The Mars Shock (6 page)

“Good find, Drudge,” she said grudgingly.

Suddenly everyone pressed back, crushing against the immovable objects that were Colden and Drudge. At the far side of the platform, something went
phut.
Sparks leapt into the thin Martian air. Grunts cheered.

Colden shouldered through them, a head taller than the tallest soldier. There’d been a hatch set into the far side of the platform. The grunts had set a leech on it and blown the hinges. Ladder-like stairs led down into darkness.

“Stand back, please,” she said urgently. “Let me and my colleague go in first.”

“Hell with that,” someone said. “You can’t have all the fun.”

Was
that
how they saw the COPs, as literal cops policing their fun? Nothing could have been further from the truth, but Colden and Drudge were two against many. The soldiers charged into the hatch. Chinese and Star Force men jostled to take the lead.

Whoops and war cries flooded the public channel. “Get ’em get ’em GET ’EM!” On her couch, Colden gritted her teeth. So there were hostiles in there. What a surprise.

A single dead muppet came flying out of the hatch. Air, escaping from below, rippled the muppet’s unusual clothes as it lay on its face, unmoving.

Drudge let out a cry of frustration.
He
wanted to get in there. But the hatch was too small for the phavatars. Using the drill and crowbar attachments he’d been issued earlier, he began to chip around the telescope set into the middle of the roof.

Colden squatted on her haunches, vidding the unusual attire of the dead muppet. Stiff blue trousers. A black shirt, sodden with blood. She turned the corpse over. There was a white design on the front of the shirt, spreading out to the shoulders. Suddenly it clicked in her mind. “Holy crap. This muppet is wearing a cowboy shirt and blue jeans.”

So much like a person. She poked the dead muppet’s face with a gripper, trying desperately to see it as a non-person again. Like all the muppets, this one had been short in stature, stocky, and flat-nosed, with wide cheeks now bunched in death like fists. Like all of them, it had skin the exact color of ‘fleshtone’ in a pack of crayons—a café au lait shade designed not to offend anyone. No one’s skin was
exactly
that color, except a few individuals with just the right mix of brown and white ancestry.
And,
as it turned out, the PLAN’s muppets. Their skin blended right in with the regolith of Mars; there’d been incidents where they ambushed patrols out in the open. You couldn’t see them until you were right on top of them.

The grunts sometimes snarked about how the muppets looked Chinese, but they didn’t. Not really.

They were descended from the men and women of the famous lost fleet of China, plus some survivors from the American colony destroyed in the Mars Incident.

The PLAN had bred them like animals, genetically adapting them to the Martian environment. In the process, it had erased ethnic distinctions. DNA analysis proved the muppets weren’t clones, but they might as well be, for all the individual differences between them. And of course, the PLAN had also erased their individual identies. Colden remembered something she’d been told in training:
You can’t kill the dead. You’re just cleaning up the trash.

She picked the dead muppet up in one gripper. She was about to pitch it off the platform when she noticed it was wearing a pendant. Very unusual. The muppets didn’t decorate themselves any more than they decorated their houses. She broke the chain, tossed the corpse away, and examined the pendant. It was a locket.

“OK, that’s it, we’ve cleaned the place out. Twenty, twenty-five hostiles have been liquidated.” Captain Hawker’s voice cut into the public channel, line-of-sight relayed out of the monument. The soldiers still on the roof, and those watching from the ground, exchanged high-fives. “We are now gonna bust into the chamber. It’s hermetically sealed. You guys on the roof, do you observe any changes in there?”

Drudge, still trying to remove the telescope from its mounting, said, “No.”

“OK, we are blowing the hatch now.”

Colden pried the locket open. “Wow, look at this.
Paper.”
The folded piece of paper was so old, it crumbled in her grippers. Realizing this might be their only chance to examine it, she went ahead and unfolded it. “‘… of the Ecopoiesis Group is to firstly carry out a survey to identify suitable locations for Test Beds, and subsequently select the most favorable ones, relying on metrics including, but not limited to, temperature highs and lows, wind exposure …’” Colden belatedly realized she was
reading
the paper. “Oh my God. It’s in English!”

The paper cracked in half along a fold line. The bottom half disintegrated into dust as she grabbed for it, but not before her camera recorded the faded blue logo at the bottom of the sheet.

Colden swallowed. The muppet had been carrying a 170-year-old document produced by the space agency of the United States, the country that first colonized Mars. What did that mean?

“We are in the chamber. Clear your bandwidth if you want to see. I’m streaming vid,” Captain Hawker said from below.

Colden shut down all her other comms channels and went to split screen.

Down below, the grunts poked around the chamber, scraping at the PLAN graffiti on the walls. Splashes and slashes of red and yellow formed glyphs like all the others, but
not
like all the others. These didn’t have the diecut precision of the other glyphs. They dripped. They clumped. They
screamed.
Colden shuddered on her couch. Malice and hatred breathed from the walls of the crypt.

“Quite spooky,” Captain Hawker commented. “Reminds me of some Satanist shit.”

For Colden, the crypt evoked memories of home. The worst kind of memories.

