We have been driven to ground by one assault, and it’s not a position I want to remain in at all. But I don’t have anything to hit back at.
The conversation dies down as the subject seems to spin itself into useless speculation. I enjoy Abbas’ hospitality, focus on the simple pleasures of simple food. I glance to Sakina who sits at my side, and she lowers her eyes. She still will not carry a gun, though she has let me teach her how to shoot. She shows promise, and approaches the task with her usual discipline. But she is not the best with a firearm, and I think that may bother her more than her pride in her ability to do without.
I look up to catch Drake eyeing her the way I’d expect any shy teenage boy to, pretending not to be. Abbas also catches him and smiles, though I expect there will be a fatherly warning later against pursuing a woman whose calling card is the sexual mutilation of her male prey.
Anton has forgotten about his legs, at least for now.
Paul takes a piece of dried fruit.
Rios takes Abbas and Drake back out for more practice, and Anton goes to reset the training drones. The day is clear and relatively warm.
Paul hangs back, and I take my opportunity to talk with him alone.
“What’s going on with your brother?” I ask him directly but gently.
“He’s been regrown, repaired,” Paul tells me, sounding distant. “His body is in a tank at our Station. We haven’t let him wake. He won’t be Simon. He might be like Simon one day. But we will have to raise him like an infant, teach him everything all over again. But putting him in the crèche with the other children… He’ll always remind us of what was lost. My father hasn’t had the heart to begin.”
He stops, stares off over the horizon. I give him a moment before I ask:
“And what about you?”
He shakes his head. I see his eyes tear up. “I… I’m torn, divided. Part of me wants him back, even just a part of him, hoping I will see Simon in there. But then I know it will be Simon’s face and not Simon inside. And I’m afraid I will hate him for it, even though he won’t understand why.”
He stands for awhile, just staring across the desert.
“If we could rebuild the body of your friend, of Colonel Burke—make his body live again—would you allow it?” he offers hypothetically. I shake my head (despite my pointless impulsive act with the vial of nanites). I hear his breath shudder. “Of course you wouldn’t. You would let him go, rather than have a stranger that looks like him. But we aren’t like you. Two generations of us now have not known what it is to die, or to lose someone to death. So we hang on. We hang on. Even I… I can’t…”
I can’t think of anything to say to him. I consider telling him what I did, what I tried to do. It was pointless, and part of me knew that even as I did it, but it was a choice. I didn’t choose to let go. I chose to hang on, no matter what lines I was crossing.
“We aren’t as different as you think.”
“It’s shaken up the Guardian teams,” he shifts the subject somewhat, discounting my statement as an idle comfort rather than a half-assed confession. “We’ve had a lot of withdrawals. Some were pressured by their elders, their parents. The Council itself has doubts. The ones that remain… We don’t know what to be, Colonel. We wanted to keep the peace, to preserve life. Now we are faced with a machine enemy that we don’t understand, that we can’t negotiate with. We will have to destroy to survive. Or hide again.”
He un-holsters his “gun” and lets it expand to sub-machinegun size, hefts it like it’s very heavy in his hands.
“We swore we would never make weapons,” he mourns. “I have made myself a gun.”
“I once believed in my heart that being strong enough to never have to take a life was the ultimate goal of any warrior,” I try. “But then I got drawn into the violence of the world, and have spent my time killing and destroying ever since. I do it because I believe it must be done for a greater good, to protect life. But each time I do, it reminds me that I’m weak, that I have to kill because I can’t manage better.”
I let that settle in, let the dust blow around our boots for awhile.
“I have thought about what it might be like to be like you,” I admit (and in fact I’ve been thinking about it more and more since Matthew died), “to be functionally immortal, to have amazingly strong weapons that don’t kill. I wonder if I could have done better in my career if I had your tools, your strengths. But I know the world wouldn’t make it that easy, that I would still find myself in situations where the only solution I could manage, no matter how strong or invincible I was, was to take life to save life. And I’ve watched you struggle with that as well, Paul. It isn’t because you’re not a warrior, that you’ve got no talent for it—I wouldn’t do much better than you have even with all of your tools. If I wanted to do my best to protect life on this planet, I would still need weapons, even if I was just this side of a god.”
I see him smile, however darkly. Shake his head. Chuckle like it hurts him.
“’Just this side of a god’…” he repeats into the rising wind. “A hell of a place to be…”
21 October, 2116:
Before breakfast I take Sakina out for another session of target practice, away from the eyes of the base because I don’t think she likes being watched when she isn’t being perfect. Walking back when our tanks are getting low, it strikes me how much of the base Thomasen has re-buried, hoping to protect us from the Discs. It looks like a quarry—only the two towers, the launch bays, the main airlocks and the remaining battery turrets are exposed. Melas Three is similarly covered (though there is much less of it to cover). I expect if we had not already contacted Earth, looking now they would not be able to see us.
