by Greg Bear
We’re wide awake in the pressure tank at the center of our space frame, fresh from timeout, being pumped full of enthusiasm while the Cosmoline is sponged off by rotating cloths, like going through a car wash except in zero g.
This drop, we’re told there are six space frames falling into insertion orbits. The first four frames hold two fasces, each fascis a revolving cylinder with three sticks like bullets. We call them rotisseries. Each stick carries a squad of Skyrines. That makes two hundred and forty of us, this drop. The fifth and sixth frames carry transport sleds with heavy weapons and vehicles and a couple of fountains. We won’t see any of that until we’re down on the Red.
Once we’re sponged, we pull on skintights, do a final integrity check, strap on sidearms, receive palm-sized spent matter cassettes, then slip on puff packs and climb back into our sticks. Precise, fast, no time to think. Waiting in the stick is not good. The tubes are tight and dark. Our angels play soothing music, but that only makes it worse.
I start to twitch.
What’s taking so long?
Then everything—and I mean everything—hisses and whines and squeals. I’m squashed against my tube on one side, then another, then top, then bottom, and altogether, we sing hallelujah, we’re off!
The fasces spin outward from the frame, cylinders retro-firing to slow and get ready to discharge our sticks. I can’t see anything but a diagram projected on the inside of my faceplate. Cheery. Colorful. All is well.
We’ve begun our drop.
The sticks shoot out of the rotisseries in precise sequence. Bite of atmosphere seems delayed. Feels wrong. Then it starts—the animal roar of entry. Just as the noise outside my stick becomes unbearable, thirty of us shoot from our tubes, out the end of the sticks, and desperately arrange ourselves, clinging to aero shields.
The shields buck in the upper atmosphere.
Over Mars.
The sky is filled with Red.
We ride ten to a shield for a few minutes in bouncy, herky-jerk free fall, at the end of which we all roll off. Comes a brief moment of white light and stove-grill heat. One side of my skintight flaps and then settles against my skin. Nice and toasty.
My drop pack spins out millions of threads like gossamer, almost invisibly thin. We call this puff. The threads expand to a lumpy ball fifty meters wide, which wobbles and snatches at Mars’s thin, thin air—and then gloms on to other balls, other Skyrines enveloped in puff.
All around our jammed puffballs, curling thread tips burn away. We’re suspended inside like bugs in flaming cotton candy. It’s spectacular—a lurid, artificial sunrise. I’m breathing like a racehorse at the end of its run. My faceplate fogs. I can barely see, but right away, I know for sure that there’s trouble. The big ball has split early. There are only three Skyrines in my cherry glow. Others have spun off in fiery clumps, and who knows where they’ll land?
The glow burns down closer and closer, brighter and brighter. With gut-check jerks we slow from four klicks per second to one klick per second to one klick per minute, until, just after the last of our puff burns out, just after our packs release and rocket away, smoking, sad, finished…
The three of us flex our knees and land with less-than-gentle thumps.
I pick myself up, surprised I’m still alive. Bad drops are usually fatal. Quick look around. Flat, immense.
Welcome to Mars.
The Red.
No immediate threat.
Time to freely scream fuck! inside my helm and figure out what the hell went wrong.
I’M WITH TAK AND KAZAK. I think it was DJ and maybe Vee-Def and Michelin I saw thrashing away through the last of our puff sunrise. They may be no more than a klick or two off. The fasces apparently shot our sticks at the apex of insertion rather than low orbit. We’ve been separated from the rest of our platoon, and I have no idea how far away our company may be. They likely came down in a north-south fan, spread across more than a hundred klicks.
We could take days to reassemble.
There are no transport sleds nearby, and therefore no vehicles—no Skells or Tonkas or deuces.
Looks like we’ll be hoofing it.
And no big weapons.
What’s left of our packs falls, still smoking, a few hundred meters north. That’s GPS north—no magnetic field on the Red. Good, I say to myself; sats are still up. We can receive our last-minute tactical and regroup in order. But then my angel loses the signal. The gyro is still good, however, and through my helm grid, I scope out the sun.
