by Read, John
“What climbed up your ass and died?” Kevin said. “At least you get to live here.”
“We don’t live here,” another guard grunted.
The helicopter landed on a pad near the wall of the complex.
We stepped down from the helicopter and entered a hyper-tube car. The car was the size of two buses parked side by side. Its roof was a display, extending the “sky” of the Presidio. Couches and chairs filled the interior and it looked like an upscale lounge.
Like regular folks riding the metro, the three of us sat on a couch, facing forward, helmets on our laps. Holovisions popped up in front of us as we sat down. My HV showed a video of a honey badger, Kevin’s an aerial view of Seattle, and Avro’s a Japanese village. Looking directly at the display immersed us in these locations. Kevin was the first to put his hands together in a silent clap, issuing the universal command to shut off the system. Avro and I did the same.
Kevin seemed happy to have been on this little adventure and was eager to summarize. “Okay, so our aircraft was destroyed by a freak kangaroo drone accident. We crawled across the surface of Mars, stumbled into some sort of freakish mirage and met the king of Mars. The king, though angry, freed us, and sent us home in an oversized pontoon boat.”
The tube-car came to a stop in what looked like the lobby of a Ritz Carlton. Passersby looked in to see three gentlemen in spacesuits. A group of women in cocktail dresses stuck their noses up and walked away, and some people pointed, tapping others on the shoulder.
“The circumferential channel is right out those doors,” the guard said.
“Can you at least summon us a car?” Kevin asked. “I forgot my wallet.”
“No.”
We didn’t wear pants under our spacesuits, so taking them off wasn’t an option. To top it off, one of us had urinated in the suit’s diapers.
We walked out of the station and looked around, standing in a pavilion larger than the one in the central dome. You could now count us among the few individuals who had seen the Alamo with their own eyes. It wasn’t like the rest of the colony. The interior looked more like a shopping mall than anything else. Unlike the domes in the circumferential, with buildings and roads, the Alamo was a solitary structure.
“That explains why the Alamo isn’t transparent,” Avro said, looking around in every direction.
“Those look like condos,” I commented, pointing at the structure’s exterior. “I bet those places have killer views!” Multiple levels of elevated walkways led to the condos with escalators situated at various intervals. People in business suits walked from place to place, holding tablets in one hand and lattes in the other.
“These people look like boring office workers!” Kevin observed. I nodded my agreement, although they also looked rich.
A stylish woman in her early forties walked up to us. She looked friendly until she opened her mouth. “Get out,” she said, “you don’t belong here.”
“Well, a happy Monday to you too!” Kevin said.
“There’s the exit,” she said, pointing to a security checkpoint. “Use it.”
Kevin glared at her and then checked her out just to piss her off.
The next morning, Kevin, Avro and I arrived at the PDC at around the same time. We filed onto the observation deck and found Jimmy eating breakfast.
“Watch this,” Kevin said, looking at Avro and me. “Hey, Jimmy!”
“What,” Jim said, rolling his eyes.
“So our plane exploded, and we found a giant underground lair filled with Greek buildings and fine art.”
Jimmy didn’t look up from his bacon and eggs. Kevin often said ridiculous things and today was no different.
I shook my head, gave Kevin a dirty look and poured myself a coffee.
“What?” Kevin said. “I’m not the one who signed a confidentiality agreement.”
Avro sat down, stirring hot water into dried porridge while Kevin ate a chocolate bar.
We finished our breakfast in awkward silence.
Jimmy looked up after he finished his eggs. “There’s a note on the window. I’m not sure how it got there,” he said.
I walked over to the observation deck’s window and picked the paper off the glass.
Dear Power Team,
Sorry about your plane. Here’s a new one.
Kind Regards,
3
I tossed the note and looked out the window. On the tarmac rested a brand new Arachnid.
“This is about you not coming back last night, isn’t it?” Jimmy asked.
“It’s a long story,” I said.
