Olympus Rising – Excerpt

Chapter 1

There was a face looking at him through a small window. It was very close, that window, that face. He saw curly brown hair and blue eyes, a lean and angular bone structure beneath clear skin. Where had he seen that face before? He couldn’t seem to recall. Catching thoughts was like… grasping at fog. Certainly, it was not a bad-looking face. Handsome even, save for that savage red cut above the left eye. Why was that there? With that face on its side, and the left eye higher than the right, blood was trickling down across the brow, darkening the ends of some unlucky brown curls. No good: couldn’t go around looking like that. What would people think? He blinked heavily, then drew a deep breath through his nose; might help him wake up. The air had an acrid taste, like smoke. Was something burning? It was quite warm here. Maybe someone left a stove on?

He sighed, thought, Dad’s burning breakfast again.

He rolled onto his back, away from the face in that window. He winced. Why did it hurt to roll over? That wasn’t right. And why was his head so fuzzy and hot? He dragged a sluggish arm up to feel his forehead. That hurt too. His hand came away red. Blood? The sight of it pierced the fog in his head, like a sharp noise to one nearly asleep. He turned his head to look at the window again. Now he saw: it was his face in the glass. That cut was on his forehead, the blood soaking his bangs was his. And that glass was not a window. It was a piece of one.

Something was burning. Thick clouds of smoke billowed into the air, collecting against the ceiling high above like some great thundercloud. Alarms blared. People were screaming. He tried to sit up, to push himself up on his elbows. His head swam suddenly and he had no choice but to lie back down. Deep breaths, try again. I have to get up. What happened? An accident? Have to help. Up once more — just get on one elbow! — but it was no good. His body would not obey him. He was too heavy, too dizzy. He wanted to sleep. No… No sleep… he told himself. His eyelids wavered. Have to… get up.

He forced his eyes open, and found someone standing over him. White shape, white flesh, bright against a glorious black cape. A child…? Here? “No,” he said to the child, his voice a rasping whisper. “Not safe.”

The child looked at him, expressionless, indifferent. Such eyes…

“Run…” he told the child as consciousness slipped his grasp. “Run away…”

Chapter 2

One hundred thirteen minutes earlier —

“Janos? Janos? Specialist Artem!”

It was the nasally bellow that blasted Janos Artem out of his daydream. The startled spasm of his arm sent a toolbox off the workbench to clatter on the floor of the lab. Tools went everywhere. “Yes, Doctor!” Janos gasped. His heart was slamming in his chest.

Doctor Glick lay on his back on the floor behind Janos. His dark-clad legs stuck out from beneath a cylinder of circuits and wires like a victim of foul play; several chains suspended its metal frame from the ceiling. The doctor’s own tools lay scattered around the machine, each used and discarded. “I need a nano-spanner, if you’re not too busy over there,” the doctor said, annoyed at the holdup of his work. “There’ll be one in that toolkit you just displaced.”

Face hot with embarrassment — God, I made such a mess. — Janos sought out the requested tool — which had slid under a wheeled storage cabinet — and placed it in the doctor’s waiting hand. That hand retreated under the contraption with its prize.

“Thank you!” Glick said happily. There was a groan of straining metal, followed by a loud pop. The doctor announced, “All done!” and slid himself out on a roller.

Watching Doctor Hans Glick stand up was like observing some kind of wading bird rising from its nest. A two-meter-tall wading bird crowned with unkempt hair the color of straw. The bird had glasses too. Dr. Glick had a full head on Janos, much like that crane Janos had seen at the zoo, which had loomed over his six-year-old self with a raptorial eye. The doctor, at least, smiled. He was always smiling, though neither his eyes nor his interest lingered long on anything. New ideas, he’d told his fellows, always demanded his attention.

“Ruminating on your future, hmm?” Glick asked, as he dusted off his white lab coat; Janos wore one over his brown uniform.

Janos managed a hasty, “Oh, um, I—I’m sorry, Doctor. It won’t happen again.” He almost added that he had, in fact, been thinking of ways to improve the precision of the secondary actuators as a total system instead of in groups… but thought that would sound like making excuses. He knelt to collect the wayward tools.

