Читать книгу Climbing Olympus - Kevin J. Anderson, Брайан Герберт - Страница 14

FLAT ADIN FEET found purchase on the volcanic path under a star-saturated sky. The world around them was silent, 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. He felt sluggish, urged on by adrenaline but held back by fatigue and weakness in the too-thick air.

As he hesitated at the broken door frame, letting his eyes adjust to the brightness, the two surviving dva women howled at him in fury. They snatched pieces of broken furniture and heavy tools from a workbench to defend themselves.

Boris reeled, feeling the wind kicked out of him as he saw Nikolas lying on the floor with rich red blood pooled beneath his crushed skull. Two dead dvas lay sprawled alongside him, blanketed in more blood. He stood motionless for an instant.

The big dva man heaved up the bloodied table and lurched toward Boris, but Boris snapped out of his daze and swung his titanium staff. Its arc caught the other man on the shoulder, cracking down and probably crushing bone. The dva man snarled, falling to one knee, and Boris kicked the side of his head with a flat, insulated foot. The dva man went down.

Then the two dva women rushed him. Boris stumbled back out into the darkness.

Outside, the burst pipe continued to howl as water and steam gushed through the ruptures. The air was thicker than ever before with cold steam, clogged with strangling vapor, making it impossible to breathe. Boris felt as if he were drowning in the dense mist. He could barely move, dragging his trembling legs one step at a time as he staggered toward the spraying water. His head pounded from the vise of pressure. Any second now his skull would crack like an eggshell.

Accustomed to the air and in their own element, the dva women went after him, wielding their sharp, crude weapons. Boris stumbled away.

The iron-oxide dirt at his feet turned to muck, freezing into slush as he ran. Though he could hear one dva woman yelling as she pursued him, he could make out nothing of the other behind him in the darkness. His eyes were still dazzled from the brilliant lights in the hut. The splash of illumination from the broken doorway did nothing but blind him.

Nikolas was dead. Boris could not comprehend it. Now we are only four.

Suddenly, silently, the second dva woman dove at the backs of his knees. Boris fell. She knocked him forward into the quagmire of icy mud under the broken pipe. The escaping water continued to scream just over their heads. She grabbed Boris’s neck, digging her knees into the small of his back. Droplets of frozen steam sprayed around them, enveloping Boris with its paralyzing coldness, so frigid he could actually feel it through his polymerized skin.

Wasting no energy on words or a roar of defiance, Boris lurched back to his hands and knees, forcing his adin muscles to do as he commanded. Struggling, he tried to find a way to hit his attacker with the metal staff, but she clung to him from behind.

The other woman reached him now, still screaming, still flailing with a steel wrench in her hand. A sunburst of pain exploded in Boris’s shoulder as she brought the sharp tool crashing down on his back, near the crease of skin that marked the implant of his second pair of lungs.

Boris heaved himself to his feet, clamping his lips shut and grunting. This was low gravity. He was strong. He could defeat these two dvas. Inside himself, he searched for the anger to give him strength, but it seemed to be fading away, running out like blood onto the ground.

The dva woman on his back tried to throttle him with her muscular forearm. Boris staggered backward, straining his leg muscles until they felt ready to rip, and slammed her into the jagged edge where he had broken the pipe. Precious water poured around her, around him, and finally the woman loosened her hold.

The other woman hurled her wrench at Boris, but it only nicked his calf as he turned and splashed away into the cold mud.

He used the titanium staff to regain his balance. The first dva woman, stunned and reeling from being hammered into the pipeline, lurched back out of the gushing water and came at him.

Boris whirled to see a figure standing in the doorway of the dva hut. For a moment, he thought it was Nikolas, still alive and coming to aid him—but the silhouette was too squat, too bearlike. This time it carried a long digging implement. The older dva man lumbered toward him with murder in his eyes.

In panic, Boris looked around, swung his staff in an empty whistling arc to ward off the dvas, and fled into the deep Martian night.

As he escaped, wheezing for breath and heading up to the blessed higher altitudes, the wailing water from the broken pipe sounded like a requiem for dead Nikolas.