by Jude Fawley
Eventually, he said, “There’s a lot to be done. Let’s head back.”
The Mars air the next day was refreshing in a way that he couldn’t understand. There were rainclouds in the distance, another gathering storm, and the faint light of the distant sun was on the opposite horizon, struggling between trees. He removed his rifle from where it was strapped across his back.
Their underground cave was nearly complete, and the other nine were putting the final touches to it. He decided that it would be best to get in some target practice with his new gun, a Winchester 1873 rifle. So he took his Martian flag and walked a few kilometers away, where he found an orchard of apple trees.
He needed to understand the exact way in which the rifle’s bullets were unpredictable. If he could do that, then they would no longer truly be unpredictable—he could at least factor the probability of the bullet’s deviations into every shot he made, which would give him probabilistically better aim. But to do that he would have to make quite a few shots, to take a proper sampling.
He picked a tree, and draped the Martian flag over one of its low-hanging boughs. The flag was a red sphere in the middle of a black field, like a Japanese flag at night. The red sphere would make a good target. He then took measured steps. The steps of his right leg were longer than the steps of his left, a predisposition that took root when the world forced his body to be right-sided, instead of sinister. It was only a few millimeters difference, but he noticed. Instead of attempting to adjust, to make them equal, he merely used one number for his left and one for his right, adding them every time he took a step.
After four hundred steps, he turned around. The number should have been 306.389 meters. He brought out a laser distance reader he had stolen and aimed it at the flag. Since it was flapping in the wind, he aimed its stable part, where it was in direct contact with the tree. The laser was the hypotenuse of a triangle, whose short leg was the length of half the flag and whose long leg was the distance between him and the flag. Trigonometry gave him his measured distance as 306.398. He had to wonder who was right, him or the machine. Maybe his footsteps weren’t as consistent as he wanted them to be. He tried not to be upset as he put the distance reader away and took his gun in both hands again.
Of course the deviation of each bullet caused by its time in the barrel was only one of many variables, like gravity and wind resistance. Gravity was easy—even though a lot of his experience with shooting had been on Earth, it wasn’t very hard for him to lower the tip of his gun just a little bit. And at short distances he knew everything that the air was doing. The one unknown variable was isolated—the inaccuracy inherent to the gun.
The gun salesman had tried to sell him a better gun, one that wasn’t so prone to missing. “It’s literally an antique,” the man had said. “I only use it myself for decoration, it’s hardly meant to shoot. Maybe three hundred years ago, but who’s to say if it works now.” There were far more accurate models, improved designs, and improved craftsmanship, although guns themselves, in the traditional sense, were quickly becoming antiques as well, their art slowly dying. The Winchester 1873 was an antique of an antique. But Hardin had insisted that it was the gun he wanted, and not for any kind of decoration, but to shoot things with.
Ten rounds. Hardin quickly worked the lever, shot, lever, shot, until all ten were spent. He then looked at the target for a long while, contemplating the distance. 306.389, or 306.398. A man with two watches never knew the time. In the future, he wasn’t going to be able to walk out each distance before he took a shot. Nor could he always use the laser distance reader, which took time that he wouldn’t always have. His eyes would have to measure. But similar experiments he had done proved that his eyes were only accurate plus or minus 0.2 m at 300 m, meaning that a perfectly well-intentioned shot would either hit too early or too late, therefore falling too far or not enough. But nothing he did seemed to increase that accuracy.
He walked back to the flag. The field of black was perfectly untouched, but the red sphere had an unsatisfactory spread of punctures around its middle. Angry, Hardin said aloud, “That’s going to be just the way it is. I’m going to want to shoot someone in the eye, and hit them in the nose. For the love of God.”
Mars 14
Shots in the Light
HARDIN’S GROUP WAS gathered in an expansive wheat field that he had picked for the occasion. There was a hill nearby, which for whatever reason had not been flattened when the field was prepared. The wheat was stunted and dry, for reasons that Hardin knew quite well—Darcy, who took an overweening interest in the agricultural practices of the planet, insisted on using archaic farming techniques and tools. One of those tools could be seen in the distance, a large, lumbering, above-ground sprinkler. It was heading toward them, although it wouldn’t be in time to hinder the fire from catching.
He handed each of his followers an unlit torch, and explained his plan to them. “We’re going to start at this very spot. When I light the torches, you will set fire to all of the drier-looking plants that you can find, moving outward. You will move in a slow, clockwise circle, to ensure that the fire becomes very big in a smaller space rather than spread out weakly. You should be safe if you’re always moving outward, but if you go slower than the person to the left of you, it may look like you’ve become trapped in a wall of flame. If this happens, you must remember to worry less about setting things on fire, and more about hurrying in a clockwise rotation, where you should be able to get out and then start again. Is this all clear?”
They nodded. Hardin said, “So we begin.” He held a lighter to his own torch, and then used his torch to kindle the others. Ten torches were lit. “Best of luck,” he said.