The most visible part of the base from any distance is the greenhouse, which has been “walled” with high berms of bulldozed rock on all sides—only the plexi roof remains visible, like the mirror surface of a liquid-filled crater. The next thing that catches the eye is the rough stone pyramid on the hilltop to the north, the monument for our honored dead. I never go up there unless it’s to plant another body, and I haven’t had to do that since I buried Matthew three months ago. I still don’t make a habit of visiting graves.
After breakfast I send my scheduled report back to Earthside command. I play my best diplomacy in telling them what Paul dropped on me, and I ask them if they did indeed receive the ETE files, and if so what have they learned. Otherwise I report on what progress my section chiefs have made in repairing or cannibalizing our dwindling assets, and how our Nomad allies have responded to the training they received for the few guns we can spare them.
I imagine this must be what war was like many centuries ago, before our technologies made Planet Earth a small place, easily traversed. My career before Mars had been a series of short, violent operations; surgical strikes with minimal time-on-target, then extraction back to the relative comfort of a base, to eat and drink and sleep and fuck and train and wait for the next mission brief, which was never more than a few days in the heyday of the Global War on Terror. Long missions were few and far between, and only in the most dire circumstances. And as the Terror War finally turned (something the popular consciousness unfortunately insisted was partially because of me), we evolved from commando to cop, and I became an unwilling bureaucrat.
Now I sit and wait for months at a time, without the benefit of global intelligence to tell me what’s coming, knowing I’m barely able to hold the ground I’m clinging to, keeping busy with the routine survival of a thousand-plus people, with relief an eternity away. My operations theater is maybe a hundred miles in any direction—a fraction of human-occupied Mars—and I can’t even ensure that my own perimeter is secured.
I remember the Zen allusion of “the world in a bowl.” Or the Norse Valhalla: a contained world where dead heroes all live together in a great hall, spending their days fighting endless, pointless battles, waiting for the day when they will go fight the most important one.
I’m
losing my mind. I idly blame Matthew for not being here to keep that from happening. I not-so-idly still blame Earthside’s stupidity for getting him killed.
I stare out through the replaced plexi of the Command Tower across the desert, watching the distant sun shimmer off the roof of the greenhouse. And I realize I only really feel this way when I am here, doing my job, shut inside this concrete. I would rather be in the sterile caverns of the ETE Stations, even though everyone who lives there looks at me like I’m some child or animal. I would rather be in a simple shelter eating simple food with Abbas and his Nomads. I would even rather be sharing a ritual cup of tea with Hatsumi Sakura, even though she speaks in riddles and will very likely always be an enemy.
But I don’t think of Earth.
And I remember I have something better to do.
I find Anton where he usually “lives” in Sciences. He spends much of his time there, even apparently sleeps there in his chair, even though he still has most of the run of the base. (His “chair” can even climb our stairwells, so he doesn’t have to rely on the few elevators to get between decks.) It’s one particular part of the base that remains an accessibility issue, I think for both of us, and that’s why I’m here.
“I sent Earthside the question about what the ETE sent them,” I start with business talk.
“Are you expecting a straight answer?” he fences, apparently trusting our relationship enough to risk sounding seditious. I allow him a shrug.
“I still think the ETE are right,” he pushes into his most recent and understandable obsession, bringing up his “blueprints” of what he’s painstakingly assumed are the innards of a Disc drone, what he’s worked the last several weeks since he’s been out of Medical (and even before he was out of Medical) attempting to reverse engineer. I have to admit: he’s done better than teams of military specialists did all during the original Disc War. “The Disc tech is way too advanced for the era. Maybe not now, but definitely then. Probably now, too, given how Luddite things seem to have gone back home.”
I feel venom when he says the word “home”.
“I’m sure Chandry and his brain trust are having seizures with it,” he keeps rolling when I don’t say anything. “Probably why they haven’t been talking to us. I’m sure they’ll say it’s security, that they’re afraid someone’s listening, but they’re probably avoiding the more obvious conclusions.”
“Time travel or aliens?” I play, really just waiting for a good social segue. And in my head I hear Matthew say something appropriately sarcastic.
“It’s either that or someone from home had one hell of a technological jump on the rest of the industrial world and kept it to themselves, just used it to keep the competition down.”
“Then why not market for profit?” I ask the question he’s probably stewed for weeks himself. “At least go military with it.”
“And why go so far to stop competition that was obviously so far behind him?” I notice he uses the singular pronoun, like he wants someone specific—not a corporation or agency or government—to blame.
“Maybe we are talking about an anti-research extremist. Somebody brilliant who bought into a version of the Eco philosophy and didn’t think they were radical enough,” I try the easy possibility—Occam’s Razor—but don’t fully believe. I don’t know what to believe. “Terrorists have always been quick to toss their revulsion for their enemy’s ways if their enemy’s tech would aid the cause. The Muslim Rads hated everything about the West but would gladly use Western aid and technology when it served.”
“So they hide some kind of cutting edge drone-growing system on something headed here and let it go once it made landing?” he considers, sounding like he also doesn’t believe. “Or launch it separately and miraculously manage not to get caught?”
