The Mars Shock (16 page)

Captain Sun stared at Drudge’s customized phavatar when he trotted up with the snacks. “You would not get away with that in the CTDF,” he said.

“It remains to be seen whether he’ll get away with it in Star Force,” Colden said darkly.

“Wah! Mint Aeros! My favorite. Thank you, Roland.” Captain Sun made the chocolate bars disappear into a pocket of his outer garment. “Here is the heatmap.” He sent it to them over the line-of-sight link.

Colden and Hawker examined it on the spot. One feature stuck out like a sore thumb. Lines marked red, for the 0-10° Celsius temperature range, snaked through an impact site at the south end of the ridge they were making for, based on Murray and Kristiansen’s last recorded location. The lines of heat wiggled across the mouth of a narrow chasm about 300 meters wide. On their own topological map, that area was shown as part of a PLAN town so wrecked, it was assumed that no Martians survived there—although assumptions of no Martians were almost always wrong, in Colden’s experience.

Hawker said, “Those lines are damned hot. Is that an artifact of data analysis?”

Captain Sun spoke sepulchrally into their situation space. “No. Based on laser induced breakdown spectroscopy in addition to IR, we assume those to be pipes.”

“Of what?”

“Water.”

Liquid water had been known to flow on the surface of Mars even before the planet was colonized. It melted out of sedimentary rocks in the Martian summer and seeped down cliff faces. Bodies of open water could not exist in an atmosphere where water boiled at 10° C. But the PLAN had used water-cooled reactors in its cities, piping the waste heat through klicks of pipes. This could be the remains of one of those systems, although it would be strange to find pipes intact in an area where everything else had been slagged by a moon fragment.

Colden said, “What’s that yellow dotted circle in the southeast quadrant of this map?”

“Whoops,” Captain Sun said. “Please erase that.”

“Not until you tell me why,” Hawker said joyfully.

Sun’s grumpy tone betrayed shame at his own screw-up. “It is our mission objective. Or it
was
our mission objective, until you neo-imperialist barbarians lost an entire MFOB, forcing us to redeploy.”

“Neo-imperialist barbarian yourself, Jin-Wei, you filthy capitalist,” Hawker snorted. “Bet I know what that is! It’s one of those modules. You figured you’d nip up there and see if there was anything worth selling on the gray market.”

“What modules?” Colden started. Hawker shushed her.

“You have a shockingly ill-formed sense of ethics,” Sun said primly. “I was
ordered
to salvage the module, for your information.”

“If you were, it’s only because your colonel has a buyer lined up,” Hawker said. “Nah; I’m just kidding, Jin-Wei. I know you’d never do something like that. Thanks for the map.”

“Thanks for the chocolate, Roland.”

“We’ll be on our way now.”

As they walked back to the Death Buggies, Hawker filled Colden in on the possibility that a Chinese hab module, part of Tiangong Erhao, had crash-landed on the surface close to here.
“We
want it. Theta Base was going to salvage it. That’s why they were up on Wallaby Ridge in the first place. There’s supposedly some kind of top-secret Chinese computer code in the module’s hub. I can’t imagine it survived the crash landing, but they can do amazing things with data recovery these days.”

“If it’s Chinese code, presumably they’ve already got it?” Colden said. “So why would they send tanks up there?”

“To stop us from getting it, of course. But Jin-Wei is primarily interested in war memorabilia. I know that for a fact, because he cut me in last time he sent a shipment off planet.”

“Hmmm,” Colden said. “Is your name really Roland? It just says ‘R’ on your ID.”

“Yes, but don’t tell anyone.”

They reached the buggies. Hawker climbed in. Colden and Pratt resumed their forward scouting positions. The convoy set off through the flood of light from the Chinese tanks. This time, no one targeted them.

But as they passed into the darkness, two of the tanks ground into motion and followed them.

x.

The underground lake steamed like a hot bath. The speaker above the door of the silo had gone silent.

