The Mars Shock (23 page)

Maybe …

“You’re my last hope,” Colden concluded her email. A touch dramatic, but it was true.

Send,
and then she put her head down on her arms. Knowing it took 19 minutes right now for a signal to make the round trip, trying to work out what time of day it was in Rome, she fell asleep.

She woke up, heart pounding. Her mouth tasted sour. She checked the time—she’d been asleep for two hours! and then her email inbox.

From: Ingrid Haller [ID string attached]

To: Jennifer Colden@Star Force

My dear, it’s hard for me to understand what you’re going through. We have to be so careful. But I know you must be desperately frightened.

Tears filled Colden’s eyes, hot and stinging.

Unfortunately, there’s nothing I can do that would be immediately effective …

Colden’s tears dried up.

Ms. Haller went on for a couple more paragraphs, but Colden just skimmed her excuses about how Star Force answered to no one short of the President’s Advisory Council, blah blah blah.

At this final rebuff, the desperation and fear that Ms. Haller had identified in her words melted away. A new resolve took their place. She jumped up from her ergoform.

Right.

04:17 local time.

If no one’s going to do anything, I’ll just have to do it myself.

★

She went back to her berthing, took off her sweats, and squeezed into a spacesuit liner. Was it possible that she’d gained weight even since she’d been on Mars? The supposedly one-size garment felt skimpy. Taking her empty Space Corps duffel, she snuck through the garden to the garage. Cold air chilled the hygiene slit between her legs. Along the way, she spotted several couples enjoying the meager privacy of the cornfield. At this rate there would soon be babies toddling around Alpha Base.

There were EVA suits in the storage area above the garage. They had to be there to comply with emergency evacuation regs, although no one ever went outside except the grunts. She put one on, sealed the diaper to her liner’s hygiene slit, and checked her seals. Then she went to one of the other lockers. It said GUNS.

Thanks again to Star Force regulations, the personnel of the MFOB had to have access to weapons to defend the base, if it ever came to that. No one had anticipated their worst enemies would be too small to shoot.

She took a carbine from the racks. That meant letting the iris scanner ID her, but you were allowed to sign out weapons for practise on the range, so her request was granted. She stuffed the carbine into her Space Corps duffel to disguise its outline, and touched the action plate of the hatch in the floor that said GARAGE. It opened. She climbed down a shiny ladder, while the air got flushed out of the chamber around her.

In the days when Alpha Base was half of a space station, the garage had been its docking bay. Now Death Buggies were parked where tugs and runabouts would once have stood on their jackstands. Bright light bathed the 100-meter-diameter parking lot with the peculiar clarity you got in vacuum. Next to the ladder she’d just descended, a partition wall cut off a slice of the garage. Huge yellow arrows pointed to the door marked SCRUBBING AREA. In contrast, the hatch she’d just exited had a big red X on this side.

When she came back, she’d have to go through the whole scrubbing routine. Maybe she’d stop by and wave at Kristiansen through the window of his quarantine cell. Although, if she was successful, he’d hate her by then.

Oh well. He hated her already.

She padded in her thick-soled gecko boots around the buggies. A few mechanics were working on the two buggies Gwok and Drudge had brought back. She waved casually at them, and they waved back, assuming she was going out to perform some maintenance task on the outside of the MFOB. Her Space Corps duffel could have held tools.

Out on the exterior parking strip, she shivered, not because she could feel the cold through her suit—she couldn’t—but because it was so dark. Rows of little red LED lights outlined the launch pad, bumping along behind the MFOB. The ramp at the far end of the launch pad, which the Death Buggies used when they went out on patrol, was in the raised position.

She climbed the catwalk that spiraled around the outside of the MFOB. Belt-iron armor plates gleamed in the light of her helmet lamp. She was trying not to think about the fact that this was the first time she’d been outside since she got here. She was trying not to be absolutely freaking terrified. She concentrated on the ache in her thigh muscles as she climbed. She hadn’t been on the treadmill or the elliptical trainer in months; she was always too busy. She vowed to change that. When she was done with this.

