Mars Descent (Cladespace Book 2)

by Corey Ostman

  Grace scooped the teen over her right shoulder. He groaned and convulsed weakly. She headed to the stairs, this time keeping the light on.

  Raj tailed them, deep in thought. He’s tall. How did the squad manage to pass him by?

  “We can’t ever walk in a straight line, can we Raj?” Grace said after a few minutes.

  Raj laughed. “Why are we on Mars? Was it really just a layover?”

  “It’s not just that. I got kicked out of cloister, the academy, nearly murdered, and I’m probably fired by now. Few months. I’ve been busy.”

  “Welcome to life outside of cloister, Grace.”

  “You mean it’s always like this for you?”

  “Last two years, anyway. I’ve been looking over my shoulder since I made Tim Trouncer,” Raj said.

  “The companies?”

  “And others. All after the blue gel. Think about what would happen if everyone could transfer their minds to robotic bodies.”

  “Help me with this kid. He’s slipping.”

  Raj assisted Grace as she repositioned the boy on her shoulder.

  “So Mars is like a vacation for you,” said Grace as they continued down the stairs.

  “Supposed to be. Not so sure now.”

  They entered the atrium, and the scent of fresh vegetables made Raj’s mouth water. He grabbed another tomato.

  “Do they have prisons here?” Grace asked. “I didn’t spend much time on Martian law.”

  “Either way, my guess is that prison guarding was a twofer job.”

  “No doubt. Then what do we do with him? Bring him into that guy Richard’s apartment? Is that wise?”

  “Where else could we take him?”

  Mr. Archdale was already standing by the apartment door at the edge of the atrium.

  “What’s this?”

  “Oh he’s a kid, more or less. But he’s the sniper,” said Grace. “He didn’t deny it.”

  Raj watched worry bubble in the old man’s face.

  “You can’t bring him here—it’s not safe,” said Mr. Archdale. “He might just be a kid, but so’s Yvette.”

  “Look, we need to treat him,” said Raj. “Soldiers shot him in the chest and head.”

  “There are offices across the hall.”

  “You know why he was up there?” said Grace, through gritted teeth. “He was trying to dodge conscription. Like you. Now let us use the damned sofa.”

  Mr. Archdale looked down, then backed up.

  Grace rushed the kid to the sofa in the main room. Raj put her to work removing the cannon, while he peeled away more of the pressure suit and attached a medbind to his patient’s natural forearm. Raj looked at the display. The boy’s vitals were still good. His neural activity was basic autonomic, but with any luck he’d regain consciousness by morning.

  Raj jumped and looked down as he felt something brush his arm. It was the girl. Yvette. She leaned into him, looking wide-eyed at the ugly burns and bruises on the kid’s skin.

  “Will he die?” she asked, softly.

  “I’m taking care of him now,” said Raj. “Don’t worry.”

  “I’ve lived my entire life on Mars,” Mr. Archdale said. He had walked into the room and was standing beside them. His voice was low, but not hostile. “My grandparents came first, made a name for themselves. My parents lived here. One wife, then another. All gone. I have Yvette. She is my only family. You understand?”

  “I understand, Mr. Archdale,” said Raj. “And I promise, this kid won’t pose a threat while I’m treating him.”

  “Cannon removed,” said Grace.

  “Good.” Raj rose up from the floor beside the sofa. “He’ll sleep for several more hours.”

  “You’re a good doctor,” Yvette said, offering Raj her hand. He shook hands with her, feeling like he’d passed some sort of test.

  “Would you two like something to eat or drink?” Yvette asked.

  “Yes, thank you. I’m starving,” Grace said.

  “She’s always hungry,” Raj grinned. He turned to Archdale. “Is that ok with you?”

  “Might as well break bread together,” Mr. Archdale said, “seeing as I’ve become your hospital.”

  “I’d invite you into our dining room,” Yvette said, “but I know the range of that medbind is quite narrow and you’ll want to stay close to your patient.”

  “Bright girl,” Raj said.

  Mr. Archdale smiled. “She is. Even helps with my designs.”

  Designs, Raj thought. Aha! “I think I recognize your name now, Mr. Archdale,” he said.

