The Mars Shock (13 page)

“Slow down and spread out,” she told the people she’d brought with her—Houlet, Watty, Drudge, and a quiet, reliable girl called Cavanaugh. Colden split her vision four ways so she was looking through all of their eyes.

Cavanaugh found the buggies, grouped behind a little rise.

They’d stopped. Their headlights were off.

Colden gathered the phavatars together. They crawled to the top of the rise, staying low. She did a quick antenna count—four buggies; two were missing from the group they’d originally detected. She relayed this information to Hawker, via Pratt, who’d stayed with their buggies.

“What are you gonna do?” Hawker asked her.

She appreciated that. No orders. He was respecting her judgement. At the same time, it put a terrible burden on her. She felt as if all Star Force were stacked up behind her, from the recruitment centers on Earth out to the atmospheric mining operations on Titan, urging her to just open up and blow the buggies away.

“I don’t know yet,” she said.

She told the others to stay put, and rose to her feet. She turned on her headlamp. She walked over the rise, pinging the buggies with an ID request. She even instructed her phavatar’s MI to ping the buggies’ onboard computers, machine to machine.

The lead buggy’s hatch opened. A person clambered out. Colden’s pulse tripped, then slowed. The person was wearing an infantry-issue EVA suit. Some part of Colden’s brain had expected a Martian. This was a human being, who needed a suit to survive in the Martians’ native environment. He / she wasn’t carrying a carbine. There might be a sidearm in that thigh pocket. She—the figure’s slight build made Colden think
she,
although the loose kevlar outer garment made it hard to tell—walked slowly up the slope into the light of Colden’s headlamp.

The Martian atmosphere might be thin but that didn’t make it soundless. Sound waves carried in this meager broth of carbon dioxide, just like on Earth, although they hardly travelled any distance, and even loud noises got attenuated to whispers. But Colden’s audio microphone could pick up sounds as soft as 1 decibel and as high as 40 Khz, and amplify them for her ears. So she heard the person’s boots crunching on the regolith.

Then there was just the mutter of the wind.

Colden cleared her throat. “Sophs?”

Somehow she knew it was Sophie Gilchrist. Her gait, the way she held her head on one side, questioning everything.

“It’s me, Jen. Please say something. Tell me you’re OK.”

“Help me.”

“Oh, Sophs!” Relief and concern flared in Colden’s heart. She reached out with her grippers. “You’re hurt, aren’t you? I can tell. Let me help you.”

Gilchrist didn’t move. Her arms hung slack at her sides.

Colden felt a fresh twinge of uncertainty. “What happened, Sophs? It must have been awful.”

“It was. It was awful.”

“Tell me.”

“You were so mean to me!”

“I … was?”
I was. She’s right. I was.

“You and Elfrida Goto. You were always the cool girls, with your drugs and your weird clothes and your attitude. Well, she’s not so cool now she’s dead! And you’ll be dead too, soon.”

On her couch, Colden gasped back a surge of grief. “I’m sorry we were mean to you, Sophs. Believe me, I really am sorry. We were so immature. But can’t we stick together now?”

“That’s what I always used to say! Can’t we all stick together? Can’t we all just get along?” Suddenly, Gilchrist’s helmet jerked up. She shot her hands out and seized Colden’s grippers. “And guess what, I was right! The PLAN isn’t our enemy. It’s the purebloods! They caused this war! They want humanity to split into a million little pieces so they can rule their petty empires in isolation, without giving a thought to the rest of the universe. They’re monkeys squabbling in trees. We could rule the
universe,
if we ever stopped fighting each other for a minute, and that’s all the PLAN has ever tried to do, is get us to stop fighting! Stop fighting over your stupid gods, your tribal affiliations, your stock market forecasts, your taste in music, your language preferences, your mindlessly violent games, your
rights
and
liberties,
and who gets to be first in the chow line! The stakes are too damn high for that shit!”

