The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN

by Michael Rizzo

Day 5:

  “Reviewing what we saw and heard before we lost communications, this is what we can put together about our likely situation,” Lisa begins her part of the briefing immediately after we all get settled around the biggest table in the Officer’s Mess.

  We’re all slowly working our way farther and farther from our beds (and now two-thirds of us have been released from Hiber-Sleep back to our beds). Walking any distance is still a Herculean endeavor, though today I can actually walk several steps in a row without hand holds. And our intimate little face-to-face briefings are growing: Today we’ve added Doctors Halley and Shenkar to give us reports from their respective patient loads, and Captain Kastl from Operations, who’s been working with Anton in getting into MAI. And, of course, there’s Lisa—Lieutenant Colonel Ava…

  She doesn’t even give us time to get our wind, and I’m not sure where she’s getting hers. She looks like death—like the rest of us, zombified versions of our pre-sleep selves—despite how incredible she still looks at sixty-six (and it’s not just the cutting edge military-elite health care slowing down the aging process: I can still see the headstrong smart pretty young woman I fell for all those decades ago). And I catch myself looking. And make sure she doesn’t catch me looking. Because we manage to be friends and work together like professionals but I hurt her way too badly to have the right to ever think about her that way again.

  “We know Ares’ Station was lost—we saw it fall. Hopefully the crew and any transferring travelers managed to get off and get to someplace safe. Phobos Dock wasn’t fairing well, and if they did survive with adequate resources, they’ve probably lost all means to get anyone down here—they’d be stuck playing the same waiting game we are.”

  Lisa takes a long moment to let Doctor Ryder process her husband’s possible fate once more. I’m glad I had her do this part of the briefing. I know I come across as stone-killer robot cold, especially when I’m angry. Matthew masks his rage with his bitter humor. Anton is just too young—despite how brilliant and dedicated he is, he can’t help but sound like a green kid, especially when he’s talking in front of a big group. And Rick—who would be my next best choice to deliver technical bad news—still hasn’t been released from bed rest.

  Ryder looks like she really wants to leave the room, wants to go back to Medical and re-bury herself in her work, stay distracted until we actually know what happened outside of our bunker home. But she stays put.

  Lisa chews her lip and moves on. “We also know that the interplanetary shuttles and freighters in orbit were at least critically damaged. Hopefully, they managed to abandon ships and get picked up by the craft we sent up their way when the shooting started. With luck, they sheltered on the surface, somewhere well away from all the detonations.”

  “Which means well away from us,” Doctor Halley considers why no one’s come back here: this whole region got nuked, and probably geologically destabilized—we’re in the biggest canyon on two planets, and it wasn’t that stable before it got pounded with fission warheads. (As far as we know, there could be a kilometer of rock over our heads.) If our pilots gathered up survivors and brought them down to the surface, they’d land far away from here, and use their remaining fuel for power while they waited the months it would take for Earthside to send help.

  (And that would partially explain the lack of contact: If everyone left is in survival-mode for the long stretch, no one has resources to do outreach.)

  Lisa has to stop then and catch her breath, and I can finally hear how weak she probably feels. She only meets my eyes for a second, enough to remind me I have no right to give a shit about her anymore as long as she can do her job, and then she gets rolling again:

  “Beyond that, if both Phobos and the orbital dock were out, then anything that was inbound from Earth wouldn’t be able to stop and offload. Or refuel. Now I know there are contingencies worked out for emergencies like this, ways inbound shuttles can make a low-fuel slingshot and get back to Earth by the skin of their teeth. But that depends on whether or not the incoming ships were still maintaining those contingencies, or if they’d gotten complacent with the regs. Even if they were careful and hit the return maneuver right on, getting home is still far from assured.”

  “A lot of the corporate supply ships were pushing it,” Matthew considers grimly, “trying to milk the dollar, flying loaded past safety specs. I doubt they were still thinking in terms of ‘What if all the docks aren’t there when we show up?’”

  “So where would that put a relief mission?” I ask for the bottom line, though I’ve been crunching the numbers myself in my rehab haze.

