Mission Mars (25 page)

“Nobody's gonna know what happened to you, kid. Not your mama, not your daddy, not even that spunkclotted girl you were poking. Nobody will find your body for a hundred years, and when they do, you'll be a dried up old mummy. Nobody will know who you were, and they won't care.” After a moment of cold, dead silence, he added, “Is it worth it?”

Grant pulled his thumb away. Sitting back in his chair, he wiped the blood on his pant leg, waiting for a reaction. Gheitley just glared at him.

“Alright . . . send him for a walk,” Grant said, shooing him away, disgusted.

Two of them grabbed the back of Gheitley's chair and dragged him backward out of the room. Grating the back legs across the stone floor, the vibration punched at Gheitley's bladder. A stream of orange piss rose in an arc. They had hit him hard in the guts. Blood stained his urine. He wheezed out an insane giggle, and watched the dark spattered trail snake across the floor.

They dragged him into an airlock and set him upright. The floor was as cold as ice on his bare feet, and the room smelled like bleach and rust. The men left without words, as if Gheitley were already dead. They closed and sealed the door behind them.

He shivered. How long had he been tortured? A few hours? Longer than one sol? His eyes were almost swollen shut, and everything from his neck down throbbed and stung.
He was glad it was all over. Gheitley felt proud that he never gave the Rebels what they kept asking for, even though he knew the answer. It was the one bit of power he had over them. It was enough.

Captain Ford had said that the Advanced Scouts was a deep undercover assignment—and a secret branch of Sol Parliament called the shots. If the Rebels had learned that detail, there's no telling what they'd do with the information.

He had, of course, after each hit, seriously weighed his loyalties. Even if Gheitley wasn't yet officially one of the Advanced Scouts, at some point during the torture it had become personal. The ordeal had turned into a test of his will against theirs. He had proved to himself that he could take it, and he was proud of himself as he sat, bleeding and shivering. He was only just now beginning to regret his stubbornness as he stared at the crusty red light on the airlock door. It began to blink.

A hiss of gentle wind moved over him, thinning the air in the room.

He had won, but he would soon be killed for his high ideals. At any second, that outer airlock door in front of him would open, and his last breath would boil inside his lungs.

He wouldn't even be able to scream.

A muttering of voices woke Gheitley. As he slid into consciousness, he could feel the swelling on his face had gone, and he was lying on something soft—a bed. Someone was in the room with him. Too tired to steel himself against further
violence, he sighed with exhaustion and tried to pry open his eyes. The room was bright.

“Just kill me already. I don't know who I work for.”

A rustling of cloth and a soft chuckle came from close by.

“Yes, you do,” said a familiar voice.

Gheitley's lungs convulsed to drive oxygen into his brain. He forced his eyes open. Two figures stood at the side of his bed. He squinted, straining against the light. It was the man who had interrogated him—Grant. He stood next to Captain Ford.

“Congratulations,” Ford said, smiling. “Now you are in the Advanced Scouts.”

Gheitley reached up and felt the bandage on his forehead.

“We gassed you in the airlock, put you to sleep … you, uh, you hit your head,” Grant said, not even trying to hide the fact that he was lying. Through the lifting haze of anesthesia, Gheitley glared at the man.

“I thought you were going to crack in the airlock,” said Grant. “Nobody ever pissed themselves like that before.”

Ford and Grant laughed. Gheitley tightened his lips against his teeth.

“Who the fuck is this?” Gheitley said, jabbing his hand at Grant, suppressing an urge to jump up and strangle him.

“Easy, boy,” said Ford. “This is your new CO. He knocked out a few of my teeth when he initiated me.”

“Initiated?” Gheitley muttered. A sudden wave of nausea caught in his throat, and he spewed out over the side of the bed.

“Doc!” Ford called into the hallway. A tall, thin man with spiked, white hair and white lab coat, slid into the room,
followed by a large caveman-looking man in pale blue scrubs. Two other men in blue followed, one carrying a tablet.

“He's presenting,” said the ape-faced nurse as he turned Gheitley on his side. He held up a basin to catch the rest of the puke. Gheitley couldn't help but notice how huge the nurse's shiny-gloved hand was. The nurse rolled him back and wiped his mouth with a cloth. One of the aides reached over the top of the bed and pulled down a metal halo that clicked into place over Gheitley's head. Without a word, the doctor injected something into his arm, and they all looked up at the screen over the bed.

Gheitley could see, reflected in the water basin, a projection of his skull—primary colors throbbed in patterns inside the contours of his brain. The aide with the tablet tapped out something, and the outline of a pill-shaped object appeared inside the wobbling colors. It glowed greenish yellow.

“Capacitation rate is three-one-four,” the aide with the tablet spoke gently.

The doctor studied the screen for a solid minute, and Gheitley studied the doctor for any sign of concern. The doctor's eyes flitted between two points on the image, but his stoic expression never changed.

“Seven PDC for three hours. Stabilize with syptho,” the doctor said to the aides, who yes-grunted. The one with the tablet tapped the screen several times, and the other nudged past Grant and Ford and left the room.

“Commander Grant, please leave the patient to recover,” the doctor said, directing them out of the curtained area. “Maybe you can speak to him tomorrow, but for now he needs to rest. I'll keep you informed.”

“Okay, Doc. We'll talk later, Gheitley,” Ford said.

