Lakes of Mars

by Merritt Graves

“Two hundred!”

  “We gotta get out of here.”

  “Contact imminent! We’re retreating to the given waypoints; LP3, meet us at junction 10196A to give support. Do you copy?”

  Jersey Trimble was looking at Sergeant McPherson. “Like hell we’re doing that. That’s a discretionary call, right, Sergeant?”

  “That’s a discretionary call,” she repeated.

  “Well, use your discretion and let’s get the fuck out of here!”

  A voice splintered over the commline. “Do you copy, LP3?”

  “Two hundred and fifty-five! Oh Christ, you hear that? They’re on multiple approaches. Move!”

  The sounds of running and panting came over the commline.

  “Do you copy, LP3?” screamed someone.

  “This is LP3 actual, we copy.” McPherson was finally giving her answer. “We’ll wait for you at Junction 10194B. That’s the best we can do.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ, that’s not good enough! We can’t—”

  “That’s the best we can do,” she repeated forcefully. “LP3 out.”

  Han-Wei looked like she was going to say something but didn’t.

  “Three plus three still equals zero down here; let’s jet,” McPherson urged.

  “Three hundred and five . . . three hundred and fifty! We’ve got contact!”

  The commline erupted with gunfire.

  McPherson, Han-Wei, and Trimble all broke into sprints, their gun lights crisscrossing the crevices ahead.

  “Faster, Trimble!”

  “It’s too rocky.” The humor in his voice had drained away and I could feel his essence retracting, fading into skin and muscle, abandoning him to the approaching panic until he was just a body. Just an animal.

  “LP3 to LP4. LP3 to LP4. Come in, LP4.”

  Nothing.

  “How far away from us were they?”

  “A couple clicks, depending on how far they got.”

  “You’re dialing in the wrong direction, Han-Wei. Go the other way and see if they’ll stick around to meet us at Junction 10185D.”

  “LP3 to LP2. LP3 to LP2. Come in, LP2.”

  “Copy that, this is LP2.”

  “LP4 has made Verex contact at 856/019/708 and is out of R-net reach. Passing a full alert down the line. They’re coming in fast enough that I doubt they’re only harrying,” Han-Wei gasped between breaths.

  “No,” echoed McPherson. “Tell them to tell LP1 to put the whole perimeter on notice.”

  I felt Jersey Trimble’s foot catch in a crevice and then after a second of weightlessness, a riptide of pain drew me outside myself, with the game-over disorientation you feel when dying in a Challenge.

  But there was still chatter from the comm echoing in the cave. Shapes were still moving in front of him. Han-Wei had her arms around Trimble’s torso and was trying to lift him, heaving and gasping and failing until McPherson joined in. Together they helped him to his knees, and then feet, and then to an awkward, damaged trot.

  The agony from my arm was overwhelming. I remembered all the times I’d seen bugs on their backs, twitching helplessly, or birds with broken wings, and now I knew what it felt like. And not just in an abstract, anonymous way; Trimble being a loudmouth reminded me of how I used to talk to myself to pad the silence when I was a kid. An offering to the beast when I was scared. It could just have easily been me there. “LP2 to LP3. LP1 has acknowledged, so we’re clear to assist. We’ll link up at Great Chamber 415 and cover your crossing.”

  “Much appreciated, LP2. Thank you. We’ll be there in one and a half, maybe two minutes. LP3 out.”

  There was beeping.

  “What is it?” McPherson called.

  “Five-micron deviation from the seismism range. Ten, fifteen, twenty,” said Han-Wei.

  “Jersey, you gotta move—you gotta move, Private!”

  “I’m fucking trying! I think the bone’s snapped.”

  “Twenty-five microns. Thirty-five microns.” She carried on counting as the number got higher and higher. “Picking them up on sonar, too. Multiple approaches. One hundred meters away.”

  Meanwhile I was nearly passed out from the pain. It crawled into my eyes. It made dots appear. Every stagger was an explosion along crushed nerves. I felt what must’ve been the sergeant’s hand gripping Jersey’s vest, tugging, applying constant pressure, keeping him from surrendering to shock. But other than that there was nothing but a raw, endless expanse, covering me up more and more every second.

