The Mars Shock

by Felix R. Savage

  He checked his suit, to make sure it wasn’t breached. His faceplate’s HUD, backlighted, flashed a reassuring message in the dark: SUIT INTEGRITY 100%.

  “Murray?”

  The thin cone of light from Kristiansen’s helmet lamp picked out litter that had fallen out of the webbings. Spare ammo drums for the carbines. Refill packs of gorp.

  Murray lay motionless on his back.

  Kristiansen crawled to the ISA agent and shook him. “Come on, man, come on, wake up.”

  Murray stirred. “Jesus H. Christ.” He tried to rub his head; of course, he could only rub his helmet. “Am I dead, or do I just wish I was dead?”

  “The latter,” Kristiansen said, relieved. “Are you OK?”

  Pause. “Yeah, I guess.”

  The hatch had been damaged, either by their fall or by the Martians who tried to break in. For a few nightmarish minutes, it looked like they were stuck in the buggy. Finally, an application of Kristiansen’s shoulder to the hatch got it open. He pitched out headfirst, grabbed the machine-gun mount to break his fall, and stumbled down to the ground.

  The dry, pebbly regolith seemed darker here. So did the light. That could be because the Martian night was falling. Or it could be because they’d fallen into a crevasse which was—just a guess—at least a kilometer deep.

  Kristiansen swallowed. The silence in his helmet seemed louder than before, thicker. He stirred the sand with his boot. Nanites teemed in this dry-as-dust soil, invisible to the naked eye. The outside of his suit would be thick with them by now. Only a layer of shape-memory alloy and his outer garment of radproof ‘sandwich’ cloth stood between him and death … or worse.

  Then again, at the moment, the nanites were the least of their problems.

  They righted the buggy by pushing on it together. The engine was dead. The machine-gun was as useless as a blunt stick. The UHF antenna and the radar mast were broken stubs, underscoring the futility of their plight.

  “Well,” Kristiansen said, hiding his dismay, “I guess we’ll walk.”

  “Yup.” Murray began to sing softly: “Welcome to the JUNGLE, d-d-dur-dur-d-d-d …”

  “What’s that?”

  “Old song.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Star Force names all its ships after bands. If we’re going to die, we might as well die with a classic rock lyric on our lips.”

  At least the Martians on the roof had vanished during their hair-raising descent—probably smeared across the slope. Good, Kristiansen thought with unwonted vindictiveness.

  To his amazement, the Medimaster 5500 had survived. It had taken a battering, but it was still there, tied to the hood. Twang cords—the 23rd-century answer to bungee cords, without the annoying snap-back factor—deserved all the fanatical praise they got in engineering circles.

  Kristiansen untied the medibot and lowered it gently to the ground. What were the odds that it still functioned? However poor, he wasn’t about to abandon the last of the medibots he’d brought all the way from Earth.

  Murray rummaged around in the buggy and found a handful of emergency locator beacons, like yellow coffee cups with antennas on top. “We’ll use these when we get to higher ground.”

  They unhooked the webbing from the interior walls of the buggy and threaded Kristiansen’s twang cords through the holes at the edges, fashioning string bags to carry the beacons, the packs of gorp and water that had been in the buggy, and all the spare oxygen tanks they’d brought from Theta Base.

  “And the guns and ammo,” Murray said. “All the ammo.”

  Kristiansen felt a pang of fear as they plodded away from the buggy. He took it out on Murray. “Why did you insist on stopping to look at the Chinese module? If we hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

  “I don’t recall that I insisted on stopping. We were in agreement.”

  “How could I disagree with you? I’m only an NGO employee. You work for the ISA. Intelligence priorities always trump the needs of mere human beings.”

  “Do you know how self-righteous you sound? That’s the trouble with you moralizing bleeding-heart types. When shit goes FUBAR, you always try to pin it on us, instead of facing the real villain of the piece: the P, L, A, fucking N. Maybe that’s because you’re scared, plain and simple. I feel for you. I do. But the fact is we need answers. The Chinese have part of the puzzle. The PLAN has most of it. We may even have some of the pieces ourselves, and be unaware of it. Putting those pieces together is the most important job in the universe right now. And if we have to turn over every fucking rock on Mars, we’ll do it.

