The Mars Shock (26 page)

“So the god
can’t
locate us?” This was a new voice, speaking strangely accented English.

“That’s correct,” Jackson said.

“It’s a bloody shame Colden didn’t know that last night,” muttered the first voice.

“I don’t want to hear about it, Captain Hawker.”

So she now had names for three of them: Jackson, Hawker, and Kristiansen.

She tried to decide which one she would kill first.

Hawker, she recalled, had mocha skin and curly hair. He displayed distinctive cultural mannerisms categorized as FUKish, but FUKish individuals were thought to be on the high end of the human potential scale.
Recruit, don’t kill
.

Commander Jackson probably possessed quantities of useful information. His genetic heritage appeared to be more-or-less pure Anglo. But he displayed no culturally unique traits. His loyalty to Star Force could be bent to serve the god’s purposes.
Recruit, don’t kill,
by a hair.

They pulled the bag off her. Sounds took on an echoing quality, as if she were in a large, mostly empty space. She breathed in gulps of sterile air and blinked up at yet another face she knew: the rat-like mestizo visage of Danny Drudge. Her records indicated that he had enormous potential.

Recruit, don’t kill.

My, my, Star Force was a rich pool of potential recruits. It was almost like they’d been preselected according to the god’s criteria.

Blinking innocently, she turned her gaze to Magnus Kristiansen.

The wealth of information she had about him on her BCI enabled her to categorize him with ease.

Kill.

She braced herself to spring—and a fifth man caught her eye. His flat-cheeked, broad-nosed face seemed weirdly familiar. It was like looking in a mirror, except this mirror showed her what she was inside. Not the competent, jokey woman her colleagues knew, but a frightened little girl who’d never got over being abandoned, first by her biological parents and then by her adoptive parents. Part of her was still stuck in that terrible room in the Congo, alone. His gaze said that he
knew
how lonely she was, how few dopamine pathways she possessed, how easy the nanites had had it.

He turned to Kristiansen, “No guarantees. The children aren’t very good yet.”

“Just do it. Please,” Kristiansen said.

More people moved into her field of vision. They were small and ridiculously cute. Like the man, they seemed to see her soul, not her skin. They began to sing.

The first wavering harmonies felt like red-hot pokers in her ears.

She struggled off the floor, screaming in anger and pain, and hurled herself at the children.

Kristiansen caught her.

Kill.

She had no weapons except her bare hands. She scratched his face. He caught her wrists, and she managed to get in one solid kick to his balls.

That was the pathetic sum total of her deeds before the song overwhelmed her, and she crumpled, sobbing.

It was like waking up from one of the nightmares she used to have about those deserted villages back home, all mixed up with the loss of her parents, and her fear of dying.

Just like when she would wake up in a Space Corps berthing somewhere on Earth or UNLOESS, crying with remembered terror, the first thing she saw was Kristiansen’s face.

And she knew everything was going to be all right.

xvi.

Kristiansen helped Colden down the steps of the FlyingSaucer. She was still crippled, bandaged up and hobbling. She should have been back on Eureka Station by now, but she’d insisted on coming along for this.

The FlyingSaucer the ISA promised had finally arrived. The name of this spaceship class said it all: it was saucer-shaped, and flew. A single ballistic hop had taken them from Alpha Base’s location at the edge of Sulci Gordii, to Archive 394.

In the ten days since the flood, the bunker had been totally transformed. The fission reactor had been immured in a regocrete sarcophagus. It was still busily melting down in there, but not hurting anyone. Uphill from the reactor site, the opened bunker resembled an archaeological dig. Little triangular flags and ropes divided the former bamboo plantation and the now-dry lake bed into squares. Bright red earthmovers labored at the entrance to the feeder tunnel at the head of the reservoir. This had been a waterway connected to the PLAN’s network of underground aqueducts beneath Olympus Mons. The Chinese had already sent drones up the tunnel, only to encounter a rockfall sealed with regocrete. They were now chipping away at the barrier remotely, while enlarging the tunnel mouth.

An agreement had been reached: the Chinese could have Archive 394, since the UN had the cute kids.

Kristiansen had figured the UN got the best of that deal. But there was something else he hadn’t known. Something the ISA was
very
upset about, to the point of barging into the CTDF’s dig in a FlyingSaucer.

Military guards surrounded the little spacecraft. The ISA agents who manned it—Kristiansen still didn’t know their names, and had a feeling he never would—ignored the armed men. They held a conversation, via line-of-sight, with some Chinese suits standing at the end of the street where they’d landed. Permission was obtained for them to proceed. The ISA agents walked through the cordon. Kristiansen and Colden followed.

She leaned on his arm. “I never thought I’d come back here.”

“Neither did I.”

He wrapped his arm around her, pretending he just wanted to give her better support. She was so much shorter, he couldn’t easily put his arm around her waist. They used to joke about how they were physical opposites. They weren’t back in that place yet, but they were getting close.

“Remember,” she said, “when I was taller than
you?”

“Yes, when you were an eight-foot robot.”

“I’m not going back to that again.”

“I know.”

“Drudge has taken over the platoon.”

“He’ll do a good job. He’s a good kid at heart.”

“I’m not so sure about that. But he’ll have plenty of chances to prove himself, one way or the other.”

Stephen One’s revelations about the PLAN’s watershed under Olympus Mons, and the sheer extent of the infrastructure down there, had prompted a reassessment—once again—of how much fighting lay ahead. The new guesstimate was: a lot.

But the biggest fear factor had been removed from the fight. Thanks to the St. Stephen virus, humanity no longer viewed the nanites with paralyzing dread. Star Force scientists were studying them. Commercial R&D outfits were sniffing eagerly around.