“It’s bloody expensive to print and assemble an Arachnid. You must have friends in high places.”
“You have no idea.”
That night we met at a Mexican place called El Planeta Rojo. Mariachi music played tastefully in the background, and a dozen sombreros adorned the walls. We sat down in a booth made of poorly printed wood and Avro ordered a round of Coronas.
“Leeth, you look exhausted.” I said. “What’s going on?”
“It’s these training exercises. The MDF has a medical field unit, but they’re bringing me the patients needing rehab. I’ve got two soldiers in comas.”
We told him about the war game we had watched and how the MDF shot up the Arachnid.
“How’d you get back?” Leeth looked at us, skeptically.
“It’s a long story, but we got to see the Alamo, that was cool,” I said, not going into much detail. Kevin didn’t get it, I didn’t think, and Avro hadn’t said it, but the confidentiality agreement was serious business. We were stuck on Mars. The company could fire us if we opened our mouths, and then what?
Leeth rubbed his forehead. “These military training exercises are ridiculous. They’re making a mess out of the landscape, people are getting hurt, and it’s an unnecessary strain on the colony’s resources.”
“I know the feeling,” I said.
“I feel used, you know,” he said, leaning back. “And they’ve got this gal, this woman, they have her locked in a padded room at the clinic. They asked me for meds to ‘mellow her out.’ I just don’t know how I feel about that. Actually, I know exactly how I feel about that. I’m pissed off. That’s how I feel about it.”
“They’re holding someone against their will?” Avro asked.
“Did she commit a crime?” I asked.
“They wouldn’t say,” Leeth said.
“If you think she’s innocent, we should at least alert the Council and call the media.” Avro said. “I know this isn’t Earth, but if you do something wrong, you get your day in court.”
“Yeah,” Leeth said, “exactly.” Leeth had recently lost his driving privileges after disabling his auto-car’s autopilot and treating the circumferential highway like the Indianapolis 500. And still, he had been treated fairly, I thought. His sentence – a hundred hours of community service – seemed fair. Hell, I thought they should have given him more.
I looked up at the holovisions that surrounded the room. Most of them showed soccer games, but one showed the news. I nodded, directing everyone’s gaze to the display. Robert Bowden stood near the spaceport while several MDF trucks rolled by in the background. I pointed at the holovision, spreading my fingers to increase the volume.
“After three days of intense training exercises, the Multinational Defense Force returns to base for some much needed time off. Things seem to be getting awfully intense in the training regimen. Earlier today, residents caught this on video near airlock five.”
The video showed two MDF soldiers hauling a woman by the arms. “Let me go! Let me go, dammit!” she swore. They hauled her out of an airlock and into the back of a troop truck and closed the door.
“That’s her!” Leeth said.
“According to the MDF, this woman was panicking and acting erratically on the training field, putting the lives of her comrades in danger. Confusion remains on how to handle civilian versus military law on Mars, but let us know how you feel by
posting @MarsTalk.” A series of social media posts streamed across the page. Some people posted “inhumane,” and others just said, “Deserter, throw her in the brig!” One said, “MDF go home!”
“This is ridiculous!” I said. “It’s a training exercise.”
“Agreed,” Avro said. “This is strange. But her incarceration is obviously public knowledge.”
“Why don’t we just break her out?” Leeth said. “I need a solider with me to access the patients. But besides the cameras in the rooms themselves, that’s it for security.”
“Handing her over to the Council should give her some sort of immunity,” I said. “At least until they figure out if her charges are legit, you know, innocent until proven guilty?”
“How do you know we wouldn’t be breaking some law?” Kevin asked. “What if the MDF comes after us?”
“I’m not worried about the MDF,” Avro said. “The Martian council hasn’t granted them any special authority. I think the worst that could happen, if we let her out, is that the Council will hear her case and simply give her back to the MDF, but the point is, she needs some sort of trial.”
