The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN (20 page)

“But you can’t just whip us up a new set of
processors,” Anton allows. Paul shakes his head, his mouth almost
pouting.

“First problem: I’m a geologist, not an electrical
engineer,” he apologizes. “I was hoping you still had enough
available parts that I could help you cobble together, clean up,
fit. I can do basic reshaping, cutting, welding, machining—that was
enough to help Sergeant Morales make the parts she needed and put a
ship together. Still, it took her almost a month to teach me what I
needed to know about your aircraft to be of any use.

“Which gets me to my second barrier: my tools are
limited by hand-eye coordination. My visor lets me see down to
micro scale, but actually working that small is impossible with the
tools I have. Even if you could teach me about nano-circuit design,
I can’t work as small as you need, no more than
you
could
fashion the circuits with hand tools.”

“And you can’t just give us new gear,” Anton states
in a way that it is clearly not a question. Paul answers him anyway
with a bitter head shake.

“Could your people repair
our
gear if we sent
it to your Stations?” I interject as I let myself in to the lab.
Paul looks up and gives me a quick smile of greeting, but then he
scowls again. His eyes do that thing where it looks like he’s
holding an internal argument. Then he takes a deep, hard
breath.

“We do have tech-manufacturing capabilities, of
course, though they’re not geared to work on technology this…” His
voice trails off with a shrug.

“Primitive?” Rick fills in, keeping his annoyance
fairly well in check.

“
Large
,” Paul tries. “All of our technology is
nano-scale, Doctor. And it’s all cross-interface designed—it all
works only in harmony with similar technology. So even if our
Council allowed you access to one of our transmitters, you couldn’t
make it work.”

“But
you
could,” Anton tries the obvious,
hopeful. Paul looks conflicted.

“I’m not sure how Earth would respond to receiving a
call after all these years that comes from gear like yours,” I let
him off the hook. “There will be enough hard to explain topics as
it is.” Rick nods heavily in agreement. Paul gives me an
uncomfortable half-grin.

“Manufacturing your technology would likely require
complete re-programming of our nano-builders, assuming any of our
Elders is still familiar with this kind of hardware,” Paul
estimates, sounding wearily frustrated. Then he goes quiet for a
moment, brooding. “I think that’s the reason my brother left me
here to do as I pleased: he knew just how far I could get. And this
is it: I can help you rebuild your base, get your simple vehicles
running again, guide you as best I can with what little I know of
the surface tribes… I can even help build you a proper Uplink
antenna. But any hope of replacing your processors
is
going
to require Council approval, and I’m afraid they will be even less
receptive to the idea than Simon was.”

“You made Simon a good argument,” Anton praises him.
“Earth will come back, and better with us telling them that you’re
allies, not…” He stops himself, as if not wanting to offend.

“Suspicious, contaminated freaks?” Paul concludes
himself.

“I was looking for a better way to say it,” Anton
apologizes.

“But it’s what Earthside will think,” I agree.

“My people did keep you asleep for fifty years,” Paul
admits. “I’m sure it will be assumed that we did it to hide what
we’ve been doing, what we’ve become.”

I give him a reluctant nod.

“What the Colonel is too polite to say is that
helping us—even this late in the game—would make you look a lot
more benign and trustworthy than refusing to,” Rick takes it after
a few beats on uncomfortable silence. “They’ll still need damn good
reasons for everything else they’ve done, but full cooperation
might be seen as a good-faith step in the right direction.”

“My people have done amazing things,” Paul does a
poor job excusing, betraying his own feelings on the matter. “Their
fatal flaw is that they did them in isolation, with no concern for
the opinions or fears of Earth. In fact, I’m sure my forefathers
were convinced that Earth would actually attempt to interfere with
their efforts to provide the survivors necessary air and water and
heat. You have to imagine what those times were like: Like the rest
of the survivors, we quickly came to fear what Earth might do, so
much that we chose to hide from them, to maroon ourselves, to give
up any hope of returning ‘home’. After that, all we had was time
and ourselves, and a cache of radical research projects given into
our safekeeping by the corporate labs that feared the Ecos or Discs
would destroy their precious work. The directed advancement of that
technology gave us purpose to fill the years—the Stations’
terraforming plants are very self-sustaining; they could go on
operating without us. In turn, we put the advancements we made to
the only things that were important: accelerating the terraforming
of the planet for the benefit of everyone trying to live here, and
keeping ourselves thriving to do so.”