  “Earthside would probably have to put it together from scratch, new ships and all,” Staley calculates. “I’m sure they’d make it top priority, but they’d also be expecting the worst on arrival. Telescopes—and any survivors’ reports—would show them how bad we got pounded. And they’d know we wouldn’t be able to support them on this end, so they’d have to put together a mission that could make it both ways and expect to carry thousands of evacuees—a lot of them badly injured—on the return trip.”

  “I doubt they’d be thinking about evacuating the wounded,” Halley interrupts. “The return flight is too long to be an ambulance ride, even with hibernation. They’d try to drop us a hospital unit, treat the bad cases here. Or set up something in orbit if they were worried about Discs or nano-contamination on the surface.”

  “And they’d want to use any viable manpower left on this end to help them respond,” Lisa considers. “They’d want to get power and fuel processors set up, sync a new space dock, get things ready for supporting multiple round trips.”

  “So they’d have to get to designing and building all that stuff,” Matthew agrees. “Expecting the worst.”

  “Which includes both an unknown risk from nano-contamination on the surface, and a probable risk of Disc attack, likely to hit them as soon as they make orbit,” Lisa assesses, her face going into her hands, her palms covering her eyes, fighting through rehab-fatigue to stay clear.

  “So they’d need a bloody armada,” Halley imagines, frustrated with the delays she’s imagining to get relief to what she’s imagining is happening on the surface and in space. Right now, our own position seems luxurious in comparison.

  “They’d just lost potentially tens of thousands of lives,” I rationalize. “And what killed them is still likely active and waiting for our next move. I wouldn’t expect them to rush into a grinder like that. First priority in a disaster: don’t get killed coming to the rescue. Can’t save anybody if you’re just going to show up and get slaughtered. Anything they send would have to be hardened and armed to resist the Discs.”

  “They’d need a bloody armada,” Matthew parrots Halley’s sentiment.

  “Months to build it, assuming they make it a planetary priority, then most of a year to get it here,” Staley adds it up.

  “But wouldn’t they have done something in the mean time?” Ryder asks. “Sent probes? Tried to establish communication?”

  “Maybe the Discs are taking out anything they send,” Lisa considers.

  “But who’s running the Discs?” Matthew demands, getting frustrated in his fatigue. “Something this big, you’d think they’d have shown their hand, given themselves away, let Earth know who they’re dealing with so they know who to take out. Or maybe they already killed themselves along with everyone else on the surface.”

  “We don’t know anything about the colonies,” Lisa tries to reassure, but that hope is tinted with accusation: any survivors are suspect. “A lot of the nukes were going wild. We didn’t get any confirmation of direct hits before our eyes got knocked out.”

  “But we also haven’t heard from our other two bases, despite MAI having been linked to their AIs,” he complains. “They would have come looking for us if they made it. They didn’t have operational Hiber-Sleep facilities. And a handful of the colonies had garrisons of Peacekeepers, or SOF units camped onsite. Plus, we sent up
over a dozen support craft. Even if they were busy with survivors, some would prioritize returning to base after the smoke and radiation cleared, if for no other reason than to scavenge for supplies. We’re assuming it’s been months. Even if fuel was short, we should have had some kind of contact.”

  Lisa is looking like she’s withdrawn into herself, trying to figure out how to say something.

  “What are you thinking, Colonel?” I ask her officially.

  “I’ve been up to Command Ops, up in the Tower,” she begins, slowly. “You said you didn’t see any sign of activity except yourself.”

  “But I couldn’t exactly see very well,” I allow her. “You found something?”

  She pulls her flashcard out of the thigh pocket of her uniform and keys up an image on the screen side. MAI automatically captures the image and projects it larger on the Mess Hall screens. It’s an enhanced photo of the dusty deck.

  “I found boot prints. Old, but still visible. But not UNMAC boots.”

  “Not Copeland?”

  “No. They match civilian seal-suit designs, but I can’t absolutely confirm the issue. But they don’t match anything anybody on-base was wearing.”

  “We’ve had a visitor?” Matthew sits up.

  “Any signs of tampering?” I ask.

