The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN (3 page)

“I can walk,” his voice grates out. “But thanks
anyway, Colonel.”

“Something’s wrong with MAI,” I tell them quietly
once we’re settled. “And I can’t find Colonel Copeland.”

“I doubt you got very far to search, Mikey,” Matthew
tries. “I’m surprised you made it all the way up to the Command
Tower and back in one day.”

“Place looks like a tomb,” I tell him, fighting for
breath again. “Dust says no one’s been moving down here for
awhile.” Then I ask Anton: “You checked the hibernation logs?”

“1197 all healthy and accounted for,” Anton confirms.
“Everybody that went to sleep with us made it through. But I
double-checked: Colonel Copeland
didn’t
join us—he’s not
logged into any Sleep chamber. What’s up with MAI?”

I take the time to try to get my brain together. It
would be so easy just to go back to sleep.

“I’m not sure,” I tell him. “That’s why I need you to
come back up with me.”

“You don’t look like that would be a good idea, at
least not today,” Matthew warns. “You know the post-sleep
protocols. You shouldn’t be on your feet for several hours, or
walking further than the nearest head Day One. And that’s assuming
we’ve only been out for about as long as a shuttle flight.”

“Those protocols also assume there will be people who
aren’t
in recovery to support you through rehab,” I remind
him.

“And since there aren’t, I take it that means there’s
no sign of relief or rescue?” he asks grimly. I shake my head.

“We’re still well-buried, as far as I can tell,” I
confirm what little I know. “But MAI won’t give me anything about
our situation. Nothing about Earthside contact, relief missions,
status of the other bases and colonies… It won’t even tell me how
long we’ve been under.”

“I noticed that,” Anton reports, sounding more than a
bit disturbed. “Date-stamps have been wiped on every system I’ve
checked. The calendars are all just… missing…”

“Like I said: Something’s wrong with MAI.”

“If Earthside hasn’t gotten here yet, it can’t be
more than nine months, maybe a year, year-and-a-half tops,” Staley
assumes hopefully, after running some calculations in his head.
“Even if all the loop shuttles got knocked out.”

“I’m not sure,” I tell them. “First, I thought MAI
was just running a basic cognitive eval on me. It started asking
the usual questions—name, rank, date, my last intact memory—but
then it wanted me to talk more and more about what happened before
we went under. The containment breaches. The Disc attacks. The
bombardment. After that, it got
strange
…”

Some of the other recent-sleepers are still watching
us, trying to listen, trying not to look like they’re listening.
Then the room takes a spin on me, and I feel Matthew’s hand on my
arm like he’s trying to anchor me.

“You really shouldn’t have humped it up to Ops so
soon,” he scolds. “Emergency protocol can wait—doesn’t look like
much is needing your attention urgently enough to risk the
concussion you’ll get when you pass out and hit the deck. You need
to get back in your couch, let the machines start building you back
up.”

“So do you,” I give him back, trying to make my face
grin. “But we have questions that need answering. At least a basic
Sit-Rep.” Then I turn to Staley: “What can we check from down
here?”

“A lot of the peripheral systems are still out,
probably just in power-save, but I should be able to get a basic
network online from here. I can start communicating with the other
Sleep chambers, get an eyes-on status report—at least enough to
tell me about supplies, atmosphere recyclers, water and heat. Maybe
how much of the base is still sealed. If that doesn’t work, I’ll
hump it down the corridor to access MAI’s core in Aux Ops.”

“Make sure Doc Halley clears you first,” I warn him.
But he only grins at me (though he looks like he’s falling
asleep).

“It’s no further than you just hiked, and
I
won’t have to climb any stairs.”

I give him back a smile.

“Copeland did his job,” Matthew tries to comfort.
“Everybody got through the storm.”

“Except Copeland.”

“We don’t know that,” he tries badly to reassure. “Go
back to sleep, Mikey. Let the rehab gear get your system spun up.
We’ve got a roof over our heads and air and heat and water and
food, at least for awhile. And if Copeland’s here, we’ll find him.
Stubborn bastard probably got tired of watching us snooze, dug out
and went for a recon.”

