The Mars Shock (19 page)

She helped him drag the rowboat ashore. It was now empty except for a few body parts, and blood washing around in the bilge. Kevin Murray breathed heavily over the line-of-sight link. She couldn’t see his face through his tinted faceplate. “Where’s the other guy? Kristiansen, wasn’t it?”
Too casual,
she thought. Her heart was telling her not to let anyone see she cared..

“Over there.” Murray pointed into the mist. “He’s holed up on the island … if he’s still alive.”

“The island?”

“Data archive.” As Murray spoke, Hawker and four of his grunts arrived at a run. Murray greeted them, “Happy to see you guys. You don’t know how happy. But we have to get to the island. Kristiansen’s stuck out there. His air’s running low ... and there’s a bunch of muppets keeping him company.”

Hawker swore. “Kristiansen, that’s the NGO guy. What’s your condition, Murray? You good?” He reached out to touch a spot on Murray’s shoulder. The ISA agent shied back.

“I’m good. I’ll come with you in the boat. I know the way.”

“That boat looks like it’s made of concrete,” said one of the grunts.

“So are ocean liners,” Colden snapped. She had turned the boat over to let the blood and water run out. Now she righted it, pushed it off from the shore— “Drudge! Hold the stern—” and gingerly stepped in. Her phavatar’s weight did not sink the boat. “Come
on!”

“We need something to paddle with,” Murray said. “Or poles. Poles would do. It’s fairly shallow, even out in the middle.”

Murray went to cut bamboo stems. Hawker’s grunts set about reinflating the tent from the Medimaster 5500, figuring it could serve as a raft. Drudge sealed the rips in the tent with his splart gun. They should have asked Murray what had happened to the medibot. As soon as Colden thought of that, she forgot it again, whipsawed by impatience and fear.

The tent floated, half-inflated. Hawker and two of his men climbed aboard the wobbly, waterbed-like object. “Jesus,” Hawker said. “This is mad.” Murray came back with an armful of long bamboo poles. Drudge got into the boat with Colden and Murray, and they poled off.

As the atmospheric pressure in the bunker dropped, the raft inflated further, until it was as taut as a balloon. The men had to cling on top. They couldn’t pole, on account of not having any free hands.

Drudge jumped into the water, got behind the raft, and kicked. His mechanical legs churned the water like an outboard engine.

“I should have thought of that,” Colden muttered. Fear for Kristiansen’s safety was distracting her. She had to stay focused.

Pratt pinged her on the operator chat channel, splintering her concentration once again. “The Chinese are coming. I can see their dust clouds. What should we tell them when they get here?”

“Two words,” Colden said. “Data archive.”

That ought to fetch Commander Sun like a shot. Hawker might not like having his rival in the mix. Too freaking bad.

The streamers of mist parted to reveal a rocky island. Murray directed them to a harbor carved out of the rock. There were two rowboats tied up there already. “I want these,” Hawker said. “I’m not floating back again on that tent. Perrault, stay here and guard these boats with your life.”

“Yes, sir!”

A flight of narrow, slippery steps led up from the harbor. Murray leapt up them like a goat. He was in good shape for a man who’d been singlehandedly fighting muppets.
That’s the ISA for you
,
Colden thought. They only took the best of the best. People said their field agents were all sociopathic nutters, but Colden was disposed favorably towards Murray, since he seemed so concerned for Kristiansen’s safety.

She followed him up the steps, thankful for her phavatar’s retractable gecko grips.

The concrete silo on top of the island had no windows and only one door. Locked. They’d brought the rest of their leeches. The shaped charges did the trick. The door, its frame, and quite a lot of regocrete exploded outwards. “That was a pressure seal,” Colden noted.

A storm of white fragments gusted out of the hole. A grunt caught one. “Paper!”

“I don’t care if it’s freaking silk.” Colden had slipped back into house-to-house mode. It felt good to be doing something familiar, after their bizarre journey here. “Drudge, on my mark …”

She went right, Drudge went left, and Hawker and his grunts came in behind them. They smashed through the interior of the silo. It was all desks and computers. The grunts shot at potential hostiles that turned out to be chairs, or fluttering pieces of paper, or shadows from the overhead lights.