The Antags keep bringing down our orbital assets, nav and recon sats and other necessities. Newly arrived space frames keep spewing them out, along with Skyrines and transport sleds, but a lot of the time, when we arrive, we don’t know right away where we are or what we’re supposed to do. We’re trained to just git along. Staying mobile makes you a tougher target. We call it drunkard’s walk, but most of us drunkards are packed tight with prayer—that we’re in range of the rest of our company, an intact sled, maybe a fountain, or at the very least we’ll stumble over a stray tent box.
After four months transvac, the pre-drop cocktail of epi and histamines makes me feel terrific, barring a slight case of the wobbles. I pay no attention to how I feel, nor do Tak or Kazak. We’re all sergeants. We’ve been here before. Our angels coordinate with fast, high-pitched screes, not likely to be heard more than a few tens of meters away. No joy. Nobody has the plan. No fresh recon. NCOs rule at last.
We know all there is to know, for now. But we don’t even know where we’ve touched down.
We bump helms.
“What strength?” Tak asks.
“A squad, no more—in this sector,” I say.
“Whatever fucking sector this is!” Kazak says.
“Northern lowlands,” I guess. “Pressure’s about right.” I scuff brown dust along the flat, rocky hardpan and point north. “DJ and some others skipped over that way.”
DJ is Engineering Sergeant Dan Johnson.
“Then let’s find them,” Tak says.
“Nothing here worth staying for,” Kazak agrees. “Terrible place for a fight—no high ground, almost no terrain. Can’t dig fighting holes in this old shit. Where are we, fucking Hellas? Why drop us in the middle of nothing?”
No answer to that.
We walk, carrying less than five hours of breath and water, armed only with bolt-and-bullet pistols that resemble thick-barreled .45s. Tak Fujimori has an orange stripe on his helm. Tak is from Oakland. He went through vac training and jump school with me at SBLM and Hawthorne. He is compact and strong and very religious, though I’m not sure what religion. Maybe all of them.
Timur Nabiyev—Kazak—wears blue tape. He’s from Kazakhstan, on exchange from Eurasian Defense. He trained with contingents of Chinese and Uyghurs in the cold desert of Taklamakan, specializing in dusty combat—then with Italians and French around Vesuvius and on the Canary Islands. Kazak is not religious except when he’s on the Red, and then he’s some sort of Baptist, or maybe Orthodox.
Out on the Red, we’re all religious to one degree or another. Soviets once claimed they went into space and couldn’t find God. They obviously never fell from high orbit in the middle of a burning bush.
The Red here is a wide, level orange desert shot through with purple and gray, and out there, to the northwest, one little scut of ridgeline, low and round. Otherwise, the horizon is unrelieved. Monstrously flat.
Skintights sport kinetic deflection layers around upper thighs and torso that can discourage rounds of 9mm or less, but no body armor can save us from Antag bolts and other shit, which closely matches what we deal. Not even our transports have more than rudimentary armor. Too damned heavy. Ours are made by Jeep, of course, mostly fold-out Skells with big wheels, but also Tonkas and Deuces and mobile weapons trucks called General Pullers—Chesties to those who love them. For important actions, even bigger weapons are delivered on wide-bed platforms called Trundles.
When a sled drops nearby. When we find the
m.
Sky still looks empty. Quiet.
No more drops for now.
We are forbidden from using radio, can’t even uplink by laser until—if—our sats get replaced and can scope out the territory. Then up-to-data and maps will get lased from orbit, unless there’s dust, in which case we may not get a burst for some time. Satellite microwave can penetrate all but the grainiest dust, but command prefers direct bursts of laser, and Antags could have sensors on every low ridge and rocky mound. If dust scatters our targeted beams, they’re excellent at doing reverse Fourier, pinning our location to within a few meters and frying us like flies on a griddle. So we’re hiking silent except for scree and touching helms.
If a fountain made it, it’s going to be dormant and heavily camouflaged, waiting for our magic touch. Hard to find. But if we do find one, we’ll replenish and maybe grab a nap before we’re in the shit.
Or there is no shit.
Hard to know what will happen.
After all this time, we know almost nothing about the enemy except they’re roughly our size, on average, with snouted helms, two long arms with hanging sleeves, three legs—or two legs and a tail—and they’re not from around here. Only once have I seen their scant remains up close.
