The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN (8 page)

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 erased.

(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.