Old Mars

Chimes answered him, a tintinnabulation of metal ringing on metal. This was the final madness. This was when I understood that we were dead—that we had died in the skymaster crash—and that war was Hell. Then I felt the ground tremble beneath the soles of my good black concert shoes and I understood. Metal rang on metal, wreckage on wreckage. The earth shook, dust rose. The spoilage of war started to stir and move. The ground shook, my feet were unsteady, there was nothing to hold on to, no surety except Count Jack. We held each other as the dust rose before us and the scrap started to slide and roll. Higher the ground rose, and higher, and that was the third time I almost killed him, for I still did not fully understand what was happening and imagined that if I stopped Jack, I would stop the madness. This was his doing; he had somehow summoned some old Martian evil from the ground. Then a shining conical drill head emerged from the soil, and the dust and rocks tumbled as the mole-machine emerged from the ground. It rose twenty, thirty feet above us, a gimlet-nosed cylinder of soil-scabbed metal. Then it put out metal feet from hatches along its belly, fell forward, and came to rest a stone’s throw from us. Hatches sprang open behind the still-spinning drill head, fanned out like flower petals. I glimpsed silver writhing in the interior darkness. Uliri padvas streamed out, their tentacles carrying them dexterously over the violated metal and rock. Their cranial cases were helmeted, their breathing mantles armored in delicately worked cuirasses, and their palps held ray rifles. We threw our hands up. They swarmed around us, and, without a sound, herded us into the dark maw of the Martian mole-machine.

The spider-car deposited us at a platform of heat-ray-polished sandstone before the onyx gates. The steel tentacle tips of our guards clacked on the mirror rock. The gates stood five times human height—they must have been overpowering to the shorter Uliri—and were divided in three according to Uliri architecture, and decorated with beautiful patterns of woven tentacles in high relief, as complex as Celtic knotwork. A dot of light appeared at the center of the gates and split into three lines, a bright Y. They swung slowly outward and upward. There was no other possibility than to enter.

How blind we humans had been, how sure that our mastery of sky and space gave us mastery of this world. The Uliri had not been driven back by our space bombardments and massed skymaster strikes, they had been driven deep. Even as the great Hives of Syrtia and Tempe stood shattered and burning, Uliri proles had been delving deeper even than the roots of their geothermal cores, down toward the still-warm lifeblood of their world, tapping into its mineral and energy resources. Downward and outward; hive to nest to manufactory, underground redoubt to subterranean fortress, a network of tunnels and delvings and underground vacuum tubes that reached so far, so wide, so deep, that Tharsia was like a sponge. Down there, in the magma-warmed dark, they built a society far beyond the reach of our space bombs. Biding their time, drawing their plans together, sending their tendrils under our camps and command centers and bases, gathering their volcano-forged forces against us.

I remembered little of the journey in the mole-machine except that it was generally downward, interminably long, and smelled strongly of acetic acid. Count Jack, with his sensitivities, discreetly covered his nose and mouth with his handkerchief. I could not understand his reticence: the Uliri had thousands better reasons to have turned us to ash than affront at their personal perfume.