The Mars Shock Read online

  Her own IR filter showed the silos as bleak ranges of polar-blue hills. But those concrete walls were thick. Anyway, the absence of heat sources didn’t necessarily mean the silos were empty.

  They clambered over the first dune of rubble, slipping on loose rocks. The entrance was at one end. It was just a hole. There’d probably been an igloo-style exit when the protective berm was in place. The silo was proportioned oddly, by human standards: long, high, and narrow. These were typical Martian proportions. Cots stood in broken lines, easily a hundred of them stretching from end to end of the silo. Broken pieces of machinery lay here and there on the floor. “This is a typical Martian dwelling,” Colden said in her tour-guide voice. “But note the absence of any working fab equipment, such as printers, CNC lathes, forges, etcetera. That is a sign that the muppets evacuated a while back, taking their valuables with them. When they were here, you would have seen manufacturing equipment all mixed up with domestic shit. They worked, ate, and slept all in the same area, like medieval people.”

  Drudge leapt into the air, turned a somersault, and came down on a cot. He jumped from one cot to the next, his clawed feet ripping up the thin polyfoam mattresses.

  “Agent Drudge! What the fuck are you doing?”

  “We used to do that at home,” Drudge explained, jumping down from the last cot.

  Oh, so he came from a group home, where the kids slept in dormitories. Colden had kind of figured that. “Jesus,” she said. “Don’t do it here.”

  Near the end of the dwelling, Allison Gwok screamed. “Aaargh! A rat!”

  A rat, Colden thought. Give me strength.

  She strode to catch up with Gwok. The newbie’s phavatar was standing on a cot, pointing at another one. “It went under there!”

  Colden’s deputy, Pratt, and the other vets struggled unsuccessfully not to laugh. Colden was having difficulty in that regard, too. She picked up the cot Gwok was pointing at, and tipped it on end.

  A dozen four-legged creatures raced out from underneath. They leapt at her, climbing her legs, gnawing on her carapace. They did look a bit like rats, except they were the size of Yorkshire terriers, with huge bouncing bellies. Colden grabbed them by the scruff, one by one, and threw them down the silo. The vets shot at them with their flechette cannons. It was a contest of skill and timing, like shooting clay pigeons. Drudge got in on the action, whooping, too late to score any kills. “Ay caramba!” he yelled. “Are these the Martians?”

  Colden strode over to one of the twitching bodies, stood on its forepaws, and bent to slice its belly open with the cutter laser in her right gripper. Silvery dust spilled out and rolled across the floor like mercury. “See that? Metal pellets. These are the PLAN’s salvage bots. You’ll find them everywhere, scavenging for recyclables.”

  She straightened up and turned to look at the far end of the silo.

  “To answer your question, Drudge: these are not the Martians. The Martians are in there.”

  A metal hatch stuck out from the end wall. It was covered with swirly gouges which formed the same patterns as the city walls.

  “That’s the entrance to a refuge,” Colden said. “You’ll find several of them on every street. Most are abandoned. But since there were scavenger bots in here, there’s a high likelihood this one is occupied.”

  She got everyone together.

  “We will go in tactically. Pratt, Thanisuwatra, Houlet …” She stacked her vets behind her in the 2, 3, and 4 positions. “Everyone else, stay here until I call you.” She just could not deal with newbies in a live-fire CQB scenario today. She’d take them through room clearance training when they had a room that was more likely to be empty. “Jay, you’re up.”

  Jay, short for Jayashankar, was the platoon’s explosives guy. He slapped leeches—handy little shaped charges, made for this purpose—on the hinges of the hatch. PLAN airlocks were manufactured to 200-year-old American standards. Same all over the planet. Phut went the timer, and the hinges blew in a shower of sparks.

  Colden hurled her phavatar through the smoke of the explosion, leaping over the fallen hatch cover, firing a .50 slug from her left-arm gun at the inner seal of the airlock. The recoil spun her around 90 degrees so she ended up with her back flattened against the wall of the chamber, in position for her next move. Air whistled past her, escaping from the breach. Same as yesterday in Conurbation 111. Same as last week in Conurbation 85. Same as last month in Conurbation 274, a thousand klicks north of here. Pratt, Watty, and Houlet squeezed into the chamber behind her. She hardly even knew where she was anymore.

