The Mars Shock

by Felix R. Savage

  “I switched with Mattis,” Drudge called back without stopping.

  Colden shook her head. That kid! He’d made followers out of earnest Mattis and several others. He had also leveraged his momentary fame, as the discoverer of the NASA museum (as people were calling it), into a shadowy kind of star status on base. He got smiles and fist bumps from even the hardest-core vets now.

  She went to see Commander Jackson.

  ★

  “This is not about the situation at Theta Base. We will not be discussing that, so don’t ask me any questions, because I won’t answer them. Clear?”

  Commander Sam ‘Squiffy’ Jackson sat behind a desk made, like all the furniture at Alpha Base, of stiffened rattan fiber grown on base. It appeared to be balancing on his belly. The joke about Commander Jackson was that he should’ve been disqualified from service on Mars, on account of exceeding the weight limits.

  Gathered in Jackson’s stripped-down office, besides Colden, were Captain Hawker and Specialist 1st Class Hannah Goldberg, of the Star Force Engineering Corps.

  “We’ve been ordered to carry out a search and rescue operation on the Mahfouz Gradient,” Jackson said, naming a region of the northwestern scarp of Olympus Mons. Like many other things on Mars, it had been named for one of the Luna Union pilots who died in the Phobos maneuver, as a way of buying the Luna pols off.

  Hawker blurted, “Isn’t that where the MFOB that shall not be named is operating?”

  “Do I have to fucking repeat myself? This is not about that. It’s about the ISA having too much power for anyone’s good.”

  Jackson ranted about how intelligence priorities were trumping military logic. Colden and the others sat tight. The commander was on the edge—they all knew that. Jackson had to carry out often-contradictory orders from Earth, while safeguarding his troops’ lives, and repudiating any fascination he may have had with the idea of military glory that lived on in Star Force’s institutional memory. They let him talk it out. The ISA was to blame for everything. It was their fault the war had taken this hellish turn in the first place. Blah, blah, blah.

  “And now they’ve mislaid an agent on the Mahfouz Gradient,” Jackson concluded. “And our job is to locate his sorry ass and carry him to safety in protective wrappings.”

  He pointed at Colden. “Put together a platoon of COPs. Pull them off other duties if you have to.”

  He pointed at Hawker. “Back the COPs up with two Death Buggies.” The Death Buggies did have an official designation—Velociraptors—but even Squiffy Jackson couldn’t stand to articulate such a cretinous name.

  He pointed at Goldberg. “Any kit problems, make them go away. I don’t want to hear about it.”

  “Yes, sir,” Goldberg squeaked. They were the first words any of them had spoken since Hawker got slapped down.

  Colden mustered her courage. “Sir, what should we do if we run into any warblers?” She felt like she owed this to Gilchrist.

  “Warblers? Detain them, Agent, detain them. Like it says in our standing orders.” Jackson’s eyes said the opposite. She could see Hawker’s lips moving soundlessly in the corner of her eye: If it moves, slag it.

  She hurried to reassure them that she wasn’t going soft. “It’s just that there’s a theory going around that the warblers may be primary targets of the PLAN. That it’s at war with them, too, so to speak. And if that was true, detaining them would put us at risk of a KKV strike.”

  “That’s a nice theory, Agent, but it is irrelevant to your mission. Which is to retrieve this ISA asset. And don’t let anything get in your way. Clear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Dismissed.”

  The trio saluted and retreated across a wide floor speckled with dirt. Jackson’s office had once been a smaller garden on 04 Deck. He had had the soil and plants removed because they offended his notions of military hygiene. But crumbs of soil kept creeping back in from the 04 Deck forest, which was twenty centimeters higher than the office, the soil held back by a restraining plank across the bottom of the door.

  Specialist Goldberg tripped on the plank and nearly faceplanted. Hawker caught her elbow to steady her. Jackson simply hit the door-close button. Now he would go back to watching his screens.

  Like a parting boot in the ass, their official orders thudded into Colden’s HUD. She wearily scanned the jargon—and gasped aloud.

  “What’s up, Colden?” Hawker said.

  “This missing ISA agent, he’s not on his own. He’s with …”

  There was no need for the whole base to know her business.

