The Paradise Factory

by Jim Keen

  “Sarge?” Alice said as she snatched a look backward. The tunnel curved away behind her, the radius far wider than that of the parliament building overhead. They’d been down here for an hour, edging further and further underground, the floor always leading downward. The dome’s heat had been replaced with a frigid cold. Her breath fogged the air, her arms shivered.

  The remnants of the Marines task force hunched back around the curve. Alice kneeled on one knee, undecided what to do next. The corridor ran straight ahead for a hundred feet to end in a heavy steel door. They’d passed through two of these already, but her back itched with fear.

  After basic training Alice had been sent to the Texas wall. Half the time she worked as a sniper from the armored turrets, the other half was spent in the wilderness tracking down insurgents. Out there she had taken point duty more than any other Marine. Her sergeant even joked about it, said she was a telepath or some high-tech cyborg. It wasn’t that. She’d spent years in the abattoir of New York City, honing her survival instincts to a keen edge, and had learned to trust her feelings. Now they were telling her something was off, she just didn’t know what.

  The corridor matched so much Martian architecture: ten-foot-tall sheets of armor glass formed curved walls, red soil visible on the other side. A flat, pink concrete floor reflected gel-pack lighting.

  A low throb pulsed at the base of her skull, a dry thirst in her mouth. There was no sign of the Moles; it was as if they never existed. She pulled the hydration straw from her armor and sucked on the sickly red gel.

  “Sarge?” she hissed again, faint echoes returning from the walls. Goddam shit comms gear. She rattled her helmet to no effect. Her headache had been building since she stopped, and it grew like a thundercloud to mock her indecision.

  Then the corridor rippled as if underwater. She shook her head, sweat spinning away as silver dots in the air. The rippling stopped, if it had ever occurred.

  A crackling sound filled her helmet, garbled noise from her headphones. She slapped the Kevlar shell with her palm. The rattle stilled; a voice came from behind.

  “Yu, what’s the delay?”

  “There’s something here, Sarge. Maybe. I’m not sure. Seeing things.”

  “Hold.”

  Alice crouched, sighted down the long barrel of her rifle, waited. McNulty crept up behind. He said nothing, didn’t need to, just unhooked his dead visor and pulled out an old set of lensed binoculars. They ran different wavelength algorithms with a low whirr.

  “Fatigue?” he said after a minute.

  “I don’t think so, sir. Perhaps. I don’t know.”

  “I got nothing,” he answered after a few seconds. “What you see?”

  “The tunnel rippled, like water or oil. There, gone, then nothing.”

  “You’ve been on point for thirty. Time to swap out.”

  “No, I can do it.”

  “That wasn’t a question. You’re fatigued or in shock. I can’t have you hallucinating on me. Step down.”

  “Sir.”

  Alice rose, knees popping in the quiet, and jogged back around the corner, high-fiving Phelps as he ran forward, then sat in a low crouch at the rear of the team. Being the point guard was exhausting beyond any physical exercise. Maybe Sarge was right, and she was in shock. Texas had been rough—she’d seen plenty of action—but nothing like that attack run. Her head throbbed, a dull ache that radiated from the base of her skull. It was rhythmic, hypnotic. She dragged herself upright, shook herself. She nudged Thomasson ahead of her, and he swung round with a goofy grin.

  “We going or what?” she said.

  He didn’t reply, instead giving her the blissed-out look she recognized from nightclubs back home. But Thomasson was as antidrugs as the rest of the white-trash born-to-kill Christians he’d signed up with. Alice’s headache spiked, sharp steel pins in her mind. The armor-glass wall opposite glowed with a red-blue halo. The scent of peppermint filled the air.

  Alice’s legs shook and gave out, throwing her face-first to the floor, rifle clattering away on the concrete. She twitched as nerves fired, but her muscles had seized like rusted farm equipment. She concentrated, forced herself onto her knees, the horizon rolling, gravity a lost concept. Thomasson lifted his head, burped a happy giggle, and stuck his thumbs in his eyes. As she watched, a scream locked inside her throat, he pulled them out and licked the bloody mess like lollypops.

