Lakes of Mars

by Merritt Graves

  He was tall. Broad-shouldered but lean. He looked first at Sebastian, then Taryn, who was using the bench as leverage to try and haul himself up. “I see you went looking for the sheep, but found the shepherd instead.”

  And then turning to me, more conversationally he said, “I apologize for my colleague. His fondness for the rules, while admirable, sometimes leads him to push beyond the bounds of their prudent application.”

  I glanced over at Taryn and he looked back, incensed.

  “Technically, he was correct about the quota, but we tend to think of it more as a guideline than something hard and fast. His unit has the highest physical rating on Corinth and sometimes he gets a little swept up in the numbers game. You see, we’re all circus freaks, and if we’re good and jump through all the hoops in just the right way, the fine people in charge throw us a fish or two. Cadet Sebastian Garrehal, just by appearing on Lieutenant Miller’s roster, will cause his unit to drop five places in that subcategory, and the fish that have been tossed his way for the past thirty-eight weeks will now be tossed to some other freak.” He paused and licked his lips. “I’d hate to think that you, or any of the other Greens, would think Lieutenant Miller was being a bully just for the sake of it. Lieutenant Miller was being a bully because he’s a freak. A freak who wants his fish.”

  With that, he turned and walked out.

  Chapter 7

  “I knew you’d be back to see me soon,” said the nurse as she stitched up my forehead.

  “Why is that?” I asked, trying to take shallow breaths. Far from the expected antiseptic, the medical bay in Corinth smelled like the scent of wisteria was being pumped through the air vents. It was a disguise that was so obviously a disguise that it made me feel queasier than I already did.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Something just told me you were going to have trouble with the other boys. I’m not always right, of course, but there’s a certain kind of presumption that’s a magnet for strife. A thoughtfulness that always ends up outthinking itself. I’ve seen it before.”

  She smiled weakly, exposing lipstick-stained teeth.

  “But you’re in the right place since that’s one of the things the school’s renowned for correcting. And only seventeen . . . so much time to learn. Meanwhile, I’ll just have to keep patching you up.”

  She squeezed my shoulder and my jaw tightened. “So hopefully, by the end of it, your parents will still be able to recognize you.”

  “I doubt it,” I said, knowing that she had probably read my medical file and knew what had happened to them.

  “You should have more faith in us human stitchers. Nurse Lynne over there told me about a patient on her ward sixty years ago whose face was turned into a crater when the automated laser malfunctioned. Sure, I’ll mess up now and again”—she was working on my ear now and the needle dug unnecessarily hard into the cartilage as she spoke—“but there’s a limit to how far my hand can slip.”

  I looked over and saw Nurse Lynne hunched over a cadet a few beds down, wisps of white hair snaking unevenly across her back. She had a tray holding what looked like a topical anesthetic by her side.

  “You’d like some of that, wouldn’t you?” my nurse said through a thin smile, her breath pelting me with rotten flowers.

  I wanted to move my head to the side to avoid it, but at the same time I didn’t want to be rude to a person who was threading something sharp through my skin.

  “And there are ways to get it, my dear. But I don’t think we’re there yet. It’s best to at least deal with what you can deal with in the beginning. Shortcuts here, like anywhere else, always lead to the same place.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “A place where you’ll need another shortcut. And that’s fine and well for a while, but eventually there won’t be another one, and you won’t know what to do.”

  She paused. She had just finished a suture and I thought I heard her take a couple steps back over to the metal instrument tray, but the environmental unit had just started a new cycle and noise from the fan sailed down the air ducts into the medical bay. A few seconds later her voice was back against my ear. “You wouldn’t know anything about taking shortcuts, would you?”

  I started to speak, but my voice caught in my throat, and only a stray syllable escaped. I’d always prided myself on facing everything head on, working as hard as I possibly could—spending hours and hours studying my weakest subjects, mastering tedious Tae Kwon Do forms, and drilling myself to delirium on the ins and outs of the lightpanel in my dad’s T67X Falcon, which he’d let me fly. I knew the process mattered. My mom had said it a million times: It was the details that brought the world into focus. But I’d run away, and now, lo and behold, everything was a blur.

  “But that’s okay, that’s okay,” said the nurse. “This school will teach you not to use them anymore.”

  Chapter 8

  Sebastian sipped his tea that night, still looking aghast, as we sat at the base of the huge room with the waterfall through which we’d first entered the station. It had previously been a point of his to make eye contact throughout a conversation, but now he was taking little uneasy glances to the side, and every once in a while over the shoulder. His voice would drift as he tracked anyone nearing our table and, as a result, the odd, musical contours of his sentences were compressed and equalized, pulled into a weary, unsteady cadence. It was like everything he’d thought he understood about things was mistaken and he didn’t quite know how to carry himself anymore in response.

  He was just repeating the same words over and over again.

  “I don’t like this place, I don’t like this place, I don’t like this place . . . not one bit,” he mumbled again. “I’m not even sure who’s worse: the first kid or the kid who broke it up.”

