“Two words,” Colden said. “Data archive.”
That ought to fetch Commander Sun like a shot. Hawker might not like having his rival in the mix. Too freaking bad.
The streamers of mist parted to reveal a rocky island. Murray directed them to a harbor carved out of the rock. There were two rowboats tied up there already. “I want these,” Hawker said. “I’m not floating back again on that tent. Perrault, stay here and guard these boats with your life.”
“Yes, sir!”
A flight of narrow, slippery steps led up from the harbor. Murray leapt up them like a goat. He was in good shape for a man who’d been singlehandedly fighting muppets. That’s the ISA for you, Colden thought. They only took the best of the best. People said their field agents were all sociopathic nutters, but Colden was disposed favorably towards Murray, since he seemed so concerned for Kristiansen’s safety.
She followed him up the steps, thankful for her phavatar’s retractable gecko grips.
The concrete silo on top of the island had no windows and only one door. Locked. They’d brought the rest of their leeches. The shaped charges did the trick. The door, its frame, and quite a lot of regocrete exploded outwards. “That was a pressure seal,” Colden noted.
A storm of white fragments gusted out of the hole. A grunt caught one. “Paper!”
“I don’t care if it’s freaking silk.” Colden had slipped back into house-to-house mode. It felt good to be doing something familiar, after their bizarre journey here. “Drudge, on my mark …”
She went right, Drudge went left, and Hawker and his grunts came in behind them. They smashed through the interior of the silo. It was all desks and computers. The grunts shot at potential hostiles that turned out to be chairs, or fluttering pieces of paper, or shadows from the overhead lights.
There wasn’t a single muppet in the place. Again.
Colden scanned the toppled computers, praying to see something she’d missed.
Hawker kicked one of the machines. Its housing came apart, revealing a motherboard. The PLAN’s computers evidently used ICs, the technology that predated processing crystals. Radiation-resistant, but not proof against an infantryman’s boot. Components and chips of solder dribbled out. “Way-hey,” Hawker said. “Let’s hope our data recovery guys really are as shit-hot as they’re supposed to be.”
“These are just archives,” Murray said. “Nothing sensitive here. All the good stuff is on the server.” He scuffled through eddies of blowing paper. Colden saw where he was heading, what she’d missed. She was running on fumes. There was another door at the far end of the silo. A pressure seal, covered with the glyphs she’d seen on hundreds of PLAN refuges in hundreds of PLAN towns.
She caught up with Murray. “I’ll do the honors,” she said breathlessly.
“Fine, but I want to go in first.”
“Why?”
“This is fun.”
The ISA: a really lovely bunch of guys.
Colden shot out the airlock’s top set of hinges with her slug-thrower. It sagged open. While Murray held it, she leaned into the chamber and put a slug through the valve.
Murray shoved her out of the way. He actually scrambled over her carapace to get into the lock. He blocked her view for a moment, and then he was gone. She stared into a sea of faces. The wind of escaping air blew their black hair around like seaweed.
Muppet faces.
Small muppet faces.
With their button noses, big black eyes, and broad foreheads, they looked exactly like the toy trolls she used to collect as a preteen.
“Holy crap, they’re children …”
Her flechette cannon sagged. Drudge shouldered past her. Bet he hadn’t collected toy trolls when he was little.
“Drudge! Don’t shoot! They’re just kids!”
“Kristiansen!” Murray roared on the line-of-sight link. “Come out, come out wherever you are!”
The usual bamboo scaffolds filled the room to the ceiling. More little faces peeped through the curtains around the platforms. Murray spidered up the nearest scaffold, agile in his cumbersome suit.
“KRISTIANSEN!”
“Fuck you and the horse you rode in on, Murray,” said a deathly tired voice, which Colden had last heard five years on UNLEOSS, telling her she was complicit in the UN’s machinery of oppression.
Kristiansen! Colden spun. An adult muppet got in her way. Without thinking, she gave it the usual dosage. She barely noticed that Hawker was screaming at his men to hold their fire, or that Drudge was getting jiggy with his splart gun. She shouted, “Magnus, where are you?”
“Jen?!?”
“Where are you?” At the same time Murray reappeared on top of the nearer scaffold. He echoed her shout. “Where are you?”
