Lakes of Mars

by Merritt Graves

  Bending down, I put the drawing end against her arm and pulled the trigger. The RXR automatically flipped to sample two after the draw, but I flipped it back and switched over to deposit mode. I closed my eyes and thought about my parents and my sister. I thought about Rhys and Sebastian. But mostly I thought about how just about every problem on the station—every problem everywhere—was rooted in people not willing to put themselves at risk. No one here wanted to stand up to Caelus because they were scared of what he’d do to them if they did. No one back home wanted to forego a re-election by saying ‘no’ to a kickback or a favor trade. No one wanted to take the hit. No one wanted it to be their blood. And so it became everyone’s blood.

  “What are you doing?” asked Eve, rubbing her eyes.

  I injected her blood sample into my arm and then placed the RXR needle atop the adjacent workstation. “Shaving twenty percent off your timetable. That’s my job, remember?”

  Eve yawned. “And just how are you going to do that? We’ve been through all the variations, I just need to . . .” She stopped, her eyes moving down to the needle and then up to my arm.

  “Human trials.”

  She jolted up. “What?”

  “We’ve been stuck on 250 mgs for almost a month now. And now we have . . . I don’t know. A week? A week and a half?”

  “I told you I could finish on the . . .”

  ‘On the Pulsar’ is what she wanted to say, but obviously she couldn’t without giving us away to the cameras and the microphones.

  “That’s too risky.”

  She looked incredulous. “Too risky?”

  “Hmmm. Where oh where could I have gotten this idea? Pricking someone who’s asleep with Kam—”

  “That was different! Aaron, I don’t . . . I don’t think you understand what you’ve done. Do you have any idea what a brain hemorrhage feels like?”

  “I’m sure it’s horrible.”

  “I was tied-in to someone who was dying from one in my field medicine class and it felt like my mind was splitting open over and over again.”

  “Don’t tie-in to me then.”

  She shook her head, more upset than I’d seen her before. “Well, I’m sure glad you’re so pleased with yourself! How can you be so . . . god-fucking-damnit! I was going to get it. I came up with this way of stimulating the antibodies another thirty percent which lets me ease off the rebiterone a few mgs; I just need to reconfigure—”

  “That doesn’t sound like a two or three-day job.”

  She shrugged.

  “It’s going to take about that to see if I bleed out, right? And then another two or three to see if it kills the Kamalgia?”

  “Double that. At least.”

  “Right, because I don’t have a mouse brain. I’ve got a human brain and that’s—”

  “Some good it’s doing you.”

  “The point is, it might not be as toxic. You said animal trial results only translate into human eight percent of the time.”

  “It’s far higher with the model’s success rate.”

  “Better chance it’ll kill the Kamalgia, too, then.”

  “Aaron, will you stop s—”

  “Do you think I want to die? God, no. Not with you around.” I looked down at the floor. “We just gotta keep you around, you know? We gotta keep your brother around. We gotta do our best or there’s not really any point, just like you said.”

  “Don’t put this on me,” said Eve.

  Two Blues from A Block walked into the lab talking to each other.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not,” I said, lowering my voice. “It’s not like there was any secret about what your reaction would be.”

  Chapter 57

  A day passed, and then two, and still no bleeding. I was terrified of dying. Every free moment I had, I closed my eyes and tried to tell if my head felt any different. It was hard to know because I was constantly getting hit in the Mat Room and the Tread Room, and then there were all the headaches I usually got right after tying-in. But nothing struck me as any worse than usual.

  Fortunately, we had so much to do that I didn’t have many free moments anyway. Bit by bit, Eve collected the ammonia texophal, Simon the catalyte fuel, and Daries the batteries, all while we surveyed the dimensions of the vent by Caelus’ bunk and stole chains from storage to wrap around the C1 doors to barricade them in at night. I was also planning to use my medical access card to get the chloroform for Caelus’ sentries—everything we’d be doing if were actually preparing a coup.