  “At least a few came to help,” I said, touching my ear, the sound waves just now starting to normalize. “It means not everyone’s an asshole.”

  Now that I’d had time to absorb things, I had started seeing more clearly. The sullenness of the students. The gloominess congealing on their expressions. They didn’t look like kids, but old men who’d seen it all. Cynical. Suspicious. Viewing everyone as potential competition. Mostly, though, they just kept their heads down or ignored you with the whole snobbish I’m-too-good-to-even-notice-you thing people sometimes do to communicate rank.

  Whatever. I’d seen that at school on Mars and I knew it was stupid.

  But after the fight I’d begun to get vaguely threatening glances, too. Maybe it was just a type of hazing that happened to all the new recruits so they’d feel alone and insecure—this was military school after all—but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was something more. That there was cause to be scared: that this was meanness due not to insecurity, but its opposite.

  I shook my head, reflecting on how overdone that sounded. Aaron, they’re just a bunch of kids under stress, drilled into exhaustion. That’s all. Maybe a few of them were mean deep-down, but there are always a few mean kids. And maybe they were just acting that way to test us. “Maybe Taryn’s like a land mine.”

  “A land mine?”

  “Yeah. A student the school puts here just to cause havoc. Maybe they want to see how we deal with him.”

  Sebastian thought about it for a long while, surveying the room, lingering on face after face. I wasn’t sure exactly what he was looking for, but it was too deliberate not to be intentional. “I think that’s sort of right, but just . . . you’ve got it mixed up.” He trembled again before continuing, “I don’t think he’s the odd one out, I think we are.”

  I stared at him.

  “None of the teachers came to break up the fight—not a single one—and they had to know about it since there has to be cameras everywhere.” He shook his head. “What’s more, it’s like they’re looking for something with the types of kids chosen to be here. Not just leaders and strategists, but something I can’t . . .”

  “There are people like that everywhere.”


  “I know, I know, but I want to understand how Taryn got to be a student officer. Did the school choose him, or did the other one, Caelus? And if Caelus did, then who chose Caelus?”

  I shrugged, shivering a little. We were sitting near the base of the waterfall and little, cold droplets were starting to form on the right side of my uniform. They reflected in the light and for a split second it reminded me of actual waterfalls, and home, and how it felt to be up before anyone else, hiking around the lakes.

  A loneliness greater than anything I’d ever felt thudded against me at the thought, sinking in deep and spreading out in networks all the way to my fingers and toes. Closing my eyes, I imagined that I was slipping down the sides of my chair, evaporating along with the water. I was so far away from everyone I’d ever cared for and who’d ever cared about me. There was so much blackness between us. So much time that could never be reclaimed.

  “Aaron,” continued Sebastian. “They’re scared of him. I can see it on people’s faces. Did you see Fin when she said his name? Did you see how fast people got out of his way?”

  I blinked, trying to sync back up with the moment. Up until now, numbness had been my best defense; feeling like I had nothing to lose had made it easy to have courage. But even suffused with all the fresh emptiness that the memories of home had generated, the name Caelus made a pinprick of fear register somewhere deep inside me. I closed my eyes, searching for it, wanting to figure out how much there was and what it meant. But as soon as my mind started wrapping around it, it was gone, and I was hollow again. Blotted out enough to be brave again.

  “I wonder what the teachers would’ve done if . . . if . . . if they would’ve . . . ,” said Sebastian, his eyes moving from the window back to me. “I’m so sorry, Aaron. I didn’t know what the rules were and never meant to drag you into that. I should’ve figured, but—”

  “Of course you didn’t know. There was no way to know.” I felt things starting to realign as I said the words, the edges of Sebastian’s worried face recrystallizing amidst the fragments of all the other faces swirling in my head. “And if Taryn tries anything again, I swear I’ll—”

  “You won’t have to. I won’t give him a reason.”

  “Like you gave him one today?”

  This made him stop and squint, tilting back as if rerunning the complex calculation that had led him to his previous thought, before saying, “I think we should at least be more careful until we figure things out.”

  “It’s okay. I’m looking for the exit, remember?”

  “No, you’re not,” said Sebastian, the intense, watery look in his eyes threatening to collect into something large enough to run down his cheek. With the exception of maybe Verna, I’d never seen someone care so much about things before. He probably wasn’t used to people sticking up for him like I had, but I got the sense that he would’ve been concerned even if I hadn’t, that he had a disgust for bad, unfair things in general, not just when they happened to him.

  I was about to say something in response, but I wavered, the thought of my plan to die on the Rim inevitably conjuring up the reason why I’d made it, sending images of the accident crashing back into my consciousness. I curled my toes. I raised my palm and ran it over my face, expelling a long breath, hyperaware that this cold, removed bulwark was the only thing keeping the person I imagined myself to be from sloshing onto the floor.

  “And where’d you learn to fight like that? The way you took them all on—I couldn’t believe it.”

  “I thought I was going to the Rim, remember? That’s what I trained for.”

