The December Protocol

by Devin Hanson

  After ten or fifteen years of mining, a drift purified and the yield of water increased. After investing all those years of labor and funds into the drift, a miner might expect a yield of five to ten thousand gallons of water. Most miners, having reached that magical number, retired and sold time shares of their drift to new miners, where they could learn the trade and keep one fifth of their harvest as profit.

  Some of the oldest drifts extended for miles beneath the surface in tangled catacombs. Stories of miners getting lost within their own drift and freezing to death were commonplace. And, of course, with that much wealth on the line, piracy and murder ran rampant. There was no law on the drifts other than the gun at your belt and the goodwill of the men who ran the habitats. A man guilty of piracy might find the doors of the habitat locked to them and a cold death by exposure their fate.

  Min’s buggy stopped trying to roll and switched over to the slower but surer walking method of locomotion as the ground grew more ragged and wind-carved. Min held onto the straps as the pilot hammock jerked and swung with the uneven gait of the buggy. After thirty minutes of bone-jarring travel, the ground evened out again and a new spread of solar panels became visible, like an infestation of silicon fungi.

  The buggy settled back into wheeled transit and soon Min started seeing the tracks of buggy tires leading toward the rising wall of ice. Nestled in a crevice, the gleam of polyresin was visible: the airlock leading down into the drift.

  Min slowed the buggy down to a crawl. He wasn’t worried about the group back at the habitat having radioed ahead. The heavy iron content of the mud made the drifts completely isolated from the outside. It was possible, though, that his quarry might have a lookout watching for the approach of an unknown vehicle.

  After a careful scan of the surrounds, Min decided there wasn’t a watcher outside. It made sense. The sun was up and everyone at the drift would be working at melting down the mud and filtering the water out of it.

  Or so he hoped.

  Min called up the marshal file on his mark and had it display on his helmet’s screens. Sarah Esperalda. Earth-born, of Spanish decent. Five feet and seven inches tall, white hair usually left to grow long. Beautiful, if your tastes went to wujin, with an aristocratic cast to her cheeks and nose. Three hundred and five years of age.

  That last number gave Min pause and his gaze lingered on it, lost in thought. For Sarah to be that old, she had to have been one of the very first to receive treatment with the Womack Process, and was likely to be one of the oldest living humans. It seemed a crime, somehow, a failure of society, for her to be where she was now, digging mud out of a hole and on the run from the law.

  After a moment, Min kept scrolling down the file. Sarah had a gang, for lack of a better term, the majority of which had been captured back in the cluster. She was thought to have escaped with six of her men. Having run into four “miners” at the habitat put the lie to the report. She either had more men than they had expected, or she had been hiring among the miners. Or both.

  Briefly, Min wished that things had gone better back at the habitat. Vito might have had useful information, such as how many men were currently working in the drift.

  It was too late now, though. Min guided his buggy to the row of other vehicles and parked. A neoprene-covered articulated arm groped out from the station and mated up with his vehicle. Min swung out of the hammock and recovered his rifle. Unlike the pistol on his belt, the rifle fired solid rounds. Monomol ammunition worked well in a habitat where he couldn’t risk punching a hole through the walls, but in the ice tunnels he wouldn’t have to worry about that.

  He checked the rifle’s safety, cycled the action to chamber a round and swung it by its strap onto his shoulder. After a pause for thought, Min ejected the half-spent clip on his pistol and replaced it with a fresh one. Satisfied he was as ready as he was going to be, Min walked up the slight rise toward the airlock.

  The drift tunnel had been carved into the nearly vertical face of the canyon wall. After boring straight in a distance of fifteen feet, the airlock had been installed. Like most mining airlocks, it was designed to be cemented into the walls of the drift with mud slurry. A few seconds of exposure to the frigid Martian environment and the mud hardened like concrete, fixing the airlock in place. A thin film of dry ice covered everything.