Through twenty eyes, Hardin saw the fire spiral outward, the shriveled plants catching fire with ease. Already a large cloud of smoke was gathering above them, black and foreboding. After the group had spread out enough that he knew he could escape unnoticed, Hardin went to the top of the nearby hill. When he reached a good vantage point, he crouched down below the level of the wheat, to be hidden, and waited for what he knew was coming next. He extinguished his torch on the ground.
He could see the vehicle coming in the distance. To minimally interfere with the crops as it drove through, the firetruck had an absurdly large suspension system, so that it looked like some sort of swollen, mutant praying mantis. Its thin wheels would still trample the occasional unfortunate plant, but the design eliminated the destruction that would have been caused by the large mass necessary for a sizable water reservoir. The truck got as close to the fire as it could using the large grid system of roads, before turning directly towards the fire.
One of his members spotted the truck, Hardin could see, but they diligently continued to set fire to everything around them, instead of running away.
Hardin didn’t have to wait for the firefighter’s reactions to know what they would be. They had responded to a distress warning, given by a satellite orbiting Mars that quickly detected any considerable amount of smoke in the atmosphere. Their job was simply to put the fire out as efficiently as they could—the driver would approach to a safe distance, two other people would mount water cannons at the top of the truck, and the remaining two crew members would dismount entirely to survey the area, analyze the future projection of the fire, and eventually determine a probable ignition source. One of those two people would be the one that spotted and reported one of Hardin’s people, and in another two minutes an armed unit would be there to deal with the arsonists. Since he wanted those two surveyors to survive long enough to make their report, he left them for last.
He took his gun from where it was strapped across his back. The first shot was easy, since he could personally see his target—from two hundred meters away he shot the driver in the head, through the windshield, immediately after the man had applied the parking brake. Hardin operated the lever, reloaded the chamber.
The next shot was also easy—he shot a man in the side of the head as he took
his seat at the nearer of the two water cannons, on top of the truck. It was nearly unpreventable that the third man, who should have gotten into the other cannon’s seat, realized something was wrong and reacted accordingly. Instead of climbing to the top of the vehicle and doing his job, he ran away, through the wheat field.
For that reason alone, Hardin had brought his nine comrades with him to start the fire. He closed his own eyes, but his other eighteen were open. There were a lot of noises, a raging fire in the center of everything, and so much heat, but through it all he could perceive the sounds of the man running through the wheat field, through the ears of two people that happened to be in that area, since everyone was spread out. He could feel the local wind around those people, and closer to himself he could feel it through another two, so that he knew the air conditions for the entire trajectory of his shot. He adjusted slightly. Then, through simple triangulation, Hardin was able to shoot the man in the head from nearly two hundred and fifty meters away, with his eyes closed.
He could hear, through Lucretia’s ears, one of the remaining firefighters make the report that something was wrong, and that there were gunshots. Hardin let him finish his sentence before he shot him through the nose. He then waited and listened for the last man, and when he visually sighted him through the eyes of a man that was to Hardin’s right, he opened up his own eyes for the last shot.
He could feel the anxiety in everyone’s thoughts, and could listen to the internal dialogue that asked what was going on. To give them reassurance, he mentally said to them, “It will be okay—one more minute and you can throw down your torches and leave, in a direction I will tell you.”
In another thirty seconds, the armed guards were there. Just as he had expected, there were four, in an air-propulsion car that cut through the wheat with reckless abandon—since it was only called in severe emergencies, it was designed accordingly. Hardin’s rifle carried ten rounds, and he only needed nine to kill everyone that he needed to, so he used his extra shot to put a hole in their windshield, although he intentionally missed everyone on the interior. The threat caused the vehicle to pull over immediately, and they dismounted out on the road, still another thirty meters from the fire.
Hardin was impressed by their poor decision making. Out on the road, with no shelter from the wheat that they were so near to, they couldn’t have been easier targets. Hardin caused two of their heads to explode before the other two realized they would be better off in the field. By some intuition, they spotted Hardin on his hill, and charged in his direction.
The benefit of having the guards show up to the fire was that they were connected to Darcy’s version of the Karma Map, using the old Chips that Karma had put into their heads when they were children. Hardin even knew their names. What they saw would be recorded, and they saw Hardin and only Hardin. Darcy would be notified of the incident, and Hardin’s image would be given to the man. He would finally become known to his enemy.
There was one final point that Hardin wanted to make to the remaining two guards, and the people that would be reviewing their final moments, trying to understand what went wrong. The weapons they carried, their Evaporation Pens, were perfectly destructive weapons. They would instantly incinerate anyone who was struck by their beam. But because they were so destructive, they had a very sensitive range selector, which was maxed out at one hundred meters. Hardin let them approach up to that range, even laughed as one of the guards misjudged the distance and shot from one hundred and three meters. Hardin reached out his hand to the incoming death-ray, and gave a loud booming laugh as it evaporated to nothing right in front of him—a good video for the records. He then shouldered his gun and shot that man directly in the eye, since he was the closer of the two.