  “I’ll need Anton to check all the systems, but nothing obvious.” She looks preoccupied, almost spooked. “But I tracked them—not completely, we’ll need to check the whole base—but they seem to wander, like someone just came in for a look around. Maybe more than one visit. It looks like they came down to the Chambers.”

  “Someone watching us sleep,” Matthew goes dark. “That’s just not okay with me.”

  “But nothing tampered with,” I repeat.

  The Links start beeping and a face comes up on the wall screens. It’s Lieutenant Carver. She’d been leading one of the survey teams. She looks pale, shaken, almost terrified.

  “Colonel Ram, this is Carver, Survey Two…”

  “You’ve got something, Lieutenant?”

  “Yes, sir… I…” She’s having trouble with words. Her eyes dart in all directions like the world is about to fall in around her. I check the stats on the section she’s in—far end of the bunker complex, Ground Operations Staging, A Deck—it looks like the corridor she’s located in is intact, no breaches, but several of the connecting sections haven’t been logged as checked yet.

  “Is it Colonel Copeland?”

  “No sir. But… I think you should get up here, sir. I think you really need to see this…” She’s urgent, out of breath.

  “What is it, Lieutenant?”

  “I… I really don’t know, sir. It doesn’t make any sense… I can’t… I can’t explain it…”

  “Do you need backup?”

  “No… No sir. Just eyes… I think we’re secure… but… maybe best if not a lot of boots came this way, not yet… Seal the section… Restrict access… It really doesn’t make any sense, Sir…”

  “We’ll be right there, Lieutenant.”

  “Right there” takes a good ten exhausting minutes. I should have known better. But I can’t remotely imagine what would have shaken her up as badly as she looked and sounded.

  One hundred and twenty meters across the complex: all the way east to the aircraft bays, then south past the vehicle garages to the Air Com/Ground Ops wing—almost as far as you can get from where we started and still be on the same deck. No fewer than six sealed pressure hatches (and one catastrophic breach airlock) to haul open and then cycle shut behind us. We’re beyond winded and aching by the time we get there. I feel like I’ve hiked uphill all day in full gear. I’m soaked in sweat. My lungs burn and my joints scream at me with every step. And with every step I hate myself because it’s only a hundred and twenty fucking meters in point-four gees. I start counting every meter, making myself take the next one.

  My legs are numb by meter 75. I feel like my body weighs a thousand pounds, not a relative sixty. I’ve been walking head-down, following the fresh footprints in the dust as I trace Carver’s team’s course, their path down the main corridors as they worked meticulously room-to-room, taking inventory of what’s intact, locking down what isn’t safe (there are warning tags on both vehicle garages—they have big doors that open outside). Every few dozen meters I can see the random blobby smears in the deck dust that tell me they had to sit down and rest.

  “This really better be good,” Matthew is grousing behind me, sounding at least as out of breath as I am. Lisa hasn’t said a word.

  We find Carver’s team where she said she’d be, camped and waiting at the end of the corridor to Ground Ops, all sitting in front of the sealed pressure hatch into that section like they’re guarding it. They all look as shaken and numb as Carver did on her call-in, staring at the walls, the floor. Carver’s got her face in her hands like she’s trying not to hyperventilate.

  “Colonel!” she snaps-to as soon as she sees us coming, the effort of rising to her feet making her look like she’s just taken a severe beating, but also looking more than just a little relieved to see us.

  “Report?”

  “We… We were doing our sweeps, sir,” she tries in fits and starts, sounding like her brain is having trouble finding words. She looks like she’s about to fall down. “Taking it slow in these sections because we expected some of the vehicle bay doors—the ones that open outside—might have been knocked in by the slide. Breached. MAI’s sensors are down in a lot of the sections on this end, but the security cameras did show us rocks and gravel pushing through some of the bay doors—we just tagged those bays and left them be as we were sure they’d be airless, no point doing a manual pressure check… Too many sections to clear... Then we moved on to the machine shops, the repair bays. The ones that looked sound, we…”

  She runs out of breath, and almost does fall down. I catch her by the shoulders and immediately regret it—it feels like someone dropped five hundred pounds in my arms—but we both manage to stay standing. Then she coughs so hard it doubles her over, and I have to let her down. She folds into an almost fetal position on her knees. Her team doesn’t look any better. Lisa checks her LA’s—her personal telemetry is good, she’s just hyperventilating. Still, she has to hang onto the bulkhead to stay even slightly upright.

