The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN (4 page)

“Or
doesn’t
know,” I consider again. “I’m
getting the impression it was milking me to fill in gaps in its
own
memory.”

“Or trying to re-organize scrambled datafiles,”
Staley wonders out loud. He continues the replay, listening as
intently as he can:

“Yes. UNMAC was hoping my reputation from the War on
Terror would scare the Ecos into cooperation…”

“They didn’t count on what a good diplomat you turned
out to be,” Matthew remembers with a weak grin.

“…managed to open talks with them. But the
corporations got impatient, pressured UNMAC to hit them hard in.
The ’59 Offensive took back Industry, Freedom and Frontier,
establishing garrisons in those colonies. The Ecos held onto
Mariner. But the bloodshed turned the free world against UNMAC and
the nations supporting the war, so the UN offered a major troop
reduction.

“And that’s when the Discs show up again, in force.
Hit-and-fade attacks against colony labs. Gagarin Colony gets hit
hard, and all they were doing was engineering better crops. Then
they come after us when we move to defend the labs, tearing up our
bases, shooting down our aircraft, strafing convoys. Now everybody
is blaming everybody else for the Discs: Ecos, competitors. There’s
even a popular conspiracy theory that UNMAC is creating an excuse
to further militarize and control the planet, a False Flag
play.

“In any case, we escalate. We spend the next three
years in a shooting war with the Discs, who show up in greater
numbers with each attack. We never do learn where they originate,
where they go to ground. We never get one intact, not even
fragments to analyze, because of how completely they break down.
There’s a growing fringe that insists we’re dealing with
extra-terrestrials, but these flying bastards are actually pretty
simple conventionally-armed drones. And we never see the things in
orbit.”

“UNTIL THE BOMBARDMENT.”

“See!” Staley almost shouts. “There! It’s like MAI
is
trying to fill in or confirm what it should already
know!”

“So it’s got memory damage?” Matthew assumes.

“No sign of EMP corruption during the bombardment,
which means the EM shielding held,” Staley denies. “The loss seems
to be isolated to archive files, not the operating system.”

“Except it won’t answer a simple question,” Matthew
grouses. “Like ‘What day is it?’ or where the hell is Cal
Copeland?”

“What about some other kind of corruption?” I wonder
out loud.

“Colonel?” Staley looks at me like he doesn’t want me
to say what I’m thinking.

“How long can a system like MAI go without
maintenance and not show degradation due to age?”

The look he gives me says that he doesn’t know and
doesn’t want to think about it.

“So our AI’s gone senile?” Matthew blurts out. “In a
dozen or so months?”

Staley doesn’t answer him, but I see him calculating
the implication uncomfortably. I continue the playback:

“Until the bombardment,” I’m agreeing with MAI.
Then:

“WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE BOMBARDMENT?”

I listen to myself pause at that, remember how
incredulous I was at the question. There’s something odd even in
the wording of it: “Who
is
responsible,” not “Who
was
responsible.” As if it’s not wanting history, but wanting to place
blame. I’m surprised to hear my reply come as quick as it does—I
was sure I deliberated for several minutes.
“MAI, do you not serve in the capacity of Tactical AI as well as
base operating system?”

“THIS IS CORRECT.” First time it actually answered a
question. I remember hoping, in my bleary-eyed almost-passing-out
haze, that I was finally getting somewhere.

“Then shouldn’t it be
you
who analyses the
available data and provides
me
with the likely answer to
that question?”

“INPUT IS INSUFFICIENT FOR ANALYSIS. PLEASE GIVE YOUR
REPORT.”

I remember getting another shock at this, but then,
given the extreme chaos of the event, it made a kind of sense: All
the chaotic, fragmented incoming data may have been too much for
MAI to process, especially as our communications were being cut.
MAI lost its eyes and ears in the middle of it. It likely doesn’t
know what happened, what the outcome was. And nobody’s come since
to fill in those blanks. Maybe that leaves MAI somehow “stuck” in
the moment, unable to resolve the scenario, unable to plan beyond
it. Or maybe something happened after, something that also explains
what happened to Cal Copeland. (Maybe MAI really doesn’t know what
happened to Cal.)

