The Mars Shock Read online

  THE MARS SHOCK

  THE SOLARIAN WAR SAGA, BOOK 6

  Felix R. Savage

  Copyright © 2016 by Felix R. Savage

  The right to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Felix R. Savage. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author.

  First published in the United States of America in 2016 by Knights Hill Publishing.

  Cover art by Tom Edwards

  Interior layout by Felix R. Savage

  THE SOLARIAN WAR SAGA

  Keep Off The Grass (short origin story)

  Crapkiller (prequel novella)

  1. The Galapagos Incident

  2. The Vesta Conspiracy

  A Very Merry Zero-Gravity Christmas (short story)

  3. The Mercury Rebellion

  The Elfrida Goto Trilogy (includes The Galapagos Incident, The Vesta Conspiracy, and The Mercury Rebellion)

  4. The Luna Deception

  5. The Phobos Maneuver

  6. The Mars Shock

  7. The Callisto Gambit (coming soon!)

  Sign up for my no-spam newsletter to get a FREE copy of Crapkiller, the prequel to the Solarian War Saga. You’ll also get access to exclusive giveaways and pre-launch copies of new releases!

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  THE MARS SHOCK

  i.

  Colden knew Danny Drudge was going to be trouble as soon as she set eyes on him.

  Barely a meter sixty, runny-nosed, spotty-chinned, he looked like he should’ve still been in high school, but he stepped off the landing shuttle blabbering like a wizened vet.

  “Roses are red, violets are blue, a vial of lovejuice is cheaper than you.”

  The target of his humor, a big-bosomed girl with silky black hair, stammered out a lame comeback.

  “Shut the fuck up, all of you,” Colden yelled, staring directly at Drudge.

  Each of the seven newbies had a profile bubble floating above their heads. In the heavily shielded interior of Alpha Base, wireless comms worked. So Colden knew each of their names, she knew which impoverished corner of Earth they each came from, and she knew they’d had exactly two months of training. On Mars, that should be enough to keep them alive. It wouldn’t necessarily keep them healthy. She was proof.

  She herded them away from the busy junction outside the scrubbing area, and took them through the garden to the quartermaster’s office. Each of them signed for a sleeping bag, minimal toiletries, and a couple of changes of uniform. Every gram of mass carried by the landing shuttles was the subject of an intra-agency bidding war, every flight. The Space Corps always lost. After all, they were just telepresence operators. They didn’t need high-spec protective gear. So they had to print their stuff on base from recyclable materials. The black-haired girl, Allison Gwok, fingered her new uniform, grimacing at the greasy feel of the non-organic fabric.

  Colden took them to their berthing, a ten-rack cabin on the other side of the garden. This was the bottom deck of the base, apart from the garage and scrubbing area. You could feel the vibration of the treads crunching over the Martian regolith. They sat on their bunks and stared at her. All except Drudge. He bit into an ear of dwarf corn he must have swiped on their way through the garden. “It’s real!” he exclaimed, chomping.

  “Yes,” Colden said, “and you’re not allowed to pick the corn, or the strawberries, or the apricolmonds, as you must have been told.”

  “Aw, chica. I mean, ma’am. It’s there for us to eat, isn’t it?”

  “It is, but the culinary services specialists do the picking. The garden is basically a lifestyle benefit. They had to do something to make this place a bit less hellish.”

  She smiled. They didn’t smile back. Their faces and blue-uniformed bodies were like bunches of flowers in the paintless, cheerless berthing. It healed Colden a little bit to see them—still untouched by Mars, like a breath of Earth air. Not that they’d stay that way for long.

  “I heard they have a suicide problem out here,” Drudge said.

  “Yup,” Colden said. “But that’s the infantry. In the Space Corps, we just die of lack of exercise. We never go outside, you know.”

  Justin Mattis—a bulked-out, tattooed bruiser—said stoically, “Guess we just gotta win this war, brah.”