  The instant they were all in position, Colden fired another projectile into the seal. She followed that up with a piston kick.

  The seal cracked like glass. More air whooshed out. They charged into the refuge.

  Rickety bamboo catwalks lined the walls, rising twenty meters above her head, crowded with hollow-eyed Martians in ragged clothes.

  She jinked right, dominating the corner, spraying flechettes from her right-hand gun.

  Pratt went left, also firing flechettes, screeching his unique battle cry: “Gargle my BALLS!!”

  Watty and Houlet zoomed through the seal, heading for the far corners, firing as they went. Colden wedged herself into her corner so her carapace protected her, and swivelled her arms all the way around. She had eyes in the back of her head. She fired another burst of flechettes, straight up.

  The muppets on the catwalks turned into clouds of shredded flesh. Blood gouted from disintegrating bodies and rained down on the phavatars.

  “I’m hit,” Watty shouted in fury. Bullet holes pocked his phavatar’s chest.

  Colden’s target-recognition software picked out the source of the bullets: three muppets with a DIY assault rifle, skulking on a catwalk near the ceiling. She fired a burst of flechettes. These little razor-edged darts were smart. Her gaze-targeting sent them arcing straight at the shooters’ ugly shaggy heads. Bastards dropped their weapon right quick.

  The air had mostly exited the room by now, but there was enough of it left to carry sound waves clearly to Colden’s audio mic.

  The high-pitched whine of flechettes circling like pigeons, looking for leftover targets.

  The screams of the dying.

  (Damn flechettes were supposed to kill, not just wound. They got confused with this many targets.)

  And the gleeful voice of Danny Drudge, projected into the air of Mars from his phavatar’s speaker, proclaiming: “Fucking hosed ’em! Sent ’em to the fucking recycling! Yee-HAAAH!”

  He jumped and grabbed an intact piece of scaffolding. It broke in his grippers. Undeterred, he attempted to climb straight up the wall, holding onto the bolts where the scaffolding had been attached to the regocrete.

  “Drudge,” Colden yelled. “I told you to stay the fuck out of here unless I called for you.”

  “They’re all dead.”

  “I did not declare the room clear yet!”

  “No they aren’t,” Drudge corrected himself. He leaned away from the wall and chopped at the last intact segment of scaffolding. It collapsed. The PLAN never built strong where they could build cheap. Bodies and body parts sluiced down, landing on top of Pratt, who cursed Drudge out. The refuge was tall but it didn’t have a lot of floor space. Piles of bodies now obscured Colden’s view. Drudge jumped down on top of the pile he’d just made and dug in it. He bobbed back up, clutching a frail young boy with his guts spilling out from a flechette wound. Drudge held the boy up to his chest. “That’s what I heard!”

  They all heard it then, transmitted from the audio mic in Drudge’s phavatar’s chest.

  Singing.

  The boy’s voice was so faint, and the air so thin, they couldn’t catch the words. But Colden didn’t need to. She’d heard this before. “Oh, fuck it,” she cried. She snatched the boy and tried to push his guts back into his body. He jerked violently. His eyes rolled up to show the whites, and he died in her arms.

  She laid him down among the dead bodies of t
he other muppets. Thought about closing his eyes, but it seemed pointless when his guts were hanging out. “Now we’ll all get in trouble!” she yelled at her team.

  She took them out through the partition wall. The refuge was divided vertically in half. One half was the room they’d just cleared, where the muppets used to come to breathe. They were like whales: gengineered to be able to store excess oxygen in their blood. They only needed to breathe a couple of times a day. In the other half of the refuge, they grew their beans and greens. The slime in the tanks generated their oxygen. There was no need to take any of this gunk back to base. It had already been analyzed, and proven to be the same algae that the first colonists of Mars had brought here in the early 2100s.

  The platoon sprayed a few flechettes around, and left. Colden tossed a grenade over her shoulder, triggering a satisfying roar of crumbling concrete.

