The Mars Shock (27 page)

She lifted her helmet off and put it down on the table.

Murray rocked back.

Colden smiled sadly at him. Her face was the same as always, and yet it wasn’t. Just like Murray, her skin had changed, going matte and somehow thick, while staying the same rich ebony shade.

“You think you know everything now, don’t you?” she said to Murray. “Yep. I was there. I didn’t talk to the god for that long, didn’t get to download any new information, but I remember what it felt like. It’s like finding out the meaning of life. The only trouble is, it’s wrong.”

She turned and walked through the twin-door vestibule, out of the Faraday cage. She spread her arms and did a little pirouette. Her braids spun. She’d had them done, at Kristiansen’s urging. Got extensions. Just because she now had a matte complexion, didn’t mean she had to stop being beautiful.

“Whoa,” Murray said. On his face was a look of utter shock. “You’re outside the Faraday cage, but … you’re not trying to kill the Chinks. Why not? They’re purebloods. They have to die.”

“I’ve got the St. Stephen virus. The god can’t talk to me anymore,” Colden said with a shrug. “I should say, it can’t
lie
to me anymore.” She strolled back into the Faraday cage, closing one door behind her, and then the next one. “The PLAN is all wrong about … well, basically everything.”

“No, it’s not. It’s NOT.”

“Oh yes, it is. You want the meaning of life? Here you go.”

She started to sing.

Colden always had had a good singing voice. Now, she sounded like an angel.
“Stephanus, vir sanctus…”
Harmonies came from her suit speaker—the voices of Stephen One and his children.

They had agreed to be recorded, in high-fidelity lossless audio, when Kristiansen told them what he planned.

“We figured out how it works,” one of the ISA agents murmured to the astonished Chinese. “The nanites automatically detect the frequency of each note. They digitize it and render it in binary. And
that’s
the source code. It’s very elegant. In software format, it’s just a dropper file … but the actual content of the dropper file
also
contains the virus. Whoever wrote it,
ahem,
may have considered it just an aesthetic flourish.”

“Fine, fine. It’s not ours. You already guessed that. Can we have the recording?”

As Colden sang, a strange succession of emotions chased across Murray’s face. It reminded Kristiansen of the way Colden had reacted when
she
first heard the song, back in the refugee center at Alpha Base. Fear and horror gave way to curiosity. Murray stood up and took a hesitant step towards her.

Then he collapsed, kneeling on the floor with his head and arms on the table. Wrenching sobs tore from his throat.

Colden knelt beside him. Still singing, she put her arm around his back and rubbed her head against his scurfy cheek.

Kristiansen licked his lips. Could he do this? Yes, he could.

Before he had time to change his mind, he quickly undid his collar seal and pulled off his helmet.

The cold air seared his nostrils and throat. He breathed deeply, knowing that he was breathing in millions of nanites. They were entering his lungs, his bloodstream.

Outside the Faraday cage, someone knocked one of the floodlights over. They were probably freaking out, but with his helmet off, he could no longer hear their voices.

Colden stumbled to her feet and screamed, “Magnus! Are you out of your mind?”

“No.” The music was still pouring from her suit. He hugged her tightly. “I said I was going to stay with you all the way … and I meant it.”

“You
are
nuts. I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

Murray wiped his nose on the back of his hand and shook his head. “I hope you thought this through. You’ll never be allowed to go back to Earth. Personally, I foresee a new posting to a secret ISA research center in the Belt. But I’m pretty sure you won’t be invited.”

The St. Stephen virus was clearly starting to work on him.

“This may surprise you, but I have thought it through,” Kristiansen said. “Medecins Sans Frontieres has won the contract to build a new home for the Martians on Ceres. I’ve got the job of project manager. I’ll be living and working at the site.”

“And I’ve quit the Space Corps,” Colden said. “So I’ll be joining him. After all, that’s what I always wanted to do: helping and protecting people in space … even if they’re Martians.”

“Here’s to our new home,” Kristiansen said, and kissed her.

