The Mars Shock

by Felix R. Savage

  “We replenish it,” Stephen One said, narrowing his eyes in a way that Kristiansen interpreted as, Duh. “That’s required under the Gesetz über Naturschutz und Landschaftspflege.”

  “Environmental protection law,” Kristiansen said. “Of course they have laws. Of course.”

  “I’m not taking anything for granted,” Murray said. “Why is the lake warm? Why is there a lake?”

  Kristiansen asked. The answer made him selfishly glad he was still wearing his EVA suit, with its built-in radiation protection. “It’s a heat sink for their fission reactor.”

  “Where’s that at?”

  “Over there,” Kristiansen copied Stephen One’s gesture, waving at the foggy lake.

  “The reactor is still functioning, I assume?”

  “Yes, although the lake will soon reach its heat holding capacity. It wasn’t meant to be the main coolant system … that was on the surface,” Kristiansen simultaneously listened and translated. “It got trashed by the Phobos impacts.”

  “Imagine what that was like for them,” Murray said. “Huddling down here, wondering if the world was coming to an end. Wondering if they’d been born again, only to die.”

  He ran his hands through his thick brown hair. Kristiansen noticed for the first time that he wore a wedding ring.

  “Clearly, we have to get them to safety.”

  Kristiansen was surprised by Murray’s resolve, and then wondered why he was surprised. The ISA agent might be hours from death, but he was still doing his job.

  “Tell them to pack their stuff, if they’ve got any stuff—”

  Stephen One—who, after all, understood English—interrupted. Kristiansen listened and translated. “He says it could take a little while before they’re ready to leave.” The Martian nodded emphatically.

  “Well, that’s just great,” Murray said. He addressed Stephen One directly. “Why? What have you got to take?”

  “Not what,” Stephen One said, fidgeting. “Who.”

  “Bloody hell. Have they got families?”

  “Haben Sie Familien?”

  “Familien?” Stephen One echoed blankly.

  Murray lost patience. “I’m going to go out and set up a Mayday beacon. Ask him if that’s OK. Maybe Alpha Base’ll see it. Maybe the muppets will, too. But that’s a risk we have to take.”

  Stephen One assented to this. “Stephen Two, Stephen Four, and Stephen Nine will go with you.”

  “Are they all called … never mind. Kristiansen, while I’m gone, get them organized to leave. I want to rock and roll at oh four hundred. Try to find out more about these perimeter defenses, and … oh, just find out as much as you can.”

  “I’m going to ask them if there’s any way to detect or reverse a nanite infection.”

  “Ask them whatever you want. Just remember, it’s not my life that’s at stake here. It’s all life on Earth.”

  ★

  Fifteen minutes later, Kristiansen sat beside Stephen One in a rowboat that seemed to be made of regocrete. Two of the other born-agains pulled at the oars. The steam rising off the lake muffled the slap of water against the boat. The Martians’ faces and bare limbs gleamed with condensation. Kristiansen sat as still as he could, in case his weight should rock the boat dangerously. But behind his faceplate, he was grimacing with anxiety. His stress indicators were stuck to the roof. He urinated, and watched his suit measure the scanty fluid. His water reserves, including estimated recoverable water, rose from 1.3 liters to a still-pathetic 1.45 liters.

  Murray had gone up to the surface with three of the born-agains, figuring they’d set up the emergency beacons on the highest possible ground. Kristiansen just prayed the beacons were strong enough to overcome the EM noise that played havoc with surface comms. Their other option was to leave the born-agains and make a run for Alpha Base … but that wasn’t really an option anymore. He knew he couldn’t leave these people. They were people to him now.

  Stephen One pointed out a shadow in the mist. “That’s the reactor. I used to work over there. Now we’ve just got a skeleton crew in the control room. It’s running at a quarter of capacity.”

  Stephen One was a nuclear reactor technician. You could give him new clothes and drop him into any city on Earth, and he would pass. The pebbly texture of his skin could be taken for a fashion statement, his unusual facial features likewise.

  “The untermenschen are desperate to get their filthy hands on our stuff,” Stephen One continued with pride.

