The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN

by Michael Rizzo

  Chapter 1: New World Order

  11 July, 2115:

  Sergeant Morales can’t help but jump—her victory shout muffled by her mask but loud-and-clear on the Link—as ASV-5 makes a slow but relatively even turn a hundred feet above the plain beyond the main gate. Its VTOL jets kick up a haze of rusty dust, but they don’t sputter this time. They burn steady, shoving out the steam exhaust that comes from burning hydrogen with oxygen. The steam rises fast and thick in the cold morning air.

  I can see Paul’s signature blue suit standing silently behind Morales’ group of cheering techs on the pads. Morales bounces over to him and gives him another solid celebratory slap on the shoulder. Paul doesn’t seem to respond, or perhaps he doesn’t really know how to. If he is smiling under his silver mask, I can’t see it.

  (“Damn thing makes him look like a chrome bug,” Matthew has more than once complained about the opaque ETE faceplate. “Like that old movie where the guy winds up with a fly head.”)

  “One up, four to go—if you include the Flash Gordon Special,” Matthew barely (reluctantly?) celebrates, leaning on his stick as he watches the ASV practice a field landing, touching its legs gently to the rocky plain, before blasting off hard and heading out for a longer spin in the valley.

  “Should be two by next week,” I remind him. He turns to look back toward the pads. He lets himself smile, watching Morales’ team celebrate. But then his eyes lock on Paul, and he goes stoic again. “You ever planning to cut the man some slack, Matthew?”

  “Is he ever planning to share his little Fountain of Youth with us?” Matthew gives back half-hearted.

  “Would you take it if he offered?”

  He chuckles under his mask, shakes his head. “Hell, no. Who wants to live forever?” He chips at the bunker concrete with his stick—the topsides of the bunkers are steadily getting riddled by his frustrated tic. “Still, a working interplanetary radio would be nice.”

  I let the comment go ignored—we’ve had this conversation enough times. Paul can’t make the deal himself, so we need to go to the source ourselves, try to force a meeting with his mysterious Council of Elders, as soon as we have the wings to get ourselves there.

  The ASV is already out of sight, its only tell the mixed cloud-trail of dust and rapidly condensing steam it has left in its wake. Kastl is keeping running commentary over the Link, letting us know that the cobbled systems are still running within parameters.

  I look back again at Paul, who has moved further away from the celebrations of Morales’ crew. He’s looking out to the north, and I follow his masked gaze as best I can estimate. What he’s looking at becomes quickly obvious: On a rise about half-a-klick out is the speck of incongruous color that betrays another blue-suited figure—likely Simon—standing out there, watching us. Watching Paul.

  Paul turns and goes back inside.

  I go looking for him again when he doesn’t appear for lunch (but then, none of the seniors have been eating on schedule since Paul started trying to help us). MAI—keeping close tabs on him—lets me know he’s in one of the B-Deck labs.

  “The Sphere is a kind of blunt instrument,” Paul is telling Anton and Rick as they labor over the fine hardware of the makeshift transmitter, its once neatly modular components broken open and strewn across a luminous worktable. “It projects a field that selectively affects the binding and repelling forces of matter. We designed them for defense and shelter when in the field. The Rods are more precise tools—their effect can be focused down to a few nanometers. I can use them to cut, fuse, push and pull.”

  “But you can’t just whip us up a new set of processors,” Anton allows. Paul shakes his head, his mouth almost pouting.

  “First problem: I’m a geologist, not an electrical engineer,” he apologizes. “I was hoping you still had enough available parts that I could help you cobble together, clean up, fit. I can do basic reshaping, cutting, welding, machining—that was enough to help Sergeant Morales make the parts she needed and put a ship together. Still, it took her almost a month to teach me what I needed to know about your aircraft to be of any use.

  “Which gets me to my second barrier: my tools are limited by hand-eye coordination. My visor lets me see down to micro scale, but actually working that small is impossible with the tools I have. Even if you could teach me about nano-circuit design, I can’t work as small as you need, no more than you could fashion the circuits with hand tools.”

  “And you can’t just give us new gear,” Anton states in a way that it is clearly not a question. Paul answers him anyway with a bitter head shake.

  “Could your people repair our gear if we sent it to your Stations?” I interject as I let myself in to the lab. Paul looks up and gives me a quick smile of greeting, but then he scowls again. His eyes do that thing where it looks like he’s holding an internal argument. Then he takes a deep, hard breath.

  “We do have tech-manufacturing capabilities, of course, though they’re not geared to work on technology this…” His voice trails off with a shrug.

  “Primitive?” Rick fills in, keeping his annoyance fairly well in check.

