The Mars Shock (12 page)

Kristiansen aimed his helmet lamp at the hole. The inner garment of Murray’s suit—the
actual
suit, the one that protected him—had a dark spot on the shoulder, a sign that the suit had patched itself.

Murray twisted, showing him another patch on the back of his shoulder. “Exit wound.”

“So that’s why you were grumbling about carrying the supplies,” Kristiansen said, stupidly. “You should have told me.” Then it sank in. “Your suit was breached.”

“That’s right, genius.”

“Oh …
no.”

Murray picked up the pouch of water he’d dropped and plugged it into his nutrient recycling unit. Drops of water welled out around the seal. They’d guessed right to begin with. The seal was good enough for government work. Not good enough to keep the nanites out. “I figure I might as well die well-hydrated.”

Kristiansen leaned against the cliff face. The news was shattering. Suddenly, hope came to him. “Nanites are
micron-
sized. They can’t move that fast. It takes these suits how long to patch themselves? Three minutes?”

“More like six. The epoxy doesn’t set hard immediately.”

“And the nanites couldn’t possibly move faster than a few microns per second. Your suit is a centimeter thick. Maybe it’s OK!”

“Yeah, maybe. And maybe not.”

“How do you feel?”

“No symptoms. Fingers crossed.”

Kristiansen bounded over to the Medimaster 5500 and tore at its tattered shrinkfoam packaging. “If worse comes to worst, let’s get you into the Evac-U-Tent.” He exposed the control panel, protected by a layer of capacitative perspex. Holding his breath, he flipped the power switch. The display lit up. “It’s working! No, shut up and listen to me for a change. This medibot has comprehensive scan functionality with sub-10 nanometer resolution. It can scan your blood, your brain, your bone marrow. It can even read the data on your BCI and any other augments you might have. Once we get a handle on the problem, we can look at options for treating the symptoms.”

“The symptoms?” Murray said. “As far as we know, the main symptom is a psychopathic urge to kill purebloods.”

Kristiansen remembered Murray casually asking him to confirm that he was a pureblood. Now he understood the motivation behind that question. Murray had wanted to know if, when the symptoms struck, he would be compelled to murder Kristiansen.

“How strong is the Evac-U-Tent?” Murray said.

“Strong.”

“I wonder if anyone’s ever tried to break out from inside one.” Murray chuckled. He threw his empty water pouch into the darkness. “I guess that’s an option. But when the time comes, I’ll probably just take my helmet off. I want your word of honor that if I can’t do that, for whatever reason, you’ll do it for me.”

Word of honor.
Kristiansen wouldn’t have expected to hear that phrase from an ISA agent. It compelled him to honesty. “I can’t promise that. I
will
promise that I’ll do anything in my power to save you.”

There was a moment’s silence. The overlapping arcs of their headlamps seemed to shrink. Kristiansen remembered that they had to worry about exhausting their suits’ power packs, as well as everything else.

“Well,” Murray said, “I guess we’d better start with walking. We should try to cover as much distance as possible before … before anything happens.”

Kristiansen nodded curtly and scanned the ground, looking for the refill packs Murray had dropped.

One of the water pouches had vanished. Kristiansen stamped further from their bivouac, looking for it. His time in the Belt had conditioned to him to view water as more precious than gold.

A flash of silver crossed his helmet lamp’s beam.

He instinctively jerked his head sideways.

The missing water pouch drifted to the ground near his boots.

Someone … or
something …
out there in the darkness had thrown it back.

vii.

Task Force Alpha mustered in the garage, ready to deploy. Colden zeroed in on one of the phavatars standing alongside the Death Buggies.

“Drudge,”
she said threateningly.

Drudge had finished customizing the phavatar he acquired from Mattis. He’d 3D-printed a oversized human skull and splarted it to the top edge of the carapace. It overshadowed and distracted the eye from the phavatar’s inoffensive face. Colden remembered the Martian skulls that ornamented the temple of the NASA hate cult. This was Drudge’s answer to that horror. For bonus ugliness, the eyes of his skull flashed red, and crossbones flanked it like gun barrels.

Captain Hawker laughed his ass off.

“He can’t deploy like that,” Colden said crossly.

“Why not?” Hawker said. “It might scare the muppets. Or at least confuse them.”

“Yes, sir, that’s the idea,” Drudge said virtuously.

The very fact that he said that convinced Colden he had some other motive, but she couldn’t guess what it was, so she let it go. Maybe he really had just wanted to indulge his creative side.

Only a couple of the phavatars they were taking were currently at Alpha Base. Colden scooped the others up from deployments far and wide, apologizing to their current operators. The tired agents relinquished their couches to her team. For herself, she took a phavatar that had recently been serviced and was in tip-top condition. She disengaged from the firefight its previous operator had been in, and started to run.

The phavatars were to rendezvous with Hawker’s team on the Miller Flats. Humanity had been going to town on Martian nomenclature, assigning names to features that had never had them. ‘Name a Crater’ competitions were being held on Earth. Many features now had English
and
Chinese names. The Miller Flats, a volcanic plain northwest of Olympus Mons, was one of a dozen features named after Bob Miller, the hero of the Phobos maneuver. In fact, it was anything but flat. Jagged rocks and ejecta from minor impact craters littered the rolling terrain.

The Death Buggies drove 200 km from Alpha Base to get there, bypassing cities they’d already cleared. Meanwhile, the phavatars converged on their route from various cities yet to be cleared. They all had different distances to travel. One was lost to a Martian ambush. One by one, the surviving phavatars caught up with the convoy.

Colden was the last to get there. The first thing she saw through the dust and gloom was Drudge’s phavatar riding on the roof of a Death Buggy.

“Drudge, what are you doing?”

“I’m flying a kite.”

“You’re
what?”

