2
The Township
My suit can’t handle the heat down here. The outer layer is nearly
melted through. Soon the second layer will go. Then the scanner
blinks silver and I’ve got what I came for. I almost didn’t notice.
Dizzy and frightened, I pull myself away from the drills. Hand over
hand, I tug my body up, going fast away from the dreadful heat.
Then something catches. My foot is jammed just underneath one of
the gears near a drill nger. I gasp down air in sudden panic. The
dread rises in me. I see my bootheel melting. The rst layer goes.
The second bubbles. Then it will be my esh.
I force a long breath and choke down the screams that are rising
in my throat. I remember the blade. I ip out my hinged slingBlade
from its back holster. It’s a cruelly curved cutter as long as my leg,
meant for taking o and cauterizing limbs stuck in machinery, just
like this. Most men panic when they get caught, and so the
slingBlade is a nasty halfmoon weapon meant to be used by clumsy
hands. Even lled with terror, my hands are not clumsy. I slice three
times with the slingBlade, cutting nanoplastic instead of esh. On
the third swing, I reach down and jerk free my leg. As I do, my
knuckles brush the edge of a drill. Searing pain shoots through my
hand. I smell crackling esh, but I’m up and o, climbing away
21
from the hellish heat, climbing back to my holtster seat and
laughing all the while. I feel like crying.
My uncle was right. I was wrong. But I’ll be damned if I ever let
him know it.
“Idiot,” is his kindest comment.
“Manic! Bloodydamn manic!” Loran whoops.
“Minimal gas,” I say. “Drilling now, Uncle.”
The haulBacks take my pull when the whistle call comes. I push
myself out of my drill, leaving it in the deep tunnel for the
nightshift, and snag a weary hand on the line the others drop down
the kilometer-long shaft to help me up. Despite the seeping burn on
the back of my hand, I slide my body upward on the line till I’m out
of the shaft. Kieran and Loran walk with me to join the others at the
nearest gravLift, just a kilometer along the cavernous K-strip of the
new mine. Yellow lights dangle like spiders from the ceiling.
My clan and Gamma’s three hundred men already have their toes
under the metal railing when we reach the rectangular gravLift. I
avoid my uncle—he’s mad enough to spit—and catch a few dozen
pats on the back for my stunt. The young ones like me think we’ve
won the Laurel. They know my raw helium-3 pull for the month; it’s
better than Gamma’s. The old turds just grumble and say we’re
fools. I hide my hand and duck my toes in.
Gravity alters and we shoot upward. A Gamma scab with less than
a week’s worth of rust under his nails forgets to put his toes under
the railing. So he hangs suspended as the lift shoots up six vertical
kilometers. Ears pop.
22
“Got a oating Gamma turd here,” Barlow laughs to the Lambdas.
Petty as it may seem, it’s always nice seeing a Gamma squab
something. They get more food, more burners, more everything
because of the Laurel. We get to despise them. But then, we’re
supposed to, I think. Wonder if they’ll despise us now.
Enough’s enough. I grip the rust-red nanoplastic of the kid’s
frysuit and jerk him down. Kid. That’s a laugh. He’s hardly three
years younger than me.
He’s deathly tired, but when he sees the blood-red of my frysuit,
he stiens, avoids my eyes, and becomes the only one to see the
burn on my hand. I wink at him and I think he shits his suit. We all
do it now and then. I remember when I met my rst Helldiver. I
thought he was a god.
He’s dead now.
Up top in the staging depot, a big gray cavern of concrete and
metal, we pop our tops and drink down the fresh, cold air of a world
far removed from molten drills. Our collective stink and sweat soon
make a bog of the area. Lights icker in the distance, telling us to
stay clear of the magnetic horizonTram tracks on the other side of
the depot.
We don’t mingle with the Gammas as we head for the
horizonTram in a staggered line of rust-red suits. Half with Lambda
Ls, half with Gamma canes painted in dark red on their backs. Two
scarlet headTalks. Two blood-red Helldivers.
A cadre of Tinpots eye us as we trudge by over the worn concrete
oor. Their Gray duroArmor is simple and tired, as unkempt as their
23
hair. It would stop a simple blade, but not an ion blade, and a
pulseBlade or razor would go through it like paper. But we’ve only
seen those on the holoCan. The Grays don’t even bother to make a
show of force. Their thumpers dangle at their sides. They know they
won’t have to use them.