  Min approached the airlock and it automatically started to cycle, pumping the atmosphere within back inside the drift. Fighting inside the drift was going to be much more difficult than in the habitat. Even though the atmosphere was pressurized, the miners worked in their suits, making the monomol rounds next to useless. It was far too cold to work without the suit’s built-in heating systems. The atmosphere was there as a safety measure and to provide breathable air so the suits didn’t have to run on their onboard scrubbers. It was far cheaper to pull the excess carbon dioxide out of the air through cryogenic liquefaction than to use a chemical scrubber.

  The airlock finished cycling and yawned open. Min swung the rifle off his shoulder and walked in. The doors closed behind him and atmosphere rushed in. After only a few seconds the inner doors popped with a hiss and slid aside, giving him access to the drift.

  The ice tunnel was illuminated by a series of LED strips tacked to the low ceiling with globs of mud. The strips gave a weak light, barely enough to navigate by. Brighter lights would be a waste of wattage that could otherwise be put toward melting more mud. Min fought the urge to turn his suit lamps on. In a few minutes his eyes would adjust to the murk anyway, and the bright lights would only make him a target.

  His suit sensed the atmosphere and opened the baffles, pulling in fresh, frigid air to replace the polluted air within. With the baffles open, Min abruptly could hear the sound of machinery and the distant rumble of human voices.

  Min waited, his rifle aimed down the passage, and his eyes gradually adjusted to the dim lighting. The distant machinery hummed and clunked. When he could see easily again, Min set off down the passage, taking care to place his feet softly.

  The walls were dense, red mud that glittered with reflected light. Tool marks were plainly visible in striations. Over everything, a thin film of dry ice gleamed. The walls were cold enough to pull the carbon dioxide from the air and precipitate it as ice. The tunnel twisted erratically, following pockets of pure water ice the miners had stumbled across, but constantly sloped downward. The miners had dumped the dried out mud on the slope after extracting the water, giving his feet a solid grip on what would otherwise have been a slope slick with dry ice crystals.

  “Yeah, I said I’ll find out what’s keeping them.”

  Min froze as a voice called out just around the corner ahead, muffled from wearing a helmet. Before he could do anything, a miner swung around the corner muttering to himself. The miner looked up, shock written plain on his face. Min leapt forward and slammed the butt of his rifle against the man’s helmet faceplate.

  Glass shattered and the man drew in a deep breath to shout a warning. Instead of raising the alarm, though, the man fell to his knees as he croaked out a hoarse moan and scrabbled at his face. The ragged edges of his faceplate shredded his gloves and cut his fingers leaving brilliant red streaks of frozen blood behind. Min carefully kicked the miner in the solar plexus, driving the air from his lungs. The miner struggled to catch his breath, but every gasp made it harder for him to breathe until he jerked in a spasm and died.

  It was a grim reminder of how cold the air was. It might have the right elements in it to sustain life, but a breath of it would freeze the tissue of your throat and crystallize the moisture in your lungs. Too many breaths and your lung tissue would be coated with ice, and that would be the end.

  Min waited, holding his breath so his suit’s air pumps wouldn’t drown out the sound of approaching footsteps. After a minute, he let his breath out slowly. Nobody had heard the sound of the breaking faceplate over the machinery.

  With a last check to make sure the miner was dead, Min stepped over the body a
nd continued down the passage. The sound of machinery was growing louder and he could hear the periodic chunk of a shovel biting into a pile of mud shards, then the glassy cascade as the shovel-load landed in a metal hopper.

  Min paused at the next corner. Ahead, the narrow drift tunnel opened up into a wide cavern. Columns had been left periodically to support the roof. Scattered about the circumference of the cavern, small exploratory drifts had been started then abandoned. Across the cavern from him, Min could see a larger drift descending downward.

  In the center of the cavern, the ice processing machinery sat, giving off waves of heat. On one end, a hopper was being fed a constant stream of mud shards. On the other, a conveyor belt disgorged half-gallon blocks of pure water ice sheathed in polymer cling-wrap to prevent sublimation. A chute trickled out a constant stream of dry Martian dust.