  Gwok was sniffling back sobs. “They look like people. I knew, but I didn’t really understand. Just like people.”

  “They aren’t people. They are Martians. Meat puppets. Muppets.” How many times had Colden gone through this with newbies? It had taken her long enough to accept it herself. “They may have human DNA, but there is nothing in their heads apart from PLAN neuroware.”

  That’s what she had been told. And then everything had gone screeching into reverse, and she wasn’t sure what she believed anymore.

  And Gwok, a product of the new training curriculum, persisted. “What about the one Drudge found? They told us some of the muppets are friendly. We have to separate the friendlies from the hostiles, and take them prisoner according to the—”

  “The Geneva Convention!” Drudge jumped in, like a kid suddenly recalling the answer to a quiz.

  All because of a bit of warbling.

  All because some linguists and computer scientists back on Earth had gotten excited about the anomalous behavior of about one in one hundred of the PLAN’s muppets, the strategy of turning Mars into a parking lot had been cancelled. And the Star Force brass, also safely back on Earth, who’d wanted a ground invasion from the start, had gotten their way. Complete with the fucking Geneva Convention.

  Colden led the platoon into the next silo. Here they found the workshop where the muppets had made their DIY rifle. She vented her feelings by kicking the equipment over. “You heard Captain Hawker,” she said. “If it moves, slag it.”

  There were just too many muppets, and 99 out of a hundred of them wanted to kill you. By shooting first, they were violating the rules of engagement jointly ordained by the UN and the Imperial Republic of China. But no one ever called them on it, because the Chinese weren’t following the rules, either. And also because the ethics officers were just as burnt out as everyone else, and hardly ever flagged your helmet vid for violations.

  Drudge’s top-quality recording of a snatch of song was certain to get noticed, though.

  She almost welcomed the prospect. A way out, even if it led through a court-martial.

  “I don’t understand why we’re fighting them,” Gwok muttered on the chat channel.

  “We are not fighting them,” Colden said wearily. “We’re fighting an AI. We’re degrading its organic components.”

  She wasn’t a soldier. She hadn’t signed up for this. The original mission of the Space Corps—before they got sucked into the war effort—was to help and protect people.

  “And now we’re going to do it again.”

  ii.

  Magnus Kristiansen called a meeting to “discuss the situation.” He had no intention of discussing the situation with anybody. He prepared himself mentally and sartorially to get his way.

  “Mirror,” he said to the wall of his room—not really a room, just a sleeping capsule on Wheel Three of Eureka Station, the Star Force base now being used as a rear staging area for the invasion of Mars. The smart wallpaper turned reflective.

  Staring into his own blue eyes—red-veined and pouchy from all his late nights at the computer—Kristiansen jerked the knot of his bowtie tight. He straightened his collar, smoothed his lapels, and checked that his newly printed trousers were fashionably tight without looking too small. He needed a pocket square. He took a sheet of toilet paper from his personal supply and folded it just right.

  He didn’t take these pains out of vanity. Kristiansen was far from vain, not least because his blue eyes and blond hair marked him as a pureblood—a category still viewed warily, even now that the PLAN was on the brink of defeat and not in a position to target anyone for their genetic heritage. His attention to the details of his appearance was a tactical move. On Eureka Station, men and women in uniform held all the power. Not being in the military, Kristiansen automatically lost about a thousand “take me seriously” points. He needed to leverage every scrap of authority he could get.

  As he had expected, he walked into the conference room on Wheel One to find his boss, Dr. Peguero, slouched in a once-white lab coat, eating a bagel with a schmear and dropping poppy seeds on the table. Dr. Peguero was an actual medical doctor—a qualification as hard to find these days as a degree in falconry—and a man of immense humanity and compassion. He had no conception of how to deal with the UN bureaucracy. He laid down his bagel and began showing Kristiansen medibot schematics on his tablet—blissfully oblivious to the condescending glances of the young people at the other end of the table.

  All these wore immaculate Star Force uniforms, navy blue piped with UN-blue. Their shoulderboards located them in the Star Force hierarchy with nano-precision. Their actual functions were a mystery.

  Admiral McLean entered the room at last, and they got started.