  “Richard, please.”

  “Richard,” said Raj, acknowledging the change of name with a nod, “did you have anything to do with the Archdale cruiser design?

  Richard smiled. “Yes I did.”

  “I thought so,” Raj said. “I know the design. Famous for its range without the bulk of an interplanetary craft.” He smiled. “The Scout was your prototype, yes?”

  “I wanted to name her the Yvette,” Richard said.

  “But I called her Scout,” giggled the little girl.

  “Now I’m curious,” Grace said. “What’s this Scout thing?”

  Richard reached over to a side table and grabbed a small tablet. He fingered its display and handed it to Grace.

  “Wow. Your cruiser is huge,” Grace said, pouring over the tablet. “Just the two of you use it?”

  “And a small crew,” Richard said. “It’s an exploration vessel.”

  “Exploration?” Grace asked. “Haven’t they mapped Mars by now?”

  Raj shook his head. Grace was showing her cloister ignorance again. Mars mapped from space was not the same as Mars surveyed from the ground.

  Richard didn’t seem to notice. “I spent most of my life in front of a screen. Dealing in architecture, ship design. It was lucrative, of course, but—well, maybe you haven’t seen, yet.” Richard stood, paced. “There are so many on Mars with so little, and more often than not it’s because of simple ignorance. I retired from traditional work three years ago. Moved to philanthropy. Concentrated on childhood education here at Elysium, and I’m happy to say our model is now in use in most of the domes. And then there’s exploration. I figure it inspires people. Opens them up to new places.”

  Richard stopped pacing, leaning against a bookshelf. He considered Grace and Raj.

  “So you found my ship interesting? I’d be happy to give you a tour.”

  “What about the rioting? The mobs?” Raj asked.

  “The port’s the first thing they’ll clear. Yvette and I were planning on heading to the Scout tomorrow, depending on the situation.”

  “You’re going to leave?” asked Grace.

  “After the shootings here? As soon as we can. The Scout’s safer than Elysium by far,” said Richard. “So a tour, then?”

  A chance to see a state-of-the-art Martian cruiser? Raj could hardly believe his luck. He was about to say yes when Grace demurred.

  “Sorry, but we’ve got a cruiser rented,” she said, with an apologetic glance at Raj. “Our layover is supposed to be short, and there’s still a lot of Mars I’d like to see. My flight to Ceres—”

  Richard shook his head. “Without twofers, interplanetary travel from here is impossible,” he said.

  “Wait,” Grace said. “What do you mean impossible?”

  “With the twofers gone, there aren’t enough people to man the port. They’ve all been reallocated to life supporting systems. And with the twofer AI problem, nobody from Earth will want to step into this mess.” He paused at the sound of distant phasewave fire. “The two of you should spend the night here instead of risking the dome.”

  “Two?” Raj said, motioning to the injured boy.

  Richard sighed. “Three of you.”

  “We insist!” Yvette chimed. She was leaning over the boy, removing things from his pockets. She had found a laser knife and a ration bar, and was in the middle of counting a small pile of credit tokens.

  “Yvette!”
exclaimed Richard.

  “Actually,” Grace said, “She has a good idea.”

  Grace lifted the boy’s hand and rolled his sleeve away from his wrist.

  “The kid’s ptenda,” said Grace. “Richard’s correct in one respect: we don’t know who he is. We don’t know if we can trust him. And we’re going to find out.”

  Chapter 4

  In the dining room, Grace inspected the boy’s ptenda. The model was an older version, popular a few years ago. The professionals back home had sported newer models, but some folks in Raj’s seedier neighborhood of Bod Town had them.

  “Too bad we can’t access it,” Richard said. “We could find out who he is. People keep everything on their wrists.”

  “Are you gonna unlock it, Grace?” asked Yvette. She seemed entirely too excited by the idea.

  “Sorry, Yvette, but even commonplace ptendas like this are hard to unlock,” said Raj. “You can wipe one and re-use it, but without his next of kin—”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” said Grace. “If this young man is from Earth, my credentials should unlock his ptenda.”

  “Protectors have entirely too much power,” Raj muttered.

