A reminder that Warren Ellis is cranking out a weekly, free comic for Avatar and it’s some cranking good stuff. If you haven’t checked it out yet, please, do yourself a favor and have a look.

Okay, the last few posts have been little pieces (first draft pieces) of a novella that I’m working on, called “From The Ancient Red Sands”. You’ll find links to all the pieces, sequentially, in the side bar. I’m working on a separate page where the whole thing will reside, in final draft form. Individual segments will continue to be posted here.

Next update will be early next week, separate page should be up by then.

Amy Benning wanted nothing to do with Mars.

She didn’t want to be on Jupiter Station, waiting to board the ship that would take her to the red planet. She didn’t want to work with John Temple. She knew this would all end badly.

Unfortunately, she didn’t have a choice. She went where they sent her, killed who they told her to kill and destroyed what they told her to destroy. They owned her, body and soul, for two more years.

If she survived.

Sometimes, she was astonished that she had made it through the first eight years of her contract. Most operatives didn’t, the average survival rate was five years on a ten year contract. Those that did survive were often injured beyond repair.

A few re-upped. Like John Temple. Rumor had it that Temple was on his fifth contract, something no one had ever done before. But he had paid the price for those years, no one doubted that. Amy had no intention of ever paying the price that he had.

All she had to do was survive for two more years. Something that might be hard to do working with Temple. His teams had an unbelievably high casualty rate. She had friends who had died working with him. The thought left her cold.

She paced back and forth in her quarters, her impatience growing. She had rejected the offer of being in on the briefings and the preliminary legwork. She had files on her computer, but she refused to open them. She’d read the final prep file on the journey to Mars, not before.

She wasn’t an investigator, like Temple. She was just a soldier. She’d kill what they told her to kill, that’s all she needed to know. Where to point her gun.

But the waiting was torture. She pulled the station guide from her bag and looked for the closest bar. Maybe a drink or two would settle her nerves.

Stan Barrow could think of thousands of places that he’d rather be than this little back office behind the Marshal’s office on Jupiter Station. Not that it was a bad office, it had all your basic amenities, especially for offworld. The chair was comfortable, the terminal was new and the coffee was pretty good.

But the data he was sifting through was something else. It was nightmarish in ways that he couldn’t even get his head around. Things that nobody could possibly have imagined.

Even if they were dealing with some kind of parallel reality (something his research considered extremely unlikely), even then, to imagine this sort of casual menace, this kind of uncaring cruelty, as if it were mere afterthought. It was beyond his comprehension.

The reports on the terminal in front of him, transcripts sent up from the computers on the surface, he couldn’t look straight at them for more than an instant. When he tried, he could feel his sanity slipping through the cracks of his mind.

Information wasn’t supposed to do that. It was supposed to be precise, orderly, easy to classify and correlate. He had spent his whole life being the person who could make sense out of the seemingly random patterns of data, who could see the shapes that hid within. That’s why Temple had come to him. He was the best, he could cut through anything and find that shape.

But this had no shape. It was fluid and amorphous, unlike anything in his experience. How could he send the team in to deal with this if he had no idea what the hell they were dealing with? How could he prepare them for this level of madness?

Unless…

It only took him two hours in the bazaar to find everything he needed. He returned to the office, frightened, but confident. He unpacked his kit and started his preparation. Two audio crystals were placed into receptacles and turned to full volume. One featured the sounds of passionate love making, the other, brutal screams of torture. He lowered the lights in most of the room, leaving only a spot on the terminal.

Then, the drugs. Digitason, to kill his sense of touch. Inheradol to shut off his sense of smell. Then, taking his seat at the terminal, the master stroke. Two old fashioned tabs of lysergic acid diethylamide. Now, let the work begin.

Temple let out a deep breath as he stepped onto Jupiter Station for the first time in 30 years. His last visit here had left him blind in one eye and unable to walk for six months. The memory still gave him a chill.

He looked around the main gateway, not exactly nervous, but certainly cautious. He had no intention of staying here long, but he had to see Gillen before he rendezvoused with his team and made the journey to Mars.

Gillen obviously knew something. Whether that something was going to prove useful or not, well, that was a wait and see proposition.

The main deck of Jupiter Station, what they called The Bazaar, while mostly made of iron and steel gave the feeling of a large, outdoor market. People of all sorts walked about, trading with each other, conversing, arguing, kissing. Their mode of dress was as varied as they were, some dressed in elaborate uniforms, some wearing nothing at all.

Tables and booths littered the floor, some offering items for sales, some games of chance. Prostitutes, both male and female, walked about in search of business. None of them approached John Temple. The sellers ignored him, the con man actually stepped from his path.

He wondered if any of them and actually been there during the riots, if they remembered what he had gone through. Most had probably just heard the stories, maybe some had seen the vids. It hardly mattered now.

He made his way across the crowd and pushed through the steel doors at the far end. they led to a familiar, narrow corridor that took him past maintenance and monitoring and into the Marshal’s office.

“Welcome back, Temple.” The voice that greeted him was hard and unyielding.