  “So, yeah. I stopped to look at the Chinese module. Feel free to file a complaint with the fucking Human Rights Commission.”

  Kristiansen tilted his head quizzically. “What, exactly, are you searching for?”

  But he’d put Murray in a bad mood. The ISA agent refused to answer. “Switch on your radar,” he said.

  Their EVA suits had range-and-rate radar integrated into their radio units. Although the radios were useless amid the PLAN’s jamming, forcing them to rely—as usual—on the line-of-sight microwave link to talk to each other, the radar worked. Turning his head from side to side, Kristiansen heard a stream of beeps. The beeps speeded up when they rounded a rocky outcropping, and then slowed down to a steady rate.

  Murray summed up: “We fell down a gully. Now we’re in one of those deep north-south ravines. We can either go this way—or that way.”

  The gloom and the dust obscured the ravine. Radar sketched a green schematic of an open-ended snake.

  “Which way is north?” Kristiansen said. Overhead, the dust obscured a slightly paler slot in the gloom.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Me, either.”

  “Eeny, meeny, minie, mo …”

  They walked in the direction they deemed most likely to be north. The light faded. Because of all the dust in the atmosphere, the Martian sunset—once a glorious event, recorded by the first colonists as a stunning tie-dye explosion of color, followed by a twilight glow—now consisted of a quick fade to black. Their helmet lamps carved yellow fans out of the darkness. The dust hardly blew around at all down here, but their steps kicked up clouds that took ages to settle. Kristiansen muted his radar; the beeps were annoying, like a taunt. No way out. No way out. No way out.

  “At least we have plenty of water and oxygen,” Murray said, echoing his thoughts—what if it took them days to get out of here?

  “And gorp.”

  “And it’s frigging heavy,” Murray grumbled, switching his string bag to his other shoulder. “I had a real rucksack in the shuttle. And a real EVA suit. That pilot was a class-A asshole.”

  Kristiansen had made a point of not complaining about his load. In addition to his share of the supplies, he was also carrying the medibot, which weighed 30 kilos in Mars’s gravity, as much as a six-year-old child. But unlike a child, it couldn’t hold on. It just bounced on his back, its corners hitting his kidneys at every step. The twang cords seemed to be slicing through his shoulders.

  He knew that if he grumbled, Murray would tell him to leave the medibot behind, so he said nothing. But he assented eagerly when Murray called for a rest.

  They sat down with their backs to the wall of the chasm and fumbled with the refill packs. You were supposed to plug them into valves on your suit’s nutrient cycling unit, a slimline pack integrated into the front of the suit’s torso.

  Kristiansen got the chest flap of his outer garment open. Then he stopped. “I don’t think we should do this.”

  The backlight of Murray’s HUD shone on his face, giving it a ghastly bluish appearance, overlaid with backwards strings of figures and letters. He nodded slowly. “I was thinking the same thing.” He opened his glove and let the refill pack drop to the ground.

  “The seals are supposed to be airtight—”

  “But it’s too much of a risk.”

  Kristiansen nodded. Airtight didn’t necessarily mean proof again
st nanites. They might end up drinking Martian madness, along with their nutrient-fortified soy-based sludge.

  “I don’t want to end up murdering you,” Murray joked, “even though the idea is appealing.”

  “Hey, I’m not that irritating. I work for an NGO; I have to pose as a self-righteous asshole from time to time.”

  “Ha, ha, and I thought that was because you’re German.”

  “Swiss-German-Danish,” Kristiansen corrected him.

  “But you are a pureblood, aren’t you?”

  Kristiansen hesitated. The fact was, he was a pureblood, according to the latest definition, which took into account cultural factors as well as genetic ones. He would have qualified under previous, strictly DNA-based definitions, too. He relied on his ‘Swiss-German-Danish’ cover story to deflect suspicion, but actually, his coloring testified faithfully to his parents’ genetic heritage: both of them were Teutonic to the last allele.

  But what did it matter, now that the PLAN could no longer target purebloods for their genetic heritage? Anyway, Murray would know this about him already.

