Life on Mars

by Jonathan Strahan (Ed)

  “Okay, then.” Ravi crossed his hands over his thin chest and glared across the clubhouse floor. “What do you want to do, then?”

  The “clubhouse” was really just a disused corner of one of the older storage zubrins. Their parents had assigned the space to the three friends years ago, probably more to get the kids out of their hair than to reward their good grades, which was the purported justification. It had just been an empty space, dimly lit and powdered with a thin covering of red dust that had worked its way inside through the air lock cycling over countless years. Once the three had outfitted it with tables and chairs lugged through the umbilicus that connected the zubrin to the rest of the habitat and brought in storage containers to hold all of their books, videos, and games, it was more than adequate to their needs.

  (Penn’s father had kidded them when they were first setting up the clubhouse, asking if they weren’t afraid of O. H. Morton’s ghost. But they’d already studied early exploration in their Martian history course and knew all about the early settler who’d gone missing during a surveying expedition out on the surface, back when there’d only been a handful of zubrins and unmanned generators on site. And they also knew enough from their Metaphysics & Philosophy course to doubt seriously that the disembodied shade of Oliver Hazard Morton haunted the research facility that now bore his name. Not that it wouldn’t have made life a whole lot more interesting if he did.)

  “How about SuperSpies?” Jace proposed. “We’ll be out near the caves, right? So we can use one of them as the setting. Make it the secret volcano base of a mad scientist bent on world domination. It’d be perfect!”

  Penn and Ravi exchanged a glance. They both enjoyed a bit of superspy action now and again, but they’d just finished off a long campaign of tabletop SuperSpies the day before and were getting a little sick of it.

  Jace didn’t need it spelled out for him. He could see it in their faces. “Okay, maybe not. . . .” he said, dispirited.

  A long silence stretched out as the three considered their options. They’d been gaming together for so long, and so often, that there wasn’t much they hadn’t already beaten into the ground like tent stakes.

  “I’ve got it!” Penn said, snapping his fingers, a wide grin spreading across his face. “Epic Quest!”

  If there was one thing that the three friends shared, in addition to a physical mailing address and a passion for gaming, it was a love of fantasy. Even Penn, who much preferred video to text, had read his way through the core works: Tolkien, Moorcock, Wynne Jones, Nix. And while Jace didn’t share Ravi’s affection for the novels of Bonaventure, they both devoured any and all fantasy comics they could find: Japanese demon-slayer manga, Australian sword-and-sorcery comics, Finnish adventure-fantasy albums. If it involved magic or monsters, sorcery or swords, elves or vampires, or any combination of the sort, it was golden in their eyes.

  And those games that managed to combine their love of fantasy and their passion for gaming? Those weren’t just golden, those were iridium. Real-time strategy games, turn-based combat, virtual simulators, and tabletop spoken-word role-play. Puzzle-based spell games, hack-and-slash melees, hunt-and-seek dungeon crawls, and magicians’ duels in unreal realms.

  But best of all were those rare games that allowed them to get out of the habs and onto the surface—albeit in constrictive “walker” suits—to get up and move for a change, away from the stale recirculated air of the clubhouse. And best of those was the LARPing.

  “Okay, we should just keep this simple,” Ravi had said as the trio trekked south toward the lava-tube caves. “I’ll take a few pics while you two make some quick observations, and then we’re good to go.”

  The assignment from their science class had only called for them to do a research paper on some geological feature of the Martian surface. It could have been as easy as doing a few minutes worth of searching online and then cobbling together a hasty few paragraphs. And under normal circumstances, that would have been precisely what they’d have done. Another thing the three friends had in common was that science was their least favorite subject in school, and one or more of them was always in danger of flunking at any given time. This semester, in fact, all three of them had stayed right at the borderline between pass and fail, which was one of the principal motivations for taking on the extra-credit portion of the assignment.

  The other reason, though, was that the extra-credit required them to go outside.

