Lakes of Mars

by Merritt Graves

  The core drill consisted of our going in teams of six through a network of rubber bunkers and obstacles as fast as we could. The other Greens in my group weren’t as experienced at shooting as I was, and we frequently got mired in between well-placed targets. But with the way the Blues worked together and covered each other, it was as if each were reading off the same constantly evolving script. Part of a larger, disciplined and choreographed performance. I’d never seen anything like it before. “You don’t always want to be in the Box,” Pierre said, jogging back over after completing a bunker run. “It feels real then, too, but there’s something about your body actually doing it.”

  “Even though you’re in these silly suits, only shooting charges,” said Daries.

  “That’s right,” said Brandon, winded. And then to me, “There’s no live ammo allowed anywhere on the Outer Ring, thankfully, given how many fucking crazies there are here.”

  “It’s the sane that scare me,” muttered Pierre.

  Chapter 14

  I couldn’t focus longer than a few moments. The instructor in red was going on about Agincourt and longbowmen, drawing some parallel to the Fleet’s Z and L cruisers, but my head was throbbing so hard I couldn’t follow. Even though I’d puked up about everything I had, the firewater must’ve been stronger than I thought it was, making me still feel drunk. Last night had also been the second in a row with scant sleep, so it was a fight just to keep my eyes open.

  I would’ve nodded off for sure if it hadn’t been for the occasional foot stomps and sharp emphasis that the instructor placed on words of import. He fidgeted with his left hand and his boots squeaked as he moved around the lightboard, every once in a while reaching up to massage his scalp when describing the errors different sides had made. He appeared to relish the anatomy of conflict, speaking of grim battles between English and French men-at-arms thousands of years ago on Earth, stating that, while they were ages apart, the same principles of strategy still applied to modern warfare, and if we knew enough historic scenarios, why they were won and when to utilize their lessons, we would never draw a blank about what to do on the battlefield.

  There was a lot to learn, but it was stunning to realize in just how little time they expected us to have it learned by. Pages upon pages of tiny print had been assigned and since I’d been absent yesterday prepping for the Challenge, I’d missed one lecture and 80 pages of it already. Add to that the 112 pages due for tomorrow, and that made 192. If there were similar numbers for my other classes, I’d need to do 500 pages of reading per night, and that was on top of the Tread Room, the Box, and everything else. Eventually I just gave in to my exhaustion and put my head down on my desk. If they let kids beat each other up in the cafeteria, who would object to my catching a few z’s here?

  “Which sowed the seeds for Henry V’s successful campaign eighteen months later . . . ,” the instructor rambled on while I drifted in and out of consciousness.

  The abstractions in my next class, Space Math, made my eyelids even heavier. I could’ve kept them open if that were all I’d concentrated on, but then I’d have missed the notation guidelines, delivered in such a smooth, monotone that their rhythm was rocking me to sleep. The professor was a solemn-looking woman in her sixties who wore her platinum hair high in a bun. It seemed like she didn’t notice me, but halfway through the class her lightwand slammed against my desk.

  “You don’t want to fall below the line this early, do you?” she yelled.

  “No,” I said, even though I had no idea what that meant.

  “Good. Because you look like the exact cut of meat the master sergeant prefers, and I won’t hesitate to feed you to him.”

  I stayed awake after that.

  Fingers was waiting for me when I stepped out of the classroom. “Bet you never expected to see this again, did ya?” he said, tossing me my U-dev. “You can thank the fence climbers for fishing it out for you. Taryn’s techs tried to crack the security, but you had it laid on pretty thick. Your work?”

  “I wish. It was my best friend from home, Verna. She’s great with networks.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Were you guys networked?”

  “Not like that.”

  “I’ve always wanted a girl who’s great with comp sci. That’s been a fantasy for as long as I can remember. Not good, but great, you know?”

  “You’d probably like her, then.”

  He contemplated this for a few seconds and then asked, “Got a pic?”