“No, no, no. Don’t say that,” Glick chuckled from somewhere above Janos. “You’re such an excellent assistant, I almost never get to yell at you.”

Janos paused as he picked up a wrench, wondering if that had been a compliment. “Um… thank you?”

“Besides, at nineteen you’ve got your whole future ahead of you. I won’t begrudge you one daydream. Not like that last chap,” Glick added, as he returned to his workstation, stepping over piles of components with his long legs. “Foisted him on me, they did. Brat couldn’t find his head with both hands and a starchart. Did I ever tell you what ridiculous thing he did on his very first day—?” The intercom buzzed. Dr. Glick looked affronted. “Oh drat, who could that be? Answer it, will you?”

Janos returned the toolbox to its workbench, then crossed the bright, cluttered laboratory to the blinking icon on the far wall; Dr. Glick had disabled the voice controls because they annoyed him. Janos tapped the control panel. A section of that wall transformed into a video screen. Suddenly displayed at three-times normal size was the face of a man: dark blond hair side-parted, small, mean eyes, a crisp goatee, a crescent scar along his left eye socket.

Janos came to attention. “General Rubin, sir!”

From the wall-screen, Major General Marco Rubin regarded Janos with hardly a glance.

“Hiya, Ruby!” Glick called over in a high, effeminate voice. He waggled his fingers at the screen.

Janos colored again, in time with the corners of the general’s mouth curling into a barely-contained scowl. “Doctor Glick,” Rubin said, “your assistance is requested in the Deep Level Lift to aid in a cargo transfer. See to it immediately.” General Rubin vanished, returning the wall to its normal display of schematics and equations.

Janos relaxed. He found he’d been holding his breath. The general had looked more displeased than normal, and the doctor had not helped matters. Janos dreaded the day when Dr. Glick finally annoyed the wrong person.

“Didn’t even stay for tea. That’s Ruby for you,” said Glick. He was now engrossed in a rotating blueprint that illuminated his workstation. Leaning over the station on his elbows put him at a perfect right angle.

“Yes, Doctor,” Janos said absently. Back to work. Lots to do. He pulled up the daily checklist on the wall in front of him, then glanced around the lab. Hadn’t they just cleaned in here? Of course, in the laboratory of Dr. Hans Glick, “cleaning” was usually just putting things into stacks. There were a lot of stacks.

“But a cargo transfer sounds so boring,” Glick mused. “You go.”

Janos whirled from the wall. “Me? But Doctor, General Rubin said—”

“If it’s something as simple as all that, they won’t care who helps. You’ll notice Ruby said my ‘assistance’ was wanted, not my ‘presence.’ Besides, if I give them this, what’s next? Maintenance on the centrifuges? Calling about every little issue any monkey with a wrench can fix? I’ll never have a moment’s peace again.” Glick peered at Janos over his glasses; lines of data spooled across his lenses. “Never fear. Artemis will still be here when you get back.”

Janos stared at the doctor — at those pale blue eyes and the enigmatic smile — contemplating which superior he was more afraid of angering. It wasn’t much of a contest. “Yes, Doctor,” Janos said. He headed for the door.

Glick called after him, “And bring me back some lime pudding.”

It was a long walk to his destination. The facility was built in rings around a central core of power generators and life support systems. Below the core was a cargo elevator called the Deep Level Lift, which ran to the lowest levels, far beneath the surface. Up top, in the sun, the facility was spread out in a flat, roughly circular construct. Janos was one level below the surface on Level Red, proceeding along bright corridors toward the nearest elevator. A glowing layout he passed showed the facility in its entirety; it reminded him of a railroad spike he’d seen in history class. He nodded to a few people he knew, while the occasional drone zipped by overhead. A flash of green caught his eye through an opening door as someone was leaving a Greenery. It was nice to see plants amidst the sterile aesthetic of the halls. Their earthy scent would linger briefly until the air scrubbers filtered it out. Janos had to hurry, but he managed to catch an elevator before the doors closed.