  “How come you get to take the pics?” Jace asked, struggling a bit with the awkward load of the three plastic swords he carried. “You didn’t even want to do this, remember?”

  “Right!” Penn said. “And as the GM, shouldn’t I be the one to scout the area in advance?”

  It was true, as Game Master that was Penn’s prerogative. More than that, though, was a fact that none of them seemed to feel it was worth saying out loud. Namely, that they wouldn’t even need to do an extra-credit school assignment to go outside if not for Ravi, and the disaster that their last LARPing outing had turned into.

  “Okay, okay,” Ravi said, holding up his gloved hands in surrender. “You take the pics, Penn. Satisfied?”

  Jace, as the injured party in the last LARPing outing, grumbled a bit under his breath that it really should have been him with the cushy job, but he didn’t care enough to start a fight over it.

  They’d been grounded in the hab ever since Jace got a rip in his walker during their last LARPing campaign. They’d been doing a round of Ninjas & Samurai that time around, using long lengths of metal wrenched off some disused shelving as makeshift swords, and everything had been going fine until Penn zigged when he should have zagged, putting more force behind a parry than was actually necessary, and his “sword” whacked hard against Jace’s upper arm. The rip in the constrictive fabric of Jace’s walker went from his shoulder down past his elbow, and by the time the three of them were back through the air locks into the habitat, the low air pressure outside had raised a wicked bruise down the length of Jace’s arm that took months to heal fully.

  It could have been worse, though. If they’d been up on the dunes out toward Barnard when the walker got cut, Jace might not have survived long enough to make it back to the habitat.

  The unanimous order from their parents had been that there was to be no more “monkeying around” outside. (Jace tried to explain to his mother that they weren’t “playing,” but had been “gaming,” a subtle but distinct difference. She didn’t seem particularly swayed by the argument.) But it wasn’t like the three friends had to be told twice. The whole thing had freaked them out pretty good, Jace especially. So for a long time, several months in fact, they’d stayed inside the habitat in their free time, meeting in the clubhouse to game, read, and watch videos.

  But they could only watch so many episodes of their favorite anime series, or hit the dee on their palmtops to see if they made their saving throw so many times before it all began to wear a little thin.

  Only the fact that one or all of them might fail science if they weren’t able to do some primary research out on the surface meant that they weren’t still cooped up inside.

  Even so, the makeshift swords that they’d be using for this campaign weren’t made out of metal. They’d learned that lesson already. Instead, they’d used pliant plastic cut from the lids of storage containers, too blunted and soft even to scrape the fabric of their walkers, much less cut through.

  And to be on the safe side, they’d brought three complete patch kits, just in case.

  “That should do it,” Penn said, switching his helmetcam from static back to standby. “You guys got what you need?”

  Ravi and Jace were sprawled on the red sands near the entrance to the largest of the caves. “Yeah, yeah,” Ravi said, waving his hand dismissively. “ ‘Lava tubes are formed when the tops and sides of a lava flow cool faster the interior, then the interior lava pours out and a hollow tube is left behind, blah-blah-blah.’ We got it already.”

  Jace tapped
the side of his helmet. “We should have enough.” Once they got back home, their palmtops would transcribe into text everything they’d recorded on their helmet mics, and they could simply cobble the text together with Penn’s images and they’d be done.

  “Then I think we’re ready to start.” Penn rubbed his gloved hands together, a wicked smile on his face.

  “I’m hungry,” Ravi said.

  The other two ignored him. They’d all known going in that all they’d have to drink was stale recirc from the packs on their backs, and that eating would be out of the question unless they wanted to lug a pressure tent out with them and go to the trouble of putting it up. The chance to do whatever they wanted was well worth the price of skipping a meal.

  “Ready when you are, Penn.” Jace climbed to his feet, dusting red sand off his legs and backside.

  “Yeah, okay,” Ravi said, standing up slowly. “Let’s get to it.”

  Penn picked up the wrapped-handled plastic swords and passed them out to the group. “What we’re looking at today is a dungeon crawl, plain and simple.”

