The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN

by Michael Rizzo

Day 152. 3 June, 2115:

  See and be seen.

  I find a big rock suitable to sit down on and watch the dozers work at scraping the remainder of the slide off the top of the roughly C-shaped bunker complex, like archeologists uncovering a buried relic. I lift my mask enough to get the straw of my canteen in for a quick drink, then put it back before I need to breathe again. I’m in no hurry to experience another breath of the thin new atmosphere like I did accidentally when Matthew, Lisa and I impulsively climbed out of our safe holes into this new world. And it’s not just the near-suffocating sparseness of the outside air. (Halley assures us that most people could actually go without bottled oxygen for several minutes without serious physiological effects; though they’d be dizzy within a minute, disoriented in two, and probably face-down shortly thereafter.) It’s what’s perpetually in that air:

  I coughed for two weeks from the one breath of micro-sand I inhaled. Halley keeps warning everybody of the risk of silicosis if we suck in too much of the stuff, but even the slightest dusting of it tears into your sensitive insides like fine broken glass. A dry rasping cough has become a pervasive music in our cramped living spaces despite precautions.

  Added to that is the “rose” we’ve all got on our noses and cheeks from playing out in the thin air. Of course, it’s nothing compared to the capillary rupturing that would happen in nothing flat if this was still one-percent of Earth’s sea-level atmospheric pressure, not to mention the boiled lungs and eyeballs. The worst risk at this pressure is edema in the lungs are brain, but Halley’s been keeping a close eye on all of us. Still, I think we’d all agree the price is reasonable for being able to walk so freely on the surface of Mars.

  I make sure my mask has a good seal, then I adjust my shrouded cap to ensure it’s keeping the distant sun’s direct UV off whatever skin is exposed between my mask, goggles and scarf—even the thickened atmosphere is no adequate barrier against solar radiation, so we have to stay covered up. The added short layered cape-like shrouds stuck on the backs of our UNMAC uniform head covers make us look like old French Foreign Legionnaires, which is certainly appropriate, given the barren terrain and the isolating distance from anything resembling civilization. Or home.

  My breath feels close in the mask, clammy-damp and stale, but it’s infinitely preferable to being sealed in a bulky pressure suit.

  It’s warm today—almost fifty degrees. “A gorgeous day,” as Halley would say, before “encouraging” as many of us as possible to get masks on and get their boots up out of the bunkers, to walk around in the open, under sky instead of concrete, to fight off the potential for depression that comes from living sealed in tight quarters (made worse by the total isolation of having no contact with any other human beings). And she’s right—it is a gorgeous day. But it won’t last. It’ll dip well below zero again when the sun goes down. And the temperature drops fast, because the air is so thin and so dry.

  But for right now, all I need is my standard Peacekeeper LA’s—UNMAC’s latest generation of infantry and special operations “Light-Armor” uniform, its skin pixilated a slightly deeper shade of rust than the actual soil, webbed with darker veins that hope to blend in with the rubble field of rock and gravel that defines much of the landscape (except for the steeper slopes of the valley walls and the occasional dry “wash” of ancient riverbed—reminders that Mars had free water once upon a time in its history, long before man and the ETE Corporation came to muck up the settled, natural order of things).

  I adjust my weapons as I sit—my pistol in its thigh rig and the light synthetic ICW sitting in its chest-mount. Not that we’ve needed our weapons. There hasn’t been a sign of any activity other than us in six months.

  On the positive, at least the Discs (or whatever their technology has evolved into after fifty years) haven’t come swarming to shoot us to pieces.

  On the negative, with all our surface activity as we begin to dig out, we should have gotten someone’s attention, even with Anton’s replacement transmitter still incomplete. But we haven’t heard anything from anyone, not even faded fuzzy chatter or fragmented code on any frequency we can pick up. And there’s nothing but background noise coming in from space, from Earth.

  Some of us are starting to worry that Earth may be dead, that whatever happened here in terms of a bio or nanotech disaster did spread there. The popular suspicions regarding the ETE Corporation have evolved into their own mythology, culminating an imagined Apocalypse wherein corporate greed brought an unstoppable plague back to Earth. Or the nanotech they had already started putting to “safe” commercial use Earthside eventually went wrong.

  Or maybe humanity simply found another way of killing themselves.

  On top of the Command Bunker, I can see Anton and his crew working on the replacement transmitter—named fittingly enough “Staley’s Tower” by the lead engineer himself. It won’t even be as powerful as the original orbital uplink (of course, as far as we can tell, there isn’t anything left in orbit to uplink to), but it will make some noise, chatter out a signal that should be heard from Earth. (Earth is only now coming out from around the opposite side of the sun from us. We woke up at the worst possible time in the two-year cycle that brings us in and out of conjunction with home).