  “Ninety. One hundred and five. One hundred and ten!”

  “I can feel it now. Let’s go, let’s go!”

  “Sonar at seventy-five, seventy-three!”

  Han-Wei fell silent but the beeping continued, sharper and more staccato every second.

  “Everyone locked and loaded?” McPherson asked, breathing harshly.

  “Affirmative!”

  “Yeah!”

  “Weapons ready.”

  The beeping got shriller still.

  “Five meters from the chamber. It’s just right up there!”

  A few moments later their gun lights went from illuminating rocky walls to extending into darkness, carving jerky arcs into what must’ve been Great Chamber 415. Either McPherson or Han-Wei shot an illumination round, and stalactites and stalagmites splashed from above and below, seeming to animate in the scramble.

  “We have a visual on you, LP3. Once you make it to the other side of the cavern, we’ll rocket the exit shut behind you, which should buy you enough time to get back to the perimeter.”

  “Copy that, LP2.”

  “Run faster, you’ve got Shifters approaching!”

  The beeps from Private Han-Wei’s pack spilled into one another.

  More illumination leafed out firework-like, expanding the sea of red light, while the Pegasus rifles sent constant, humming rounds into their wake.

  Muzzles flashed out of a little opening high in the wall where LP2 was nestled, and then there were flashes much closer from McPherson and then Han-Wei, tracers shredding the shadows behind them into smaller and smaller lines.

  The beeps flatlined into a drone.

  “Mantas incoming!”

  The shaking ground made balance unpredictable and my initial response was to freeze. But he couldn’t freeze. My host just had to heave himself forward, absorbing the trauma, hoping against the odds he wouldn’t slip, or that one of the smaller stalagmites wouldn’t drive up into his boot.

  A brown, woolly cloth sprang out from beyond and crashed a few feet to Jersey’s right. His Pegasus lurched to life, snapping at the ground behind and ahead of it, and then at the Manta itself, lifting it up into the air for a few moments and bringing it down.

  Another shadow plunged and pulled McPherson back up with it. Seconds later a grenade exploded, filling the void, and she was falling, slamming into the ground. I was stunned that she rose to her knees, the rock erupting around her in a blanket of cover fire, although she ambled forward for only a second or two before falling again. I couldn’t tell if it was because the light from the illumination round was receding or because she was being dragged backward, but her image faded a few moments later.

  “We’re almost there!” shouted Han-Wei, leaping through a row of stalagmites. “It’s just a—”

  Her sentence was cut short and Trimble swung his Pegasus upward, just ahead of her ascent into the blackness, as if trying to sever an invisible rope.

  “You’re almost there, LP3!” blared a voice from Han-Wei’s comm pack. “Just keep running!”

  There was an explosion in my legs. Jersey’s legs. For a few heartbeats my arms were still pumping, disconnected, before I slammed into the ground. I could still make out the comm pack ahead, even as my vision fragmented, but no Han-Wei. The hiss of a rocket sizzled through the terror and the corridor ahead of us crumbled, sealed with a mouthful of shining, liquid rock. Lips of flame framed what remained of the pathway until there was another hiss and that gap, too, was filled.

&
nbsp; Trimble’s finger was still on the trigger, but there was no ammo left as the terrible shapes loomed closer. Two watery golden eyes pushing through the red of the flare were the last things he saw before everything went black forever.

  I’d seen those eyes before.

  III

  Part Three

  Chapter 47

  I gasped and waited to vomit.

  There was no shattering relief of realizing it had all been a dream, because every moment had been real. “No. No. No.” I kept repeating the word over and over, screaming for myself and for everyone who had just died, knowing that even though I might have been able to disconnect from the terror, they hadn’t, and more people were going to die there—probably were already dying now. But that wasn’t even the worst of it.