  Well, he would pass until he opened his mouth. “No one uses that word anymore,” Kristiansen corrected him.

  “Why not? The prophet uses it. It’s the perfect word for those tools.”

  “Your, um, ex-buddies?”

  “Who else? They send us begging letters. The god is rebuilding its capacity. It needs all the resources it can get, especially metal, to fight off the wreckers. Well, it can’t have our stuff.” Stephen One slapped the side of the boat for emphasis, making it rock.

  Kristiansen reflexively gripped his seat for balance. “Why don’t the—the others—” He couldn’t bring himself to utter the word untermenschen. “Why don’t they just come and take your stuff? There are millions of them. They have weapons.”

  “And we have the dam.”

  “The dam?”

  “Yeah. This is a reservoir, right? It’s connected to the watershed.”

  “The watershed.”

  “Yes, the watershed.” Stephen One gave him another of those looks: are you slow? “The god needs its water. If they come for us, we’ll blow the dam. Oh, sure, they’d close the valves higher up on Olympus Mons. But even so, the god can’t afford to lose forty million gallons of water.”

  “A watershed on Mars,” Kristiansen muttered. “A watershed under Mars.” It was dismaying to realize that although humanity had been fighting the PLAN for months on the surface, there was still a lot they didn’t know about the PLAN’s infrastructure under the surface. “Dams. Reservoirs. Where does the water come from?”

  “I can’t remember,” Stephen One said.

  OK. “So that’s why the others don’t attack you. They’re afraid you’ll blow the dam.” This was both good news, and not. He expected by now Murray had discovered that Archive 394 did not have any minefields, artillery, or other conventional defenses.

  “Right, so like I said, they just send us whiny letters.”

  “Is there a postal service on Mars?” At this point he’d have believed it.

  “No, fax.”

  Kristiansen had to consult his BCI’s encylopedia to find out what a fax machine was, or had been.

  “Could we use this fax thing to contact our friends?” he asked hopefully.

  “Probably not. But you can have a look at it.”

  An island rose out of the mist ahead of them. Its steep, rocky sides gleamed with moisture. A regocrete silo crowned the island.

  The rowers brought the boat into a pocket-sized harbor, and Stephen One leaned out and tied it up.

  They climbed a steep, slippery flight of steps carved out of the Martian rock. The rowers trailed behind, clearly exhausted by their exertions. By the time they got to the top of the steps, Stephen One was clinging wearily to the handrail, too. Kristiansen remembered how the born-agains had struggled to lift the medibot. “Are you all right?”

  “No,” said a voice from the mist. “They’re not all right. They’re suffering from alkalemia due to increased CO2 levels in their blood. The nanites are responsible for maintaining a stable acid/base balance during respiratory shutdown, so when they aren’t functioning properly, blood pH goes to hell. On top of that, we’re having problems with limbic control and autoimmune functioning. All the stuff that used to be controlled by our neuroware. Add in protein and vitamin deficiencies, and I’d say, yeah. You’ve done us a big favor.”

  The voice ended on an unmistakable note of sarcasm. Like the others, it spoke dated, foreign-sounding German. Unlike the others, it was female.

 
Kristiansen spun around, searching the mist, seeing no one.

  Stephen One rolled his eyes upwards. A speaker was mounted outside a door flush with the walls of the building.

  “Mom! Gonna let us in?”

  ix.

  Colden walked beside Captain Hawker through the Martian night. Pratt—who’d claimed one of the newbies’ phavatars so he could stay with the team—flanked Hawker on the other side. They kept a close watch on their radar, but Colden wasn’t really worried about anyone jumping them from behind. Light drenched the pitted terrain.

  It came from massed headlights up ahead.

  The headlights of Mobile Armored Squadron 7 of the Second Army of the China Territorial Defense Force.

  Known for their elastic definition of Chinese territory, the CTDF had apparently decided that it now included the Mahfouz Gradient. They’d got wind of the clusterfuck at Theta Base, and had driven over from their own operating sector to ‘help.’