  “With some meddling turdbrain from Medicins Sans Frontieres,” she finished, angrily.

  She’d heard that Kristiansen would be arriving next week.

  When she heard about Theta Base, she’d felt a stab of relief that least he wasn’t there.

  It appeared he had been there, but he hadn’t fallen prey to the nanites. Thank God. He’d escaped, with ISA agent Kevin Murray, heading north down the Mahfouz Gradient.

  Hawker laughed out loud.

  “What?” Colden said.

  “I’m just thinking, an NGO guy and an ISA agent? Talk about the blind leading the blind. If they’re still alive when we get there, it’ll be a miracle.”

  “Why shouldn’t they be?” Colden snapped. “They’re only about forty kilometers from the scarp. As long as they don’t fall into a ravine, they’ll be all right. There aren’t any conurbations in their way.”

  “Speaking of those ravines,” Hawker said. “They’ve not been very well mapped yet. We’ll be heading into the unknown.”

  The Mahfouz Gradient rose ‘only’ about 300 meters above the plain, as compared to the stunningly high scarps on the south side of Olympus Mons. Primordial lava flows and landslides had mostly buried it. More recently, subsidence had cracked the gradient like the toes of some monstrous beast, opening up a number of deep north-south ravines.

  “Yeah,” Colden said, picturing the map in her mind. “That’s why I thought we might run into warblers.” Gilchrist said they were hiding from the PLAN …

  “Muppets,” Hawker said. “You mean muppets. That’s somewhat of a given, I think.”

  “Let’s just get moving,” Colden said.

  She was already pinging the agents she wanted to take. She hesitated over Drudge. But he had a nose for finding things. It might be needed.

  “Colden?” Whenever Goldberg talked, she sounded like a beaten wife. That was what came of being the Engineering Corps’s point person for Jackson’s shit. She sniffled, “One of your agents, um, D. Drudge, just signed for five kilos of splart.”

  vi.

  The buggy was under attack! Kristiansen charged up the slope with no thought in his mind except rescuing the vehicle and his Medimaster 5500.

  The things swarming over the buggy had to be PLAN salvage bots. He’d heard they weren’t dangerous in and of themselves. He stopped at a safe distance and threw stones at them.

  They boiled off the buggy and scrabbled towards him. Their eyes glinted blood-red. They had fur.

  Bots?

  “Rats! They’re RATS!”

  Rats the size of poodles, their black pelts smeared with Martian dust, their stomachs bulging and almost scraping the ground.

  Kristiansen kicked out at them, his teeth gritted, his hair standing on end inside his helmet.

  “They aren’t rats.” Murray’s voice came over the line-of-sight link. “I know, I know, they look like giant mutant rats out of some lame-ass horror flick. But they’re only animals by the broadest definition of the term. They breathe CO2. Eat lithium to react it with. The rest of the scrap that goes in, comes out as refined metal poop. It goes to show what biotech can achieve where there are no pesky obstacles in the way, such as ethics.”

  “Shoot them!”

  “Waste of juice.”

  Kristiansen spun in mid-stomp. Murray was just standing there. The salvage bots—Kristiansen found himself thinking of them as salvage rats, w
hatever Murray said—streamed past Murray, parting around his legs as if he were just a boulder in their way. Kristiansen realized the creatures weren’t actually attacking either of the men. When Kristiansen disturbed their feast, they’d left the buggy. They flooded down the slope in a moving black patch, so tightly synchronized they looked like a single organism. They vanished into the hole in the side of the Chinese module.

  That hole hadn’t gotten there when the module crashed, after all. It had been gnawed.

  The buggy looked a bit gnawed, too.

  “They must’ve been here already, recycling the module,” Murray said. “There’s probably millions of them in there. They weren’t interested in us because there isn’t enough metal in our suits.” He walked around the buggy. “Looks like they didn’t have time to do any real damage, thank fuck.”

  Kristiansen jumped onto the buggy’s hood and inspected his medibot. The rats had tried to get through the shrinkfoam, but had only succeeded in exposing one corner of the machine. He wondered why he was bothering to carry the medibot around like this. His mission had narrowed down from the expansive ideals he held in his heart, to a singular focus on making it through the day alive.