  “Could be a while,” Colden said. “A few more weeks, a few more years, we just don’t know. Every time we gain some momentum, something happens and we bog down again. When we first landed, they said the war was as good as won. Obviously not. They told me I would be rotated out after a month. It’s been three months. The PLAN just keeps coming up with new ways to torture us.” She smiled, but she was flashing on faces exploding, hot blood spattering her optic lenses. They followed her home and mutely asked: Why? And she answered, Because we have to win. But that wasn’t something she wanted to share with the newbies. They’d find out what it was like, all too soon.

  Mattis was muttering a question to Drudge. Colden said, “Care to share that, Mattis?”

  “Ma’am, I was just asking, what’s the PLAN?”

  The other newbies tittered. Mattis looked embarrassed.

  “That’s actually a very good question, Mattis,” Colden said. “The easy answer is it’s an AI.”

  “It’s been nuking our space colonies since forever!” Drudge chimed in, regurgitating the media’s canned version of the long war. “And now we’re finally nuking it back, YEEEAHH!”

  “Like I said, that’s the easy answer,” Colden said. “The PLAN came into existence here on Mars in 2165. It slaughtered all the colonists and immediately began to build out its own energy grid and manufacturing infrastructure. Earth took a cautious stance, waiting and watching, until a Chinese fleet fell into the PLAN’s hands. The AI reverse-engineered and improved the Chinese ships on a massive scale. Then it was game on. As you said, Drudge, the PLAN began to attack our colonies throughout the solar system, targeting purebloods. We don’t talk much about that anymore, because it doesn’t matter.” She deliberately did not look at the newbies who appeared to be purebloods themselves. It didn’t matter anymore, because the PLAN no longer had the luxury of selecting its targets. “What matters is that we are here now, fighting to eliminate this threat to humanity, and we’re doing a damn good job, considering how much we still don’t know. What is the PLAN? The answer, Mattis, is we don’t really have any idea. But we don’t need to, to stomp it.”

  “YEEEAHH!” Drudge said.

  The others looked more confused, rather than less.

  Colden worked up a smile. “Don’t worry about it. Just do the job, and let the wonks work out what it all means.”

  This was the best advice she had to give. They gazed at her with the merciless pity of the young.

  “When’s chow?” Drudge said.

  Colden sighed. “I was trying to break it to you gently. Our shift starts in—” she glanced at her wrist tablet— “sixteen minutes. Don’t worry, you’ll have an IV.”

  ★

  Here in Alpha Base, Jennifer Colden was a short, curvy woman of Tutsi heritage, with a posh accent she had inherited from her adoptive parents. She was thirty-two and seriously out of shape. It was a professional hazard for telepresence operators.

  On the job, she was an eight-foot combat-optimized robot with an armored carapace, a Faraday cage around her head, a flechette cannon in her right arm, a slug-thrower in her left arm, and hydraulic legs that ate the klicks relentlessly.

  She led her platoon, including all seven newbies, at a run across a sandy canyon in Sulci Gordii, the corrugated doormat of Olympus Mons. She calculated their route by i
nertial guidance, with help from the radio-navigation beacons mounted on Star Force’s surface vehicles. Mars had no geomagnetism, so compasses didn’t work. It was the middle of the day, but a thick blanket of dust hid the sun. The haze reduced visibility to a few hundred meters of rock-strewn desert.

  They zigzagged through a rubble field. Sharp-edged boulders stood at improbable low-gee angles. The wind blew eddies of dust up from dark patches of sand fused into glass by intense heat. Satellite data showed that they were passing near an impact crater the size of a city block.

  “What made that, brah?” Mattis asked on the operator chat channel.

  “The crater?” Colden responded. “A piece of Phobos.”

  Mattis’s phavatar tilted its head at the sky. “Figure there’s more of ’em coming?”

  Colden laughed. “Yeah. Pieces fall out of the sky every day. Some of them are just pebbles. Some are big. But statistically, you’re more likely to die of a pulmonary embolism from spending too long on the couch.”