Day 3:

“PLEASE DESCRIBE THE EVENTS OF THE LARGER CONFLICT
THAT LED TO THE ATTACK ON 2
^ND
JANUARY 2065.”

“Where do I start, MAI?”

“BEGIN WITH THE FIRST INCIDENTS.”

And it was hard to find a place to start, even if my
mind wasn’t struggling to function again after what must have been
months of chemical hibernation.

“With the Discs? Or the Ecos?”

“BEGIN WITH THE FIRST INCIDENTS.”

“Pause playback,” I order the screen, and watch my
image freeze just as I’m about to answer.

“You’re right,” Matthew agrees with my original
impression as we review the video record of my post-sleep
“evaluation” with MAI. “This is weird.”

“It
isn’t
anything like the standard
post-sleep evaluation,” Staley concurs, uneasy. “It’s more like a
debriefing.”

I take a breath, and settle back in the chair I’ve
got wedged into a corner of Matthew’s tight quarters.

The “Deluxe Senior Officers’ Accommodations”—the best
and biggest the base has to offer—are cells about two-and-a-half
meters square, mostly filled by a single bed, minimal storage
cabinets, a small desk workstation, and one chair. This is 50%
larger than what all but eight of the top officers and department
heads get, and most of the junior officers and techs get packed in
at least two to a cell. The rest—the vast majority—bunk in barracks
(but there’s a rack for each body, so at least no one has to share
“hot bunk” style).

Only about a third of us have been medically released
from the Hiber-Sleep chambers to those bunks, and that’s only
partially because we’ve only got three physicians and a half-dozen
nurse practitioners to clear almost twelve hundred people. The
hibernation-inducing drugs aren’t clearing our systems like they
should. I remember feeling significantly better by post-sleep Day
Three after the shuttle ride. But this time Day Three still feels a
lot like Day One, and I’m not the only one suffering. The medical
staff checking us out look worse than the personnel they’ve
released.

I’ve managed to move back into my own quarters—about
half the distance to Command, just below the Tower on A Deck. But I
haven’t been further than that since Day One. I certainly haven’t
tried climbing up into the Tower again. No one else has,
either.

Anton’s managed two short trips to Aux Ops to start
poking MAI’s guts, but he’s having trouble concentrating for any
length of time, and his fine motor skills are shot.

It took three of us and a wheelchair to get Matthew
to his quarters next to mine. Doctor Ryder didn’t want to release
him yet, but I argued it was an issue of mental health and
morale—he’d more likely sit put and rest up if he wasn’t worried
about how sick and weak he looked in front of his officers and
troopers. I promised Ryder I’d do regular checks on him, but I can
barely stay out of bed myself.

So Matthew’s propped up in his rack with a stack of
pillows behind him, because Ryder’s ordered him to another few days
strict bed rest, and the only way I could keep him there (I found
him laying on the deck at the bottom of the Tower stairs once
already) was by suggest we use his quarters as a place to do some
private conferencing. That means Anton has to perch on the foot of
the bunk, because there isn’t room for another chair without
blocking the hatch (so it’s either sit on the bed or on the
retractable toilet in the small-closet-sized bathroom).

Our first piece of business: Get more eyes to review
the bizarre conversation I had with MAI on Day One. But not
too
many eyes on it, not yet. Given our condition, we’ve
probably been under a lot longer than a shuttle ride, but we still
don’t know how long that was (despite Anton’s drugged efforts at AI
diagnostic and repair). We still don’t know what happened outside
our little tomb (and being too weak to do a damn thing about it
only makes the long Rehab more unbearable). All we know is no one
has come to dig us out yet. (Uplink is gone, but if anyone was
close, they’d be heard over our short-range Links, and all we’re
getting is static and each other.)

The last thing I want is panic over all the things we
don’t
know. So the official word is: We’re buried, we’re
okay, we’re trying to get something working enough to call out, but
it will probably be awhile yet before anyone can get to us.

