The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN (9 page)

“Colonel Ram,” I hear Anton on the Link before I’m
finished. “We’re about ready to try a test, sir.”

“I’ll be right up.”

I don’t hurry, though. Instead, I catch myself
sitting and staring at the deck. Thinking of Matthew. It’s not like
him to dip so far into hopelessness, even with all he’s been
suffering physically. The last time he was remotely like this was
when an assassin missed him (maybe on purpose) and took away what
was probably the first actual love of his life. He retired for
awhile after that, but couldn’t stay out of the game for long.

But he’s not wrong: when they offered me a choice
between a pretty public “hero’s” retirement (filled with carefully
scripted face-tours and media-friendly endorsement opportunities
until I’d aged safely off the celebrity radar) or a trip the hell
off the planet (even if it was designed to get me martyred so I
couldn’t cause them any more trouble), I got on the shuttle without
a second thought.

Yes, Matthew. We did some evil things in the name of
a “better” world, more than whatever we “fixed” could ever pay off.
On Earth. But on Mars, I thought—for the first time in a long
time—that I could do something better. But only if I could start
fresh.

And Mars itself was just getting started—a new world.
There was hope, possibility. And because basic survival was still
tenuous, that made cooperation a premium: working together to keep
each other alive. Fighting endangered
everyone
—it was far
too easy to destroy the delicate resources that kept humans alive
here. If we took the killing path—the path that was too often the
rule on Earth—we would kill ourselves in the process.

That simple fact gave us leverage over what Earthside
demanded we do.

We were supposed to
kill
the Ecos,
Matthew—that was what the corporations wanted, that was why they
sent us—and if this were Earth, we would have, and with little
hesitation, wiped them out like any other kind of “terrorist.” But
instead, I made peace with them, brought them back into the fold,
made them part of building something here instead of tearing it
down.

I made enemies into friends—that’s something I could
die with. And now I wonder if any of those friends managed to
survive.

Anton and Lisa are waiting up in Command Ops, like
they really need my presence to turn on the new beacon. At least
the stair climb has become easy again.

The view from Ops is much better than my first trip
up, now that we’ve got the Tower unburied and the blast shields
over the viewports can stay open. The natural daylight even makes
the place less tomb-like.

(It’s one of the precious few places that filtered
daylight can get inside the bunkers—the vast majority of the
installation is below ground, and the one deck that’s at surface
level only has windows in the airlock staging areas, which have now
become favorite leisure-time spaces when not being used to move
large numbers of personnel in and out. Otherwise, you have to work
in the Ops Tower or the Air-Com Tower to have a view.)

Matthew isn’t here, of course. I look out through the
panoramic pillbox slit of thick plexi, scanning the mostly
uncovered base and perimeter wall until think I see him still out
on the sand: old man with a stick, staring out west through the
main “gate”, out beyond the base perimeter. I’m not sure if he’s
hoping to see someone come out of that waste, or maybe thinking
about disappearing into it himself.

Lisa’s been watching him too. I notice her eyes keep
tracking back out the windows, like she’s passively keeping an eye
on him. She’s known him almost as long as I have. And she sat up
late with him, night after night when the rehab was keeping him
sleepless and in pain, trading places with me when I needed to go
fall down myself. A vigil of old friends, though Lisa and I barely
spoke to each other beyond what a Base CO needs to talk about with
his acting Operations XO. We were civil, professional, and nothing
more than that. Nothing like former lovers.

Some things do stay the same, despite the evolution
of the planet around us, despite waking up to the possibility that
we’ll never see Earth again.

I can still remember the beginning: the passion, the
hunger we had for each other. We were breaking the Uniform Code:
She was a Lieutenant, I was a Major. She transferred divisions so I
wouldn’t be her direct CO, but it made people nervous, fed the
gossip pages, the fan sites. (We were celebrities, after all.
Heroes.) And we were limited in our choices for intimacy: locked
lifelong into the job, unable to get close to anyone who wasn’t
locked in with you because everyone who wasn’t was vulnerable. So
our fraternizing was unofficially condoned. And many others
followed our example (including Matthew).