  I get back on my feet and stretch out my old bones. They still ache deeply from the re-calcifiers injected into them—worst in the hips and lower spine—but it’s one indispensable benefit we reaped from the nano-boom: an effective means to fight low-gravity skeletal demineralization. It hurts like hell all over, but it works. Even on busted old bodies like mine.

  But not so well on Matthew’s, thanks to his old-school knee replacements, a souvenir of the Terror War. I catch sight of Matthew now, walking the perimeter alone, like he’s done every day since he could spend more than an hour on his feet. His circuit gets longer every day—he’s up to needing two cylinders worth of air for his afternoon “therapy”. Still, he’s limping even in the low gravity, chopping the gravelly Martian soil with his makeshift walking stick, checking on the progress that Carver and Rios and their respective platoons of troopers have made on getting some of the battery guns replaced.

  Refitting after what the slide did to us has been an exercise in creative engineering. Everything has been a game of scavenge and trade-out, digging deep into our stores of spare parts, making one working machine out of a few (or more than a few) busted ones. That strategy got us two working construction dozers, a handful of assorted short-range scout rovers, one almost-working armored track, and about a quarter of our pre-bombardment compliment of base guns.

  But nothing flying. We had four ASVs safe in the bunker hangars when the slide hit, but the reason they didn’t go up with all the rest of our ships to rescue the people we had in orbit was that they didn’t fly. And they’ve continued to defy Sergeant Morales’ attempts to cobble one good aircraft out of them. She’s threatening to get creative, weld together something from scratch. It wouldn’t make orbit, but it would give us eyes in the air, and get us a lot further out for recon than the battery-powered rovers.

  I head in Matthew’s general direction, my boots crunching the rusty gravel, doing the light shuffle-skip that walking on uneven ground becomes in .38 G’s, raising puffs of fine red dust (dust that I’ll need to vacuum off of me when I go back inside, to keep the abrasive and somewhat corrosive stuff from wreaking havoc with delicate gear and sensitive skin).

  The pervasive dust makes me think of Lisa’s mystery footprints again: if anyone else could have survived this long, they’d be able to move around on the surface like we can, needing only oxygen and protection from the elements, and they probably could have been doing so for the last several years. Unfortunately, since the length of Marineris sits in line with the equator, the shifts in temperature from one end to the other as the sun crosses the sky creates regular dust storms at least twice a day, scouring away even recent footprints. If anyone was walking around on our real estate, the evidence is long erase
d.

  (One interesting note, though: there was no trace of outside sand in those mystery footprints. Whoever visited us was carefully clean.)

  Then I remind myself of some other math: without Hiber-Sleep, the youngest adult colonist at the time of the bombardment would now be almost seventy, and without the benefits of the nano-treatments that have been working to keep both time and the rigors of this harsh planet in check. (Plus, this base is one of the only sites that had G-Simulator centrifuges to maintain enough muscle tone and skeletal integrity to keep one’s “Earth Legs”—a twice-daily ritual of being spun up to Earth gravity for several minutes, which Halley got us all ordered back to as soon as we’d cleared Stage Two rehab.)

  “Don’t we look spry?” Matthew teases through his obvious discomfort as I come jogging up.

  “Five months of PT and nano-rehab,” I give him, “it’s either spry or dead.”

  “I think I’m number two.” He leans on his stick—part of the barrel of one of our battery guns bent out of true—like he’s bearing full Earth weight (but if he was, his “stick” would be almost too heavy to drag around).

  He looks out at the horizon to the west, out into the center of the vast clamshell-shaped Melas Chasma, over three hundred miles across and over 20,000 feet below Datum (Martian “sea level”) at its deepest. Its distant rims are barely visible in the pink haze of dust and frost as they rise up four miles above us, leveling off almost perfectly with the great Planums on either side of the Marineris Valley.

  “I’ve been out here every day for three months now and it doesn’t get old,” he tells me. “Looking at it. Those slopes that go up and up forever, higher than Everest—not that I’ve ever seen Everest, of course—then flattening out like that on top, like the Grand Canyon, if the Grand Canyon was as big as the United States and five times deeper. And don’t remind me I didn’t look at it twice all the five-and-a-half-years we were here before everything blew up… It was different looking at it through eight inches of plexi, or through the bubble of a stuffy pressure suit.” He stops for awhile, just drinking it in. And I hate to admit it, but he does sound old, despite what cutting-edge nano-medicine and a lifetime of Spec-Ops PT have done for him.