Crowded in here. Hints of oil, perfume, curry. No music. No one talked. Patriotic imagery illuminated the walls: soldiers running into battle; fighters in daring formation; a commander, surrounded by his troops, pointing decisively at a holomap; a battleship in orbit, lit at just the right angle to show off its bristling weaponry. One image beside the door drew Janos’ attention; that one always did. In it, a man in a spacesuit stood on the hull of an orbital station, power drill in hand, ready to go to work on the mechanical innards exposed by an open panel. Behind and beneath that man in the spacesuit, in a vast curve of blue and green, was Earth. The caption above the image read: I’m doing my part. Are you?

Janos smiled a little, looking at that image. It was an old advert. It might have been the first he’d ever seen. He did not remember exactly where or when he had come across it, though he knew he had been with his family. He remembered, seeing it, that he’d felt this funny little tug inside himself. He had wanted to know more. How long ago had that been? He had been very young, but he had known, in the feeling beneath words he had not then possessed, that it was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life.

The elevator delivered Janos to Level Green. Minutes more through corridors brought Janos to the cavernous Deep Level Lift. The ceiling was vast as a cathedral. Below it was a metal pit vanishing into darkness. Janos had never liked coming here. He was fine with heights, but this place troubled him. The octagonal shaft was massive, yet wholly enclosed, a steel cocoon wrapped around a half-sized elevator. There were no advertisements here, no green things. Only a thick pole, anchored into the center of the ceiling, subtracted from the immensity of the open space. He felt small here, and strangely vulnerable.

Janos found Colonel Markham idling on the lift, picking absently at the sleeves of his blue and violet uniform. Medals adorned the stout colonel’s jacket, and braids weighted his shoulders. His boots were polished like black mirrors. A white, rearing stallion marked his carmine half-cape — the heraldry of his noble house.

Determined not to look down, Janos marched from the landing onto the lift, where he came to attention and saluted his superior. “Specialist Artem reporting, sir.”

The colonel turned from the chatting technicians, with whom he shared the lift. “A specialist? Where’s Doctor Glick?” Markham groused loudly.

Janos knew not to take it personally. The colonel was this way with anyone he outranked, which was almost everyone in the facility. “Doctor Glick is… occupied, sir. He sent me in his place,” said Janos. He held his salute, though keeping his eyes forward made it impossible to look anywhere but at the colonel’s bald and bulbous head. It looked like that block of clay he’d tried to sculpt in sixth grade. Janos ordered himself not to laugh.

Markham clicked his tongue. “Fine. You’ll do. Glick wouldn’t take an idiot for an assistant, at least.” He motioned for one of the technicians to start the lift. A mechanical groan echoed through the chamber. Then the lift began its descent into the abyss beneath the Martian Headquarters of the Military Engineering and Research Division.

About halfway down, Janos had to steady himself through a sudden bite of vertigo. Or rather, an effect that seemed like vertigo. That would be the intersection point of the gravitomagnetic fields, their exact center, where they overlapped and were strongest, and in passing through that point a person weighed more for a moment, and then didn’t. It felt to Janos like being bounced. He would go through it again on the way up. That was the price, he supposed, for having three gravity centrifuges. One would have been enough — but then you couldn’t have this charming hole into the depths — and two was one short of ideal redundancy, so three. The military liked redundancy. So did Janos, though he could do without being bounced inside his own skin.

Nine minutes crawled by before the lift, descending the thick pole at its center, delivered the group to their destination. Janos found it wretchedly slow, and it was strange not to see any drones in such an open space. Nothing here was familiar to him. The destined landing, which seemed to rise up over the rim of the lift and lock into place, might have been bleached white by repeated sterilizations. A sign in bold lettering over the doors read: LEVEL BLACK.

Janos chanced a glimpse over the lift railing, where the pole continued down into darkness. The wall-mounted lights did not reach down there. He had heard only rumors of this place, where the most secret of research was conducted. He had once asked Dr. Glick about Level Black, and had a pudding cup thrown at him.

“The less you know, the better,” Glick had whispered, deliberately ominous. “People who ask too many questions about that place tend to have markedly shorter life spans.”

