The Mars Shock

by Felix R. Savage

  She heard someone screaming on the line-of-sight frequency about purebloods secretly controlling the solar system. She located their signal, and shot them.

  Then a whoosh of flame lit up the dust clouds. Someone must have chucked an incendiary grenade into a Death Buggy’s hatch. Chlorine trifluoride, otherwise known as an inferno in a can.

  And in the light of the flames, Colden saw Allison Gwok’s phavatar cutting down an EVA-suited human figure with her flechette cannon, and running over to the corpse, and not just making sure it was dead, but stomping on it. With both feet. While screaming in Korean.

  She sure had adjusted quickly.

  “Attagirl!” Drudge cried, listening in.

  “Cap’n said if it moves, slag it,” Gwok panted. “Am I doing OK, ma’am?”

  Colden thought of Sophie Gilchrist and she said, “You are. Yes, you are, Gwok. You’re doing great.

  viii.

  Kristiansen took a hesitant step into the darkness.

  “Who’s there?”

  A puff of dust drifted towards him.

  “Hey, you see something?” Murray floundered over to him, carbine in hand.

  “This pouch,” Kristiansen said. “You threw it away. And someone threw it back.”

  Murray set his carbine to his shoulder. They shone their helmet lamps around. The rocky floor of the chasm looked carnelian red in the weak light.

  Suddenly Murray let out a shout. He ran back to their bivouac.

  Lean, half-naked Martian figures crouched, picking at their string bags of supplies. Two of them were trying to lift the Medimaster 5500.

  When Murray’s helmet lamp shone on them, they darted away. Murray launched into a long jump and tackled one of them before it could escape. Kristiansen ran to assist him, adrenaline surging. The would-be thieves looked like Martians, but they weren’t acting like Martians, insofar as they hadn’t tried to murder the two men. Yet.

  Murray knelt on the back of his struggling captive. “Gimme a twang cord.” He hogtied the Martian, ankles to wrists. His brisk efficiency made Kristiansen wonder just what they taught ISA agents in training.

  “What the fuck are you up to, huh?” Murray’s shout was doubled, projected from his suit’s external speaker.

  The Martian’s mouth opened. Its teeth were brown stumps.

  “Murray, it can’t talk! There’s no goddamn air.”

  “There’s about a thousand pascals of mostly CO2. You could talk fine here, if you could get around the problem of not breathing.”

  “It’s saying something!”

  Their suits, cheap as they were, had external audio microphones. Normally these picked up nothing but the faint whistle of the wind.

  Now Kristiansen, holding his breath, heard: “Saaay seeeeee fu vee…”

  The exact same sounds he’d heard from his computer on the night he found Colden’s ethics violation.

  Set to the same tune.

  He and Murray realized the truth at the same moment. “Holy cow,” Murray said. “We’ve got ourselves a warbler.”

  The warbler stopped singing. Its head drooped.

  “It had to draw breath to sing,” Kristiansen said. “So it’s just inhaled a faceful of CO2. That can’t be good, even for a Martian.”

  The warbler’s companions crowded back into the light. They pulled Murray’s captive away. There were fifteen or twenty of them, enough to overpower the two men if they all attacked at once. Murray backed against the wall of the chasm, covering them with his carbine, as twitchy as Kristiansen had been a moment ago. But for his own part, Kristiansen had lost his fear. He could see the difference now. These Martians didn’t move with the choreographed purposefulness of the ones that had attacked the buggy. They were faffing around, dropping things and making false starts. They were afraid.

  These were the Martians he’d come here to save.

  The ironic thing was, now he and Murray were the ones who needed saving.

  When the warblers started to carry off their supplies, Murray threatened them. “That’s our shit!”

  “They need it!” Kristiansen said. “Murray, their world’s been trashed. They’re living through an apocalypse. They must have been following us, waiting for their chance.”

  Murray shook his head. “Gonna let them have your medibot, too? Look at that. Ha, ha. They can’t even pick it up.”

