The Mars Shock

by Felix R. Savage

  Kristiansen nodded curtly and scanned the ground, looking for the refill packs Murray had dropped.

  One of the water pouches had vanished. Kristiansen stamped further from their bivouac, looking for it. His time in the Belt had conditioned to him to view water as more precious than gold.

  A flash of silver crossed his helmet lamp’s beam.

  He instinctively jerked his head sideways.

  The missing water pouch drifted to the ground near his boots.

  Someone … or something … out there in the darkness had thrown it back.

  vii.

  Task Force Alpha mustered in the garage, ready to deploy. Colden zeroed in on one of the phavatars standing alongside the Death Buggies.

  “Drudge,” she said threateningly.

  Drudge had finished customizing the phavatar he acquired from Mattis. He’d 3D-printed a oversized human skull and splarted it to the top edge of the carapace. It overshadowed and distracted the eye from the phavatar’s inoffensive face. Colden remembered the Martian skulls that ornamented the temple of the NASA hate cult. This was Drudge’s answer to that horror. For bonus ugliness, the eyes of his skull flashed red, and crossbones flanked it like gun barrels.

  Captain Hawker laughed his ass off.

  “He can’t deploy like that,” Colden said crossly.

  “Why not?” Hawker said. “It might scare the muppets. Or at least confuse them.”

  “Yes, sir, that’s the idea,” Drudge said virtuously.

  The very fact that he said that convinced Colden he had some other motive, but she couldn’t guess what it was, so she let it go. Maybe he really had just wanted to indulge his creative side.

  Only a couple of the phavatars they were taking were currently at Alpha Base. Colden scooped the others up from deployments far and wide, apologizing to their current operators. The tired agents relinquished their couches to her team. For herself, she took a phavatar that had recently been serviced and was in tip-top condition. She disengaged from the firefight its previous operator had been in, and started to run.

  The phavatars were to rendezvous with Hawker’s team on the Miller Flats. Humanity had been going to town on Martian nomenclature, assigning names to features that had never had them. ‘Name a Crater’ competitions were being held on Earth. Many features now had English and Chinese names. The Miller Flats, a volcanic plain northwest of Olympus Mons, was one of a dozen features named after Bob Miller, the hero of the Phobos maneuver. In fact, it was anything but flat. Jagged rocks and ejecta from minor impact craters littered the rolling terrain.

  The Death Buggies drove 200 km from Alpha Base to get there, bypassing cities they’d already cleared. Meanwhile, the phavatars converged on their route from various cities yet to be cleared. They all had different distances to travel. One was lost to a Martian ambush. One by one, the surviving phavatars caught up with the convoy.

  Colden was the last to get there. The first thing she saw through the dust and gloom was Drudge’s phavatar riding on the roof of a Death Buggy.

  “Drudge, what are you doing?”

  “I’m flying a kite.”

  “You’re what?”

  Drudge showed her the kite string, a gossamer-fine carbon-nanotube cable. The kite itself—invisible in the dust clouds overhead—was a radar transponder. By elevating it into the atmosphere, they broadcast their location to the missing men. Hopefully, that would tell them which way to walk.

  “Goldberg’s lot came up with it,” Hawker explained. “They’ve been working on drone aircraft for surveillance. Earth sent a bunch of designs. None of them work as aircraft, but they took the best wing template and splarted a beacon on it.”

  Aircraft on Mars: a dream as old as telescopes. The atmosphere was not thick enough to support full-sized airplanes. Their wings would’ve had to be kilometers long to achieve lift. Of course, it was possible to use short-hop spacecraft that travelled on ballistic trajectories. But the He3 shortage had gotten so bad, you couldn’t expect to have the use of a Superlifter or its Star Force equivalent, the Pegasus Lander, unless you were at least a colonel. And if you did get one, you risked being KKV’d …

  Except that hardly ever happened, did it? It was more of a story they told themselves to feel better about not having air support.

  Uneasily, Colden remembered Gilchrist’s theory that the PLAN targeted the warblers, not Star Force …

  Hawker said he’d heard the ISA was sending a FlyingSaucer. But it wouldn’t get here for at least another day, if it ever did.

  So they walked, and ran, and drove across the Miller Flats, heading for the last known location of the missing men.

