Mission Mars

by Janet L. Cannon

  - Your loving Father,

  Dr. Leopold Castle

  P.S. Dr. Canton heard that you weren’t feeling well and sent you some Stellaria media tea. Isn’t that nice?

  At Lone Crater bar, no one could hear Cynthia Abilene Castle’s distant howls of rage. There, three members of the Botanical Technologies division and a bartender raised their drinks in a toast of celebration.

  STORM SEASON

  Chuck Regan

  The sky was thick with brown static—too early in the season for a storm this bad. The tall, blue graphene sails of the storm baffles vibrated in shimmering ripples as the winds railed against them. Electricity sparked an erratic light show on the fabric, and even through his suit, Mason Gheitley could hear the sand on the sails hiss through his teeth. Mount Olympus was above him, somewhere, but he couldn’t see any hint of it—the sky was that dark. At least the rads were dropping, and his suit could vent what it had absorbed.

  Each year, the storms bit down harder. Rebel terraformers were still pumping water vapor and CFCs into the air, in spite of the anti-terraforming laws. Still fighting on the wrong side of an old war, their attempts to thicken the air made the storms worse. As a Redpaw Enforcer, his job had been to hunt down and destroy the Rebels’ pump houses, but after tonight, he would be in the Advanced Scouts, hunting the Rebels themselves.

  He leaned against one of the sails’ struts. His heads-up display read only 87:17, barely ten centisols past dusk. He wouldn’t be relieved until 3000—at five past dawn. Captain Ford had warned him that the locals came out at night to steal the dust that piled up under the sails during storms.

  At his last briefing with the Enforcers, Geitley was issued a stunner and ordered to dissuade anyone from stealing city property. The dust was city property. So stupid.

  His parents had once been forced to pay a crippling fine after they dug a well for their village. They had mixed that excavated soil into concrete to cover a newly built hab, just like villagers had done for generations. And that was the issue. The Mars Council wanted villagers to buy the endorsed and recommended brand of ExoTerra rad shielding, not to make their own. It was for their own protection. The infodocs clearly illustrated that Martian concrete didn’t protect against all wavelengths of dangerous radiation. But since villagers couldn’t be forced to buy ExoTerra rad shielding—this wasn’t the Fascist government the Rebels claimed it was—the excavation fees had been imposed to dissuade them making their own.

  To get around the fees, villagers now braved the storms to collect the dust that piled up under the baffles. Technically, the villagers weren’t excavating anything, but since the baffles were within the city limits of New Dublin, the dust belonged to the city as soon as it hit the ground.

  Getting villagers to do what they were supposed to was like trying to patch a leaky, old suit—the seals kept popping open. And now his job was to stun them and cart them off to jail for stealing the same dust that covered the planet.

  So stupid.

  Interference from the ionized air around the sails made his com pop and chirp. He muted the volume. Living with the Advanced Scouts was a big achievement. He wanted to tell someone. His hand shot up to his com to call his girlfriend, Gina.

  But Ford had also said that Gheitley would officially have to be killed, making him a virtual ghost to the outside world. No further contact—ever—meant no more seeing Gina, or even talking to her.

  Maybe that was just a test.

  Maybe Ford had set this up to make sure he could keep his mouth shut.

  Security first.

  Gheitley lowered his hand. Gina and his parents would just have to wait to hear the news of his advancement until after he had been cleared to do so. His parents had never been happy about his choice to pursue Security and Defense as a career anyway.

  His father had tried to convince him that the Redpaw Enforcers were nothing more than overpaid bullies doing the dirty work for Ares Aqua, the company that regulated water extraction on Mars. His father was just angry that his side lost the war. Gheitley had caught him listening to old rebel songs more than once, but never reported him.

  9805. Two to midnight—just like the song. He started to sing it, but only knew the chorus.

  Two to midnight, almost out of air.

  My girl has gone to Luna.

  She said I didn’t care.

  Gone on up the spacelift,

  Packed up and took my heart.

  Her ship, it never made it.

  Soon we’ll never be apart.

  He hummed the rest.

  The city’s lights shimmered through the dust. Gheitley’s shadow danced. His outline morphed and melted from the liquid light show flickering on the sails.