★

A week later, Kristiansen, Colden, and Murray left Mars. Their shuttle’s launch painted a glowing line through the haze.

The Miller Flats lay silent and dead beneath the clouds.

A few more days passed. Then, without warning, a crude rocket screamed out of the sky. Fired from the peak of Olympus Mons, it descended at a nearly vertical angle and smashed into the region of the Miller Flats that had briefly been inundated by the flood.

Although the rocket was just a solid projectile with a engine attached, lacking an explosive warhead, the sheer velocity of its attack gave it kinetic energy equal to 100,000 tons of TNT. Like every other PLAN KKV, it completely obliterated its target.

In this case, its target had been the heads of six born-again Martians, still lying in the ravine where Danny Drudge had tossed them away.

Their thin coat of splart had not stopped the nanites inside them from broadcasting their location. The vengeful entity in Olympus Mons, which believed itself a god, had duly pasted them.

“Bollocks,” said Captain Hawker, watching from high on the Mahfouz Gradient. Dust and ejecta welled into the atmosphere, mingled with the atoms of Drudge’s trophies. “I was going to go back and get those.”

“Wash your mouth out. They were
people,”
Danny Drudge said, virtuously. His phavatar stood at Hawker’s side, now decorated with the shoulder stripe that had once been Colden’s, in addition to its ornamental skull. “Anyway, there’ll be better stuff higher up.”

They proceeded.

The story continues in
The Callisto Gambit.

SNEAK PEEK AT
THE CALLISTO GAMBIT

THE SOLARIAN WAR SAGA, BOOK 7

“I hate this,” John Mendoza said. Kiyoshi stood beside him on the quarterdeck of the dilapidated Startractor, watching the ship’s former occupants tumble into space.

Two men, two women, and two preteen boys. They were all wearing EVA suits. Kiyoshi wasn’t a murderer. He just needed their ship.

“They stole it in the first place, so, no need to feel guilty about taking it off them,” he told Mendoza. “C’mon, let’s get off this truck.”

They exited the airlock and flew back towards Kiyoshi’s own ship, the
Monster.
Behind them, the Startractor’s twin hab modules rotated slowly around its spine, like weights on the ends of a skinny propeller. Kiyoshi’s boarding party milled at the drive end of the ship, checking every rivet.

The sun was a bright pin stuck into the blackness of the asteroid belt. A cloud of rock fragments drifted in front of it, from time to time blocking its glare, and allowing the stars to shine out. These were pieces of the asteroid that Kiyoshi and his people had called home for the last four years, 99984 Ravilious.

They’d had another home before that: the Venus trojan asteroid 11073 Galapagos. The PLAN—the hostile AI that humanity was now at war with—had destroyed it, forcing them to flee into the asteroid belt, to this lonely location in the middle of the 2.5 Kirkwood Gap. They’d put their lives back together. Recreated their society and rebuilt their churches, in the hope that this time they’d be left in peace. So much for that.

Wasn’t the PLAN that had destroyed this rock. It was its owner. Kiyoshi’s boss. And for what, huh? For
what?

To the left of the fragments, a dotted wheel of light spun lazily. Although it appeared far away, it was just on the other side of the rubble cloud. It was another ship, built from the raw materials of 99984 Ravilious—half-built, or maybe three-quarters; the boss-man said it was finished, but he’d been saying that for weeks, and new engineering issues kept cropping up. Its name was
Salvation.
No irony there, no sense of history. Just an ego the size of freaking Jupiter.

Kiyoshi could no longer see the six people he’d tossed into space. He and Mendoza were halfway back to the
Monster
when Jun radioed him. “They picked them up.”

“Who?”

“The previous occupants.”

“No, who picked them up?”

“I couldn’t see for sure. Might’ve been Brian. Anyway, they took them to the
Salvation.”

Kiyoshi scowled at the distant wheel of light. Smaller specks buzzed around it. One of them might have been the mobility sled that Brian Shaughnessy, the boss’s thug-in-chief, often rode over to the
Monster
to insolently spy on Kiyoshi and his people. Brian and Kiyoshi had both worked for the boss-man for years. The difference was that Brian believed in the
Salvation
project, and Kiyoshi did not. When Kiyoshi begged off from the entire insane business, Brian had gleefully stepped into his position as second-in-command.