  Murray and Kristiansen had travelled 53 kilometers from Theta Base before losing their sat connection. Most people assumed they’d been ambushed by Martians at that point, making this a pointless mission at best and a dangerous one at worst.

  Colden was in anguish. She couldn’t separate her feelings for Kristiansen from her feelings about the war in general. Each seemed as futile and eternal as the other. She took frequent breaks during their journey, which was unlike her, hiding out in the garden and vaping an illicit cigarette—this, too, was a new bad habit.

  During one of her cigarette breaks, she got a ping from her deputy, Pratt. “Trouble,” he said breathlessly.

  Colden flew back to the telepresence center and burrowed into her couch. When she saw what her phavatar was seeing, she reached into her BCI’s telemetry suite and commanded the drugstore implant in her left arm to inject her with a dose of morale juice. Space Corps agents weren’t supposed to use stimulants, but right now Colden felt the need for an artificial floor under her emotions.

  She was not looking at anything real, but at a radar plot shared from Hawker’s buggy. In this ‘situation space,’ data was presented graphically for the whole team to see and comment on. Graphs and charts appeared to float on the surface of a table in a dark room. It was a low-tech, slow-moving version of the fighter pilot’s gestalt, supposedly to enable smarter decision-making.

  “I’m thinking we run for home,” Hawker said.

  The radar plot showed six moving objects approaching at 60-plus kph, about 40 klicks off.

  “They’re coming down off Wallaby Ridge. That’s where Theta Base is operating,” Colden said.

  Wallaby Ridge, named by some child in Australia who’d painted a cute picture of Mars, was one of the north-south wrinkles on the Mahfouz Gradient. It was the best route from the Miller Flats up to the flank of Olympus Mons. Theta Base had been climbing Wallaby Ridge when disaster struck. Presumably it still was. The group of vehicles on the radar plot had come from the same direction.

  “They’re from Theta Base. Speed fits with them being Death Buggies,” Colden muttered, wishing the morale juice would hurry up and kick in.

  “Maybe they’re survivors, coming to ask for help,” one of the grunts said optimistically.

  The team had been brought up to speed on the disaster at Theta Base. They had taken it with a stoicism that Colden had found kind of heartbreaking. Now she realized that they just hadn’t believed what they were being told.

  “Look at the comms log,” Hawker said. “I radioed them. There was no answer. And if anyone thinks that’s good news, I have a lightly used planet to sell you.”

  Colden decided to radio them herself. “Unknown unit, this is alpha one seven actual, please squawk IFF and state your intentions. If unable IFF, please respond to recognition code …” She checked the list. “Zero two niner alpha five, over.”

  No answer.

  She tried again. “Unknown unit, this is alpha one seven, radio check, over.”

  Still nothing.

  “They’re the Death Buggies from Theta Base, and they’re not friendly,” Hawker said. “It doesn’t take a genius to work that out.”

  “Speaking of geniuses, they’re probably homing in on Drudge’s bloody kite.”

  “Or on your telepresence signals.”

  “Yes, we ought t
o spread out. But let’s get the kite down, pronto.”

  Hawker left the situation space to help Drudge reel in the kite. Actually, turning off the transponder wouldn’t make much difference now. The fact that they’d acquired the DBs from Theta Base on their own radar meant that the DBs would also have acquired them. Hawker—who hadn’t meant it seriously when he talked about running for home—ordered the COPs to split up into two groups, one to act as a fire screen, the other to advance northeast to intercept the buggies from Theta Base. Colden took command of the intercept group. They sprinted at a steady pace into the dust.

  Dusk was falling, making visibility worse. They ran for fifteen minutes, relying on their phavatars’ obstacle-avoidance routines and night-vision capability. Colden used the time to explain the situation to their mission coordinator at Alpha Base. Hawker’s comms with the MFOB were patchy, whereas she was right here, so she took responsibility for telling the coordinator, “We are requesting permission to use lethal force.”

  Truth was, she herself wanted to believe the buggies from Theta were friendly. They might be loaded down with survivors in desperate need of help. But she had to keep the other possibility in view.

  Their coordinator blustered about the rules of engagement; she was obviously paralyzed by the dilemma.