Obedience is the highest virtue.
The Gray captain, Ugly Dan, a greasy bastard, throws a pebble at
me. Though his skin is darkened from exposure to the sun, his hair
is gray like the rest of his Color. It hangs thin and weedy over his
eyes—two icecubes rolled in ash. The Sigils of his Color, a curling
gray symbol like the number four with several bars beside it, wend
along each hand hands and wrists. Cruel and stark, like all the
Grays.
I heard they pulled Ugly Dan o the frontline back in Eurasia,
wherever that is, after he got crippled and they didn’t want to buy
him a new arm. He has an old replacement model now. He’s
insecure about it, so I make sure he sees me give the arm a glance.
“Saw you had an exciting day, darling.” His voice is as stale and
heavy as the air inside my frysuit. “Brave hero now, are you,
Darrow? I always thought you’d be a brave hero.”
“You’re the hero,” I say, nodding to his arm.
“And you think you’re smart, doncha?”
“Just a Red.”
He winks at me. “Say hello to your little birdy for me. A ripe
thing for piggin’.” Licks his teeth. “Even for a Ruster.”
“Never seen a bird.” Except on the HC.
24
“Ain’t that a thing,” he chuckles. “Wait, where you going?” he
asks as I turn. “A bow to your betters won’t go awry, doncha think?”
He snickers to his fellows. Careless of his mockery, I turn and bow
deeply. My uncle sees this and turns from it, disgusted.
We leave the Grays behind. I don’t mind bowing, but I’ll probably
cut Ugly Dan’s throat if I ever get the chance. Kind of like saying I’d
take a zip out to Venus in a torchShip if it ever suited my fancy.
“Hey, Dago. Dago!” Loran calls to Gamma’s Helldiver. The man’s
a legend; all the other divers just a ash in the pan. I might be
better than him. “What’d you pull?”
Dago, a pale strip of old leather with a smirk for a face, lights a
long burner and pus out a cloud.
“Don’t know,” he drawls.
“Come on!”
“Don’t care. Raw count never matters, Lambda.”
“Like bloodyhell it doesn’t! What’d he pull on the week?” Loran
calls as we load into the tram. Everyone’s lighting burners and
popping out the swill. But they’re all listening intently.
“Nine thousand eight hundred and twenty-one kilos,” a Gamma
boasts. At this, I lean back and smile; I hear cheers from the younger
Lambdas. The old hands don’t react. I’m busy wondering what Eo
will do with sugar this month. We’ve never earned sugar before,
only ever won it at cards. And fruit. I hear the Laurel gets you fruit.
She’ll probably give it all away to hungry children just to prove to
the Society she doesn’t need their prizes. Me? I’d eat the fruit and
25
play politics on a full stomach. But she’s got the passion for ideas,
while I’ve got no extra passion for anything but her.
“Still won’t win,” Dago drawls as the tram starts away. “Darrow’s
a young pup, but he is smart enough to know that. Ain’t you,
Darrow?”
“Young or not, I beat your craggy ass.”
“You sure ’bout that?”
“Deadly sure.” I wink and blow him a kiss. “Laurel’s ours. Send
your sisters to my township for sugar this time.” My friends laugh
and slap their frysuit lids on their thighs.
Dago watches me. After a moment, he drags his burner deep. It
glows bright and burns fast. “This is you,” he says to me. In half a
minute the burner is a husk.
After disembarking the horizonTram, I funnel into the Flush with
the rest of the crews. The place is cold, musty, and smells exactly
like what it is: a cramped metal shed where thousands of men strip
o frysuits after hours of pissing and sweating to take air showers.
So, bad. It’s dark. Grime on the oor. Cracking walls. Fissures in the
cement where gather hair and human detritus.
I peel o my suit, put on one of our haircaps, and walk naked to
stand in the nearest transparent tube. There are dozens of them
lined up in the Flush. The hum of motors and catcalls lls the place
as naked men and boys jostle past one another to take turns
cleaning o. Here there is no dancing, no boastful ips; the only
26
camaraderie is exhaustion and the soft slapping of hands on thighs,
creating a rhythm with the whoosh and shoot of the showers.
The door to my tube hisses closed behind me, muing the sounds
of music. The contraption is decrepit. Dirt and deposits of dead skin
and old hair crust the holes at the bottom where the air goes out. I
move my feet away from the lth as the machine activates. A
familiar hum comes from the motor, followed by a great rush of
atmosphere and a sucking resonance as air lled with antibacterial
molecules screams from the top of the machine and shoots over my
skin to whisk away dead skin and lth down the drain at the bottom
of the tube. It hurts.