  Riffing off of our earlier joint training exercises with D Block and Fingers’ initial faux plan to remove their opposition leader, Lt. Kava., the new pretext for Whistler’s wing helping us was that we were going to return the favor after Caelus was gone. Since we’d no longer be needing all of our points and specialty personnel as C had the points race locked for the term, we’d simply give the surplus to Whistler. The beautiful part of it was that it didn’t even seem farfetched: It’d be exactly what we’d do if we were trying to win.

  Besides the elevated number of canceled classes, we heard nothing from the Reds. Marquardt made his usual administrative rounds, roaming the tubes and glad-handing with his favorite cadets and instructors. Paters was his acerbic self in the Physical Wing. If anything, they seemed more lenient—almost indifferent, like instructors at any regular school. Either they hadn’t been lying about the cameras or their non-reaction was a silent, tacit endorsement.

  The quiet didn’t stop Simon and Fin from getting increasingly anxious, though. Fin in a general sense, while Simon was bothered that he had kept running into Kendall Pratt near the supply locker, the one Fire besides Caelus who had a logistics permit. “I think he’s up to something. There’s no reason for him to be up there that much.”

  “You were up there that much,” Daries had said.

  “And I’m doing something suspicious as hell—that’s exactly my point!”

  I’d been having similar kinds of thoughts, but since I was so scared of CS-32’s side effects, those fears felt almost remote in comparison. In a weird way, seeing them think everything was some sort of sign that they were onto us helped me be calmer and more clearheaded in contrast.

  Oddly enough, the person I’d been most worried about, Brandon, was doing the best. He enjoyed using our supposed coup against Caelus as a cover to talk about the real plot and went off on long, elaborate tangents to further obfuscate things for anyone who might’ve been listening. He’d ask me endless questions on what I thought about Caelus and Taryn and drew me into debates about this or that power dynamic between the SOs and techs in different blocks, talking about how he felt that he had to conform to the terrain here, whether he wanted to or not. He said it was that pressure of always having to play a role that had led him to take Zeroes, but even that had become a role now, too.

  I felt guilty for having hit him and I indulged him most of the time, but it made me weary that we were spending so much time together. Regardless of his recent turn and Sebastian’s words in his favor, he’d been erratic and fainthearted since the first day I’d arrived on the station, and it wasn’t like I could just forget that.

  A week from detonation, a sense of expectation and dread about the drug and the array alternated faster and faster until they became indistinguishable. It was like every hour before a final exam or Tae Kwon Do tournament mashed together with my family’s and Sebastian’s accident, on and on in a loop. I kept feeling like a wave of exhaustion was going to crash over me again, taking me back to where I’d been for the past couple months, but it didn’t. If anything, my heart was speeding up and I was becoming more and more awake.

  At times Fingers looked more awake and sure of himself, too, making bold assertions and rhetorical flourishes, while other times he appeared completely transfixed and spellbound by what was happening around him. It was like he was dismayed about setting this incredible machinery into motion and about how everything had an inevitable quality to it as a result—not just from the
momentum, but because there were too many interconnected, self-propagating parts to be able to call it off. Though just when I’d get to the point where I thought I should at least try to slow it down again, I’d picture the colonists and the glowing Verex eyes, and imagine what would happen if Mars was free to do anything it wanted.

  “So, Aaron, have they set a date for the inquest?” Daries asked. I’d skipped most of my classes so I could help Eve work out a contingency plan in the biolab, and now he, Pierre, and I were sitting in the Great Room, pretending to study. I was feeling pretty good. Six days had passed without any sign of hemorrhaging and there was only about a three-hour window left when it could still happen. Every time I looked down at my U-dev and saw that another minute or two had ticked by, I’d feel better still—slowly letting myself get cautiously optimistic.

  “Next Monday.”

  Daries counted off the days on his fingers to eight. “I know you’re freaked out about the charges, considering how they’re pretending to play it super straitlaced and everything, but in the end they let off who they want to.”