  “This was going to be something our great-great grandkids were supposed to be able to enjoy: being able to take a stroll on fucking Mars with only a wimpy little oxygen mask.” He sounds deeply, profoundly sad—something that’s been getting steadily worse over the last five months. His pissed-off has long since mellowed, his outrage at the bombardment and the imagined criminal atrocity behind it. It no longer drives him, and he’s begun the slide through the stages of grieving into the debilitating depression Halley fears will take hold of all of us.

  His irony when he talks of children’s children’s children isn’t lost either: Neither of us had the time or security for having children, not with the life we chose. We were allowed lovers, bodies to cling to, to soothe one another like real people do, but families were an unobtainable luxury. Loved ones were just another way for your enemies to hurt you, and we’d made a world full of enemies.

  “This isn’t supposed to be for us, Mikey,” I listen to him wallow in it. “We’ve done some shitty things. Evil things. In the name of a better world.”

  A world we couldn’t live in.

  “I know…” I try badly. And I tell myself this crisis is normal, expected. Halley can increase his serotonin levels, and he’ll push through it.

  “No,” he sounds like he’s almost crying in his mask, trying not to. “No, you don’t.” He won’t look at me, just keeps his eyes on the horizon. “You still think I came here for you, for loyalty and still needing to keep your crazy ass out of bad trouble, like always, even after I tried to retire and walk away. And I did come here because of you. But that’s not all of it.”

  He picks up his stick and jabs it at the dirt, poking holes, stirring up dust.

  “I had this nice little dream: I’d pull one last tour… And if I didn’t get myself holed by an Eco or a Disc, I’d get established, make a life here—settle into a cushy corporate security job at one of the nicer colonies like Tranquility, or maybe even Pax—the hippies would drive me crazy, but maybe I’d find myself a nice young tofu-girl to nurse me through old age. Then one day I could actually die in my sleep, fifty million miles away from the planet I participated in fucking up, so maybe here they’d make me a nice little marker that remembered me for being a sweet but slightly crazy dirty old man. But that’s what it comes down to—I had it all planned out in my head before I got on the damn shuttle. One-way ticket. Last frontier. The ultimate get-away-from-it-all. Last line on the tombstone, if there’s gonna be such a thing.”

  He looks up at the sky. You can see stars even at midday. And the irregular blobs of the two moons.

  “Maybe we should do up one for them,” he suggests, pointing up at the bigger blob that is Phobos, thinking of those who probably died in space, in orbit, half-a-century ago. “A tombstone. Maybe a monument. Names on a rock, at least. Even if nobody but us ever gets to see it.”

  “We should,” I agree. I don’t say anything else for awhile, just stand with him. Then I give him: “I figure I came here to die, too, you know…”

  He chuckles at that, shakes his head, pushes a gloved hand up under his goggles to wipe at his eyes.

  “Of course I know, you selfish fuck,” he scolds me, laughter cutting through his grief. “Except you had no delusions about going out sexed-up and happy in bed. You didn’t come here to die; you came here to get killed. Maybe you told yourself you signed on to do something righteous, save this planet since you did such a fantastic job of it on the last one… But what you were really going for was the whole pointless blaze-of-glory thing, and our UN masters were happy to oblige. Why else would they have approved your transfer at sixty-five-goddamn-years-old to the fucking Starship Troopers and put you on the shuttle? You’d done enough damage to their precious agendas with your bizarre un-killable popularity and that righteous rage that you pass off as some kind of code of honor and justice. And, yes, you did manage to make most of it balance out right by the end and walk away with everybody shaking hands and pledging to do the right thing. But then, everybody knew it would just be a matter of time before you started in again, before you felt like somebody in power had crossed one of your personal lines and needed to be taken down, and then the shooting would start all over—nobody believed you were done. So they needed to get your happy ass as far away from their newly ‘secure’ little planet, and let you off yourself in a way that would cause them minimal mess, and maybe lets your memory serve them in the process…”

  He turns away, looks down at the tip of his stick as it chops idly into the broken rock between his boots. “That’s why Lisa came—even with all the shit you put her through, she still wouldn’t miss your funeral.” Then he shakes his head, his laughter getting lighter now. “Selfish fuck…” he repeats. “Just go ruin my pity party. It is all about you, just like always.”

  I give him time, let him breathe. I don’t put a hand on his shoulder—I think he’d be offended.

  “So this is what getting old is,” I dig instead.

  “No,” he sighs, shakes his head. “This is getting old for us.”