After, I part with Loran and Kieran as they go to the Common to
drink and dance in the taverns before the Laureltide dance ocially
starts. The Tinpots will be handing out the Allowances of foodstus
and announcing the Laurel at midnight. There will be dancing
before and after for us of the dayshift.
The legends say that the god Mars was the parent of tears, foe to
dance and lute. As to the former, I agree. But we of the colony of
Lykos, one of the rst of the colonies under Mars’s surface, are a
people of dance and song and family. We spit on that legend and
make our own birthright. It is the one resistance we can manage
against the Society that rules us. Gives us a bit of spine. They don’t
care that we dance or that we sing, so long as we obediently dig. So
long as we prepare the planet for the rest of them. Yet to remind us
of our place, they make one song and one dance punishable by
death.
27
My father made that dance his last. I’ve seen it only once, and I’ve
heard the song only once as well. I didn’t understand when I was
little, one about distant vales, mist, lovers lost, and a reaper meant
to guide us to our unseen home. I was small and curious when the
woman sang it as her son was hanged for stealing foodstus. He
would have been a tall boy, but he could never get enough food to
put meat on his bones. His mother died next. The people of Lykos
did the Fading Dirge for them—a tragic thumping of sts against
chests, fading slowly, slowly, till the sts, like her heart, beat no
more and all dispersed.
The sound haunted me that night. I cried alone in our small
kitchen, wondering why I cried then when I had not for my father.
As I lay on the cold oor, I heard a soft scratching at my family’s
door. When I opened the door, I found a small haemanthus bud
nestled in the red dirt, not a soul to be seen, only Eo’s tiny footprints
in the dirt. That is the second time she brought owers after death.
Since song and dance are in our blood, I suppose it is not
surprising that it was in both that I rst realized I loved Eo. Not
Little Eo. Not as she was. But Eo as she is. She says she loved me
before they hanged my father. But it was in a smoky tavern when
her rusty hair swirled and her feet moved with the zither and her
hips to the drums that my heart forgot a couple of beats. It was not
her ips or cartwheels. None of the boastful foolery that so marks
the dance of the young. Hers was a graceful, proud movement.
Without me, she would not eat. Without her, I would not live.
28
She may tease me for saying so, but she is the spirit of our people.
Life’s dealt us a hard hand. We’re to sacrice for the good of men
and women we don’t know. We’re to dig to ready Mars for others.
That makes some of us nastyminded folks. But Eo’s kindness, her
laughter, her erce will, is the best that can come from a home such
as ours.
I look for her in my family’s in our oshoot township, just a half
mile’s worth of tunnelroad away from the Common. The township is
one of two dozen townships surrounding the Common. It is a
hivelike cluster of homes carved into the rock walls of the old
mines. Stone and earth are our ceilings, our oors, our home. The
Clan is a giant family. Eo grew up not a stone’s throw from my
house. Her brothers are like my own. Her father like the one I lost.
A mess of electrical wires tangle together along the cavern’s
ceiling like a jungle of black and red vines. Lights hang down from
the jungle, swaying gently as air from the Common’s central oxygen
system circulates. At the center of the township dangles a massive
holoCan. It’s a square box with images on each side. Pixels are
blacked out and the image is faded and fuzzy, but never has the
thing faltered, never has it turned o. It bathes our cluster of homes
in its own pale light. Videos from the Society.
My family’s home is carved into the rock a hundred meters from
the bottom oor of the township. A steep path leads from it to the
ground, though pulleys and ropes can also bear one to the
township’s greatest heights. Only the old or inrm use those. And
we have few of either.
29
Our house has few rooms. Eo and I only recently were able to take
a room for ourselves. Kieran and his family have two rooms, and my
mother and sister take the lone second-story room.
All Lambdas in Lykos live in our township. Omega and Upsilon
neighbor us just a minute’s worth of wide tunnel over to either side.
We’re all connected. Except for Gamma. They live in the Common,
above the taverns, repair booths, silk shops, and trade bazaars. The
Tinpots live in a fortress above that, nearer the barren surface of our
harsh world. That’s where the ports lie that bring the foodstus
from Earth to us marooned pioneers.