  A break in the storm came at 0507, and Gheitley watched the moon Phobos crawl overhead. The wind kicked up again. He jogged along the baffles to stay awake.

  1078. Almost dawn. Two hours left on his shift. The storm gnashed its teeth again. Shifting dust slid under his feet, and the snapping wind knocked at him down. Fighting to stand, despite all the stimulants, he felt exhausted fighting against the screaming planet. A headache gnawed on the back of his skull and his legs began to shake. The hissing dust falling from the sails was a white noise narcotic, the steady seashore shush washing against his helmet. His legs dissolved and his eyelids shivered, hypnotized by the silken cascade of powder.

  He had been trained to fight through this. He had been warned about wind hypnosis and had done all he could to stop its effects, but the endless barrage of scouring winds and their siren whispers carried the same power over him that had overcome colonists for the last two centuries.

  He collapsed into the dunes.

  I should get up. The voice in his head was so weak and muted, there was no point in fighting it any more. I should get up now.

  Gheitley succumbed to sleep.

  As drifts grew higher around his visor, he dreamed of the ocean—an ocean he had only seen in movies.

  Gheitley woke to the rasp of gloves scooping dust off his helmet. A bright light shrieked into his eyes, and a gust of brown grit washed across the light. The storm still raged around him, and it made him feel as if he were being raised from the dead, his chest and legs tingling back to life as mars-suited men pulled him out of the dunes. They yanked him up and stood him straight.

  He fought to stand as the angry winds punched his limbs. The figures standing around him shimmered like dark phantoms—hands and lights flickering behind sheets of dark flashing gauze. He clicked on his com and was immediately assaulted by static. Another glove jabbed an external jack at him—the movement blunt and insistent. Gheitley looked up to try to see a face inside the helmet, but he could only see the silhouette shimmering in the shredding haze.

  It was an old style helmet, an antique.

  Gheitley plugged the cable into his input jack and a raspy synthesized voice growled, “Follow!” Something jabbed hard into his back.

  Gheitley injected laughter into his voice, “Hey, take it easy. Sorry I fell asleep.”

  “Slam it,” the synthesized voice snapped, then Gheitley saw through the brown squall the silhouettes of three railguns pointed at him.

  This was not his relief team. They were Rotgeist! Dressed in antique armor to look like the phantoms out of myth, the Rebels had found him, their railguns aimed at his face.

  When Mason Gheitley next woke, the taste of cherry-flavored air was hissing into his helmet. He allowed himself a half-second to remember happier days when flavored air had been a fun childhood novelty for him, then he recalled the last thing he could remember—suffocating in his own helmet. The Rotgeist had loaded him at gunpoint into an old hovertruck and pinched his air hose.

  He had no idea where he was now.

  Gheitley made no movement to give away he was awake. He felt his arms and legs were strapped tight to a chair, and over the hiss in his helmet he could hear muffled speech, but no words. His heads up display showed only empty windows where his stats sho
uld be blinking in bright green and white—GPS location, air levels, com status, body and external temperatures. They were all grey, blinking the icon for no data. His external cameras were dead, except for one image that was flickering random pixellated patterns.

  Empty suits had been found with their cameras broken or blacked out just like his—all of them had been victims of Rotgeist attacks.

  This couldn’t be happening.

  Scuffling of fingers on his helmet. Someone wrenched his helmet forward. Gheitley let his head flop, pretending to still be unconscious, smashing his nose into his dark visor. He clenched his face to stop from sneezing, eyes watering. Hands scraped over levers on his helmet and with a squeak, the seals released. Dragging the rim over his face, his helmet snagged on his nose and scraped against his forehead.

  “Open your eyes. We know you’re awake,” a man said in a gruff voice. He had a Lowland accent.

  Gheitley raised his head and sniffed back the thin snot that had begun to stream out of his nose. Spotlights bit into his eyes, obscuring his captors in harsh silhouettes. Gheitley squinted to try to see details around him.

  The walls were stone—inside a lava tube, so it had to be somewhere in Tharsis. The air was moist and smelled like rust. Four men in the room. Gheitley turned to look behind him, and was cracked hard across his cheek, his vision sparking white.