Following the ISA agents and their Chinese escorts, they climbed down into the bunker and walked across the bed of the lake. Chalky sediment crusted the rock, crisscrossed with bootprints.

A ladder led up the steep side of what had been the Server’s island, and was now a rocky tableland. Colden had to take the ladder very slowly. Kristiansen climbed behind her, anxious that she might fall. By the time they reached the top, the ISA agents had already vanished inside the silo.

Kristiansen pushed open the door. His memories of his previous visit were so vivid he almost expected to see the Server in her chair, giving him her wry smile. Instead, he saw spacesuited Chinese technicians sitting crosslegged on tarps, taking the Server’s computers apart in the light of free-standing LED floodlights.

The last ISA agent was just vanishing through the newly repaired airlock of the refuge.

Colden hesitated. “Call me a wimp, but I’m suddenly not sure I want to do this.”

“It’s up to you.”

“OK. I’m doing it. I’m scared. But I’m going to do it.” She limped forward. He followed, wondering if he could follow through with his own plan.

The interior of the refuge had changed dramatically. The scaffolds were gone. In their place stood a free-standing Faraday cage—a cell furnished with a cot, table, and chairs.

The ISA agents sat in two of the chairs, talking and gesticulating at the occupant of the third chair: K’vin Murray.

Murray, too, had changed.

His neatly trimmed mustache had spread into a stubbly beard. He wore a Chinese-red coverall and a bored expression. Most notably—and this sent a cold crawling sensation of fear down Kristiansen’s spine—his skin had developed a matte, pebbly texture.

He glanced over at Colden and Kristiansen, and waved.

The ISA agents exited the Faraday cage. One of them said to Kristiansen, via their suit-to-suit comms link, “The amazing thing is he hasn’t changed at all. He’s still as goddamn annoying as ever.”

“Has he agreed to talk?”

“Nope. He says we’re filthy spooks dedicated to serving the soft totalitarianism of the United Nations.” The ISA agent poked a gloved finger into Kristiansen’s chest. “If we
were
the monsters he thinks we are, we’d arrest you right now for thought crime.” She chuckled. “Fortunately, we’re not.”

“I don’t get it,” Colden said.

Kristiansen said, “I gave him my BCI. So he’s adopted … I guess … some of my opinions.
Former
opinions.”

“Glad to hear that,” the ISA agent said. “When you go home, you might tell your boss that we’re really,
really
not as bad as the NGO community perceives us to be.”

“Has he talked to the Chinese?” Kristiansen asked.

“If he had, we’d never have been allowed near him. Nope, he calls them ‘pawns of the world’s secondary totalitarian power.’”

“Eeesh,” Kristiansen said. “Sorry.”

“Eh, that one’s on us. He’s still
himself,
to a much greater extent than we would have expected. But apparently you and he saw eye to eye on the subject of the Imperial Republic.” The ISA agent shrugged. “Anyway, he’s flatly refused to talk to them. And we just struck out. So, now it’s your turn. Good luck.”

Colden said, “What’s the air like in here at the moment?”

The ISA agent pointed at the atmospheric monitor clamped to the wall of the refuge. “They’ve been reducing the pressure, temperature, and oxygen content of the air periodically, to see how he handles it. That would be classified as torture in the UN, if you’re listening in, you Chinkie slimeballs.”

Kristiansen heard laughter. Of course the Chinese were listening in. It made sense that the intelligence communities of Earth’s premier totalitarian bureaucracies
would
get along rather well …

Whoops. He really was going to work on being less judgmental.

“He can apparently handle temperatures down to minus 15 without discomfort, and oxygen content of as low as 1% for limited, but increasing, periods of time. But right now we’ve got Earth-alike figures for temperature, pressure, and oxygen content.” The ISA agent addressed Colden. “So you should be fine.”

“Right. OK.” Colden took a deep breath. Then she walked into the Faraday cage.

Kristiansen followed on her heels. He slid the door of the cage shut. The Chinese and ISA agents watched them from beyond the floodlights.

“Hey,” Murray said. He nodded at Kristiansen’s nametag. “My favorite pureblood. We meet again.”

A Chinese-accented voice boomed from a speaker. “Make one hostile move and you will be shot. There are—”

“Flechette guns in the table legs, trained on my head,” Murray completed. “You’ve told me enough times.” He gave the table a casual slap. “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna jump him, much as he may deserve it, and I’m in a unique position to say he
does
deserve it.”

“I’m not like that anymore,” Kristiansen said. “A lot of my more extreme opinions were founded in ignorance about the realities of combat on the front lines. Anyway, it’s hard to keep hating people who have saved your life. I’m going to recommend that Medecins Sans Frontieres work more closely with Star Force in the future.”

“Wonders never cease.”

“What about you, K’vin? Do you feel differently now about the things we discussed?”

“You’re talking about the pureblood thing. Oh hell yeah, Magnus. When you get new information, you have to change your opinions. And I have a
hell
of a lot of new information. I had plenty of time to talk to the god before they put me in here. Boy, was that an eye-opener. The god knows everything, and more importantly, the god knows what it all means.”

Colden twitched. Kristiansen put a hand on her arm. “So tell us. What does it all mean?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Murray said, grinning. “What’s up, Magnus? Who’s your friend?”

Colden lifted her hands and undid her collar seal. As she began to take her helmet off, panicky shouts came from beyond the floodlights. Kristiansen glimpsed a scuffle. The ISA agents had apparently not troubled to tell the Chinese ahead of time exactly what they planned.

A figure burst out from behind the floodlights— “Stop! Don’t take your helmet off! The air is full of nanites!”

“I know,” Colden said. “It’s OK. I’ve been nanitized already, to borrow a term from one of the corporations that’s hoping to patent the process.”