  “Seriously?” Jace arched an eyebrow behind his helmet’s face shield.

  “Ah,” Penn answered, his grin growing even more wicked. “But this is a dungeon crawl with a twist.”

  He paused a beat, while the other two looked on, waiting for him to continue.

  “Two words, guys,” Penn said triumphantly. “Zombie ninjas.”

  As the only three kids anywhere near their age at O. H. Morton, they tended to get on one anothers’ nerves from time to time. There were even occasions when they stopped speaking to one another, either collectively or in all possible permutations of any two of them, but those occasions were more the exception than the rule. And in another year or so when they went their separate ways, they all knew that they’d miss these days, if only a little.

  Ravi would be heading to Earth for college—provided he didn’t flunk science—and had already been accepted by Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia. Penn talked about going to Australia and trying to break into the video business, but didn’t have any concrete plans yet. Jace dreamed about becoming a big-time manga star, in Japan maybe, or Finland, but secretly suspected that he’d probably just stay at home on Mars.

  Penn had modded some graphics from the online Return of Sauron game, skinned them over logics he’d frankensteined together from a hundred different sources, and was transmitting them directly from the palmtop clipped at his waist to the heads-up displays in everyone’s helmets. With their plastic swords tagged as virtual artifacts as well as physical objects, the trio could interact directly with the nonplayer characters who shambled toward them, parrying the virtual swords of the zombie ninjas with the plastic ones in their own hands. The lack of force-feedback in the lengths of inert plastic meant that the three couldn’t feel the impacts, but this was role-playing, after all.

  “Okay,” Penn said as they moved deeper into the cave, having fended off the last round of NPC attackers, “now you smell a foul, acrid stench from up ahead that makes your eyes water and sting.”

  “Can I identify the origin?” Jace asked.

  “What’s your Perception?” Penn answered.

  “Plus Three.”

  Penn thought for a brief moment. “You’d need to roll a nine.”

  Jace tapped the palmtop on his belt and scowled as the results of the dee flashed on the corner of everyone’s helmet display, a three and a four.

  “No,” Penn answered, suppressing a grin, “you can’t identify the origin.”

  “I’m preparing magic missile,” Ravi said.

  Penn sighed. Whenever in doubt, Ravi always went with magic missile.

  “Okay,” he answered, “but that means you lose the initiative.”

  Ravi grinned. “ ‘ That, my friend, is a risk I’m willing to take.’ ”

  “Don’t.” Jace stopped short, holding up his hand.

  “What?” Ravi and Penn turned in his direction.

  “Just don’t, okay. I swear, if you start quoting from Bonaventure novels again, you won’t stop.”

  “It’s true, Ravi,” Penn said. “Last time, I wanted to beat you to death with a chair when you started that crap.”

  “Fine!” Ravi threw his arms in the air in frustration, the tip of his plastic sword almost reaching the roof of the lava tube overhead. “But I’m still preparing magic missile.”

  “Shall we continue?” Penn motioned ahead. “And I’ll point out that it’s getting darker, the deeper into the cave you go.” The light from the opening behind them barely reached this far in, and from this point onward they’d need to rely on their helmet lamps.

  “Okay,” Jace said, switching on his lamp. “I’m lighting a torch and continuing into the cave.”

  “The scent grows stronger as you proceed,” Penn said as they walked on. “Smelling of death and decay.”

  “Um, guys?” Ravi said as soon as he switched on his own helmet lamp. “Either Penn’s graphics are getting way better than I thought, or there’s something up ahead.”

  And that’s when they found the body.

  At first, they didn’t know whose body it was, and Ravi started in on Battlesnakes again.

  “Who is it, do you think?” Penn asked, ignoring Ravi’s demand for experience points.

  It was a dead person, there was no question about that. The face seen through the helmet’s faceplate was like one of the mummies in Tomb Raiders of the Lost Pyramid, desiccated and leathery, pulled taut over the bones of the cheek and forehead, lips curled back over a grimacing death grin.