  Three warblers were struggling to lift the Medimaster 5500. It looked funny to Kristiansen, too, until it occurred to him that they were malnourished to the point of physical weakness. He gently pushed them aside and lifted the medibot onto his back.

  “Lead the way,” he said, gesturing to make his meaning clear.

  “You’re supposed to say ‘Take me to your leader,’” Murray said. “I wonder if they have one? It might be a trap.”

  They followed the warblers along the chasm in the same direction they’d been travelling earlier. After a few minutes the warblers ahead of them vanished into a cleft in the chasm wall. It was barely wide enough for Kristiansen to fit into with the medibot on his back. Had he and Murray kept walking, they would have passed it by without noticing. Their helmet lamps shone on concrete walls, and then steel.

  More warblers pushed into the cleft behind them. A hatch clanked shut.

  “It’s an airlock,” Murray said.

  Kristiansen felt a familiar sensation of lightness. “No. An elevator.”

  They seemed to go down about as far as the bottom level of a parking garage on Earth. Then the elevator stopped. Double doors hissed open.

  They stumbled out into a jungle of shadows. Kristiansen blundered against tall, thin-stalked plants. Cold, misty light angled between the plants. He stared around in complete confusion.

  Their escorts scampered ahead along a path, towards the source of the light.

  “Well, this is interesting,” Murray said. “An underground bamboo plantation. Who knew, eh? Who the fuck knew?”

  The door of the elevator shut behind them. There was no call button on the rocky wall outside it. They were trapped, unless there was another way out.

  “Oh, by the way,” Murray said. “My suit’s saying the air is fine.”

  He lifted his hands to his helmet and took it off. His head looked naked, vulnerable. Stubble shadowed his chin.

  “It’s not even cold! Smells a bit sulfurous.”

  Kristiansen stared at him. If Murray hadn’t been infected by the nanites before, he was now. He’d just doomed himself.

  “I’ve got nothing to lose,” Murray said with a shrug. “Don’t you try it. One of us has to live to tell the tale.” He folded his helmet and clipped it onto the velcro patch on his shoulder.

  “They’re waiting for us,” Kristiansen said, pointing. “I think they want us to follow them.” His own voice echoed back to him, coming out of the speaker in Murray’s helmet, captured by their external microphones.

  That wasn’t the only sound he heard. Now that there was real air to carry sound waves—0.9 Earth-standard atmospheres, with a healthy oxygen content, according to his suit’s analysis—he could hear ice crackling under their boots, the slithering of the bamboo as they pushed between the stems, and most intriguing of all, the voices of the warblers ahead of them. They were all singing now, all singing the same syllables, but not singing together. Occasionally harmonies emerged that made him think they were trying to sing in chorus, and failing miserably.

  They emerged from the bamboo forest in a clearing shrouded in white mist. Machinery stood about. It all looked old and crude to Kristiansen’s eye, although he could tell these were machines for pulping and enzymatic retting. Bamboo had been one of the first plants ever cultivated in space. It could be used for anything from textiles to building materials, and its roots could be eaten in a pinch.

  One side of the clearing was a wall of mist. Murray walked down to it— “Water! Jesus H. Christ. Kristiansen, this is a lake!”

  He put down his carbine on the rocky ground, peeled his spacesuit off his upp
er body, and thrust his bare hands into the water. “Warm. It’s freaking warm.” These words were mangled by scraping noises, as Murray’s helmet mic was now hanging off his waist, buried in folds of spacesuit.

  “Put your suit back on, Murray!”

  “Nuh uh. I think I might go for a swim.”

  “You’re crazy.” Kristiansen felt a touch of dread. Was this how it started?

  “If you had twenty-four hours to live, and you got the unexpected chance to go for a swim, wouldn’t you take it?”

  Kristiansen’s dread turned to pity. “Nope. I’d go climb a mountain. I’m from a land-locked country.”

  “Well, I’m not. Born and raised in New Zealand. I’m a quarter Maori.” Murray trailed his fingers through the water, and straightened up. “Too bad.”