“The most likely conclusion is that it was whoever
was behind all of the Disc attacks since ’49. And we still don’t
know who that was. But they had to have the resources to build and
place the drones on planet. And they had to have a way to access
the colony systems to simulate multiple site breaches.
And
detailed intel on the Shield in order to hack it.

“The Ares’ Shield platform had only been activated a
month prior, reluctantly placed in orbit by UNMAC to appease the
growing popular fear that an unstoppable nanotech plague might get
loose and kill all life. But no one underestimated how dangerous
the platform was. Security for the project was
extreme
. We
were agreeing to point nuclear weapons at ourselves. We had to
trust that the system was redundantly safe, that no one could use
it against us, unless the worst did happen and it was absolutely
necessary to protect Earth and we were already as good as
dead.”

“WHY DID YOU MAKE THE ASSUMPTION THAT THE WEAPONS
PLATFORM COULD NOT BE TURNED AGAINST YOU?”

Now the machine almost sounds prosecutorial. I watch
myself trying to fumble for an answer—a reasonable
answer—especially given my feelings regarding the placing of the
platform.

“
I
would not have made that assumption, MAI,”
I qualified my answer, but I do sound beyond angry, quickly losing
any professionalism I’m hanging onto, thinking about the thousands
and thousands that must be dead because of the stupidity that comes
with fear. “I’m a soldier. I expect things to go wrong. I expect
vulnerabilities to be exploited by my enemies.”

“YOUR ASSESSMENT IS LOGICALLY SOUND,” it tells me
after a fraction of a second’s delay.

“But you want to know why
other
people—the
ones that pushed for placing the Shield—assumed it could not be
purposefully turned against us?”

“PLEASE GIVE ME YOUR ANALYSIS.”

I watch Matthew’s eyebrows go halfway up his
forehead. Staley is mesmerized. The AI does sound like it’s
desperate for some kind of understanding.

“I expect it was too big, too unimaginable. Tens of
thousands of lives were under that gun. The idea that someone would
intentionally burn the whole planet, kill everyone … No one
considered—or wanted to consider—that
anyone
was fanatical
enough to commit planetary genocide, simply given the means.

“The Ecos were always careful with human life, even
in their greatest militancy. And they were beginning to become
mainstream, to move away from violence into diplomacy and
democratic politics. They might still have a few hardcore holdouts,
isolated fanatics, but whoever pulled this off was big and
well-coordinated. And something that big and that scary
should
have shown up on the radar. Intel should have picked
up
something
. But there was no one we saw with any apparent
motive for genocide.

“Even if the Discs—and whoever was behind them—could
be considered a threat to the entire Martian project, genocide
didn’t fit with their established methods: The drones were always
selective with their attacks, only targeting labs and the military.
They didn’t target the colony biospheres. And they never touched
the ETE terra-forming stations, even when the embattled labs moved
their hottest research there for protection.”

“THE DISCS DID INITIATE THE BOMBARDMENT.”

“Yes,” I admitted, feeling the foolishness of the
defense I just made, even though I’d never had much faith in it.
“So either they were trying to eliminate everyone on Mars, or—if
they
were
being run by one of the national or corporate
players on-planet—they were counting on their own interest’s
countermeasures to spare them.”

Then I consider the obvious next question:

“Who else has survived, MAI?”

“UNKNOWN.” At least it’s an answer. If nothing else,
a willingness to admit ignorance.

“Has there been
any
contact from Earth?”

No answer. Back to where I was before. But I pushed
anyway:

“Has there been any contact from any of
colonies?”

No answer.

“Has there been any sign of activity on the
surface?”

No answer.

“How long have we been asleep, MAI?”

No answer.

“What happened to Colonel Copeland?”

Day 4:

“Okay—Colonels, Doctor—this is what I’ve managed to
find out so far…”

Staley seems reasonably bright despite starting his
rehab PT this morning. He should be in agony like the rest of us.
(He very well may be—the chipper mood may just be his pain meds.)
We older folks almost needed wheelchairs just to get here: The
Officer’s Mess, just around the corner from our block of quarters,
re-tasked for now into a Command Briefing Room. (Our actual
dedicated Command Briefing Room is almost straight above us in the
Command Tower, but none of us are looking forward to stairs just
yet).