  “Get in,” Murray said. Kristiansen climbed into the buggy. Murray dropped through the roof hatch after him, and locked it. “Wherever there’s a pack of salvage bots, there are Martians nearby. So I’ve heard, anyway. They herd the bots, and collect the metal pellets they deposit in their shit pits.”

  “Uh oh.” Kristiansen scanned the optical feed screens. From inside the buggy, the view was technically 360°, but the screens were so small he felt like he wasn’t seeing everything. Martians could be lurking under their noses, hidden by the sheets of blowing dust.

  “Just drive.”

  Kristiansen put the buggy in drive. He reversed out of the rubble field around the module. Then they had a long hard climb up the slope that the module had skidded down when it crash-landed. Kristiansen had done some off-roading as a teenager, strictly in secret—it was forbidden by the UN’s ecological conservation regulations—on a quad bike he and a friend had built from salvaged parts. He fiddled with the buggy’s annoyingly simplistic drive controls, looking for a lower gear.

  Murray knelt behind the front seats, fiddling with the carbines the guys at Theta Base had given them. These were as long as a man’s arm and heavy as hell—but not as heavy as they would have been on Earth. They had few moving parts that could get clogged by Martian dust. Murray passed one between the seats. Kristiansen pushed it away. He had to concentrate: they were crawling uphill over loose rocks, at risk of starting a landslide, and of getting stuck.

  “Fuck!” he shouted suddenly.

  “What? What?”

  Kristiansen stabbed a gloved finger at the ‘rearview’ optical feed. Lean humanoid shapes moved swiftly uphill through the dust clouds thrown up by the buggy’s wheels.

  “Hello,” Murray said softly. “Martians.”

  Kristiansen’s stomach clenched into a cold, hard knot. Here they were. The beings humanity had come to Mars to kill, or save.

  Right now, all he could think about was getting away from them.

  Murray dropped his carbine. He swung up onto the gunner’s platform. The hatch clunked open. “Eat lead, you putrid scrap bandits!”

  Kristiansen heard a succession of whines and bangs—the sound effects electronically generated by the roof-mounted .50 calibre machine-gun. The real noise of the gun, attenuated in the Martian atmosphere, travelled through the buggy’s frame and up his spine, rattling his teeth.

  The Martians seemed to melt away into the rocks. Smaller boulders exploded into shrapnel and dust.

  “Hot dog!” Murray whooped. Whine. BEEEP. “Shit, I can’t reload. The fucking rats ate the latch of the feed tray.”

  Almost before he finished speaking, a rash of blue sparks sprang out on the rearview screen. Murray’s barrage hadn’t taken out all the Martians. And some of them were armed. Kristiansen had heard they used primitive energy weapons. Blasters, like something out of the 21st century. But primitive beat sophisticated, when your high-tech machine-gun had been literally chewed up by salvage bots.

  “There are hundreds of the fuckers!” Murray sounded panicked. After all, he wasn’t a soldier, either.

  “I can see that,” Kristiansen gritted. The sideview screens as well as the rearview showed Martians converging on the buggy, leaping over the boulders like mountain goats. They were unbelievably agile. And fast.

  A horde of salvage rats scurried at their heels, like undersized hunting dogs.

  “No. No, these little bastards do not get to recycle us.” Grabbing his carbine, Murray jumped up on the gunner’s platform again.

  PEW PEW PEW, the carbine uttered electronically, sounding more like a gun in a game than the real thing. But this was no game.

  Kristiansen frantically scanned the dashboard. They didn’t have any other armaments. This was it: his life depended on an ISA agent’s aim.

  Only a few of the Martians went down. Either Murray’s aim sucked, or the ‘smart’ darts’ motion-targeting sensors were getting confused by all the pebbles bouncing downhill in the buggy’s wake.

  “Can’t this piece of shit go any faster?” Murray yelled.

  “Nope.” Still climbing the slope, they were progressing at only 10 kph. Murray could yell all he liked, but the buggy’s electric engine wasn’t going to put out any more juice.

  “I’m outta ammo!”

  Kristiansen grabbed the other carbine by the barrel and stretched backwards, keeping his toes hooked under the dashboard. The ISA agent bent down through the hatch to snatch the weapon.

