“I remember Goto used to do her research, too,” Gilchrist said. Their minds were running along the same track. “She really took the job seriously. Ugh, I can’t get over her being gone.”
Colden’s throat tightened with grief. Elfrida Goto had been her best friend. She’d died in Mars orbit, thrown off a fragmented moonlet, her body lost forever in the chaos of the Big Breakup.
“There was some rumor, I remember,” Gilchrist went on, “that she was special. She was some kind of an outlier who could survive anything.”
“All that was, was lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
“And I keep thinking, if even she could get killed, what are our chances?”
Colden was about to snap back something about Gilchrist being as self-centered as ever, when she realized that she was witnessing a moment of vulnerability. Gilchrist was scared to death, just like everyone else.
“We’ll be fine.” Colden managed a grin. She snapped her fingers sassily. “Fat girls don’t go out like that.”
“Guess I’m screwed, then,” sighed the sylph-like Gilchrist. Then she crossed her eyes and stuck out her tongue. She was an OK chick at heart. “So listen, what I was going to tell you! Oh my God, Jen, are you ready for this? Guess who’s coming to Theta Base on the next transport from Eureka Station? I’m just going to tell you, because you’ll never guess. Magnus Kristiansen!!”
The name of her old flame went through Colden like a rod of solid titanium. The surge of emotion she felt surprised her. Kristiansen had broken her heart long ago, when he chose his ideals over her. She didn’t feel anything for him anymore. Did she?
“Well, thank God they aren’t sending him here,” she said. “Because I would have had to tie his balls around his neck and push him out the airlock for the nanites to devour. Say hi to him from me.”
Gilchrist giggled. “Will do. And regarding your ambush theory, I’ll pass it on to the grunts from Theta. Maybe I can even get Captain Saroyan to take it seriously. He quite likes me.”
The screen darkened as Gilchrist signed off, twirling her hair. Colden smiled tolerantly to herself. Same old Gilchrist, convinced she was God’s gift to men. It was funny how much people could change, and yet stay the same …
She hurried back to the telepresence center. Her practiced eye surveyed the couches. All quiet. Her operators lay peacefully in their polyfoam cradles, only their right—or left—hands twitching slightly, depending on whether they were right- or left-handed. They were digging. If there’d been a flap, they would be jerking around. Involuntary reflexes, you couldn’t control ‘em.
She squeezed between the couches and crouched down by the one that held Drudge’s skinny body. She tapped his shoulder. You weren’t supposed to do this, but if Drudge couldn’t cope with an off-schedule break from immersion, he wouldn’t last long in the Corps.
His limbs flew out straight—one arm narrowly missing Colden’s head. He sat upright and ripped off his mask. “What the fuck? What’s happening? Oh whoops. Ma’am!”
“Drudge, where are you right now?”
“Right here! Oh. OK. I get what you mean. I’m digging,” he said virtuously.
“No, you’re not,” Colden said. At this point in her acquaintance with Drudge, she didn’t even need to make it a question. “You’ve bunked off again.”
“I’m right over there,” he insisted, pointing at the wall of the telepresence center, meaning the same direction relative to his phavatar’s location in Conurbation 243.
“Good. No, I’m not taking the piss, Drudge. That’s good, that’s what I wanted to hear. You went to look for souvenirs, right? So go a bit further away. Like a couple of streets. And then …” She lowered her voice and told him what she wanted him to do. He leaned towards her, shoulders sharp-pointed under his shapeless uniform. He reeked of cheap cologne. Like he thought he was going to get some romantic action, on freaking Alpha Base.
“Got it, ma’am!”
★
Colden hopped back onto her couch and waited for the fun to start.