  “That’s right. I’m a German pureblood. Double-plus ungood.” He was referring to the PLAN’s well-documented obsession with German romantic philosophy.

  “Yeah, you Germans can’t catch a break, can you? No sooner do you get through apologizing for World War Two, then you have to start apologizing for Heidegger.” Murray uttered the taboo name carelessly, in recognition of the PLAN’s broken power. “Then again, Heidegger basically was a Nazi. I’ve always thought it’s weird that the PLAN took the opposite message from his stuff. Instead of elevating ethnic purity to a goal, the PLAN tried to abolish it altogether.”

  “You could take any message you like from Heidegger. His stuff is completely opaque.”

  “You’ve read it?”

  Caught out, Kristiansen admitted, “Yeah. You can find copies of Sein und Zeit on the internet.”

  “Ha! They made us read it in training. Oh yeah. It was supposed to help us understand the enemy. I snoozed off.”

  Kristiansen said, “I do think you can trace the PLAN’s ideology to Heidegger, though. The idea of Being. To achieve pure Being, you have to strip away all temporal phenomena. So: no races, no cultures, no religions. In the end, no people. Totalitarian regimes always end up trying to abolish the people … the inconvenient, self-willed, obstinate people. The PLAN just took that to a logical extreme.” He grew animated as he spoke, enjoying the unusual experience of unmasking his thoughts on the fundamental conflict of their age. “We have to decide: are we going to allow self-willed polities to exist? I see this in the asteroid belt all the time—this stubborn striving after freedom, at any cost. I think it’s fundamental to the human condition. If we crack down too hard on that, we’re in danger of becoming the PLAN lite.”

  “I think,” Murray said, “the human condition is one of fundamental laziness, somewhat tempered by the urge to do reckless things with new technology. You underestimate the need for constant vigilance in that respect.”

  Kristiansen sensed the shadow of a hint there. Was that what the ISA sought on Mars? New technology—be it Chinese, or PLAN-developed—that might destabilize the solar system’s economy?

  Kristiansen believed the ISA’s primary loyalty was to the supermajor corporations that funded the UN. They would be anxious to preserve the status quo ante at all costs.

  “This came up during the Mercury Rebellion,” Murray said. “We found some wild stuff out there. Genetically engineered carpets. An elite corporate class of clones. Like you said, if we don’t want to become the PLAN lite, we have to watch out for that shit.”

  Kristiansen settled himself more comfortably against the rock. He linked his hands behind his head and gazed into the Martian night. “How bad would it be? If we found out how the nanites work, and how the Chinese virus sabotages them. If we learned how to do quantum-entangled comms, and how to stealth our spaceships like the PLAN did. Would it really have a disastrous impact on the economy?”

  “Number one, we’ve already got a handle on the stealth thing,” Murray answered. “Turns out some sleb in the asteroid belt has been trying to patent the self-same technology for years. Star Force is all over that now. That’s what I mean about having some of the pieces but not knowing it. Number two, the rest of that shit is small. Quantum-entangled comms? We know how to do that already, it’s just too hard to entangle the particles in the first place. The PLAN probably uses a biological solution that we’d consider unethical, hence useless. No, we’re looking for something bigger.”

  Here it was. “What?”

  “Why.”

  “Huh?”

  “Why? Why did the PLAN try to fundamentally transform humanity in the first place?”

  Disappointed, Kristiansen said, “Because we’re here, I guess.” Knowing this had been a glib, meaningless answer, he transferred his attention to his suit. With the chest flap of his outer garment open, he studied the readout on his nutrient cycling unit. He had 800 ccs of gorp in reserve, which would provide him with 4,400 calories of energy. He’d probably burned through more than that today. But you could go without food for a while. Water, or rather the lack of it, was the killer. If he couldn’t refill his reserves, he was stuck with what he had now. 1.7 liters, plus whatever his suit could recover from his urine by reverse osmosis.

  “I mean, why?” Murray said. His voice was loud and harsh. “I want some fucking answers, you know? Why have I got to die?”

  Surprised and alarmed, Kristiansen said, “We’re not dead yet.”