  The Martians surged towards the buggy.

  Kristianensen plopped back into the driver’s seat.

  The rearview screen filled with broad-cheeked, flat-nosed faces. Dust-coated hands in fingerless gloves reached up. Blaster fire obliterated the rearview camera.

  Murray screamed.

  The front screen was next to go. It went black, and then the blackness turned into legs. A Martian had leapt onto the hood of the buggy, blocking the front camera. Kristiansen detachedly noted that the legs were rounded with muscle, and the skin had an odd pebbly texture. A foot in a fur-topped boot kicked the camera. The feed vanished.

  Murray toppled down into the cab.

  Martian arms reached in through the open hatch. A hideous face blocked out the dull sky. It wore the Martian expression familiar by now to everyone in the solar system: a tight-lipped evil smile. That smile said clearly that the creature was enjoying this. It wormed around and fired its blaster into the cab.

  Kristiansen struggled out of the driver’s seat.

  He jumped over Murray and—because he couldn’t think of what else to do—punched the Martian in the face.

  It recoiled. Its second blaster pulse sizzled into the wall of the cab, narrowly missing Kristiansen.

  He slapped the big red button next to the hatch. It closed hydraulically, grinding shut on the arm of a second Martian. The trapped limb jerked.

  Fingers pried into the gap, trying to force the hatch open again.

  Murray pulled himself up, using Kristiansen’s legs as a ladder. A cutter laser hummed in his hand. He slashed it across the trapped arm and the prying fingers. They fell severed, smoking at the ends.

  “Drive!” Murray yelled at the transfixed Kristiansen.

  Reminded of what he should be doing, Kristiansen threw himself back into the driver’s seat. The autodrive had carried the buggy onto a slope too steep for it to gain traction. The wheels were spinning. Kristiansen engaged the spikes, which extruded from the wheels like crampons, giving them better purchase.

  All the screens except one—the righthand sideview—were dark. That one showed what looked like the top of the slope.

  “Murray, are you OK?”

  “Just get us the fuck out of here!”

  “I’m trying!”

  The buggy’s nose tilted up, and then lurc
hed sharply down. Kristiansen had hoped the slope would flatten out on top. His hopes were dashed. They’d just gone over a ridge as sharp as a knife.

  He slammed the joystick over hard, jamming the brakes on.

  The buggy spun 180° and began to slide down the hill … backwards.

  The single working screen allowed him a glimpse of where they were going. And it was terrifying.

  The slope descended at a brutal gradient, fractured by gullies deep enough to swallow the buggy. Pebbles and large rocks bounced away downhill, leaping high in the low gravity, raising a tsunami of dust that seemed to boil back up the slope towards them. Kristiansen fought for control. He turned the buggy at an angle across the slope.

  “Ah fuck! You fucker!” Murray howled. Kristiansen risked a glance back. A blue spark flashed at the edge of the hatch. The Martians had come along for the buggy’s wild ride. They were drilling through the hatch with their blasters.

  Murray braced himself to one side of the hatch, carbine at his shoulder, waiting for the first Martian to show its ugly face.

  With the buggy descending in reverse, Kristiansen was doing everything backwards. He leaned on the joystick and cut the engine, taking the traction off the front wheels—which were now at the back. The buggy drifted. Just like in the hills of Nidwalden, where he’d broken his collarbone when he was fifteen. But Mars only had 38% of Earth’s gravity. At the midpoint of the drift, the front wheels lifted off the slope. It was a gentle sensation. Kristiansen knew it was irreversible.

  “Hold on!” he yelled. “We’re going to flip!”

  CRASH. The buggy flipped and skidded down the slope on its roof. Kristiansen hung upside-down in his straps. Murray bounced around on the ceiling, which was now the floor. They flipped a couple more times, coming off bumps, and hit the slope each time with a louder, more violent crash.

  For a moment they fell straight down, weightless. Then the buggy bounced once more, hard, and came to rest.

  On its side.

  Kristiansen felt like he’d been bludgeoned, repeatedly, with a mallet. But he was alive. He hit the release button on his harness with trembling fingers, and fell out of the driver’s couch. It was pitch dark. Screens, interior lighting, everything was dead.