The rest of her platoon were busy digging. They’d persuaded an earthmover to come over and help. It was a smart six-legged bulldozer that scooped up pieces of rubble too big for the phavatars. The PLAN had built its silos, farms, and city walls out of regocrete—a concrete-analog made from pulverized Martian regolith—reinforced with steel rebar. These tall, skinny structures looked deceptively fragile to Earth-adapted eyes. They were actually very strong. The PLAN’s regocrete used molten sulphur, which was abundant on Mars, as a bonding agent. Even in the quakes following the Phobos impacts, which exceeded the greatest earthquakes in Earth’s history, structures located further from the equator had swayed and cracked but not fallen. Took a direct impact to bring these suckers down …
Colden glanced up at the haze. She was twitchy, fearing that any moment the next KKV might split the overcast sky. Come on, Drudge.
Turned out he’d just been obeying her instructions to move further away. “Hey, guys!” He broadcast his shout to everyone at the site. “You gotta come and see this!”
Colden exclaimed in fake surprise, “That’s one of my agents! Wonder what he’s found?”
“Like, guo lai ya, dudes!” Like all the newbies, Drudge had been made to learn a bit of basic Chinese. “For real! I need backup, pronto!”
All the Chinese troops immediately downed tools and drove towards Drudge’s location. The Star Force troops followed, just in case Drudge had found something good and the Chinese were going to get to it first.
Result! Colden thought to herself. She counted a hundred and fifty human beings passing her, hanging off the sides of their Death Buggies and Dongwu Che surface transports. There could hardly be anyone left at the farm. They all converged on the building where Drudge was yelping about his amazing discovery.
Uh oh. He’d better have found SOMETHING to justify this build-up.
She needn’t have worried.
Drudge’s phavatar stood on the roof of a ziggurat. This wasn’t one of the 120-meter ziggurats that housed the PLAN’s fission reactors. She’d never seen one like this before. It was a smooth-sided cone, about 30 meters high, with a ramp that spiraled up to the top, reminding her of a helter-skelter. She flashed back on the pure joy of a day at the funfair with her parents, and then she saw the skulls carved into the sides of the ramp.
Scratch that.
Actual skulls—muppet skulls—set into the regocrete, like decorations.
“Oh boy, this is sick!” said the grunts, vidding from every angle.
“It sure is!” Drudge shouted. “But you haven’t seen the really interesting thing yet!” His phavatar danced like an excited stag beetle. “Come on up here!”
Chinese and UN grunts climbed the ramp. It was steep enough to force them onto their hands and knees. Infected by the general excitement, Colden climbed up behind them.
There were so many people crowding the platform at the top that she couldn’t reach Drudge. She turned to look back at the ruined farm, about a klick away. Her platoon’s phavatars were still digging, as were those from Rho Base and Theta Base. She line-of-sighted Sophie Gilchrist’s phavatar. “Any time now,” meaning that all the humans were off the site, so she wouldn’t mind if the PLAN sprang its ambush any time.
“One of our combat units is still here,” Gilchrist responded anxiously. “They found a bit that didn’t collapse, and they’ve gone inside. I told Geoff—I mean Captain Saroyan—about our theory, but he was just like, ‘I don’t give a rat’s ass. This is my duty.’”
“It’s Geoff now, is it?” Colden teased her.
“Ma’am! Ma’am! Mizz Colden!” Drudge was trying to get her attention. “You really should look at this!”
People were squeezing through the crowd to where Drudge stood. One by one, they bent down as if to look at something on the floor, and fell back with curses on their lips, to make way for the next set of gawpers. Drudge held his position, quivering self-importantly. Colden could hav
e accessed his phavatar’s optic feed, but whatever it was the human beings were getting so riled about, she felt like she ought to see it with her own eyes, even though she was a hundred klicks away on the couch.
Did that make any sense? Nope. She pushed her way towards him.
He stood guard over a telescope or periscope set into the platform, wrong end up, waist-high to a human. There were metal handles on either side that you could use to focus and tilt it. Star Force and CTDF gloves had rubbed the dust off them. Colden aimed her optic sensors at the telescope’s eyepiece. Lenses trying to look through lenses. All she saw was a blur. Then her sensors auto-focused, rendering a picture of a dimly lit room with a square object in the middle.
“It’s like a crypt or something,” Drudge jabbered. “I bet there’s a mummy in there!”
