Mission Mars (26 page)

“I get it, I said,” Gheitley barked. “But what if someone did find out about the blind spots?”

Boon put the peel-and-slap patches back in the rack and relaxed into his seat. He rested his hand on his rifle. “What do you think we're doing out here, Tabasco?”

Pincer chuckled over the com. Boondock was smiling something predatory behind his visor.

Pincer parked the truck behind the village greenhouse and scanned through the com channels—no alert going out, nobody had seen them drive in.

“You gonna tell me now? What's the op?” Gheitley asked. The team had teased him with possibilities of how bad each simulation got, trying to scare him. This was just another simulation—another test of his character, he told himself. He just wanted something real to focus on.

“Follow me,” said Boondock.

It was an old village, the kind that had been built underground, long before ExoTerra had signed exclusivity rights with the Mars Council. The soldiers ran crouched low along the edges of the buildings, avoiding any window ports, and located the main airlock. Tiny village—maybe five or six families.

Pincer aimed his rifle and fired into the doorframe. A spray of air hissed out and blue-green putty sprouted out from the edges of the holes in an attempt to seal them. Pincer shot again a little lower and ruptured the pneumatics, triggering the door open. Dust exploded out.

“Turn on your external mics,” Boon said over the com.

Gheitley clicked them on and heard the squeal of the straining door mechanism. Pincer looked inside the window of the inner door and stepped back. His railgun made no sound when it fired, but Gheitley heard the muted triple plunks when the flechettes hit, the holes whistling, the pitch rising as sealant swelled inside the leaks. Another few shots into the doorframe and the pneumatics shrieked, spraying its oily blood onto the ceiling.

Boondock handed Gheitley a crowbar and together they pried open the inner door. The seals howled in protest, and a rush of air pushed them back, as if a spirit guardian were trying to protect the villagers inside. The door relented. Pincer stepped into the hallway first, followed by Boondock, then Gheitley. Pincer stopped and twisted at the waist back and forth, scanning with his external mics, then pointed down one end of the hallway. Over the com, Boondock told Gheitley to follow.

Gheitley heard muffled screams of terror from behind one of the doors. The idea of an AI generating those sounds made him ill. The AI knew people's minds too well—it knew how to make sounds that could bruise the human soul.

“Stay low,” Boondock said. “Once I open this hab door, shoot whatever moves.”

Gheitley heard the words and weighed it against what his
senses had told him. The scream was from a young woman. Certainly, she was not someone expecting to be attacked—nothing like in the other combat simulations where targets were armed enemies—Rebels determined to defend their territory. Boondock fired into the doorframe and the pneumatics jerked open immediately, sending out a shriek that barely covered the thin screams coming from inside.

Empty food wrappers flew toward him, and a single cloth shoe tumbled forward, drawn by the semi-vacuum of the Martian air. He could hear a squeal—the sound of air pulling through a poorly sealed door. Gheitley stood up but couldn't pinpoint where the sound was coming from. Just like how he'd been trained, Gheitley twisted back and forth at his waist, scanning with the ten external microphones in his helmet and located the whistling sound—the door to the kitchen.

Targets were inside. It was just a simulation—just targets to be tagged, points to be scored. Despite the advertised guarantee on ExoTerra products, the door was obviously insufficient to protect against accidental blowouts—a strange detail to add to the simulation.

“Focus, Tabasco,” said Grant. He was watching Gheitley's stats—heart rate, breathing rhythm, EEG, cortisol and other stress hormone levels—it was as if he was reading Gheitley's mind.

Gheitley fired into the doorframe and nailed the pneumatics with the first shot. The door snapped open. Three figures were crouched in a corner of the kitchen. Tag the targets rung in his head—not a voice, not a message in his heads-up display, but a hard thought—a directive plugged straight into his mind. He took aim.

He couldn't pick out a detail like he had been trained to do—a logo on a shirt, a line on a helmet, a nostril on a face—but something was stopping him from seeing the details. Their faces vibrated in and out of focus.

The single, hard thought burned intensely—tag the targets—but Gheitley's eyes refused to find focus. He looked down at the floor. Tiny, child-sized shoes scuffed putty-colored lines into the tile as they tried to scramble away from him.

This simulation is too real.

But that was the test—to see if he could handle it.

He brought up the scope of his railgun, aimed at the center of the face-blur and fired.

One hundred points.

He aimed at the other two figures behind the dead weight of the first and fired again.

One hundred points.

Seventy-five points.

A crisp, fizzing sound filled his earphones as the bodies melted into green froth.

Why did the bodies sizzle like that? In the other simulations, the bodies didn't sizzle. He pushed the thought out of his mind. A pleasant feeling then washed through him. He felt good. He felt really good. He felt invincible.

“Clear the next hab!” Boondock barked, slapping Gheitley's shoulder. “Pop and go, Tabasco! No survivors!”