  Starting a couple of hours ago, they’d plonked their tanks at the foot of Wallaby Ridge, positioning them along a low rise, so their guns could sweep the 5-kilometer-wide slope that descended to the Miller Flats like a ski run.

  Hawker’s first idea had been to just go around the Chinese tanks, but one of their deadly CP cannons had turned to track the task force, putting paid to that.

  “Very fucking helpful, I must say,” Hawker seethed as they walked. “I think these are the same guys we met in Conurbation 112. Remember? The twats who slagged that reactor.”

  “Don’t piss them off,” Colden said wearily.

  “Don’t worry.” A few tens of meters from the headlights, Hawker stopped and set his fists on his hips. “Hey, assholes!” he shouted over the line-of-sight link. “Where do you get off targeting us? We’re allies, remember? And also, you’re trespassing. This is our sector.”

  A Chinese-accented voice retorted smugly, “The tragedy at Theta Base threatens us all. We’re enforcing the quarantine order approved by Joint Forces HQ.”

  Joint Forces HQ was a bunch of meddling REMFs based on Deimos. A travesty of an organization, it had been thoroughly infiltrated by the Chinese, who used it for PR purposes. Colden knew of no quarantine order, although there might well have been one. Down here in the dust, it didn’t matter.

  “We’re not interested in Theta Base,” Hawker said. “We’re not planning to go anywhere near it.”

  “That’s right. You’re not.”

  “We just need to go around you.”

  “Oh?” the Chinese officer said with interest. “Where to?”

  “None of your effing business.”

  “We have egg drop soup,” the officer said seductively.

  “God,” Hawker said, “I’d kill for soup. Got any hot and sour?”

  “For you, yes.” Pause. “Have you got coffee?”

  Hawker said to Colden, “Have we?”

  On the operator chat channel, Colden said to Drudge, “Check and see how many refill packs of RedEye are in the buggies.”

  “A bunch,” he responded a few seconds later.

  “Some,” Colden said to Hawker.

  “Yes, we have coffee,” Hawker told the Chinese officer.

  The central bank of headlights blinked on and off, like a wink.

  Fifteen minutes later, standing in the backwash of hot gas from an idling Chinese tank, Hawker accepted a handful of soup packets and handed over an equal number of RedEyes. This beverage could only be described as ‘coffee’ by reference to the fact that it was black and contained caffeine. The Chinese loved it. Although no one would risk refilling their nutrient reserves outside, the contraband goods would be taken back to their respective bases and enjoyed there.

  “Have you got recent IR scans of the Mahfouz Gradient?” Hawker asked the Chinese tank commander, a Captain Sun.

  “Yes, of course,” Sun said. “We compiled a heatmap as we proceeded. It’s very detailed, thanks to the superior IR scanning capability of our vehicles. What are you specifically interested in?”

  Colden could practically hear Hawker’s teeth grinding. “What’m I gonna have to give you for it?”

  “Chocolate.”

  “Drudge,” Colden said, “fetch all the Dairy Milk. And the fun-size Aeros.”

  This concession kind of blew their cover. With no way to consume chocolate while wearing their suits, they had no earthly reason to have them in the buggies, except to use as currency for bargaining with the Chinese. Their permission to carry snacks actually dated back to the beginning of the ground war, when Star Force had hallucinated that the Martians might be won over by goodies flung from buggy turrets.

  Captain Sun stared at Drudge’s customized phavatar when he trotted up with the snacks. “You would not get away with that in the CTDF,” he said.

  “It remains to be seen whether he’ll get away with it in Star Force,” Colden said darkly.

  “Wah! Mint Aeros! My favorite. Thank you, Roland.” Captain Sun made the chocolate bars disappear into a pocket of his outer garment. “Here is the heatmap.” He sent it to them over the line-of-sight link.

  Colden and Hawker examined it on the spot. One feature stuck out like a sore thumb. Lines marked red, for the 0-10° Celsius temperature range, snaked through an impact site at the south end of the ridge they were making for, based on Murray and Kristiansen’s last recorded location. The lines of heat wiggled across the mouth of a narrow chasm about 300 meters wide. On their own topological map, that area was shown as part of a PLAN town so wrecked, it was assumed that no Martians survived there—although assumptions of no Martians were almost always wrong, in Colden’s experience.

