I shake my head. This has now gone from science to fantasy. And it’s all pointless.
“We can all speculate later,” I derail them. “If you agree this particular Disc is some kind of trap, then we need to discourage Earthside from stepping into it. Give Earthside your research. If you know all anyone can know by studying these things, and it still doesn’t answer the big questions about who did this and why, then leaving that Disc buried won’t make any…”
Mark Stilson raises his hand to shut me up, his other hand going to his mask like he’s trying to focus on something.
“It’s too late,” he tells me with an edge of urgency.
“What?”
“It’s too late,” he repeats. “Our team onsite confirms: your people have just hauled the Disc up out of the crater and are loading it onto your aircraft. Right now.”
I feel sick. I turn and head for the Lancer as fast as I can.
I barely notice that Paul is right behind me until I get back up to the landing pad.
“Matthew, what’s going on?” I call into my Link as soon as I’m clear to send a signal.
“I’m not at liberty to discuss it, Colonel Ram,” he comes back formally, but I feel the frustration in his tone, barely contained. “We both have orders to stand down.”
“Explain,” I come back tersely, but I think I already know the answer. Then Lisa cuts in.
“Colonel Ram, Colonel Burke, you are ordered stand down. You have both been temporarily relieved of command. Stay off this channel.” Her voice is firm, but I can also feel her rage under it.
“Who’s in command?” I demand.
“I am, Colonel,” she comes back hard. “By order of General Richards. Now stay off this channel.” There is something in the way she repeated her last command. I click off and go straight to the Lancer, to Smith.
“What’s been happening?” I ask him directly.
“I almost came down to drag you out of there, sir,” he begins urgently. “Only Colonel Ava ordered me to sit put. Apparently Earthside didn’t accept your stand on things, ordered Colonel Burke to relieve you and secure the Disc immediately. I think they were extra nervous because the ETE were there.”
He looks past me at Paul, who is shaking his head in simmering frustration.
“Colonel Burke sent back a pretty colorful reply—I’ve got it recorded if you want to hear it,” Smith continues. “That’s when they started working their way down the chain of command. I think Colonel Ava just agreed so they would keep one of the base commanders still in charge.”
It makes sense. Lisa made the hard call, did her job while I was being stubborn. And maybe kept me in the loop.
“What about the Disc?”
“Horst’s team loaded it onto one of the ASVs,” he catches me up, running snips of video footage on the cockpit screens. “They’re flying it back now with minimal crew, just Lieutenant Jane flying and Doctor Staley on to monitor the thing during flight. One peep out of the Disc, and Jane has orders to drop the cargo module and blow it to hell. Lieutenant Acaveda is flying pursuit. And they’ve got company…”
MAI’s mission graphic shows the ETE ship following at a respectful distance. The ships are already halfway back to base.
“Get me back there, Captain,” I tell him.
“The troopers have orders to detain you if you interfere, Colonel,” he warns me.
“Let me worry about that,” I stand firm. “Pretend you’re arresting me.”
“I’m coming with you,” Paul insists. “I’ll ride the hull back if I have to.”
“I think we owe you a ride back to your ship,” I grin at him. Right now I think I need all the help I can get.
Smith spins the engines up.
“You think your people would really arrest you?” Paul wants to know as we fly across the valley.
“Tough decision,” I consider. “Some of them want to go home, no matter how different home is. There’s also the threat that resupply will be withheld, or that Earthside would send force to take all of us into custody. Or worse.”
I realize that sounds like we’re adopting almost the same kind of fear of Earth that the survivor factions have. I push that thought away, watch the screens. MAI calculates that the ASV carrying the Disc will land at base twenty minutes before we can get there. And I can’t say a damn thing about it.
But I remind myself: sometimes an officer has to accept a bad order just to still be in command when things go wrong. I fucked that up. Lisa didn’t.