“Jen, he’s infected!”
“WHO is WHAT?”
“He’s not Kevin Murray anymore!”
“That’s what my mother named me,” Murray drawled.
Colden was paralyzed. “He sounds like the real deal,” she whispered.
“Damn straight,” Murray said.
“He said he had a plan! I believed him. I didn’t know it was the PLAN talking! He didn’t even need a BCI. The nanites communicate wirelessly with the PLAN. That’s why he kept trying to stick his head in the water. He was trying to attenuate their signals. He was trying to escape. But the nanites won. They wanted more bandwidth. And I gave it to them.”
“Bullshit,” Murray said. He leapt across to the next scaffold, making the whole fragile structure shake.
Colden sourced Kristiansen’s line-of-sight signal. She started in the same direction.
“If you really are Kevin Murray,” Hawker yelled suddenly, “prove it. Where were you born? What’s your favorite food? What’s the name of the first person you ever fell in love with?”
“Basel,” Murray said immediately, “Zuricher geschnetzeltes, and Jennifer Colden.”
“Huh? Colden, you know this guy?”
“He doesn’t know her. He doesn’t even know who he is,” Kristiansen’s voice grated. “He thinks he’s me.”
“Like I’d lower myself to impersonate a cowardly, traitorous, lying pureblood,” Murray sneered.
Colden’s reflexes went into overdrive. She fired her flechette cannon at Murray. At the same time she leapt and pulled herself up the same scaffold Murray was climbing down. She parted the curtains, crawled onto the lowest platform. There was Kristiansen in a Star Force spacesuit, kneeling between the bloody thighs of a woman—
—a Martian—
“She’s hemorrhaging,” Kristiansen said. “She was nine weeks pregnant. With quintuplets.”
“Come out and prove you’re a MAN,” Murray bellowed. “Heh, heh, heh.” His carbine thrust between the curtains, followed by his head. Colden realized she hadn’t hit him. Nor would Hawker have. The flechettes were programmed to avoid anything that profiled like a non-Martian human being. The infantry carbines functioned the same way. The smart darts had no way of knowing Kevin Murray wasn’t human anymore.
She twisted on her knees and fired her slug-thrower. Her stupid gun. Stupid was good.
Murray fell backwards.
The woman on the platform screamed. Blood gushed out.
Pratt said on the operator chat channel, “Ma’am? Colden? I hate to interrupt, but there are a couple things you need to know. The Chinese are here. I’m watching Commander Sun try to decide if he wants to go down there or not. The other tank went to investigate the hot spot.”
“Tell Sun to get his ass down here,” Colden said. She laid a gripper on Kristiansen’s sleeve. He knelt, cradling the woman’s head on his lap, watching her life gush away.
“Murray smashed up my medibot. I could have helped her.”
“Magnus, she was a muppet.”
“She was a person. A warbler, in your braindead Star Force jargon. They all were. That’s why he killed them.”
And we killed the rest, Colden thought, remembering the muppets they’d s
lain when they found the beacon. Jeepers. Those could have been warblers, too. She hadn’t let them live long enough to find out.
She leaned out between the curtains. Murray’s body lay on the floor. To her astonishment, he wasn’t dead. He was struggling wildly as Hawker’s men tied him up with twang cords. She’d missed. Point blank, and she’d missed. That was the trouble with stupid guns. And with being exhausted.
“Drudge,” Hawker called, “get over here and make yourself useful. These cords aren’t going to hold him.”
“I don’t have much left,” Drudge said from the far corner. For the first time Colden noticed what he was doing. He had rounded up all the adult Martians in the refuge, and some of the larger children. He was carefully spraying their heads with splart, one by one. Every time he finished one, he’d lop it off with his phavatar’s built-in cutter laser, wait for the blood to drip out some, and splart the raw end. He now had a row of five such objects sitting on the floor, drying quickly in the increasingly thin and cold atmosphere.
“Drudge!” Colden yelled. “Stop it! They aren’t muppets, don’t you understand? That is fucking sick! I’m gonna report your ass!”
“Aw, chica.”
“I gave you an order! Now get over there and help Captain Hawker.”
