Mission Mars (24 page)

So stupid.

Interference from the ionized air around the sails made his com pop and chirp. He muted the volume. Living with the Advanced Scouts was a big achievement. He wanted to tell someone. His hand shot up to his com to call his girlfriend, Gina.

But Ford had also said that Gheitley would officially have to be killed, making him a virtual ghost to the outside world. No further contact—ever—meant no more seeing Gina, or even talking to her.

Maybe that was just a test.

Maybe Ford had set this up to make sure he could keep his mouth shut.

Security first.

Gheitley lowered his hand. Gina and his parents would just have to wait to hear the news of his advancement until after he had been cleared to do so. His parents had never been happy about his choice to pursue Security and Defense as a career anyway.

His father had tried to convince him that the Redpaw Enforcers were nothing more than overpaid bullies doing the dirty work for Ares Aqua, the company that regulated water extraction on Mars. His father was just angry that his side lost the war. Gheitley had caught him listening to old rebel songs more than once, but never reported him.

9805. Two to midnight—just like the song. He started to sing it, but only knew the chorus.

Two to midnight, almost out of air.

My girl has gone to Luna.

She said I didn't care.

Gone on up the spacelift,

Packed up and took my heart.

Her ship, it never made it.

Soon we'll never be apart.

He hummed the rest.

The city's lights shimmered through the dust. Gheitley's shadow danced. His outline morphed and melted from the liquid light show flickering on the sails.

A break in the storm came at 0507, and Gheitley watched the moon Phobos crawl overhead. The wind kicked up again. He jogged along the baffles to stay awake.

1078. Almost dawn. Two hours left on his shift. The storm gnashed its teeth again. Shifting dust slid under his feet, and the snapping wind knocked at him down. Fighting to stand, despite all the stimulants, he felt exhausted fighting against the screaming planet. A headache gnawed on the back of his skull and his legs began to shake. The hissing dust falling from the sails was a white noise narcotic, the steady seashore shush washing against his helmet. His legs dissolved and his eyelids shivered, hypnotized by the silken cascade of powder.

He had been trained to fight through this. He had been warned about wind hypnosis and had done all he could to stop its effects, but the endless barrage of scouring winds and their siren whispers carried the same power over him that had overcome colonists for the last two centuries.

He collapsed into the dunes.

I should get up. The voice in his head was so weak and muted, there was no point in fighting it any more. I should get up now.

Gheitley succumbed to sleep.

As drifts grew higher around his visor, he dreamed of the ocean—an ocean he had only seen in movies.

Gheitley woke to the rasp of gloves scooping dust off his helmet. A bright light shrieked into his eyes, and a gust of brown grit washed across the light. The storm still raged around him, and it made him feel as if he were being raised from the dead, his chest and legs tingling back to life as mars-suited men pulled him out of the dunes. They yanked him up and stood him straight.

He fought to stand as the angry winds punched his limbs. The figures standing around him shimmered like dark phantoms—hands and lights flickering behind sheets of dark flashing gauze. He clicked on his com and was immediately assaulted by static. Another glove jabbed an external jack at him—the movement blunt and insistent. Gheitley looked up to try to see a face inside the helmet, but he could only see the silhouette shimmering in the shredding haze.

It was an old style helmet, an antique.

Gheitley plugged the cable into his input jack and a raspy synthesized voice growled, “Follow!” Something jabbed hard into his back.

Gheitley injected laughter into his voice, “Hey, take it easy. Sorry I fell asleep.”

“Slam it,” the synthesized voice snapped, then Gheitley saw through the brown squall the silhouettes of three railguns pointed at him.

This was not his relief team. They were Rotgeist! Dressed in antique armor to look like the phantoms out of myth, the Rebels had found him, their railguns aimed at his face.

When Mason Gheitley next woke, the taste of cherry-flavored air was hissing into his helmet. He allowed himself a half-second to remember happier days when flavored air had been a fun childhood novelty for him, then he recalled the last thing he could remember—suffocating in his own helmet. The Rotgeist had loaded him at gunpoint into an old hovertruck and pinched his air hose.

He had no idea where he was now.

Gheitley made no movement to give away he was awake. He felt his arms and legs were strapped tight to a chair, and over the hiss in his helmet he could hear muffled speech, but no words. His heads up display showed only empty windows where his stats should be blinking in bright green and white—GPS location, air levels, com status, body and external temperatures. They were all grey, blinking the icon for no data.
His external cameras were dead, except for one image that was flickering random pixellated patterns.

Empty suits had been found with their cameras broken or blacked out just like his—all of them had been victims of Rotgeist attacks.

This couldn't be happening.

Scuffling of fingers on his helmet. Someone wrenched his helmet forward. Gheitley let his head flop, pretending to still be unconscious, smashing his nose into his dark visor. He clenched his face to stop from sneezing, eyes watering. Hands scraped over levers on his helmet and with a squeak, the seals released. Dragging the rim over his face, his helmet snagged on his nose and scraped against his forehead.

“Open your eyes. We know you're awake,” a man said in a gruff voice. He had a Lowland accent.

Gheitley raised his head and sniffed back the thin snot that had begun to stream out of his nose. Spotlights bit into his eyes, obscuring his captors in harsh silhouettes. Gheitley squinted to try to see details around him.

The walls were stone—inside a lava tube, so it had to be somewhere in Tharsis. The air was moist and smelled like rust. Four men in the room. Gheitley turned to look behind him, and was cracked hard across his cheek, his vision sparking white.

“Face front!” barked the voice behind him. The hit was just hard enough to make a point without knocking him out. His cheek bloomed with pain.

“Who do you work for?” said the gruff voice.

“I am a Redpaw Enforcer. I work for Ares Aqua,” Gheitley sneered.

“We know you're in the Advanced Scouts now, Corporal Mason Gheitley. Who do the Advanced Scouts answer to?”

Gheitley tried to squint through the lights to find features in the man's face. One other man emerged from the shadows. He wore an old, industrial-looking rebreather that covered the bottom half of his face. He leaned in close.

The man grabbed Gheitley by the ear and drove a thumb into the rising welt on his cheek, “Redpaw is just a club that picks out the scum that rises to the top. Advanced Scouts. You were hired yesterday.” He slapped Gheitley across the scalp and pulled another chair out of the dark to sit in front of him. He sat and leaned in close.

“Who do you work for?”

Gheitley coughed up blood. It spattered onto his thigh. He had forgotten they had shredded his suit and tore it off of him along with shards of skin. He looked at his lashed and bloody legs and what was left of his manhood dangling between them.

The man with the gruff voice—Gheitley had heard someone call him Grant—let out a heated sigh.

“Okay, we're not getting anything out of this one,” Grant said with a disgusted huff. The man with the rebreather—wielding the insulation tube dripping with clots of Gheitley's blood—stepped back. Gheitley coughed sharply, almost laughing, a wave of endorphins washing through him with the promise of an end to the torture. Grant bent down to get face-to-face.

“So I guess you proved to us that you're a tough little hitch. Tough, but very dumb,” he said, pressing his thumb again into the bruise on Gheitley's cheek. Gheitley snarled weakly through the pain.