  “Many at Elysium Planitia are new arrivals or first generation,” Richard said. “Not bad odds.”

  Grace tapped her ptenda, transmitting her credentials and the unlock command. Her display froze for only a moment. Then the familiar link screen appeared.

  Grace smiled. “I’m in. Here come the docs.”

  Yvette applauded as she suppressed a giggle.

  “Who is he?” Raj asked.

  “I don’t knock the scalpel out of your hand and I’m not the PodPooch, you know. Gimme a sec.”

  Grace had to collapse and lock her own ptenda persona to get at the information. By law, nothing she saw would be transferrable to her ptenda. She’d never done this before, so it took her a while to find the protector screen. At last, the kid’s primary infodocs floated into view. She began reading aloud.

  “His name is Quint Brown, Junior. Sixteen years, one month old. Looks like he came to Mars four years ago. Father’s fifty-six years old. Same name. No mother listed.” She paused as more information crowded in. “Some access keys to buildings and networks. Work records. Odd jobs. Wait—”

  What was this? A personality count? It ticked to two as the boy’s data expanded. Three. Four. Five.

  “Wait a sec.” Her fingers danced. What was hiding in there?

  “What is it?” Raj said.

  “He has other peoples’ files on his ptenda. Four to be exact: his father, Harold Daumier, Marion Samms, and Saxon Meld.”

  “Say that last name again, Protector,” Richard said.

  “Saxon Meld?”

  “I remember that name. Meld was killed here in Elysium Planitia last week. It was the first death since the twofers left,” Richard said. “Read me the other two again, please?”

  Grace complied. Richard consulted his ptenda.

  “Hmm. Nothing on them.”

  “Odd,” Grace said, “to have others’ files on your ptenda. Even for a spouse or parent.”

  “Nah, he’s just young,” Raj said, sitting back down in his armchair. “This is probably his first ptenda. Maybe something he bought secondhand. Whoever sold it to him probably didn’t wipe it completely first. It happens, Grace. Ptendas purchased in Bod Town often have several wayward, incomplete personae. A permanent wipe requires registry information, you know.”

  “Still,” said Grace, “this Meld person wasn’t from Earth, or from a long time ago. He was here, and murdered. When the kid wakes up, I ought to arrest him.”

  “Really, Grace?” Raj said.

  “He’s a sniper, Raj. He had a gun.”

  “He’s just a boy!” exclaimed Yvette.

  “If you want to call that a gun,” Raj said. “It was mostly scrap.”

  “Boy or not, we don’t know what he was up to,” Richard said.

  “Avoiding conscription,” Raj said.

  “At the very least,” Grace countered, “but that might not be all.”

  Richard nodded.

  Raj shook his head. “He’s not old enough to have gotten into any serious trouble. He just panicked.”

  Richard sighed. “I was that age once. You might be right.”

  “Have you studied case histories? Even kids can kill people, Raj,” Grace said.

  “Do you think this man was a hired killer, Poppy?” asked Yvette, excited. Grace smiled. This child was fearless.

  “No, dear,” said Richard, with an apologetic look to Grace and Raj.

  “We won’t know much until he comes to,” Grace said. “But then I can get him to talk.”

  “Are you going to torture him?” Yvette said.

  “No,” Grace chuckled. “How long before he wakes up?”

  Raj glanced over at Quint. “Couple of hours.”

  And we’ve got plenty of time, Grace thought. She turned to Richard. “You’re saying we’re stranded here? No way off Mars?”

  “No. Not without the twofers. I’ve been trying to determine what made them leave,” Richard said. “It all happened about three weeks ago.”

  “About the time we left Earth,” Grace murmured.

  Richard frowned. “I was at the rim port when it began. There’s an older robot there—Shorty—that repairs minor hull damage. I had it working on the Scout that day. As I headed toward the ship, the twofer stopped, handed me its ultrasonic polisher, and then began to babble. Completely garbled speech. I asked what was wrong, and it walked off. I thought perhaps Shorty was done with the work, but the Scout still had some grooves in the hull.”