  Behind them, Alpha Base dwindled to a black beetle on the horizon. Star Force referred to Alpha Base and its sisters as MFOBs—Mobile Forward Operating Bases. The personnel who lived in them called them, with no little irony, hell on wheels. Alpha Base massed 500,000 tons and sheltered two and a half hundred people within its impact-shielded hull. It was actually one half of a space station borrowed from a colony out Venus way, with treads slapped on, and a launch pad for shuttles hitched to the back. Humanity had not been prepared to fight this war. Even the lethal phavatars used by the Space Corps had humanoid faces behind their mesh masks, left over from their previous existence as therapists, nurses, and daycare workers.

  In the telepresence center on 03 Deck, Colden lay on a couch, headset jammed over her braids, gloves on her hands, feedback booties on her feet. An IV fed a nutritional drip into her cubital port.

  “We’re almost there,” she said. “We’ll be RV’ing with Combat Unit Alpha 15 inside the city.”

  Ahead of them loomed a tableland 200 meters tall. The city wall crowned it like some medieval fortification. Constructed of reinforced Martian concrete, the wall was so high you could see it from space. It formed a shape like an ampersand, with a big gap in the southeast corner. The PLAN had not built its cities for defensibility. They were—according to the eggheads—art. Viewed from space, they formed glyphs that looked kind of like Chinese characters, but weren’t. The Chinese couldn’t work out what the hell they meant, either.

  Few of these fascinating artifacts survived. The fall of Phobos had scoured the equatorial regions of the planet clean. This catastrophic event, named the Big Breakup by Earth’s media, had started late last year, when a gang of rogue pilots had sabotaged the PLAN’s fleet of orbital fortresses—fragments of Phobos, which the Plan had taken apart decades ago and kitted out with big guns. The daredevil pilots, led by Bob Miller of the Luna Union, had steered one of these moonlets onto a collision course with its neighbor, setting off an unstoppable chain reaction. As soon as they started to collide with each other, the fragments had shattered into smaller and smaller pieces, reducing their ballistic coefficients, and causing their orbits to decay. Not just one, but dozens of moonlets had slammed into Mars at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour. Each one had delivered the impact of a nuclear fusion bomb—or several nuclear fusion bombs.

  Colden had watched the first, worst days of the Big Breakup from a Star Force carrier in orbit. Giant impact craters had glowed red-hot, while molten ejecta spewed into space. For a while, Mars had seemed to wear a cummerbund of fire. God, it had been pretty.

  Everything within 20 degrees of the equator had been annihilated. Seismic shocks so intense they were off the Richter scale had travelled around the planet, resonance piling on resonance, levelling PLAN artworks as far away as the poles. Fragments ranging from the size of a pebble to the size of a house continued to fall out of the sky on a daily basis.

  Unfortunately, the destruction had been spotty. The city designated Conurbation 112 remained more or less undamaged.

  The phavatars climbed the tableland towards the flattened section of wall Colden could see on the sat map. This pinpoint strike hadn’t come from a Phobos impact, but a Star Force warhead. For a while after the Big Breakup, it had looked like Star Force was going to slag everything on Mars, finishing up the job that the sainted Bob Miller had started. Colden wouldn’t have shed a single tear. The PLAN had pulverized Hyderabad and Seoul last year. It had killed Colden’s adoptive parents two decades ago, and killed her best friend during the Big Breakup. She herself had had a very narrow escape. So—give the metalfuckers a taste of their own medicine. Hell yeah.

  Then it had all come to a screeching halt.

  And three months later, here was Colden leading a bunch of half-trained teenagers into a PLAN city, vidding all the way, because ethics. And accountability. And the founding principles of the United Nations, and our human identity, and all the rest of that crap.

  To Colden’s secret glee, the Chinese were not so big on the founding principles of the United Nations etc., etc., blah, blah. Not surprising, as the Imperial Republic of China did not belong to the UN. China had joined the war belatedly and now operated on the ground in loose confederation with Star Force, which caused no end of logistical snarl-ups and misunderstandings, a situation which was not aided by the awful quality of surface-to-surface comms. As the phavatars rounded the end of the wall, they saw that a Chinese artillery unit had got to Conurbation 112 first. They’d slagged the city’s power plant. Three glossy red Chinese tanks sat fatly on their treads before the ruins. Dust devils boogied around their charged-particle cannons.

