The Mars Shock (18 page)

The more wrecked, the better, from her perspective. Less chance of muppets. Kristiansen and Murray might still be alive …

After all,
someone
had triggered that emergency beacon.

The task force had picked it up less than an hour ago, as they drove towards the ruined town. Actually, a sat had picked it up and notified Alpha Base. The signal came and went, confounded by the PLAN’s radio-frequency jamming, but Colden had the location of the beacon marked on her heads-up display.

It tracked with Kristiansen and Murray’s last known location.

Their buggy broke down,
she thought.
They walked. Twelve kilometers in one night? Totally doable. Kristiansen always kept himself in shape, and if this Murray is an ISA agent, peak fitness is part of their job description.

Alternatively, the muppets could have killed the two men and taken the emergency beacons.

She could be walking into a trap.

Pratt said on the operator chat channel, “Hawker wants me to tell you we’ve found a place where the buggies can get through. We’ll probably catch up with you in a few minutes.”

“Pratt, no. Tell him to stay the fuck out of here until I ascertain what this beacon is.”

She knew Hawker and his people were brave. To be out here in the flesh, with only a crappy-ass layer of kevlar between them and death … they were so brave it made her mind hurt. They didn’t need to keep proving it, to her or anyone.

But they had their own ideas of what they needed to do. She hadn’t gone another half a klick before she saw the buggies puttering out of a cross street ahead of her. This far from the impact crater, the silos weren’t all destroyed, and the streets of PLAN cities were so wide, it took a lot to make them impassable. The buggies slalomed around stray chunks of rubble, while she ran to catch up. The grunts taunted her on the microwave link.

“Kiss my fat ass,” she shot back, powering past the buggies. One final spurt uphill, and she’d be on top of the beacon …

Flash!

Her sensors picked up movement. Someone, or something, had peeked around the corner of the next silo.

“Possible hostile at my ten o’clock.”

Automatic targeting: engaged.

Flechette cannon: fully loaded.

She sprinted around the silo.

Not
human beings in spacesuits.

Just muppets.

She unloaded on them.

“Three hostiles down. Pratt, Watty, Drudge, Mattis! Clear the area. Check inside those silos.”

They should’ve done this by the book, house-to-house. It was pure folly waltzing into a conurbation without securing your flanks or rear. She boosted her motion sensors to hair-trigger sensitivity. The other four phavatars scattered, Pratt and Watty crossing the street, Drudge and Mattis heading into the silos on either side of her. She walked towards the beacon. It was just sitting there on the ground, a splash of yellow beyond the corpses of the muppets she’d taken out.

The buggies stopped in the street behind her. Hawker jumped out of a roof hatch and ran to her. He kicked the corpses. They didn’t move.

Colden stared up at the wall of rock that burgeoned over the city, twin to another mountainous buttress on the far side of the built-up area. Nothing moved up there, either.

“Squiffy was wrong about this place,” Hawker said. “Fucking useless fucking satellite maps have it as a write-off, nothing standing, no place for muppets to hide.”

“The dust really mucks with radar imaging.”

“Doesn’t change the fact that our fucking maps
and our fucking commanders
are complete fucking rubbish.”

Colden knew why he was so angry. They might be surrounded by muppets lurking in the undamaged silos. She scanned 360°, heart racing. Meanwhile, Hawker inspected the beacon. “No signs of tampering.”

“Whoa! Fuck! Shit!”

The stream of curses came from Drudge, on the operator channel. Colden raced into the silo he’d been checking, leaving Hawker to guess what was going on.

Drudge was buried under muppets. They’d pinned his flechette cannon to the floor. His other arm flailed. His slug-thrower drilled a hole in the roof. Colden selected angles and fired through the billowing dust. She had her flechette cannon set on burst. With this many muppets about, she needed to conserve ammo.

“Splart you!” Drudge howled. His head jerked up. The eyes of his custom skull ornament shone blue.

The last muppet reeled back, clutching at its face.

Its hands stuck to its cheeks.

Over its head and shoulders—glistening in the light from their headlamps—dripped a mantle of splart.

Colden lowered her flechette cannon and laughed.

She knew it was wrong. She knew there wasn’t really anything funny about the Martian blundering around in panic, its eyes and mouth glued open, its hands glued to its cheeks, alive in there, not needing to breathe, it might survive like that for ages, like a bug in jam, it was horrible ... but once she started laughing, she couldn’t stop. Near-hysterical spasms gripped her. Her stomach muscles hurt.

The grunts laughed, too. A couple of them prodded the muppet with their carbines to make it run around the inside of the silo.

“It’s getting all dusty,” Drudge complained.

“Not funny!”
Colden snapped. Suddenly her mirth faded, leaving her shocked cold. “It’s not fucking funny at all, it’s disgusting! Drudge, put the goddamn thing out of its misery.”

Drudge sighed loudly and gave it a burst of flechettes. The splart was still soft, so the flechettes got stuck in it. The muppet ran about bristling like a dartboard. The grunts pissed their pants laughing. Drudge ended up having to put a .50 slug through the muppet’s midsection. He posed with one foot resting on its body, and asked Mattis to vid him doing a complicated fist-pumping thing.

“So that’s a splart gun?” Colden said coldly, gesturing at Drudge’s ornamental skull.

Drudge preened. “Two of them, ma’am! It shoots splart from its EYES!”

“How effin’ cool is that, brah?” Mattis said admiringly.

It’s not cool at all,
Colden thought.
And what does that make me, for laughing at it?

Hawker came in. Taking in the scene in one glance, he said, “Quit fucking around. How many of them were there, and where did they come from?”

It was now impossible to count the slain muppets, as the flechettes had chewed them into pieces, but Drudge estimated there’d been about ten. As to where they came from …

“There’s an airlock over here!” Gwok piped up.