  Richard walked to a window, where the sandstorm still swirled beyond the dome. “Pretty soon I heard about other twofers. Some walked in circles, squares. Simple patterns. The tracks left in the dust seemed artistic to me. You know, beautiful.” He paced back to his chair. “A few started digging. Straight down, like they were trying to get to the other side of the world. Some stopped mid-hike and started building things. Junk, right out of the rock. Abstract stuff.

  “Martian Authority tried to keep everyone calm. The initial report was ‘malfunction.’ Still is. And at first, we could stay calm, because it was just a handful of twofers going nuts. A few in every dome. We figured we’d isolate a particular twofer series and fix the problem. But then the weirdness spread. After just a week, only two twofers were left here in Elysium. Old ones, low on processing power.”

  He looked off, lost in thought for a moment.

  “We stopped the ones we could, and tried to restart them. Then we tried to wipe them. Nothing worked. As long as they had an operating system, as soon as we weren’t paying attention, they fled the domes.”

  “Where?” Raj asked.

  “Headed south!” Yvette said. “Right, Poppy?”

  Richard gave a weary smile and nodded. “Right Yvette, headed south. Archdale Construction had over three thousand twofers in tow and two hundred thousand credit hours banked. Except for a few twofers that seemed to go truly berserk, they all went south.”

  “Just heading south.” Raj said. Grace knew he was pondering the importance and finding none.

  “Another settlement? Is it sabotage? Someone’s stealing them?” Grace asked.

  “You don’t have to steal them,” Richard said. “They’re free labor. Time credits are often stolen and sold on the black market, but all residents get their weekly allotments, and the twofers themselves regularly use scrap to build more twofers.”

  “What about Earth? There’s a lot of talk there about the capabilities of Martian robots,” said Grace.

  “They don’t work off-world. Not cost effective to ship them, even if they could.”

  “Just their ability to build more twofers would be worth shipping them,” Raj said.

  “Illegal AI on Earth, though,” Richard said.

  “I know,” Raj said, “But I’ve been thinking about what you said of the economic situation on M
ars. The differences between the haves and have-nots might have gotten so great that a group of people may have decided to build another dome. Could that be where the robots are going?”

  Richard shook his head. “Maybe, but satellites have picked up no new habitation.”

  “South, you said. What exactly is south of here?” Grace asked.

  Richard looked at his daughter.

  “Yvette, can you bring me the atlas?”

  “The big one, Poppy?”

  “Yes, that’s the one.”

  She scampered down a hallway. After a few moments, Yvette returned carrying an ancient book, bound in leather and some five centimeters thick. On the cover was an embossed rendition of the Red Planet.

  “Thank you, Yvette.”

  Richard placed the atlas on his lap and thumbed through it until he arrived at the south pole. Grace and Raj walked over to stand on either side as he pointed to the image.

  “The south pole of Mars is actually quite dynamic,” said Richard. “The seasonal ice changes from year to year, obscuring some geological features while highlighting others. It remains mysterious despite multiple surveys.”

  Richard fingered his ptenda and projected a mass of black dots onto the open page of the atlas.

  “This is data from a three week period, bread-crumbing the twofers’ movements.” Groups streamed from locations inside and near the Martian dome settlements toward the south pole.

  “Why isn’t the Authority sending people out to retrieve them? They know where they are, and they’ve got plenty of conscripts now,” Grace said.

  Richard grunted. “And deplete the workforce even more? Besides, we still don’t know how to fix them.”

  “But why the south pole?” Raj said. “From what you’ve said, it seems a hostile environment. There’s nobody down there.”

  Richard nodded. “Hostile to humans, yes.”

  Raj quirked a brow. “You have a theory.”

  Richard sighed. “Gah. You’re gonna think I’m crazy.”

  “You’re not crazy, Poppy.”

  Grace smiled. “Out with it.”

  “Ok, it’s like this.” Richard turned off his ptenda and sat back. “Many years ago, a ship disappeared at the south pole. A ship crewed entirely by robots. It was called the Essex, and the twofers aboard were unlike any other.” He tapped his index finger on the center of the map. “Their work in the geyser fields was dangerous and they had to adapt quickly—so quickly that they soon became autonomous.”