The holoCan above me shows images of mankind’s struggles,
which are then followed by soaring music as the Society’s triumphs
ash past. The Society’s sigil, a golden pyramid with three parallel
bars attached to the pyramid’s three faces, a circle surrounding all,
burns into the screen. The voice of Octavia au Lune, the Society’s
aged Sovereign, narrates the struggle man faces in colonizing the
planets and moons of the System.
“Since the dawn of man, our saga as a species has been one of tribal
warfare. It has been one of trial, one of sacrice, one of daring to defy
nature’s natural limits. Now, through duty and obedience, we are united,
but our struggle is no dierent. Sons and daughters of all Colors, we are
asked to sacrice yet again. Here in our nest hour, we cast our best
seeds to the stars. Where rst shall we ourish? Venus? Mercury? Mars?
The Moons of Neptune, Jupiter?”
Her voice grows solemn as her face with its regal cast peers down
from the HC. Her hands shimmer with the symbol of Gold
30
emblazoned upon their backs—a dot in the center of a winged
circle. Only one imperfection mars her golden face—a long crescent
scar running along her right cheekbone. Her beauty is like that of a
cruel bird of prey.
“You brave Red pioneers of Mars—strongest of the human breed—
sacrice for progress, sacrice to pave the way for the future. Your lives,
your blood, are a down payment for the immortality of the human race
as we move beyond Earth and Moon. You go where we could not. You
suer so that others do not.
“I salute you. I love you. The helium-3 that you mine is the lifeblood
of the terraforming process. Soon the red planet will have breathable air,
livable soil. And soon, when Mars is habitable, when you brave pioneers
have made ready the red planet for us softer Colors, we will join you and
you will be held in highest esteem beneath the sky your toil created. Your
sweat and blood fuels the terraforming!
“Brave pioneers, always remember that obedience is the highest virtue.
Above all, obedience, respect, sacrice, hierarchy …”
I nd the kitchen room of the home empty, but I hear Eo in the
bedroom.
“Stop right where you are!” she commands through the door. “Do
not, under any condition, look in this room.”
“Okay.” I stop.
She comes out a minute later, ustered and blushing. Her hair is
covered in dust and webs. I rake my hands through the tangle. She’s
straight from the Webbery, where they harvest the bioSilk.
“You didn’t go in the Flush,” I say, smiling.
31
“Didn’t have time. Had to skirt out of the Webbery to pick
something up.”
“What did you pick up?”
She smiles sweetly. “You didn’t marry me because I tell you
everything, remember. And do not go into that room.”
I make a lunge for the door. She blocks me and pulls my
sweatband down over my eyes. Her forehead pushes against my
chest. I laugh, move the band, and grip her shoulders to push her
back enough to look into her eyes.
“Or what?” I ask with a raised eyebrow.
She just smiles at me and cocks her head. I back away from the
metal door. I dive into molten mineshafts without a blink. But there
are some warnings you can buck o and others you can’t.
She stands on her tiptoes and pecks me good on the nose. “Good
boy; I knew you’d be easy to train,” she says. Then her nose
wrinkles because she smells my burn. She doesn’t coddle me, doesn’t
berate me, doesn’t even speak except to say, “I love you,” with just
the hint of worry in her voice.
She picks the melted pieces of my frysuit out of the wound, which
stretches from my knuckles to my wrist, and pulls tight a webwrap
with antibiotic and nervenucleic.
“Where’d you get that?” I ask.
“If I don’t lecture you, you don’t quiz me on what’s what.”
I kiss her on the nose and play with the thin band of woven hair
around her ring nger. My hair wound with bits of silk makes her
wedding band.
32
“I have a surprise for you tonight,” she tells me.
“And I have one for you,” I say, thinking of the Laurel. I put my
sweatband on her head like a crown. She wrinkles her nose at its
wetness.
“Oh, well, I actually have two for you, Darrow. Pity you didn’t
think ahead. You might have gotten me a cube of sugar or a satin
sheet or … maybe even coee to go with the rst gift.”
“Coee!” I laugh. “What sort of Color did you think you
married?”
She sighs. “No benets to a diver, none at all. Crazy, stubborn,
rash …”
“Dexterous?” I say with a mischievous smile as I slide my hand up
the side of her skirt.
“Reckon that has its advantages.” She smiles and swats my hand
away like it’s a spider. “Now put these gloves on unless you want
jabber from the women. Your mother’s already gone on ahead.”
33