There wasn’t a single muppet in the place. Again.

Colden scanned the toppled computers, praying to see something she’d missed.

Hawker kicked one of the machines. Its housing came apart, revealing a motherboard. The PLAN’s computers evidently used ICs, the technology that predated processing crystals. Radiation-resistant, but not proof against an infantryman’s boot. Components and chips of solder dribbled out. “Way-hey,” Hawker said. “Let’s hope our data recovery guys really are as shit-hot as they’re supposed to be.”

“These are just archives,” Murray said. “Nothing sensitive here. All the good stuff is on the server.” He scuffled through eddies of blowing paper. Colden saw where he was heading, what she’d missed. She was running on fumes. There was another door at the far end of the silo. A pressure seal,
covered with the glyphs she’d seen on hundreds of PLAN refuges in hundreds of PLAN towns.

She caught up with Murray. “I’ll do the honors,” she said breathlessly.

“Fine, but I want to go in first.”

“Why?”

“This is fun.”

The ISA: a really lovely bunch of guys.

Colden shot out the airlock’s top set of hinges with her slug-thrower. It sagged open. While Murray held it, she leaned into the chamber and put a slug through the valve.

Murray shoved her out of the way. He actually scrambled over her carapace to get into the lock. He blocked her view for a moment, and then he was gone. She stared into a sea of faces. The wind of escaping air blew their black hair around like seaweed.

Muppet faces.

Small
muppet faces.

With their button noses, big black eyes, and broad foreheads, they looked exactly like the toy trolls she used to collect as a preteen.

“Holy crap, they’re
children …”

Her flechette cannon sagged. Drudge shouldered past her. Bet
he
hadn’t collected toy trolls when he was little.

“Drudge! Don’t shoot! They’re just kids!”

“Kristiansen!” Murray roared on the line-of-sight link. “Come out, come out wherever you are!”

The usual bamboo scaffolds filled the room to the ceiling. More little faces peeped through the curtains around the platforms. Murray spidered up the nearest scaffold, agile in his cumbersome suit.

“KRISTIANSEN!”

“Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Murray,” said a deathly tired voice, which Colden had last heard five years on UNLEOSS, telling her she was complicit in the UN’s machinery of oppression.

Kristiansen!
Colden spun. An adult muppet got in her way. Without thinking, she gave it the usual dosage. She barely noticed that Hawker was screaming at his men to hold their fire, or that Drudge was getting jiggy with his splart gun. She shouted, “Magnus, where are you?”

“Jen?!?”

“Where are you?” At the same time Murray reappeared on top of the nearer scaffold. He echoed her shout. “Where are you?”

“Jen, he’s infected!”

“WHO is WHAT?”

“He’s not Kevin Murray anymore!”

“That’s what my mother named me,” Murray drawled.

Colden was paralyzed. “He sounds like the real deal,” she whispered.

“Damn straight,” Murray said.

“He said he had a plan! I believed him. I didn’t know it was the PLAN talking! He didn’t even
need
a BCI. The nanites communicate wirelessly with the PLAN. That’s why he kept trying to stick his head in the water. He was trying to attenuate their signals. He was trying to escape. But the nanites won. They wanted more bandwidth. And I gave it to them.”

“Bullshit,” Murray said. He leapt across to the next scaffold, making the whole fragile structure shake.

Colden sourced Kristiansen’s line-of-sight signal. She started in the same direction.

“If you really are Kevin Murray,” Hawker yelled suddenly, “prove it. Where were you born? What’s your favorite food? What’s the name of the first person you ever fell in love with?”

“Basel,” Murray said immediately,
“Zuricher geschnetzeltes,
and Jennifer Colden.”

“Huh? Colden, you know this guy?”

“He doesn’t know her. He doesn’t even know who he is,” Kristiansen’s voice grated. “He thinks he’s me.”

“Like I’d lower myself to impersonate a cowardly, traitorous, lying pureblood,” Murray sneered.