  She manages to get her flashcard out of her pocket, pull up a floor plan of these sections.

  “This… This one here…” She jabs a shaky finger at the Staging Area just off the corridor on the other side of the hatch she’s propped against. She gulps in a breath, shakes her head like she’s trying to get her brain to process. “It… looked sound on the security camera… So we checked the air pressure at the hatch. It was low, sir, but within tolerable pressures. Safe enough to go in… We assumed that there must be a slow leak, something that may be bleeding our air out, but so slow that didn’t trigger MAI to seal it off with the sensors out. Pinhole, maybe… Hairline crack… So we broke out our masks, sealed up this section of corridor behind us to make an airlock, and we opened it…”

  Coughing again. But she looks like she’s getting her wind back. Only she doesn’t continue her report.

  “And?” I press her after giving her more time to breathe, but she doesn’t answer, doesn’t even look up. I’m almost expecting her to puke. Lisa shoots me a look that’s somewhere between incredulity and terror. She’d always been impressed with Carver—Carver never flinched, even in a war where a pinhole in your suit would kill you (something I dismissed as the illusion of immortality common in academy-fresh child-soldiers).

  “You should go see, sir,” one of the specialists—his name plate says Ryan—looks up at me. His face is pale as death. He looks like he wants to say something more, but—like Carver—can’t find the words. “I think… I think it’s safe…”

  Carver doesn’t agree with him, but does move aside to let Lisa and I open the hatch into the next section. The lights are dimmed to horror-movie creepy, but it feels warm enough,
and there was no rush of unequal pressure to say the air may be leaking out. The first hatch on the right—one of two staging rooms off the Primary Ground Vehicle Staging Bay—has been marked with one of Carver’s tags, though it looks like it was slapped on in a hurry, sloppy and off-kilter.

  Matthew looks through the small polycarb porthole in the hatch, trying to see. Then he gives up and shakes his head. I take a look. I see racks of pressure suits, heavy armor, field packs, air tanks, tool kits, all where they should be. The room is dimly lit, with an odd pinkish glow. The air is hazy with dust, every surface and piece of gear is evenly powdered with it, but worse than anywhere else. The frost on the polycarb tells me it’s cold in there, and my breath fogs it. Lisa checks the reads on the hatch plate.

  “It’s cold,” she confirms. “Below freezing, but not surface-cold. Air pressure is point-three-two atmospheres. We’ll need O2, but can go in without pressure suits. Radiation levels are acceptable.”

  I look to Carver again. She doesn’t say anything, but her eyes—when she raises her head just long enough to make contact with mine again—look like she wants to scream. Matthew is already pulling out his breather mask.

  We seal Carver’s team on the other side of the corridor hatch—likely the same protocol they followed before they risked opening the hatch into the apparently leaky Staging Room. Ryder has caught up to us and gets to work checking them out.

  Then we turn our attention to the hatch that got them so spooked. Matthew blows it manually, equalizing the pressure between the room and the section of corridor we’re in. There’s a quick and significant rushing of air, and I have to brace myself to ride it out. My ears pop, but it’s nothing like full decompression. But even with the pressure equalized, it takes two of us to crank the hatch open—nothing to do with the condition of the hatch, we’re just that post-sleep weak. I can feel the cold before the job is halfway done, making me feel like I’ve been splashed with ice water because I’m sweating so badly. The hatch creaks on its hinges like we’re on an old ship.

  I step in first. The dust is thick underfoot, but the surface crunches like frost—like the surface sand does, after it’s settled in the cold near-vacuum.

  “Oh, shit!” Matthew squeals, and I turn to look. The connecting hatch to the next (and larger) Staging Room either wasn’t sealed or failed, and whatever Matthew saw on the other side of it made him jump back and try to slam it shut. But it won’t seal.

  I remember what Ryan said—that he thought we’d be safe enough—and figure since we haven’t been sucked into near vacuum, we’re good for now. So I step past him and ease the hatch open.