Jun drew a red circle around the largest speck of light on Kiyoshi’s faceplate. “That’s the
Now You See It,
a quad-module Ironcamel. It just arrived from Ceres with a bunch of stuff for the suicide mission.” This was how Kiyoshi and Jun referred to the
Salvation
project. “I think some new recruits also arrived. So they’ll be busy over there for a while.”

“We got lucky,” Kiyoshi said.

“Yep.”

If the
Now You See It
had not shown up at the same time as the Startractor, there was no way Kiyoshi and Jun would have been able to capture the smaller ship. The boss-man would have pounced on it himself. He had a track record in that respect.

Kiyoshi directed a quick prayer of thanks to the Holy Spirit for this stroke of luck. Out loud, he said. “All the same, we’d better move fast.”

“Agreed.”

Kiyoshi juiced his mobility pack. With Mendoza trailing behind, he headed for the
Monster’s
command airlock. He keyed in the combination, spoke today’s password for the voiceprint lock, and finally inserted a keycard in the physical lock he’d recently installed, after Brian came buzzing around one too many times.

Maybe he was paranoid. Scratch that, he
was
paranoid. But the extra security helped him sleep at night. The
Monster
was the last home they had, and he wasn’t losing it.

They entered a world very different from the shabby plastisteel confines of the Startractor. The
Monster
was a hundred years old, in the same sense as certain shrines in Japan had been a thousand years old. Its existence dated back to the 2190s, but nearly every physical component of the ship had been replaced since. The ops module was the exception. Kiyoshi and Mendoza glided through linked caves panelled with real wood that had once been real trees growing in the mountains of Honshu. Right now the caves were
sushi-zume,
packed like sushi in a box, with stuff—and people. This many human beings had not lived on the
Monster
since the ship first carried Kiyoshi’s ancestors from Earth to an asteroid called 11073 Galapagos.

These people were (some of) the descendants of those colonists. They were the last Japanese in the universe. They were Kiyoshi’s people. They were Galapajin.

And they were packing.

Getting ready to move,
again.

“Hurry up,” he told them. “We need to get this done while the boss is looking the other way.”

A young mother looked up in despair from a suitcase whose contents kept floating out. “Ever heard of advance warning, Yonezawa-san?”

“I didn’t know before today that we were going to get another ship to move into.” Kiyoshi grabbed a floating set of child-sized stabilizer braces and stuffed them into the suitcase. Then flew on, dodging a bevy of little girls who were playing at nuns in some beautiful old wimples that had turned up. For the kids, this chaos was a holiday from their normal schedules of school, Mass, and bone-building exercises.

Tense faces greeted him on the bridge. Kiyoshi flew to his throne. It wasn’t really a throne, just the captain’s workstation, but he’d put in a custom couch and jacked it up so that he could lounge on it in a commanding fashion. Stirrups made this possible even in zero-gee. He looked around at his inner circle. “Well, this is it. Starting today, we’ll be on our own.”

He wished they looked more enthusiastic. Their murmurs of
“Hai”
did not imply much confidence in his leadership. The problem was two-fold: these men and women had either grown up with him, if they were his generation, or had been his parents’ friends, if they were older. They still saw him as the kid who used to ditch school to get off his face on homebrewed
shochu.
What’s more, they didn’t really believe in any of his exploits in the inner system, which they had heard about but not seen for themselves. They’d been stuck here the whole time.

And now he was going to be stuck here with them.

The thought terrified him a bit.

He put a brave face on it, describing how they were going to fortify the Startractor and turn it into a lovely home. It would be a bit of a squeeze, he couldn’t deny that. Compared to the
Monster,
the Startractor’s passenger and command modules, combined, offered only 80,000 cubic meters of living space, compared to the
Monster’s
capacious 260,000. But a person only really
needed
200 m3 of space, he reminded them.