  I thought about pocketing the syringe on the tray, but I imagined the cameras that Marquardt had said didn’t exist and chose not to. There was more than one way to get a sample.

  Lightheaded, I tried to steady myself on the seat as I got up, but it spun and I nearly stumbled before catching myself on a neighboring stand. Instead of joining the column of other Blues exiting their booths and headed for the debriefing, I hung back and slunk down the opposite way to the foyer, where I’d passed Commander Marquardt and his dogs on the way in. He was gone, but they were still there, licking themselves. Their ears pricked up and they swiveled on their haunches as I approached.

  “Hey there,” I managed to say as I got within reach. “How ar—”

  A set of fangs sank into the skin of my forearm and I jerked away, leaping back before the dog could bite again and then rolling out of its leash’s radius.

  Master Sergeant Paters’ snicker came from the other side of the room. “I’ve seen a lot of crazy things during my time here, but that takes the cake. Whadjya think was gonna happen?”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t know. I just thought I could . . .”

  “Make it like you? There’s a word for that with animals. Do you know what it is?”

  “Uh, I don’t think so, sir,” I said, looking down as the row of holes in my arm began leaking blood.

  “Anthropomorphizing. It’s funny that they needed to dream up such a fancy term for somethin’ so obvious, but I s’pose it gives all those learned folks somethin’ to do. Whatever fancy thing you call it, though, it’s still nature. And nature’ll bite if you put your hand somewhere stupid.”

  “I better go to Medical,” I said.

  I opened the medkit on the wall in the corridor outside and feigned pouring antiseptic on a cotton ball, before using the ball to dab the saliva around the wound. Then I put on some antibiotic, bandaged it up, and proceeded to the laboratory.

  “Hey,” said Eve, removing her forehead from the microscope shield. “How are you hold—”

  “I’m going to prepare those slides you wanted.”

  I could tell she was about to ask what I was talking about, but pivoted seamlessly when she saw the look in my eyes. “Oh, good.”

  I went to the back of the lab and injected myself with a syringe that was pre-prepped with Verex antivenom, not even needing the pretense of accidentally sticking myself with one of the lab venom samples first, since so many people were using it recreationally due to its hallucinogenic effects. Then I prepped a few slides the regular way at my workstation—waiting until the fourth one to let the cotton ball slip out of my shirt pocket, and smear it on the glass. I casually knocked it onto the floor a few moments later, prepared a couple more slides, then placed the sample tray by the microscope. “Here’s mice ten to sixteen,” I said.

  Ten to thirteen went by without incident, but when Eve got to fourteen I gave her shoulder a squeeze and we made eye contact again. She slid the slide under the lens and jotted down some notes, just like she had with the previous ones. “Same old, same old. I think we’re going to have raise the dose back up after all.”

  After finishing off the last two samples and wiping down the workstation, she asked, “Want to take a break? Maybe go to the Launch Bar or something?”

  “What the hell was that?” Eve whispered over the surge a few minutes later, once we were sitting up against the waterfall.

  “Saliva from one of Commander Marquardt’s dogs. I was in a tie-in, and the last thing my marine saw were these veiny, golden Shifter eyes, and it hit me that I’d seen them before. I see them all the time.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I don’t know, exactly, but maybe . . . maybe . . .”

  Eve’s face had come alive in a way I’d never seen before and I realized just how much of herself she usually held back. “Maybe Marquardt took a souvenir from the Rim and spliced the DNA into a puppy embryo.”

  I thought for a moment, trying to ignore the fact that the antidote was making the waterfall turn orange, and hoping to God that we were close enough and it was loud enough to keep the mics from picking this up. “The problem with that is that the Rim War has only been going on for four years.”

  “And how old’s the dog?”

  “Older. With the grayness at the muzzle, it looks about how my dog looked when it was eight or nine.”

  “So . . . it’s probably not just the antidote that the scientists are here for . . . ,” said Eve, bringing her hand to her mouth, staring at the waterfall.