“Continue playback…”

“The Discs started in ’51,” I listen to myself trying
to answer the AI, playing along despite its refusal to answer any
of
my
questions, trying to understand what’s gone wrong with
it. “Or maybe in ’49, depending on what you believe, when AAV-4
went down in Coprates on a recon flight during the First Sprint
Mission. The official theory was it got hit with a micro-meteorite,
but the angle was all wrong, too shallow. Still, nobody seriously
considered there was anything else here but us. Of course, there’s
never been any sane reason to believe the Disc drones aren’t ‘us’,
aren’t of human engineering, just someone with impressive tech
resources and an agenda to hinder us.”

“DECRIBE WHAT HAPPENED IN 2051.”

“Second Sprint Mission. Major Mark Harker came back
for another trip since he was the first boots-on-the-ground in ’42,
if you’re testing my memory for history. In April of 2051—don’t ask
me the day—after they’d had a productive but incident-free month
on-planet… He’s out on a rover trip, just a few miles from where we
built Melas One, riding with one of the team geologists when he
sees something in the dust: something moving very fast, skimming
just above the ground, using the landscape and the haze for cover.
It’s there, then it’s not. In his own report, Harker says he was
reluctant to call it in, even when the geologist said he saw it,
too. Given what the Discs looked like when we did get a good look
at them, I can understand his hesitation: They’re a stereotype
UFO—a bad sci-fi flying saucer. Only small: maybe two meters across
and half-a-meter thick. Too small to have anyone inside, so it must
be a drone, an ROV. It played Hide-and-Seek with them for several
minutes, then made a run at them and opened fire with some kind of
small mounted machine gun. Harker ditched the rover and dove for
cover. Then it was over, just like that. The dust clears, the
rover’s a wreck and his geologist has a leak in his suit, but the
saucer is gone like it never was. Nothing on radar, not even from
orbit. The team picked over the site with a microscope, but found
nothing that wasn’t Mars dirt. It was much later we learned that
the Discs’ weapons fire projectiles that break up and degrade back
into base elements, just like the whole drone does when we manage
to bring one down. Some kind of advanced nano-material with a
built-in failsafe. Whoever makes them doesn’t want anybody to be
able to examine one.

“The incident was kept quiet, and when it didn’t
repeat, things moved ahead on schedule. The popular theory at Intel
was that somebody who had an interest in slowing down the
multinational project had landed some kind of new drone. There were
a lot of countries involved, a lot of corporate backers. But every
investigation on both planets came up empty. So Marineris Landing
Site One becomes Mariner Colony, and the colonial ‘Land Rush’
starts not long after, as soon as the corporations figure how much
money they can make using Mars for high-risk research projects, for
stuff they’d never get away with trying on Earth.

“And that’s what started the Eco Movement: people got
scared of what the corporations were doing here, or what they
imagined they were doing. Scared enough to make the Ecos popular.
Scared enough for the Ecos to get militant and try to stop the
corporations on-planet. But while the Ecos are still getting
organized, the first five research colonies are up and running by
’55. By ’56, they’ve already sent back cures for four major cancers
and two strains of HIV, not to mention the nano-ware and ‘smart’
materials that make hundreds of billions worth of bleeding-edge
consumer goodies.

“But the DNA re-sequencing and the
nanotech—especially the hybrid biotech that promised to be the
answer to everything that ails the mortal body—are scary enough
that the Ecos
do
start resorting to violence. They’re
terrified we’ll lose control over it and it will wipe us out as a
species in nothing flat.

“They start with sabotage first, relying on
sympathizers already imbedded in the colony projects. Then they get
enough balls and support to actually stage coordinated mutinies and
take over Industry and Liberty colonies. UNMAC holds off on an
armed response in hopes of avoiding bloodshed, but the
corporations—who are losing billions for every day a facility is
off line—push for a more aggressive solution, and UN Peacekeepers
start getting sent despite mass protests on both planets.

“Shooting starts. People die. More troops get sent.
And it all makes the Ecos even more popular. So UNMAC tries to make
peace. And the corporations push to break it when they don’t get
the results they want…”

“Which is when we found ourselves on a Hohman
shuttle...” Matthew interjects sourly.

“THIS IS WHEN YOU ARRIVED ON MARS?” the AI parallels
him.

“Okay, see, that’s odd,” Staley notes, pausing the
playback. “It’s not asking a question like it’s evaluating your
memory, Colonel. It’s like it’s trying to confirm what it
knows.”