The Mars Shock (17 page)

“Pfuh.
” She made a noise of impatient distaste. “The god is obsessed with self-tracking. Some of the legacy data is useful: the encyclopedias, the technical manuals. All the rest is the equivalent of logging one’s weight and blood pressure on an hourly basis.”

“It’s ironic. We blitzed the valuable information, leaving the junk,” Kristiansen said. Once again, the reckless violence of humanity amazed him.

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“So there’s no way to help my friend?”

“Friend?” the Server said, puzzled. “What’s that?”

Stephen One came through a door at the far end of the silo, followed by his two companions. The Martian waved gladly at Kristiansen, as if relieved to see that he was still here.

“That,” Kristiansen said. “Stephen One is my friend. So is Murray. I won’t abandon either of them.”

People were still coming out of the door. They were
small
people. They were, Kristiansen realized, children.

“Will you abandon
them?”
the Server asked quietly. “They’re too young to know anything.”

“How … how many …”

“Oh, they’re not all mine. There were six other Servers in this cluster. They all died. But I feel responsible for their immature client nodes.”

As the small Martians continued to stream into the computer room, Kristiansen doubled his estimate of the bunker’s surviving population. “I’ll get all of you to safety,” he promised. “Somehow.” But he knew his promise would be empty without Murray’s help.

★

Murray returned from the surface. His face was gray, like a t-shirt that was ready for the recycler. Brushing past Kristiansen, he knelt by the edge of the lake and plunged his head into the steaming water.

Kristiansen stared for an instant. Then he seized Murray and dragged him back from the lake’s edge.

“I’m all right!” Murray said, his hair plastered over his face. “It comes and goes. The water helps.” He made a move towards the lake. Kristiansen held him back.

“You’re delirious! Snap out of it!”

“Don’t be daft. I feel fine.”

Kristiansen cast a desperate glance at the born-agains. They watched with folded arms. They’d seen so many of their own people die, he couldn’t expect them to be moved by Murray’s decline.

“I just want to go for a swim,” Murray gritted. He jerked against Kristiansen’s grip, and then suddenly stopped struggling. “Jesus, it’s cold. All right, Kristiansen. Listen. I set up the beacons, turned them on. No idea if anyone will detect them. It’s a mess out there. They took me out the back door—it’s hidden under a silo. There was a PLAN town up there. This’ll blow your mind: this lake is a
reservoir,
held back by a restraining wall. There are pipes sticking out of the outside of the wall. The water circulates through the subzero atmosphere, gets cooled down, then it gets piped back underground—”

“The dam,” Kristiansen nodded.

Murray gave him an irritated glance. “Stop me if you’ve heard this before.”

He really did seem to be all right now.
It comes and goes,
Kristiansen remembered.
“No, go on.”

“The wall’s leaking. It must have been damaged in the quakes. There’s water trickling down around the outside of the pipes. These little fuckers may be ace at nanobiotechnology, but they don’t know crap about infrastructure maintenance.”

“They’ve forgotten everything,” Kristiansen said. He explained to Murray that the born-agains had lost their memories.

“Figures, with our luck.” Murray wrung water out of his hair. “What the hell?”

Kristiansen followed his glance. Several of the Martians’ clumsy rowboats had just sculled out of the mist, loaded with children.

“I was coming to that,” Kristiansen said. “They’re the Stephens’ little brothers and sisters. The woman I met on the island said they were a Beowulf processing cluster.”

“Yeah, yeah. Lots of parallel processing nodes, a few server nodes. The PLAN probably used them for scatter-gather processing, in addition to making them store its crap. I get it. I get it. Try and stay focused, Kristiansen,” Murray said, although he was the one losing focus, his attention jumping all over the place. “I don’t have much time left.”

“We’re going to fix you up,” Kristiansen said in the impassive, soothing voice he used when advising patients long-distance in the asteroid belt. It helped him to ignore his own terror. “We need the source code for the St. Stephen virus. Our best bet is to get it from the Chinese.”

