He would begin in the ancient, dead city of Lotus. The land sped by him in a long, continuous plane of red-orange sand and rocks. The large white pillars of the outer gates of Lotus loomed into view as Rick’s sledge shot around the foothills of the city of Lotus proper. As he drew closer, the red-orange sandstone gateways appeared. They had been carved from the nearby hills, but no one in the Science Corps knew where the polished white stone for the city proper had come from. The large gateways had an Oriental flare to them, but that was impossible since, according to the Science Corp, the city had been dead for tens of thousands of years.

The archways formed a winding pathway that some in the Corp said was the main roadway, and they had found pieces of the gates as far as Dalcan, the capital of Thrane, the Green Martian leader. He didn’t look forward to meeting that particular individual. Still, he expected the saurian creature would try and get his suit; he tried this with every Ranger who came to the city, or even into the Green Martian lands.

The city of Lotus was immense, a gargantuan city carved from a white sandstone-like material, which was an unknown stone on Mars. One of the rumors he had heard from his friends in the Science Corp was that the blocks were from Earth, and the Empire of Lotus, as it was colloquially named, had ruled all the planets in the solar system at one time. Yet, beyond this one city, nothing else remained of those who’d ruled it, nor were there remnants of an empire on any other planet. The frescoes and bas-reliefs were humanoid, leading some in the Corp to think mankind was a descendant of them. This sounded strange and wrong to Rick. Science had established that Man had started on Earth.

Once he reached the wide gates of Lotus, he entered the opening between the gateposts, which was wide enough to play football—the American version—between them. The walls were fifty feet high and contained a tomb rather than a dead city. Any bodies had long ago dried up and returned to dust. Rick doubted he would find anything, but he had to go through the city in a grid pattern that covered a fifth of the entire city to search for anything. Part of the patrol, in case some Ranger might catch something that hadn’t been seen by aerial photos, satellites, or the thirty other patrols that were sent through the city before Rick.

His gauntlet blinked when he reached the city. He said, “Map, Lotus grid,” and a HUD sprang up inside his helmet. It revealed a path to navigate around his section of the city to explore. The last three Space Rangers had done their job, and he was going to do his own scouting.

Entering the city, he took a sharp right and started down a long, broad, stone-paved street, his sledge hovering a few inches off the ground and not causing any harm to the actual stone. Though, from what he had seen and heard from the Science Corp, nothing short of an atomic could even cause a scratch in the white stone. He hit a four-way street rather suddenly, and his map angled him off to his right. His eyes slid to the left, and for a second, he thought he saw a shadow. He snapped his head to the left, but there was nothing there. For a handful of moments, he waited, taking long, steady breaths from his suit. The air supply was at ninety percent. He could breathe the Martian atmosphere a little if he needed, yet he wanted to keep his helmet on if he could. It wouldn’t be great, but he could save the suit some wear and tear if he needed to take off the helm. The suit was his key to everything back on the ship. And it was his to guard.

The suit was the reason the Green Martians wanted him. Especially their leader, Thrane, who wanted a Space Ranger suit so badly. With it, the saurian Martian thought he could gain control of a Ranger’s ship. Then the cowardly creature would use it to try and attack Ranger Command. One of the Thranes, two decades ago, had tried it and nearly succeeded. Had it not been for the help of a Golgoro psi-blade, Command would have been attacked by a small Trojan Horse ship. It was the reason suits were now DNA-locked to one person only.

Granted, plans for meetings and his route had been put in place since. It was something Rick didn’t want to befall him and his suit. Even the Golgoro wanted the suit to find out how the helmet shielded the Rangers from their mind-control powers.

He turned his head to the right again, seeing the blinking path illuminated before him. Again, he turned his head left and felt something, someone calling him. Don’t do it. Stay the course. But that little niggling doubt continued to chip away as Rick started to turn the control yoke to the right.

He wrenched the sledge to the left instead and twisted the throttle a half rotation. It started to slew to the left, and his helmet flickered with a warning.

PATH DEVIATION. WARNING. PATH DEVIATION.

Rick grumbled in his throat. Another demerit. Yet, it could be something. He let out a sigh and said, “Override, Space Ranger Rick Tavish, authorization number 5498204.”

The suit went quiet. It still illuminated his path behind him with an angry red glow coming from behind him. He turned to see the map, and his path was still laid out for him in the suit’s HUD. As he moved the sledge down the long, corridor-like passage, a sense of dread filled him. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.” He looked up. Spans of bridges thirty feet up that crisscrossed in random patterns made him blink his eyes before looking back ahead of him.

He had slowed the sledge to a near-crawl to make the tight turn ahead when something slammed into him. The force of the hard impact slammed the sledge into the wall. Rick tried to look around, yet for a moment he was disoriented and felt his stomach threaten to rebel. His right leg was pinned against the pure white wall. He let out a grunt of pain. The suit registered the pain and injected a small pain reliever in his arm.

Something grabbed at his helmet hard, trying to wrench it free from behind. He grabbed his ray pistol and jerked it out of its holster, firing when he saw the pale, skinny thing that had slammed into him, grabbing at the helmet again. It squalled in pain and dropped to the ground, part of its right shoulder atomized by the Tellic ray pistol. It looked much like a chimpanzee, except it was covered in coarse white fur, and its eyes were red with slitted green pupils. The hands were much like human hands, while the feet were more simian-like, and the creature had a long tail that he thought could aid in balance.

Rick looked over the thing to see it was not alone. There was a tribe of thirty of these monkey-sized pale creatures. They had somehow gotten a stone loose and used it to pin the sledge against the wall. They held crude spears of rust-tinged metal that they thrust toward Rick, not getting close enough to actually strike him. Yet, all of them cowered before the ray pistol that Rick held. One of them crept forward and started to jabber in its language at Rick. Its hands were held up, showing they were empty. Rick swung his Tellic in a wide arc, not firing, but still not trusting these creatures fully.

The creature that spoke to him babbled, and it sounded like something like “Baa ba baab babba,” before the Ranger translator unit kicked in. It needed a few moments to find the right language to help make it work. Many linguists had worked to program the translator with hundreds of languages, yet not all of them worked. The words were translated into, “We need your kill gun. Do not shoot us. Shoot the ones who control us. Please. Need help.”

Rick followed the bony finger of the monkey-thing toward the center of the city. There, he saw a tower that looked plain and unadorned as usual. Then, he continued to look and saw small pennants and banners on it that wouldn’t have been seen by fellow Space Rangers unless they had looked directly at it. Something didn’t make sense. Those banners shouldn’t be there.

“We need your help,” the creature said again.

“Then why did he attack me?” Rick asked, pointing at the dead monkey-thing. Finally, the name of the creatures, the Makay, sprang to mind.

“He wasn’t supposed to. I think that . . . he . . . was . . . kill . . . kill! Kill!”