  “But what if they don’t want to let me off?” I said, my voice wavering. We talked about the trial all the time because we suspected it was what the Reds would think we’d talk about, and I always pretended to be extra nervous to match their expectations. Eve had told me that scientists were always looking for the data to confirm the things they already believed, and I imagined it held true with Marquardt and the rest of the Reds running the station, who probably viewed themselves as social scientists just as much as instructors.

  “You’re too high in the rankings. Star players get pardoned.”

  “What about this Rapshaw guy people keep mentioning? Wasn’t he a star player?” I asked with even more apprehension.

  “Well yeah . . . but the Reds must’ve had a special reason for wanting him out, since all he did was cheat on a test. That’s the only person who’s gotten in that much trouble for something like that,” Daries said.

  “Well, what makes you think there isn’t a special reason to get rid of me?”

  “You’re the last person they’d want to lose, especially since you’re playing their game now. They want you to figure it out yourself, but the point they’re trying to make is that it’s okay to break the rules. You just have to break the right ones.”

  “That’s a funny thing to be teaching.”

  “Is it?” asked Pierre.

  If this were real, I’d have asked him to elaborate, but I always had to remember that we were role-playing and everything we said had to serve the story we wanted them to believe.

  “And they’re trying to scare the living shit out of you. That’s the other thing. Psychic, existential fear.”

  “Mission accomplished.”

  “You’re looking all right,” Pierre said, rubbing my head. “I suppose it’s all kind of relative when you’re on trial for something terrible. Daries, do you remember Ben Woolsely?”

  “Oh yeah, Ben Woolsely. Jesus.”

  “All right, so Ben Woolsely’s this excellent frigate group commander and super-nice guy. Like seriously, one of the most genuinely nice people I ever met, who just so happens to hit someone a little weird in a training exercise—a freak type of thing that’s clearly an accident. And that’s what everyone thought it was, too, until someone from one mat over—this sergeant in the block Woolsely’s block was facing two weeks later—came forward. Saying he saw Woolsely wind up to hit the guy. A few others backed him up and pretty soon there was an inquest set. So Woolsely was already freaked out, really freaked out, and then he checked his U-dev’s link search history and he saw all these pages on cranial anatomy, as if he’d been trying to research how to hit someone just right to cause trauma. Which he hadn’t done, of course. So he deleted them and got his wing’s tech to wipe the traces. But the cleanup was uncovered and Woolsely lied about it—and then they scared the tech into ratting him out to prove that he lied. And it just kept getting worse and worse until finally, the night before the verdict, Woolsely broke down and they took him to Psych. No one ever saw him again.”

  “The Reds were just screwing with him, as usual,” Daries said. “People tried to tell him that; it was an obvious frame-up. Obvious. They just wanted to see how he’d deal with the stress of serious charges. Even when you know you’re innocent, formal charges can scare the shit out of you. Sometimes the more ludicrous they are, the more real they seem.”

  “You lose your sense that the world’s a rational place here,” said Pierre. “’Cause once one irrational thing happens, it’s like anything can happen. And that can really terrify people.”

  “So, yeah, I’d say you’re holding up well,” Daries finished.

  We’d go on and on like this, trying to throw off the Reds, swapping details between the fake plot to threaten C1 and the real one, adding in all kinds of color to be as convincing as possible. Sometimes it even felt like I was actually preparing a defense, coordinating with Mr. Katz to prove that Caelus orchestrated Sebastian’s death. And other times when we switched gears, especially after day five with CS-32 in my system came and went, it really did feel like we were just seventeen-year-olds talking together, goofing off and working through our homework and problem sets.

  I couldn’t help but feel closer to them in the process, like our faking it was actually more real than any of our previous interactions. And because we were trying so hard, in a way, we were actually getting to know each other better than we otherwise would have. Daries was relentlessly blunt and insightful. Pierre was amazing at putting himself in other people’s shoes, sensitive but never sentimental and perceptive but not over-analytical in the way adults sometimes are. He seemed to effortlessly understand all the Blues as he pretended to gossip about them, and even some of the Reds. He wasn’t even stumped when I told him that Master Sergeant Paters had winked at me that day in the Mat Room after Pierre had been injured.

