The Mars Shock (20 page)

Pratt was in the break room, too. The little room had a LivingLawn™ carpet of real grass—you had to take your shoes off to enter—and a soundtrack of waterfalls. It was supposed to be relaxing. It made her think of the Congo, someplace where there were no people anymore.

“We screwed up,” she said. “Jesus. They’re warblers. They’re
human,
and we murdered them.”

Pratt slumped with his long legs stretched out in front of him, slurping yogurt from a pouch. “They murdered that poor fucker from the ISA.
Worse
than murder, what happened to him.”
Slurp.

“Did you see what Drudge was doing? No, you were outside. That kid’s heading for a meeting with no tea and biscuits.”

“It’s tit for tat, ma’am.”

“No. Sophie was right.”

“Sophie who?”

“Gilchrist. A friend of mine. She thought the PLAN was targeting the warblers, and she was right. The PLAN’s in the middle of a civil war. The AI in Olympus Mons, versus the warblers. They were
hiding
in there! Hiding … from KKV strikes.”

“Guess we’re rescuing them,” Pratt said. “But what are we gonna do with Murray?”

“He’s infected. We can’t bring him back here. I’ll ask Squiffy.” Colden tossed her Mars Bar wrapper into the recycling. “We shouldn’t both be out here at the same time.”

“No, you’re right.” Pratt finished his yogurt and took out a cigarette. He blew vapor at the NO VAPING sign.

“Give me a drag. Wait, what’s in it?”

“Mostly THC.”

“Oh, never mind then. Actually, I’d prefer it if you stayed off that stuff while we’re working.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Pratt said, rolling his eyes.

Colden made a mental note to request that Pratt be rotated out of her platoon. Then she went back into the telepresence center. Before logging in, she sent an urgent email to Commander Jackson asking for advice on what they should do with Murray.

Then she went back to work.

Her phavatar, obeying commands from Hawker, had gone into service as an outboard engine. Kicking up low-gee geysers of water, she was pushing a dinghy laden with Martian children across the lake. She instinctively raised her head out of the water. There were two other boats ahead of hers, one being propelled by Drudge, the other by bamboo poles.

“What did I miss?” she line-of-sighted.

“Oh, nothing very interesting,” Hawker replied. “Theta Base is coming to pay us a visit. That’s all. Nothing very fucking exciting. We’re all going to die, that’s all. Where the fuck are the Chinese?”

xii.

Kristiansen crouched on the shore of the lake, staring through his faceplate at the crumbly soil. A spot of agony over his left ear throbbed. He felt like he had a hole in his head—because he did. Where all his personal data, job-related records, vid archives, and libraries of books and music had been, was … nothing. He’d had his BCI since he was fifteen. Precisely because it had been so much a part of him, he’d rarely noticed it was there. But he noticed its absence.

Now
he knew how the Server had felt when the St. Stephen virus disabled her memories.

He felt
stupid.

He relived the moments when Murray had hacked his way out of the Evac-U-Tent. The man turned out to have artificial fingernails that could morph into razorblades. Guess those didn’t qualify for exclusion under the ISA’s no-augments policy. He also had a drugstore implant, of course. The ISA was hardly going to send its agents into the field without a whole pharmacy of stimulants and painkillers at their fingertips—literally at their fingertips: Murray had not had a BCI, but he could dose himself by pushing tiny buttons on a panel set into his inner arm. That was convenient enough for the PLAN. Fully under the AI’s control, Murray had destroyed the medibot in a frenzy, before turning on them.

Terrified, the born-agains had scattered. Stephen One had hauled Kristiansen into one of the rowboats. He’d still been too woozy from the anesthetic to be any help. He remembered the rocking of the boat. Then it all broke up.

The next thing he remembered was delivering stillborn quintuplets. There’d been so much blood. Stephen One had asked him to help because he thought Kristiansen was a doctor. What irony. All his medical knowledge had been on his BCI.

Squatting, rocking, he heard Hawker’s voice.