Grumbling, Drudge went, leaving the rest of his captives alive. Kristiansen nearly knocked Colden off the scaffolding, he pushed past her so fast. If this wasn’t Mars, he’d have broken his neck jumping to the floor. He hugged the captives, wrapping his arms around as many of them as he could. The smaller children crowded around him as if he could protect them.
“Nobody lays a fucking finger on these people,” Kristiansen shouted. His voice cracked and broke as he raved about their lack of ethics. Colden nodded bleakly to herself. This was the Kristiansen that their friends in the Space Corps had tagged a radical, so driven was he to stand up for his ideas. But he was right. Nutty old Kristiansen had been right all along. They were murderers.
“All right, fine, we’ll take ‘em back to Alpha,” Hawker said, caving in, the way people did cave in, just to get Kristiansen to shut up. “They can ride on top of the buggies. Jesus.”
Colden took a break. The blood rushed to her head when she stood up. She’d seriously overdone it. Her muscles were so tense, she could barely walk out of the telepresence center. It hurt to move her eyes. Although her IV had supplied all her nutrient needs, her stomach grumbled, informing her that she hadn’t had a real meal in going on twenty hours. She quieted it with a Mars Bar from her illicit stash in the break room. This was how you gained weight as a telepresence operator.
Pratt was in the break room, too. The little room had a LivingLawn™ carpet of real grass—you had to take your shoes off to enter—and a soundtrack of waterfalls. It was supposed to be relaxing. It made her think of the Congo, someplace where there were no people anymore.
“We screwed up,” she said. “Jesus. They’re warblers. They’re human, and we murdered them.”
Pratt slumped with his long legs stretched out in front of him, slurping yogurt from a pouch. “They murdered that poor fucker from the ISA. Worse than murder, what happened to him.” Slurp.
“Did you see what Drudge was doing? No, you were outside. That kid’s heading for a meeting with no tea and biscuits.”
“It’s tit for tat, ma’am.”
“No. Sophie was right.”
“Sophie who?”
“Gilchrist. A friend of mine. She thought the PLAN was targeting the warblers, and she was right. The PLAN’s in the middle of a civil war. The AI in Olympus Mons, versus the warblers. They were hiding in there! Hiding … from KKV strikes.”
“Guess we’re rescuing them,” Pratt said. “But what are we gonna do with Murray?”
“He’s infected. We can’t bring him back here. I’ll ask Squiffy.” Colden tossed her Mars Bar wrapper into the recycling. “We shouldn’t both be out here at the same time.”
“No, you’re right.” Pratt finished his yogurt and took out a cigarette. He blew vapor at the NO VAPING sign.
“Give me a drag. Wait, what’s in it?”
“Mostly THC.”
“Oh, never mind then. Actually, I’d prefer it if you stayed off that stuff while we’re working.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Pratt said, rolling his eyes.
Colden made a mental note to request that Pratt be rotated out of her platoon. Then she went back into the telepresence center. Before logging in, she sent an urgent email to Commander Jackson asking for advice on what they should do with Murray.
Then she went back to work.
Her phavatar, obeying commands from Hawker, had gone into service as an outboard engine. Kicking up low-gee geysers of water, she was pushing a dinghy laden with Martian children across the lake. She instinctively raised her head out of the water. There were two other boats ahead of hers, one being propelled by Drudge, the other by bamboo poles.
“What did I miss?” she line-of-sighted.
“Oh, nothing very interesting,” Hawker replied. “Theta Base is coming to pay us a visit. That’s all. Nothing very fucking exciting. We’re all going to die, that’s all. Where the fuck are the Chinese?”
xii.
Kristiansen crouched on the shore of the lake, staring through his faceplate at the crumbly soil. A spot of agony over his left ear throbbed. He felt like he had a hole in his head—because he did. Where all his personal data, job-related records, vid archives, and libraries of books and music had been, was … nothing. He’d had his BCI since he was fifteen. Precisely because it had been so much a part of him, he’d rarely noticed it was there. But he noticed its absence.
Now he knew how the Server had felt when the St. Stephen virus disabled her memories.
He felt stupid.
