The cathedrals of mars, p.1
The Cathedrals of Mars, page 1
THE CATHEDRALS OF MARS
BOOK THREE OF THE HELIOSPHERE TRILOGY
E. M. RENSING
Copyright © 2023 by E.M. Rensing
Cover Design: Ryan Meeks
Cover Font: “Ailerons,” Adilson Garcia
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Generative AI was not utilized for any component of this book; narrative development, drafting, editing, formatting and cover artwork were all accomplished by humans. With help from caffeine, toddlers, and synthwave compilations on YouTube.
For my Dad
CONTENTS
Prologue
Book One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Book Two
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Book Three
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Epilogue
Author’s Notes
About the Author
PROLOGUE
The void, for anyone else, was silence.
Not so for the disgraced major from a dead world’s military. Tom. The Flet. Whoever the hell he was.
For him, the void was the roaring of the ocean. Beating on the edges of its planets. Currents washing around and under and through. Magnetic. Photonic. Gravitic. Other forces at play that no other human had ever observed, much less thought to name. The grand swell of space-time, sweeping all before it from the moment of creation to an end that not even he could see. He had never dared venture out so far, into the darkness where light itself dissolved and black holes evaporated.
That day, the void was screaming.
He was still tired from his long ordeal, the prison of possibility he’d been trapped in. Moments or centuries, it barely mattered. He was awake now, for however long that lasted, and the screaming had not stopped.
Weary, the Flet scraped together what he could of his consciousness, all the parts that were not otherwise occupied, guiding the movement of matter and data that held humanity’s precarious post-Earth civilization together. He consulted the internal chronometers built into the tendrils of silicone that twined around lab-grown neurons, extending his mind to vast proportions, out into every human-haunt of the Heliosphere.
Once—yesterday, centuries before, mere moments past—he had engaged with this process through metaphor. Pulling on his uniform, walking into his plane. Wrapping a robe around bare shoulders in the early morning and reading the newspaper. He’d discarded that. Too inefficient. Too slow.
He reached out through his own mind, through the sensors of his craft, the microphones of his communication arrays, to find the location of that scream.
An asteroid. Many. Many, many. More than even Jupiter, in its constant war with Saturn, could have rightly torn out of place. At the heart of a cloud. No longer orbiting.
It had become a missile. An apophis.
It was deep in the inner system, within that ring of rubble that she called an empire. Once his daughter, now something else.
They were all something else.
The Flet’s thoughts had drifted; he’d lost his lock. With great patience, with eons of effort that passed in the blink of an eye, he sought to find it again.
Talking.
There was talking.
… and what, are we supposed to just accept…
It slipped away, caught in the fast currents of the surface. The Flet consulted his chronometer again. Once, he had imagined this as checking his watch, an instrument panel, waiting for dawn.
Now, he saw nothing. Just a pinprick of not-light in the not-water of space-time’s surface. A position.
Multiple extensions of himself were present. Conversations. He was awake enough to hear their speech. The accents helped him locate the moment.
Ahh.
With great effort, almost more than he could bear, he forced himself to the surface.
Like swimming upward through dark waters.
In all his long life, that was one metaphor he never would shake.
…s he going to wake up, or do I need to call the fucking priests out at…
He wanted to see that asteroid, that little chunk of once-planet, would-be-again planet. He wanted to know where it was going, and why, and how.
He ignored the voices.
Dove again.
Reached.
Found.
Craft were desperately trying to leave, struggling to disconnect from their moorings at the spaceport, screaming condemnation across both conventional and dive comm channels. Screaming, screaming.
He listened to their chatter, dispassionate, as his fractured mind fought to make sense of what was happening.
Had it already happened? Was it still in the future? He had chronometers wired into his biochemical support suite for this very reason. He wanted to map this. Figure out where it was going…had gone? Taste the churn of its gravity wake, rippling through space-time. And yet, would it fall there, would it fall on…
But before he could analyze it fully, before he could see what would come, a voice came across his comm line. Not just over one of the myriad channels that his mind enabled, but into the internal speakers of his tank. To the remnants of his physical ears.
Donner, they need you to wake up. They say we can’t start until you wake up.
One of the others, then.