  Seven and a half minutes into Kristiansen’s presentation, McLean got back to his feet. His escort of armed Marines moved to flank him. “Interesting,” McLean said. “Thanks for putting that together.”

  Kristiansen realized that McLean had stood up, not to contest Kristiansen’s argument, but to leave.

  He was stunned. When the admiral had agreed to attend the meeting, he’d felt sure they were on the verge of a breakthrough. He stammered, “Wait, let me show you a couple more slides.” He riffled through his powerpoints and threw up the slide that was to have capped his presentation.

  “I don’t have time to look at a whole lot more of this crap,” McLean said, unmoved.

  “I should think you’ve seen enough.” Kristiansen’s voice trembled with anger, foxing his resolve to play the bureaucrat. “These are extremely serious violations—”

  “Allegations. I agree they are serious allegations, and they will be looked into.” The famous military passive construction: no indication of who would be doing the looking-into. Because no one would, Kristiansen was sure.

  Dr. Peguero texted him, nervously, in French. “That’s enough.” Dr. Peguero was afraid of pissing McLean off, and losing what access they had to the theater of operations.

  Kristiansen glanced back at the screen. The text from Dr. Peguero stayed in his field of vision, so that it seemed to float on the grainy still captured by the phavatar of a Space Corps agent named Allison Gwok. The snap showed the interior of a Martian refuge, literally piled with corpses. Shoulder-deep in bodies stood several other combat-optimized phavatars, COPs as they were called, grotesque metal monsters that looked like beetles walking on their hind legs. One of them held up a boy’s body like a trophy. There was no caption, but Dr. Peguero’s words provided an appropriate caption for the scene, as red as blood: Ça suffit.

  Yes, Kristiansen thought. Ça suffit.

  ENOUGH.

  He cued the audio clip that went with the vid. A distinctive warbling sound emerged from the speakers. Halfway to the door, McLean checked. Kristiansen had cleaned up this clip in a rageful all-night session at his computer. The words of the boy’s song could now be easily distinguished.

  “Stephanus, vir sanctus, virtute ac imbuti …”

  The same words as always. It didn’t matter what the words were. It mattered that they were coming from the lips of a Martian
.

  A Martian on the edge of death, slaughtered by the very same UN that proclaimed itself the guardian of humanity’s values.

  “This was murder!” Kristiansen shouted. He stood behind the conference table, clutching its edge in a death grip.

  On the far side of the table, McLean halted with his back to Kristiansen. The young mystery-people rose smoothly to their feet. The unhurried efficiency of their movements suggested that they were security personnel of some kind or other. They closed in on Kristiansen and Dr. Peguero.

  Kristiansen raised his voice again. “Star Force is violating the Joint Command’s rules of engagement! The Select Security Council’s directive number 9003 is being egregiously ignored! I don’t ask that you control your troops.” Clearly, you’re not capable of it, he thought. The truth was this war had tapped into a well of bestiality from which the media had agreed to avert its collective gaze. There was no external pressure on Star Force to live up to its moral obligations … and there never would be, unless it came from the handful of NGOs operating alongside the troops. “I ask only that we be allowed to embed our medibots with front-line units performing urban clearance operations. We have repeatedly made this request, and it has been ‘under consideration’ for months. If there had been a medibot accompanying this unit, that boy could have been saved.” He remembered to make the tactical argument he’d planned out. “The medibots could also benefit your troops in the field. Their vacuum tent functionality could be a life-saver when soldiers are not able to immediately reach their bases.”

  “Please, sir. You have the power to make this happen,” Dr. Peguero added humbly.

  Admiral McLean gestured to the security personnel. They halted. The closest one had been on the point of reaching for Kristiansen’s arm. He rolled his eyes and leaned against the wall.

  “OK,” McLean said. “I have no objection to deeper integration of medical assets.” He skewered Kristiansen with a glare that emphasized the difference between his authority—the real kind—and Kristiansen’s—a pose pieced together from brass cojones and toilet paper. “Your request is approved. But I’m not making my people hump your heavy-ass, breakdown-prone bots around the battle theater. You want to embed, you do it. Carry the damn things yourselves.”