The helpless time keeps my mind spinning, mostly about what the ETE had to say about the Discs: That they somehow grow themselves, that they may have no on-planet controllers, that they may be adaptive AI sent with a simple mission objective. That means they could still be operating today, independent of any human presence, waiting for any sign that they’re mission isn’t finished.
And one other thing about the ETE’s assessment makes sense (not the bullshit-science time travel fantasy): Maybe whoever sent the Discs wasn’t some corporate or national competitor, but some fringe Eco (or beyond Eco) paranoid enough and brilliant enough (or with resources enough) to hatch a plan to stop the scary research at all costs. Given how much time is past, said monster is probably long-dead, on Earth or here, satisfied that he’d won, that he’d saved us all from ourselves.
But someone that smart and that fanatical (fanatical enough to murder tens of thousands of people) wouldn’t just leave it at that. He’d take steps to ensure that corporate nano-research wouldn’t ever be able to regain a foothold here. If his drones were self-directing and self-manufacturing…
The Discs haven’t attacked the human survivors, not since they thoroughly severed them from Earth fifty years ago. That means extermination isn’t the primary program. But that just supports the idea that the corporate nano-science was the target.
But in fifty years, Earthside hasn’t been able to ID the culprit?
Unless he did die here on Mars, leaving no evidence back on Earth.
If he survived, he’d be in at least in his eighties now.
He could be here. Still. (And what was that Sakina told me about her father chasing after some rumored “old evil”?)
“Do you really think these things somehow came from the future?” I have to ask Paul. He shakes his head, unsure.
“I’ve seen the theory. But there’s still too much we don’t understand about time and reverse causality. It’s all in mathematical models, a few successful experiments on a sub-atomic scale, but nothing really functional. And then there’s your paradox: what happens to time when you intentionally change something, assuming that’s even possible. I don’t know. It would be huge. The amount of matter that would be altered by actually changing the course of causality is unthinkable. But I can’t adequately explain the Disc technology any other way. If Earth had that level of seed-manufacturing during the colonization rush, I think they would have used it to further colonization. Even if there was some super-secret project, it would have come to light by now, and there would be no urgency in recovering that Disc except for historical curiosity. And why wouldn’t they just tell you they’d solved the mystery? They’re behaving as if Disc technology is still an unknown to them, and frightening one, an active threat, possibly more advanced than the technology they have since they limited themselves. What we had here fifty years ago is probably more advanced than what Earth has now…”
He chuckles absently.
“Because of the fear of the Discs and the Ecos, we were entrusted with the most cutting edge research on-planet at the end. And because of that I know: Seed-manufacturing was still in early experiments, nowhere near functioning production. And the doomsayers were almost as afraid of it as they were of the bio-nanites and engineered DNA. A seed gone wrong could overgrow a planet. Why would someone so fearful of an unknown untested technology employ it to stop itself? It would be like using bio-weapons to stop a potential biological war. Unless it was an established technology, trusted.”
<
br /> “And much less frightening that whatever it was you were trying to stop,” I let myself follow him.
We fly in silence for awhile. We’re still thirty minutes out.
“If your intent was to save the future, maybe the entire human race,” I bounce off Paul after a few minutes, “would you be willing to kill tens of thousands of people to do it?”
“Humans have done worse for poorer reasons,” he gives me my answer. But then takes it further: “But what if you knew for certain? Because you’d seen that future?”
“Then you’d be killing those tens of thousands, plus all of their potential descendants,” I run the fantasy math. “And yourself in the bargain, assuming you’re erasing your own timeline, your own existence. And you’d never know if you succeeded.”
He thinks about the hypothetical moral (and existential) dilemma a lot harder and longer than I’d intended. Then he finally looks me in the eye and gives me the only sensible answer:
“It depends on how bad it was.”
We’re still fifteen minutes out when the ASV carrying the Disc touches down on Pad 6, the furthest from our command structures in the southeast corner of the base. Pad 6 is also the closest to the main vehicle repair facility, which Thomasen is scrambling to turn into some kind of secure examination facility.