Him.
The Flet withdrew. He could return when this was finished. Ponder to his full satisfaction.
BOOK ONE
LUNAE
CHAPTER
ONE
“They want me to execute you, you know.”
Nobody knew what to do with her. That much had been clear to Tharsis, from the moment they’d pulled her out of the med vat the night before. Diana Watch’s medical staff had been kind, but they hadn’t told her anything. What had happened to her. Where she’d been. Probably because they didn’t understand it themselves.
All they’d been able to tell her was that when she’d shown up in Singapore, she’d still had her injuries from Noqumiut.
Fresh, as if they’d just happened.
“You still alive there, El-Tee?”
Tharsis tried to focus. Tried to remind herself where she was. The Diana Watch Medical Clinic. Earth’s moon. A standard month past her desperate attempt to skin-dive off Eris. Almost seven months past her arrival on Earth. Eight days since she kissed Bea goodbye. Twelve hours since she’d woken up.
She still had goo in her hair from the med vat. They’d given her nothing to wear but a couple of surgical robes. She was cold.
The Landlord had shown up. They’d warned her he was coming. She’d expected to see Olin again. The corporal she’d met on Lanai was here instead, sunburned and tired. Uncomfortable.
None of this made any sense at all.
When had time come apart like this?
“Should I?”
“What?”
He looked exasperated. It was one of Sergeant Olin’s favorite expressions, on a face twenty years younger than the one she’d known. “Should I execute you?”
“Over, umm, me going out to Noqumiut?” Against your orders? Somebody must have told him. He wouldn’t have remembered, right?
How had Olin died? Nobody had told her. Nobody had warned her. Fuck.
“Among other things.” His gray eyes studied her. “Some of it seems pretty unimportant right now, to be honest.”
Tharsis cast about for something, anything, to say.
“We’ve done this before, you know,” she eventually said. “You, me, Medical, Earth’s inwell.”
“Was that when the, uhh, when the Naven died?”
“You mean Bea, right?”
He didn’t look at her. “How do you know about that, Tharsis?”
Tharsis found her eyes unfocusing. Something she couldn’t hear was ringing in her ears.
Damn the Flet for putting her in this position.
“I found her,” she said quietly. “Back on Earth, as a bab
“Her, Rallison, the guy whose brain cells are down in that dive core thing. The four of us were pretty inter-tangled before any of this Landlord shit happened,” he said.
That explained some of what she could remember from Lanai. “Maybe that’s what the treaties were built on.”
“Maybe that’s the entire problem,” he countered. “This hash we’ve made of what was supposed to be our salvation.”
He fell silent, and she let him. It was a while before he spoke again. And when he did, it was the question she’d been expecting.
“What happened? What did you see out there?”
“You were there,” she said, confused.
“Eris, not Lanai.”
That, right. One of her hands started shaking. Damn. She wasn’t sure if it was from nerves or nutrient loss. The level of acceleration to her body’s natural healing processes, the extent of her injuries, had been extreme. “It was the same thing, sir.”
“Tharsis, focus, okay? I need to know what you found out at Noqumiut.”
“Like what?”
“Anything that might help me understand why I left the place without carpet-bombing it.”
“There was a kid—”
But Tharsis was cut off by a knock at the door. “What?” he asked, Tyr pacing over.
Somebody Tharsis didn’t recognize was standing there. A civilian. “You wanted me to let you know when the conference was up.”
“Now?” he asked with a groan.
“Now, sir.”
The Landlord looked at her. “We’re not done here,” he told her.
Tharsis managed to keep herself upright until he left.
Only once the door closed did she let herself slump back on the bed.
She was asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow.
“Motherfucker, are you kidding me?”
The frail old Ctesi, his video feed patched in from the last functioning hydrocarb platform around Uranus, glared with rheumy eyes through his camera. “This is an official meeting, young man. I’d appreciate you keeping Arran vulgarities out of the debate.”
Caleb took a deep breath, forcing down his rising anger. “Excuse me, you’re right, that language was a little harsh. Let me rephrase: what you’re saying is insane.”
“We have rules, Caleb,” another, one who’d introduced himself as the Scient, said.