  He turned to the warblers, who were standing at a distance with their arms folded. Getting his first good look at them, Kristian was struck by the amount of differentiation among them. It was a cliché that all Martians looked the same, but now Kristiansen could see square faces and rounder faces, larger and smaller builds, scars and bruises. What he did not see was any sexual differentiation. They all looked like young men, if he had to assign a gender. No facial hair. Underdeveloped muscles.

  “What do you want?” Murray shouted, waving his arms.

  Silence.

  “Can you even fucking talk?”

  “Of course we can fucking talk,” said one of the warblers. “I’m just trying to decide what to say.”

  Kristiansen laughed out loud. The mere fact of the remark was unexpected enough. What really astonished him was that the warbler had spoken in German.

  “Warum können Sie Deutsch sprechen?” he asked, using his audio speaker to project his voice.

  “What? Oh. We understand the languages of NASA and CNSA, but we aren’t allowed to speak them. I don’t remember why. It’s probably something to do with the war.”

  “Translate,” Murray said, snapping his fingers.

  “Don’t you have a German translation program on your BCI?”

  “No, why would I? All Germans speak English.”

  “He said they understand English and Chinese, but they aren’t allowed to speak them, because they’re the languages of the enemy.” Kristiansen swallowed. “German, on the other hand, would be the language of the prophet Martin Heidegger … I assume.”

  “Ja, Prophetensprache.”

  “His German is weird,” Kristiansen admitted. “I can hardly understand it.”

  “Ask him what the glyphs are, the artworks on the surface, what they mean—are they writing? Pictures? Of what?”

  Kristiansen could only imagine how frustrating it must be for Murray to have come within spitting distance of his goal, a potential treasure trove of intelligence—and be barred from accessing it by a language barrier.

  While Kristiansen questioned the warblers’ spokesman, Murray prowled around, using his helmet as a handheld camera to take close-up vid of the soil, the lake, the bamboo processing machinery. He even moved the warblers around, like a studio photographer, to get better shots of their faces. They cooperated willingly. By this time, Kristiansen had realized that they were frightened, but friendly. They hoped Kristiansen and Murray could rescue them.

  Kristiansen mirrored the spokesman’s increasingly relaxed posture, sitting on the ground, leaning back against a gigantic drum of soaking bamboo. More Martians assembled, twenty-three in all. They tore into Kristiansen and Murray’s supplies of gorp. When they were finished, they ripped the packs open to lick the insides, as if the bland substance was the best thing they’d ever tasted. Then they crouched on their haunches, watching Kristiansen needily.

  His professional experience in the Belt enabled him to push his frustration, pity, and grief away, so they didn’t cloud his ability to organize and deliver information. “OK, Murray. This guy is Stephen One.”

  “Erfreut, Sie kennen zu lernen,” said Stephen One, which was how the warblers’ spokesman identified himself, rather icily.

  “This is Archive 394, and these guys are the survivors of the personnel who worked here. They were on the surface when the Chinese module crash-landed nearby. It infected them with the computer virus we were discussing. They have computers in their brains—”

  “Yeah, yeah, we know about that,” Murray interrupted. “Neuroware. Took us the longest time to identify it on scans. We were looking for hardware. The nanites are bacteria. They get into the brain, and apparently configure themselves into a neural lace—that’s what the first generation of BCIs were called. Very invasive.” Murray’s voice shook slightly. Kristiansen remembered that Murray was describing what might be happening at this moment inside his own brain. “They translate the electrochemical language of the brain into zeroes and ones, to enable interfacing with the PLAN. They’ve also got local command-and-control functionality. They control the limbic system. We don’t even know how the limbic system works.”

  “So the PLAN is ahead of us.”

  “So far ahead of us, it’s not funny. Remember the Dust plague?”

  “Hell, yes. The PLAN bombarded Luna with brain-eating nanobots.”

  “Yes,” Murray said grimly. “Which we invented ourselves. We thought we accidentally leaked the technology to the PLAN. Well, the PLAN must have been laughing its bionic ass off. The Dust was a kiddie science experiment compared to these nanites. The whole episode was meta. It was an exercise in point-making. The PLAN was playing with us.”

  “So how good are these nanites?”