  “So kick it upstairs to Squiffy,” Colden said. “Now I have to go fight.”

  She switched channels and fell back into her phavatar. Her perspective joggled up and down, up and down, as she pounded through the gloom. Her powerful headlamp illuminated the arid terrain ahead. Her radar feed had lost the Theta buggies. They must be hidden by a fold of the land.

  “Slow down and spread out,” she told the people she’d brought with her—Houlet, Watty, Drudge, and a quiet, reliable girl called Cavanaugh. Colden split her vision four ways so she was looking through all of their eyes.

  Cavanaugh found the buggies, grouped behind a little rise.

  They’d stopped. Their headlights were off.

  Colden gathered the phavatars together. They crawled to the top of the rise, staying low. She did a quick antenna count—four buggies; two were missing from the group they’d originally detected. She relayed this information to Hawker, via Pratt, who’d stayed with their buggies.

  “What are you gonna do?” Hawker asked her.

  She appreciated that. No orders. He was respecting her judgement. At the same time, it put a terrible burden on her. She felt as if all Star Force were stacked up behind her, from the recruitment centers on Earth out to the atmospheric mining operations on Titan, urging her to just open up and blow the buggies away.

  “I don’t know yet,” she said.

  She told the others to stay put, and rose to her feet. She turned on her headlamp. She walked over the rise, pinging the buggies with an ID request. She even instructed her phavatar’s MI to ping the buggies’ onboard computers, machine to machine.

  The lead buggy’s hatch opened. A person clambered out. Colden’s pulse tripped, then slowed. The person was wearing an infantry-issue EVA suit. Some part of Colden’s brain had expected a Martian. This was a human being, who needed a suit to survive in the Martians’ native environment. He / she wasn’t carrying a carbine. There might be a sidearm in that thigh pocket. She—the figure’s slight build made Colden think she, although the loose kevlar outer garment made it hard to tell—walked slowly up the slope into the light of Colden’s headlamp.

  The Martian atmosphere might be thin but that didn’t make it soundless. Sound waves carried in this meager broth of carbon dioxide, just like on Earth, although they hardly travelled any distance, and even loud noises got attenuated to whispers. But Colden’s audio microphone could pick up sounds as soft as 1 decibel and as high as 40 Khz, and amplify them for her ears. So she heard the person’s boots crunching on the regolith.

  Then there was just the mutter of the wind.

  Colden cleared her throat. “Sophs?”

  Somehow she knew it was Sophie Gilchrist. Her gait, the way she held her head on one side, questioning everything.

  “It’s me, Jen. Please say something. Tell me you’re OK.”

  “Help me.”

  “Oh, Sophs!” Relief and concern flared in Colden’s heart. She reached out with her grippers. “You’re hurt, aren’t you? I can tell. Let me help you.”

  Gilchrist didn’t move. Her arms hung slack at her sides.

  Colden felt a fresh twinge of uncertainty. “What happened, Sophs? It must have been awful.”

  “It was. It was awful.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You were so mean to me!”

  “I … was?” I was. She’s right. I was.

  “You and Elfrida Goto. You were always the cool girls, with your drugs and your weird clothes and your attitude. Well, she’s not so cool now she’s dead! And you’ll be dead too, soon.”

  On her couch, Colden gasped back a surge of grief. “I’m sorry we were mean to you, Sophs. Believe me, I really am sorry. We were so immature. But can’t we stick together now?”

  “That’s what I always used to say! Can’t we all stick together? Can’t we all just get along?” Suddenly, Gilchrist’s helmet jerked up. She shot her hands out and seized Colden’s grippers. “And guess what, I was right! The PLAN isn’t our enemy. It’s the purebloods! They caused this war! They want humanity to split into a million little pieces so they can rule their petty empires in isolation, without giving a thought to the rest of the universe. They’re monkeys squabbling in trees. We could rule the universe, if we ever stopped fighting each other for a minute, and that’s all the PLAN has ever tried to do, is get us to stop fighting! Stop fighting over your stupid gods, your tribal affiliations, your stock market forecasts, your taste in music, your language preferences, your mindlessly violent games, your rights and liberties, and who gets to be first in the chow line! The stakes are too damn high for that shit!”