  I cycle the airlock, wait for the pressure to stabilize (which is much quicker now that it doesn’t have to cycle up from near-vacuum anymore), feel it stab into my ears until I swallow a few times, pinch my nose and blow. Peel my mask off. Trade bottled air for recycled air. Then sit on one of the benches provided in the tight space between the inside and outside hatches and start the routine chore of vacuuming the dust off of me.

  “Colonel Ram,” I hear Anton on the Link before I’m finished. “We’re about ready to try a test, sir.”

  “I’ll be right up.”

  I don’t hurry, though. Instead, I catch myself sitting and staring at the deck. Thinking of Matthew. It’s not like him to dip so far into hopelessness, even with all he’
s been suffering physically. The last time he was remotely like this was when an assassin missed him (maybe on purpose) and took away what was probably the first actual love of his life. He retired for awhile after that, but couldn’t stay out of the game for long.

  But he’s not wrong: when they offered me a choice between a pretty public “hero’s” retirement (filled with carefully scripted face-tours and media-friendly endorsement opportunities until I’d aged safely off the celebrity radar) or a trip the hell off the planet (even if it was designed to get me martyred so I couldn’t cause them any more trouble), I got on the shuttle without a second thought.

  Yes, Matthew. We did some evil things in the name of a “better” world, more than whatever we “fixed” could ever pay off. On Earth. But on Mars, I thought—for the first time in a long time—that I could do something better. But only if I could start fresh.

  And Mars itself was just getting started—a new world. There was hope, possibility. And because basic survival was still tenuous, that made cooperation a premium: working together to keep each other alive. Fighting endangered everyone—it was far too easy to destroy the delicate resources that kept humans alive here. If we took the killing path—the path that was too often the rule on Earth—we would kill ourselves in the process.

  That simple fact gave us leverage over what Earthside demanded we do.

  We were supposed to kill the Ecos, Matthew—that was what the corporations wanted, that was why they sent us—and if this were Earth, we would have, and with little hesitation, wiped them out like any other kind of “terrorist.” But instead, I made peace with them, brought them back into the fold, made them part of building something here instead of tearing it down.

  I made enemies into friends—that’s something I could die with. And now I wonder if any of those friends managed to survive.

  Anton and Lisa are waiting up in Command Ops, like they really need my presence to turn on the new beacon. At least the stair climb has become easy again.

  The view from Ops is much better than my first trip up, now that we’ve got the Tower unburied and the blast shields over the viewports can stay open. The natural daylight even makes the place less tomb-like.

  (It’s one of the precious few places that filtered daylight can get inside the bunkers—the vast majority of the installation is below ground, and the one deck that’s at surface level only has windows in the airlock staging areas, which have now become favorite leisure-time spaces when not being used to move large numbers of personnel in and out. Otherwise, you have to work in the Ops Tower or the Air-Com Tower to have a view.)

  Matthew isn’t here, of course. I look out through the panoramic pillbox slit of thick plexi, scanning the mostly uncovered base and perimeter wall until think I see him still out on the sand: old man with a stick, staring out west through the main “gate”, out beyond the base perimeter. I’m not sure if he’s hoping to see someone come out of that waste, or maybe thinking about disappearing into it himself.

  Lisa’s been watching him too. I notice her eyes keep tracking back out the windows, like she’s passively keeping an eye on him. She’s known him almost as long as I have. And she sat up late with him, night after night when the rehab was keeping him sleepless and in pain, trading places with me when I needed to go fall down myself. A vigil of old friends, though Lisa and I barely spoke to each other beyond what a Base CO needs to talk about with his acting Operations XO. We were civil, professional, and nothing more than that. Nothing like former lovers.

  Some things do stay the same, despite the evolution of the planet around us, despite waking up to the possibility that we’ll never see Earth again.

  I can still remember the beginning: the passion, the hunger we had for each other. We were breaking the Uniform Code: She was a Lieutenant, I was a Major. She transferred divisions so I wouldn’t be her direct CO, but it made people nervous, fed the gossip pages, the fan sites. (We were celebrities, after all. Heroes.) And we were limited in our choices for intimacy: locked lifelong into the job, unable to get close to anyone who wasn’t locked in with you because everyone who wasn’t was vulnerable. So our fraternizing was unofficially condoned. And many others followed our example (including Matthew).

  But then my “job” started to swallow me up, drag me into the darkness more and more as the years went on, as the Terror War never ended, no matter how many we killed. More and more, I became the weapon that those that made me wanted me to be. And then I couldn’t bear to be around her, to watch her suffer because she couldn’t reach me anymore; because all I was, was rage. And a mission. So I just ran away—took myself away from her, lost myself in the job.