He relived the moments when Murray had hacked his way out of the Evac-U-Tent. The man turned out to have artificial fingernails that could morph into razorblades. Guess those didn’t qualify for exclusion under the ISA’s no-augments policy. He also had a drugstore implant, of course. The ISA was hardly going to send its agents into the field without a whole pharmacy of stimulants and painkillers at their fingertips—literally at their fingertips: Murray had not had a BCI, but he could dose himself by pushing tiny buttons on a panel set into his inner arm. That was convenient enough for the PLAN. Fully under the AI’s control, Murray had destroyed the medibot in a frenzy, before turning on them.
Terrified, the born-agains had scattered. Stephen One had hauled Kristiansen into one of the rowboats. He’d still been too woozy from the anesthetic to be any help. He remembered the rocking of the boat. Then it all broke up.
The next thing he remembered was delivering stillborn quintuplets. There’d been so much blood. Stephen One had asked him to help because he thought Kristiansen was a doctor. What irony. All his medical knowledge had been on his BCI.
Squatting, rocking, he heard Hawker’s voice.
“Theta Base is moving across the Miller Flats. It’s currently 62 klicks away, and at its current rate of approach will be here in one hour and twenty minutes. Just to give you an idea of what we’re dealing with, Theta’s route was blocked by three Chinese tanks, equipped with charged-particle cannons, which are among the scariest weapons known to humanity. Those tanks do not exist anymore. Theta slagged them from over the horizon, using actively guided anti-ship nukes, which are some of the other scariest weapons in humanity’s arsenal. They’ve got onboard MI guidance. They shouldn’t really exist. The gunners at Theta were using them to intercept KKVs, which was deemed to be A-OK.”
Colden’s voice said, “My view is we should stay here and wait for our assets in orbit to deliver an orbit-to-surface strike.”
Kristiansen couldn’t believe it was her. What were the odds? Did Star Force have that few competent telepresence operators? Bleakly, he suspected that was probably the case. The other face of the coin was that Jen Colden had always wanted power and authority. Now she had both: an eight-foot combat-opt
imized phavatar, with a platoon leader’s stripe on the shoulder area of its carapace. She sounded calm and confident. Wasn’t her conscience troubling her at all?
“I’m not going to assume we’re safe here,” she went on. “Theta Base’s anti-ship missiles deliver five Hiroshimas each. However, we’re a lot safer here than we would be on the surface.”
“Might be an idea to retreat up the chasm,” Hawker said. “Except we’d be going in the wrong direction.”
“Why doesn’t Deimos fucking hurry up?” demanded one of the grunts.
“It takes time to line up a strike,” Colden started, and then her voice suddenly cut out. Kristiansen raised his head with a weary flicker of curiosity.
Hawker stood in the middle of a mob of Martian children, with Stephen One watching over them. The other Star Force soldiers stood guard over Murray, who was lying on the ground in his spacesuit, trussed with twang cords and splart-reinforced knots. The lake was boiling. Three phavatars stood in sentry positions, facing the edges of the clearing. Colden’s phavatar had also been acting as a sentry, but now it clumped into the midst of them and spoke … in a different voice.
“This is Jackson. To answer your question, Private, we will not be carrying out an orbital strike on Theta Base at this time. Now obviously, this is a crisis without precedent, so our operational guidelines are evolving, but at the present time we regard this as a hostage situation. We will be handling it as such, and initially deploying non-lethal assets with the goal of obtaining better information on the status of our people.”
Hawker snarled, “With all due respect, sir, that is not necessary. I can tell you what the status of those people is. I’ve got one of them right here. Murray, wanna say hello?”
Murray writhed so he was facing Colden’s phavatar. “Commander, I’m appealing to you personally.” He sounded like himself again. Kristiansen had never credited the PLAN with craftiness. But after the way Murray had tricked him, he’d changed his mind. If I had a BCI, I could interface with the PLAN, Kristiansen recalled. It’ll tell me everything … Murray spoke on, with just the right amount of stress coloring his reasonable tone. “Your men are convinced I’m dangerous, but all I want is to share with you what I’ve learned about the PLAN. And I’m sure that is also the goal of the soldiers in Theta Base. If they took out the Chinese tanks, it was to prevent sensitive information from falling into the hands of the Imperial Republic.”
The Mars Shock Page 14