Another group of technicians waited on the landing of Level Black, a dozen men and women. They wore immaculate white jumpsuits, each with a trio of interlocking black circles on their left arms; no other identifiers, not even rank. That group was busy performing checks on what looked like a large, upright coffin. It was riddled with tubes and cables, which connected it to two humming, mechanical cubes. All three occupied a trolley the size of a family sedan.

Markham glanced at Janos. “Do only what you’re told.”

“Yes, sir.”

Not being Dr. Glick — about which the technicians grumbled — Janos spent fifteen minutes helping move loaded trolleys onto the lift. None were so large as the one with the coffin-thing, but there were quite a few. Everything was in white crates, each marked with an everchanging Rubric Block; only a scanner with the right code could puzzle those open. Janos — after patiently and repeatedly asking if anyone needed help with anything — was eventually permitted to assist in another round of technical checks. He wondered how many checks had been done already. With experimental equipment, there really was no such thing as being “too safe.” Whatever the case, Janos found it gratifying to put his education to some use.

After the last of the equipment had been transferred to the lift, the technicians began running a final check on the thing that resembled a coffin. “You there, young man,” said a female technician with her black hair in a bun. She waved Janos over.

“Yes, ma’am?”

The woman pointed at a small screen on the side of the coffin-thing. “Watch this readout and tell me what it says,” she instructed. She opened a panel in one of the mechanical cubes attached to the coffin, and began an inspection of internal circuits.

“Yes, ma’am.”

The screen in question was very small, no wider than Janos’ thumb, and was the lowest in a stack of similar screens. Had that screen been any higher up on the coffin-thing, Janos would need to climb onto the trolley and kneel just to be at eye-level. He managed to avoid standing on his toes, but only by pressing his stomach against the side of the trolley. At least he could read the screen from here. The numbers were red.

“One hundred ten over eighty,” Janos reported.

“Good,” said the lady technician. “Tell me if it shifts more than five points either way.”

Janos fixed his eyes on the screen. The numbers fluctuated, but never more than two points positive or negative. Staring at the readout saved him from looking at the coffin-thing. It towered over him, a stone-gray monolith. He was no stranger to working with large machines, but this thing made him feel small, like a child. It looked new. He didn’t think it was new. It felt… what was the oldest thing he’d ever seen?

The Valles Marineris: standing on the edge in a suit, seven years old, gazing in speechless awe at the gash in the planet itself. The valley was so far across he couldn’t see the other side; the same for the east and west; the very land seemed to just drop away, to fall and fall and fall. The whole world seemed to fade into a red-brown haze. Janos had learned later in school that the Mariner Valley was hundreds of millions of years old, yet it was atop that precipice that he had understood the word “ancient.”

Why should the strange device above him evoke the same feeling as the largest canyon in the Solar System? He wanted to get as far from this thing as possible. Focus on the numbers, he told himself. Janos thought he could see patterns in the numbers, like the old Morse code they had taught in training. Stranger still, he could have sworn he felt something in the back of his mind, some kind of pulse, steady, repeating. What was it? Why did it feel like—?

There was no warning when the screens turned red. It seemed to happen in the space of a saccadic twitch. Sirens howled from above. Indicators plummeted on the stack of screens, each now a blinking crimson eye. Horror filled the technicians’ faces. Colonel Markham went white. Something was very badly wrong.

The lady technician pushed Janos aside to get to the screens. “Power surge!”

Sparks erupted from the coffin-thing, tubes burst, gas hissed from ruptures, and the numbers on the screens went absolutely mad. Janos wrenched the woman away before the screens exploded. Then all went silent. Beneath Janos’ protection, the lady technician trembled.

“Wha—what happened?” asked a shaky voice.

“I… I don’t know,” said another of the technical team.

Colonel Markham, who had fallen over in a panic, picked himself up off the landing. “All right… All right. I want to know what exactly just happened!” he blustered. He wiped an accumulation of sweat from his wide brow. “Double-check everything. No exceptions. This has to be out of here today.”