  “Let me count the ways, dude. They have an always-on connection with the PLAN. How do you figure that part works?"

  “Quantum entanglement,” Kristiansen said, parroting the rumor he’d heard on Eureka Station, although he didn’t actually have a clue what quantum entanglement was.

  “Yeah. Two quantum bits, entangled, can communicate instantly, regardless of how far apart they are. The trick is getting them entangled in the first place. Ask this guy how the PLAN does that. And did you ask him about the glyphs?”

  “Yes, I did. He says he doesn’t remember what the glyphs mean, but they’re Gottschriftlich, ‘god-writing.’ I’d guess they’re religious symbols.”

  “Figures: the PLAN thinks it’s a god.”

  “I’ll ask about the quantum bits next, but Murray, you need to understand how they experienced their separation from the PLAN. The St. Stephen virus cut them off instantly.”

  “More likely, the PLAN cut them off to stop it from propagating through the network.”

  “Either way, they were suddenly alone in their heads. They were suddenly themselves. Their experience of the physical world became singular and individual. He talks about it like … the nearest parallel I can think of is a born-again Christian. It’s like they were born again. Complete disconnect between the old life and the new.”

  Murray stopped fidgeting. “The words to that song of theirs, again?”

  “Yeah. It starts with ‘Stephanus, vir sanctus, virtute ac imbuti…’”

  “I’m really starting to doubt this virus was written by the Chinese,” Murray said heavily. “They’re not known for their evangelical Christian fervor. Or their fondness for Latin. Go on.”

  “That’s about it. They’ve been hiding out here ever since. They have the advantage of being underground. The PLAN can’t KKV them. Also, Stephen One says they have defenses. I think he’s talking about mines, but he also mentioned defenses against the Naniten. So there is a chance there aren’t any nanites down here, Murray!”

  “Oh yes, there are. It takes electrostatic scrubbing and fumigation to kill them. I didn’t see any scrubbing equipment. Ask him.”

  Kristiansen put the question to Stephen One.

  “Of course there are Naniten here,” the Martian said impatiently, dashing Kristiansen’s hopes. “There are Naniten everywhere.”

  “But not on Earth,” Kristiansen muttered. “Yet.”

  Murray said, “I know what you’re thinking.
What if the PLAN seeds a meteor with nanites and throws it at Earth? That was our worst nightmare, even before we knew what the nanites were. Even before we knew there were nanites. The PLAN’s been throwing rocks at Earth for decades. What if one got through? And what if it was loaded with a bio-terror agent? That used to keep my bosses up at night, let me tell you. But then Hyderabad happened, and Seoul, and everyone didn’t turn into muppets.”

  “They did in Theta Base.”

  “Aha. Remember I was talking to Deimos on our way here? Their new theory is it’s the noble gases. Helium and neon are present in trace amounts in Earth’s atmosphere. The preponderance of xenon-132 on Earth, as opposed to xenon-129 on Mars, is also much higher. Even though those gases don't normally react much, they could be poisonous to the nanites.” Murray sighed. “The damn things are so advanced, we're not sure how they work or why they fail.”

  Kristian struggled to translate this for Stephen One. The Martian started nodding before he finished. “Helium, neon, xenon? Mildly toxic. Everyone knows that. We have none of that muck in here.”

  “And nor,” Murray said bleakly, “is there any of that muck in Star Force’s forward operating bases. Just your basic oxygen, nitrogen, and a dash of CO2.”

  Kristiansen switched into French. It was one of the official languages of the United Nations, so Murray should know it, or at least have a translation program on his BCI. “Murray, they don’t know you may be infected. They probably think it couldn’t happen to one of us, because we’re not Martian. We must seem incredibly strange to them. They may not even view us as human.”

  “Bien,” Murray said. “No need to worry them.”

  “But maybe they could help.”

  “Look, that isn’t what matters right now! We need answers, and we don’t have much time to get them.” Murray addressed Stephen One. “I’m still not convinced. If the nanites consume CO2 at the rate you’re suggesting, we should have noticed some thinning of the atmosphere.”