  Just one more thing I owe Planet Earth. One more reason I jumped on that shuttle.

  And so did she. She said she couldn’t pass up the chance, that she’d always had the childhood dreams of going into space, touching other worlds. And she stuck by that story—probably would still, if I asked her right now. But there’s still a deep, bittersweet pain between us, any time we’re together.

  We managed to work together, to maintain professionalism, but we never really healed the rift I dug. Her career soared. Mine went where the powers-that-be deemed I’d be safest for them. I had other relationships—sort of. I assume she did as well, though managed to be more discreet about it. We moved on, but not really.

  Maybe Matthew got it right: Despite the distance we’ve kept between us, Mars was just too far away, so she had to come along, had to keep some kind of connection (or, as Matthew put it, see how the story finally ended, so she could have my funeral for closure). Or maybe there is something left between us, something we can’t ever really break.

  She gives me a sad little smile that says she knows I’m thinking about things I shouldn’t be, about doors that need to stay shut, even now. Then she’s back to business. She never holds eye contact with me for very long.

  She looks good. It’s more than how gracefully she came through rehab. She really doesn’t look sixty-six. If I just met her and had to guess, I’d think she was fifty. Healthy fifty. Her long dark hair is barely frosted with gray (I shaved mine decades ago—no idea what color it would be now). Her skin is only barely lined, her eyes still luminously dark. But more than the surface, she’s more alive than I am—always has been. And stronger, at least in the ways that really matter.

  “Rick wants to see you,” she reminds me.

  Rick—Doctor Mann—the fourth member of our little geriatric family from the golden age of being Heroes of the Free World to jump on this long, strange trip. I just doubt he did it because he loves us.

  Rick was SENTAR Corporation (before they got chopped up and sold off in the big scandal), head of interface small arms and armor R&D. I’m not sure if he was offered or had to call in every favor he had with his DARPA contacts, but no way he’d miss out on a prime onsite off-world consulting gig for a goddamn space army.

  “Matthew thinks he’s being obsessive-compulsive,” I repeat the popular sentiment. “Worrying about how many weapons we have working when there’s likely nothing left to shoot but each other.”

  “We’ll find out soon enough,” Anton interrupts, getting impatient in his own stress. Then he checks in with his team up on the roof for the twentieth time.

  “And if there is something left to shoot at?” Lisa reminds me of my own lingering dread.

  “Then I doubt we have enough guns to make a difference.”

  It’s not just the limited resources. We’re fifty years behind.

  Anton looks like he’s about to hyperventilate.

  “Go ahead, Mr. Staley,” I give him my official permission. A touch on one of MAI’s screens, a graphic comes alive. That’s it. Nothing even to hear.

  “It’s working,” Anton finally sighs. I smile at him, and send kudos up to his antenna-building crew.

  “Now, we wait.”

  “Doctor Mann,” I greet him officially when I find him down on B-Deck in one of the larger labs in Scie
nces. (I’d expected to find him overseeing the heavy armor checks in Staging, or helping with the refitting the base batteries.) He’s looking mostly recovered after his rough rehab (he does have the distinction of being the oldest of us, a year older than Matthew), having what looks very much like a cup of hot tea with Doctor Ryder, both of them staring with an analytical dreaminess at a sealed incubator they’d cobbled together out of a clear acrylic bio-containment glove box. The light inside the lid makes their faces glow ghostly.

  Apparently, this isn’t going to be a conversation about guns.

  “Our ‘weeds’?” I nod at the incubator.

  Two months ago—when enough of us had enough legs back to go walking around—Lieutenant Carver took a team out surveying the conduits from one of the two base reactors. (Carver always seems to stumble upon the weird shit first—she says she must be cursed.) The reactors had been shut down, protocol when the bombs fell, reducing us to batteries. Each core had been buried what had been calculated to be a “safe” distance from the base. (Safe but securable: close enough to defend if attacked; though the Ecos were loathe to risk breaching a reactor, and the Discs seemed to share this sentiment in avoiding firing on them.)

  The half-mile hike out across the unstable terrain to check everything and start the process of heating the reactors up again kept them out of reach for awhile (and Morales hadn’t gotten any rovers back to rolling yet). So, three months after we woke up, Carver gets the second shock of her young life: after discovering Martian atmosphere, she gets to discover Martian life.

  “They’re potentially a lot more than weeds, Colonel,” Rick gives me back with a hint of his signature annoyance with the soldiers he’s spent his life arming better. But there’s also a gleam in his big expressive eyes that makes him look like the man I met almost fifty years ago (actually, almost a hundred years ago).