“Without comms, in the next thirty minutes? Might be less. Kristiansen, I can feel the nanites moving shit around in there. One time when I was in college, I did E on top of half a bottle of vodka, then simmed a full-immersion documentary about Weimar Berlin, in zero gee. This is like that, with extra chainsaws.” Murray’s mouth was going a mile a minute, but his eyes were staring pits of horror.

“You’re not going to die. The nanites don’t want to kill you. They want to interface with the PLAN.”

“Same difference.”

“No, it isn’t. The neuroware can be destroyed. These guys are living proof of that.” He pointed at the watching born-agains. “We’ll get the St. Stephen virus and download it into your BCI—”

“I don’t have a BCI.”

“You don’t
what?”

“I do not have a brain-computer interface. Or EEG signalling crystals. Or even a flipping ID chip. There was a panic a few years ago: an ISA agent got infected with the Heidegger program. It was when the shit hit the fan on 4 Vesta. Remember that? You probably didn’t hear the story behind the story. Her name was Shoshanna Doyle. She managed to do a lot of damage before an armed bystander took her out. And I’m talking severe, long-lasting,
organizational
damage. The PLAN grabbed all the information on her BCI. Details of undercover missions, the names and numbers of deniable personnel, encryption protocols and passwords, all kinds of classified shit. It was a security nightmare. So the word came down from on high: We are
never
letting that happen again. And what that meant for yours truly—I was in training at the time—was I had to get my BCI removed.”

“I’d never have known,” Kristiansen said in amazement. He meant that Murray had so much information at his fingertips, he’d never have guessed he was relying on his own memory, rather than a memory crystal implanted in his skull.

“You learn to get along without it.” Murray shrugged. Then he grinned strangely, and vomited.

Kristiansen held Murray’s shoulders. Stephen One got out of his rowboat and splashed over to them.

Kristiansen said, “What’ll happen if his
Naniten
can’t talk to the PLAN? I mean, the god.”

“They have to talk to the god. That’s what they’re for.”

“You know, you need to learn a new word to express yourself. Here it is:
Duh.”

“Duh.”

“Yes, like that. Now just suppose that oh, maybe he doesn’t have any comms. What will happen?”

“He’ll try to get comms.
Duh.”

Kristiansen snorted. “Yeah. But what if he can’t?”

“The
Sitzpinklers
killed themselves. But maybe he has strength of character, like me.”

So maybe he’ll be fine,
Kristiansen thought for a delusional moment. Murray was clearly not fine. He was on his knees, gripping his head in both hands, digging his fingernails into his temples, drawing blood. His teeth ground audibly. His brain was being rearranged by molecular chainsaws.

“He’s a dead man,” Stephen One said dispassionately.

“… Not yet,” Murray coughed. “Where’s your medibot?”

The Medimaster 5500!
Kristiansen had forgotten all about it. He let go of Murray and dodged between the bamboo processing machines. It was where he had left it.

When he returned, lugging the heavy machine, Murray’s spasm had passed. The born-agains held him by his arms and legs. He squinted at Kristiansen’s burden. “Is it still working?”

Kristiansen pulled off what was left of the medibot’s packaging and set it up. Thankfully, it was made to be operated by a person in a spacesuit, so he had no trouble working the controls with his gloved fingers. “Yes.” Warm relief spread through him as the console lit up. “We’ll put you in the Evac-U-Tent. You’ll be safe in there.”
And we’ll be safe from you,
he thought. “You’ll have a better supply of air and water than I do. Ha, ha. We just need to keep you alive until we get the source code for the St. Stephen virus.”

“Oh, forget about the virus. The Chinks are never gonna give it up.”

“It’s the only chance you’ve got!”

“I don’t matter! The mission matters. Winning this war matters.” Murray’s eyes burned. “If I can interface with the PLAN, I’ll find out everything these guys have forgotten. I’ll learn all its secrets. I’ll be able to tell you everything.”

