The Mars Shock (21 page)

But Stephen One had seen something Kristiansen hadn’t. A
second
Chinese tank lumbered up the street. Stephen One positioned himself in its path. Certain this was a very bad idea, Kristiansen stood beside him.

The tank rumbled closer.

Kristiansen pissed himself. As he was wearing a spacesuit, he had no pants to piss, just a condom-style collector, but he could smell it all the same.

An angry Chinese voice blared into his helmet.

The tank stopped.

Stephen One leapt up on its hull—prompting further shouts.

“It’s all right! He’s on our side!” Kristiansen bellowed, praying the Chinese would at least understand that.

He ended up inside the Chinese tank with Stephen One, listening without comprehension to a staccato conversation in Mandarin. Stephen One’s improbable mastery of their language made the tank crew accept him as an honorary comrade. They rigged a respiratory mask for him from a spare oxygen canister and a suction cup, so he could alternately breathe and talk.

The interior of the tank was unpressurized, hellishly cramped, with nowhere to sit except the crew couches, nowhere to stand up straight, and screens showing cascades of Chinese characters. Kristiansen had had a Chinese translation program on his BCI. Gone now. He understood nothing. He wished he could stay here forever.

The tank commander spoke to someone on a line-of-sight comms link, presumably his counterpart in the other Chinese tank. A few minutes later, the tank ground into motion.

Stephen One plucked at Kristiansen’s sleeve. “Come on.”

They clambered out of the turret and jumped down to the street. The tank turned in a wide circle and headed back the way it had come.

They were left alone with the faint howling of the wind.

“What was the meaning of that?” Kristiansen said.

Stephen One shook his head. His Martian smile made him look improbably gleeful. His eyes—lidded by a nictitating membrane to keep out the dust—were pools of fear. He darted back towards the bunker.

Kristiansen hurried after him. Somewhere out there in the haze, Theta Base was grinding inexorably towards them. His shoulderblades prickled in visceral anticipation of violence. He used to approve of Star Force’s refusal to take human life, and even more so the corollary to that principle, the imperative to
save
human life, whatever the cost. It was pretty much the only thing about Star Force he did approve of. Now, however, he’d have personally signed off on an orbital strike, slaying who knows how many hostages, if it gave him a chance of living another day. The drive to survive, he understood, reduced all high principles to garbage blowing in the wind. He understood Colden a little better.

xiii.

“We’ll keep them busy,” Colden said to Hawker. “You get those kids safely home.”

Her words had a doubly encompassing meaning. She meant Hawker’s team, fifteen young men and women who were doing an admirable job of hiding their fear. If they died, it would destroy their families and friends, a ripple effect far larger than it might seem in the cold calculus of operational losses. She spoke from the personal experience of losing her parents to the PLAN.

And she also meant the Martian children. They stood pressed together, under guard, twenty-five of them at last count. In their smocks and short pants of bamboo textile, with their little mouths firmly closed, they looked so cute she wanted to put them in a box and hide them safely away from all danger. If only.

Hawker said wryly, “I feel like I’ve been put in charge of a nursery school field trip. Right. See you at home.”

He arranged the children into a crocodile, holding onto a rope. Their sole surviving adult guardian went in the middle. The grunts split into flank and point groups.

Kristiansen tagged onto the end of the column, and got chased into the middle by a nervous grunt.

The whole lot of them walked away into the Martian morning. None of them looked back.

Colden turned to her own team. “Right. This is what we’re built for. The dirty and dangerous jobs that humans dare not do. And this is an easy one, really. We just have to buy them enough time to get away.”

The latest satellite updates showed Theta Base twenty klicks away from the outskirts of the ruined town.

The MFOB had had them in range for hours—ever since it rolled down onto the Miller Flats, actually.

Yet it had not rained missiles on them, and from that, Colden and Hawker had come up with a theory. The PLAN didn’t want to atomize them, as much as it wanted to
capture
them.

It wanted the information they might possess in their BCIs. (“Little does it know,” Hawker said, “we’re just cannon fodder. All it would get from my people is a new vocabulary of cuss words.”)

Commander Sun had begged to differ. He pointed out that Theta Base had blown away three-fifths of his squadron without so much as stopping to gloat over the wreckage. The disagreement had blown up into an argument. Hawker had accused Sun of holding out on him. Time was ticking away, everyone’s nerves were frayed, and the upshot was that the Chinese had decided to stay here.

Commander Sun had driven his tank into the bunker. He probably still hoped to get his hands on the archives. Tight-beam the data to a Chinese satellite, or something heroic like that, before he died.

The other Chinese tank had pissed off to do its own thing.

And Hawker had decided to make a run for it.

The countdown timer in Colden’s HUD flashed 0:00. Five minutes had passed since the hopeless little group vanished into the dust. “OK,” she said on the operator chat channel. “Drudge, Gwok, you’re up.”

Her two youngest operators ran to the Death Buggies. Colden noted to her disgust that Drudge was still carrying his trophies—he’d splarted twang cords to their neck stumps for easy portage. The two phavatars squeezed into the roof hatches of the buggies. “Crap, it’s a tight fit,” Drudge said. “Wish you were in here with me, Ally. Hur hur hur.”

“Can you reach the controls?” Colden said.

“Um ... Yes.”

“Then pull your finger out, Drudge, pull it out.”

The buggies started up and drove away in opposite directions.

Unlike the human beings, the phavatars were expendable. They would act as decoys, hopefully drawing Theta Base’s fire away from the city … and away from Hawker’s group. Hawker had said he planned to trek due west, hugging the foot of the scarp. It would mean heading back
towards
Theta Base. But on the MFOB’s present heading, at least 12 klicks would separate it from Hawker’s group at all times, and down here on the surface of Mars, 12 klicks meant something. Every weary, dusty step of it counted as an advantage or disadvantage. There was a good chance that Theta Base would fail to pick up the small group amid the uneven terrain of the Miller Flats.