  “Large,” Paul tries. “All of our technology is nano-scale, Doctor. And it’s all cross-interface designed—it all works only in harmony with similar technology. So even if our Council allowed you access to one of our transmitters, you couldn’t make it work.”

  “But you could,” Anton tries the obvious, hopeful. Paul looks conflicted.

  “I’m not sure how Earth would respond to receiving a call after all these years that comes from gear like yours,” I let him off the hook. “There will be enough hard to explain topics as it is.” Rick nods heavily in agreement. Paul gives me an uncomfortable half-grin.

  “Manufacturing your technology would likely require complete re-programming of our nano-builders, assuming any of our Elders is still familiar with this kind of hardware,” Paul estimates, sounding wearily frustrated. Then he goes quiet for a moment, brooding. “I think that’s the reason my brother left me here to do as I pleased: he knew just how far I could get. And this is it: I can help you rebuild your base, get your simple vehicles running again, guide you as best I can with what little I know of the surface tribes… I can even help build you a proper Uplink antenna. But any hope of replacing your processors is going to require Council approval, and I’m afraid they will be even less receptive to the idea than Simon was.”

  “You made Simon a good argument,” Anton praises him. “Earth will come back, and better with us telling them that you’re allies, not…” He stops himself, as if not wanting to offend.

  “Suspicious, contaminated freaks?” Paul concludes himself.

  “I was looking for a better way to say it,” Anton apologizes.

  “But it’s what Earthside will think,” I agree.

  “My people did keep you asleep for fifty years,” Paul admits. “I’m sure it will be assumed that we did it to hide what we’ve been doing, what we’ve become.”

  I give him a reluctant nod.

  “What the Colonel is too polite to say is that helping us—even this late in the game—would make you look a lot more benign and trustworthy than refusing to,” Rick takes it after a few beats on uncomfortable silence. “They’ll still need damn good reasons for everything else they’ve done, but full cooperation might be seen as a good-faith step in the right direction.”

  “My people have done amazing things,” Paul does a poor job excusing, betraying his own feelings on the matter. “Their fatal flaw is that they did them in isolation, with no concern for the opinions or fears of Earth. In fact, I’m sure my forefathers were convinced that Earth would actually attempt to interfere with their efforts to provide the survivors necessary air and water and heat. You have to imagine what those times were like: Like the rest of the survivors, we quickly came to fear what Earth might do, so much that we chose to hide from them, to maroon ourselves, to give up any hope of returning ‘home’. After that, all we had was time a
nd ourselves, and a cache of radical research projects given into our safekeeping by the corporate labs that feared the Ecos or Discs would destroy their precious work. The directed advancement of that technology gave us purpose to fill the years—the Stations’ terraforming plants are very self-sustaining; they could go on operating without us. In turn, we put the advancements we made to the only things that were important: accelerating the terraforming of the planet for the benefit of everyone trying to live here, and keeping ourselves thriving to do so.”

  “You have amazing compassion for someone raised in elite isolation,” I compliment him.

  “I am a rare exception,” Paul discounts. “Which is why my own brother keeps watch over me.”

  “How rare?” I ask. “Are there others we could contact?”

  “No one in authority,” he admits sadly. “Like many cultures, our ‘rebels’ tend to be our youth, not our established senior leadership. And that is another reason you may find little welcome in our Stations: The Council will fear the dissent you may sow in the younger generations.”

  “So our waking up hasn’t been made general knowledge among your people yet?” Anton asks him.

  “As I told you, I was officially censored by the Council, ordered not to speak of you to anyone—I was even kept under watch, which made getting back here a creative challenge. And while I unexpectedly found you awake, I fully expect the Council knew you had woken as soon as you began moving on the surface, changing your power-consumption profile. I have no reason to believe the Council would be any more open with this knowledge than before, just as they have made no attempts to contact you. You are UNMAC, remember, and UNMAC has become synonymous with unreasoning fear, mindless destruction. You are seen as the ultimate enemy to all precious life on this planet. The surviving tribes have taken to calling you the ‘Unmakers.’ You are the devil of their mythologies.”

  “And if we show up on the doorstep?” I let him know what I’m considering. “Fly out to the nearest Station and knock on the hatch? Do your people answer? Do they disintegrate us? Or do they just keep pretending nobody’s home?”

  Paul looks like he’s struggling for any kind of answer.

  “Is it worth going?” I try.

  “I suppose better that way, than by some surprise encounter that results in gunfire,” Paul accepts, then he laughs under his breath.

  “Like our surprise encounter with you,” I tell him I get the joke. He rubs his chest like it still hurts sometimes.

  “Yes, Colonel. That could have gone better.”