The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN (7 page)

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?”

Day 6:

“Fifty years.”

Halley lays it on the table without preamble.

We all sit in numb shock. The Officers’ Mess goes
silent as a funeral.

All I can think of is that it should be more of a
surprise, but I’m still feeling the dust-burn from that lung-full
of Martian air I gulped down yesterday. Air that shouldn’t be
there, not even with the Environmental Terraforming Enterprises’
best PR spiel, not for at least
twice
as long as Halley’s
answer.

“That’s based on what we found when we pulled apart
the Hiber-Sleep systems,” she qualifies. “The chemicals and
nutrients are almost fully depleted. We were down for the maximum
time the system could keep us. And that was a lot longer than it
should have been, except MAI apparently figured out an algorithm
for adjusting our sleep feed to make it last almost two decades
beyond what the original system specs projected. It did a damn good
job, too, considering how well we all made it through.”

“If we can find something resembling a working
telescope, we could probably confirm based on planetary positions,”
Lisa offers, the shakiness in her tone letting us know she’s not
really eager to confirm Halley’s estimation. But from the looks on
the faces around the table, no one doubts Halley. All they’d have
to do is poke their heads topside without a pressure suit if they
needed convincing—and I know almost anyone who could walk far
enough to get to the breached bay has at least gone up long enough
to experience the unbelievable first-hand.

Anton especially doesn’t look surprised at Halley’s
numbers. He looks tense, scared, angry.

“I’m still not sure what happened,” he tells us. “It
looks like MAI went into some kind of modified sleep mode for
extended periods, and had to give itself several restores. There
was corruption. Hardware degradation. Memory is lost. Yet it worked
a miracle in keeping us alive, managing power, tweaking the
Hiber-Sleep systems.”

“Did it have
help
?” Lisa asks him, thinking of
her mystery footprints—footprints we found more of in the breached
vehicle bay.

“
Someone
was down here,” he admits. “But
there’s no record of it. And no record of what happened to Colonel
Copeland. It could be that MAI just overwrote the security files to
save more critical software along the way. Or it could be
tampering.”

“But who would come down here, check on us, maybe
adjust our sleep meds to keep us out longer, then leave us here,
erasing their passing?” Matthew doesn’t buy the benevolent visitor
theory. His eyes are still distant—he can’t get the experience of
standing on the surface without a suit out of his mind. None of us
can. “What about the air?” he changes the subject. “Anybody figure
that out yet?”

“The Terraforming Stations weren’t targeted by the
nukes,” Lisa tries. “No one wanted to burn something that expensive
and that would give this rock a future for mankind, not even when
it went public that the corporate labs were moving their scariest
projects to the Stations to protect them from the Ecos and the
Discs. So they’ve been running all this time. Even if the crews
were dead, they’d just keep cooking the planet on automatic.”

“And if the crews
weren’t
dead, they would
have made contact with Earthside,” Matthew concludes bitterly.
“Either that, or we just figured out who’s been behind the Discs.
Someone at ETE wanted the planet to themselves?”

“Interesting theory, Colonel,” Anton agrees, an
unusual darkness in his tone. “Add this into it: The nuking
actually
helped
them. That’s probably why the air outside is
twice as thick as it should be, even given ETE’s best projections.
I ran a few simulations through MAI: The nukes generated heat,
lots
of heat. And freed up lots of water from the deep
permafrost. On top of that, they threw tons upon tons of crap into
the sky. On Earth, that would spell nuclear winter. On Mars, we get
a greenhouse effect. Think about what the ETE generators do:
they’re big, hot reactors. They free water, raise the temperature,
pump what would otherwise be fluorocarbon pollution into the
atmosphere to make a solar radiation shield, make the air thick
enough to hold the heat they put out and what the sun beats down.
Over time, the sun plays a bigger and bigger role because there’s
more to absorb its energy. The stations all get this big bonus
boost. And all this time their processing plants have been freeing
oxygen, stockpiling byproducts in the form of hydrogen fuel and
iron ore.”

“And they conveniently got the colony labs to hand
over their hottest science for ‘safekeeping,’” Ryder adds in,
agreeing with Matthew’s suspicions, her voice edged with the
persistent rage that comes from grief.

“So the ETE Corporation planned this whole thing
out?” I question. And I realize I’d like to have a target for my
rage as much as anyone down here, but it doesn’t add for me. “How
could they benefit financially from this if they effectively cut
themselves off from Earth?”

“Maybe they got themselves evacuated a long time
ago,” Anton considers grimly. “Declared us all dead, covered their
tracks, smuggled the profitable research home.”

Matthew is nodding in agreement.

“I can’t see it,” I counter. “What about Earth? Did
they just take the ETE crews at their word, evac them and not look
any further? Then close the book and don’t come back? For
fifty
years?”

“If the ETE Corporation—or whoever—could pull off the
Disc attacks and set off the Ares’ Shield, then maybe they could
sell Earthside a hopeless worst case,” Lisa throws out, “make it
look like everyone else was dead—and maybe everyone else
was
dead. With us conveniently buried.”