Colden said, “The walls of the room look to be covered with markings. Probably just PLAN glyphs, but I’m getting that they’re red. That’s unusual.”
The PLAN never normally used colors. Its cities, monuments, and earthworks were paintless, lacking any pigments except the natural brownish-gray of regocrete, or the blue-black of graphite-based solar panels, or the oxidized terracotta hue of Martian rubble. Martian houses weren’t decorated on the inside, either. In contrast, Colden’s optic sensors reported that the graffiti in the crypt was primary-colored—mostly red, a bit of yellow and black. There was a light source in there, illuminating the reflective square object in the middle of the room, like an exhibit in a museum.
Interesting that the monument still had power. The PLAN’s power grid had gone down for the count. In pre-war days, solar panels had paved vast areas of the planitias, sucking up the sun’s energy. Any surviving solar panels were now useless, thanks to all the dust in the atmosphere. The fission reactors in the towns had also died, as dust clogged their vents and filters. This monument must be important enough to have its own backup generator.
“Good find, Drudge,” she said grudgingly.
Suddenly everyone pressed back, crushing against the immovable objects that were Colden and Drudge. At the far side of the platform, something went phut. Sparks leapt into the thin Martian air. Grunts cheered.
Colden shouldered through them, a head taller than the tallest soldier. There’d been a hatch set into the far side of the platform. The grunts had set a leech on it and blown the hinges. Ladder-like stairs led down into darkness.
“Stand back, please,” she said urgently. “Let me and my colleague go in first.”
“Hell with that,” someone said. “You can’t have all the fun.”
Was that how they saw the COPs, as literal cops policing their fun? Nothing could have been further from the truth, but Colden and Drudge were two against many. The soldiers charged into the hatch. Chinese and Star Force men jostled to take the lead.
Whoops and war cries flooded the public channel. “Get ’em get ’em GET ’EM!” On her couch, Colden gritted her teeth. So there were hostiles in there. What a surprise.
A single dead muppet came flying out of the hatch. Air, escaping from below, rippled the muppet’s unusual clothes as it lay on its face, unmoving.
Drudge let out a cry of frustration. He wanted to get in there. But the hatch was too small for the phavatars. Using the drill and crowbar attachments he’d been issued earlier, he began to chip around the telescope set into the middle of the roof.
Colden squatted on her haunches, vidding the unusual attire of the dead muppet. Stiff blue trousers. A black shirt, sodden with blood. She turned the corpse over. There was a white design on the front of the shirt, spreading out to the shoulders. Suddenly it clicked in her mind. “Holy crap. This muppet is wearing a cowboy shirt and blue jeans.”
So much like a person. She poked the dead muppet’s face with a gripper, trying desperately to see it as a non-person again. Like all the muppets, this one had been short in stature, stocky, and flat-nosed, with wide cheeks now bunched in death like fists. Like all of them, it had skin the exact color of ‘fleshtone’ in a pack of crayons—a café au lait shade designed not to offend anyone. No one’s skin was exactly that color, except a few individuals with just the right mix of brown and white ancestry. And, as it turned out, the PLAN’s muppets. Their skin blended right in with the regolith of Mars; there’d been incidents where they ambushed patrols out in the open. You couldn’t see them until you were right on top of them.
The grunts sometimes snarked about how the muppets looked Chinese, but they didn’t. Not really.
They were descended from the men and women of the famous lost fleet of China, plus some survivors from the American colony destroyed in the Mars Incident.
The PLAN had bred them like animals, genetically adapting them to the Martian environment. In the process, it had erased ethnic distinctions. DNA analysis proved the muppets weren’t clones, but they might as well be, for all the individual differences between them. And of course, the PLAN had also erased their individual identies. Colden remembered something she’d been told in training: You can’t kill the dead. You’re just cleaning up the trash.
She picked the dead muppet up in one gripper. She was about to pitch it off the platform when she noticed it was wearing a pendant. Very unusual. The muppets didn’t decorate themselves any more than they decorated their houses. She broke the chain, tossed the corpse away, and examined the pendant. It was a locket.