“But, colonel,” one of the technicians started, “after this kind of anomaly, we can’t—”

“No exceptions!” Markham barked. “That thing is leaving Mars today.” He jabbed a finger at the coffin-thing. “Those are your orders, that is your timetable. I want everything double—triple checked! Do whatever you have to to get the unit’s integrity back in the green.” Several technicians began to object, but the colonel talked right over them. “Just make it flight-worthy. The onboard containment system will compensate for any deficiencies. The vessel can be fully repaired en route.”

For the next hour, the technicians carried out their orders. They went over every centimeter of the coffin-thing and its attached equipment. They replaced hoses and cables, sealed breaches in the coffin’s outer shell with vacuum-tight patch kits; one of the smaller trolleys carried nothing but spare parts. Very little was said. Janos helped as he was able, but found himself largely ignored by the shaken technicians. There were no more malfunctions, but the workers took no chances. They ran through every item of some very long checklists.

When no one was looking, Janos checked the time on his IT-watch. Virgil will be getting out of school soon, he noted. I hope he did well on his math test.

At last, the technicians grudgingly pronounced the coffin-thing ready for transport. Markham was no more enthused than they were about moving the contraption, but their schedule could be delayed no longer. He muttered under his breath about “the highest of orders.”

With everyone onboard, the Deep Level Lift groaned to life, and began another interminable nine-minute trip back to the surface. No one spoke. Janos kept his gaze up, watching the walls above as he slowly ascended the vast shaft. He did not want to look at the coffin-thing. He counted the level designations as the lift passed one landing after another. Level Violet… Level Indigo… Level Blue… Like rising along a rainbow.

What was that feeling? Janos wondered. He had no desire to think about the coffin-like apparatus at his back, he just couldn’t seem to help it. What was that sensation, right before the power surge? A steady pulse, distant, but he was certain he’d felt it in the back of his mind. It felt like a heartbeat.

“Specialist.”

Janos turned to Colonel Markham, who had come up beside him. “Yes, sir?”

The stout man stepped close. He glanced unhappily at Janos’ hair, perhaps put off that his subordinate was taller than him. “While it goes without saying that military matters are not to be discussed with civilians,” he paused as they passed through the vertigo-inducing intersection of the artificial gravity fields, “you are not to speak of this operation to anyone without my express clearance. This is a matter of the highest security. Understood?”

“Understood, sir,” said Janos.

The lift returned them to Level Green, from where they had begun their ponderous journey. Janos was given responsibility for one of the motorized equipment trolleys, which he guided alongside the others. The technicians were not so shaken now, and some idle chatter began as they marched along bright, green-lined corridors, toward the cargo elevators that would take them the rest of the way. Janos was glad. Listening to the small talk kept him from thinking about the coffin-thing, or that strange feeling from before. Markham gave the technicians a stern look, but did not order them to silence.

Their destination was the primary landing bay. The size and shape of a stadium, it was deep enough to occupy the centers of Levels White and Red; perhaps appropriate that it was carved from the red Martian rock. Craft of various size filled the bay, if not around the wide floor, then in docking cradles along the walls, accessible by catwalk. Interceptors, gunships, drone tugs, transports. Nothing extraneous in their designs, nothing unnecessary. What was not purely utilitarian, was utilitarian and lethal. In the ceiling were the bay doors — closed at present — able to open in sections to accommodate a single-seat fighter or a five hundred-meter frigate.

Janos had first seen those doors over a year ago, at the beginning of his tenure. They were only a single set, and thus not an airlock. “Won’t all the air be sucked out when they open?” Janos had asked Dr. Glick, as concerned as he was fascinated.

The doctor — who had taken his then-new assistant on a tour to get out of paperwork — had grinned like a boy with a secret. “It’s brand new tech, you see: single-unit magnetic containment fields. Keeps the budding atmosphere outside, where it belongs, while letting physical objects pass right through, like always. Much easier than those dull, bulky versions you see everywhere. These’ll be the standard in no time, mark my words.” The doctor had been right.

Janos’ final task under Colonel Markham’s direction was to help load the equipment into the designated ship; farthest from the elevator, naturally. The ship was a tiny thing of uninspired design, resembling the original space shuttles flown above Earth centuries ago. This shuttle, however, had no need of massive rocket boosters to reach planetary orbit. That much, and more, it could accomplish on its own.