  The power plant had formerly been a ziggurat the size of the Grand Pyramid of Cheops. Colden had seen intact ones. It pleased her to see this one levelled.

  Combat Unit Alpha 15 had parked their buggies nose to nose with the Chinese tanks. They were out in the dust, arguing with the tank crews. The Chinese soldiers responded with familiar gestures signifying that they were not speaking English today.

  Captain Hawker line-of-sighted Colden: “Check your rad exposure. These meatheads just blew up a fission reactor.”

  Nuclear fission had gone out of fashion on Earth 150 years ago. But the PLAN didn’t care about the march of technology. Mars had thorium and traces of uranium, so the PLAN had exploited them to power its cities. The Phobos impacts had killed pretty much every reactor on the surface: dust was murder on heat rejection systems. This power plant would already have been shut down. But its core would still have been hot. Colden duly checked her rad counter. The phavatars were striding through a blizzard of gamma-emitting particles.

  “We’ll be fine,” Colden radioed to Hawker. “It takes more than a few pissant gamma rays to cramp our style. But what about you?”

  The Star Force infantry wore combat suits, which was to say standard Star Force EVA suits with a kevlar outer garment. They were supposedly rad-proof, but manufacturing standards had fallen so far during the war that equipment specs could not be trusted.

  “We need to clear this burb,” Hawker said. “They’ve been harassing our rear.” He was interrupted by the unmistakable sound of someone puking in their helmet. “Oh, fuck.”

  “Get back in your vehicles,” Colden said. It was not her place to give them orders. But she was probably the most experienced person on the scene. “We’ll handle the door-to-door. I assume the Chinese will help, and you can provide fire support if necessary. Now get that kid into the buggy and give him some rad pills.”

  “’M not taking my suit off,” mumbled the puker.

  “Fine, whatever. The buggies are rad-shielded, so get inside, anyway.”

  Hawker reluctantly ordered his grunts back into their buggies. He gave the Chinese tank crews a middle-finger salute by way of farewell. From inside his low-slung Death Buggy—more Star Force irony; the personnel carriers used by the infantry were more likely to cause death to their occupants—he radioed Colden’s platoon. “You go
ahead, we’ll bring up the rear. If it moves, slag it. If you need additional slagging capacity, yell. Any questions?”

  One of Colden’s noobs, Allison Gwok, had not got the message being subliminally—and now overtly—radiated at her throughout her short career. She spoke up. “But sir, what if we encounter one that, you know, isn’t dangerous? How can you tell the difference?”

  Hawker said, “They’re all dangerous. I’m repeating myself, but if it moves, slag it. Any other questions?”

  No one had any.

  Colden led her platoon around the mountain of rubble that used to be the power plant. They crossed a broad plaza littered with debris from the demolition of the power plant. Radioactive particles billowed around them. Their electronics would go flakey if they stuck around here too long. Dimly seen through the haze, four boulevards of Stalinist scale and straightness radiated off the plaza. Dunes of rubble paralleled them. Before the Phobos impacts, these dunes had been high berms topped with solar panels. Humanity—spying on the PLAN’s building programme from afar—had assumed they were just more art. But the quakes had demolished the loosely bonded rubble blankets, revealing what was inside: long, one-storey concrete silos, mostly intact.

  Two of the Chinese tanks overtook them, and rumbled away down the two leftmost boulevards. Every fifty meters or so, they paused to rake the silos with charged-particle beams. The buildings did not explode. They just collapsed.

  “OK,” Colden said. “We’ll stay a safe distance from that.” She led the platoon down the rightmost boulevard.

  The newbies swivelled their heads, eyes on stalks. “Hard to ’magine it was an AI made this place,” Mattis murmured. He said AI like everyone did, as if it was a curse word.

  Colden scanned the street alertly, too. But she was not looking at the scenery. Once you’d seen one PLAN town, you’d seen them all. She was looking for movement.

  “We have to clear the houses,” she said. “We’ll go up one side of the street, and come back down the other side. Everyone has their IR filter enabled, right? I shouldn’t even have to ask.”