  “I’ll do one better.” I punched a few buttons and the U-dev morphed into a video of Verna and me, smiling broadly side by side, joking around right before we went to the Winter Ball together two years ago. I hadn’t planned on going, but then her date had bailed on her at the last minute so it seemed like the right thing to do.

  His face brightened. “She’s kinda cute.”

  “Aren’t there any cute girl techs around this place?”

  “A few, but Mars is—no offense or anything—kind of misogynist, so they don’t really let in any more than the bare minimum Fleet requirement. Besides, things get complicated up here. There’s a lot of competition for the ladies, and it’s usually safer not to piss people off . . . it’s, it’s just good to be as small a target as possible. I know that sounds spineless or whatever, but—”

  “I get it.”

  “Yeah . . .”

  “Well maybe Verna’ll come visit sometime and I’ll introduce you guys.”

  He frowned. “I doubt it. Rules are pretty clear. No visitors allowed.”

  “For how long?”

  “The duration; until we’re twenty-one . . . you did know that, didn’t you?” he asked.

  I remembered Verna’s saying something to that effect, but I’d just wanted to get out of there and didn’t think I’d be coming here anyway.

  He looked away suddenly, almost flinching, as if I’d reminded him of his own choice. “I miss my parents so much.”

  “Me, too.”

  “During the first couple weeks I was here I figured out a way to hack into the comm and write them messages, but then they traced the signal and Marquardt threatened to send me to the Rim. He said that comm silence was the most sacred of all their rules and that if I ever broke it or hacked anything on Corinth again, they’d go full transparency.”

  “Full transparency?” I asked.

  “Yeah, they’d make me give up my TRCV number like they do with front-line marines so they can tie-in anytime. Which is like my worst nightmare. Well, that or them taking away my tamo-bass . . .” He stopped and ran a hand through his hair, clearly stressed out by the topic. “But I’ve been good since then.”

  “Didn’t you hack into the system to look up my schedule yesterday?” I asked.

  Fingers flinched noticeably this time, throwing his head back to scan the surrounding walls and ceilings, first fast, and then slow when his eyes caught hold of the vent.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s nothing,” he said, his demeanor transformed.

  “Are they listening or something?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t know.” He put a hand on my side and guided me away from the vent. “They might be.” And then in barely a whisper, he said, “Yes, I hacked in, but they wouldn’t catch me in a million years because it’s all Outer Ring, admin stuff. Critical systems like comm, environment and weapons are where they’ve got the real firewalls.”

  “Weapons?” I asked, looking over my shoulder.

  “Yeah, they have an armory and a standard battery of pulse cannons outside, but just . . . just try not to talk about that kind of thing. I saw the schematic while I was inside their network, so I’m not even supposed to know that. Okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Because I can barely lift a Pegasus rifle, man, so the Rim is really the last place I want to be.”

  “Is that where they send you for not doing your homework, too?” I asked jocularly, hoping to help him calm down.

  “Nah, that’s just to throw
you off. They know damn well you can’t do a quarter of it, but hand it out anyway because it trains you to pick your spots and allocate resources. I read just enough to get by and spend the rest of the time hacking . . .” He paused and looked past me down the corridor, which was empty save for a tread-mounted AI turning a corner fifteen meters away. “Hacking stuff that’s sanctioned by Corinth, that is. I was only lead tech in the traditional sense because there was no one else. Pierre worried I’d feel threatened by Sebastian, as if the pressure to write algos on the fly and having everyone bitch that they weren’t getting enough kills was something I got off on. Shit, no. I’m a specialist—and the thing about this place is you want to be as special as you can be. If you get decent grades in everything, you’re boring, and you’ll get a boring, mid-tier assignment. You gotta make an impression here in high-points categories: hacks, enemy kills, personnel flips, mission observance . . .”

  “Mission observance?”