Allison Ryder had the longest trip since she was just
at work in B-Deck Medical, doing her part to monitor the recovery
of 1197 people (including herself). She must have drawn the short
straw among her fellow physicians Halley and Shenkar, or maybe
their patient load was heavier, because she got sent up to
represent them at this quick intimate briefing. She’s looking as
old as I feel (possibly as old as Matthew feels) and she’s only 55.
But she has more than just fatigue to account for it.

“Bad news first,” Staley gets right to it, bringing
his figures up on the wall screens that are usually used for Link
or—more routinely—entertainment feed. “Something’s wrong with the
nuclear batteries. They’re running below 40%, which makes no sense
since they were supposed to last a hundred years. That’s impacting
everything, including the atmosphere scrubbers.

“The scrubbers themselves are straining above normal,
which makes sense with all the grunting and huffing trying to get
almost twelve-hundred people up after what’s likely been several
months of hibernation. But I asked Lieutenant Rios to have his more
mobile bodies pull a sampling of the filters, and they’re unusually
cruddy and breaking down, which is odd since they should have been
barely working while we were asleep. It looks like they’re all long
past due for replacement. We’ve started swapping out from our
stores, and cleaning the ones that can be recycled, but it will
take awhile. The good news is we seem to be breathing pretty
well.”

I watch Matthew take an extra-deep breath, like he
doesn’t trust Staley’s assessment of the air systems.

“Any idea what could account for all the grit in the
filters?” Ryder asks. “Could we have a leak? Sand getting into the
system?”

“Preliminary indicators say we’re intact,” he tells
her. “And the crud isn’t sand. It’s just dust. I asked for samples
to be sent to the labs, but it looks like what we’d normally shed
into the air. There’s just a lot of it.”

“It may be the effect of running on limited power for
so long,” I wonder.

“Colonel Copeland would have left the air systems
running for himself,” Ryder considers.

“He would have shut down all sections he didn’t
need,” Matthew assumes.

“But it’s dusty in Ops,” I say what’s bothering me.
“And in his quarters.”

“And we still have no idea what happened to him?”
Ryder pushes, sounding anxious.

“Records are dumped,” Anton reports heavily. “It’s
like MAI just didn’t bother to record anything while we were
sleeping.”

“Was MAI offline?” Ryder is starting to get a sense
of the weirdness we’ve been dealing with. I expect she—and the
other department heads—have only just recently reviewed the
recording of my wake-up “interview” that I selectively
released.

“MAI has a ‘Sleep’ protocol for emergency
conservation, but it stays on stand-by,” Anton explains. “It would
have woken up and monitored any activity. And it wouldn’t have gone
to sleep to begin with if Colonel Copeland was awake and
working.”

“Unless he ordered it to,” Matthew lets us know what
he’s been thinking.

“Why?” Ryder presses.

“Maybe he thought we’d be down awhile,” Anton offers,
though doesn’t sound like he believes the possibility. “Maybe he
thought he needed to conserve resources.”

“Or MAI did,” Matthew throws out another worrisome
possibility.

“How are the post-sleep evals coming?” I ask Ryder,
partially changing the subject.

“Everyone reports the same. We made it through the
worst. Eleven-hundred and ninety-seven souls, all alive and
breathing…” But I watch her lips purse, her eyes get moist. She’s
thinking about her husband. General Ryder was on Phobos.

“Despite the power issue, it looks like MAI put
priority on keeping us healthy,” she continues after taking a
moment to compose herself. “No sign of significant tissue damage in
any of the personnel I’ve examined. Everybody is stable. We’ll need
time to do more detailed workups to be sure.”

“But no idea how long we’ve been out?” Matthew asks
one of the big questions, one we’ve all been asking for days.

“I know it feels worse than the average shuttle
sleep,” she admits the obvious. “And it looks worse, too. The
problem is I don’t have access to the research they were doing for
flights to the outer planets—that was still going on when we got
cut off. We don’t know what more than a year deep-under looks
like.”