“Yeah, that’s where they came out of,” Drudge said. “Must be a refuge.”

“An
underground
refuge,” Hawker said. “They have those. I saw one in Gigas Sulci. It was packed to the gills with Mr. Muppet and friends. I think we’d better wait for the Chinese.”

The Chinese tanks had followed them through the night. Task Force Alpha had pretended to ignore them, while the Chinese had pretended they just happened to be going in the same direction. Colden could see the sense of Hawker’s suggestion. The tanks were slower than the Death Buggies, but they would have no trouble climbing over the collapsed city walls. And once they got here, they could bring overwhelming firepower to bear.

On the other hand … it wasn’t like Hawker to make a
suggestion.
He’d deliberately left the door open for her to suggest something else.

So she did.

“Sir, I don’t think it’s necessary to wait. Time is of the essence. If our guys are in trouble down there, seconds could make all the difference. I vote we go in.”

Hawker covered his ass with a bit of hemming and hawing, but it was decided. Colden lined her people up and proceeded with their standard airlock-blowing procedure. They piled into the chamber. She fired her slug-thrower at the rear wall, realizing at the same time that it wasn’t a valve. It was a solid steel wall.

The chamber resounded—the .50 made so much noise it was deafening even on Mars, in an enclosed space—and her slug ricocheted, drilling into the carapace of Mattis’s phavatar.

“Shit! Sorry, Mattis.”

“‘S OK, ma’am, I’m fine.”

The chamber rocked and started to descend.

“It’s a fucking lift!” Colden screamed on the operator chat channel. She’d left Pratt and Watty up top.

The lift stopped. They shot their way out.

Into a forest.

Bamboo?

Irrigation sprinkler pipes ran overhead. The gengineered bamboo plants leaned towards the phavatars, creaking. Their leaves pointed at them like accusing fingers. The refuge had been pressurized. Soon, it wouldn’t be pressurized anymore.

“Standard procedure,” Colden told her companions: Houlet, Drudge, and Mattis. She streamed her vid feed to Pratt. “Show this to Hawker. Ask him if this is normal.”

They crashed through the bamboo plantation. Fog streamed around them, pulled towards the busted elevator by the escaping atmosphere. It was normal to see fog during explosive decompression events, due to the sudden drop in temperature, but this seemed like more moisture than would be normal in a Martian refuge. They burst out of the plantation into a clearing full of machinery.

Hawker’s reaction to her feed came back, via Pratt: “On Mars,
nothing
is normal.”

“Tell him that’s not very fucking helpful.”

“They’re coming down, ma’am. They’ve rigged a rope. He says he’ll be with you in a tick.”

Colden shouldn’t have been as glad to hear that as she was. She’d been expecting hordes of Martians. Instead, the refuge seemed to be deserted. It spooked her. Where had all the muppets gone? And what about Kristiansen and Murray? Had they ever been here?

Drudge cried out: “Holy crap, ma’am!”

She sprinted to his location. He pointed into the fog.

But Colden noticed something else.

On the ground at the edge of the processing area, a puddle of silvery fabric, like a collapsed tent.

Attached to …

… a machine that
wasn’t
Martian bamboo processing equipment.

“We’ve found them,” she transmitted, brokenly. “At least, we’ve found a Medicins Sans Frontieres medibot.”

The Medimaster 5500 was in as many pieces as her heart. Looked like someone had taken a sledgehammer to it.

But Drudge was still staring into the mist. He jumped up and down in excitement. “Hit ‘em!” he squealed. “No, no, dumbshit, not like that!”

“I can’t see anything!” Colden said.

“You gotta zoom!”

She tweaked her optical settings. That was water out there. A lake. A
warm
lake.

On the lake—
oh God,
she thought,
can I please wake up now
—floated a wide-bottomed dinghy.

Several muppets crowded the dinghy, fighting off another human figure that was
in
the water, trying to climb into the boat, or capsize it.

The figure in the water wore a grunt’s bubble-helmet.

And wielded a Star Force carbine by the stock, swinging it like a club at the muppets.

“Kristiansen!” Colden screamed. Then got control of herself. No guarantee it was him. But it
was
a Star Force individual, alive and fighting. “Right. Question of the day, and it’s a doozy: can combat-optimized phavatars swim?”

Despite her strained flippancy, Colden was not about to waste time checking the user’s manual. She splashed into the lake. It was slippery underfoot, and she nearly toppled over. With everyone yelling at her to come back, she waded out as far as she dared, until the water came up to the bottom of her phavatar’s carapace, and forgotten old circuits switched themselves on—
Ooooh,
murmured the ghost of the therapist this bot had once been.
It’s lovely and warm.

Out on the lake, one of the muppets in the boat smashed an oar down at the man who might be Kristiansen. He ducked into the water. The blow fell on his shoulder. Clinging to the stern, he jabbed at the muppets with his carbine. He was obviously out of ammo.

“Get down,” Colden yelled. She raised her flechette cannon and fired bursts. The flechettes flew straight and true through the racing mist. The muppets exploded into clouds of blood and tissue that leaned over the side of the boat and rained redly into the water.

The man swam back towards her, towing the rowboat. Before he reached her, she knew he wasn’t Kristiansen. He was too narrow in the shoulders, plus Kristiansen couldn’t even swim, much less do the crawl, while towing a boat, in a spacesuit. Disappointment pinched her bitterly. “You must be Kevin Murray,” she line-of-sighted him. “We’re here to rescue you, not that you seem to need it.”

“Are you kidding? I am so fucking happy to see you, I’d hug you, if you weren’t a eight-foot robot.”

“My other ride is a Vespa. Jennifer Colden, Space Corps.”

“Kevin Murray.” ISA agents never admitted out loud what agency they worked for.