The door swung open. Kristiansen followed the born-again Martians into an open-plan office lit by overhead fixtures.

Whatever he’d expected, it wasn’t this. It looked ridiculously similar to the back office of some small company on Earth. Messy desks stood in island arrangements, crowded with clunky computer equipment.

And stacks of paper.

Like the office of some small company on Earth … a hundred years ago. No one used paper anymore.

“Don’t just stand there dripping on the mat,” the same female voice as before called out. Its owner glided into view, seated on an office chair with wheels, propelling herself with her feet. She was the first Martian woman Kristiansen had seen. She looked to be in her early forties, and wore a sack-like tunic over leggings. Her long black hair hung in a braid down her back. At first glance Kristiansen thought she was hugely fat. Then he realized she was hugely pregnant.

“I’m only in my ninth week,” she said. “By my third trimester, I won’t be able to walk at all. I’ll have to work from bed. It’s lucky you came now.”

Kristiansen again felt, acutely, the awkwardness of being encased in an EVA suit, with a faceplate between him and the Martians. “I assume you know why we’re here, madam.”
Gnädige Frau.
It came out without calculation. It just seemed the least he could do was to be polite. “We want to help you. The United Nations stands ready to offer you refuge. But we
must
hurry.”

“Why?”

“Because my colleague has been exposed to the
Naniten.
You seem to know a great deal about medicine. Is there any way to help him?”

The woman laughed. “Knowledgeable? Me?” She waved at the stacks of printouts sliding off the desks. “I know only as much as I’ve been able to absorb from my backups. It’s in no kind of order. Imagine an encyclopedia in the form of a jigsaw puzzle, in a foreign language. That’s what this is. I’ve been putting the pieces together for months. I only just got to G, for glycolysis. That’s when I figured out why our freedom has come at such a cost. It’s all to do with intracellular CO2 uptake.”

Kristiansen’s confusion receded somewhat. He nodded, on familiar ground now. Human or Martian, biology was biology. The born-agains’ physical weakness and their muscle spasms, which he had taken for nervous fidgeting, were symptoms of metabolic alkalosis.

Kristiansen had no medical credentials, but he’d picked up a lot during his career with Medecins Sans Frontieres. “We need to be careful because of your altered physiology, but normally I would say you need ACE inhibitors, carbonic anhydrase inhibitors and extra fluids. Longer-term, you’ll need supplementation to fix your bone salts. Have you seen any cases of vomiting or renal failure?”

“V? R? I haven’t got that far yet,” the woman answered.

“Your increased CO2 expulsion must be engineered at the DNA level. The nanites would have worked with that, regulating your blood CO2 levels,” Kristiansen said, thinking aloud. “That would mean your bodies are now overcompensating, blowing off too much CO2. Have there been any deaths?”

“A lot of us died in the early days, but I don’t need an encyclopedia to call
that
by its name. They offed themselves
.
Completely unable to deal with freedom.” She twirled a hand, dismissing their memory.
“Sitzpinklers.”

Stephen One, who was leafing through printouts, said, “Their own limbic systems killed them.” He stuck his tongue out at the woman.
“I
started with L.”

“L for laser,” the woman said, fondly. She shooed him away. “Go, go check the fax and the cameras. I can’t get up those stairs.” She watched him go, followed by the others. “My favorite son,” she confided to Kristiansen in a low voice. “I was happy he survived. That was the first taste I ever had of happiness.
True
happiness; it’s so different from dreaming. After that, I knew I had to survive, too.”

Kristiansen took on board that this woman was Stephen One’s mother—if it was true, she must have given birth in her early teens—and decided not to inquire further.
“Frau Doktor,
I would be honored to talk with you at greater length, but this is urgent. I have to ask again. Is there any way to help my colleague? Couldn’t we infect him with the St. Stephen virus, as an antidote to the
Naniten?”