  The plant samples we carefully brought inside—initially under nano-contamination precautions—have grown visibly in the container since last I saw them, and appear healthier, at least to my uneducated eye. They remind me of the hardy crab grasses that used to annoy many a desert landscaper in the Phoenix I knew as a boy. But the leaves are broader, the stalks thicker, like a ground-crawling bamboo. Except the sample isn’t ground-crawling anymore—it’s starting to reach up and expand to fill the space of the tank. And it’s seeding.

  “This is what they’ve been doing with a little TLC,” Ryder explains eagerly. “A little more water, a little less acid in the soil. Compare it to the patch that’s been kept where it was found.”

  Found by poor, cursed Lieutenant Carver, lacing its way through the crevices in the rocks above Reactor Two, struggling for life against the cold, the dryness, the thin air. But living. And it may have been doing so for decades.

  Urgent testing let us know it wasn’t nano-contaminated, but it was nano-engineered, it’s DNA custom-tweaked. Otherwise, it’s been speculation as to where it was engineered. Several colonies had active hydroponics “farms” started. I remember Pax and Tranquility had the most impressive gardens, and some of the colony labs were working aggressively on engineering life (through DNA manipulation at the molecular level—one of the scary industries that put nukes over our heads), life that could take to the surface of Mars and thrive as terraforming progressed (and, in fact, help it along). ETE Corp had been cooperating actively with the colony labs to promote this.

  “It’s an amazing plant, Colonel,” Ryder plays towards some kind of proposal I’m sure is coming. “It looks like it was designed with multiple uses in mind. The fibers could probably process like hemp into a variety of materials. And with processing, it could also be a good food source. It’s not toxic, though the iron content is fairly high—treating the soil might reduce that. The young shoots are high in carbohydrates and a number of vitamins. And now that it’s seeding, the seeds look like they could be a complete protein source. We could harvest them like beans or grain.”

  “You’re suggesting we start a farm?” I conclude, keeping my tone objective despite how infectious her newfound enthusiasm is trying to be.

  “We have the materials—we could build a greenhouse over one of the reactors, harness the heat,” she suggests. “Radiation risk is minimal. Scher’s team says the levels are good, and the samples we’ve taken aren’t hot—the plants don’t hold it.”

  “We don’t have the benefit of a botanist,” Rick reminds me, “but Dr. Ryder was an avid gardener, and she studied herbology…”

  “You used to have a green thumb yourself.” I remember all the plants in his offices at SENTAR R&D. It was like a rainforest for his techs to retreat to, to get away from building better guns for at least a little while.

  As usual, he’s bad at taking a compliment. He just looks at me like I’ve failed to answer the question.

  “Get yourself some volunteers,” I agree. “There might be some eager idle hands among our resident refugees. And it might improve morale around here, give us something worth doing.”

  And I see the change in Ryder, that she’s starting to think about living beyond all the death. Rick gives me just enough of a quick smile to let me know he’s seen it, too. I think the two of them have been getting close over these hard months, though I have to smile at the idea of the reclusive, antisocial Dr. Mann taking up with a widow twenty years younger. But after five months with no contact, some of us are starting to think about how to get on with living.

  “Once we get more mobile, we can make it a priority to keep an eye out for other species,” I encourage. “If this one survived blowing in the wind from somebody’s breached lab or greenhouse, there may be more.”

  “I’m hoping we find some of the facilities intact,” Rick considers after Ryder gets focused on making some plans on her pad.

  “Or at least not contaminated,” I agree.

  “I was thinking in terms of finding people,” he corrects me, testily. “Alive.”

  “There could be significant renewable food sources out there somewhere,” Ryder backs him, though taking less offense. “More hope that there could be other survivors.”

  “We’re still a ways from having the means to make any kind of trek to even the nearer colonies.”

  Oxygen bottles and rebreathers only last hours to a day. The nearest colonies—Avalon and Arcadia—are over seventy-five miles away, northwest and southwest respectively. The nearest other UNMAC base—Melas Three, a small bunkered airbase—is a hundred and twelve miles south-southeast. Melas One, which was still being rebuilt after it was smashed in the slides of ’57—is a hundred and thirty miles west-northwest. The nearest ETE generator is marginally closer—a hundred miles northwest—but it’s also up twelve thousand feet of treacherous Marineris slope (not to mention the air is likely much thinner up that high).

  “Assuming we don’t get help from home,” he redirects. “The transmitter is up?”