  “Not yet.” Murray sighed. “Get some sleep. I’ll take the first watch.”

  Sleep? On Mars? With hostile Martians potentially sneaking up on them? Impossible, Kristiansen thought. But as soon as he arranged himself in a more-or-less comfortable position on the ground, his eyes closed.

  And opened again, what felt like a few seconds later. He lay still, trying to figure out what had woken him.

  Something brushed against his arm.

  He switched on his helmet lamp.

  There stood Murray.

  Kristiansen froze.

  Murray was holding a refill pouch of water.

  “What are you doing?” Kristiansen said.

  Murray shrugged. He let the pouch of water fall. The chest flap of his outer garment hung open.

  Kristiansen stood up. His boot crunched on something. A refill pack of gorp. Crumpled. Empty.

  “Murray, did you refill your reserves?” While I was asleep, so I wouldn’t know? “Are you crazy? We decided it was too much of a risk!”

  “I’m not risking anything,” Murray said. He pulled at the shoulder of his outer garmet. Stuck two fingers through a hole that had been concealed by the fold at the collar seal. “Look at this.”

  Kristiansen aimed his helmet lamp at the hole. The inner garment of Murray’s suit—the actual suit, the one that protected him—had a dark spot on the shoulder, a sign that the suit had patched itself.

  Murray twisted, showing him another patch on the back of his shoulder. “Exit wound.”

  “So that’s why you were grumbling about carrying the supplies,” Kristiansen said, stupidly. “You should have told me.” Then it sank in. “Your suit was breached.”

  “That’s right, genius.”

  “Oh … no.”

  Murray picked up the pouch of water he’d dropped and plugged it into his nutrient recycling unit. Drops of water welled out around the seal. They’d guessed right to begin with. The seal was good enough for government work. Not good enough to keep the nanites out. “I figure I might as well die well-hydrated.”

  Kristiansen leaned against the cliff face. The news was shattering. Suddenly, hope came to him. “Nanites are micron-sized. They can’t move that fast. It takes these suits how long to patch themselves? Three minutes?”

  “More like six. The epoxy doesn’t set hard immediately.”

  “And the nanites couldn’t possibly move faster than a few mi
crons per second. Your suit is a centimeter thick. Maybe it’s OK!”

  “Yeah, maybe. And maybe not.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “No symptoms. Fingers crossed.”

  Kristiansen bounded over to the Medimaster 5500 and tore at its tattered shrinkfoam packaging. “If worse comes to worst, let’s get you into the Evac-U-Tent.” He exposed the control panel, protected by a layer of capacitative perspex. Holding his breath, he flipped the power switch. The display lit up. “It’s working! No, shut up and listen to me for a change. This medibot has comprehensive scan functionality with sub-10 nanometer resolution. It can scan your blood, your brain, your bone marrow. It can even read the data on your BCI and any other augments you might have. Once we get a handle on the problem, we can look at options for treating the symptoms.”

  “The symptoms?” Murray said. “As far as we know, the main symptom is a psychopathic urge to kill purebloods.”

  Kristiansen remembered Murray casually asking him to confirm that he was a pureblood. Now he understood the motivation behind that question. Murray had wanted to know if, when the symptoms struck, he would be compelled to murder Kristiansen.

  “How strong is the Evac-U-Tent?” Murray said.

  “Strong.”

  “I wonder if anyone’s ever tried to break out from inside one.” Murray chuckled. He threw his empty water pouch into the darkness. “I guess that’s an option. But when the time comes, I’ll probably just take my helmet off. I want your word of honor that if I can’t do that, for whatever reason, you’ll do it for me.”

  Word of honor. Kristiansen wouldn’t have expected to hear that phrase from an ISA agent. It compelled him to honesty. “I can’t promise that. I will promise that I’ll do anything in my power to save you.”

  There was a moment’s silence. The overlapping arcs of their headlamps seemed to shrink. Kristiansen remembered that they had to worry about exhausting their suits’ power packs, as well as everything else.

  “Well,” Murray said, “I guess we’d better start with walking. We should try to cover as much distance as possible before … before anything happens.”