The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades (5 page)

They sold it to him—and the rest of us—by playing it
up as an essential and high risk mission. None of that is a lie,
it’s just that it’s obvious that they didn’t select anyone for the
three Leviathan teams just for our skillsets. Hence Specialist
Sharp, who has no apparent skillsets beyond her vacantly-absolute
loyalty to Earthside, and certainly none remotely related to recon
ops or running a nuclear-powered rolling CP. That tells me her only
reason for being on the team is to keep an eye on us, to make sure
we’re toeing the line. I’ve startled her a few times just walking
in on her off-shift in our shared rack space, and she’ll snap off
her flashcard and pocket it (or shove it in her underwear if she’s
not wearing anything with pockets, hopefully remembering to turn
the camera off first). I’m sure what she’s doing is slipping her
own encrypted reports to Upworld Command, probably hidden in her
personal messages home.

So that also means Sharp is likely the only one of us
who freely volunteered for this mission. The rest of us they just
wanted to get well-away from their primary foothold, from on-planet
Ops, so they applied the appropriate pressure. I’m sure they would
have sent several select members of the veteran tech and medical
divisions—and Colonel Ava—if they could justify it.

(Though I have my own secret agenda for being here:
If we can find any remnants of Chang’s former forces, his hidden
bases, I might be able to find surviving Peace Keepers—my
people—and convince them to go home, rebuild.)

I zone out, staring through the slit viewports—a good
twenty centimeters of layered polycarb between me and the cold thin
outside, and whatever’s out in the cold thin, which has been
nothing but desert and a few stripped ruins so far. I guess I
should be grateful for the view.

“We never got to see topside at Industry, not unless
we were on sentry duty—that was usually a reward for our best
snipers, if you could call freezing in an H-A can for six hour
shifts a reward…” I’m rambling to fill the monotony as the big
treads under us grind the landscape as we crawl. “The Civvies never
saw daylight at all, unless there was a repair job up in the
topside structures. Their whole life was underground. I grew up
living in tunnels, playing in tunnels. Crowding around heaters
whenever we weren’t generating our own heat from hard work. Always
in minimal light to conserve power—full daylight still burns a bit,
but it helps in low-light ops. Things got a little better when I
was old enough for Service, for Academy. There was heat. Metal
walls. Better light, at least for studies. Much better food, and
more of it. Regular showers. And topside time, when there were
missions. I remember the first time I got out under open sky, how
bright and disorienting it was… I almost fell over, in front of the
whole unit… but I wasn’t the only one. I think the Seniors enjoyed
that, watching us freak about being outside, like they’d tossed us
into the void of space… huh…”

“What?” Rios is an attentive listener.

“Just thinking… When we had to evac, after the
rebellion, when Chang sent his toys after us… I hustled three
hundred people outside, two thirds of them Civvies. So most had
never been outside before. I didn’t have time to enjoy their first
taste of it, and neither did they. It was all terror and running
and ducking.”

“Colonel Ram was there, wasn’t he?” He apparently
doesn’t care who’s listening, reporting. (Sharp pretends she isn’t,
pretends she’s bored numb.) I nod.

“And Captain Bly. And the Blue ETE: Paul Stilson. And
the Devil. Bel. We wouldn’t have made it out without them.”

“Your men didn’t take down the Box bot?” he refers to
my official report.

“We were a distraction at best. I lost a lot of good
people that day. I would have lost them all…”

He lets my falsification go. I know he understands
what any association with Ram or those like him will incur from
Upworld. And maybe our shared association connects us, though I
know I can’t compare: He served under Ram, fought by his side for
years. Ram and I just collided occasionally, usually as enemies,
and once as my savior.

“How’d you get the scar?” he brings me back as I’m
zoning again, pointing almost shyly to the corresponding spot below
the corner of his own mouth. “May I ask?”

I force a smile. Fail.

“Cutting torch. I was still cherry, just out of
Academy… There was this… problem… with one of the Civvies. A
welder. Good one. High risk work, up in the structures, exposed.
His wife got sick. So did a lot of others. Breakdown in one of the
recyclers, missed some nasty E-Coli. But she was pregnant. And the
Pharmos weren’t able to keep up with drug-synthing. He wanted
special priority for her. Section MP told him no. She got worse, so
he threatened to blow the section, rigged it with fuel canisters.
He would have killed thirty or forty people. I took a squad in, all
full of myself, to deal with it.”