Gheitley sat in the conference room with eleven other
scouts. The walls held no hint that he was deep underground, and the room appeared like any other conference room in Tharsis City or Peacock Station, except the people sitting in these chairs were not executives in expensive suits discussing quarterly earnings—these were scarred and dust-etched soldiers in dingy fatigues spitting expensive vodka across the table at each other. The dimmed overhead lights carved their unshaved faces in shadow as they drank and laughed about their missions.

“This guy threw his chair at me!” an albino named Crater laughed, “An inflatable chair! Idiot. I nearly missed him I was laughing so hard.”

The Tharsis News Network was on screen and blaring, but nobody was listening. A pretty, blonde newscaster spoke in her standard buoyant tone about the worsening weather patterns on Mars. Hotter autumns brought stronger storms, and with stronger storms came the inevitable nightmares.

“If the next story is any indication of what we can expect this winter, we are indeed in for a cruel, hot season in North Tharsis,” she said.

“This is it! Tabasco! Boon! Pincer, you're up!” one of the soldiers barked from across the table, pointing at the screen.

“Sometime this afternoon, every occupant of Kescura village has vanished without a trace. TNN has obtained footage taken from the Redpaw investigative team that was dispatched to the scene….”

Gheitley was slapped on the back as whoops and cheers erupted from all corners of the room. He felt cold. A headache throbbed behind his temples. The camera focused a tight shot of a kitchen counter and a meal half eaten.

“This small village was planning their menu for their Solstice Feast when tragedy struck. Here you see a world frozen in time, as if an entire village disappeared in the blink of an eye.”

The camera pulled out to frame the same kitchen Gheitley had left not four hours ago. He recognized the scuffs on the tile floor where the owner of tiny cloth shoes had tried to push away from him.

He remembered the screams.

He felt sick.

There were no bodies on the floor, no blood, just an empty kitchen—the exact same kitchen from the simulation. But it was just a test. It was just a simulation.

The blonde went on to detail the number of villagers that were missing in this and three other villages, and how many disappearances there had been in previous years. Thousands. Charts and dates.

“The Rotgeist are still out there,” she said.

“That's it. That's it!” someone said, wagging his finger at the screen. There were cheers and feral smiles aimed at Gheitley. The word tragedy came from the blonde's mouth, and the rest was lost in a swell of distorted laughs and howls discharging from the leering faces of his teammates.

Teammates. Something roiled in Gheitley's guts.

“What's wrong, Tabasco? Can't handle your drink?”

Boondock was leaning in toward Gheitley's face, breathing through a vicious smile. Gheitley pushed away from the table and ran out of the room, laughter pealing in his wake. He skidded around the corner, found a recycle bin, and emptied his guts.

Tiny shoes scrabbling over a tile floor played over and over in his head.

His headache throbbed as he heaved again. It was the implant, burrowing deeper into his skull. He heaved again, and saw their faces. Three children. Children. He had shot three children. There had been others, but they were a cold blur to him now.

He tried to remember details, but a searing spike drove deeper into his brain, erupting in fractal explosions behind his eyes. It was the implant—it shut down the bad memories, and he welcomed the relief. Distantly, he thanked it for saving him from more pain, and it felt like a weak prayer to a neglected deity. The pain stopped altogether.

His head finally quiet, his forehead resting against the cool edge of the recycle bin, cold sweat crawled down his chest. He felt like he was floating outside his own body.

The image of the little shoe threatened to emerge—just an inkling, a potential—and then it receded again, nudged back into the dark by some cold, denying hand.

Gheitley rolled off of the bin and sat on the floor, leaning his back against the wall. His eyes hurt to move. A figure stepped into his periphery. It took effort to move to see who it was.

Ford.

“Everyone goes through it,” Ford said, crouching to meet his eyes.

It hurt to blink.

“Real Rotgeists, Gheitley. Rebels are working against us. They're subverting all that we are trying to build here on Mars.”

Gheitley breathed in and out, hearing the words, but had difficulty finding their meaning.

“We can't just pop the ones we know are Rebels. We have to pop the whole village … to cover our asses. In case we miss someone important.”

“But … they were just kids.”

“They're terrorists in training, Tabasco. We have to fight terror with terror. No mercy. No survivors.”

Some kind of logic blossomed in Gheitley's head. Some warm comfort filled him, like a mother's lullaby. The screams were now silenced, but his mind flashed back to the frothing stain growing on the kitchen floor. If it was all real, what really happened to the bodies?

“What do those guns fire?” Gheitley managed. “The green froth?”

Ford looked up at the ceiling, searching for his answer there.

“It's ‘Pagan', the terraforming chem, but it's been modified to work on specific organic compounds.” Ford let that hang. “Targets human bodies. Leaves no trace.”