Drudge showed her the kite string, a gossamer-fine carbon-nanotube cable. The kite itself—invisible in the dust clouds overhead—was a radar transponder. By elevating it into the atmosphere, they broadcast their location to the missing men. Hopefully, that would tell them which way to walk.

“Goldberg’s lot came up with it,” Hawker explained. “They’ve been working on drone aircraft for surveillance. Earth sent a bunch of designs. None of them work as aircraft, but they took the best wing template and splarted a beacon on it.”

Aircraft on Mars: a dream as old as telescopes. The atmosphere was not thick enough to support full-sized airplanes. Their wings would’ve had to be kilometers long to achieve lift. Of course, it was possible to use short-hop spacecraft that travelled on ballistic trajectories. But the He3 shortage had gotten so bad, you couldn’t expect to have the use of a Superlifter or its Star Force equivalent, the Pegasus Lander, unless you were at least a colonel. And if you
did
get one, you risked being KKV’d …

Except that hardly ever happened, did it? It was more of a story they told themselves to feel better about not having air support.

Uneasily, Colden remembered Gilchrist’s theory that the PLAN targeted the warblers, not Star Force …

Hawker said he’d heard the ISA was sending a FlyingSaucer. But it wouldn’t get here for at least another day, if it ever did.

So they walked, and ran, and drove across the Miller Flats, heading for the last known location of the missing men.

Murray and Kristiansen had travelled 53 kilometers from Theta Base before losing their sat connection. Most people assumed they’d been ambushed by Martians at that point, making this a pointless mission at best and a dangerous one at worst.

Colden was in anguish. She couldn’t separate her feelings for Kristiansen from her feelings about the war in general. Each seemed as futile and eternal as the other. She took frequent breaks during their journey, which was unlike her, hiding out in the garden and vaping an illicit cigarette—this, too, was a new bad habit.

During one of her cigarette breaks, she got a ping from her deputy, Pratt. “Trouble,” he said breathlessly.

Colden flew back to the telepresence center and burrowed into her couch. When she saw what her phavatar was seeing, she reached into her BCI’s telemetry suite and commanded the drugstore implant in her left arm to inject her with a dose of morale juice. Space Corps agents weren’t supposed to use stimulants, but right now Colden felt the need for an artificial floor under her emotions.

She was not looking at anything real, but at a radar plot shared from Hawker’s buggy. In this ‘situation space,’ data was presented graphically for the whole team to see and comment on. Graphs and charts appeared to float on the surface of a table in a dark room. It was a low-tech, slow-moving version of the fighter pilot’s gestalt, supposedly to enable smarter decision-making.

“I’m thinking we run for home,” Hawker said.

The radar plot showed six moving objects approaching at 60-plus kph, about 40 klicks off.

“They’re coming down off Wallaby Ridge. That’s where Theta Base is operating,” Colden said.

Wallaby Ridge, named by some child in Australia who’d painted a cute picture of Mars, was one of the north-south wrinkles on the Mahfouz Gradient. It was the best route from the Miller Flats up to the flank of Olympus Mons. Theta Base had been climbing Wallaby Ridge when disaster struck. Presumably it still was. The group of vehicles on the radar plot had come from the same direction.

“They’re from Theta Base. Speed fits with them being Death Buggies,” Colden muttered, wishing the morale juice would hurry up and kick in.

“Maybe they’re survivors, coming to ask for help,” one of the grunts said optimistically.

The team had been brought up to speed on the disaster at Theta Base. They had taken it with a stoicism that Colden had found kind of heartbreaking. Now she realized that they just hadn’t believed what they were being told.

“Look at the comms log,” Hawker said. “I radioed them. There was no answer. And if anyone thinks that’s good news, I have a lightly used planet to sell you.”

Colden decided to radio them herself. “
Unknown unit, this is alpha one seven actual, please squawk IFF and state your intentions. If unable IFF, please respond to recognition code …” She checked the list. “Zero two niner alpha five, over
.”

No answer.

She tried again. “
Unknown unit, this is alpha one seven, radio check, over.”

Still nothing.

“They’re the Death Buggies from Theta Base, and they’re not friendly,” Hawker said. “It doesn’t take a genius to work that out.”

“Speaking of geniuses, they’re probably homing in on Drudge’s bloody kite.”

“Or on your telepresence signals.”

“Yes, we ought to spread out. But let’s get the kite down, pronto.”

Hawker left the situation space to help Drudge reel in the kite. Actually, turning off the transponder wouldn’t make much difference now. The fact that they’d acquired the DBs from Theta Base on their own radar meant that the DBs would also have acquired
them.
Hawker—who hadn’t meant it seriously when he talked about running for home—ordered the COPs to split up into two groups, one to act as a fire screen, the other to advance northeast to intercept the buggies from Theta Base. Colden took command of the intercept group. They sprinted at a steady pace into the dust.

Dusk was falling, making visibility worse. They ran for fifteen minutes, relying on their phavatars’ obstacle-avoidance routines and night-vision capability. Colden used the time to explain the situation to their mission coordinator at Alpha Base. Hawker’s comms with the MFOB were patchy, whereas she was right here, so she took responsibility for telling the coordinator, “We are requesting permission to use lethal force.”

Truth was, she herself
wanted
to believe the buggies from Theta were friendly. They might be loaded down with survivors in desperate need of help. But she had to keep the other possibility in view.

Their coordinator blustered about the rules of engagement; she was obviously paralyzed by the dilemma.

“So kick it upstairs to Squiffy,” Colden said. “Now I have to go fight.”

She switched channels and fell back into her phavatar. Her perspective joggled up and down, up and down, as she pounded through the gloom. Her powerful headlamp illuminated the arid terrain ahead. Her radar feed had lost the Theta buggies. They must be hidden by a fold of the land.