by Jim Keen
“Learned all this from protecting your window garden, huh?”
“Either that or go to school.”
“You make a compelling argument.” She tried to smile, but her mouth hurt too much.
“Can you move?” Red said.
The stim inhaler had worn off long ago, leaving her body to deal with its chemical aftershocks. The worst pain came from her ribcage; something had happened when the Klichka collapsed onto her. She didn’t have a punctured lung, but her insides shifted, loose and wet. Her jaw and legs throbbed, but that was superficial damage. She pushed herself upright.
“Help me.” She held out her arm. Red slipped it across his thin shoulders and lifted.
“Suit, any suggestions?”
“Give up while you still can.”
“Helpful.”
She looked around. The corridor ran twenty feet to another submarine door. It was hot in here now, stifling. She chewed her lip as the overhead lights sparked. The floor shook with distant explosions; electrical systems popped like firecrackers on the other side of the door.
Suit was right, its sociopathic intelligence arrowing to the truth—she didn’t know how to find Mike, and was in no shape to rescue him even if she did. For a moment Alice closed her eyes and savored the thought of surrender. They would kill her, of course, and that beautiful velvety blackness beckoned to her: so close, so absolute, so peaceful. She’d been smothered by that blanket once before, and had raged against the medics and machines who brought her back.
Isn’t that what you want?
The thought came out of nowhere, yet it felt so at home, so much a part of her, that she couldn’t ignore it. After Mars, no street patrol had been too risky, no arrest too dangerous. She’d led the chase into the alley that brought them here. A memory came back to her, of Mike shouting for her to stop, that the dead end was too dangerous.
She’d ignored him because—
No.
Yes.
The realization felt like a dam breaking, the knowledge flooding her mind, death’s dark appeal laid bare yet reduced of its potency. Alice let her emotions churn. Her selfish desire to find a way out, any way, had brought harm to the very people she should have been protecting. Mike’s capture was her fault, no one else’s, and carrying on with Red was piling error upon error. He had to be her priority now—getting him out and nothing else. It was time to stop, run, and get help.
“Red,” she said. “We’re heading straight up and out. I’ll come with you the whole way.”
“What about your partner?”
“I can’t save him and if you—we—go in further, none of us will survive. Once we’re safe I’ll call the shift sergeant and tell them face to face. See if they can swing a SWAT team to come here. If my credit stretches I can buy some extra help as well.”
“Official backup is highly unlikely without new evidence,” Suit said. “You leave now, Officer Squire will die in here.”
“We don’t know that for sure. I was only thinking of myself, following him in here. That’s one thing I can change today.”
Alice stood and set off, struggling to ignore the doubts and insecurities that hovered over her.
17
“The current operations are a suitable testing ground for smart munitions. However, we cannot ignore budgetary constraints: the human element is by far the cheapest and most easily replaced of modern combat componentry.”
Pentagon Report, “War in the Age of Sentient Machines,”
President of the United States, 2053
“End of the day, it all comes back to politics. War, employment, death—everything.”
Corporal McKinney, Martian occupation force, Mars, 2054
Red followed Alice, deep in thought. If he’d met her on the streets, he would have said she was in control, safe and secure in her brotherhood of police. Now that he knew her, she seemed flinty, brittle, as if one sharp blow would shatter her to a thousand pieces.
He recognized that mixture of fear and panic, having seen it in his mother. Whereas Alice still functioned, it had poisoned his mom, and leeched out to corrupt everything she touched. Red slowed to a standstill, realizing his mother had never said she would come home again. When was the last time he’d even seen her, anyway?
It had been on the Boatel, the Hudson’s floating detention center. His mom was in for some bullshit charge, and had called Red to get her out. The ship was tethered to the George Washington Bridge, a long funicular railway ferrying jeeks in and out the holding cells.
She waited for him at the entrance as he used his few remaining dollars for bail. Afterward, they sat on the side of the river, the turbulent water somehow producing a moment of peace between them. Red begged her to come back, but she said little in return, just closed her eyes and listened to the waves.
In the end she’d stood, kissed his cheek, wiped his face with the edge of her shirt, turned, and walked away. He’d held it together until he made it home, then cried for so long that his uncle joined him on the sofa to cradle him as if he were a baby.
Red took out the letter. This morning it had been pure, untouched. Now it was wet, filthy, ruined. He looked at Alice as she moved along the corridor. Wasn’t this what he wanted? She could get him out, even said she’d stick him in a Hopper, fly him to Cortex to hand deliver the message. He turned it over to see that the Professor’s wax sigil was still in place. It was worth five dollars, nothing more. Most likely Mom would take the cash and disappear again.
And what of his uncle? The old man had asked nothing of him, only taken delight in his presence. What would happen if Red moved out?
This Scorcher, this cop, this woman could save him, if he trusted her.
“You going to keep up or just lounge there with your mouth open?” Alice said.
Red jumped, reverie broken, to see her watching him. He looked at the envelope.
“It’s only a letter,” he said under his breath.
“You’ve changed your tune. A few hours ago that was life or death.”