  Colden gulped. “The last part of that almost made sense,” she said cautiously. Her heart raced, and fear hollowed out her stomach. She tried to pull gently away from Gilchrist, but the other woman wouldn’t let go of her grippers. She radioed Hawker: “Something is definitely not right here.” Understatement of the freaking century.

  He responded, “Did she have a drugstore implant?”

  “Did she what, Hawker?”

  “Squiffy told me to ask you. Did she have any other augments apart from her BCI?”

  “No—oh, wait, yes she did. Does.” They were talking about Gilchrist like she was dead, when she was standing right here. “She was diagnosed with clinical depression a while back, and she has an implant to manage that.”

  “SSRIs,” Hawker said. “That’s bad news, I’m afraid. It enables the PLAN to control the reward pathways.”

  She never heard the rest of what he said. All the buggies’ headlights came on at once, and their .50 cal guns opened up on the phavatars. Colden would later learn that Drudge, ignoring her orders to stay put, had been overcome with curiosity and led the others over the rise. As soon as all four phavatars were in sight, the machine-guns set to work. The noise sounded like the gates of hell rattling open.

  Rounds ripped into Colden’s torso, literally cutting her in half. But combat-optimized phavatars were tough. Her upper body continued to function. She flipped herself over with her arms, braced herself on her right arm, and fired her left-arm slug thrower at the nearest buggy’s undercarriage. White sparks showered from its engine. Hydrogen fuel cells didn’t explode, but that buggy wouldn’t be going anywhere soon.

  She dragged herself towards the next buggy. She glimpsed pieces of Cavanaugh’s and Howlett’s phavatars littering the slope, and Drudge—miraculously uninjured—jumping up and down like an angry child.

  She shot out the next buggy’s engine. Then Gilchrist—also prone on the ground—grabbed handfuls of Colden’s exposed innards. She wormed up level with Colden’s face. At some point Gilchrist had turned on her helmet’s HUD, so Colden could see her face in the blu
e reflected light. Gilchrist was smiling. Colden knew in that instant that her friend was dead. She was still moving—but she was dead. Her pretty features seemed to have been subtly rearranged, so she looked like a robot not quite realistic enough to pass as human. “Ha, ha,” she said.

  And then she fired her sidearm into Colden’s face.

  “Fun.”

  Colden popped off her couch, screaming. Her midsection tingled. Stars filled her vision. This was sympathetic debilitation, the illusion that you’d really experienced what your phavatar had gone through. The pain wasn’t real, but on their own couches, Cavanaugh and Howlett were also sitting up, moaning and clutching their limbs.

  Colden had to get back in. She stumbled over to Pratt’s couch. “Sorry,” she said, shaking him. “Need your bot.” As soon as she had the headset on, she dipped into Drudge’s feed.

  He was running away as fast as his phavatar’s legs would carry him.

  The two buggies Colden hadn’t disabled chased him, their headlights glaring, engines growling in top gear.

  Drudge stopped and turned to fire his slug-thrower at his pursuers.

  “Don’t stop!” Colden yelled at him. “Keep moving! You’re outgunned! Don’t let’s lose this bot, too.”

  “This sucks! I hate running away!”

  “Everyone hates running away. You’re doing fine.”

  “But I wanted to …”

  “What? You wanted to what? Take them on singlehandedly?”

  “Wanted to impress Gwok.” Drudge tittered, making light of his confession, but confession it was.

  Colden didn’t want to embarrass him for it. She chided him lightly, “You’re way off target, Drudge. Gwok isn’t gonna swoon for do-or-die heroics. She’s the kind of girl who prefers flowers.”

  But Colden was wrong about that.

  Returning to Pratt’s—now her own—feed, she struggled to orient herself amidst a violent assault of information. The other two buggies from Theta Base had circled around and ambushed Hawker’s convoy. The rest of the phavatars, caught flatfooted, had rushed back and attacked the Theta buggies from behind. Tracer rounds stitched bright lines across the twilight. The .50 cals chattered, sounding far away. The dust was so thick, Colden could see neither friend nor foe. She leapt over a body in a Star Force EVA suit, and didn’t know if it was one of Hawker’s people, or one of their former friends from Theta Base.