  Alice looked up to witness her platoon slicing themselves to shreds, some opening their stomachs with boot knives, others shooting themselves. Alice dragged herself on all fours around the bend to see Top lying unconscious on the floor. She raised her rifle in hands that shook so hard it was impossible to aim. Blue flames leaped from the barrel, the brrrrrrppp of the weapon drowning out the screams of her friends.

  The tunnel rippled and came apart. The Moles had stretched nanocamouflage across the shaft, its weave mimicking the background perfectly. The sheet exploded under the gunfire to reveal a red cylinder attached to a wide nozzle. It hissed as it bled hallucinogenic gases into the air.

  Blood flooded the floor beneath her. Her hands were claws, should she cut them off? A steel blade was there, in her arm sling. She pulled it free, the rainbow of its edge—

  No.

  With a shiver, she dropped the knife and staggered toward the cylinder. She made it, clung on. There was no way to shut it off; the gas was inside her now, soaking from her pores with the dazzling blue fire of a Dust trip. She fumbled at her belt for a thermal grenade, tore the firing pin free, and tossed it between her and her team. She tried to cover her head, failed. The grenade was still in her hand.

  Or was it—

  —there—

  —why was, it was …

  Fire filled her universe, flames smothering her, searching for every crack in her armor, the composite running like wax. Her hair was burning, skin black. The armor-glass wall folded inward like a wet cardboard tube to leave her in roaring, sealed blackness.

  Alice awoke into a void defined by pain. Was she dead? She floated and struggled to remember where she was, who she was. Memories danced, fragments bursting like flames only to die away. The pain localized; her face was raw, her scalp radiating waves of agony that drowned out every other sensation.

  A cold, hard floor pressed against her back. She was lying somewhere dark. She tried to move, but pain erupted in a storm so she stopped. There was an anesthetic stick in her belt. She waggled her fingers: they worked. She walked them across her belt, inch by inch, until they brushed the cold, hard tube. She flipped the cap in the dark, turned the cylinder around and jammed it into her stomach.

  Burned skin shrieked, then a numb blanket smothered her, sensations nothing but distant voices. She floated.

  A scrape in the dark, nails over stone. Again, closer. Something was in here with her, something that used the tunnels, that liked to trap people, to chew on bones like old wood. Peppermint—

  That triggered her. Peppermint. Her team. Gas canisters. Paranoia. Fear.

  She was in a Martian tunnel, tripping out of her gourd on hallucinogenic gas. Waves of claustrophobia crashed over her, and a crippling fear of the dark pummeled her senses. She knew it was false, had spent months living in New York’s sewers, but that didn’t help, the emotions too strong to fight.

  She scrambled for her second anesthetic stick, jammed it into her elbow and embraced the blackness that blossomed to envelop her.

  How long had she been out? When would the Fucker release its nukes? It couldn’t be long; so much of this had happened out of sight of its surveillance systems. The pain medication was failing, spikes stabbing through her with every breath. If she was going to do anything, it had to be now.

  Alice rolled to her side, gasped, pushed herself upright. There was nothing, just absolute dark. Her armor was deformed—hard and lumpen—making moving difficult. With desperate care she ran her hands over her body and peeled the main panels of her uniform away. Buckled and warped, they fell to the floor
with a clatter. They’d saved her life: only her midriff was raw, where the panels were thinner. She checked her equipment. There was nothing left except her pistol and gel-pack light. She pulled the pack out, cracked its spine, and shook it until a pale glow grew bright enough for her to see.

  The tunnel was no longer armor glass, but native red Martian stone. Drill bit marks from demolition charges marked every few feet. This had to be one of the earliest tunnels, dug back in the first few years. The floor was still flat concrete. Ten feet ahead lay a small blue glove with a unicorn logo. She raised the gel stick and gasped in pain as burned skin cracked. There was nothing else to be seen.