“It was. It is. But …”
“What?”
“I don’t know what matters anymore. My plan was to earn some money and use it to get my mom back. That’s the point of this, not to buy Dust or clothes.”
“I’m sorry, Red, I didn’t know.”
“But maybe she won’t. Come back, I mean. She never said she would. Maybe she’s like you.”
“I’m not following.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate your help. I’d be dead left to myself. But, you know, bailing on your friend is cold. Maybe Mom’s the same, just says stuff ’cos it’s easy, but in the end she only looks after herself.” Red gasped, words out of his mouth before he could stop them. “Sorry, sorry, but, you know what I mean.”
“That’s not what I’m doing here, Red.”
“Yeah, but isn’t it, though? You’re abandoning your friend to whatever fate Bank has in mind. That’s cold, right there …” His voice trailed off as she stared at him.
“I’m not abandoning him, I’m saving you.”
“I don’t want that guilt. I want to go get him.”
“We’ll die down here if we go after him. I can accept that fate, but I’m not letting it happen to you.” Alice took her jacket off and examined an array of purple bruises. Her arms were thin, strong, tanned. High up on the right one was a tattoo, a red sphere with the letters USCM across it. He’d seen it before: his uncle had the earthbound version.
“You were in the Colonials?” he said, desperate to change the subject.
She nodded, head down.
“Mars? Saw action?”
She raised her head, lips a white line.
“Come on, we need to go,” she said.
“That’s why you hate the tunnels, ain’t it? ’Cos they remind you of up there.” He nodded at the ceiling.
She walked over to him, her face gray and hard. She stopped an inch from his chest, her presence a mixture of exhaustion, soot, and musk
y perfume. The air grew warm until Red was shedding sweat into his jacket, heart hammering. He didn’t know if she would beat him or leave him.
“You don’t get to talk about that.” She raised a fist, skin white around her clenched knuckles.
“Officer Yu, pull yourself together,” Suit said from its location on the floor behind her.
She stared at Red, anger boiling from her. Then it was gone in an instant. She sagged backward, turned, and picked up Suit. “Keep slowing us down, kid, we’ll both end up hating tunnels or worse.”
After that she wouldn’t listen whenever he tried to start a conversation, just telling him to shut up. They worked their way upward for a grueling hour before slumping to an exhausted halt. The duct was dripping water from broken condensers, the air thick with heat and mildew. Red kept his leather jacket on—he never took it off except to sleep and wash—but Alice removed hers.
This time he got a better view of her tattoo. The circle wasn’t Mars; it was the symbol of the Martian Parliament building. Even Red knew that mission had been fucked from the start.
“Tell me what happened,” he said.
“No.”
“It’s time you told someone, Alice,” Suit said. “You can’t carry on like this.”
She didn’t look up, just rubbed her arm and closed her eyes. “No.”
“If not now, when?” Suit said.
“I’m not debating this with a smart-system.”
“How about debating it with me?” Red said.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Would telling me be that bad? You could spend your last few hours alive not hating yourself so much.”
“For a street kid, you’re annoyingly observant.”
“I saw some pictures of the domes, the early models, made out of them gel pillows.”
“That was to suck up radiation. They yellowed with the dosage, so you could see which ones needed replacing.”
“I thought they spent most of their time underground.”
Alice took a deep breath and continued. “That was later. At the start the Martian settlers based their habitat designs on the lunar series: circular biomes connected by curved corridors radiating outward. Half above and half below ground, hence their Moles nickname. The colonists traveled on those big Space X shuttles, the ones with the bulb tips. We understood why they did it. There wasn’t such a divide between Earth and Mars back then.”
“I never got why they sent you.”
“Mechanical Intelligence’s caught them out, same as the rest of us. Think about it: the X shuttles take six to nine months to get there; a radio signal can upload a body scan in minutes. China got a printer there first, must have hidden it on a supply run. Soon they were adding hundreds of reprints to the population, which meant they won every vote. Mars had been this self-regulating colony, but as the demographics tilted, democracy slipped away. Mars was under UN jurisdiction—being the first multination off-world settlement—so the initial colonists asked them to intervene. The UN ordered China to stop, but they refused, said their scientists formed a nation-state province outside Earth control.”
“So the UN sent you in to take over?”
“Not at first, but there was too much at stake for either side to back down. The UN formed the Colonial Marines as a deterrent, I think, made of soldiers from every member country. I’m not sure we were ever supposed to be deployed, but once you have a weapon it’s oh-so tempting to use it. After a year of political stalemate the Moles acted for themselves and killed the reprints. That forced the UN’s hand; they bought a Jupiter Mission ship from NASA, retrofitted it for the military. We were directed to reestablish Earth-based control, which was the polite way of saying kill everyone who refused to surrender. You know, stick a flag in the Martian soil, claim it for the starving and hopeless back home.”
“But it didn’t work like that.”
Alice laughed, the cold bark echoing around the damp metal surroundings. “Got that right, kid. The UN thought it would be your standard asymmetrical engagement: go in heavy, shock them into surrender.”
“What happened?”