If we succeed, they’re scrap and stain. If they succeed—
All physics.
I SCAN THE horizon over and over as we walk, nervous habit. The low line of atmosphere out there is brownish pink and clear except for a tan fuzzy patch near the distant ridge that doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. Did I miss that the last time? I point it out to the others. Could be vehicular, could be a recent fountain drop; could be Antags.
We’ll find DJ and the others, then head that direction. No sense rushing.
My angel, mounted above my left ear, follows my focus with little whirring sounds, then finishes laying out grids and comparing the negligible terrain to stored profiles. I look at Tak, then at Kazak. Their angels concur. We dropped over Marte Vallis in southern Elysium, within a few sols’ hike of a small pedestal crater the angels label EM2543a, locally known as “Bridger,” probably after some Muskie who died there.
The loess laps in low, snakelike waves across the hardpan. We cross over an X and then a Y and then a W of long, broad marks like roadways, some, we know—we’ve seen them from orbit and from the air—running for hundreds of klicks. These are not roads but wind-doodles, cryptic messages scrawled across the flats by millions of dust devils.
According to the angels, we are transiting a low plateau of ancient olivine. A second layer of flood basalt overlaps this one a few dozen klicks south. If we play tourist and venture that way, we will see that the edges of the upper plateau have sloughed, leaving irregular cliffs about ten meters high, with several meters of rubble at the base—quite fresh, less than fifty million years old.
My boot sensor is working for once and says the local dust is pH neutral. No signs of water outflow. Still, the basalt layers overlie deep, heavily fractured, and angled plates of ancient sandstone, probably the broken remains of a Noachian seabed. That means there could be underground water way below, shifting deep flows with no surface eruptions in our epoch. All same-same. Nary a sip for us. Mars is rarely generous.
Skintight injects more enthusiasm. Christ, I love it. I need it. We’re experiencing our first sol! How exciting. A sol is one day on the Red, just a little longer than an Earth day. There won’t be a pickup for at least seven or eight sols. Much longer if they can’t find us, which seems likely. We’re probably screwed.
But for the moment, none of us cares.
JOURNEYS END IN LOVERS MEETING
We walk north, saying little.
Skyrines rarely survive more than four drops. This is my fifth. So far, I’m as clear and frosty as a winter eve, but my skintight is already pulling back the encouragement.
I hate transitions.
As the cocktail slacks off, I start to think too much. Brain is not my friend. Leathery-winged shadows rustle in the back of my skull. I may or may not be psychic, but I can feel with knife-edge prickles that we’re heading into opportunity—by which I mean trouble.
With his new eyes, Tak is the first to spot the body. He swings his arm and in turn I alert Kazak. We spread out and charge our sidearms.
In a few minutes, walking steady, no leaping, we surround the body. There’s another about ten meters off, and another twenty beyond that. Three in all. The uniforms are Russian, probably with French equipment. Tak bends over the first and rolls it faceup. The skintight is still puffy. The helm plate is gruesome. Can’t tell if it was male or female.
Tak pokes his finger at his own helm, then explodes his hands away. Sploosh! Germ needles. Poor bastard was feverish in seconds, crazy for the next four or five minutes, could have even shot his or her squad before falling over and fermenting. Tak finds where the little needle punctured the fabric and ta-da gestures at its feathery vanes. He doesn’t try to pull it out. Fucking germ needles can poke up as well as prick down. They can be deployed from aerostats—large balloons—or dropped from orbit in exploding pods. Both systems spray silvery gray clouds over a couple of square kilometers. The needles, each about four centimeters long, shift their wide fletches and find you. Then they turn you into a balloon filled with bone chips and pus.
Real nightmare batwing shit.
Our angels scree the swollen suit, just in case the dead soldier’s unit is still up for a chat. No luck. It’s long since self-wiped. Since we haven’t uplinked since the drop, and of course have not been briefed on recent engagements, we don’t know anything about these guys or why they are here. They must have arrived many sols before us—maybe weeks. Why? There weren’t supposed to be major operations before our arrival. Somebody’s had second thoughts since we left Earth. Maybe these guys were shipped out on fast frames, taking only a month or two rather than four… They left before us, and now they’re dead, and we don’t know anything about why they are here.