  I nod. “But even if we get a call today, it could be a year or more before Earthside gets here.”

  “I think I can keep busy,” he considers, watching Ryder work. Then he gives me a look that lets me know he’s not sure if he wants to pass this news: “Speaking of eager idle hands, Tru Greenlove has been making noise again.”

  “She hasn’t called up to Ops,” I let him know.

  “Not her style, Colonel,” Rick remembers sourly. “First she’ll stir it up, then she’ll come looking for you.” I catch Ryder giving him an equally sour look, like Rick is just being a judgmental old fart.

  “Maybe I should go see her.”

  MAI tells me she’s in the obvious place:

  A-Deck, Main Bunker, Northeast Quadrant.

  We’d given the section to the civilian refugees after Mariner Colony got crushed by slides in ’57, the year before I offloaded on this planet. The concrete casting was barely dry on the bunker shield-walls when we had to quickly take in over two thousand colonists, as well as the bulk of the Melas One UNMAC battalion when they were forced to evacuate as well. An
d this brand-new dug-in bunker complex—the first designed specifically to stand against Disc attack—became a kind of “castle town” surrounded by a shanty camp of temporary shelters. The majority of the refugees camped on the surface, inside the perimeter wall. But when the Discs came to hit us, everybody had to pack into the bunkers (and that was three times what they were designed to hold).

  The section hadn’t been developed when the first wave of refugees came. It was just being used for stores: Six decks of big open spaces—each about twice the size of one of our large barracks—wedged behind the Atmosphere and Water Recycling facilities in the “back corner” of the base. The first arrivals got to work with the same spirit that established twenty colonies on this planet in only ten years. And they used every square inch we could give them. (They even improved the efficiency of our recyclers to support the extra population.)

  By the time of the bombardment seven years later, most of the refugees had either given up on the Martian dream or found a place in the other growing colonies. Those that stuck it out remained camped here while they rotated shifts trying to rebuild Mariner. About five hundred people had managed to move back into that colony when the bombs fell. The two-hundred and thirty-nine that were still living here waiting for a Mariner habitat slot went into Hiber-Sleep with the rest of us. We had more than enough couches for them, especially since we’d just sent ninety of our own personnel—pilots, gunners and rescue teams on the fifteen flyable ships we had—into orbit to try to do some good against the unthinkable.

  But even after seven years of living and working together in such intimate conditions, I expect that there were still tensions felt in giving some of those refugees couches that should have been filled by UNMAC Spacers. More than a few of those refugees were former (or some would say still active) Ecos.

  Truganini Greenlove certainly made few friendships with the military. Beyond the unfortunate name—a product of her rabidly activist co-parents—Tru was no idealistic hippie. While there was no evidence she participated in any of the front-line violence of the Eco War, she was one of their most vocal spokespeople, holding court with a tight circle of equally passionate activists while their “soldiers” held onto Mariner, Liberty and Industry during their little “revolution”.

  Since the slides drove them all out of the colony before I made landfall, I never had to face Tru or her followers behind a gun. But I remember how hard she took it when UNMAC command—under General Ryder—launched their ’59 surge, taking back Industry and Liberty colonies by force, resulting in almost seven hundred fatalities. But to her credit (or some would attribute it to cunning), she stayed with the refugees here at Melas Two when many of her fellows staged a new uprising at the Mariner construction site. It was her reputation with even the most militant Ecos that helped me leverage a cease-fire agreement, while UNMAC—under intense public criticism for the casualties incurred—made good on promises to scale back their military ground presence (at least until the Discs re-escalated things).

  “To what do we owe, Colonel?” she purrs, making a point not to look up from the ration packs she’s been sorting for the night’s meal. I do catch looks from a few of the civvies helping her figure out how to make sure everybody gets enough to eat. Most of them look either nervous or uncomfortable, like I’m bringing bad news (or that anyone in a uniform just simply is bad). They’re mostly twenty-somethings, wearing assorted work gear and casuals that match their ragged but functional grooming: chopped hair, short beards on the males, lean bodies used to eating rations or basic recycle and doing without simulated Earth gravity.

  The bay itself looks much like it did in the days before we slept: a hive of bunks stacked three high, each with a little more than a thin pad for a mattress, and paired with a small a storage locker. They had been scavenged from construction ships landed as temporary barracks for colony workers. The tight spaces between the stacks form “common” areas for sitting, eating, and socializing. Curtains made from survival blankets separate blocks of bunks into somewhat more private barracks, and some are arranged for families (Halley’s census tells me there are forty sets of co-parents caring for sixty-two children, and at least two expectant mothers). They’d even installed their own communal kitchens, toilets and showers for each section.