“It took a year to retrofit the Fucker and get us up there. By the time we arrived they’d turned the buildings into threshing machines. Marines went in, blood came out.”
“You?”
“I missed something I shouldn’t have and a lot of people died.”
“Was it your fault, though? Them Moles sound pretty smart.”
The words hung between them. She didn’t reply, just stared at the wall in front of her, unblinking.
“It wasn’t like that,” she said.
And then she told him.
MARTIAN INDEPENDENT REPUBLIC, 2052
The Parliament dome was built from three interlocking foil layers. Each was perforated in such a way as to create dappled shadows in the debating chamber below. They moved on separate tracks like a huge clock; every minute the mechanism gave a dry click as it shifted.
If the mission brief had been correct—and military intelligence had to get something right today—even if by sheer luck, the entrance would be less than a hundred feet away. Alice looked up; the black rain had stopped, the lake and steam gone, but the burning forest still blazed around her. The air stank of the fires, her mouth coated with a gritty texture. Her lungs were working hard, and every few steps she had to stop and gulp like a beached fish. The MI had calculated how long the trees would burn, and how much oxygen that would take. It had been wrong, or perhaps the crack in the foundation had opened the dome up to some underground pollutants. The atmosphere was becoming unbreathable.
Alice pulled a filter over her face, its carbon-black weave cutting out the stench of smoke. It would block particulates, but she didn’t have an oxygen pack that could help.
She kept moving and soon saw the building’s entrance ahead, the white concrete ring beam cut away to reveal the lip of a red stone crater.
Alice stopped, the surrounding horror gone for a moment. It had been twelve minutes since the It’s Been A Long Week began its drop, and she hadn’t had a minute to consider that she was on Mars, on another planet. She crouched, eyes closed, and put her hand on the floor. Below her, past all the human shit, were soil and microbes and water and fossils from an alien world.
“Marine, are you injured?”
A hand cupped her elbow; it was Gallagher, a field medic. He looked worse than Alice felt, the side of his face blackened, teeth missing. Two stim patches nuzzled against his neck and his pupils were like saucers. Still, he was here, alive. The desire to babble platitudes, to hug him, was so strong Alice had to push him away, breathe deep, act like a goddam Marine for once.
“No sir, minor injuries. I’m the only survivor of the Long Week, though.”
“It’s been a bad morning all round. We’re over here, at the assembly point.”
She followed, her strides light in the reduced gravity, to reach a huddle of Marines about to breach the building. A tech was working at the door controls, tablet open and jacked in. Green code scrolled across its screen.
“How many?” Alice said.
“With you, twenty-three out of the sixty. The Why Can’t We Just Get Along? made it down before they set the bomb off. The Mess and Long Week went down hard. You’re the only one walking out of those two. Nine from the Mess are alive but in no shape to move.”
“Any contact with the Fucker?”
“None. All comms are out. I’ve not seen a weapon like that before. Our gear was supposed to be shielded.”
“First to go, last to know.”
“Got that right.”
“What’s the plan?”
“Sergeant McNulty is leading us in. We’re following mission parameters to secure the dome. After that is a judgement call. You okay?”
“Good to go.”
“Get ready.”
“Thee, two, one, now.”
Alice was in the breach team. The hackers cracked the door code, and moved back
as her four-person group broke in and spread out, followed by the rest.
They’d trained in Virts, so were prepped for the surroundings. Alice focused on checking for combatants, then IEDs, as she scuttled between the rows of seats. The Moles had been intelligent with their architecture, as in so many things. They’d left the ancient crater alone as much as possible, using its curved sides to support the rows of seats. A concrete floor and lectern had been added at the center for presentations. This was where they executed the UN envoy, the video broadcast worldwide.
Except the envoy was alive and sat on the floor, along with her four bodyguards. There was a click as the dome shifted, light flickering over their faces.
“It’s about goddam time,” the envoy shouted, her voice echoing from the hard surfaces. “They’ve gone down into the tunnels. Now get me out of here.”
Alice ignored them, and worked with her team to make sure the chamber had been cleared. There were no weapons, traps, explosives, or Moles here. Nothing except five very much alive and pissed-off people in gray suits.
Alice took up perimeter security as McNulty spoke to the envoy, his rough Scottish accent carrying in the quiet.
“What happened here? We thought you were dead,” he said.
“Dead? Why would we be dead? We relayed their demands. It was the UN that came back with unreasonable subclauses. I have a series of proposals for the security council, and need transport back to the ship. We’ve been radioing you, but never got a reply.”
“You must be mistaken, ma’am,” McNulty said. “We received no communications.”
“I managed to work that out for myself once you blew the dome and made your dumb entrance. They went down there.” She pointed to what looked like a maintenance hatch in the flat concrete floor.
“Ma’am, we have no direct comms to the ship, so can’t get you out right now. We are going to proceed with our mission directives as ordered. You stay here; we will leave water and rations plus two Marines for support. The rest are going into the tunnels. If we can’t get communications back up, the Fucker will nuke us in five hours. There has to be an off-world relay station somewhere down there that can get a message out.”