After all, they knew for a fact that Star Force ground-based radar regularly missed Martians.

The whole plan rested on the assumption that the PLAN did not know exactly where they were at all times.

Kristiansen had supported that assumption, in the last thing he said to her. “The nanites aren’t seismic detectors, Colden. No. They can’t tell when you step on them—they don’t know the difference between a rock and a boot.” (God, he was as condescending as ever.) “They’re programmed to associate symbiotically with living organisms. If it isn’t alive, they aren’t interested. So they may cling to the outside of your suit because it’s warm, but they won’t know what it is. And even after they infect a living person, they still need comms to interface with the PLAN.”

“I thought they were biological transmitters.”

“They are, but they don’t have much bandwidth.”

”So, the PLAN’s gray goo isn’t actually that awesome,” she’d said, falling back on bravado.

“It’s only light-years ahead of anything we can manufacture,” Kristiansen had said. He’d cocked his head on one side, gazing up at her phavatar. “This is just another day at the office for you, isn’t it?”

She’d wanted to say something suitably cutting in response. But before she could string words together, Hawker had called Kristiansen’s name and he’d plodded off with the rest of them.

Now, glancing into the ragged mouth of the bunker, she wondered if Commander Sun had found the thing that used to be Murray. They’d abandoned him—
it—
in the clearing by the lake. She wished she’d put a bullet in his head. Maybe she should go back and do that now.

But the buggies were gone, and it was time for her to play her role in their deception.

She turned to the four phavatars remaining with her: Pratt, Mattis, Watty, and Houlet. “OK, guys: scatter.”

They ran together down the street, then split up and disappeared between the buildings. She stayed where she was, waiting.

After a little while, she registered a radio-frequency burst from the direction of the impact crater downtown. The phavatars were dropping Mayday beacons like clues in a treasure hunt. Anything to fox Theta Base’s scanners. Several more beacons lit up, and then Watty said, “I’m out.”

“Me too, brah,” Mattis said.
“Ow.”

The seismic shock waves of a blast reached her a few seconds later. Theta Base had stomped the two phavatars, probably with small-bore kinetics, not the MI-guided horrors. Maybe the PLAN had fallen for their deception. Or maybe it hadn’t, and this was its way of letting them know it was not amused. No way to tell.

She felt the next blast vibrating through the ground
before
Houlet’s voice reached her, saying, “Me three.”

“Me four,” Pratt said. He sounded relieved. “I am now going to go smoke a spliff, and I don’t give a fuck who hears me saying that. Then I plan to sleep for two days. Good luck, ma’am.”

Colden had some supplies with her—explosives, det cord, and detonators that Hawker had cajoled out of the Chinese. She spent some time rigging these around the entrance to the bunker. Then she sat down, with the end of the det cord beside her. She had no need to sit, of course, since she was already lying full length on her couch. It just seemed appropriate. She checked in with Drudge and Gwok—neither of them had been blown up yet—and then she waited.

Presently the ground began to shake. This time it was not the hard shudder of a missile strike, but a sustained rumble.

Theta Base was climbing the hill.

A mountain of dust moved around the MFOB, a dark blot on the already dark day. Colden zoomed, tweaked, and filtered until she could see the spires inside that mountainous cloud. Theta Base had begun its existence as a water drilling rig on Io. The gantries had been left in place as supports for the MFOB’s missile launchers. Colden counted three missiles pointing at the sky, ready to go.

The base of the MFOB rose into view, an armored casket full of … what? Hostages? Death? Madness? For an insane moment, Colden had an urge to find out. Then she reminded herself to breathe. She still had a life to live, no matter how shit it was.

The top edges of the treads rolled over the silos on the other side of the street, crushing them to gravel. Fresh waves of dust and debris spurted out. The MFOB loomed over her, cliff-high. The bogeys clanked like a factory, audible even in the Martian air.

Colden stood up, holding the det cord loosely in one gripper, poised to pull the detonator.

Theta Base stopped.

Tilting her head back to gaze up at the armored superstructure, Colden saw pale T-shaped splotches on its prow. Something about those shapes gave her the heebie-jeebies. She zoomed in.

Human bodies.
Naked human corpses, splarted to the outside of the MFOB like trophies. Arms outstretched. Legs together. Crucified.

Some of them still wore their helmets, as if in mockery of the spacesuits that had been stripped off them. The helmets bore personalized decals—STAR FORCE MOM, Colden read on one of them.

In a trance of horror, she saw a hatch in the superstructure pop open above the row of crucified people. A living human figure emerged. It balanced for a moment, and then grew wings. It leapt into space, jinked on an updraft from the bunker entrance, and glided gracefully to the ground.

Colden walked over, letting the det cord trail out behind her. “Hey, Sophs.”

“Hey yourself,” said the thing that wasn’t Sophie Gilchrist anymore.

“What’s with the wings?”

Gilchrist shook the flimsy panels attached to her arms, and they folded. “Made them in the printer shop. This was one of the things we planned to do when the war was over.”

“We, as in the gang from Theta Base?”

“Of course not, dummy. We, the Solarians. Hang-gliding from the top of Olympus Mons—can you imagine how
awesome
that would be? That was just one of the things we were gonna do when the war was over, and we didn’t have to hide anymore.”

Colden took a step closer. “Come here, Sophs. I want to show you something.”

“What?”

“Just come see.”

They walked towards the hole in the ground. The Chinese were keeping quiet down there. As you would. Theta Base stood like a wall behind them, coughing out waste gas from its vents. “All I see is a big fucking hole,” said Gilchrist, who’d never used a rude word in her life.