  Alice limped forward, a cloud of fear overhead. Claustrophobia came close to crippling her, the feeling that at any second she’d be trapped here, unable to breathe, the weight of the ground above growing heavier, heavier.

  The floor sloped ever downward. There were more signs of life now. A discarded toy, a half-eaten energy bar, some new shoes.

  Her gel stick dimmed as the walls became rough-hewn stone. She ran her hands over them as she limped forward, touching rock from another world.

  Terror came in surges. The tunnel, so cold and hard, filled with heat and humidity, as if she were sliding down the stinking gullet of some long-dead animal. Tentacles stroked her cheeks, grazed her ankles. She spun around, burned skin oozing blood, to see nothing but empty shaft passing out of sight. The fear faded, replaced by terrors of ancient things with hard scales and waxen skin beckoning her onward.

  The anesthetic shots dwindled with every step. Her scalp hurt the most, a hot, raw sensation as if she were still on fire. A desire to stop and lay down fought with an inner voice that pushed her on. The voice was weak, though, coming and going, while the desire for rest grew relentlessly.

  If she stopped now, there was no getting up.

  The shaft ended at a heavy door with a central spin-wheel lock. The Rocket X logo was embossed in its steel, followed by 018, the first ship to land on Mars. This had to be it, the original deep tunnel and habitat.

  Alice reached for the handle, but then stopped herself. Was it a trap? They’d blown Marines out of the sky, burned them, poisoned them. Why would they leave this here, untouched?

  “Fuck it,” she said and grabbed the handle.

  Nothing happened.

  She spat blood on the floor, and rotated the lock counterclockwise. It moved, the mechanism oiled, and with a snick the door swung open. There was a brief gust of warm air, an odd scent, then more darkness.

  “Hello?”

  Silence. She stepped over the door’s metal lip and into a white ceramic room. She held the gel stick up, its feeble light barely enough to pick out the interior of an airlock. There was an access panel beside the inner seal. She placed her hand against it and lights glowed to life. There was a background buzz of electricity, the tink of cooling metal, then the inside door unlocked.

  Alice peered into this new room, its gray twilight revealing forms on the floor. She didn’t want to go in, her fear amplified to terrifying heights by the drugs in her system.

  “No,” she said. She just wanted to stop, give up, sleep.

  Her feet moved of their own accord, up and over the lip, into the room. It was circular and narrow, the metal walls and ceiling lit by wire-covered lights. A console bristling with equipment rose from the middle. A small green light blinked.

  She looked at the floor.

  The Moles were here. She’d found them at last, arrayed in a circle, ordered from old to young. The original settlers took the outside spaces, feet against the wall. Next were the second, then third crews: younger, heavier. Children made up the final ring, six corpses encircling the center console.

  They had dressed for their deaths, clothes washed and pressed, hands crossed and holding sheets of paper. Alice kneeled beside an old woman and saw that the paper in her hands was a signed and authorized recycling form. They had remained scientists to the last, their bodies offered up to fertilize soil on the planet they considered their own.

  Alice stepped over the woman, then a man, refusing to look at the children (—blond hair, shoulder length; white skin, thin lips with—) and reached the console. It was a bootstrapped communications panel from the settler’s first ship. The blinking green light signaled an upload buffer; it contained a thirty-second video. Someone had taped a handwritten note to a small red button: If you are a human first, a soldier second, send this with no regrets.

  Alice pressed the button. It was old, mechanical. It clicked and released the signal, some remote colony transmitter sending whatever the Moles had wanted to say. She waited until the transmission was complete, then raised a microphone to her scorched lips.

  “Mars is taken,” she said, then sat in the dim light and let the terrors in.

  NEW YORK, 2055

  “So that’s where their last video came from. I never knew. It was a big deal down here, new laws and everything ’cos of that. Did they ever find who sent the fake one? With the UN envoy losing her head?” Red said, his surroundings and predicament momentarily forgotten.

  “No. A Mars relay was hacked. Rumor has it some rogue MI did it, but they could never prove anything. The whole raid was based upon a lie.”