But then my “job” started to swallow me up, drag me
into the darkness more and more as the years went on, as the Terror
War never ended, no matter how many we killed. More and more, I
became the weapon that those that made me wanted me to be. And then
I couldn’t bear to be around her, to watch her suffer because she
couldn’t reach me anymore; because all I was, was rage. And a
mission. So I just ran away—took myself away from her, lost myself
in the job.

Just one more thing I owe Planet Earth. One more
reason I jumped on that shuttle.

And so did she. She said she couldn’t pass up the
chance, that she’d always had the childhood dreams of going into
space, touching other worlds. And she stuck by that story—probably
would still, if I asked her right now. But there’s still a deep,
bittersweet pain between us, any time we’re together.

We managed to work together, to maintain
professionalism, but we never really healed the rift I dug. Her
career soared. Mine went where the powers-that-be deemed I’d be
safest for them. I had other relationships—sort of. I assume she
did as well, though managed to be more discreet about it. We moved
on, but not really.

Maybe Matthew got it right: Despite the distance
we’ve kept between us, Mars was just too far away, so she had to
come along, had to keep some kind of connection (or, as Matthew put
it, see how the story finally ended, so she could have my funeral
for closure). Or maybe there is something left between us,
something we can’t ever really break.

She gives me a sad little smile that says she knows
I’m thinking about things I shouldn’t be, about doors that need to
stay shut, even now. Then she’s back to business. She never holds
eye contact with me for very long.

She looks good. It’s more than how gracefully she
came through rehab. She really doesn’t look sixty-six. If I just
met her and had to guess, I’d think she was fifty. Healthy fifty.
Her long dark hair is barely frosted with gray (I shaved mine
decades ago—no idea what color it would be now). Her skin is only
barely lined, her eyes still luminously dark. But more than the
surface, she’s more
alive
than I am—always has been. And
stronger, at least in the ways that really matter.

“Rick wants to see you,” she reminds me.

Rick—
Doctor
Mann—the fourth member of our
little geriatric family from the golden age of being Heroes of the
Free World to jump on this long, strange trip. I just doubt he did
it because he loves us.

Rick was SENTAR Corporation (before they got chopped
up and sold off in the big scandal), head of interface small arms
and armor R&D. I’m not sure if he was offered or had to call in
every favor he had with his DARPA contacts, but no way he’d miss
out on a prime onsite off-world consulting gig for a goddamn space
army.

“Matthew thinks he’s being obsessive-compulsive,” I
repeat the popular sentiment. “Worrying about how many weapons we
have working when there’s likely nothing left to shoot but each
other.”

“We’ll find out soon enough,” Anton interrupts,
getting impatient in his own stress. Then he checks in with his
team up on the roof for the twentieth time.

“And if there
is
something left to shoot at?”
Lisa reminds me of my own lingering dread.

“Then I doubt we have enough guns to make a
difference.”

It’s not just the limited resources. We’re fifty
years behind.

Anton looks like he’s about to hyperventilate.

“Go ahead, Mr. Staley,” I give him my official
permission. A touch on one of MAI’s screens, a graphic comes alive.
That’s it. Nothing even to hear.

“It’s working,” Anton finally sighs. I smile at him,
and send kudos up to his antenna-building crew.

“Now, we wait.”

“Doctor Mann,” I greet him officially when I find him
down on B-Deck in one of the larger labs in Sciences. (I’d
expected
to find him overseeing the heavy armor checks in
Staging, or helping with the refitting the base batteries.) He’s
looking mostly recovered after his rough rehab (he does have the
distinction of being the oldest of us, a year older than Matthew),
having what looks very much like a cup of hot tea with Doctor
Ryder, both of them staring with an analytical dreaminess at a
sealed incubator they’d cobbled together out of a clear acrylic
bio-containment glove box. The light inside the lid makes their
faces glow ghostly.

Apparently, this isn’t going to be a conversation
about guns.

“Our ‘weeds’?” I nod at the incubator.