It’s getting tougher and tougher to stay focused.
At this point, we decide radio silence is stupid. Our only chance is to try to raise other Skyrines and hear if they’ve found something useful.
We split three different directions.
Only then do I see Engineering Sergeant Dan Johnson, DJ, waving his hands and descending a short slope made nasty by BB-sized pebbles. He manages to skitter down on his feet, then waves again and signs that he’s found a tent box. We greet him with shoulder slaps and real joy. His angel screes ours, and now we’re four instead of three.
“Anybody see sparkly?” DJ asks. “I saw sparkly coming down, above and outside.”
We all agree that we saw no sparkly. Sparkly is bad—it’s our term for space combat observed from a distance. Space frames and sticks being blown out of the sky.
“The puff was all fucked,” Kazak says resentfully. “How could you tell?”
“Well, I saw something,” DJ insists, but he doesn’t push. We don’t even want to think about it. He’s found a tent box, he’s leading us to it. The box is up on Bridger’s pedestal. Craters on Mars often sit on rises caused by force of impact hardening the surrounding regolith, making them more resistant to erosion. Scientists call the rises pedestals, and this one is about two meters above the hardpan.
We’re starting to really wear down by the time we reach the box and do a walk-around. The box is at least a month old, probably also Russian or French, and still has fresh purple striping—no interference since it was dropped, no booby traps, and no germ needles to render it useless. We make damned sure of that. Safety and sanctuary. We may be in the middle of nowhere important, off course and ultimately doomed, but at least we’re good for the night, which is rolling over fast, and of course it’s going to be cold and dry.
Still, we’re about to sleep in a tent dropped for a dead squad. I’m not happy about that, but something similar happened on my last drop, and we all survived and took down something like sixty Antags—painted them on the sand
from a couple of hundred meters. A good two weeks in the shit, and the nearest I’ve been to learning what an Antag looks like up close.
Bolts don’t leave much to autopsy after the fighting is done: cuplike pieces of helm filled with grayish skull-bits—no teeth; shreds of light armor and suit, big, wide sleeves and leggings filled with crumbling bone and charred spines. Backbones, maybe. Our gunny ignored the tissue but scooped up some of the fabric and tech and packaged it for return. We heard no more about it. It’s traditional in the Corps to keep grunts ignorant about who we fight, something about dehumanizing the enemy. Well, they ain’t fucking human to begin with.
DJ and Tak break the tent box’s seal. The stripes turn orange-pink and then brown—safe—and the tent inflates. It carries enough air to last the night, and because it’s made for five, maybe a few hours into tomorrow. Strapped in a bag outside, we find a case of MREs with sacks of water and six vials of vodka. The MREs consist of hard sausage (Finnish, the label says—probably reindeer) and tubes containing something like borscht. A feast. We stuff the vodka in our hip packs, keeping our eyes on the black sky while the tent grows and the sun drops.
We talk without butting helms, but can barely hear each other through the thin, thin air. Not that there’s much to say. The smudge on the horizon has not changed, other than turning a pretty shade of violet. It may only be a big dust devil. If so, the wind conditions out there have been stable for several hours.
I look higher, bending my neck to see the zenith. Much of the time the stars over the Red shine brighter and steadier than they ever do on Earth. Their beauty is lost on me. They judge. Worse, they send Antags. The stars are waiting for me to fuck up.
After we trigger and tune the sentinel, the tent is ready. We scoop dust in our gloves and fling it in slow plumes over the striped plexanyl to provide local color. Then we circle, pull short dusters from our thighs, and brush each other down, paying particular attention to wrinkles around our underarms and gear belts. Nobody wants to itch inside the tent all night, and nothing itches like fine Martian loess. We might not notice at first; six or eight hours after a drop, Cosmoline blocks itching and a lot of other sensations, so all seems smooth and cool and baby-powder sweet. During those hours I feel like a walking ghost or some other kind of disembodied asshole. But when sensation returns—and it always does—Mars dust can turn a miserable night on the Red into something truly special.