“You have amazing compassion for someone raised in
elite isolation,” I compliment him.

“I am a rare exception,” Paul discounts. “Which is
why my own brother keeps watch over me.”

“How rare?” I ask. “Are there others we could
contact?”

“No one in authority,” he admits sadly. “Like many
cultures, our ‘rebels’ tend to be our youth, not our established
senior leadership. And that is another reason you may find little
welcome in our Stations: The Council will fear the dissent you may
sow in the younger generations.”

“So our waking up hasn’t been made general knowledge
among your people yet?” Anton asks him.

“As I told you, I was officially censored by the
Council, ordered not to speak of you to anyone—I was even kept
under watch, which made getting back here a creative challenge. And
while I unexpectedly found you awake, I fully expect the Council
knew you had woken as soon as you began moving on the surface,
changing your power-consumption profile. I have no reason to
believe the Council would be any more open with this knowledge than
before, just as they have made no attempts to contact you. You are
UNMAC, remember, and UNMAC has become synonymous with unreasoning
fear, mindless destruction. You are seen as the ultimate enemy to
all precious life on this planet. The surviving tribes have taken
to calling you the ‘Unmakers.’ You are the devil of their
mythologies.”

“And if we show up on the doorstep?” I let him know
what I’m considering. “Fly out to the nearest Station and knock on
the hatch? Do your people answer? Do they disintegrate us? Or do
they just keep pretending nobody’s home?”

Paul looks like he’s struggling for any kind of
answer.

“Is it worth going?” I try.

“I suppose better that way, than by some surprise
encounter that results in gunfire,” Paul accepts, then he laughs
under his breath.

“Like our surprise encounter with you,” I tell him I
get the joke. He rubs his chest like it still hurts sometimes.

“Yes, Colonel. That could have gone better.”

13 July, 2115:

At just after 0600, I get the call that Paul and
Anton—after an apparently sleepless night—have “unlocked” the
Lancer. We can fly it.

“You really mean to take a spin in this scary thing?”
Matthew tries to dissuade me as we climb up into the Lancer’s
forward airlock. “We do have
two
ASVs up now.”

“And if our attempted first-contact mission runs into
problems?” I return.

“Mechanical problems or diplomatic problems?” he
qualifies. “Ship breaking, or ship getting shot at? Or in this
case: Ship getting impulsively disassembled on a molecular level by
technology we can’t defend against.”

“At least the Lancer doesn’t
look
like it’s
bristling with guns,” I give him one of my reasons.

“Is Blueboy going to make those weapons work for us?”
he criticizes.

“I already have,” Paul himself answers as we come
into the cockpit. Matthew just shakes his head and shuts up.

“We have access, Colonel,” Anton tells me, swiveling
almost joyfully in the forward chair. A slide of his fingertips
over the armrest, and the front of the cockpit seems to melt away,
giving us a clear view of the bay in front of the ship. More
graceful strokes bring up graphics that look like gun sights,
target lock graphics.

“But this is the coolest part:”

A relief map hovers in front of the outside forward
view. I immediately recognize the familiar shapes of the Chasmata
that make up the Valles Marineris. But the map has changed. The
bigger features—the lines of the canyons themselves—seem mostly the
same, but the interior landscapes appear different, re-sculpted,
smoothed. And there are many new craters. Anton rotates it in all
planes, zooms in and out like an excited child with a new game.

“
Recent
orbital mapping,” Anton explains. “The
images were probably taken before they made landfall. This is
Marineris
after
the Big Blow. This…” He brings up another
map—the map I ingrained in my memory on the trip from Earth and
studied tactically every day in the years before we went to
sleep—and lays it over the top of the first. “…is ‘Pre-Apocalypse.’
And this…” Icons flash. Dots and lines and labels detail the
parallel maps. “This shows us where everything used to be, in
comparison to what it looks like now. Colony sites. ETE Stations.
Feed Lines. The other two UNMAC bases.”

“Are they still there?” Matthew speaks up instantly.
Anton makes the ghostly old map vanish, tries to zoom in on the new
one, increasing resolution.

