See The Worlds

by Gavin E Parker

  See The Worlds

  Version 1.0.7 published 2015

  Copyright © 2015 by Gavin E Parker

  This work is copyright under the Berne convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  All rights reserved.

  The right of Gavin E Parker to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  See The Worlds

  Gavin E Parker

  Looking back on it now, I still can’t decide whether coming to Mars was a good thing or a bad thing. I’d volunteered, kinda, so I must have thought it was a good idea at the time. Now though, I’m not so sure.

  I’d grown up in a small seaside town on the south coast of England. Nothing had happened there for about two hundred years. Joining the army was my ticket out. There were risks, of course. We were in the middle of a major war, after all. But I thought that I’d get sent to the mainland USAN and, with any luck, get stationed in one of sheds there. Even if I did draw the short straw and get sent into a battle zone it would still be pretty safe. Forward Support Operations were all about logistics and civilian support; any fighting would still be by drone. It wasn’t like I’d signed up for the Commander Program, or anything.

  I don’t remember when I met Greeley. I think it was in basic, but it might have been on the bus or maybe even somewhere before that. He always made me laugh - still does. He was from some woebegone shithole like me, only he was mainland. I think he was from Ohio or somewhere. We never really went into that sort of thing. We’d joined the army to get away from all that stuff, so we never spoke about it much.

  Greeley was the smartest idiot I’ve ever met. He thinks fast, sees all the angles. But in a strange way he’s kinda dumb, too, but funny with it. Sometimes I think he just puts it on to make me laugh. Other times I think maybe he really is as much of an idiot as he seems. I can’t decide.

  We made it through basic and we were sent to Kentucky, to the sheds. We were going to be piloting drones operating out of a forward base near the Pakistan border in northern India. It was a good gig. Most of the time we were doing circuit training, or team sports. Now and then we’d have to go into the IVRs and pilot drones, when there was a big mission on or something.

  I wasn’t bored in the sheds, or anything. It was what I’d signed up for. I’d made it out of my hometown, seen a bit of the world and was having a great time. I was getting paid for it, too. But one day they asked if any of us would be interested in a Mars posting. Guys got rotated out every two or four years and there was a batch due out in few months’ time. The garrison on Mars wasn’t big enough for a whole battalion, but when a battalion was selected for the Mars posting it would be asked to provide volunteers. Our group had been selected this time. It would be a weird gig - a year of the tour would be spent just getting there and back.

  Tours to Mars were always oversubscribed. It was a cushy job. You got to experience space travel, and you got to spend a year on an interplanetary cruise ship doing pretty much nothing. So what they did was gather the names of the volunteers and then just select the required number at random. Pulled them out of a hat, or something.

  My number came up, and Greeley’s.

  A few weeks after that we were pulled off our usual duties and sent for some advanced training. We thought it was going to be space warfare, low-gravity fighting and stuff like that. To be fair, there was a little, at the beginning. We spent a bit of time in an AG room, where they lowered the gravity until it was like Mars. That was great. We could jump really high. Greeley did some amazing backflips. But that was just one morning. What we did mostly in our Advanced Mars Training was study policing.

  That’s right, we were going a hundred and forty million miles to arrest shoplifters. Couldn’t the locals take care of that themselves? Well, yes and no. The truth is there is no need for a USAN garrison on Mars. Venkdt and the others can take care of their own. There’s no military threat out there, and Venkdt Security can handle any policing they need.

  The garrison was there for appearances only. Back in the old days it wasn’t even a garrison - it used to be the USAN Research Center. It was about thirty scientists working away at various projects, trying to figure if Mars was habitable in the long run, what the impact of the low gravity and confined living conditions might be on human beings.

  After Venkdt arrived in 2143 the Research Center’s raison d'être faded away. Venkdt’s operation expanded so fast that they ended up doing the things that the Research Center was researching the viability of. Pretty soon the Venkdt operation dwarfed the Research Center, and the scientists were called home. In their stead the USAN put a garrison on the site.

  It was one of those decisions that I guess must have felt right, even though there was no logical justification for it. It was small, to be sure, with just over two hundred personnel. But that was still two hundred people, a long way from home and with nothing to do.

  As a sort of post-hoc justification for the garrison they fell to the role of an informal police force. They flew the flag, reminded everyone that Marineris and the rest of Mars was an outpost of the USAN, and then calmed domestic disturbances and threw old soaks into the drunk tank on a Friday night.

  It was a huge waste of tax-payers’ money in truth, but it’s what they had been doing for over a hundred years and it just seemed like one of those normal things that nobody questions. It’s what we had to train for, anyway.

  The launch was amazing. I’d been on sub-orbital flights before but that was something else. Greeley slept through it, or at least he pretended to. He had to have been faking it. The sound, the vibrations were enough to wake the dead. I loved it. You don’t get excitement like that in southern England.

  The HLV took us out to the solar orbiter. We transferred to that, and that was the ship that took us to Mars. We were on there for six months, which was fine by me. They had artificial gravity, AG, which they subtly lowered over the course of the journey. By the time we reached Mars we were at 0.38 Earth gravity, ready for life on the surface.

