Lakes of Mars

by Merritt Graves

I elbowed him in the throat, just like Caelus had done to Pierre. “She wasn’t contagious yet,” I shouted, getting up off him. “You . . .” I was about to say something more, but I couldn’t manage the words. The tears I’d dammed up were back, flowing harder than ever. Fingers had his hands on his head, anguish on his face. Daries was wiping away tears of his own. I was phasing in and out again, one person one moment, another the next.

  Brandon’s words made me think of my own infection, and the CS-32 I’d given myself to treat it. I did have a pretty splitting headache and was shaking and nauseous, which were all symptoms of the hemorrhaging that had killed the mice. But I always got that way after tying in. It was just worse now because I’d tied in so much in the past couple of hours, not to mention the bullet wound and crash landing in the scout ship. It was impossible to tell what was what. It was just a smear of pain.

  There was a whooshing and the whine of an engine as another shuttle approached, preparing to land. It was UFM, too, but the colonials weren’t shooting at it as they walked toward us from different streets, out from behind mauled buildings, cautious and confused. Despite the plaster and the dirt and the blood caking their faces, they were well organized for a colonial security force, with mostly matching uniforms and thin, sleek commpieces. It seemed impossible. All this time I’d been looking at the planet, thinking it was empty, they’d been down here veiled in the clouds and the storms.

  Brandon got up, spitting blood, and shambled backward as the shuttle landed. I looked at Fingers and Daries, but they seemed as perplexed as I was. There was another big whine and a final swooping noise, like the engine was falling over a large divide, before the hatch opened and Taryn Miller appeared, followed by Michael Paulus, Max Zoellers, and Caelus Erik.

  I raised my Pegasus rifle, as did Fingers and Daries. Facing us, Taryn and Michael did the same.

  Zoellers smiled thinly. “Not the heroes’ welcome we were expecting, having shot down that last ship of theirs, but it’s not like we’re in it for the accolades.”

  Caelus signaled for his guys to lower their guns.

  I kept mine up. What the hell is he doing here? “Give me a reason I shouldn’t shoot you now.”

  “I’ll give two,” he said, walking toward me through the dust. “One, I saved your life. All your lives. Just how exactly did you think the water storage tank above you happened to explode when it was two sections over from your bomb?”

  “That’s horseshit,” said Daries. “Why would you have a bomb lying around?”

  Zoellers smirked.

  “The same reason you did,” said Caelus.

  “No fu—”

  “You see something terrible happening and you have to do something about it. Simple. Especially out here where there’s no one to warn. The only difference is we were getting our bomb onto the array.”

  “No one has clearance for a spacewalk,” I snapped.

  “No Blue,” he said, drawing the word out, “but Zoellers and I put in a lot of time with the Reds and the nurses. Making friends. Making deals. That is, until you fucked it up.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? We blew up the array,” Daries yelled.

  “You damaged it. At first I had the same idea—we did a dry run by breaking a vial to see how long the lab would go on lockdown.”

  My whole body stiffened, recounting what Eve had told me in the hydroponics bay and what Simon had said about Kendall Pratt in the supply locker, and then remembering Michael Paulus’ scale-model bomb the day his and Fin’s Field Chemistry class got canceled.

  “But then I found a Red that would place the bomb out on the array. He was just suiting up as you guys put the place on alert.” He looked over at Brandon. “So yeah, we had an extra one lying around to bail you out with.”

  “Which had nothing to do with creating your own diversion so you could escape, of course.”

  “We could’ve put it a lot of places. Most good decisions, though, have multiple things going for them. That’s why they’re good.”

  “Like killing Sebastian?” I sneered, taking a step forward. “Did that have a lot of good things going for it?”

  “Aaron, I had Student Access Permits to everything. So did my guys. We got them by being exactly who the Reds wanted us to be. That’s how you win someone’s trust. Scaring Sebastian and threatening to blow up C4 was our excuse for going into the armory. For getting everything we needed to finish the bomb. I bet you had an excuse for making yours, too, with all those eyes around, didn’t you?”

  I was stunned.

  “Of course you did. And it’s not like we were trying to kill him, either. I feel horrible, but what were the odds that one would get him in the head before you realized what was going on and emptied out the chamber?”

  I took the magazine out of my sidearm, dumped out about three-quarters of the cartridges, reloaded, and then aimed at his head. “About as good as these.”

  “I wouldn’t blame you for shooting me, Aaron. But there’s another reason not to.”

  I stared at him, my grip tightening around the gun.

  “You understand what’s happening now, right? Making the Verex antidote was an excuse to let Mars stay on the station, drawing all the top scientists who were desperate for the opportunity to practice real science, uninhibited by their Mylan Chips.”

  “And the school was just a front for that?” I asked, keeping my gun fixed on his head as he matched my step forward.

  “More than that. Think about it. Graduating cadets who thrived in that jungle environment are perfect for helping to stage a coup. You station them somewhere, promise them ranks and prestige, and they’ll do to that ship or outpost what they did to their block: take it over. There are probably only a few thousand Mars regulars and they’re all here, but think about how many Corinth graduates there are, placed around the Fleet in high-ranking strategic positions, who’ve been taught this stuff. It doesn’t take too many guys like that on a ship to take it by surprise.”

  “What about everyone else?”

  “Everyone else . . .” Caelus shook his head. “Is a delivery system. Vectors spreading Zeroes across the Fleet. They get you addicted here where you can figure out formula approximations since your Mylan Chips are interfered with, and then you pass them along when you’re given your first assignment. Every ship has some form of the ingredients on board: a little from the med bay, a little from the science bay, a little from the supply lockers. Designed with the express idea that every vessel would unknowingly be a lab, turning its crew into junkies. Making it that much easier for their best guys to stage mutinies.”

