Gamecock comes up beside me, along with Tak, and we decided how best to move the bus to where the lady wants it to go. Our effort is mighty, the progress slow, but we manage in about fifteen minutes to close the distance. Then Teal locks the brakes, steps out again through the airlock, holds up her hand, and marches off into the shadow of that massive, crooked arm with a wonderful, long-legged stride that combines hop and jog. A true princess of Mars.
The sun is just over the upper forearm and shines in our eyes, so we can’t see her in the shadows. A minute or two later, she returns, shaping out of the darkness like a green ghost, and tells us to push some more.
We push.
Hard-packed sand and dust form a decent floor inside the arm. In the shadow of the wall, my eyes finally adjust and I see, set into the giant’s upper chest (I can almost count the ribs), a solid metal gate about ten meters wide and nine meters high. Beside it is a smaller gate, more of a door. The big gate has been opened, I presume by Teal, exposing a black cavern. The gate’s outer surface has rusted to a close match for natural Martian brown. Hardly visible at all, except up close. The stony wall surrounding the rusted gate is coated with a thick layer of lava, alternating rough and glassy, as if a melted flow slurped up the giant’s arm. In the armpit and crook of the elbow lean two dramatic intrusions of massive, six-sided columnar basalt.
Vee-Def leans in to say, “Muskies are vegan, right?”
He probably saw a movie about cannibals on Mars.
“They certainly won’t eat your stringy ass,” Kazak assures him.
I am only half listening. The giant has faced wind, water, and lava for a long, long time—why not just wear away, sink down, give up? “It’s still trying to swim,” I tell myself.
Michelin emerges and lends a hand as we push the bus across the threshold, into a cramped, dark airlock barely wide enough to accommodate the wheels and skinny dudes sneaking around each side. He tells us the general is doing poorly, might not last more than a few hours unless we decant him into full medical. “He’s got something he wants to say to Gamecock. His English is better than my Korean, but he’s going in and out.”
As our ranch wife comes through the narrow gap to the left, shining a bright single beam, I see glints and realize the roof is low, low indeed. How the bus fits at all puzzles me until I notice that it has hunkered down on its suspension and the bottom of the fuselage is now just a few centimeters above the lava floor. Teal’s light reveals unnatural-looking grooves crisscrossing the walls and roof. I’m no expert, but the cavern, the lock, seems to have been dug, blasted, or melted out of a large mass of metal-bearing rock, leaving basalt columns as structural support.
Teal opens and climbs through a smaller hatch in the inner wall, and we stand around for a few minutes until the gate closes behind us. Then she returns and inspects the outer seal.
“Airtight,” she says. “After I open te inner, we’ll push and park beyond.”
“Have you been here before?” Tak asks.
“No,” she says. “But I know of it.”
“Is this the eastern Drifter?” I ask.
She looks past me. “Get everyone out when we’re t’rough.”
“Our Korean general is going to need some help,” I say.
“Stretcher in te boot.” She taps the bus’s stern, showing us the outlines of a flush equipment bay. In short order, with her help, I pull out a rolled and folded stretcher and prepare it. “From here is slope,” she says. “Should make pushing easy.”
With that, the tall young lady returns to the bus’s midsection, lifts herself up, squeezes flat, and climbs in.
The inner lock door now pulls aside, back into the rock. Very neat engineering, I think. An echoing blat of the horn tells us to resume pushing. A few minutes later, we’re inside a chamber about three meters below the floor of the outside entrance. DJ and I close the second gate behind the bus. This one has a thick polymer seal that grabs hold of the circular metal frame. Encouraging, but still no pressure.
The inner chamber is high, dark, possibly natural—a relatively smooth half ovoid about twenty meters across. What would leave a big egg-shaped hollow in the dense, metal-bearing stone? Hot gas? Steam? The floor is dust and sand, compacted from material that could have drifted in before the airlock was finished. In the gloom, we see nine other vehicles in a tight half circle pushed close to the northern wall. They look old and worn-out.
Teal clambers down from the bus, all arms and legs, with an unfamiliar, almost alien grace. She looks back at us, at me, gestures for us to follow—and is once more definitely human, definitely female.
Command would surely frown upon fraternization with Muskies, if they thought it likely or even possible. But the fact is, we’ve received no instruction about them one way or another.
We do know how to treat our sisters in the Corps. They’re fellow Skyrines, no more, no less, ever, as long as we’re in service. It’s a hard code and both sides are held responsible. Tak and Kazak once served rough justice on a flagrant violator of the sister code, a corporal named Grover Sudbury. Sudbury had raped and beaten a female PFC in his crummy apartment outside the depot at Hawthorne. Tak excluded me because I had a list of sketchy fitness reports and might have been DD’d if caught. But I saw the bastard after they had finished with him, crawling bloody and mewling across the deck of a second-floor walkway. They had finished by shoving him through a door that was closed at the time. Corporal Sudbury did not appear capable of standing, much less fit for duty. Months later, the Corps booted him in disgrace.
And then, Sudbury just vanished. Nobody ever heard from him again. Remember his name: Grover Sudbury. There have been a lot like him in the last couple of years, far more among civvies than Skyrines.
So I know when to stop thinking about sex. But I’m tired, pretty sure we’re doomed, and the dust widow is exotic, not like women back on Earth—not like any female in the Corps. Great fun to watch.
We ferry the general out of the buggy on the stretcher. He’s mostly out of it, awake but delirious. Vee-Def keeps him from plucking at his faceplate. I glance at my glove and wrist joins, usually the first to reveal increasing pressure. We’re still in Mars normal.
Michelin stays close to the ranch wife. “Where exactly are we…?” He runs a glove along the dark stone walls.
“Te Drifter, I told you,” she answers softly, reluctantly. Does she regret bringing us here? “Te eastern Drifter.”
“But what is that?” Michelin asks, glancing around for assistance. We know as little as he does.
“Te garage will pressure, if t’ere pressure on t’other side. T’at’s the inner lock. If a pressure, you strip, go naked—except for te general. Brush down now. Doan a want you bring in batTle sand.”
I’m not sure what she means, battle sand, with that brittle T of thinspeak—spent matter waste? What do the Muskies know about that? That’s all she’ll tell us until we open yet another smaller hatch, less rusty, quite thick, serious about keeping stuff in and out. An inner sanctum must lie beyond.
Gamecock has said little throughout our trek. Now he bumps helms with Tak and they seem to reach some agreement. I hope it doesn’t mean we’re about to commandeer this place or otherwise take charge.
As we open the thick hatch, enter the inner lock, and crowd in around the stretcher, I feel a deeper, almost creepy sense of awe. This formation is so very different from anything I know about Mars. The stone is remarkably dark and looks exceptionally dense and hard. Every few meters, ceiling and walls are shot through with glints of large metal crystals—wider than my hand. Nickel-iron, I guess. Beyond the polished crystals, there are more runs of grooves and other signs of excavation. Must have been a bitch to carve and finish. If the Muskies did all this, years ago, then they’re a lot more accomplished than we were ever taught at SBLM.