  Each of the four sections—stacked on top of each other from A to D Deck—now houses sixty to seventy refugees, a ghost town compared to when it was four times that many, but it still makes our enlisted trooper barracks look luxurious.

  Maybe two-thirds of the adults aren’t here during the day shifts. Several dozen of them have volunteered to help Thomasen’s engineer group dig us out. Others have been helping restore the base, pulling shifts as medics and nurses, using their expertise to assist wherever they can, and working to keep everybody as fed and healthy as possible. Those that are “home” are sleeping for night shift work, cleaning up, cooking, or running a makeshift school/daycare for the children (who at least don’t recoil as much as their parents do at the sight of a uniform).

  “A rumor you’ve been looking for me,” I greet her back. I see her grin. Her long, straight hair—black frosted with gray—falls over her pale, partially oriental features. She has faint scarring on her cheekbones from the rigors of colony life.

  “You’re not hard to find, boss,” she denies, still not looking up from her inventory. “But then, neither am I.”

  “Sorry I haven’t gotten over here sooner,” I try.

  “Restarting civilization from scratch and all,” she jokes, finally showing me her green eyes, but staying aloof. “I get it. Besides: Not really your neighborhood.”

  “No excuses,” I try again, then get to the point. “We’ve shut you out. I’d say it’s because of the seriousness of the situation, but that’s exactly why you should be involved.”

  “Being proactive, Colonel… Very nice. I think you’ll work out better than your predecessors.”

  I glance up at the eyes still uncomfortably on us, then suggest: “Can we go somewhere else?”

  “Well, since you hobbled your old frame all the way down here, I suppose I could suffer equally,” she agrees after a moment of letting me stew. She uses her hands to push herself up out of her chair, then rebalances herself to get her prosthetic right leg—a casualty of early colony building—properly under her. She takes me arm-and-arm (not as any need for support, just to show off with a wink to her cadres) and takes the lead on a walk toward a back corner of the bay. She moves with a pronounced limp, but her step is still lively.

  The section’s north wall on this deck is one of few places with windows, and it’s been arranged for recreation, relaxation. There isn’t much actual view because there’s a ridgeline that runs just to the north of the bunkers, but you can see the distant canyon rims above it. The winds are starting to kick up again as the sun gets lower in the west.

  She turns, leads me through a curtain and into a narrow space which I realize is around the back of Water Recycling—I can hear the uneven thrum of the plumbing. Bunks are stacked to either side of us. She takes me back through one more curtain, to a space just big enough for a single bunk and a locker, and a small dome light. There are posters of Earth—trees and grass and water—on the walls.

  “Make yourself comfy.” She gestures for me to sit. “I don’t entertain much anymore.”

  “I’m thinking we need a refugee representative sitting in on our command briefings,” I tell her, getting right to business.

  “And I thought you were just taking me somewhere to make out,” she jibes, dropping down next to me, then running her index finger down my shoulder.

  “Are you going to hold an election, or just take the job by default?” I ignore.

  “Ouch,” she concedes with a pout.

  “Not the answer I was looking for,” I press her.

  “Do we get full disclosure?” she wants to know, sitting up, finally turning serious. “Rumors are flying, Colonel. It’s all scary science fiction:
Dead Earth. No survivors. Nanobug monsters. Engineered plagues. Discs controlling the planet. And we had friends and family out there in the colonies.”

  “Full disclosure is we still haven’t heard anything from anyone,” I give her. “The transmitter just went up, but planetary alignment isn’t promising—won’t be for several months. And I won’t keep it a secret if we get a reply.”

  “Unless you’re ordered to,” she counters.

  “I’m not sure how that works if the books say I’ve been dead fifty years,” I allow myself to get lighter with her. “If I’m still working for them, I think they owe me enough back-pay to buy a small country.”

  She smiles at that, but then presses:

  “You thinking of resigning your commission?”

  “If we don’t hear otherwise, I’m an officer in a non-existent army. Then you’ll need to hold a whole other sort of election.”

  “You telling me you wouldn’t pull any martial-law bullshit on us?” All the (probably defensive) playfulness is gone now. She’s playing the leader of her people.

  “I’ve heard of this thing called ‘democracy’. Apparently it’s worked okay in the past.”

  She smiles again, her face showing a few lines around her eyes. “I was serious before. You’re actually pretty tasty for an old jarhead. Screw what the kids think—let me know if you get lonely.”

  I give her a noncommittal nod, get up to let myself out.

  “I’ll be in touch.”

  I realize that probably just encouraged her.