“You killed him?” he asks without judgment.

“It wasn’t my intention. He was an asset. But I
didn’t know he was almost as sick as she was. Fever. Dehydration.
Made him crazy. We had no choice. I had to fire… Next thing I know…
He had a son, ten years old. Kid grabbed his dad’s cutter, tried to
set off the canisters. I tackled him, didn’t want to hurt him. He
shoved the thing in my face, still live. The shock took me down, my
face sizzling and smoking, I could
taste
myself cooking
inside my goddamn mouth.… So my sergeant shot him. Right in front
of me. I saw his eyes… Blood all over me.”

He lets me get quiet, just sits there with me as we
roll on. Then Sharp lets me know she was listening.

“What happened to his wife? The baby?”

“They died.”

Dinner is quiet tonight. I guess my happy little
story killed whatever cheer we manage to muster. But I don’t have a
lot of stories of rousing adventure like Rios, Jane, Horton and
Wei, fighting alongside the great Mike Ram in heroic battles.

My battles were all skirmishes against Nomad and
Pirate incursions. And, thanks to our snipers, we rarely engaged
them close enough for any real fighting. When we were finally
pushed into big battles, it was in the service of Chang, and he
used us mostly for decoration, arraying us in neat ranks in clean
new uniforms to intimidate, then left us to get slaughtered when we
weren’t so intimidating. I watched hundreds of my fellows, my
friends, die under fire, cut to pieces, incinerated, blown apart.
Then I spent weeks in a makeshift UNMAC POW hospital, somehow too
lucky to die with them. And then I had to kill more of my fellows,
my friends, when some of us decided we’d had enough, and tried to
say no to Chang.

I know Rios, Jane, Horton, Wei and especially Lyra
have had their own share of loss. Scut says Rios had a close thing
going with another platoon leader, but she got killed—of all the
bad luck during their first contact with the Northeast Nomads.
Thirty minutes later, they were allies. I can’t imagine what that’s
like: Playing friendly with the people who killed someone you love.
(I should be able to say that about the UNMAC—including Rios
himself—for the deaths of over four hundred of mine, but I blame
that on Chang. The UNMAC warfighters were just doing their jobs,
trying to survive. We thought we were. We were wrong.)

The tiny fold-out tables make us sit in tight, wedged
hip-to-hip. The others grouse about this every time like it’s a
tradition, as we do our little wresting match to get our arms to
our food, all of them used to bigger accommodations on base, or
before that, wherever they called “home”. And they tell stories of
those homes, of happy family dinners on Earth, a place I can’t
begin to imagine. Except for Lyra, who—like me—has never been
there, having been born here. Me, I never got to eat at a proper
table until Academy. And then in Service it was always at post or
in barracks with my unit, unless I was invited to a feast-night
with the Seniors, a recognition for good service.

And I’m actually grateful for the ration packs. Rios,
Jane, Horton and Wei got spoiled by the bounty of the base
greenhouse, and with what they traded with the Nomads, before
Upworld Command shut that all down. All that I miss—and the vets as
well—are the meat flavors. And the sweets. (And the home-craft
hooch and brew, off-shift of course.) New Righteous Earth has
banned all such things, and has no issue with enforcing their
values on the rest of us.

The good news is both Wei and Captain Rios are magic
cooks, even with limited stocks to work from, and happily take
turns feeding us, something that picks up all of our days. And
full-belly, even my mood is improved enough to enjoy my KP
rotation. Because it’s more than just duty. It’s something to do
for people you care about. My new unit.

I’m also grateful for the rolling can we’re packed
into, believe it or not. It’s tight, but it beats tunnels. It’s
warm. It’s clean. It’s brighter than what I’m used to (but not
uncomfortably so to my eyes). The recyclers keep up. And there are
viewports on the Bridge. I do have to share cupboard-sized quarters
with Lyra and Sharp—the Upworld morality insisting sexes sleep and
get geared-up/down separately from each other for some reason, like
we can’t control ourselves at all—but it’s a bed, and sometimes
it’s privacy.