  “It’s nobody from O. H. Morton, that’s for sure,” Jace said. The full population of the research facility numbered only in the dozens, and if anyone had disappeared on the surface it was sure the three would have heard about it. “Maybe a researcher from one of the other stations?”

  The walker worn by the dead person—the dead man, it seemed, given the physique and size of the body—had a large cut in it that went from the right shoulder all the way down to the left hip, continuing a few handspans down the left leg. The three friends knew at a glance that so much flesh exposed to the lower atmospheric pressure on the surface wouldn’t just leave a bruise, but would have killed the man in relatively short order.

  But there was something odd about the dead man’s walker, too, in addition to the clearly fatal tear.

  “Look over there,” Ravi said, shining his lamp farther down the cave. There was a metal assemblage about twice the length of one of their plastic swords, a kind of tripod with a swivel mount on top. A few steps away was a large piece of machinery, clearly damaged, that seemed to have fallen from the tripod and rolled off a short distance. “Maybe he was setting that thing up, and when that—whatever that thing is—fell off, it hit him and ripped his walker?”

  Before either of the other two could answer, a host of zombie ninjas swarmed out of the darkness, swinging their blades overhead and moaning for blood and brains.

  “Penn, do you mind?” Jace looked up from the dead man’s body with an annoyed expression on his face.

  “Sorry,” Penn said sheepishly, and then tapped his palmtop to shut down the NPCs altogether.

  “How long do you think he’s been down here?” Jace said, once the zombie ninjas had disappeared from view. In the thin, dry atmosphere of Mars things tended to rot very, very slowly. When they were just kids, the three had done an experiment in their science class where they left a sandwich, an orange, and various other organics out on the surface and then charted the course of decay and decomposition over time. It had been a few years, but so far the food looked pretty much like it had the day they put it out.

  “A long time,” Penn answered. “I mean, look at that walker he’s wearing. Doesn’t have a built-in recirc system, and check out the helmet lamp. That’s a halogen bulb. When was the last time you saw one of those?”

  Ravi was still looking back and forth between the broken machinery and the dead man, a look of extreme conc
entration on his face. “Um, guys?”

  The other two glanced in his direction.

  “I don’t think that he was from O. H. Morton. I think that he was O. H. Morton.”

  A silence fell over the three friends as they considered the idea, staring down at the dead man in the antique walker.

  “Wow,” Jace said in a quiet voice.

  “Guys, if that is . . .” Penn began, then faltered. “I mean . . . He was born on Earth, right? He was one of the first settlers on Mars. One of the pioneers.”

  “The trip back then took ages,” Ravi said in breathless wonder. “They used to use . . . use . . . what where those things called again?”

  “Hohmann transfer orbit,” Jace said, after a few moments’ thought. He was the farthest from the pass-fail borderline in their science class, largely because he’d reluctantly done an extra-credit assignment on transit times between Mars and the other celestial bodies early in the semester. “They used to call it ‘The Long Way Around.’ Now they use . . . um . . . wait a minute, um . . . brachistochrone trajectories, where the ship just flies straight at the destination, accelerating full out the first half of the trip and decelerating the rest of the way. But back then it didn’t take two weeks to get here from Earth, but nearly two years.”

  “And when they got here,” Penn said, “there was nothing here. No habs, nothing.”

  “There were the zubrins they sent ahead,” Ravi said. “With the automated factories already manufacturing oxygen and water and stuff.”

  “Yeah, but no people,” Penn answered.

  “Wow,” Ravi said, whistling low. “They must have gotten bored.”

  “I don’t know, guys.” Jace was thoughtful. “Sounds kind of . . . cool.”

  They considered trying to carry the body back to the hab, and possibly the old broken machinery as well, but none of them looked forward to the long walk lugging the awkward load. In the end, they called ahead to their parents, told them what they’d found, and started back.