Colden’s reflexes went into overdrive. She fired her flechette cannon at Murray. At the same time she leapt and pulled herself up the same scaffold Murray was climbing down. She parted the curtains, crawled onto the lowest platform. There was Kristiansen in a Star Force spacesuit, kneeling between the bloody thighs of a woman—

—a Martian—

“She’s hemorrhaging,” Kristiansen said. “She was nine weeks pregnant. With quintuplets.”

“Come out and prove you’re a MAN,” Murray bellowed. “Heh, heh, heh.” His carbine thrust between the curtains, followed by his head. Colden realized she hadn’t hit him. Nor would Hawker have. The flechettes were programmed to avoid anything that profiled like a non-Martian human being. The infantry carbines functioned the same way. The smart darts had no way of knowing Kevin Murray wasn’t human anymore.

She twisted on her knees and fired her slug-thrower. Her
stupid
gun. Stupid was good.

Murray fell backwards.

The woman on the platform screamed. Blood gushed out.

Pratt said on the operator chat channel, “Ma’am? Colden? I hate to interrupt, but there are a couple things you need to know. The Chinese are here. I’m watching Commander Sun try to decide if he wants to go down there or not. The other tank went to investigate the hot spot.”

“Tell Sun to get his ass down here,” Colden said. She laid a gripper on Kristiansen’s sleeve. He knelt, cradling the woman’s head on his lap, watching her life gush away.

“Murray smashed up my medibot. I could have helped her.”

“Magnus, she was a muppet.”

“She was a person. A warbler, in your braindead Star Force jargon. They all were. That’s why he killed them.”

And we killed the rest,
Colden thought, remembering the muppets they’d slain when they found the beacon. Jeepers. Those could have been warblers, too. She hadn’t let them live long enough to find out.

She leaned out between the curtains. Murray’s body lay on the floor. To her astonishment, he wasn’t dead. He was struggling wildly as Hawker’s men tied him up with twang cords. She’d missed. Point blank, and she’d missed. That was the trouble with stupid guns. And with being exhausted.

“Drudge,” Hawker called, “get over here and make yourself useful. These cords aren’t going to hold him.”

“I don’t have much left,” Drudge said from the far corner. For the first time Colden noticed what he was doing. He had rounded up all the adult Martians in the refuge, and some of the larger children. He was carefully spraying their heads with splart, one by one. Every time he finished one, he’d lop it off with his phavatar’s built-in cutter laser, wait for the blood to drip out some, and splart the raw end. He now had a row of five such objects sitting on the floor, drying quickly in the increasingly thin and cold atmosphere.

“Drudge!” Colden yelled. “Stop it! They aren’t muppets, don’t you understand? That is fucking sick! I’m gonna report your ass!”

“Aw, chica.”

“I gave you an order! Now get over there and help Captain Hawker.”

Grumbling, Drudge went, leaving the rest of his captives alive. Kristiansen nearly knocked Colden off the scaffolding, he pushed past her so fast. If this wasn’t Mars, he’d have broken his neck jumping to the floor. He hugged the captives, wrapping his arms around as many of them as he could. The smaller children crowded around him as if he could protect them.

“Nobody lays a fucking finger on these people,” Kristiansen shouted. His voice cracked and broke as he raved about their lack of ethics. Colden nodded bleakly to herself. This was the Kristiansen that their friends in the Space Corps had tagged a radical, so driven was he to stand up for his ideas. But he was right. Nutty old Kristiansen had been right all along. They were murderers.

“All right, fine, we’ll take ‘em back to Alpha,” Hawker said, caving in, the way people did cave in, just to get Kristiansen to shut up. “They can ride on top of the buggies.
Jesus.”

Colden took a break. The blood rushed to her head when she stood up. She’d seriously overdone it. Her muscles were so tense, she could barely walk out of the telepresence center. It hurt to move her
eyes.
Although her IV had supplied all her nutrient needs, her stomach grumbled, informing her that she hadn’t had a real meal in going on twenty hours. She quieted it with a Mars Bar from her illicit stash in the break room. This was how you gained weight as a telepresence operator.