And it’s about as secure as something not made of
reinforced concrete and buried deep underground can be: The main
hull is a sectional module that was manufactured on Earth and
shuttled here for the restoration of Phobos Base, but the specs
were off (blame the rush job), and it didn’t quite fit with the
other sections. But it’s armored against Disc attack (supposedly)
and built for the vacuum of space.
And
it proved sturdy
enough to be dropped from orbit on recycled chutes.

And “tight” is twenty-five meters long and ten wide,
with enough head clearance to mostly avoid regular concussions.
(Though there are lots of odd ridges and rails all over to trip on
and bang into, since the thing was built to be used in zero-G.)
Inside, we’ve got spaces for three cupboard-sized “quarters”, a
small machine shop, a slightly-bigger lab (which Lyra seems very
happy to sleep in on a folding cot, giving Sharp and I the extra
space), an armory locker with H-A cans for everyone, a toilet with
an actual shower, a galley/mess that doubles as a map room (and a
rec room), and the Bridge, which is big enough for all of us to
enjoy the viewports and not be sitting on each other.

On top of the hull is a full-sized base battery,
cobbled from spare and salvaged parts, complete with dual 20mm
chain cannons and missile launchers. And if we don’t want to
totally vaporize any unfriendlies we might meet, there are AP
batteries fore and aft.

Below us (accessible through heavy floor hatches) is
Stores, and the quad motors and reactor for our drive train. The
reactor was re-purposed from one of the incoming freighter shuttles
that was scavenged on arrival for the orbital construction project.
(One of my duties is to regularly check radiation levels to make
sure the shielding is as good as we’ve been told. Assuming my gear
is properly calibrated.)

And below that is my contribution: Treads from four
heavy construction tractors to move all this tonnage over rough
terrain. They were left behind when Chang stripped our
sister-colonies for his Stormcloud. I knew where they were buried.
Lieutenant Thomason and Sergeant Mallard headed up the team that
linked them together and mounted this beast on top of them, using
ASVs for cranes. Then a skirt of armor was added to help protect
our motive system from potshots.

The biggest downside of the design is that the hull
is piled up ten meters off the deck—we’re almost fifteen meters
tall if you count the main turret. And that means we’re a really
big slow-moving target. An overspray of Mars-camo polycoat doesn’t
make us invisible. Or silent. We really are a massive monster.

And fittingly, we’re named after a monster—a Biblical
one, of course, given New Earth’s obsession with such things. My
attitude coming through, I had to point out that the Leviathan in
the Good Book was a
sea
monster. Apparently I wasn’t the
only one who noticed, so Command’s comeback seemed pretty
rehearsed: Spacecraft have always been referred to with some of the
same nomenclature as Earth’s water-faring vessels, it’s just that
they sail a different kind of sea. And, I suppose, so do we. After
all, the traditional names of certain expanses of waterless worlds,
including Mars, have included the appellation “Sea”. So here we
are, riding a sea monster.

What I actually believe is that using the Bible’s
land-based equivalent for a massive beast—Behemoth—would make these
things sound oversized, sluggish and awkward. Which
is
what
they are, but let’s not point out the obvious. Besides, “Leviathan”
just sounds cooler, like we should really
want
to ride
inside one. (Though I expect a guy named Jonah would have a good
counter-argument.)

Supporting the sea monster analogy, Rios says it
reminds him of being inside of a submarine he’d once visited back
on Earth. This just reminds me again how different our worlds are.
Of course I’ve seen seas, oceans, lakes—unthinkably massive
expanses of free surface water, and many kilometers deep in
places—but only in pictures and video files, part of my basic
schooling requirements. But I can’t grasp the concept of seeing one
for real, much less riding a vessel across or under the surface of
one. The biggest expanses of free-standing water I’ve ever seen—and
felt, got my body actually into—were the communal “hot tubs” they
had at Melas Two, and that was a weird enough experience, just a
dozen or so cubic meters of water… Water filling something as big
as our valley world—or even bigger, two-thirds of a
planet
—I
can’t even begin to imagine. So my concept of “sea”
is
an
expanse of open desert. We are in a sea monster.