  “Face front!” barked the voice behind him. The hit was just hard enough to make a point without knocking him out. His cheek bloomed with pain.

  “Who do you work for?” said the gruff voice.

  “I am a Redpaw Enforcer. I work for Ares Aqua,” Gheitley sneered.

  “We know you’re in the Advanced Scouts now, Corporal Mason Gheitley. Who do the Advanced Scouts answer to?”

  Gheitley tried to squint through the lights to find features in the man’s face. One other man emerged from the shadows. He wore an old, industrial-looking rebreather that covered the bottom half of his face. He leaned in close.

  The man grabbed Gheitley by the ear and drove a thumb into the rising welt on his cheek, “Redpaw is just a club that picks out the scum that rises to the top. Advanced Scouts. You were hired yesterday.” He slapped Gheitley across the scalp and pulled another chair out of the dark to sit in front of him. He sat and leaned in close.

  “Who do you work for?”

  Gheitley coughed up blood. It spattered onto his thigh. He had forgotten they had shredded his suit and tore it off of him along with shards of skin. He looked at his lashed and bloody legs and what was left of his manhood dangling between them.

  The man with the gruff voice—Gheitley had heard someone call him Grant—let out a heated sigh.

  “Okay, we’re not getting anything out of this one,” Grant said with a disgusted huff. The man with the rebreather—wielding the insulation tube dripping with clots of Gheitley’s blood—stepped back. Gheitley coughed sharply, almost laughing, a wave of endorphins washing through him with the promise of an end to the torture. Grant bent down to get face-to-face.

  “So I guess you proved to us that you’re a tough little hitch. Tough, but very dumb,” he said, pressing his thumb again into the bruise on Gheitley’s cheek. Gheitley snarled weakly through the pain.

  “Nobody’s gonna know what happened to you, kid. Not your mama, not your daddy, not even that spunkclotted girl you were poking. Nobody will find your body for a hundred years, and when they do, you’ll be a dried up old mummy. Nobody will know who you were, and they won’t care.” After a moment of cold, dead silence, he added, “Is it worth it?”

  Grant pulled his thumb away. Sitting back in his chair, he wiped the blood on his pant leg, waiting for a reaction. Gheitley just glared at him.

  “Alright . . . send him for a walk,” Grant said, shooing him away, disgusted.

  Two of them grabbed the back of Gheitley’s chair and dragged him backward out of the room. Grating the back legs across the stone floor, the vibration punched at Gheitley’s bladder. A stream of orange piss rose in an arc. They had hit him hard in the guts. Blood stained his urine. He wheezed out an insane giggle, and watched the dark spattered trail snake across the floor.

  They dragged him into an airlock and set him upright. The floor was as cold as ice on his bare feet, and the room smelled like bleach and rust. The men left without words, as if Gheitley were already dead. They closed and sealed the door behind them.

  He shivered. How long had he been tortured? A few hours? Longer than one sol? His eyes were almost swollen shut, and everything from his neck down throbbed and stung. He was glad it was all over. Gheitley felt proud that he never gave the Rebels what they kept asking for, even though he knew the answer. It was the one bit of power he had over them. It was enough.

  Captain Ford had said that the Advanced Scouts was a deep undercover assignment—and a secret branch of Sol Parliament called the shots. If the Rebels had learned that detail, there’s no telling what they’d do with the information.

  He had, of course, after each hit, seriously weighed his loyalties. Even if Gheitley wasn’t yet officially one of the Advanced Scouts, at some point during the torture it had become personal. The ordeal had turned into a test of his will against theirs. He had proved to himself that he could take it, and he was proud of himself as he sat, bleeding and shivering. He was only just now beginning to regret his stubbornness as he stared at the crusty red light on the airlock door. It began to blink.

  A hiss of gentle wind moved over him, thinning the air in the room.

  He had won, but he would soon be killed for his high ideals. At any second, that outer airlock door in front of him would open, and his last breath would boil inside his lungs.

  He wouldn’t even be able to scream.

  A muttering of voices woke Gheitley. As he slid into consciousness, he could feel the swelling on his face had gone, and he was lying on something soft—a bed. Someone was in the room with him. Too tired to steel himself against further violence, he sighed with exhaustion and tried to pry open his eyes. The room was bright.