“Theta Base is moving across the Miller Flats. It’s currently 62 klicks away, and at its current rate of approach will be here in one hour and twenty minutes. Just to give you an idea of what we’re dealing with, Theta’s route was blocked by three Chinese tanks, equipped with charged-particle cannons, which are among the scariest weapons known to humanity. Those tanks do not exist anymore. Theta slagged them from over the horizon, using actively guided anti-ship nukes, which are some of the
other
scariest weapons in humanity’s arsenal. They’ve got onboard MI guidance. They shouldn’t really exist. The gunners at Theta were using them to intercept KKVs, which was deemed to be A-OK.”

Colden’s voice said, “My view is we should stay here and wait for our assets in orbit to deliver an orbit-to-surface strike.”

Kristiansen couldn’t believe it was her. What were the odds? Did Star Force have
that
few competent telepresence operators? Bleakly, he suspected that was probably the case. The other face of the coin was that Jen Colden had always wanted power and authority. Now she had both: an eight-foot combat-optimized phavatar, with a platoon leader’s stripe on the shoulder area of its carapace. She sounded calm and confident. Wasn’t her conscience troubling her at all?

“I’m not going to assume we’re safe here,” she went on. “Theta Base’s anti-ship missiles deliver five Hiroshimas each. However, we’re a lot safer here than we would be on the surface.”

“Might be an idea to retreat up the chasm,” Hawker said. “Except we’d be going in the wrong direction.”

“Why doesn’t Deimos fucking hurry up?” demanded one of the grunts.

“It takes time to line up a strike,” Colden started, and then her voice suddenly cut out. Kristiansen raised his head with a weary flicker of curiosity.

Hawker stood in the middle of a mob of Martian children, with Stephen One watching over them. The other Star Force soldiers stood guard over Murray, who was lying on the ground in his spacesuit, trussed with twang cords and splart-reinforced knots. The lake was boiling. Three phavatars stood in sentry positions, facing the edges of the clearing. Colden’s phavatar had also been acting as a sentry, but now it clumped into the midst of them and spoke … in a different voice.

“This is Jackson. To answer your question, Private, we will not be carrying out an orbital strike on Theta Base at this time. Now obviously, this is a crisis without precedent, so our operational guidelines are evolving, but at the present time we regard this as a hostage situation. We will be handling it as such, and initially deploying non-lethal assets with the goal of obtaining better information on the status of our people.”

Hawker snarled, “With all due respect, sir, that is not necessary. I can tell you what the status of those people is. I’ve got one of them right here. Murray, wanna say hello?”

Murray writhed so he was facing Colden’s phavatar. “Commander, I’m appealing to you personally.” He sounded like himself again. Kristiansen had never credited the PLAN with craftiness. But after the way Murray had tricked him, he’d changed his mind.
If I had a BCI, I could interface with the PLAN,
Kristiansen recalled.
It’ll tell me everything …
Murray spoke on, with just the right amount of stress coloring his reasonable tone.
“Your men are convinced I’m dangerous, but all I want is to share with you what I’ve learned about the PLAN. And I’m sure that is also the goal of the soldiers in Theta Base. If they took out the Chinese tanks, it was to prevent sensitive information from falling into the hands of the Imperial Republic.”

Kristiansen was on the edge of believing it himself, but Colden’s phavatar pointed at Murray and said in her own voice, “You can shut up now. He didn’t even
hear
you.” Turning to Hawker, “He didn’t hear you, either. He busted into my session from on high, said his piece, and then bombed off again. He must be busy.”

The grunts chortled. Kristiansen felt a ridiculous stab of envy at the camaraderie that allowed them to share a joke at their commanding officer’s expense.

“Hawker,” Colden went on, “I’ve got orders for you: the usual ten-page screed with bonus ass-covering verbiage. Want the highlights now, or later?”

“Oh, you might as well go ahead and ruin my day.”

“We’ve been ordered to return to Alpha Base immediately. Nothing said about the fact that Theta Base is in the way.”