“And the planet hopelessly contaminated,” Matthew
plays in. “Or at least made to look that way.”

“And the ETE leave their stations running in hopes of
coming back some day,” Anton adds on.

“Corporate raiding at its finest,” Matthew finishes
his nightmare.

“But I can’t see Earthside just leaving it at that,
no matter how bad it was,” Halley protests. “They’d at least keep
watch. Survey the established sites. Even if the other colonies and
bases were all nuked,
we
weren’t. A close look would have
shown that. They would have come for us.”

“Maybe they couldn’t,” Lisa considers. “Maybe the
Discs were waiting to fight them back, keep them away. They trashed
our entire incoming shuttle network in minutes, took down the
docks. If the Discs established a blockade, controlled orbit… ”

“And Earth would just leave it at that?” Ryder
denies.

“We’ve got a makeshift receiver dish up on the
surface now,” Anton reminds us. “It’s dead quiet up there. No
signals. Not from any of the colonies. Not from the other two
bases. Not from orbit. Not from Earth—granted, we’re sitting almost
opposite from the sun if the date’s right, but I’d expect to pick
up noise if they were still sending.” He lies back in his chair,
still so very easily fatigued—youth doesn’t seem to be much
advantage after we’ve all slept the last half-century together.

“Maybe they gave up,” Matthew throws out darkly.
“Maybe they tried. Tried some more. Got nothing. Took the ETE or
whoever survived at their word that there wasn’t anyone left to
save. Or maybe they lost too many more lives trying.”

“I can’t buy,” Ryder bites back. “They’d have to be
watching the planet growing an atmosphere, see the stations still
humming. They’d come back. If the Discs met them, they’d come back
harder. They’ve had
fifty years
to fight their way back
here.”

“Maybe they have,” Anton offers. “Maybe they came and
went.”

“And didn’t find us?” she counters harder, her anger
flushing her. “I’ve been up there. Yes, the base is buried, but you
can still see signs of it if you know what you’re looking for. And
even if you couldn’t see it from space, global positioning would
pinpoint it for you, or you could just find it on a map…”

“
Somebody
found us,” Lisa considers, flashing
her mystery footprints up on the table’s holoscreen.

“And left us here,” Matthew finishes the obvious
thought. “Maybe kept us asleep longer.”

“It would have been easier to kill us all,” I make
clear. “All they’d have to do is cut power to the chambers. Why
didn’t they?”

I get no theories, only uncomfortable squirming.

“But the footprints mean somebody’s been walking
around recently,” I try to progress Lisa’s thought in a more
promising direction. “Someone was here. And that means everybody
isn’t dead or evacuated. And it wasn’t a rescue crew, or we
wouldn’t still be here.”

I see a look of validation in Lisa’s eyes—the mystery
of her footprints have been almost an obsession. And, like me, she
doesn’t believe they were simply made by Colonel Copeland before he
met whatever fate he did.

“We don’t know what the surface looks like from
orbit—or from Earth,” Lisa tries. “Someone else could have found a
way to survive, just without a means to be seen or heard from
space. Marineris is twenty-eight hundred miles long and hundreds
wide—it’s a lot of territory to search. We know slides came down
all over. There’s a good chance the whole landscape is different.
Everything in the valleys could have been buried if it wasn’t
nuked, or maybe the survivors had to evacuate their established
sites and dig in elsewhere—they could have gone unfound. And maybe
the surface
does
show signs of contamination—if those labs
weren’t breached before the bombs fell, odds are hot they broke
open during the bombing.”

“It’s been fifty years,” Ryder reconsiders, sounding
beaten, sounding like a woman who’s just coming to grips with her
husband dying in an unimaginable genocidal atrocity, and
simultaneously trying to grasp that it happened fifty years ago.
“Who knows what could have happened…”

“And we can’t risk jumping in to find out,” I focus
them on the present. “Not yet, anyway.” Then I tell Lisa and Anton:
“Just keep a passive listener on the surface for now. Don’t send
any signals out until further notice. Just in case. We’re in no
shape to respond if the Discs
are
still waiting out there,
and if they are, then they’ve effectively held the planet for all
this time.” Then I turn to Halley and Ryder. “Rehab is priority
one. We need back on our feet before we can do much about anything.
Next, we concentrate on getting this pit as livable as possible,
figure out the long term. If we don’t hear anything from the Discs
by then, we go up, dust the place off, start making noise. See and
be seen. I just want us to be in fighting shape if bad comes. Which
means digging out and repairing the batteries, the tracks, the
rovers, the ASVs that are still down in the hangars because they
wouldn’t fly…”

They nod in solemn agreement, but I can tell they
wish I would give them something more. So I do:

“First we get on our feet. Then we get some wheels
and some wings. And some guns, as many as we can get functional,
just in case. Once we do that, then if nobody comes looking for us
when we start making noises, we go looking for them.”

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.