  “Guys like you!” I snapped.

  “Guys like me,” said Caelus. “And the guys like you get so beat up and worn down from the stress that you take stims, and then eventually Zeroes to balance out the uppers.”

  “I’m not addicted,” I said, cycling through all the worry and fear—how I’d taken stims so I’d be awake to help Eve—how I’d taken Zeroes once so I could finally fall asleep.

  “How many two-way tie-ins have you done?” asked Caelus, stopping a couple meters away from me.

  “Enough.”

  “Then you will be. They’re the most stressful things of them all. Your thoughts in someone else’s head—their thoughts in yours. That’s not something your body has had any evolutionary experience dealing with.”

  “But why is any of that a reason for me not to shoot you?” I asked, trying to process everything he’d just said. Things were moving in and out of focus, swaying in the breeze that had begun to pick up from the north. It was like my mind was a camera trying to capture everything in a coherent frame, but it was all swerving too fast for any one zoom to make sense. I felt helpless. Stranded in my head. Knowing deep down that I should just shoot him right there, before it was too late, but unable to disprove the things he was saying quick enough to fully justify pulling the trigger.

  “Simple. Because I know how to stop it.”

  “Bullshit,” said
Daries and I simultaneously.

  “Aaron, remember when you saw me at the student biolab? I wasn’t just fucking around, I was figuring out how to counteract Zeroes. So were Paulus and Pratt and Shu—all my smartest guys. The Reds thought we were just making it to protect our own wing, but you know how that goes: same show, different narratives. So if you fancy turning into the typical Corinth graduate, by all means, blow my head off.”

  A growing number of uniformed colonists had gathered around us, fascinated by the spectacle of their rescuers fighting.

  “I think I will,” I said, aiming the gun at his forehead. “Because I don’t believe a fucking word of it.”

  “Easy, Aaron, maybe that isn’t such a good idea,” said Fingers.

  “Listen to him,” said Caelus, urgency finally breaking through his coolness. “He has a unique perspective on things, given how much tie-in fluid it looks like he pumped into himself saving your ass. You’re not just making a decision for you; you’re making one for someone who got you all out. Shooting the one person who knows the antidote formulation would be a pretty shitty way of saying thanks.”

  He’d broken the vial in Main Lab C with Eve. I knew he’d snuck into the student biolab on the Outer Ring, too. But that didn’t mean he knew anything about an antidote. “I can’t fucking trust you!”

  “You’re right. But let me ask you something: Don’t you think we’d be better off right now if the array had been completely destroyed?”

  “That’s not how it works!” I yelled, shaking.

  “Of course it is,” he said. “We both want justice. We both want to stop the coup. I’m just better at getting things done.”

  “I’d say we did all right!”

  “I’d say you both did,” said a silver-haired man who came walking up through the ring of colonial soldiers that had formed. He was dressed in the same tan color they were, but it wasn’t a combat uniform, and there wasn’t any dirt on his face. My mind was strewn with fragmented thoughts, and it took me a few moments to pull enough of them together to realize it was the face I’d seen next to articles on the colonists: the founder, Jack Sivers. It was traversed by age and stress, and there was a hollowed-out sleeplessness in his eyes, but there was still the same determination.

  “We always thought an audit or a survey team might come from the Fleet, but students, from the station . . .” His gaze slowly brushed over each of us. I don’t think he thought this was a trick considering how close the Mars forces had been to taking down the lightwall, but given the mixture of concern and disbelief on his face, I got the sense he was struggling just as hard to make sense of everything as I was. “We never even considered it.”

  Caelus looked up at the sky. “They didn’t either.”

  “No . . .” Sivers stopped in front me, seeming to notice just how exhausted and beat up and bewildered we all were. “Regardless of what happened between you before, we’re in this together now. We may be safe for the moment, but they’ll just rebuild the array and try the same thing again. We’re not going to have much time to figure something out.”

  Michael Paulus frowned. “They won’t even have to rebuild it; it’s only been knocked out of alignment with superficial damage to the firing coils. I’d give ’em . . . two weeks. Maybe less.”

  He took a step toward the citadel, paused, and turned back toward us. “Then there’s not a second to waste.”

  Thanks for reading. I’m working on the second book now. If you’d like to see some early chapters for free, please sign up on the mailing list https://mailchi.mp/4a6bc90e5ecb/lakesofmars and drop me a line at https://www.facebook.com/LakesofMars/

  Also, if you feel like it, please consider leaving a review.

  And finally, there’s the other book I’ll be releasing soon—or have released—depending on when you’re reading, Sunlight 24. Description below:

  If the game wasn’t fair before, it’s definitely not fair now. Or so thinks Dorian Waters, part of the ever-expanding portion of humanity who can’t afford the nano-implant and genetic augmentation regimen known as Revision. And because he can’t afford Revision, he can’t get into college. He can’t get a job. And when he sees the brilliant and mesmerizing Lena for the first time, he knows he doesn’t have a chance with her, either.

  Feeling thoroughly lost and exasperated, Dorian robs a house with his best friend, Ethan. Then they do it again. It’s thrilling and terrifying and deeply unsettling. But since they take so little each time that their targets don’t notice, they’re able to keep at it until they have enough money saved up.

  Once they do their first Revision, their initial choices in self-enhancement start impacting their future choices, which in turn impact their future Revision––on and on in an increasingly surreal loop, transforming their personalities the entire away. Dorian desperately wants to slow things down and figure out the kind of person he really wants to be, but with the police one step behind them and a contentious relationship with his brother, Jaden, threatening to unravel everything, it’s the expedient choices that he’s finding himself more and more compelled to make.