“Lovely.”

“We’re to leave Murray here. That’s the good news.
But
we’re to take the warblers. So Kristiansen, that’s some good news for you, isn’t it?”

Kristiansen wondered what he’d done to deserve her spite. With all eyes on him, he spoke for the first time. “It’s not particularly good news, if we’re going to be vaporized.”

“Yeah, there is that,” Hawker said—a grudging acknowledgement of Kristiansen’s existence. “Any word on what the Chinese are up to, Colden?”

“No; bloody Pratt is still on break.”

A violent tremor shook the bunker. One of the overhead light fixtures that had been obscured by the mist broke loose and swung down, narrowly missing them. As fragments of roof pattered down, the grunts took off like frightened cats, heedless of Hawker bawling at them. Colden and the other phavatars followed. Skull-Face brought up the rear, shepherding the Martian children. He was likely only being solicitous because he had designs on them, Kristiansen thought in disgust.

Stephen One gripped Kristiansen’s arm. “This is nothing!” he said. “Are all your people
Sitzpinklers?”

“No, they’re just scared,” Kristiansen said. “One suit breach, and we’ll join Murray on the crazy train.” He found that after all, he did want to keep on living.

“Why don’t you just sing?”

“Sing?
Stephen One, singing isn’t going to stop an anti-ship nuke.”

“But it stops the
Naniten.”

Kristiansen frowned. He had wondered why the ambient nanites didn’t reinfect the born-agains. Stephen One seemed to be saying that their song acted as a prophylactic. But that contradicted the Server’s belief that the music file was just a dropper …

Before Kristiansen could voice any more questions, Stephen One took off running. He was keen to keep the children in sight. Kristiansen blundered after him through the bamboo. The identical thickets, and the blowing mist, wrecked his sense of direction, but he felt sure it shouldn’t have been this far to the elevator. And the ground should have sloped up, not down.

A low rumbling noise came from ahead, so deep-pitched that Kristiansen felt it in his ribcage. His blood froze. That was the sound of immense tractor treads grinding over the Martian regolith. He’d last heard it when he was standing on the launchpad of Theta Base.

Daylight struggled through the bamboo. Dust mingled with the mist. A stand of bamboo leaned sideways and fell towards them. Behind it loomed a huge shovel blade, attached to the most beautiful sight Kristiansen had seen in days: a bright red Chinese tank.

Stephen One moaned, “What are they
doing?”

“It looks to me,” Kristiansen said, “as if they knocked down your back door so they can fit their tanks into the bunker.”

“Idiots!
Idiots!
”

The tank halted, its shovel blade suspended in the air. A Chinese officer picked his way around it. He spoke to Hawker. There was back-slapping, bicep-punching, and hollow laughter. “Maybe we will be buried alive like the Terracotta Army,” the Chinese officer said.

“I’d rather not, if it’s all the same to you, Jin-Wei.”

“We have no time to spare,” Stephen One coughed. “Quick.” He pulled Kristiansen up the newly graded slope.

They stumbled around the tank, onto a broad suburban street. The proportions of the buildings, even though they were partially demolished, the strips of waste ground between them, and even the Death Buggies—with their silhouettes not dissimilar to terrestrial minivans—punched Kristiansen’s normality buttons. It was just like some rustic town in North America … that had been bombed.

“Stay with me,” Stephen One panted. “Otherwise, they might shoot me. That’s what happened to the others.”

Kristiansen questioned him about his intentions, but Stephen One’s mouth stayed closed. Now that they were outside, talking would have stressed his system by overloading his blood with CO2. His tight-lipped expression pulled his face into the cliched, sinister Martian smile. It was easy to see how Colden’s platoon could have mistaken the other Stephens for muppets when they were outside.

Beckoning to Kristiansen, Stephen One sprinted down the street. Kristiansen ran after him. Where on earth was he going? Was he leaving the children behind with that dirty little shit in the skull-faced phavatar, who was just waiting for a chance to turn their heads into dashboard ornaments?