“Melas Three looks completely buried,” Anton
confirms. “Worse than what happened to us—a nuke hit closer.” He
highlights the offending crater, the resulting slide patterns. “But
then Three was all heavy bunker, most of it flush with the
surface—our hardest site. It may be intact.”

“But no Hiber-Sleep,” Matthew remembers sourly. “They
hadn’t installed the couches yet.”

“And the new surface over it looks undisturbed,”
Anton shows him. “No one’s tried to dig it out.”

“That doesn’t mean no one is there,” Paul tries.
“Remember: Most of the survivors have gone to great lengths to hide
themselves from anyone who might be looking down from the
skies.”

“Base One looks like a loss,” Anton continues,
zooming in on the original base site west of us. There’s a spread
of half-buried twisted wreckage—little is recognizable. The
unfinished bunkers look shattered, collapsed, completely
breached.

“Never was in the best real estate,” Matthew mourns
what was to be his command, probably considering what his fate
might have been if he was there and not here when the bombs
fell.

“Either site might be salvageable,” Anton offers. “We
might be able to find what we need to get the transmitter tower up.
Or at least supplies. Food. Ammo. Even vehicles.”

“I doubt they’ve gone un-looted,” Paul argues. “Your
site here was the farthest from our Feed Lines, and I think that’s
what protected it from opportunistic raiding. Not many could get
here and back to a tap-site without running out of the bottled air
they could practically carry with them.”

“And there’s been no activity from our own people, no
survivors?” I ask him. His lips purse.

“What I have heard is anecdotal only, Colonel, but
this is what I have been told: In the beginning, the UNMAC
survivors couldn’t contact Earthside, and—like many other
groups—were eventually driven to evacuate, relocate,” he explains.
“They were either too far from our surviving Feed Lines to keep the
sites viable, or there was too much pressure from competing tribes.
Some probably fell in with existing groups, pooling resources and
skills, working toward mutual survival. Others… Many lives were
literally lost in those early days, their fates unknown.”

“Still, we can use the Lancer and the maps to start
doing recon,” Anton changes the subject back to what’s pressing.
“Check the other base sites. And the colonies.”

“I can show you where Nomad tap-sites have been
established on our Feed Lines so you can refuel and refill,” Paul
offers.

“Maybe we should check the other bases first,”
Matthew considers. “We might find what we need there, and not have
to deal with the ETE at all.”

I digest that for a few moments, then turn to
Paul:

“I’m assuming your people will be watching us,
whatever we do. So what if we go looking for our own means and
don’t
approach you—what would your Elder Council make of
that?”

“I see your point, Colonel,” Paul allows. “You’re
assuming a no-win: If you go to the Council, they will refuse you.
If you act without contacting the Council, they will assume you are
suspicious, prejudicial; the UNMAC everyone is afraid of.”

“Would they try to stop us?” I ask him directly.

He purses his lips again, shakes his head like he
isn’t sure.

“Is that why your people left us sleeping so damn
long?” Matthew confronts. “So you wouldn’t have to make that
decision?”

“Perhaps partially, Colonel Burke,” Paul agrees
candidly. “I expect the Council was hoping for… Well, for some
other solution to present itself. Our longevity does give anything
our Elders do an appearance of protracted procrastination. The
planet had already been isolated for many years—as well as having
become a violent, predatory, desperate place—when I finally
discovered you were sleeping here and the Council explicitly
ordered that I not revive you. As I said: they deliberated about
that for many days. They have never shared with me the content of
that debate, but I expect there were a number of reasons behind the
final decision, though I doubt you will find any of them
acceptable. The foremost would be the fear that you would contact
Earth and bring down another Apocalypse, intentionally or
otherwise. There is also the fear that you would attempt to enforce
order among the various competing survivor factions—you do possess
an advantage in terms of weapons and technology over the majority
of the tribes, but the tribes would likely fight you to the death,
and you would replace the balance of tribal violence with actual
genocide. And I am quite certain at least some on the Council—many
of my Elders have become men of patience, not action—felt the
situation would be best served by waiting for Earth’s inevitable
return, perhaps imagining that your ‘discovery’ at that time might
have made such a return hopeful, joyous. As things stand now, any
visit from Earth or representatives of its military force would
likely be met with fear and violence. And Earth would find a planet
of what they would consider hostile savages.”