Gheitley coughed up a sour mouthful and spit it into the pan.

The aide with the tablet silently stood, tapping on his tablet. Gheitley twisted his head to get a look. Charts of sine waves and bar graphs flitted across the screen. The speed of movement and the bright, saturated colors ached in Gheitley's eyes. He closed them and turned his head back as another wave of nausea swelled up. He wretched, but nothing came up.

“It's the anesthetic,” the nurse said in a deep, bass voice, placing another cold cloth on Gheitley's head. “It'll pass in a minute.”

Gheitley had seen reverts before—caveman-like genetic throwbacks—a side-effect of the genetic therapy the Seyopont company initiated to protect spacers from radiation. One in one hundred thousand babies born looked like him—thick brow ridge, heavy face, wide-set eyes, broad nose, tiny teeth, lots of hair. Intelligence was not impaired, but muscles and bones were much stronger. Conspiracies claimed that Seyopont was trying to modify all humans so they wouldn't need density harnesses to strengthen their bones in low gravity, and reverts were just the beginning. Gheitley didn't give any weight to those conspiracies, but still, he had never seen a revert up close. He studied how large the caveman's pores were and how stiff his eyebrow hairs looked.

“You're staring,” said the nurse, not looking at Gheitley as he rinsed the cloth in cold water.

“Sorry,” Gheitley managed, spitting again.

“Rinse,” the nurse said, handing him a cup of water. Gheitley sipped the water.

“Don't swallow. Spit.”

The water tasted good. Clean. Fresh. Not like the stale recycled water he was used to, which always tasted like antitoxins and plastic.

“You want to try some ice chips?”

“Yeah.”

The nurse scooped out some ice from a bucket, wrapped it in cloth, and handed it to him. It felt good in his mouth, which had become pasty and burned from his stomach acid.

“What did they do to me?” Gheitley asked. The nurse looked up at the aide, still tapping through data on the tablet. The aide had heard the question, but feigned being too engrossed in his work to bother to answer.

“You're Advanced Scouts now, soldier,” the nurse said. It was difficult for Gheitley to tell if the nurse then smiled or grimaced. “They gave you an implant.”

This simulation was more vivid than the rest. The antique suit and helmet Gheitley wore had a rich, musky odor inside it, not the sharp, flat scents typical of Viro simulations. His helmet actually smelled old—real—like it had been lived-in for weeks. The gravity in simulations also always felt shallow and predictable—not this time. Even the weight of the old railgun was oddly realistic, and the flechette rounds wobbled and clattered when he shook his spare magazine.

“Careful!” Boondock yelled. “This isn't a game, Tabasco!”

Gheitley hated his call sign. Grant had named him that
because of the color of his piss on initiation day—he said it had looked just like Tabasco sauce, and the name stuck.

During the two weeks and twelve “missions”, the simulations had gotten more detailed, more realistic. The Amygdalal Regulatory Medium they had implanted into his head had finally “learned” his brain, the doc had said. This mission was just another test to gauge how integrated it had become. It was just the three of them this time—Boondock, Pincer, and him. Everyone else was out on other missions.

Gheitley set his rifle back down and watched the dunes speed by. The hovertruck clung to the terrain like it was running on a rail—sliding over boulders and riding high over gullies as if they weren't there. The simulation was committed to making it as real as possible—spits of dust and pebbles hailing against the hull didn't feel like they had been randomized by a computer. The transport had been traveling for a couple of hours, which he knew was a lot of high-def processing for a computer. He wondered what other Viro games he would be granted access to when his training was over.

The hover truck's vortus drive whined and lifted up over a ridge of rock. Olympus loomed beyond the rise. They were driving through a densely populated part of Tharsis, and it was clear outside—daylight, no storms. About a kilometer away, a windmill farm. The spinning rotor blades looked like ghostly orbs set on dead, white sticks.

“This vehicle,” Gheitley said, “when we're out on the rocks for real, won't someone see us?”

“We'll be black,” Pincer said from the cockpit, “Satellites can't see us.”

“Why not?”

“It's embedded in the system. Our transceivers throw blind spots on all the sats.”

“Why hasn't anybody noticed that?”

Boondock looked at him for a long moment, then grabbed the patch dispenser off the rack.

“You were trained how to use these, right?”

“Yeah,” Gheitley answered with a hint of suspicion in his voice, expecting some kind of embarrassing lesson to unfold. Everyone knew how to use the kwikseel emergency sealant quick-slap patches.

“Do you know what chemicals they use to make these work?”

“No.”

“But you know how to use them.”

“Yeah, just peel and slap, like the commercial.”

Boondock laughed. “You'd never be able to find out how they're made.”

“And why's that?” Gheitley sighed, eager to get to the end of the game.

“Company secret. If they let it out how they're made, anybody could make them. Patents and stuff.”

“And? So?” Gheitley said, not masking his annoyance with the lesson Boondock was wringing out of him.

“The workers building satellites, do you think they try to find out what is inside every piece?”

Gheitley nodded. “Right. Okay, I get it.”

Boondock ignored Gheitley's response and continued. “No, they put the parts together the way they were trained to do it. They put chip A into slot B, they tighten the screws and
solder the wires and go home when their shift is over. They know that the parts are all made from different places, and all the pieces each have their own patents and their own secrets. The factory workers just do their job and take their pay and don't care why it works, as long as it works.”