“It’s a short stay, Glenn. I won’t be causing any trouble.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

“Where is he?”

“Holding room 5.”

Temple walked past the Marshal and down to the holding area. He stopped outside room 5 and his stomach tightened. He recognized the smell.

“Marshal!” he yelled.

Glenn strolled down the corridor. “What is it, Temple?”

“I wanted you here when I opened the door, Glenn. Take a nice, deep breath. We both know what’s on the other side.”

He nodded and Temple slid the door open. The smell of death and decay was even stronger from inside.

But the cell itself was empty.

It only took four hours. The initial rescue and research team sat down in New Austin, got everything running, and started firing information back to Jupiter Station.

Jupiter relayed the information to Earth.

Fourteen scientists poured over the information with terror in their hearts.

This was new.

This was The Unknown.

The military wanted answers. The scientists only had more questions.

And then, four hours after the first transmission……. nothing.

All attempts to contact the research party were inconclusive. Two more days passed. Governments debated on a proper course of action. Too much had been spent on the Mars Project to abandon it. Another team would have to be sent.

Not a rescue team. Not a research team.

An Investigation Team.

And that’s when they called John Temple.

The computers have been back online for two hours, The things they have to say? Well, they’re unusual.

One of them talks of the infestation, and how it must be cleansed. I think it’s talking about us. Humans. Another talks about transition theory. I can’t tell what it means, but it has something to do with a doorway.

The third computer, I don’t think I like the third one. It makes even less sense that the others. It keeps talking about something called meatspace. I think it means us.

They all seem to have developed sentience. And they don’t appear to like us very much.

Richards is trying to communicate with them. To learn what happened to the colonists.

I’m sorting through actual notebooks, astonished that some people still write longhand. Most of it is boring day to day stuff. Most of it. Some of it, though. Are these feeling, dream diaries? Or did they actually do this stuff. Did a Nobel Prize winning geneticist actually sew her daughter’s lips and eyes shut?

Did the town’s heroic Sheriff actually rape and kill his own fourteen year old daughter?

And where did the all go?

All the people are gone.

We were expecting something bad. No power, no atmosphere, we knew something had gone wrong. Nobody could survive on Mars without the artificial atmosphere.

So, where are the bodies?

The colony looked old. Abandoned. Like no one had been here for decades. The last transmission was only three days ago. What could have done this?

My crew is offloading equipment now. We’ll re-establish the atmosphere, bring the grid back online. Maybe there’s a clue in their computer system, something to tell us what happened here. Something to explain why there’s not even a trace of DNA left in any of the colonies.

It started here, according to the warning systems. The first alarm sounded right here, in New Austin. The final message came from here, as well.

“What fools we’ve been, not to have seen. What heights of arrogance we have reached, what incredible hubris. It laughs at us. We amuse it. And we deserve all that is to come.”

That message was sent by a Nobel Prize winning geneticist. She was designing a new strand of wheat that could grow in artificial soil. It would have made the colony self sufficient in forty years.

Where did everyone go?

“They woke it up.”

That’s a hell of a thing to see on your monitor first thing in the morning. Even before you figure out what it means, even when it’s just four little words staring right at you, it makes your blood run cold. At least, that’s what it did to me.

Little red warning lights are flashing on nine different panels. Nine? How is that even possible? Nine separate catastrophes in one night?

Monitoring station offline. Power grid offline. Atmosphere failing. Temperature settings reading off the scale. What the hell?

I looked back to the message on my main terminal, to those four words. I knew who it was from before I even opened the header. Gillen. That crazy old bastard on Jupiter Station. He’d been right all along.

And now New Austin was gone.

What about the other colonies? My station was only connected to the one colony, the others all had their own monitors. Were they all gone, too? Would we all be making the same call back to Earth this morning?

I knew the answer was yes, down in the pit of my stomach, I knew. And I felt the coldness pass through me as I reached for the phone.

The wind was increasing.

Wyatt watched as it blew red sand across the surface of what had been New Austin, coating the rubble with its rust like palette. He sat, perched on the remains of a Tucker ’96 Shadow ATV, smoking a cigarette and waiting for the end.

All those years of terra-forming, then the growth pains of setting up a new community, all for nothing. Soon, the old atmosphere would return and all life here would once more be extinct.

Almost all life.

It would continue of course, just like it had for ages untold. If only we had known that before we came to this barren world. If only we had known that all the legends had sprung from here, so very close to our home.

All the legends, the myths, the stories of ancient evils. All true, every last god forsaken one of them.

He pulled the gun from his holster, a silly but functional replica of the six shooters they used to carry in the old west, on Earth. New Austin had been a bit of an affectation, really. A designer colony, for those who wanted to live the pioneering lifestyle of ancient America.

What pioneer ever had to face this reality?

Wyatt considered ending his own life, all it would take was a single bullet. But he had five left and it seemed like a waste not to use them. They wouldn’t do any good, bullets had already been tried. But still, it would bring him some small bit of satisfaction before his time was done.

As long as it got there before the atmosphere turned….