  Hawker said, “Those lines are damned hot. Is that an artifact of data analysis?”

  Captain Sun spoke sepulchrally into their situation space. “No. Based on laser induced breakdown spectroscopy in addition to IR, we assume those to be pipes.”

  “Of what?”

  “Water.”

  Liquid water had been known to flow on the surface of Mars even before the planet was colonized. It melted out of sedimentary rocks in the Martian summer and seeped down cliff faces. Bodies of open water could not exist in an atmosphere where water boiled at 10° C. But the PLAN had used water-cooled reactors in its cities, piping the waste heat through klicks of pipes. This could be the remains of one of those systems, although it would be strange to find pipes intact in an area where everything else had been slagged by a moon fragment.

  Colden said, “What’s that yellow dotted circle in the southeast quadrant of this map?”

  “Whoops,” Captain Sun said. “Please erase that.”

  “Not until you tell me why,” Hawker said joyfully.

  Sun’s grumpy tone betrayed shame at his own screw-up. “It is our mission objective. Or it was our mission objective, until you neo-imperialist barbarians lost an entire MFOB, forcing us to redeploy.”

  “Neo-imperialist barbarian yourself, Jin-Wei, you filthy capitalist,” Hawker snorted. “Bet I know what that is! It’s one of those modules. You figured you’d nip up there and see if there was anything worth selling on the gray market.”

  “What modules?” Colden started. Hawker shushed her.

  “You have a shockingly ill-formed sense of ethics,” Sun said primly. “I was ordered to salvage the module, for your information.”

  “If you were, it’s only because your colonel has a buyer lined up,” Hawker said. “Nah; I’m just kidding, Jin-Wei. I know you’d never do something like that. Thanks for the map.”

  “Thanks for the chocolate, Roland.”

  “We’ll be on our way now.”

  As they walked back to the Death Buggies, Hawker filled Colden in on the possibility that a Chinese hab module, part of Tiangong Erhao, had crash-landed on the surface close to here. “We want it. Theta Base was going to salvage it. That’s why they were up on Wallaby Ridge in the first place. There’s supposedly some kind of top-secret Chinese computer code in the module’s hub. I can’t imagine it survived th
e crash landing, but they can do amazing things with data recovery these days.”

  “If it’s Chinese code, presumably they’ve already got it?” Colden said. “So why would they send tanks up there?”

  “To stop us from getting it, of course. But Jin-Wei is primarily interested in war memorabilia. I know that for a fact, because he cut me in last time he sent a shipment off planet.”

  “Hmmm,” Colden said. “Is your name really Roland? It just says ‘R’ on your ID.”

  “Yes, but don’t tell anyone.”

  They reached the buggies. Hawker climbed in. Colden and Pratt resumed their forward scouting positions. The convoy set off through the flood of light from the Chinese tanks. This time, no one targeted them.

  But as they passed into the darkness, two of the tanks ground into motion and followed them.

  x.

  The underground lake steamed like a hot bath. The speaker above the door of the silo had gone silent.

  The door swung open. Kristiansen followed the born-again Martians into an open-plan office lit by overhead fixtures.

  Whatever he’d expected, it wasn’t this. It looked ridiculously similar to the back office of some small company on Earth. Messy desks stood in island arrangements, crowded with clunky computer equipment.

  And stacks of paper.

  Like the office of some small company on Earth … a hundred years ago. No one used paper anymore.

  “Don’t just stand there dripping on the mat,” the same female voice as before called out. Its owner glided into view, seated on an office chair with wheels, propelling herself with her feet. She was the first Martian woman Kristiansen had seen. She looked to be in her early forties, and wore a sack-like tunic over leggings. Her long black hair hung in a braid down her back. At first glance Kristiansen thought she was hugely fat. Then he realized she was hugely pregnant.

  “I’m only in my ninth week,” she said. “By my third trimester, I won’t be able to walk at all. I’ll have to work from bed. It’s lucky you came now.”