“Every time we open her cell, I want to strangle the guards.” Leeth was seething.
“Do not do that,” Avro said. “Your bar fight was one thing, but assaulting someone in the hospital will get you thrown off the planet.”
“I’m guessing the locks are electromagnetic?” Kevin asked.
“Yeah, I think so,” Leeth said.
“Let us deal with the lock,” I said. “We just need to think of some reason to mess with the building’s power.”
“There’s a reason security seems light,” Avro said, “They don’t need it. Every solider has one of these.” Avro held up his arm and pointed to a scar on his wrist. “It’s a tracking devise.”
“Leeth, I’ll tell you what,” I said. “If she’s still in there tomorrow night, we’ll come up with a plan to get her out. In the meantime, you should file a report with the Martian council. Her story was in the news, so I’m sure they’re being inundated with similar requests. But at least try to get her released using official channels first.”
Leeth nodded and took the last sip of his beer.
The next day we went back to work as usual, but the woman in Leeth’s clinic occupied all our thoughts. The Martian Council had been set up for a reason, to provide law, order and good governance. Until now, they seemed to have been doing a pretty good job. Mars had a functioning police force and a simple judiciary court. We even voted on who would represent us. They didn’t have much bargaining power with the corporation, but that had never been an issue.
According to SpaceNET, hundreds of people had called the Council to ask for Leeth’s patient’s release. The response was worrying: “Currently, Multinational Defense Force personnel under MDF command are outside our jurisdiction. However, we will be reviewing the case and will make recommendations to MFD leadership during the Council meeting next Friday.”
It was the middle of the day and I was flying over the arrays, completing a survey flight over some recent drone construction. Avro and Kevin had just completed an EVA and were heading home in the Arachnid.
“Hey, Johnny, is it getting hazy out here, or is it just me?” Avro said over a private channel.
I squinted at the horizon; the pink haze seemed to be taking on a grey hue like the sky right before a thunderstorm.
My radio crackled on our primary channel. “Call it in boys, a storm is brewing,” Jimmy said from the dispatch station. “It’s coming in fast, you better get back here.”
I shook my head. “Why couldn’t it have held off two more weeks!” I yelled into my headset. We were on schedule but the coil crews had thousands of miles of cabling left to go.
Avro switched to the primary channel. The gain on the high frequency band gave his voice a sharpened tone. “Make sure to tell the crews in the coil trucks. They’ll need to stop and set up camp.”
I met up with the Arachnid several miles south of the colony. We formed up like geese heading to Canada in the summer.
The thin air around us darkened as Martian dust rose in swirling columns, as if sucked by millions of imaginary vacuums. Both aircraft were self-contained and didn’t require air intake like planes back on Earth, but we’d be flying blind if too much dust caked on the sensors.
“Johnny, Avro here, set your landing procedure and trust your autopilot. Don’t try to fly your approach manually.”
A red carpet spread out below us as the dunes, rocks, and hills below faded away.
“I can’t see the colony, this is crazy!” I shouted.
We skimmed over a rising tide like a swirling pot of tomato soup. I felt my stomach lurch up into my throat as a downdraft punched my aircraft. I pulled up on the controls to compensate.
“Okay, setting the autopilot now,” I radioed.
The Pelican dropped into the storm, maintaining several hundred kilometers per hour. The plane would maintain that velocity all the way to the hangar.
My view turned bright pink, dark red, and then grey as I descended deeper into the cloud. Dust caked on the windshield and I prayed the sensors could see better than I did.
To my left, I could still distinguish Avro and Kevin in the MVA. They were fifty meters off my port. Avro’s retrorockets fired, bringing the Arachnid into a hover, followed by a rapid descent.
The horizon line on my HUD twisted left and right as the Pelican plotted its approach vector. Turbulence pummeled my body left and right in my chair. The HUD’s vertical approach vector lines passed like streetlights seen from a speeding car.