“The St. Stephen virus.” She unexpectedly sang a snatch of Latin. She had a lovely voice. “It came out of the sky, disguised as a distress call from one of the god’s stealth fighters. I remember
that.”

“It came from China,” Kristiansen said. “But we don’t have the source code, and we need it.” Murray would be proud of him. But he wasn’t interested in giving the UN a leg up on the Chinese. He was interested in saving Murray’s life—and the lives of the born-again Martians—in that order. He formulated these priorities coldly. He needed to switch off his emotions to keep functioning. “Do you have it?”

“I’m not sure. I could sing it to you, if that would help. But it probably wouldn’t. The music file is just a dropper. It drops a bash script that executes a wiper, which presumably erases the virus itself along with everything else.”

Kristiansen’s patience snapped. She was stonewalling him, just like Admiral McLean back on Eureka Station, holding back information that could save people. Information that could save
Murray.
Without whom none of them would get out of here alive.

He slammed a gloved fist on the edge of a desk. Sheaves of paper cascaded to the floor. “ ‘Presumably’! ‘Probably’! ‘I’m not sure’! Do you HAVE the source code, or NOT?”

The woman stared at him for a second. Then she effortfully bent over sideways and tried to pick up the papers. Feeling ashamed of himself, Kristiansen gathered them up for her.

“It’s all in here,” she said, sitting with a sheaf of papers on her lap. She didn’t have much of a lap. “The source code might be here, too. We’ve found some strings that don’t look like our stuff. I know that’s not much help.”

Kristiansen frowned, getting control of his temper. He glanced at the papers he held. Long strings of letters and numbers bracketed English phrases related to gamma globins, gluconeogenesis, and glycolysis—all the Gs. He was no computer expert, but this looked like the raw content of a medical database. Could the secrets Murray sought be hidden in here? Kristiansen started, “When the PLAN cut you off from the network—”

“We were components in the god’s network, and we’d failed. That’s what you do with failed components. You remove them.”

And then you recycle them,
Kristiansen thought with a shiver. After disconnecting the staff of Archive 394, the PLAN had sicced its muppets—the
untermenschen,
as Stephen One put it—on them. It was reductive to think of the born-agains as mere failed components. Their freedom threatened the PLAN’s very existence, regardless of what information they did or did not possess.

“It was indescribably frightening, and uplifting. But my first experience of freedom was followed by a terrible realization.
I couldn’t remember anything.”

“I don’t understand,” Kristiansen had to confess.

“It’s all in here!” The woman slapped the side of her head. “Let me put it in the simplest possible terms. We were a Beowulf cluster. Our memory was stored in the server node. When the nanites broke, we lost our processing capacity. And what use is memory if you can’t read it?”

Her ‘simplest possible terms’ were not simple to Kristiansen. He didn’t know the term ‘Beowulf cluster.’ Still, he grasped what she was saying. It dovetailed with Murray’s hypothesis about the St. Stephen virus—that it had crashed the Martians’ neuroware. His understanding of the born-agains underwent a wrenching realignment. So
that
was why Stephen One had kept saying ‘I don’t remember.’

They’d literally lost their memories.

Clearly, not
all
their memories. Emotionally charged items, stored in regions not directly governed by the neuroware, would remain. The brain was a complex organ, even based on Kristiansen’s limited knowledge of neuroscience. It found workarounds. But certain categories of information and abstract knowledge would be irretrievably locked away. He couldn’t imagine what that felt like.

“I’m sorry.” The words felt inadequate, and yet he understood that a human saying sorry to a Martian was crossing a boundary, for better or for worse. “Are your memories in here?” he asked, indicating the stacks of print-outs. Perhaps they could be recompiled …

The woman shook her head. She was regal in her heaviness and stillness. “I was the server. When you broke the nanites, you broke me. It’s all in here, but I can’t read it.” Again she touched her temple, a gesture as helpless as trying to reach across the void of space.

“I’m sorry. … Then these hard copies are …?”