“Ivana Parva’s exploits in the War of Martian Independence are near legendary.” -Tony D.
The lithe young woman hit the accelerator on the buggy as it came through the tunnel to the underground entrance to the northwest corner of the Pyramid. She looked around carefully. She knew she wasn’t being followed, not in the conventional sense, but she was used to being watched. Everyone on this whole planet was used to being watched. Every minute. But that didn’t mean they always knew what they were seeing. The less time exposed the better.
She turned into one of the side tunnels, and left the vehicle near one of the guardian statues. Horus? Sutekh? She could never remember. N’gawa would have known. N’gawa had even claimed that only one of the monstrosities had been moved here- that no one knew where the other had come from, that it had been here before the first Survey Team. But N’gawa had said a lot of things, particularly near the end, as his skin turned the color of ash, and his blood treated the very oxygen it needed so desperately like a second class citizen- a true Martian at the last.
Anyway, it was not merely eccentric to bring an inert lump all the way from Earth, dredging old memories from the one desert to bury them in another. The sheer cost to move the things had to have been astonishing. It was an obscenity. How like the Earthers- a small fortune to move some rocks to be near some other rocks, but damn the medicines, damn the broken down carbon dioxide scrubbers, and damn the people they were barely keeping alive in Viking’s Crest.
She adjusted her re-breather, and headed into the passageway. The light faded to nothing a few meters into the passage, and she could risk a light now- the UV wouldn’t make it past the rock of the walls, but she knew the way, and the dark suited her. Feeling her way around the first left-turning, she put her hand to the right wall and followed it. She started off through the mountain into a maze of twisting, turning passages, all alike. Her fingers brushed against the wall on her right. Already the diameter of the tunnel felt closer.
Walking through the dark, Ivana remembered briefly the excitement she had felt when that other long journey had come to end, when she first came to the planet she would always think of as home. That ship- the one that had brought a wide-eyed girl across the stars- certainly didn’t have room for old statues. Packed so solidly with supplies they literally had to eat their way down the main corridor Captain Parva, her mother, had decreased the ships rotation to reduce gravity and make floating over obstacles practical. She remembered playing a makeshift game of volleyball against N’gawa with a near weightless box of self-sealing stem-bolts.
She reached the mosaic, and felt the squares. Over sixteen, up ten, she pressed. Slowly, a stone in the ceiling moved aside, and she climbed into the hole it presented.
After a long climb up a shaft, she emerged in the central chamber, high above the desert floor. From here, she could see outside again, could look back at the bright little eyes, staring intently from beyond the red skies.
From the pocket on her back, she pulled two circuit boards and fitted them into two slots in the sprawl of junk before her. She spent some time connecting wires all over the room.
She flipped a switch on the fusion generator. It passed through her mind once again to wonder how a generator of this power had found its way into such an old structure- when this place was built the atomics should have been much more primitive. The Beacon started glowing. When N’gawa had first found the tunnel to the pyramid, she had been worried, but the access to the generator had finally brought her around- a power source that was totally off the grid was too good to ignore. After moving the buggy storage dome over the entrance to keep the secret, they spent more and more time at the Pyramid. He had started bringing bits and pieces of salvaged tech to their special place- to fiddle with- to learn. N’gawa loved to build things, and Ivana had a great fearlessness when it came to bringing unlike systems together. At first most of the things were more interesting than useful, but as time went on, the toys got more complex, their uses more intricate. And they were together. It was a sacred time.
Things started to change as the particles built up in his skin, and in his blood. The tools to keep the atmosphere out of his body were available to those working for the corporations, but students didn’t have many places to turn. His skin started to turn. N’gawa didn’t have the energy to get to the Pyramid very often. The little machines she put together built when she was alone weren’t the same as the toys they had made together. It was months before she realized what she was making.
It was impossible to tell with the naked eye, but Ivana imagined the gazes that were already trained on her glow, looking down from the cold of space. She checked a display on the small screen attached to the old equipment in front of her. Five, and then ten. Fifteen. She was gathering attention to herself. Attention was bad. Dangerous. The first thing a new arrival learned was not to be noticed, although it was no easy lesson- on the whole planet no one could move a meter out of line without some machine in the sky scrutinizing, focusing closer. Thirty, thirty-seven, forty-one. This light show everyone wanted to see.
The glow grew in strength. Above the hemisphere, now fifty-eight irises narrowed automatically. Hoverships were lifting off from Viking Crest, heading toward the Pyramid. The light became more intense. When N’gawa first got sick- he went to the hospital. When they turned him away, he went to the governor’s dome. When they had nothing for him, he went into the common, to talk to anyone he could find. Friends for years acted as if he wasn’t there. You don’t listen to someone when anyone could be watching. Ivana pulled a lever, and a wire covered antenna rose above the Beacon, out of the room to the top of the Pyramid. She followed the spire, climbing above the ceiling of their hideaway, away from the light. Even though it was now only coming out through cracks below her, the incandescence was overpowering. She could barely see the display as it passed seventy, then eighty. The light of the Beacon encompassed the entire Pyramid. Through her clenched eyes the numbers weren’t clear but saw they were into the triple digits.
“Now that I’ve got your attention…” thought Ivana as she felt for the switch on the antenna, and stabbed it with her finger. Immediately, the light stopped growing, and a noise began from the room below. Wires snaking up from the generator started glowing red hot, then white, and the sound turned to a high pitched whine. There was a crash from below, and the Beacon grew dark. Her position being ever more precarious, she climbed back into the room.
She checked a gauge coming from the generator as her eyes started to adjust to the spreading darkness. As a connection crackled in the corner of the room, she looked out the window and saw what she was waiting for- a flare in the sky, and then a line towards the horizon- like a meteor. And then another. And another. The sky was filling with streaks of fire from pole to pole. “Now I see you, too”, she said to herself as the first of the man-made satellites crashed to the planet below.
There was a flash as the target acquisition display went blank. Sparks flew from the tangle of cables leading up to the antenna, and an acrid black smoke rose quickly. The whine crescendoed as the connections to the generator finally overloaded, and the scrounged bits of junk burst their tenuous connections to each other. The antenna toppled over as the motor at its base exploded in a wave of fire and the many bulbs of the Beacon shattered, throwing shrapnel over the room. Arcs of electricity shot across the room and the apex of the Pyramid, weakened from the fall of the antenna, came crashing down in on itself.
“Although fighting and open warfare didn’t actually break out for several weeks, the Rain of Eyes is the commonly accepted beginning of the Martian War of Independence. The inhuman conditions and wild mismanagement by a new breed of corporate aristocrats had long set the stage for terrible violence that would follow, and by the start of the year were only held in check by the ruthlessly efficient corporate police forces, whose most powerful weapon was the constant and complete surveillance of nearly the entire populace.
“Paradoxically for historians, the exhaustive records of the whereabouts of most every human on the planet in fact are extremely troubling. The simple reason for this disquiet being that anyone and everyone who could possibly be responsible for this pivotal moment in human history can be proven conclusively not to have done it. Although leaders of the nascent Martian Council came forward and claimed responsibility, every one has been since been shown to have been elsewhere at the time, most amusingly Bartholomew Jeremies, who was actually on Earth giving evidence to the World Court about Human rights abuses on Mars. That the site of the event was found destroyed, presumably by those responsible to hide evidence, very shortly after it happened has only deepened the mystery.”
-Excerpts from, “What Have We Learned? The War of Martian Independence and Terran Expansion” by Richard Von Slonniker