  “See, I knew you cared!” Sebastian almost shouted, the gloominess vanishing inside his excitement. “You were fighting the part of yourself that wanted to give up, doing everything you could to stay alive. Drilling. Training. Studying the Verex. It was like you were battling an infection or something. I knew it!”

  This was all making it worse for me but, thankfully, before he could continue, something caught his eye out the window adjacent to us. “That’s the second one in as many hours.”

  “Huh?”

  “Look out there—that long red stick-looking thing. It’s the second large cargo freighter I’ve seen . . . but what would they need all that room for?”

  “Maybe more medicine balls,” I joked wearily. My dad had owned a shipping company that flew freighters just like that one back on Mars, so I knew people liked to transport all kinds of things across the solar system. “Probably food or supplies or, I don’t know . . . furniture.”

  Sebastian didn’t seem to be listening; he was typing commands into his U-dev as I spoke.

  “Maybe fuel,” I tried again.

  “Hmmm. According to this, food is grown in the hydroponics facility on level nine and all the water’s recycled. Everything’s pretty much recycled, so I’m not sure what they’d need to ship to us. And fuel?” he teased. “This is a space station, as in stationary. It’s not like—”

  “Yeah, yeah, that’s hilarious. But there are the shuttles and the scout ship.”

  “You don’t need two enormous freighters just to fuel those.”

  “What about repair parts?” I asked.

  “They probably just come from the planet down there. I’m sure they’ve got some kind of synthesis facility.”

  The planet glowed bluish green in the distance, shining through the nebula’s red and orange clouds of plasma and dust.

  I gazed at it for a few seconds, thinking, but then the freighter lurched into the foreground, blocking the view, its red hull looking as decrepit as Montgomery Station.

  “According to this, Corinth orbits a planet called Drieus that was home to a small colony until it was destroyed by a lightning storm eight years ago. The Confederation deemed the planet unsafe for settlement afterward, but there’s still talk about setting up an unmanned research station there to study the nebula.” He paused for a few moments to reflect. “Though if the storms were that bad, why did they settle on the surface at all? Why not build underground?”

  “Would you want to live underground?” I asked.

  “Not really.”

  “Well, they must have just decided to chance it, then.”

  “When a storm is releasing strikes with five-million-amp currents carrying a billion volts each, it’s not a chance, Aaron. That’s what I don’t understand. Even with the cruder instruments they had back then, atmospheric disturbances that size wouldn’t have been secrets. It just doesn’t make sense, especially since hydroponics can be housed anywhere.”

  Sebastian was obviously a really thoughtful guy, but it was funny how he always needed everything to have some perfect reason. “Colonists have always gone to stupid places. They settled on Alpha Cernau because of the moon-surface etchings that looked like Mary, even though it barely had an atmosphere. They settled on Telus Seven even though all the water was five hundred meters under igneous rock. They settled—”

  “Yeah, but this really doesn’t make any sense.”

  The red freighter had moved and there was the planet again with its bright gas clouds bubbling thousands of miles beneath us. The side effect of terraforming on Mars was powerful storms, more powerful than the climate models had predicted, but nothing like what was going on below us.

  He was right. It didn’t make sense. “Maybe there’s something in the Corinth library files.”

  Sebastian had his eyes on his U-dev, frowning. “You’d think, but I’ve been through just about every one now and there’s nothing besides the obvious stuff you can call up on the Link. There’s a press release about how the search party turned up no survivors, and a report, eight months later, said they were closing the planet off to future colonization and research. But that’s it.”

  “I guess it wasn’t worth it,” I said.

  “But what made it worth it in the first place?”

  The air was getting cooler and Sebastian began rubbing his arms in an effort to stay warm. Behind him, I saw two figures emerge from the corridor
and approach us, passing a pair of tread-mounted AIs carrying trays full of glasses. I recognized one of them, a Blue from the cafeteria. The other was a Black.

  “Mind if we join you?”

  “Please,” I said, recalling that the speaker had come to help us earlier, and had a dark purplish eye to show for it.

  “This is going to sound crazy, but listen anyway,” the Black next to him said without preamble. “They’re going to take you out. Probably tonight, in the barracks.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I was able to get Sebastian transferred into my unit this afternoon,” he said gravely, his hand twitching slightly on the table, “but they put a lock on you. It might take a while to get enough points to override it.”

  Points? What are points?

  “We realize you just got here and know nothing of the station’s intricacies, but there’s no time to explain it now.”

  He glanced around the room obliquely. I could tell he meant to be subtle, but with his hair gelled all New American and his sweeping, exaggerated postures, he just wasn’t the subtle type. He looked concerned and there was warmth in his voice, but it was fleeting, landing and flying away again every few words—as if he was too exhausted to really connect.

  “You’ve stirred up something and they’re going to try and stop it. I know you’re probably thinking the instructors will intervene, but they’ll sit back and watch you take your last breath through those things.”

  He gestured upward toward an air vent to my right. “Say cheese.”

  I had known that Taryn was furious, and that the instructors hadn’t stopped the fight, but the idea that they’d just let him kill me seemed so ludicrous that I couldn’t help but smile.