  “But you didn’t know that.”

  “No.”

  “And the deal with the gas, how were you to know? That landing would have screwed anybody up.”

  “I knew something was there. I didn’t hold my ground.”

  “You were ordered to quit, though. It don’t sound so bad to me.”

  Alice sat opposite him, her heavy boots pulled in tight, knees to her chest, arms wrapped like a shield. She lifted her head and stared at him, lips back in a snarl. “What?”

  “You’re saying the mission was based on a faked video, right, and you missed some super-secret high-tech camouflage thing, and everyone died. That’s no big bad on you.”

  “You don’t get it, kid. They died because I fucked up. It’s my fault.”

  “No it ain’t. You were out of your depth, right? They should have sent a drone in or something, but were too cheap for any of that high-tech stuff. Soldiers cost nothing these days, what with the unemployment. Everyone knows that. Look, I ain’t saying you’re a hero or anything, but you got to get a grip.”

  She stared at him, silent, black eyes unblinking.

  “I’m right, aren’t I?” Red pressed. He knew it was dumb to say more, but he couldn’t stop himself, the words tumbling out. “All that anger you’re carrying is old news. You need to give it up.”

  “I spent a year in rehab. First on the ship back, then down here.” Alice scratched her scalp with a dirty finger. “This is all new, the hair, the skin, my face. Got the tags if you shave me. The reprint grafts hurt, but they had drugs to fix that. This was harder.” She tapped her skull.

  “That why you joined police instead of some plush tower-security gig?”

  “Yeah. There are too many memories in my head. Do anything chill and I start thinking about it, over and over in a loop I can’t stop. If I keep busy they stay out of the way.”

  “Killing yourself won’t fix anything.”

  “The Moles poisoned their kids because of us. I can’t shake that, or accept it. Every time I sleep I see them. Younger than you: six, four. Their clothes—” She stopped, unable to continue.

  “Driving yourself into the recycling vats won’t bring them back. Last thing I expected from you was cowardice.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Putting a gun to your head is hard, yeah? Takes guts to do that and pull the trigger. But making it so someone else does it to you is a cheat’s way out. This death-wish stuff puts your team, your partner, straight in the firing line, right?”

  “Always faithful”—Alice didn’t sound bitter to Red, just tired and scared—“is the Marines motto.”

  “See what I mean? What’s the cop one? To protect and serve? Does that mean anything to you, or they just slogans
on badges you wear?”

  “They used to mean something.” Fatigue cut deep creases in her face that grew as she looked at him. “But I’m not so sure anymore.”

  “Marines, cops, your job is to protect those who can’t protect themselves. Killing yourself rejects that code.” Red pulled out the letter again, filthy and wet. It dripped water onto the floor. “This letter is bullshit, I understand that now. Some things you just have to accept, no matter how bitter. But you can’t go back, ever. Done is done. You’re in the here and now, get that? You and me. We’re the good guys, and good guys don’t leave their friends behind. You got to put him first, over us.” Red stopped, his breathing heavy.

  “If we try to get Mike, we’ll die.”

  “Some partner you are.”

  “I came here to save my job, just as much as save him.”

  “That make you feel good?”

  “Fuck no,” she said with a quiet laugh.

  “The Marines in the drop-ship …” Red said.

  “Careful.”

  “You leave them there? Or you go back when you could?”

  “I know what you’re saying, but this is different.”

  “No it ain’t. Your Scorcher partner? I don’t give two shits what he’s done, all I know is he’s scared and alone, just like us. Think you have it tough? Look at me. Every day I choose the hard option. I could run drugs, be so easy. Lots of money, life expectancy all fucked up for sure, but living large, short term. Or I could go to one of them big unemployment halls, get my red gel pack and watch the screens. But I ain’t gonna do that, I ain’t. This is us, right here. I say who I am, not some stupid-ass job. Can’t you see that?”

  Alice searched her jacket pockets, ignoring him.

  “You know what I’m saying is right, I see you do. Stop being so selfish and let’s go get him.”