  The larger Staging Room had a large polycarb window that looked out into the vehicle bay. It’s been ruptured, blown outwards. The room is full of dirt, sand, piled feet deep.

  “Fuck…” I hear Lisa sigh out in shock. But she’s looking up, her flashlight turned toward the ceiling, to a small skylight that explains the pinkish light leaking in. When she shifts her stance, I realize I hear the unmistakable sound of her boots grinding on the high-oxide silicate of Martian sand. She’s standing on several inches of it, like someone dumped a bucket of the stuff right under the skylight.

  “No fucking way…” Matthew protests, staring up at it. Then he turns like a man on fire, pushes past me into the ruptured Staging Room.

  I’m staring up at the broken skylight. Looking through it to open sky. My mind numbly recalls that there were no “skylights” in this section—what I’m staring up through was where an exhaust vent used to be, likely sheared off by the slide. Now it’s a five-inch hole opened cleanly to the surface. The sky is a pinkish haze—like an Earthly sunset—straight above us.

  We’re open to the outside.

  “Help here…!” Matthew is protesting. He’s pushing through what’s left of the polycarb viewing window, climbing over the piled sand and out into the bay.

  “Why aren’t we dead?” is the best Lisa can come out with. Then she remembers to think, and has her sniffer out. “Point-three-two atmospheres…”

  More than thirty times what it should be.

  “…and fifteen percent oxygen…”

  I turn and chase after Matthew on his insane mission. He’s on all fours, pushing through the shattered polycarb.

  “No… No fucking way…”

  He disappears. I can hear his boots on loose rock. The Vehicle Bay is almost filled with slide debris, rock and sand. Only the tops of the rovers that had been parked inside it are visible. And I see more light. More pink light. The bay doors have been busted inwards. Martian rubble mixed with broken vehicle scrap pours in from outside. From outside.

  I push through after him, climb through the window into the buried bay, forgetting how much I hurt, forgetting how easy it would be to break my weakened bones.

  There shouldn’t be air. The near-vacuum should have ripped the masks off our faces as it decompressed our lungs. Our capillaries and eyes should be cold-boiling.

  Matthew is climbing up and out over the rubble, out through the thin gap in the smashed and twisted blast-grade doors, sending more sand and gravel rolling into the bay. It’s all I can do to keep up with him. And I can’t even to that—the hill of debris starts to come out from under me, and I fall, and it knocks my mask loose. Matthew’s hand reaches down and grabs my flailing arm, pulls me up. The 40% gravity is the only thing that keeps our bones from breaking, our joints from tearing. He gets my feet under me, gets me up. And out.

  Outside.

  I’m suddenly under open sky instead of concrete. And I realize I’ve taken a breath before I get my mask back on.

  My lungs burn, but it isn’t vacuum. More like very high altitude on Earth, like making a HALO jump. Or being up on something Everest-class. And the air tastes like rust. It gets me coughing. But there is air to draw in when I gasp for it. Still, I’m going dizzy and numb fast, and Matthew has to help me get my mask resealed. He holds me steady until I’ve got my oxygen back.

  And we look around.

  Rubble has rolled over the base—and the surrounding landscape—as far as the eye can see, all rust red and yellow ochre. It’s dotted with twisted scrap—whites, grays—what’s left of anything even remotely fragile—or less fragile than the reinforced concrete bunkers specifically designed to survive the possibility of a Martian super-slide—that was on the surface when the slide hit. Very little is recognizable. The whole landscape has changed.

  But when I look close—and know what I’m looking for—I can still almost make out the lines of the bunker sections. The slide isn’t deep. Maybe a few meters. An engineering team with bulldozers could dig us out in a couple of weeks.

  But I’m standing on the surface of Mars. Without a pressure suit.

  I feel a hand grip mine. Lisa is standing next to me. Looking up at the pink and violet sky, at the distant sun overhead, softly haloed in a blue haze. Eyes wide like a child’s. Shivering in the cold.

  Outside.

  Outside and not dead.

  Outside and breathing.

  “How long have we been sleeping?”