  Around the machinery, a crew of miners worked. Min counted eight miners tending the machine, bringing wheelbarrow loads of mud shards from deeper within the drift, stacking the ice blocks neatly on the far wall, or shoveling away the accumulated dry dust.

  All of the miners were gweilo, the tall, stick-thin descendents of Mars natives. Nowhere did Min see the diminutive figure of Sarah Esperalda.

  Min frowned. He couldn’t, in good conscience, simply open fire on the miners without knowing if they were working with Sarah. At the same time, he couldn’t ask them if they knew where Sarah was. There were too many. If he got into a drawn-out firefight here, the odds were stacked against his survival. As the dead miner in the tunnel had demonstrated, even the smallest breach to his suit could be fatal.

  What he needed, Min decided, was a distraction. From where he stood in the entrance, he could see a bank of batteries nestled in a hollow, with heavy cables running to the processing machinery. A junction box fed a bundle of smaller wires that crawled up the wall to the ceiling and multiplied outward, powering the lighting in the cavern and throughout the mine.

  Min unhooked the loudspeaker from his belt and tucked it into a crevice. Normally, loudspeakers were used to communicate when direct radio wasn’t possible. Marshal-issue suits came with oversized loudspeakers in case it was necessary to be heard over long distances or over loud ambient noise, like a gunfight. After a long look around the room to fix everything in his mind, Min drew a careful bead with his rifle on the lightning junction box, thumbed the safety off, and gently squeezed the trigger.

  The report of the rifle cracked through the cavern, echoing madly. The junction box exploded in a coruscating waterfall of sparks and the cavern was plunged into darkness. Pandemonium followed, with the miners shouting and running about. Min slipped into the cavern and felt his way along the wall until he found one of the niches where excavation had been abandoned.

  “This is the marshals!” Min cried. His voice boomed from the entrance where he had left the loudspeaker. “We’re here for Sarah Esperalda. Lay down your arms and nobody needs to get hurt!”

  A long burst of automatic gunfire lit the cavern, strobe-like, chewing a cloud of mud shards from the walls around the entrance. Min sighted down his rifle. The question of innocence among the miners had been answered. The gunman spraying bullets toward the entrance was clearly visible, the only bright source of light in the cavern. Min shot him and the gunfire died instantly. In the dark, it was hard to tell if the shot had been good.

  Min heard confused shouting over the ringing in his ears. The din of the automatic weapon had been fantastic. A woman’s voice, high and commanding cut through it, then the cavern fell silent. They had switched to a private radio frequency.

  “Sarah Esperalda,” Min called, “Lay down your arms. This is your last warning!”

  A gleam of light from the sparking junction box reflected off the curve of a helmet to Min’s right. He pressed himself back into the niche and watched the miner creep by. It was so dark that Min could only see the miner as a blob of darkness shifting around, with sporadic glints reflecting off polished surfaces.

  Min let the miner get in front of him before easing out behind. With one motion, Min grabbed the miner from behind with one hand, and with the other drew the knife in his leg sheath. The knife was an emergency blade, sharp as a razor but not nearly long enough to kill someone with. It did, however, work perfectly to cut a great ragged slash through the front of the miner’s suit.

  “He’s here!” the miner shrieked, and swung his hand around, bringing something to bear on Min. A cloud of steam erupted from the front of the miner’s suit as the warm, humid air inside was released.

  It was too dark to see what the miner held in his hand, but it didn’t take a lot of imagination to guess. Min blocked the swing, then twisted the arm around and locked out the joint. If Min had been trying to subdue the miner, he could have just held pressure on the arm until the miner capitulated. Min didn’t have the luxury, though, so he heaved his weight against the arm and felt the joint give with a soggy crunch.

  The miner screamed, then choked as the cold rushed into his lungs. Lights flared from a suit somewhere on the far side of the cavern, stabbing out into the darkness. Min left the miner huddled around his shattered arm and started carefully making his way around the cavern’s outer walls.

  The waving suit lights illuminated a cluster of miners near the bulk of the machinery in the center of the cavern. Min braced himself against a crate and started shooting. The miner with his lamp on made the easiest target, but Min ignored him for now, instead shooting the miners that the light shone on.