His was not a difficult job, given the motorized trolleys and the generous angle of the loading ramp. As he worked, Janos would glance at the far wall of the bay, where stood rows of immobile humanoid machines. They were large, boxy, and drably-colored, yet there was an efficiency in their design that Janos admired, like great suits of armor. How fantastic, their replication of the human form. He was not allowed to operate them — not the combat models — and that stirred in him a mix of envy and pride. Envy for the operators of those craft. Pride for the project he was working on.

“Artemis will eclipse them all,” said a memory of Doctor Glick.

When the accompanying equipment was stored, the technicians guided the coffin-thing into the cargo hold of the shuttle. That trolley hummed with the effort. Janos stayed clear of the coffin-thing, but he kept it in sight; he had the absurd notion that it would do… something if he looked away. Nothing happened. The coffin was stored inside the ship, and the technicians went to strap themselves in for takeoff. All was ready. The ship’s engines growled to life as the pilots concluded their final checks. One of the flight crew, a mustachioed man in an orange jumpsuit, saluted Colonel Markham, presented him a paper-thin Flexie, and hurried into the ship.

This left Janos alone at the foot of the ramp with his superior. The colonel did not seem to notice Janos, leaving his subordinate to stand at attention while he jabbed commands into the flexible computer. He frowned, jabbed, frowned. He sent a resentful glance into the shuttle hold, but looked away just as quickly. At last, Colonel Markham stopped jabbing the Flexie, and clamped the malleable computer sheet onto his upper left arm. He sighed, then turned to Janos.

“Your assistance in this matter has been noted, specialist. Resume your regular duties,” said the colonel.

That was as close as Janos had ever come to hearing, “Good job,” from the colonel. He gave the man a crisp salute. “Yes, sir.”

Markham returned the salute and started up the shuttle ramp, grumbling to himself that he needed to lose weight.

Janos turned back toward the hangar entrance. He wondered why the colonel was going off-world. Was he seeing the cargo into orbit? Had he been recalled to Earth? And what in space was that thing shaped like a coffin? Janos shook his head to stop his own speculation. If he was meant to know such things, he would be informed. He was a soldier — that was how it worked. There was a certain comfort in knowing exactly where he stood in the grand machine that was the military system, even if it left his own curiosity unsatisfied. Janos returned his attention to his duties; what he might accomplish in the remainder of his shift? Major June should now be back in the laboratory, after her meeting with that interdepartmental liaison. What else? Ah, yes, he also had to stop by a mess hall to procure some lime pudding for Doctor Glick. Always pudding, for some reason…

Yet no sooner had Janos remembered this than he found himself flying, inexplicably, through the air. He cleared quite a distance, upside-down at one point, and he experienced the most remarkable sensation of euphoria before he crashed to the floor and his eardrums nearly burst.

Specialist Janos Artem opened his eyes to his own youthful face staring groggily back at him in a small window. Everything was hot, and the air reeked of smoke. Janos sighed. Dad’s burning breakfast again. He rolled onto his back, winced, found blood on his hand when he touched his forehead. Blood? He looked at the window again, and found it to be a jagged piece of glass embedded in the floor, one of several that had missed him by millimeters.

Something was burning. Clouds of smoke billowed into the landing bay. Alarms mixed with screams. Movement: people running, crawling, struggling to stand. Janos tried to push himself up on his elbows, his body weak and wavering. He saw the source of the smoke. The shuttle was a fiery ruin. He had to turn away from the sheer heat. An accident? I have to… Have to help. He tried to get up, but he was so dizzy, so sleepy. No… The colonel… The shuttle…

Once more Janos forced open his eyes, his vision blurry. Now there was someone standing over him. A white shape, bright against a black cape that fluttered in the burning fury of the shuttle. Who? A… child? Here? Janos blinked, blinked again. And… naked? White form, white flesh, mantled not in fabric, but in a cloak of black hair.

“No,” Janos said to the child. “Not safe.”

The child looked down at Janos, expressionless, indifferent to the chaos. Never had Janos seen such brilliant, pale-green eyes.

“Run…” he told the child. “Run away…