“The Arcna is dead,” he snapped back. “You all have our swarm footage.”
“Photographs do not constitute proof.”
“She has wetware out there. The rules say I’m allowed to blow her out of the sky for violations like this.”
“Once we have proof, yes.”
“But we have to go out there to get the proof,” he said, “and you’re saying I need her vote to do that? The Arcna therefore has the right to veto military action against herself for a violation of the Accords, under the bylaws of the Accords?”
“Simply put, Sergeant?” the Ctesi replied evenly. “Yes, that’s the rule.”
“And who wrote the rules?”
“We did.”
“And we can’t change them?”
“That would take another vote.”
“Which we also can’t do,” the Scient replied serenely. “Without the Arcna.”
Caleb didn’t know what he’d expected from his first encounter with the Tenancy, but he hadn’t been prepared for this meeting.
The other Landlords were little more than talking heads on the screen at the end of Diana Watch’s main briefing room. Some, including the Flet, were represented only by a blank section of screen and a voice. Several appeared to be totally absent. It was the first time they’d been able to coordinate a call over the dive core, though. Since everything started working again.
“How does she even vote? She is dead.”
“We send it out via the Lighthouse network, and she radios back.”
“What does she vote?”
“Present,” the Scient answered, serene.
“But she’s not.” Caleb stopped, took a deep breath. Willed his temper to stay out of his throat. “She’s clearly programmed the wetware out there to supply you with that answer.”
“Is that not still an expression of her will?”
“Wetware itself is illegal,” the Scient mused. “The medium may invalidate the intent.”
“She doesn’t have any intent. She is fucking dead,” Caleb repeated, emphasizing each word. “Does this make sense to anybody?”
The Dena’s masked face gave no indication of her thoughts. “What the others are not explaining properly, dear Caleb, is that we are missing several voting members from this particular quorum. If the Arcna did eat herself to death, and what an amusing image that is, we still need everyone else to vote.”
“Who are we missing?”
“The Killain, for one. Somebody shall have to go wake him up. And I have not yet heard from the Rallarhu.”
One of the black screens rippled. “My vote stands as it always has. No.”
“And why is that?” the Onias asked pointedly. “Was she a corpse when you went out? What about that led you to kill an entire planet?”
“I won’t be lectured on ethics by you, meat puppet.”
How the hell, Caleb wondered, had any of it held together so long?
“And so we are stuck,” the Flet said, the screen bearing his name indicating that he was speaking. He had been the last of them to connect on the networked call, and he sounded weary. Caleb wondered if he was still recovering from whatever he’d been through on Earth.
“No, I think we’re beyond that,” the Onias said. “If the two of you knew, Caleb, Eliza, if you knew what was out there and you failed to inform us, failed to act, your lives and the lives of everyone you rule over are forfeit. Everything, everything between my inwell and the Dena’s may die for your actions.”
For a moment, nobody on the call spoke.
“As I said before, I will not be lectured by a meat puppet,” the Rallarhu’s voice said, anger creeping into the words now. “Nor threatened.”
“Can’t I just veto military action against myself?” Caleb asked sarcastically. “It’s apparently been working for the Arcna for seven fucking centuries.”
“This is going nowhere,” the Dena said. “If nobody else will advance the motion, I shall. I propose a full quorum, in person, at the usual location.”
“He threatens me with annihilation and you expect me to show up at his inwell?”
“Themisto, fifteen days from now. That should be adequate time to prepare,” the Dena said. “Any objections?”
“I’ll be there. With the goddamn navigation material,” Caleb said, and killed the call.
He tossed away his notebook, shoving back from the table. Earth was visible beyond the broad windows of the moon-side habitat. In its night cycle right now.
It disturbed him, how dark everything was. It had been easy to ignore in the vastness of the Pacific how few humans remained on the surface. But that, the complete absence of light, of civilization, drove the point home like nothing else. He couldn’t even tell which continent was rolling by.
“I take it that didn’t go well, sir?”
Adair, in the doorway. Caleb huffed, waving him in. He would have had the historian in the room with him, but apparently, there were rules against that. “You don’t have to ‘sir’ me.”
“You’re not just a corporal, Caleb,” Adair replied wryly.