“Fire and forget,” I dwell on my most unsatisfying assumption. “Then maybe the programming just went rogue on them, and they were in no position to do anything about it.”
“Or it did exactly what it was designed to,” he damns. I’m certainly not the one to tell him no one would do such a thing.
He digests the darkness for a few breaths, staring at his work.
“Scary thoughts.”
Time to face my own.
“You should move into Colonel Burke’s old quarters,” I just drop what I came here to. “You could use the extra square footage.” I try not to make it sound like sympathy, pity; just practicality.
I hear him breathe, hesitate.
“I don’t know… I just seems…”
“I’ll pack up his things,” I volunteer to do something I’ve been forbidding my staff to take care of for three months. “You need the space. And I’m sure one of the other techs would love your little private cell. It’s just practical.”
“Or I could take Colonel Copeland’s room,” he flips it on me, unintentionally reminding me of another mystery we’ve totally failed to make headway solving. He turns his chair toward me, looks me in the eyes. “Speaking of what we hang on to… I liked Colonel Burke. I liked him a lot. And I miss him. I understand the practical thing, but I don’t think I can take his space.”
“It’s not a shrine, it’s a room,” I say it almost more to convince myself. “A shitty one at that. But it’s two-and-a-half feet wider than yours and the shower is more accessible. He’d want you to have it. I can’t think of a better use for it.”
He swallows hard, looks down at his legs. Nods.
Richards’ reply is waiting for me after my first spin-time. It’s been sent with a new encryption that only MAI should be able to unscramble.
“Forgive our secrecy, Colonel Ram,” he begins, “but the information you’ve asked about is highly sensitive. What I can tell you is that we’ve learned little more than you have about our enemy: That the technology is very advanced, and defies any attempt to trace it back to any source manufacturer. As we will not attempt to reverse-engineer nanotechnology of this nature, we’ve had to make do with simulations. We agree with Doctor Staley’s and Doctor Stilson’s assessments that the Discs likely take up to three months to self-manufacture. That time should be pro-rated in the case of self-repair, depending on the damage. That means you are likely due for another attack any day now, assuming that the manufacturing system is on Mars and still operating. We also agree that the Discs are likely AI-driven, so there could very well be no local operator, nor was there any detected command signal coming from Earth before or during the attack on your facilities. Further encounters may reveal patterns in whatever programming is loaded into these weapons, but your team’s theories match our own: Their mission appears geared to completely stop nanotech and biotech research and production on Mars, starting from their interference in initial colony exploration, through the total destruction of facilities and the severing of all interplanetary commerce in 2065.”
I catch on that, pause the message. The Discs started hitting us long before anybody thought to use the planet for scary R&D. How could whoever sent them predict the course we would take? Unless they had insider access to corporate designs—perhaps a disgruntled researcher? (Or maybe because they already knew what would happen—my mind can’t help but flash on that little fantasy, however ridiculous.)
I let Richards finish.
“That given, they will probably attempt to prevent any foothold that might result in future use of the planet for nanotech development. Even though that ‘s no longer an acceptable possibility for us, they—or their AI—still may interpret our relief efforts as colonial re-establishment. They likely attacked your base just because they identified you as an active UNMAC installation—that supports the theory that they’re operating under some standing programming, and not under anyone’s control. Unless, of course, it’s someone still on-planet running them that considers you a threat.”
I fully expect to hear Matthew’s voice, blurting out some frustrated sarcasm about how long it’s taken our betters to figure out the obvious, and then how many big words they the
n need to make it sound intelligent.
Then I finally realize that Richards looks different today: No uniform, just a gray T-shirt. Behind him isn’t the usual UNMAC banner that probably hangs in whatever briefing room they usually use to call us, but only a plain white wall, which I realize is padded like a shuttle bulkhead. And he’s got that semi-hung-upside-down look that people get in microgravity.
He’s in space. At least in orbit.
“From that assessment,” he continues, “your standing order is to dig in and await relief and reinforcement. The Discs should not be able to do critical damage to your facilities if you bury everything under at least two meters of regolith—that includes your com-towers. We were not expecting such a welcome when we launched the initial transports, but first relief is still on schedule for arrival in your orbit mid-January. More substantial military resources are now on the way and will arrive by early March, with the next flights following in June. Until then, keep your people alive.”
He signs out officially.
I immediately give MAI a brief reply to send:
“General Richards: Are you in space?”
It takes two hours to get the answer.
“Yes, Colonel. I am en route to you. Colonel Burns will arrive with the March flights to oversee re-supply and begin to assess the situation. My ship launched two days ago, and will arrive with the June fleet. I didn’t want to advertise my mission, as there is already a lot of fear, as well as renewed pain and rage, since the news of the Disc attack was hacked to the public media nets. We’ve been trying to avoid exacerbating the situation, and the Council has been downplaying the military resources on our outbound relief flights. As we have taken steps to better secure our transmissions, I can now inform you of certain aspects of our mission.
The God Mars Book Two: Lost Worlds Page 19