Colden gulped. “The last part of that almost made sense,” she said cautiously. Her heart raced, and fear hollowed out her stomach. She tried to pull gently away from Gilchrist, but the other woman wouldn’t let go of her grippers. She radioed Hawker: “Something is definitely not right here.” Understatement of the freaking century.

He responded, “Did she have a drugstore implant?”

“Did she what, Hawker?”

“Squiffy told me to ask you. Did she have any other augments apart from her BCI?”

“No—oh, wait, yes she did.
Does.
” They were talking about Gilchrist like she was dead, when she was standing right here. “She was diagnosed with clinical depression a while back, and she has an implant to manage that.”

“SSRIs,” Hawker said. “That’s bad news, I’m afraid. It enables the PLAN to control the reward pathways.”

She never heard the rest of what he said. All the buggies’ headlights came on at once, and their .50 cal guns opened up on the phavatars. Colden would later learn that Drudge, ignoring her orders to stay put, had been overcome with curiosity and led the others over the rise. As soon as all four phavatars were in sight, the machine-guns set to work. The noise sounded like the gates of hell rattling open.

Rounds ripped into Colden’s torso, literally cutting her in half. But combat-optimized phavatars were tough. Her upper body continued to function. She flipped herself over with her arms, braced herself on her right arm, and fired her left-arm slug thrower at the nearest buggy’s undercarriage. White sparks showered from its engine. Hydrogen fuel cells didn’t explode, but that buggy wouldn’t be going anywhere soon.

She dragged herself towards the next buggy. She glimpsed pieces of Cavanaugh’s and Howlett’s phavatars littering the slope, and Drudge—miraculously uninjured—jumping up and down like an angry child.

She shot out the next buggy’s engine. Then Gilchrist—also prone on the ground—grabbed handfuls of Colden’s exposed innards. She wormed up level with Colden’s face. At some point Gilchrist had turned on her helmet’s HUD, so Colden could see her face in the blue reflected light. Gilchrist was smiling. Colden knew in that instant that her friend was dead. She was still moving—but she was dead. Her pretty features seemed to have been subtly rearranged, so she looked like a robot not quite realistic enough to pass as human. “Ha, ha,” she said.

And then she fired her sidearm into Colden’s face.

“Fun.”

Colden popped off her couch, screaming. Her midsection tingled. Stars filled her vision. This was sympathetic debilitation, the illusion that you’d really experienced what your phavatar had gone through. The pain wasn’t real, but on their own couches, Cavanaugh and Howlett were also sitting up, moaning and clutching their limbs.

Colden had to get back in. She stumbled over to Pratt’s couch. “Sorry,” she said, shaking him. “Need your bot.” As soon as she had the headset on, she dipped into Drudge’s feed.

He was running away as fast as his phavatar’s legs would carry him.

The two buggies Colden hadn’t disabled chased him, their headlights glaring, engines growling in top gear.

Drudge stopped and turned to fire his slug-thrower at his pursuers.

“Don’t stop!” Colden yelled at him. “Keep moving! You’re outgunned! Don’t let’s lose this bot, too.”

“This sucks! I hate running away!”

“Everyone hates running away. You’re doing fine.”

“But I wanted to …”

“What? You wanted to what? Take them on singlehandedly?”

“Wanted to impress Gwok.” Drudge tittered, making light of his confession, but confession it was.

Colden
didn’t want to embarrass him for it. She chided him lightly, “You’re way off target, Drudge. Gwok isn’t gonna swoon for do-or-die heroics. She’s the kind of girl who prefers flowers.”

But Colden was wrong about that.

Returning to Pratt’s—now her own—feed, she struggled to orient herself amidst a violent assault of information. The other two buggies from Theta Base had circled around and ambushed Hawker’s convoy. The rest of the phavatars, caught flatfooted, had rushed back and attacked the Theta buggies from behind. Tracer rounds stitched bright lines across the twilight. The .50 cals chattered, sounding far away. The dust was so thick, Colden could see neither friend nor foe. She leapt over a body in a Star Force EVA suit, and didn’t know if it was one of Hawker’s people, or one of their former friends from Theta Base.