  “Yeah, they don’t like people going off script in the Box. There are times when you can bank a ton of kills that way, but you get such a steep points dock that no one really does it anymore. Though it cracks me up that they get so touchy about some stuff that you really wouldn’t think would matter, since the rest of the time you can do whatever the hell you want. Seriously.”

  “I appreciate the advice.”

  “And I appreciate what you did in the cafeteria,” he said, starting to relax a little again. “Some Greens voted for Brandon yesterday at the DC because of it.”

  “The DC?” I asked him.

  He smiled and shook his head. “No one’s really given you the run-down yet, have they?”

  I shook my head, too, mirroring him.

  “Okay, well every night Blues and Greens who’ve been here at least a week vote for their pick as block captain in something called the Daily Cast. It’s an open ballot, meaning whoever you vote for is public info.”

  “That’s convenient for anyone trying to pressure people.”

  “I know, right?” Fingers said, scrunching up his nose. “But anyway, each block of sixtyish is made up of two wings—one of which is led by the block captain and whoever they choose as their lieutenant, while the other is led by the lieutenant who gets the second-most votes. Every wing has a barracks—sometimes more than one, depending on points. Um, let me see, when we fight other blocks, like the Challenge coming up on Saturday, we fight as one unit, but otherwise the wings within fight it out between themselves for control of the block. Like our wing is the C3 Storms and C1 and C2 are the Fires. This is only my second year, but Caelus has been a Fire and the block captain for one and a half of them now, and Taryn has been his lieutenant for almost that long.”

  “And what about Brandon?” I asked, trying to follow along, but beginning to feel lost amidst all the new details.

  “Only nine months. Seres Rapshaw was captain when I was a Green, but he got tossed for cheating because someone transferred a bunch of hacked answers onto his U-dev before midterms. So that’s another lesson: Always check your U-dev before a test. Always. It’s a popular trick. But anyway, votes elect officers and the officers are the ones who use their wing’s points to get stuff—like buying better ships for the intra-block Challenges, placing holds on Greens, bringing over Greens—”

  “Like what Brandon did for Sebastian?”

  “Exactly. Hmmm, what else is important right away?” He paused, staring at the ceiling, considering. “Oh yeah, if you score below seventy in any of your classes it’s called ‘falling below the line,’ and if you fall below it for more than a week you get ‘rank disciplined,’ which means grueling after-hours drilling in the Tread Room, making it that much less likely that you’ll be able to recover, and on and on like that in a loop. So don’t get sucked in. And if you fall below fifty it’s called ‘Tetra Styx,’ which means the penalties double unless you sacrifice five percent of your next term’s grade in a comparable class or three point five percent each in two non-comparable classes, called ‘subbing out,’ which means that you . . .” He must’ve seen the strain intensifying on my face, because he stopped, shaking his head sympathetically. “I know, right? I know. It’s a freaking lot. I suppose the point is to try and snow you under with all this shit—make you feel hopeless—but there’s not really any way around it because the rules can still get used against you. There’s a lot more, too, but I’ll send annotated versions to your U-dev to keep it manageable.”

  I side-eyed him.

  “Okay, as manageable as I can.”

  “But Fin said Caelus doesn’t want the Greens being told the rules at all, right?” I asked, blinking a few times as if there were something caught in my eye. I wanted to slow things down and just try to absorb everything, but I still had so many questions and couldn’t keep myself from continuing to fire away.

  “Of course he doesn’t. The less you know, the less you can do, and he’d rather the noobs not do much of anything until he has them in his pocket.”

  “Well, then, who does Fin sup—”

  “Brandon, of course. She just plays at being on the fence because it lets her get into places where C3s can’t go. That’s good that you couldn’t tell, though—because while she’s pretty convincing—you know, like a method actor, Caelus is pro at sniffing people out. The guy’s freakin’ observant. A couple terms ago he asked me why I’d stopped wearing the bracelet I had on when I first got here. I’d only worn it for a few hours, and he remembered after four months. Creeps the shit out of me.”