Kristiansen sat back on his heels. The Evac-U-Tent inflated in front of him. It ballooned to a silver bubble the size of a family car, attached to the side of the medibot. The ‘trunk’ of the car was a flexible airlock. The medibot extended its instruments into the tent.

“Can this bot install BCIs?” Murray demanded.

“Yes,” Kristiansen said. “It was designed to serve all the medical needs of a remote colony. It has the ability to perform neurosurgery, including BCI installation and removal. But this is a really stupid idea. I’m not doing it.”

“We need
answers!”
Murray’s voice was an agonized shout. Kristiansen understood that Murray’s quest for answers was the only thing giving him hope. If he were balked in that, he’d have no choice but to resign himself to a death as cruel as it was futile. The horror of futility struck a chord with Kristiansen. He, too, had always wanted to believe his life had meaning. Failing that, that his death could have meaning …

He shook his head, but with less certainty now. “What if it doesn’t work? What if the PLAN simply uses the BCI to control you?”

“Won’t happen,” Murray said with a dreadful grin. “One of the things we found out from the disaster on 4 Vesta. A BCI on its own isn’t enough. You also need a drugstore implant. Some kind of neural stimulation mechanism. The PLAN controls its victims by monopolizing the dopamine pathways.” He spread his hands. “Without that, it’ll just tear me apart. But I’ll be quite talkative during the process. You’ll have to stand by to record everything.”

Kristiansen couldn’t believe he was doing this. “All right.” He moved towards the Evac-U-Tent.

“What are you doing?
I’m
the one who needs to get in there.”

“The Medimaster 5500 doesn’t come with a supply of factory-fresh BCIs. We don’t have that kind of funding.”

Murray sagged. “Then I’m fucked.”

“No, you’re not.” He opened the airlock. It had electrostatic scrubbing capability, which Kristiansen trusted to be as good as anything Star Force could offer. You needed an absolutely sterile environment for surgery. “I’m going to give you mine.”

This was
his
mission: to save people. He hadn’t left the Space Corps, sacrificed his relationship, and changed careers, to half-ass it now.

“I’ll remove it and clean off the gunk.” He crawled into the airlock. “Then we’ll implant it in your brain. Reselling BCIs is illegal, but I’m not taking any money from you, so we’re good.”

“I can’t let you do this.”

Kristiansen looked at him—gray-faced, blood trickling down his temples, sprawled amidst the watchful Martians—and laughed. “It’s cool, K’vin.”

“No. No. The PLAN will think I’m you.”

“It won’t matter.”

“Dude, you’re a pureblood.”

“Shit,” Kristiansen said. He’d actually managed to forget about that.

Murray scratched his temples, drawing blood again. “It might still work. Erase your medical records. Apart from DNA, you tell people you’re Swiss-German-Danish, right? And you don’t have a secret journal where you agonize about your heritage?”

“Jesus, no.”

“Then we’re golden. I’m gonna owe you so big. The entire solar system will owe you. I take back anything I may have said about NGOs …” Murray turned his head aside and vomited again.

Kristiansen squeezed into the airlock. He had to tuck his knees up and bend his head so the seal could close. Line-of-sighting Murray through the fabric, he said, “It’ll only be for a little while. Star Force has to come, or what do we pay taxes for?”

“Damn straight. And by the time they get here, I’ll be besties with that bionic motherfucker.” Murray cracked a spittle-flecked, triumphant smile. “It’s gonna tell me
all
its secrets.”

xi.

Colden jogged through the wreckage of the nameless town, circling wide of the impact crater in the city center. This conurbation was so wrecked, Star Force hadn’t even bothered to designate it as a target. She crunched through knee-deep debris and clambered over fragments of regocrete walls. In the light of a quiet Martian morning, she could see further than was normal, and everything she saw was in ruins.