  There wasn’t much to do on the orbiter. There was a gym and some IVRs, so we did a bit of training in them. Some of the time we did ‘enhanced sleep’. That involved taking some pills and hooking yourself up to some monitoring equipment. I think there was something that sent waves into your head, or something, too. Anyway, you could sleep for two or three days at a time, and that helped to shorten the journey a bit.

  At Mars we transferred to a local shuttle craft, and that took us down to the surface. That was another wild ride. From there we went to the garrison, and that’s where we met Colonel Shaw.

  Colonel Katrina Shaw was a good commanding officer. I liked her from the off. That first day on the parade ground, she gave a short speech and she seemed like a straight up sort of character. I think she knew that Mars was a bullshit posting but she wasn’t going to let that be an excuse for any slackness or shirking. She was army to the core, so I felt like we knew where we stood with her.

  Her two subordinates were poles apart. Major Edley seemed fine. Like Shaw, she was old school and down the line. She seemed to get that it was a weird gig, but that we had to maintain standards and do our part and get to the end of it.

  The other guy, Major Bowers, was a different case. He seemed to take it seriously. Shaw and Edley seemed to know that there was a job to be done, and we had to do it to an acceptably high standard, and that beyond that it was just a case of seeing the tour out.

  Bowers, though, seemed to take everything way too seriously. Everything, and I mean every little thing, mattered to him. It wasn’t just about maintaining discipline. It mattered to him that your creases were out of line. It mat
tered to him that your cap wasn’t quite straight. He actually thought we were there for a reason. Shaw and Edley were soldiers like the rest of us, but they were human beings too. Bowers was just a soldier.

  I lucked out and ended up in the same squad as Greeley. We were under Major Edley, which was another piece of good fortune, but we still had to deal with Bowers from time to time. It might be an impromptu kit inspection or extraordinary detail or something, but he could be relied on to be a pain in the ass. I never liked that guy.

  We settled in quickly. Within a few days we were going out into Marineris on patrols or calls. It was all pretty lightweight stuff. I had a cousin in the police on Earth and what we did was a walk in the park compared the stories he had told me about policing London.

  Although there was the occasional theft or domestic bust-up most of what we did involved the bars, especially on Friday and Saturday nights. I’d heard that in the early days of settlement alcohol had been banned. I don’t know whose idea it was to lift that ban, but sometimes on a Friday night I’d wish they had never been born.

  Things were good on Mars. We got all the streams from Earth, we were a long way from the war and living was easy. Now and then I felt a little guilty watching the news from home. World War IV was in its fifth year by then and, although the USAN military were relatively safe, it still felt like we were dodging our duty out here on this cushy posting.

  There was a new thing going on, too. It was called the Commander Program, and it was all over the news. Someone had the great idea that our soldiers were too safe, or something. Wouldn’t it be great to roll back a hundred and fifty years of technological development and put soldiers back on the battlefield? Somehow this madness had caught on and there were now special forces where mechs were piloted - I mean literally, not remotely - by soldiers on the battlefield. They dressed it up by talking about situational awareness and stuff like that, but to me it just seemed like macho bullshit. Soldiering was risky business, we all knew that. Peacekeeping forces were regularly attacked, and it wasn’t unknown for forward support bases to be overrun. But deliberately putting soldiers at the heart of the fighting just seemed barbaric and unnecessary. They were all volunteers, too. Probably jock assholes, trying to impress each other.

  After a year I was used to living on Mars. I’d adapted to the gravity and I didn’t miss open outdoor spaces as much as I thought I would. The garrison was in central Marineris, which was the only conurbation on Mars. There were a few far-flung outposts with a smattering of personnel, but Marineris was where it was at for humans on Mars.

  Marineris was bigger than I had expected. The population was about ninety thousand or so, and it covered a good few square kilometres. Most of the buildings were underground, with domes or skylights at the surface. The road system was dropped below ground, again with Plexiglas overhead, allowing natural light.

  There were a few large public domes in Marineris, which were as close as you could get to an outdoor space. They tended to be parks or bathing areas, though I heard there were some private ones for fancy housing.

  So life on Mars was good for a young USAN soldier. Stay out of Bowers’ way, put your hours in and wait for your tour to play itself out. That was all we had to do.

  I guess it all changed part of the way through ’41. Charles Venkdt, the top boy at Venkdt Mars Corp, decided that he was going to rock the boat and pull Mars out of the USAN. I didn’t even pick up on it at first. I’ve never followed the news all that closely and the odd bits I did hear about it just seemed ridiculous. The war had just ended at home and I suppose lots of things were changing. I guess this crazy idea just got jumbled up in all of that and I didn’t really take it seriously.

  One day we were called to the parade ground and Colonel Shaw addressed us all directly. The only time she had done that before was when she told us the war was over. We already knew that anyway, but she made the formal speech and we got extra chow that evening. But this other time it all seemed very serious. We were to be on high alert and were not to leave the garrison. All leave was cancelled. Greeley said it was a revolution, and we’d have to suppress it. I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not.