Home
for Jennifer Colden was a loaded concept. Her adoptive parents, UNAID workers from the Former United Kingdom, had raised her in the back of their mobile field office as they travelled around central Africa. In the mid-23
rd
century, technical innovations in the cybersecurity sector had plunged the Congo basin into a conflict now known as the infowars. New inequalities had reignited old resentments. A ruthless new breed of hacker had emerged from the cyber-jungle to prey on the assets of rival tribes. It was all too typical to find villages and towns deserted, vegetation creeping relentlessly back into the homes of people whose reputations and psyches had been destroyed by cyberattacks. The losers of these virtual battles had often committed suicide in despair, or fled to start new lives elsewhere under false identities, as Colden’s birth parents had done. The victors had stolen their stuff and defaced their houses. This was like that. She’d glimpsed a room like this in the Congo, before her mother yanked her away. Sealed up and reeking in the heat, the walls had been daubed with slogans painted in human feces, radiating vengeful fury. She could still smell the stink, and hear the flies buzzing.

Breathe,
she told herself,
breathe. All it is, is some graffiti.

In the center of that room in the Congo had stood a gruesome artifact: a stack of BCIs, extracted under duress from victims, embedded into holographic mugshots of their former owners, which were in turn embedded in plastic globes the size of beachballs, stacked one on top of the other as if they were severed heads.

The centerpiece of this chamber on Mars looked innocuous by contrast. It was a glass display case. But Colden got the same nasty vibes from it, from a hundred klicks away.

Captain Hawker leaned close to the display case. Reflections off the glass whited out Colden’s split screen for a minute. “Sorry, sorry,” Hawker said. “Trying to get a better view. It’s a topological model. Green hills, some lakes, some rivers … hey, here’s a little tiny model spaceport, with spaceships and everything. I wanted one of these when I was a kid.”

The model spaceships bore the same logo Colden had seen a few minutes ago. The logo of NASA, the agency that had first colonized Mars, back in the days when nobody believed AIs could get angry.

Everyone watching the streaming vid realized the truth at the same time.

“It’s a NASA model.”

“This was how Mars was gonna be after they got through terraforming.”

“They must’ve made this as a mock-up.”

Tired, dispirited soldiers, the excitement of their discovery wearing off, looked around at their bleak surroundings with fresh disgust. It was painful to imagine that Mars could’ve been a green paradise.

★

The superstitious grunts, and the officers monitoring the scene remotely, soon decided that the monument was a PLAN temple. The PLAN worshipped NASA’s memory!

But Colden knew that was wrong. “It’s not a temple or a museum or anything like that,” she insisted to Hawker.

They sat on the roof of the monument, taking a break while other troops crawled around inside the monument, vidding every square centimeter. The eggheads on Earth would go nuts over this. But they would misunderstand it, just like the troops were misunderstanding it, because none of
them
had grown up in a war zone. “The infowars, OK? Everyone thinks they weren’t
real
wars, because no one went around lopping off heads. We don’t do that anymore. But cyberwars are plenty violent, even if nobody dies.”

She told Hawker about that room in the Congo. The stack of holo portraits, deliberately mimicking a tower of severed heads.

“That was a
hate
display. Like the opposite of a temple. Or maybe a kind of temple, OK … a temple of hatred. This is the same thing. The PLAN exhibited that model, yeah, sure. Muppets probably crawled up the ramp to gawp through the telescope. But they weren’t supposed to worship it. They were supposed to
hate
it. NASA was the PLAN’s first enemy. That scale model is NASA’s severed head. The priesthood of the, whatever, the NASA hate cult, those muppets wore jeans and cowboy shirts as if they’d stolen them off the enemy, they wore NASA documents around their necks. The netwarriors in the Congo, these whip-smart hackers who could trash a whole village in an afternoon, they would wear pendants decorated with BCIs, which they’d forced their victims to remove from their brains. Sometimes with tweezers and no anesthetic. You just have to see the similarities.”

Captain Hawker regarded the eight-foot phavatar. Her grippers were mangling the locket she’d taken off the dead muppet. “Take a deep breath, Agent Colden. This is Mars.”

Colden sighed to herself. She’d put her past on the line. She might as well not have bothered. Now Hawker probably felt sorry for her.

Unbidden, Magnus Kristiansen came to her mind. It never would have crossed
his
mind to feel sorry for her. To him, her background had just been part of what made her herself.

Eh, hell with him.

She looked down at the locket in her grippers. She’d crushed it. “Whoops,” she said lightly. “Guess I don’t know my own strength. You should tell your guys to pick up some more of these, if there are any down there.”

“I’m not taking that shit back to Alpha Base,” Hawker said.

A procession of Chinese grunts climbed out of the hatch, carrying dead muppets, stacks of ceremonial blue jeans, and some wicked-looking machetes.

“Wow,” Hawker said. “Machetes.”

“For killing the sacrificial victims whose skulls ended up on the ramp,” Colden said. “I’ve changed my mind. The muppets we killed probably
were
sacrificial victims. That would be why they made them dress up in NASA gear. Maybe they were about to be killed when the Phobos impacts struck, and they’ve been stuck here ever since.”

“And then we came along and sacrificed them to the noble cause of winning this war a little faster,” Hawker said. “Heh, heh.”

All this time, Drudge had been messing with the telescope. The gouges he’d made in the roof, combined with the weight of the soldiers in their combat suits, and possibly prior weakening by the impact of the KKV a few streets over, suddenly cracked the regocrete right through. Drudge’s phavatar, the telescope, a chunk of roof, and the grunts who’d been standing on it fell down into the chamber.