Simultaneously he noticed that one of his own people was wandering too close to the last guard. Lucretia. He sent her a mental warning to turn around, but for whatever reason she disregarded his warning. The last guard, upon seeing her at the edge of his vision, reflexively turned to shoot her instead. The Pen was already aimed. Hardin had a difficult decision to make, but he did so very quickly—to prevent the possibility that the man’s body would squeeze on the trigger upon dying, instead he shot the man’s hand off. He then took over Lucretia’s body, and broke the man’s neck while he was still in shock over his hand. And then it was over.
Hardin ran down to where Lucretia was recovering from Hardin’s takeover. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I didn’t have a choice.”
“What did you do?” she asked.
“We don’t have time to talk about it now.” Mentally, he added, “Everyone, pick up their weapons, then we’re leaving. Back to the cave. Come on.”
On their second day on Mars, Hardin allowed his comrades to have a ceremonial wig burning. They had only worn the wigs for one day, but that one day had been traumatic enough that they felt the need for a ritual cleansing. Since they were starting so many fires anyway, Hardin didn’t see a reason to deny them one. They walked a few kilometers from their cave, found a dry crop of barley, and gathered in a circle. Together they watched the synthetic fibers melt into nothingness.
Lucretia was the only one that kept hers. She asked Hardin afterwards, “Do you like me better with hair? I look more like a woman this way, don’t I?”
Hardin personally didn’t care about the length of a person’s hair, his or anyone else’s, and so he didn’t have an answer for her. “You look like you,” he said. And even though that answered nothing, she kept the wig anyway.
Over the course of the next week, Hardin killed twenty firefighters, as well as six search parties that were sent by Darcy to find him. Because it took a lot of effort, and increased the risk of being found, he only killed search parties when he knew that they were close to finding their hideout. It wasn’t that hard—the searches were well-organized, and carried out in efficient patterns. Patterns that were easy for Hardin to recognize. He watched their progress on his computer’s map of Mars, did the calculations, and ambushed the unfortunate party from a random angle, so that they couldn’t use his appearances to triangulate the location of his base. And after seven days, they had yet to devise a better system of finding him. For the most part, Hardin had no trouble. He had found a way to communicate wirelessly with his computer, so he was able to instantaneously look up any information that he needed, no matter what he was doing. Nothing could surprise him.
His group also started several more fires, in places that he established after analyzing the Martian weather for a few days. He wanted the fires to converge in a certain way, and was very careful with the choices he made. Of all the calculations he had performed in his life, those ones were the most difficult. There were so many variables. The firefighters were just one of those many variables—he killed them to simplify the equations, but also because it was part of the plan. Quickly there was a shortage of qualified people, and an enormous fire that threatened to consume the entire planet. Darcy would bring in reinforcements from Earth, inevitably.
When they weren’t out gathering food, starting fires, or killing people, his group spent their time in the cave they dug. It was in the middle of a field of corn, completely inconspicuous. A person looking for them would have had to be standing on the entrance to find it, which was entirely improbable, but Hardin still took no chances with the search parties. The cave started with a hole that was one meter in diameter and one and a half meters deep. Then there was a narrow tunnel that led deeper, at a small incline, ten meters in length, supported with cornstalks. It opened up into the cave, which was just large enough to fit their food, supplies, and all ten of their group at once. There were pipes in the ceiling, driven through to the surface for ventilation, and cornstalks lined the walls. It was dark and cramped, but it was the best that could be done with the tools they had.
On their eighth night on Mars, all jammed into their cave, Hardin lay awake as his companions slept. He was still receiving mental signals from the people he was connected to back o
n Earth, the ones that had stayed at New Karma. He rarely thought much about them, since they were so far away and largely irrelevant, but on that night he paid closer attention.
They were living their lives almost entirely unchanged—they had been placed back under the jurisdiction of New Karma, in Hardin’s absence. They grew food while Hardin burned it, they cleaned bathrooms while Hardin defecated in a corn field, they did laundry while Hardin’s group accumulated layer after layer of Martian dirt on their clothes. Real Martian dirt—their cave was deeper than the superficial changes that humanity had made to its surface, to make it habitable. The kind of dirt that nothing could grow in. He watched those faraway people make trivial moral choices, like they were conditioned to do, just so they could eat a little bit of food in return. And he was on Mars, trying to make a change. Trying to kill Darcy.
Violently, his passionate hatred of the man took over. He imagined pulling all of Darcy’s organs out, one by one, through a hole that he clawed in the man’s stomach. It was so vivid that he lost control of it—it entered the dreams of the people around him, for a moment, before he was able to take it back. It was interesting to see how they reacted, though—some ignored it, others reinterpreted it into their own morbid fascinations, and others reinvented it entirely. None of them actually understood it as Darcy, none of them directly related. For a fleeting moment, Hardin felt lonely. In his hatred, he was alone.
Mars 15
Betrayed by Firefighters
DARCY WAS IN a panic. A week before, nine of his men had been attacked and killed, five firefighters and four guards. They were all easily replaced, from a nearly endless reserve back on Earth, but the threat had never been removed—even though he had sent hundreds of people out as search parties to address the problem, still sixteen more firefighters had died, as well as several entire search parties. An entire week they had been looking, and still they had found nothing. Because he knew that the threat was directed at him, he doubled the guard at his manor.
