satellite; Deimos was a white dot indistinguishable from the other stars. The tiny sapphire of lost Earth glinted near the horizon, but Boris refused to look at it.
By midnight, the two adins had reached the level rock-strewn plain and sprinted toward the long thread of pipeline extending from the water mines deep inside Pavonis. Boris raised a clenched hand to signal a rest, and as he crouched, heaving burdened breaths into his four lungs, his heart hammered against his rib cage as if demanding to be let out. His head pounded. Knives stabbed behind his eyes from the pressure. How could anyone live in such air?
Nikolas made a high-pitched whimpering sound next to him, but he blinked his eyes at Boris and did not complain.
Resting would do no good, Boris decided. He let out an animal cry that converted the pain in his head into anger in his heart, like an alchemist changing lead into gold. He lurched back into motion, slashing with his titanium staff. “Time to strike. Are you ready?”
Imitating Boris, Nikolas pulled out his scimitar, as if that would help him keep his balance. A determined grin spread across his skull-like face.
Up ahead they saw the pumping station, nearer now, silhouetted by the silvery light of stars and limned by a glow of lights from the inside. Boris paused to stare. Posturing, he raised the spear in one hand and let out an ululating cry that sounded high-pitched and eerie in the empty, frigid night.
Nikolas looked at Boris as if he had gone insane. Boris forced his cheek muscles to form a smile on his uncooperative face. “That will put the shiver of fear down their spines,” he said in a hoarse voice, then shrieked again like a wild man.
Never had any animal made a mournful nighttime cry on the surface of Mars. The miserable dvas huddling inside their shelter would hear it and feel true terror. They would have no idea what was about to happen to them—they must think all the adins were long dead.
A dappled yellow glow trickled from chinks in the Quonset hut adjacent to the pumping station. Sections of transparent plastic let the light escape but kept the heat inside. The hiss of a chemical-based generator came from behind the hut, near the pumping machinery. The structure appeared flimsy, set up as a shelter but not a home by any means.
What did the dvas even have to live for? Boris wondered.
He heard high-pitched, frightened voices coming from inside, no doubt stirred up by his howl. Nikolas snickered and ran closer to the shelter, scooping up a handful of small rocks. He tossed them onto the sloped metal roof so that they clanged and clattered all the way down. Then, with a howl of his own, he threw a large rock to smash out one of the window plates. Nikolas collapsed to his knees in a whoosh of exhaled air, as if the effort of lifting the boulder had strained him to the limit.
Boris did not hesitate for an instant. The dvas did not yet understand. It was time to strike.
His head pounding, he ran to the vee of thin metal pipelines that joined at the pumping station. He raised his staff and plunged the sharp point into the intersection, twisting it like a crowbar. The pipe seam split.
Rushing water burst through the crack and volatilized. The cold steam made a razor-sharp screaming noise as it squirted outward, spewing gouts of freezing ice water onto the ground. The sounds drowned out Boris’s laugh.
Wielding his scimitar like a Cossack pirate, Nikolas crashed through the front door of the dva hut, spilling orange-yellow light across the darkened plain. Screams came from inside.
Water sprayed on Boris’s deadened skin, flash-freezing into a sheath of ice. He flexed his arm and shattered the film, but he could feel cold seeping into his bones as Mars stole his body heat. He sloshed through the slushy muck to where the pumping conduits extended in the other direction. He plunged his staff in again and again, puncturing the pipe and leaving breaches for the flowing water to force its own way out, tearing at the thin metal.
Nikolas charged into the cramped quarters where five dvas lived communally like a pathetic peasant mir in Siberia, three women and two men. They had a small kitchen, cupboards, a tiny table that Nikolas overturned, spilling playing cards—real plastic playing cards!—on the floor.
With lesser surgeries, the dvas looked more like deformed humans and less like monsters, expanded chests and enlarged lungs with oxygen-efficiency modules, rather than hunchbacked from an extra set mounted between the shoulder blades. Their skin insulation was thinner, so their nerves could still feel, though the dvas had to bundle themselves up in thick, warm clothing against the cold of the Martian night.
In a frenzy Nikolas slashed with his scimitar and yowled, still blinking in the sudden stinging light. The largest male dva was already up, grabbing a chair to defend himself. But Nikolas cleaved the dva man’s face with the honed edge of his blade.
In the low gravity, the dead dva man flew across the room. Blood sprayed in an arc across the walls, bubbling and steaming in the thin air.
The dva women screamed, two in terror and one in grief. Nikolas continued to flail with the sword and glared at the waiting victims. “Boris!” he shouted.
One of the women, her hands extended like claws, leaped on Nikolas, scratching at his hooded eyes. He staggered backward, tripped on the body of the dva man he had just killed, and fell down. Nikolas managed to turn his blade up and thrust it into the woman attacking him. She screamed as the tip plunged through her chest, then protruded from her back where a second set of lungs might have been … had she been adin instead of dva.
The other dva man, older and more bearlike than the first, kicked the fallen woman aside and wrenched the scimitar from Nikolas’s hand. Covered in steaming blood, Nikolas grabbed for his makeshift, scrap-metal sword.
“Boris!” he shouted again.
The older dva man grabbed up the fallen table, raised it over his head in complete silence, and brought its heavy edge smashing down on Nikolas’s skull. Again. And again. And again.
Covered with freezing mud, Boris felt the ice-covered staff freeze to his fists as he strode into the dva hut like a conqueror.