  “Everyone just keeps talking and talking about Caelus, but has anyone ever tried talking to him?”

  Fingers seemed to get a kick out of this, tilting his head back and snickering. “You’d think that’d be possible, right? I did once, too. The problem is he doesn’t think about things the way you or I do. He might pretend to, but in order for him to feel like he’s winning, someone else has to be losing. You see the problem with that? You can only compromise with someone who wants something that you can give them.”

  Wiry and birdlike, Fingers wasn’t the best-looking guy to begin with, but as he said those last words his face twisted into such a large sneer that he was almost unrecognizable from who he’d been a few moments ago. Caustic. Irascible. His posture stiffening so much that I nearly stepped backward, wondering what could have happened to make him so upset. “How do you know that?”

  “Because I’ve been here for three years and I’ve had my eyes open.” He paused and stared at me. “Now let me ask you a question: Why’d you stick up for the fat kid?”

  “I had to.”

  “Was it because you didn’t know what they’d do? Huh? Because I can understand not knowing . . . but now that you do know, would you still do it?”

  “Of course—they were going to make him puke up his food. He didn’t deserve that.”

  “Deserve is a funny word. You’d think by the way we say that it’d be tied to some larger reality, but real’s only what we imagine it to be, and we all have different imaginations. Which is just another way of saying everything’s chaos.”

  Fingers scowled even more as he moved closer, his breath hot and damp on my face, his freckles flaring as he laughed. “Deserve it. Caelus and Taryn have done far worse than that to other cadets, and no one’s ever felt like they had to do anything. Just getting by is enough for most here. Get by, get a decent assignment on a command track. That’s it. That’s the grand goal. And I get it. I completely get it,” he said. “Personally, I think what you did was awesome. I just wonder if you’d do the same in a couple weeks, or a couple months, if you make it that long. They’re going to come for you. You do know that, don’t you?”

  “They already have.”

  “Oh man, you haven’t seen anything yet. The Challenge gave Brandon the points to get you out of C2, but there are other ways . . .” He faux laughed again. “Especially since he and Pierre‘ll have you in front now that they know you’ll fight their battles for them.”

  “They came to h
elp—”

  “You in the cafeteria, but not Sebastian at first. It’s easy to help someone who doesn’t need it.”

  “We do what we can,” I said, wincing as the accident flew through my mind and then my subsequent attempt to escape it. “I still have another session before lunch so I better run. But thanks again for this.”

  I held up my U-dev.

  “Thank Fin; she’s the one who got it,” he whispered. “Just not too loudly.”

  Chapter 15

  I tasted blood in my mouth as I hit the mat, rolling out of the way just before Bluerine landed a finishing shot. It didn’t look promising then, but he was already gassed, while only a single bead of sweat trickled down my forehead. I just needed to stay up and draw things out. Block, dodge. Block, dodge. Just keep coming, you big bastard. Keep expending all that energy.

  I started bounding around the ring to demoralize him, shuffling my feet, showing him just how much I had left. Then I thrust my leg out and kicked him right on the lip. And then again, with a combination snap kick that left him on the ground writhing.

  “Match!” an instructor called, and a light above me flashed red.

  It took Bluerine a while to get up, but was glaring when he did. “When the rings shrink next week, there won’t be any more prancing around like a faggot,” he jeered as we shook hands.

  No. Because I’ll have a completely different strategy then.

  There were still three fights continuing in adjacent rings, but most people had gathered around the two-on-one in the far left. Wading through the crowd, I saw that the one was Pierre and, while not as fast as me, he was stronger and had waited patiently for just the right spot—when one of his opponents’ balance teetered—to bull rush. Pierre’s second opponent came to assist his teammate, but Pierre flung the first into the oncoming blow and then swept the second guy’s legs out. Two finishing shots to the chest and it was over.