  “Paters’ purpose is to get inside your head, so it’s only natural to try to get into his, too. But you won’t find much: He’s played the game long enough to just be a stand-in.”

  “Guys, guys—look outside!”

  Jolted out of my daydreaming, I followed Daries’ gaze and saw about twelve or thirteen ships clustering in the planet’s upper atmosphere. “What the hell are those doing there? Combat shuttles. Fury gunships. Mars isn’t supposed to have those. It looks like Fingers was—”

  I kicked Daries under the table to shut him up before he said something stupid.

  “It’s starting,” Pierre whispered.

  Other Blues and Greens gathered at the windows.

  “Guys, it’s early, but this might be our chance to hit Caelus, with everyone distracted,” Pierre said urgently.

  We needed more time. It would still be at least two hours before we knew about the drug’s toxicity. And then another four or five before knowing if it killed the Kamalgia. “But we don’t even have the transmitter or fuse wiring worked out,” I muttered, not sure what my intentions were. The plan for the switcheroo was to have Daries bring the bomb back with him in his sparring bag and push it up through the hole into Pierre’s covered bunk above, and then for Eve to carry it out in her backpack. However, “fuse wiring” was code for Daries not having lasered the hole yet.

  “Then we better start now.” Determination etched onto Pierre’s face as he and Daries got up and started walking toward C3. “Fin’s clever enough to figure something out. She’s in Mil History, right?”

  I grabbed their shoulders from behind. This was all happening too fast, way before it was supposed to. “Guys, we can’t go yet!”

  Daries spun around. “What are you talking about? We have to. There’s no time!”

  Eve had said she could finish on the Pulsar if this formulation didn’t work, but now that we were faced with actually having to do it that way it seemed exponentially riskier. I wanted to buy her more time, yet clearly Daries was right: It wouldn’t matter whether or not we blew up th
e array if it opened a hole in whatever was keeping those ships from entering the planet’s atmosphere first.

  “Aaron, what’s wrong with you?” Daries asked, staring at me. He looked bewildered.

  “I . . . I just think . . .”

  “You think what?”

  I couldn’t say it, not after I’d been the one who’d started this whole thing in the first place. “It’s nothing. Never mind.”

  “So, Fin then,” Pierre urged a moment later. “She’s in Military History, right?”

  “Dunno.” I took out my U-dev and sent her a message asking her to meet me in C3 right away.

  She wrote back a few seconds later. I’m in class.

  When I wrote again, telling her it was important, all I got back was: Something tells me it can wait.

  “Shit.” I broke away from Daries and Pierre and headed south down a winding corridor to the Humanities Wing. Ideally, I would’ve spoken to Fin through a tie-in, but we had started to run low on fluid and were relying increasingly on the parallel narrative to communicate.

  I messaged Fingers: We’re all moving. What room’s Fin in right now?

  Within thirty seconds he had hacked her schedule and responded. Even though I couldn’t say it in a message, I hoped he understood, too, that this wasn’t just a casual request and that he should head right to C3.

  I strolled into Room 305 and casually sat down in an open seat adjacent to her. “We really need to talk.”

  Fin went red, clearly startled to see me. “After class, maybe,” she whispered, and turned back to face the front of the classroom.

  “Now.”

  She gave a shrug and didn’t answer. I’d been feeling uneasy about her ever since she’d expressed doubts about the plan’s sincerity, and it suddenly occurred to me she might have no intention of finishing the bomb. That she might go to the Reds and tell them that she’d built it for us to scare Caelus, but then we decided to use it on the array and she wanted no part of it. And the awful thing was that because all the incriminating details were communicated through the tie-ins, the camera footage wouldn’t betray her story.