  Min shot four of the miners before a burst of automatic fire took down the miner with the lamp. Distantly, Min heard Sarah screaming at her men. Min allowed himself a tight smile. They would think twice before shining another light around.

  A smudge of movement to Min’s left caught his eye, then a miner crashed into him, knocking him sprawling across the frozen ground. Something heavy whistled through the air by his head and cracked into the ground, sending a burst of frozen mud tinkling against Min’s helmet.

  Min rolled to the side frantically. He had lost his rifle somewhere in the dark. Motion blurred again and slammed into the crate. Polymer shattered and foil-wrapped meal packets sprayed out onto the ground. Min scrambled to his feet, his heart racing. He closed a hand around the butt of his pistol and tried to listen over the pounding of blood in his ears.

  He heard the crunching pop of a pouch of noodles being stepped on, and he drew and fired. The muzzle flare gave him just enough light to see a towering miner staggering backward under the impact of the monomol round, a bare two yards away, a heavy pickaxe clutched in one hand. Min adjusted his aim higher and fire again, this time he got the rewarding shatter of the miner’s faceplate.

  “It’s just one man!” Sarah screamed. “Will one of you useless bastards kill him already? He’s over by the storage crates!”

  Min dropped to the ground and started to crawl through the scattered meal packets. He had been lucky so far. His suit was undamaged despite rolling around on the ground. He didn’t want to hit his faceplate against something and crack the glass, but he was rapidly running out of options.

  Sporadic fire from two automatic guns starting ripping through the air over Min. Shards of frozen mud, bits of polymer, and shreds of preserved food rained down around him. Ricochets howled off the walls. Any moment, Min expected to feel the flashing pain of a bullet tearing through him.

  Then he reached a pillar and crawled around it, putting its bulk between himself and the storage crates. He could see the two shooters, lit in flashes from their gunfire. Behind them, he saw the small form of Sarah pacing back and forth. If only he had his rifle he could end this right now, but the gun was somewhere mixed up in the debris of the storage crates.

  During the course of the fight, Min had moved almost halfway around the cavern. The electrical installation was close by on his left. Whatever short that had been spraying sparks had melted down and only an occasional arc sputtered now.

  Moving quickly and hoping nobody turne
d to look in his direction, Min circled around the cavern, making use of whatever cover he could find. Finally, the gunners ran out of ammunition and quiet descended on the cavern once more. Min heard Sarah shouting at them, and one of them turned on his suit lamp before the two of them picked their way over toward the storage crates with pickaxes clutched in their hands.

  Sarah stood alone, nervously watching the two miners. Min kept picking his way around the cavern. He was close enough now that he could close the distance with a short sprint.

  “He’s not here!”

  Min abandoned stealth and ran toward Sarah. The miners had both turned on their lamps and were sweeping the cavern wildly. Their beams were visible as they swung around, the light shining off the frozen mist formed by the humidity vented from breached spacesuits.

  Sarah spun around. Min was close enough to see her eyes widen behind her faceplate, and then he plowed into her, knocking her sprawling and sending her gun skittering across the floor. Min kept his balance, if only just barely, and was ready when Sarah surged up from the ground swinging. Like most Earth-born who had remained physically active, she still retained more muscle mass than even the strongest gweilo, and in the low Martian gravity, she could use it to great effect.

  She swung powerful blows that would have knocked Min sprawling had any of them landed. Min turned her swings aside then caught one of Sarah’s wrists as she overextended. A tug pulled her off balance and before she could recover, he lashed out with his knife, ripping a six-inch tear in her suit.

  Sarah stumbled away, pressing her gloved hands against the tear. Mist boiled from her suit and froze against her gloves, coating them in a white frost.

  Before Min could re-engage with Sarah, light engulfed him, stabbing pain into eyes that had been adjusted to the darkness. One of the miners charged forward, screaming wordlessly with his heavy mining pick held overhead. Min jumped backward a moment before the miner swung and came down ten feet away, his pistol out and leveled at the two miners clutching their picks.