Blue Remembered Earth

This was how Mars murdered, with an assassin’s stealth and cunning. People came from Earth or elsewhere with the best of intentions. They knew that the environment was lethal, that only suits and walls would protect them. Yet time and again, men and women were found outside, dead, half-out of their suits. They weren’t mad, exactly, and most of them had not been suicidal. But something in the landscape’s familiarity had worked its fatal way into their brains, whispering reassurance, even friendliness. Trust me. I look welcoming, because I am. Take off that silly armour. You don’t need it here.

This was not the Mars that Eunice had first set foot on a hundred years earlier, Sunday reminded herself. She might be a long way from Vishniac, and Vishniac might be a long way from the nearest city, but, crucially, there were cities. There’d been none in Eunice’s time. No trains, no space elevator, no infrastructure.

If Sunday’s suit failed now, which was about as mathematically probable as her being hit by a falling meteorite, Dorcas and her crew were close at hand. And if Dorcas and her crew ran into trouble, help would arrive from other Overfloaters soon enough. Vishniac could send an airship or plane, and by bullet train nowhere on Mars was more than a day from Vishniac. She was plugged into a planetary life-support system no less capable than the one clamped onto her back.

Sunday’s courage wasn’t lacking; she did not need anyone to tell her that. But it was a different order of courage that had brought Eunice to this world, one that had no currency on this prosperous and confident new Mars, with its casinos and hotels and rental firms. Even here, in the Evolvarium, the risk to which Sunday exposed herself was measured, quantifiable – and if she didn’t like it, she could leave easily enough. And in the worst of scenarios, it would not be Mars that killed her. It would be the things people had brought to Mars, and set amok.

‘We start here,’ Gribelin said, nudging the drill into place. ‘If we’re off, it’s not by more than a couple of centimetres, and we should be able to refine our bore once we get closer.’

‘How long?’ Sunday asked.

‘To chew down?’ He shrugged through the tight-fitting armour of his surface suit. ‘Two, three hours, if it was solid Tharsis lava. But it’s not. It’s been shattered and poured back into the shaft, so progress’ll be a lot easier. Shouldn’t take us much more than an hour.’

The Overfloaters had lowered his truck back down from their ship, depositing it gently a few metres from the drill site. The truck had deployed bracing legs, and then Gribelin had swung a vertical drill out from the rear of the cargo bed, directing the heavy equipment into place with gestures, voked commands and the occasional shove from his shoulder. The drill was greasy with low-temperature lubricant and anti-dust caulk. He guided the bit into position, allowed it to rotate slowly as it chewed through the top layer of dust and reached rock. Then it began to spin faster, a tawny plume of digested rock arcing out from the top of it. Sunday could feel its grinding labours through the soles of her boots.

‘See now why we held off until sun-up?’ Dorcas said, angling her head back to track the plume’s trajectory, making sure it went nowhere near her precious airship. ‘Machines hunt with vibrations. Would’ve been a very bad idea to be sat here at night, practically inviting them to come and take a closer look.’

Sunday nodded: she could see the prudence in that, but she could also see the sense in being done with this as quickly as possible. The drill was already making tangible progress, its cutting head a hand’s depth into the solidified lava.

There were five of them in suits: Gribelin, Jitendra and Sunday, Dorcas and one of her senior crew, another Martian woman who Sunday had gathered was called Sibyl. The Overfloaters had their own suits, very sleek and modern, with Neolithic and Australian aboriginal animal designs embossed on them in luminous holographic inks. Jitendra and Sunday made do with the units Gribelin carried on his truck for emergency use. They were clunkier, with stiffer articulation and no fancy ornamentation, but they worked well enough, and there was sufficient comms functionality to facilitate a sparse local aug. Tags identified the other suited figures, and a simplified version of the tactical map hovered in Sunday’s upper visual field, ready to swell and assume centrality when she needed it. There had been no significant alterations to the map during the night, but in the morning the Overfloaters had acquired intelligence from their fellow brokers, and the positions of the Evolvarium’s chief protagonists had been updated.

There were shifting networks of rivalry and cooperation, favour and obligation. It wasn’t transparently clear that all this intelligence was reliable, but Dorcas was used to applying her own confidence filters. Her high-value allies had reported that the golem was on the move again, heading their way after spending the night immobile. ‘But it’s taking a big chance,’ Dorcas had explained, while they were suiting up.

‘Aren’t we all?’ Sunday asked.

Dorcas tapped a version of the map. ‘Two C-class collectors moved into this sector since we passed through. A pair of hammerheads. Not the worst, but bad enough. If your golem carries on, it’ll pass within two or three kays of their present positions.’

It’s not my golem, Sunday thought sourly. ‘Is that going to be a problem for him . . . I mean, it?’

Dorcas nodded sagely. ‘He won’t automatically be ambushed, not in daylight. But then again one or both of the hammerheads may decide to have a go at him, if it thinks the likelihood of reprisal is small. Which it would be – the golem’s not even a warmblood – but the hammerheads probably don’t know that.’

‘Probably?’

‘Don’t put anything past these things. Sniffing comms traffic, distinguishing between a human pilot and a chinged proxy – that’s within their cognitive bound, just as it’s within ours.’

Sunday brushed a gauntleted finger against the largest icon on the map. ‘The Aggregate?’

‘Yes,’ Dorcas said.

‘Maybe it’s me, but it looks closer than it did yesterday.’

‘It’s covered some ground overnight. It probably doesn’t mean anything.’

‘Probably,’ Sunday echoed once more.

‘It can’t know what we’re doing here,’ Dorcas said. ‘It can’t know, and even if it did, it wouldn’t be interested. I told you, it’s like a city-state. We’re nothing to it.’

Sunday watched the drill bite deeper, its progress plain to the naked eye – it had reached at least a metre into the ground, perhaps more. That there was something down there was now beyond doubt. The radar and seismic