On top of the MOFB’s wide flat roof, the refugee center stood just like she’d pictured it. A bull’s-eye on a big fat target.

It resembled a cargo container. An outer shell of mesh stood away from the walls. She had to go through a gate in this fence to reach the airlock. But after that there was nothing to stop her from getting in.

Bright light drenched her. In the middle of the basketball court marked out by the grunts months ago, small brown figures sat on a carpet of sleeping-bags stenciled with the Star Force logo, practising their warbling. The chorus of small voices trailed off at Colden’s approach. She stopped at the edge of the sleeping-bag carpet, feeling embarrassed and panicky at the same time. She turned up her suit’s external speaker to maximum volume. “You have to go,” she said. “You have to leave. Now.”

They just sat there staring at her. She blundered through the mess of stuff on the floor—toiletries, food, clothes, everything Squiffy Jackson could think of to make them comfortable. Just like muppets in a silo, they’d scattered their shit everywhere. She stood over their adult guardian. He looked up, frowning at the interruption. He was reclining on an ergoform, ankles crossed, a screen on his lap. It showed a news feed from Earth, curated by one of those comics who narrated current events as if they were jokes with punchlines. Her external mic picked up the word
Martian,
and laughter. Oh God, they’d been searching for news
about themselves
on the internet.

“You have to go,” she repeated.

The adult put the screen down and stood up. He seemed to have grown since she saw him last outside Archive 394. Then she realized no, she’d shrunk—she wasn’t a phavatar anymore. He seemed to look her right in the eye through her faceplate. “Who decided this?” he said in German.

Being clever, Colden had loaded a German translation program into her BCI. She said, “I did.” Her suit’s MI voice said,
“Ich.”
She gestured with her carbine. The children flinched. “Out. Now! You have to leave!”

“Why?”

“Because you’re a risk to all of us. As long as you’re here, we’re all in terrible danger. The PLAN has a vendetta against you—the ones that got away. They might be targeting us right now!” Her voice rose to a desperate pitch as she spoke. The MI voice emerging from her suit stayed monotonous. “No one understands! No one believes me! I guess they’ll believe me when a KKV squashes us flat.” She got hold of herself. “But that’s not going to happen, because you are going to leave this base.”

She prodded the Martian man in the chest with her carbine. He flinched. Emboldened, she prodded him backwards. The children clung to his legs.

“There are some caves in this area,” she said. “In the sides of the tablelands. It’s a bit of a climb, but you wouldn’t be KKV’d in there.”

“Yes, I think I know the caves you’re talking about.”

“You can take this stuff if you want. I might even be able to get a buggy for you.” A lie. She’d never be able to steal a buggy. She’d have said anything to get them out of here. She kept remembering Conurbation 243. The temple of the NASA hate cult. Hawker on the roof:
Do the right thing.
She was doing this for all of them. “You just have to go!”

He reached down and squeezed the children’s shoulders, calming them. She thought she saw sadness on his alien face. “You’re right, of course,” he said. “The god
will
target us. Defective components must be excluded from the network. I’ve hated sitting here, waiting to be blown up. I asked the fat man, the one who welcomed us, to take us to this place here. It looks nice.” He pointed at another screen unrolled on the floor, showing pages from a book:
The Rough Guide to Earth.
Who’d given them
that?
“He said he didn’t want to hear about it.”

“That’s what he says to everyone.”

“It’s beyond belief. We must be extremely valuable to your people, and yet you’ve taken almost no steps to protect us.”

“Welcome to the UN,” Colden said, and bit her lip. “But you do understand, don’t you? You have to go?”

“Oh yes, I understand.”

He packed, sorting out the useful items from the keepsakes and random junk, stuffing them into a sleeping bag. Colden was reminded of a guy she’d known on her first posting. His room had been a total dump, but he could always lay hands on whatever he was looking for. Maybe Martian clutter wasn’t inefficient, just a different way of doing things.