  For a few moments I couldn’t speak. It made sense, yet it didn’t seem possible. It was just so vast. Suffocating. It was like one of those adult truths that took part of your innocence away when you learned about it, making you feel so alienated and lonely, but a thousand times worse. A thousand times sharper, because there was nowhere to run to.

  “Maybe it’s not the scientists. Maybe they don’t know what they’re working on—like Marquardt and Kerr divvy them up little pieces of the task, which they do in exchange for getting to work on the projects they care about.” I shrugged. “It could be a lot of things.”

  “The colonists might’ve known. That could’ve been what the message in the shuttle was about,” Eve said.

  I nodded slightly.

  She took a deep breath. “Fuck . . . either way, it’s not good.”

  “No,” I said, taking one too. The new reality continued to expand in my mind like a balloon, pushing everything else out. The almost physical sensation made me wonder if I was still hallucinating, or if I was actually feeling this way because of the gravity of the realization. There was the sense of vertigo—of things feeling like they were skipping a few seconds forward and back. Of little valves that were hidden in the Great Room’s rock wall blowing open so I could feel the pressure, and the pent-up energy, and the forming vortices inside, rupturing into sounds that squealed across my consciousness. They kept growing and growing, crowding me out of myself, on and on, until Eve reached through the chaos and grabbed my hand.

  “We have to figure this out.” And then it all stopped. The balloon ruptured, the valves closed, and I was in reality again, next to Eve, hearing nothing but the water pattering and the murmur of voices at surrounding tables.

  The quiet reminded me of the first time I’d sat here by this waterfall with Sebastian, and how impressed I’d been with his calm, meditative logic. The way he always tried to get to the bottom of everything and see how it all fit together. “Sebastian would’ve known what to do,” I said, squeezing Eve’s hand back. My classes and the inquest had faded into the background, but the image of the blood spouting from Sebastian’s head continued to fill every unoccupied second. I couldn’t stop seeing it. “He always came up with the perfect plan. I don’t even know where to begin . . .”

  “I think the plan is just to try and figure out what’s going on, right?”

  I nodded.

  She closed her eyes. “I’m racking my memory from the past two years, going over every little thing to try and see if there’s something there. But nothing suspicious is happening in Main Lab C—they’re just doing basic disease research: Proteins. RNA. Immunotherapies. The kind of stuff you’d expect. Which mean
s it’s gotta be A or B.”

  “You’ve got a Student Access Permit for there, right?”

  Eve shook her head. “Just to C. And all the passes are very specific; that’s why we could only take that one route to get to the hydroponics bay.”

  “Could Dr. Mitchell get you in?”

  She seemed almost amused at this. “He made it clear early on that those were faculty labs only because they were using hazardous materials. That it was a liability issue. And was evasive whenever someone brought it up .”

  “Well, there you go.”

  “I always assumed it was just the antidote.”

  Eve sighed and brought her hand to her chin, staring at the waterfall. I was blown away by how poised she was. I wanted to try to match it and be as thoughtful as I’d always imagined myself being in crises when I was kid, but I’d already proven that wasn’t who I was, and now—yet again—I couldn’t get my heart to slow down enough to focus.

  “But you don’t do science without leaving bread crumbs,” she said. “They’d have to be using some type of biological CAD software like I am. Lab notes. Trial designs. Could you get your friend that deleted the shuttle logs to hack into their workflow?”

  I closed my eyes like she’d done a minute ago and forced myself to think about one thing at a time. One conversation. One detail that could pull the rest out with it. At first it was the big stuff like the fight in the cafeteria and C1 and the first Challenge, but slowly I started shrinking myself down enough to fit inside the cracks, into the out of the way spaces my mind hadn’t thought worth remembering.

  After what felt like an incredibly long time I said, “Fingers already tried to get through once and says they’ve really got it locked down now. Told him they’d make him give up his TRCV number if he ever tried it again. Shook him up pretty good. They obviously don’t want us seeing this Verex research, but what if that’s because it’s just classified in general? What if the Fleet knows about it and they’re working together with Mars, and it’s something we should just . . .”

  “Stay out of?” Eve finished for me.