The magnetic decelerators captured the skid plate on the bottom of the Pelican, pushing me forward against my harness. Jets in the hangar blasted the plane with compressed air, offsetting the torque and cleaning the dust off the vehicle. The result was exhilarating. A three-second, five-G deceleration brought the Pelican from three hundred kilometers per hour to zero, all within a couple hundred feet. When the aircraft came to a complete stop, the hangar door closed.
Unstrapping my harness, I climbed through the jetway and ran down the stairs, meeting Avro and Kevin at the airlock.
They were covered in dust. A storm couldn’t blow away the Arachnid. Martian air pressure was too low, but they had tied it down anyway, it was standard practice.
In the airlock, a current of wind circled around them, the entire cylinder turning red as the compression fans revved up to full power.
With the dust clear and the airlock pressurized, Avro and Kevin stepped out, releasing the seals on their helmets.
“Well, that was fun,” Kevin said. “I’m going to go throw up now.”
As the storm entered its second day, dust-covered domes left the entire colony in darkness, which was intermittently penetrated by the occasional lightning strike. When the discharge missed the colony’s lighting rods, the lightning drew patterns in the sand along the dome wall all the way to the ground.
With Project Bakersfield temporarily on hold, Avro, Kevin and I took the evening off while Jimmy held down the fort at the PDC. He’d been through a dozen storms, and for him it was business as usual. In my apartment, Leeth joined Kevin, Avro and me for a game of Martian Monopoly.
A NewsFlash briefing played in the background. Robert Bowden spoke in front of a large screen, describing the colony’s energy management system, something we were intimately familiar with. “The colony holds its energy reserves in hydrogen,” Bowden said, pointing to a simulation of several large underground tanks situated around the colony. “Combining the hydrogen with our oxygen supply provides heat and electricity. With careful rationing, this reserve can last well over a year.
“Rationing will begin at fifteen kilowatt hours per day. We recommend limiting hot food and long showers. Streetlights will be turned off, and commercial offices will remain closed until the storm has ended. Central Control asks that any quota exceptions be filed accordingly.” This was nothing we didn’t already know. I
turned off the holovision.
We sat around my living room’s coffee table. Martian Monopoly was a game we found somewhat ironic. Kevin liked to claim that his piece was H3, and that as CEO, he had won before anyone rolled the dice.
“This sitting around sucks,” Leeth said. “That woman started screaming last night, a reaction to the meds or something. I think someone told her about the storm and she just freaked. Screamed all through my shift and pounded on the padded door.”
“What was she screaming about?” I asked.
“No idea, couldn’t hear the words through the padding. But I found out her name from the MDF medic: Amelia Shepherd. She was a lieutenant. The medic seemed just as upset as me for keeping her, but as he said ‘orders are orders’. We need to get her out of there. I can’t watch them treat her like that.”
“That would give us something useful to do,” Avro said. “If this guy,” pointing at Kevin, “makes me binge watch another episode of his stupid Firefly show, I’ll lose it!”
“What?” replied Kevin. “It’s a classic! How were you not raised on Whedon? It’s like you were raised in a cave.”
Avro handed me some cash, purchasing Broadway, I sorted the colored bills into the bin.
I looked at Leeth, who couldn’t care less about the game. “If we help break her out, I think we need to play dumb. You know, plausible deniability.”
“The hospital has an electricity quota,” Kevin said. “What if people suddenly decide to recharge their cars in the hospital’s underground parking garage? That’ll trigger an alert we’ll have to address.”
“That’s true,” I said, “and we’ll have an excuse to mess with the building’s circuit breakers. I can temporarily ground any system the MDF has installed, that should release any electromagnetic locks.”
“What’s the hospital’s quota?” Avro asked. “I’m guessing it’s around fifty kilowatt hours?”
“Maybe fifty, in total,” I answered, “but they’ll use half of that during the day.”
“A dozen cars should exceed that in fifteen or twenty minutes,” Avro said