He needn’t have bothered.
“We’re down soft,” Jane is reporting over the Link as he’s about to spin the engines down. I hear the muffled rattle of gunfire, sharp pinging off metal. Then shouts and screams. The cockpit video feed shows chaos. Rounds are punching their way through the bulkhead between the cargo bay and the command module. Jane hunkers down low in his seat and slams the throttle, but not before I see Anton go limp in his own seat, his blood spraying the camera.
“Drop the cargo!” Lisa is shouting over the Link. “Drop it! Drop!!”
Jane is trying that very thing. MAI tells me he’s already blown the releases on the cargo module and has slammed the ASV into hard vertical takeoff, but I see a shell take a chunk out of his right shoulder. He manages to keep it together and finish his burn with one hand, but he’s going into shock.
The externals show me the ASV lurching upwards, leaving the module to drop out of its belly onto the pad.
“Batteries!” Lisa keeps yelling orders. “Take it out! Take it out now!”
The ASV tips nose-down and wobbles crazily. Inside, I can see Jane starting to fade fast from his wound. Anton isn’t moving. The nose of the ASV scrapes deck—it’s heading toward the vehicle bays, and it’s in the way of the big guns. Metzger is trying to get MAI to remote pilot, but the cockpit controls have been shot up.
Out on the pad, I can see the cargo module start to come apart as the Disc starts pumping out explosive rounds from its upper turret. The hatches blow, and the aft wall is bowing outward. I can only hope the Disc will destroy itself or expend its limited ammo in its desperation to get air.
The wounded ASV’s nose digs into the dirt in the small courtyard space between the pads and the vehicle bay. Jane manages to kill the engines, and the ship drops into the courtyard, one wing twisting. I can see hydrogen and oxygen vent from the rear tanks. The engine section blows apart a second or two later, throwing the rest of the broken ship forward to slam into the vehicle bunker. The cockpit feed is lost.
The big guns open up immediately, pounding the abandoned cargo module with explosive rounds. Acaveda adds to the mayhem by firing a brace of rockets from her ASV. I think I can see the saucer of the Disc try to slam its way out of the shredded and now burning module, but the combined bombardment reduces the module and its contents to flaming scrap in a matter of seconds.
Fire control systems start spraying suppressant over the wrecked ASV, but they’re frustratingly inadequate—they were designed to work on fuel fires when there was almost no atmosphere. Thomasen concentrates on saving the cockpit section, his crew daring to come out on the surface with no sure confirmation that the Disc is dead, adding whatever portable fire gear they can to the job. Thankfully, the hydrox mix burns out before igniting the forward tanks. They’re already breaking the hatch into the cockpit.
Acaveda circles, giving me a distant view of the damage. The cargo module is little more than scattered, unrecognizable metal. Somehow I doubt there will be more than dust left of the Disc. The ASV lays twisted and broken, tail section torched, starboard wing pointing up at the sky. I can see two bloody bodies get packed into trauma pods and rushed inside.
The ETE ship can be seen hovering a half-klick off, watching it all. The whole thing happened in less than a minute.
Chapter 6: Unacceptable Losses
There is very little left to do by the time the Lancer gets me back. Rios makes it a point to meet me at the pad. He has nothing to say to me, but he doesn’t arrest me or even ask for my sidearm. His H-A troops are more intent on keeping close watch on the shredded ruin of the cargo module, no matter how pointless. There’s no sign of the Disc.
Rios does shadow me over to the edge of the pads, where I watch Thomasen’s crew breaking down the wrecked ASV, getting whatever fuel and ammunition that can be salvaged away from any more potential fires. Morales is inbound from Melas Three to do whatever she can to repair or more likely scavenge it.
“Colonel Ram!” I hear a familiar voice behind me, and turn to see Tru limping toward me in the best run she can manage. I can’t think of anything to say.