Two months ago—when enough of us had enough legs back
to go walking around—Lieutenant Carver took a team out surveying
the conduits from one of the two base reactors. (Carver always
seems to stumble upon the weird shit first—she says she must be
cursed.) The reactors had been shut down, protocol when the bombs
fell, reducing us to batteries. Each core had been buried what had
been calculated to be a “safe” distance from the base. (Safe but
securable: close enough to defend if attacked; though the Ecos were
loathe to risk breaching a reactor, and the Discs seemed to share
this sentiment in avoiding firing on them.)

The half-mile hike out across the unstable terrain to
check everything and start the process of heating the reactors up
again kept them out of reach for awhile (and Morales hadn’t gotten
any rovers back to rolling yet). So, three months after we woke up,
Carver gets the second shock of her young life: after discovering
Martian atmosphere, she gets to discover Martian
life
.

“They’re potentially a lot more than
weeds
,
Colonel,” Rick gives me back with a hint of his signature annoyance
with the soldiers he’s spent his life arming better. But there’s
also a gleam in his big expressive eyes that makes him look like
the man I met almost fifty years ago (actually, almost a
hundred
years ago).

The plant samples we carefully brought
inside—initially under nano-contamination precautions—have grown
visibly in the container since last I saw them, and appear
healthier, at least to my uneducated eye. They remind me of the
hardy crab grasses that used to annoy many a desert landscaper in
the Phoenix I knew as a boy. But the leaves are broader, the stalks
thicker, like a ground-crawling bamboo. Except the sample isn’t
ground-crawling anymore—it’s staring to reach up and expand to fill
the space of the tank. And it’s
seeding
.

“This is what they’ve been doing with a little TLC,”
Ryder explains eagerly. “A little more water, a little less acid in
the soil. Compare it to the patch that’s been kept where it was
found.”

Found by poor, cursed Lieutenant Carver, lacing its
way through the crevices in the rocks above Reactor Two, struggling
for life against the cold, the dryness, the thin air. But
living
. And it may have been doing so for decades.

Urgent testing let us know it wasn’t
nano-contaminated, but it
was
nano-engineered, it’s DNA
custom-tweaked. Otherwise, it’s been speculation as to
where
it was engineered. Several colonies had active hydroponics “farms”
started. I remember Pax and Tranquility had the most impressive
gardens, and some of the colony labs were working aggressively on
engineering life (through DNA manipulation at the molecular
level—one of the scary industries that put nukes over our heads),
life that could take to the surface of Mars and thrive as
terraforming progressed (and, in fact, help it along). ETE Corp had
been cooperating actively with the colony labs to promote this.

“It’s an amazing plant, Colonel,” Ryder plays towards
some kind of proposal I’m sure is coming. “It looks like it was
designed with multiple uses in mind. The fibers could probably
process like hemp into a variety of materials. And with processing,
it could also be a good food source. It’s not toxic, though the
iron content is fairly high—treating the soil might reduce that.
The young shoots are high in carbohydrates and a number of
vitamins. And now that it’s seeding, the seeds look like they could
be a complete protein source. We could harvest them like beans or
grain.”

“You’re suggesting we start a farm?” I conclude,
keeping my tone objective despite how infectious her newfound
enthusiasm is trying to be.

“We have the materials—we could build a greenhouse
over one of the reactors, harness the heat,” she suggests.
“Radiation risk is minimal. Scher’s team says the levels are good,
and the samples we’ve taken aren’t hot—the plants don’t hold
it.”

“We don’t have the benefit of a botanist,” Rick
reminds me, “but Dr. Ryder was an avid gardener, and she studied
herbology…”

“You used to have a green thumb yourself.” I remember
all the plants in his offices at SENTAR R&D. It was like a
rainforest for his techs to retreat to, to get away from building
better guns for at least a little while.

As usual, he’s bad at taking a compliment. He just
looks at me like I’ve failed to answer the question.

“Get yourself some volunteers,” I agree. “There might
be some eager idle hands among our resident refugees. And it might
improve morale around here, give us something worth doing.”