He took the screens, she noticed.

“Put your coats on,” he said to the children. “It’s cold outside.” The coats were newly printed, child-size puffy jackets, decorated with Space Corps logos. The children had had their picture taken in them for a press release. Colden felt a twinge of satisfaction at the thought of the inconvenience that would ensue in Geneva when the Martians were discovered to be missing.

Still holding her carbine, she gestured them towards the airlock.

“It’s for the best,” the man said philosophically. “We’ll find a nice cave and hole up there until the war is over.”

“It’ll be over some day,” she said, trying to believe it.

“You can tell them where we are. You could also send us supplies from time to time.” Now he was telling
her
what to do. It was almost funny. “Food. The stuff you call gorp is good. The other things are indigestible in various degrees. We’ll need oxygen, of course, although I know of several depots in this region that don’t appear to have been touched. I saw them as we were coming along. And it would be helpful to have some guns, in case the
untermenschen
track us down.”

“Yes, oh yes, we’ll get all that stuff to you. I’ll make sure it happens.”

He paused in front of the airlock. He unrolled the screen he’d been carrying in his hand. “I’d really like to know. Where
is
this place?”

It was the news feed from Earth. “Well, that’s Curacao,” Colden said. “This guy’s gimmick is he’s always on the beach.”

She thought he was going to ask her what a beach was. But he asked a different question. “Where is Curacao?”

“Well, it’s on Earth …”

“But where is Earth? At the south pole? On the other side of the Amazonis Planitia?” He shook the
Rough Guide to Earth
in her face. “I’m trying to understand why you didn’t take us to Curacao, or London, or Hanoi, or any of these other wonderful bunkers.”

Colden’s jaw dropped.
Specialized components,
she thought.
These guys were archivists, not fighter pilots. They have no idea where Earth is. They think we’re rebels from some other part of Mars, who have better bunkers.

She was tempted to ask him if he even knew what a planet was, or that he lived on one. But she hadn’t come here to do anthropology.

“It’s just outrageous,” he said huffily. Practically quivering with indignation, he shooed the children towards the airlock. “We might agree to join you—
might
—if Curacao was on offer. Tell them that.”

Colden hid a smile. “I’ll tell them you complained about the room service, too.”

“Thank you.” He stopped in front of the airlock. “But how are we to get out?”

“Oh,” Colden said. “That part’s easy.”

She gently moved the children aside. Standing in front of the airlock, she raised her carbine and shot the control panel. The recoil kicked her shoulder. She’d forgotten how violent this felt in the flesh. The noise echoed through the basketball court. She lined up the crosshairs again and fired another burst. The smart darts weren’t made to destroy hardware, they were strictly for wet work, and she’d had to disable the auto-targeting to use them for this purpose at all. But they did the job. The control panel vaporized. Electronic slurry dripped from a hole in the wall.

Colden took hold of the airlock’s flanges and heaved them open, straining against the inert hydraulics. “That’s how,” she said.

A klaxon went off. The children cringed and covered their ears. Colden heard it via her cochlear implants. She’d heard it once before, in training, before she was deployed to Alpha Base. In the event of a containment breach, everyone would awake to this klaxon. Red text flashed in the corner of her faceplate: WARNING DECOMPRESSION EVENT WARNING—

They wouldn’t have long now to make their getaway. But she’d planned for this. She strode into the chamber, knelt, and took aim at the hinges of the outer door.

It took all the smart darts she had left in her magazine to chew through one hinge. After that, the force of the escaping air helped her twist the heavy hatch upwards and outwards. They squeezed out, one by one, onto the rooftop. Colden waited until last, her nerves sizzling with impatience. She threw the Martians’ sleeping-bags full of stuff out to them, and then slithered through the gap, mindful of the risk of tearing her suit’s outer garment.