“OK, that’s it, we’ve cleaned the place out. Twenty, twenty-five hostiles have been liquidated.” Captain Hawker’s voice cut into the public channel, line-of-sight relayed out of the monument. The soldiers still on the roof, and those watching from the ground, exchanged high-fives. “We are now gonna bust into the chamber. It’s hermetically sealed. You guys on the roof, do you observe any changes in there?”
Drudge, still trying to remove the telescope from its mounting, said, “No.”
“OK, we are blowing the hatch now.”
Colden pried the locket open. “Wow, look at this. Paper.” The folded piece of paper was so old, it crumbled in her grippers. Realizing this might be their only chance to examine it, she went ahead and unfolded it. “‘… of the Ecopoiesis Group is to firstly carry out a survey to identify suitable locations for Test Beds, and subsequently select the most favorable ones, relying on metrics including, but not limited to, temperature highs and lows, wind exposure …’” Colden belatedly realized she was reading the paper. “Oh my God. It’s in English!”
The paper cracked in half along a fold line. The bottom half disintegrated into dust as she grabbed for it, but not before her camera recorded the faded blue logo at the bottom of the sheet.
Colden swallowed. The muppet had been carrying a 170-year-old document produced by the space agency of the United States, the country that first colonized Mars. What did that mean?
“We are in the chamber. Clear your bandwidth if you want to see. I’m streaming vid,” Captain Hawker said from below.
Colden shut down all her other comms channels and went to split screen.
Down below, the grunts poked around the chamber, scraping at the PLAN graffiti on the walls. Splashes and slashes of red and yellow formed glyphs like all the others, but not like all the others. These didn’t have the diecut precision of the other glyphs. They dripped. They clumped. They screamed. Colden shuddered on her couch. Malice and hatred breathed from the walls of the crypt.
“Quite spooky,” Captain Hawker commented. “Reminds me of some Satanist shit.”
For Colden, the crypt evoked memories of home. The worst kind of memories.
Home for Jennifer Colden was a loaded concept. Her adoptive parents, UNAID workers from the Former United Kingdom, had raised her in the back of their mobile field office as they travelled around central Africa. In the mid-23rd century, technical innovations in the cybersecurity sector had plunged the Congo basin into a conflict now known as the infowars. New inequalities had reignited old resentments. A ruthless new breed of hacker had emerged from the cyber-jungle to prey on the assets
of rival tribes. It was all too typical to find villages and towns deserted, vegetation creeping relentlessly back into the homes of people whose reputations and psyches had been destroyed by cyberattacks. The losers of these virtual battles had often committed suicide in despair, or fled to start new lives elsewhere under false identities, as Colden’s birth parents had done. The victors had stolen their stuff and defaced their houses. This was like that. She’d glimpsed a room like this in the Congo, before her mother yanked her away. Sealed up and reeking in the heat, the walls had been daubed with slogans painted in human feces, radiating vengeful fury. She could still smell the stink, and hear the flies buzzing.
Breathe, she told herself, breathe. All it is, is some graffiti.
In the center of that room in the Congo had stood a gruesome artifact: a stack of BCIs, extracted under duress from victims, embedded into holographic mugshots of their former owners, which were in turn embedded in plastic globes the size of beachballs, stacked one on top of the other as if they were severed heads.
The centerpiece of this chamber on Mars looked innocuous by contrast. It was a glass display case. But Colden got the same nasty vibes from it, from a hundred klicks away.
Captain Hawker leaned close to the display case. Reflections off the glass whited out Colden’s split screen for a minute. “Sorry, sorry,” Hawker said. “Trying to get a better view. It’s a topological model. Green hills, some lakes, some rivers … hey, here’s a little tiny model spaceport, with spaceships and everything. I wanted one of these when I was a kid.”
The model spaceships bore the same logo Colden had seen a few minutes ago. The logo of NASA, the agency that had first colonized Mars, back in the days when nobody believed AIs could get angry.
The Mars Shock Page 4