  “Just kill me already. I don’t know who I work for.”

  A rustling of cloth and a soft chuckle came from close by.

  “Yes, you do,” said a familiar voice.

  Gheitley’s lungs convulsed to drive oxygen into his brain. He forced his eyes open. Two figures stood at the side of his bed. He squinted, straining against the light. It was the man who had interrogated him—Grant. He stood next to Captain Ford.

  “Congratulations,” Ford said, smiling. “Now you are in the Advanced Scouts.”

  Gheitley reached up and felt the bandage on his forehead.

  “We gassed you in the airlock, put you to sleep … you, uh, you hit your head,” Grant said, not even trying to hide the fact that he was lying. Through the lifting haze of anesthesia, Gheitley glared at the man.

  “I thought you were going to crack in the airlock,” said Grant. “Nobody ever pissed themselves like that before.”

  Ford and Grant laughed. Gheitley tightened his lips against his teeth.

  “Who the fuck is this?” Gheitley said, jabbing his hand at Grant, suppressing an urge to jump up and strangle him.

  “Easy, boy,” said Ford. “This is your new CO. He knocked out a few of my teeth when he initiated me.”

  “Initiated?” Gheitley muttered. A sudden wave of nausea caught in his throat, and he spewed out over the side of the bed.

  “Doc!” Ford called into the hallway. A tall, thin man with spiked, white hair and white lab coat, slid into the room, followed by a large caveman-looking man in pale blue scrubs. Two other men in blue followed, one carrying a tablet.

  “He’s presenting,” said the ape-faced nurse as he turned Gheitley on his side. He held up a basin to catch the rest of the puke. Gheitley couldn’t help but notice how huge the nurse’s shiny-gloved hand was. The nurse rolled him back and wiped his mouth with a cloth. One of the aides reached over the top of the bed and pulled down a metal halo that clicked into place over Gh
eitley’s head. Without a word, the doctor injected something into his arm, and they all looked up at the screen over the bed.

  Gheitley could see, reflected in the water basin, a projection of his skull—primary colors throbbed in patterns inside the contours of his brain. The aide with the tablet tapped out something, and the outline of a pill-shaped object appeared inside the wobbling colors. It glowed greenish yellow.

  “Capacitation rate is three-one-four,” the aide with the tablet spoke gently.

  The doctor studied the screen for a solid minute, and Gheitley studied the doctor for any sign of concern. The doctor’s eyes flitted between two points on the image, but his stoic expression never changed.

  “Seven PDC for three hours. Stabilize with syptho,” the doctor said to the aides, who yes-grunted. The one with the tablet tapped the screen several times, and the other nudged past Grant and Ford and left the room.

  “Commander Grant, please leave the patient to recover,” the doctor said, directing them out of the curtained area. “Maybe you can speak to him tomorrow, but for now he needs to rest. I’ll keep you informed.”

  “Okay, Doc. We’ll talk later, Gheitley,” Ford said.

  Gheitley coughed up a sour mouthful and spit it into the pan.

  The aide with the tablet silently stood, tapping on his tablet. Gheitley twisted his head to get a look. Charts of sine waves and bar graphs flitted across the screen. The speed of movement and the bright, saturated colors ached in Gheitley’s eyes. He closed them and turned his head back as another wave of nausea swelled up. He wretched, but nothing came up.

  “It’s the anesthetic,” the nurse said in a deep, bass voice, placing another cold cloth on Gheitley’s head. “It’ll pass in a minute.”

  Gheitley had seen reverts before—caveman-like genetic throwbacks—a side-effect of the genetic therapy the Seyopont company initiated to protect spacers from radiation. One in one hundred thousand babies born looked like him—thick brow ridge, heavy face, wide-set eyes, broad nose, tiny teeth, lots of hair. Intelligence was not impaired, but muscles and bones were much stronger. Conspiracies claimed that Seyopont was trying to modify all humans so they wouldn’t need density harnesses to strengthen their bones in low gravity, and reverts were just the beginning. Gheitley didn’t give any weight to those conspiracies, but still, he had never seen a revert up close. He studied how large the caveman’s pores were and how stiff his eyebrow hairs looked.