The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN (6 page)

“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 plexi 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 plexi 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 plexi 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 plexi 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 plexi.

“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.