“They’re alive,” she announces, so breathlessly she must have run all the way from Medical. “Jane’s shoulder is messed up bad, but Ryder thinks she can save his arm. He’s lost blood, but he’s awake.” She takes a breath in her mask before continuing, but at least she doesn’t make me ask. “Anton is critical but stable. He also lost a lot of blood—almost bled out in fact. He took three rounds—they punched right through his chair. He took one through the right lung, one hit him in the left buttock and came out through his shin just below his knee, shattering it. Number three went pretty much straight through the base of his spine. Thankfully, he’s still got his kidneys. Ryder’s working on him now.”
“His spine?” I have to ask. She takes three more deep breaths before giving me the answer.
“Severed at Lumbar Three. He’s paralyzed. We don’t have anything on base to fix this kind of damage. And if UNCORT stopped all research on nano-rebuilders, I doubt Earth has anything either.”
I look past her. Paul is standing back by the Lancer. Just watching.
I feel my rage pounding inside me, demanding outlet, target, satisfaction. Driving me to do something—anything—to fix this or repay this. But all I’ve got is an automated drone that’s gone to dust and lethally stupid bureaucrats tens of millions of miles out of my reach…
I turn for the nearest hatch. That’s when Rios gets the nerve to speak up, however unwillingly.
“Colonel Ram. I have orders to escort you directly to your quarters.”
Sakina is there waiting for me, sitting in meditation on her mat, wearing her armor. The first thing I do when the hatch closes behind me—with the two guards Rios had to leave to make sure I stayed put on the other side—is check my terminal. I’ve been locked out. Blind and deaf.
I look at Sakina. She nods her head up toward the sentry cams that watch over the suite. I turn and look and find she’s neatly disabled them. MAI will be able to tell we’re still in here by heat and by O2 consumption, but they’ll otherwise be as blind to us as we are to them. I manage to grin at the minor act of defiance, even given the circumstances.
I appreciate that Rios gave me the time to get updated, especially about Anton.
I wonder what Paul’s doing.
Then I settle back on my rack and stare at the ceiling and wait this out, and try not to think that I’m just as helpless now as I really always have been.
Four hours later, I hear the alert sirens go off in the corridor outside.
My terminal screens go live three seconds after that. MAI is flashing me a radar imaging map of a h
alf-dozen small, fast blips incoming from the east, from Coprates. They keep flashing on and off our radar because they’re flying so low—less than fifty meters off the ground. They’ll be on us within four minutes.
The base batteries are already tracking for intercept, whatever good they’ll do in their salvaged condition. MAI also lets me know all aircraft (now down to two ASVs and the Lancer) are secured in their bays. The ETE ship is still out there, sitting on a low hill about a half-klick away. Melas Three signals that it’s sending its two ASVs to provide support, but they’re twenty minutes out.
Lisa comes up—behind her head I can see the bunker wall with the “CROATOAN” carved into it, so I know she’s still at Melas Three.
“I think I’ve played good soldier long enough,” she starts, sounding weary and frustrated. “I’d catch you up but you can see what we’ve got incoming. Now if you’ve had a nice break, I need you.”
The hatch to my quarters pops open then, and Matthew pokes his head in.
“You coming?”
“Give me H-A teams at each airlock, ready to go out with heavy packs if the batteries don’t manage,” I order. “Keep the incoming ASVs back—those pilots don’t have enough training for this yet. Get Smith back in the Lancer. I’m headed to him.”
“No, you’re not,” Matthew steps in my way before I can make it out of Ops.
“The Lancer has an EMP weapon,” I remind him. “It looks like it was designed for this very thing.”
“But you don’t have to be in the ship,” he won’t budge.
“Smith’s faced Discs before, but I need someone up in the sky for immediate active command and to help him run the guns. You know how fast those things adapt.”
The God Mars Book Two: Lost Worlds Page 15