  So we were cooped up at the garrison, where nothing much happened for a couple of months. The rest of Mars was going independence crazy, and eventually they got their way. They had an election, or something, and declared independence. That left Colonel Shaw twitchy, and the rest of us, too.

  Greeley told me about this thing. I slept through it, but apparently some woman from Vendkt Security turned up in the middle of the night with troops and transports and demanded to speak to Colonel Shaw. She wanted to take control of the garrison, or take Colonel Shaw prisoner or something, but Colonel Shaw told her to get lost. Greeley said he saw them nose to nose. He said he thought Colonel Shaw was going to swing a punch, but in the end she backed off and the Martian woman left.

  This all sounded crazy to me. I’d signed up for a good life in the USAN army, and I’d lucked out with one of the cushiest postings going. Now our commanding officer was being threatened and we were holed up like it was some sort of medieval siege.

  Well, I thought, that was surreal, but the next day it got worse.

  It was early afternoon. I was due on a late that day. I’d spent the morning at the gym and I’d just come back from the refectory. I’d seen Greeley was strung out on his bunk. He was on a late, too. I’d taken my stuff and gone to the head. I thought I’d shave and shower then; we were due on at 20:00 that night. I’d planned to spend the rest of my free time that day watching a movie and playing in one of the IVRs.

  I’d shaved half of my face when I heard the first bang. I instinctively flinched, though at first I thought it was something in the kitchens. When those big serving pans get dropped they make a hell of a racket. I dropped my razor into the water and listened. There were further loud bangs and I ran back to the bunks. Our dorm overlooked the parade ground, so I thought I might have a view of what was going on if it was out front.

  Greeley was off his bed. That was what first made me think something might be up.

  “What was that?” I said.

  “Don’t know,” said Greeley. “Did you see the flashes?”

  “What flashes?”

  “Flashes. I don’t know. You didn’t see them?”

  Just then there was another flash, followed by a loud cracking sound. We both crouched, and made our way to the window. Greeley peeked first. I was going to pull him back, but in the end I peeked too.

  Looking across the parade ground to the entrance I could see there were no guards at the gate. None of this was adding up. I wondered if Colonel Shaw was running some sort of surprise exercise. “Look,” said Greeley. “Look at the tunnel.”

  The main entrance to the garrison was served by a road tunnel. The tunnel opened out near the entrance. There was some scrubland and then the gated entrance to the parade ground. I could just make out the shape of a vehicle in the tunnel. It wasn’t one of ours.

  “They’re attacking us,” said Greeley.

  At first I thought this was one of his jokes. He was so straight faced, even when he was saying the most ridiculous things, that it could be difficult to know when to take him seriously. But he remained stony-faced, and I could see he was concentrating on the tunnel.

  I could hear some sounds coming from our building. Orders being shouted, and running. Edley appeared at the door. “You two, get to the entrance hall, now!” Edley never shouted, but when she said ‘now’ that was the most forceful thing I’d ever heard her say. She was already gone when I heard her shouting, “And take your weapons with you!”

  I looked at Greeley. He just shook his head, but he was moving toward his rifle. I went to get my rifle, and I went to grab my side-arm too. It was then that I remembered I was only wearing my shorts and flip-flops. I tossed the side-arm on the bunk and followed Greeley to the door. I put my hand up to my face, remembering that I hadn’t finished shaving. Half of my face was st
ill covered in shaving foam and bristles.

  In the corridor were others like us. Half-dressed and looking confused and worried. We made our way down to the entrance hall and tried to figure what was going on. I heard someone loudly insisting it was just a drill but another voice disagreed. “I saw them go down. It wasn’t our guys. It’s an attack. I’m telling you, it’s an attack.”

  “What do you think?” I asked Greeley.

  “I don’t know. Seems like a funny kind of a drill,” he said.

  We could still hear people running about. Over the next minute or so those sounds petered out. There was the odd distant shout or the sounds of chairs scraping, but soon even those had stopped.

  Edley came down the stairs. She had her pistol drawn and she was focused on the main entrance. I think that was when I knew for sure that it wasn’t a drill. She wasn’t looking at any of us, assessing our performance or anything. She was looking at the door and nothing else.

  There was a group of guys over by the window. I heard one of them say, “It’s a transport, Major,” and I could see others about him struggling to get a look. I heard the sound of a vehicle approaching. I heard it slow down, and then the engine cut. There was a spooky silence. We were all straining to hear what might happen next.

  “This is Commissioner Maya Foveaux of the Martian Security Service. I would like to speak with Colonel Katrina Shaw.”

  It must have been through a loudhailer or something. The garrison had blast doors and toughened windows, and we could still hear it pretty clearly. There was dead silence, then we heard footsteps. Not running, but deliberate and at a steady pace. It was Colonel Shaw. She came down the main stairway into the entrance hall and walked right up to Edley.

  “Are you going out there?” said Edley.

  “I am,” said Shaw.