She heard someone screaming on the line-of-sight frequency about purebloods secretly controlling the solar system. She located their signal, and shot them.

Then a whoosh of flame lit up the dust clouds. Someone must have chucked an incendiary grenade into a Death Buggy’s hatch. C
hlorine trifluoride, otherwise known as an inferno in a can.

And in the light of the flames, Colden saw Allison Gwok’s phavatar cutting down an EVA-suited human figure with her flechette cannon, and running over to the corpse, and not just making sure it was dead, but
stomping
on it. With both feet. While screaming in Korean.

She
sure had adjusted quickly.

“Attagirl!” Drudge cried, listening in.

“Cap’n said if it moves, slag it,” Gwok panted. “Am I doing OK, ma’am?”

Colden thought of Sophie Gilchrist and she said, “You are. Yes, you are, Gwok. You’re doing great.

viii.

Kristiansen took a hesitant step into the darkness.

“Who’s there?”

A puff of dust drifted towards him.

“Hey, you see something?” Murray floundered over to him, carbine in hand.

“This pouch,” Kristiansen said. “You threw it away. And someone threw it back.”

Murray set his carbine to his shoulder. They shone their helmet lamps around. The rocky floor of the chasm looked carnelian red in the weak light.

Suddenly Murray let out a shout. He ran back to their bivouac.

Lean, half-naked Martian figures crouched, picking at their string bags of supplies. Two of them were trying to lift the Medimaster 5500.

When Murray’s helmet lamp shone on them, they darted away. Murray launched into a long jump and tackled one of them before it could escape. Kristiansen ran to assist him, adrenaline surging. The would-be thieves looked like Martians, but they weren’t acting like Martians, insofar as they hadn’t tried to murder the two men.
Yet.

Murray knelt on the back of his struggling captive. “Gimme a twang cord.” He hogtied the Martian, ankles to wrists. His brisk efficiency made Kristiansen wonder just what they taught ISA agents in training.

“What the fuck are you up to, huh?” Murray’s shout was doubled, projected from his suit’s external speaker.

The Martian’s mouth opened. Its teeth were brown stumps.

“Murray, it can’t talk! There’s no goddamn air.”

“There’s about a thousand pascals of mostly CO2. You could talk fine here, if you could get around the problem of not breathing.”

“It’s saying something!”

Their suits, cheap as they were, had external audio microphones. Normally these picked up nothing but the faint whistle of the wind.

Now Kristiansen, holding his breath, heard: “Saaay seeeeee fu vee…”

The exact same sounds he’d heard from his computer on the night he found Colden’s ethics violation.

Set to the same tune.

He and Murray realized the truth at the same moment. “Holy cow,” Murray said. “We’ve got ourselves a warbler.”

The warbler stopped singing. Its head drooped.

“It had to draw breath to sing,” Kristiansen said. “So it’s just inhaled a faceful of CO2. That can’t be good, even for a Martian.”

The warbler’s companions crowded back into the light. They pulled Murray’s captive away. There were fifteen or twenty of them, enough to overpower the two men if they all attacked at once. Murray backed against the wall of the chasm, covering them with his carbine, as twitchy as Kristiansen had been a moment ago. But for his own part, Kristiansen had lost his fear. He could see the difference now. These Martians didn’t move with the choreographed purposefulness of the ones that had attacked the buggy. They were faffing around, dropping things and making false starts. They were
afraid.

These were the Martians he’d come here to save.

The ironic thing was, now he and Murray were the ones who needed saving.

When the warblers started to carry off their supplies, Murray threatened them. “That’s our shit!”

“They need it!” Kristiansen said. “Murray, their world’s been trashed. They’re living through an apocalypse. They must have been following us, waiting for their chance.”

Murray shook his head. “Gonna let them have your medibot, too? Look at that. Ha, ha. They can’t even pick it up.”