Sad to say, this had involved blowing up a number of fission reactors, which left the elaborate system of caverns under Olympus Mons highly radioactive.
The water had been saved, though. The rivers that the PLAN had fracked out of Olympus Mons’s clayey sediment layers still flowed. Humanity grudgingly admitted that the PLAN had done good there. The CEF now used the water—once it had been thoroughly decontaminated—for its own needs.
Elfrida hurried, holding up the skirt of her wedding dress, through streets of tall, narrow buildings. The streets curved without apparent rhyme or reason. Viewed from the air, they would form one of the PLAN’s weird glyphs. This town had once been populated by Martian servants of the PLAN’s legacy hardware. Now it was a CEF base. Signage splarted above high, narrow doors abounded with military abbreviations. Men and women in uniform stared open-mouthed at the girl in a wedding dress. A few actually pointed and laughed.
“Jun,” she panted, “this is really freaking embarrassing.”
“They’ve travelled to Mars, killed enemy soldiers, seen marvels that others can only dream of … but it’s possible, Elfrida, that they’ve never been to a wedding. Think about that.”
“OK, I’ve thought about it, and I really want to go back and make sure all the placecards and flower arrangements are right. As you point out, they don’t have much experience with weddings.”
“I think you can safely leave that to Cydney.”
“How much further is it?”
The blue arrows projected on her contacts led her around another corner, and dead-ended at an airlock.
“I have to go outside?”
“Yeah.”
A CEF colonel loitered near the airlock. He moved towards Elfrida. “Miss Goto?”
“Elfrida,” Jun said, “this is Colonel Hawker. Hawker, this is Elfrida Goto.”
He spoke to both of them via their comms at the same time.
“Nice to meet you,” Hawker said, staring at her dress.
“I’m supposed to be getting married in forty minutes’ time,” Elfrida said grimly.
“We don’t want to get that crumpled, then, do we? You’d better take it off. It wouldn’t fit under a suit, anyway. Do you, er, need any help with the zips and things?”
“I think I can manage.”
Elfrida used the airlock chamber as a changing room. A CEF spacesuit was waiting for her. As soon as she had it on, curiously, she felt more like herself.
Hawker joined her in the airlock. They checked each other’s seals—a ritual which was doubly important on Mars.
The airlock cycled. Instead of being gradually sucked out of the chamber, the air blew out all at once, in a gale-force blast that would prevent any stray nanites from entering the chamber. Elfrida tumbled out head over heels with it, into the electrostatic scrubbing corridor. Hawker had held onto the grab handles when the screen said to. He picked her up off the metal-mesh floor. They proceeded to the second airlock—which would function as an air-blast shower when they came back—and went out.
The sky seemed to close on their heads, because the air was dirty all the way down out here. The outer wall of the CEF dome looked silvery, not transparent, on the outside. It rose sheer from the dusty, yellow-brown Martian rock. Ahead, a pile of what appeared to be deflated tents lay on the ground. Elfrida scuffled past and looked over the edge of the precipice beyond.
The CEF base stood at the bottom of one of the summit craters of Olympus Mons, 2km down from the massive shield volcano’s peak. She was gazing down into the deepest crater of the caldera complex. The dust hid its floor, another kilometer below. She looked up at the cloudy Martian morning, and shivered. No matter how many times she was told that the pieces of Phobos were done falling out of the sky, the back of her neck still crawled when she thought about the Big Breakup. She’d been thrown off the hull of the UNSF Thunderjack with Petruzzelli—leaving her best friend, Jennifer Colden, behind …
“I thought you were in a hurry?” Hawker said.
She turned. He bounced behind her, wearing twenty-meter wings.
“Oh wow!”
The ‘deflated tents’ were hang-gliders.
Of all the things Elfrida might have expected to do on her last morning as a single woman, hang-gliding in the caldera of Olympus Mons was not among them. It turned out to be splendidly fun. She and Hawker leapt off the precipice and swooped across the crater, around and down. Jun had to take control of Elfrida’s glider only once, to prevent her from stalling out—Mars’s thin atmosphere provided only a hundredth as much lift as Earth’s, which was why their gliders’ wings had to be so long.
They landed at a bouncing run on the lower crater’s floor, near the bottom of the cliff they’d launched from.
“Oh, I have to come back and do this with John!” Elfrida exclaimed.
“Now’s your chance,” Hawker said, helping her out of her harness. “It’s going to cost six figures a pop when they start letting the punters in.”
“Olympus Mons, the hottest new tourist destination in the solar system,” Elfrida sighed. “Yeah, a friend was telling me it’s going to be huge.” That, she felt pretty sure, was why Cydney had really come to Mars—to network with the new owners of Olympus Mons ahead of the lifting of travel restrictions.
“You know what they’re planning, though,” Hawker said, as they walked towards the foot of the cliff.
“No, what?”
“Ter-ra-form-ing,” Hawker singsonged. “The old NASA proposals are being dusted off.”
“Really? That’s great!”
Jun said, speaking into their helmets, “That would depend on your point of view.”
“Yup,” Hawker said. “But we’ll let those with the most to lose tell it.”
A pipeline climbed the cliff to the CEF base far overhead. That was the base’s water supply. The pipe came out of an arch in the cliff ahead. All this was old PLAN infrastructure. Martians clambered up and down the steep grade beside the pipeline, shirtsleeved (and some of them were barefoot) in the -80° weather. The ones going up carried stacks of collection plates for the base’s electrostatic scrubbers. They washed the dust and particulate matter out down here, as a service to the CEF, although the nanites still had to be electrically scrubbed inside the airlocks. The ones coming down carried food and other aid donated by well-wishers on Earth.
Elfrida followed Hawker into the pipeline tunnel. She tried not to shy away from the Martians passing around them. Inside her suit, she was safe from the nanites that infested their bodies and brains.
She also tried not to look at the time.
Wisps of water sublimed from a leak in the pipe. The quakes that shook Mars during the Phobos impacts had damaged most everything. A work crew of Martians were patching the leak. Their stepladder and welding equipment blocked the tunnel.
Three Martians squeezed around the blockage and came up to Elfrida.
She thought they were Martians, because they weren’t wearing EVA suits. They wore CEF handout shirts, pants, and hiking boots.
But one of them was taller than any Martian, with fair hair.
Another was shorter than Elfrida, and although her skin had the alien pebbly texture of the Martians, it was a rich ebony hue. Blue beads clinked on the ends of her dusty braids.
Hawker offered the woman a gloved fist-bump. “How’s it going, Colden?”
★
In the sacristy of the newly consecrated Roman Catholic church in the CEF base, John Mendoza paced up and down. His stiff, freshly printed gray tuxedo hid his prosthetic leg. He still limped, but it was not very noticeable. “She’s not coming,” he moaned for the tenth time. “She’s run away.”
“She has not run away,” Kiyoshi said shortly. He was getting bored of Mendoza’s anxiety.
“I’ve been left at the altar. I don’t freaking believe it.”
Just in time before he said something harsh, Kiyoshi realized Mendoza genuinely did think it possible that Elfrida had dumped him on the day of thei
r wedding. He said as gently as he could, “Dude, she loves you.”
Mendoza turned a haunted look on him. “Does she? You don’t understand, I’ve found the perfect woman. This is the woman I want to spend the rest of my life with, OK? And she’s marrying me? No, no. It’s too good to be true. My life does not work out like this. I knew something would go wrong …”
He resumed pacing. He stopped at the one-way window in the wall of the sacristy and lifted the curtain to peek into the church.
“Oh, God …”
Kiyoshi took a peek. With ten minutes to go until noon, the church was already full.
He subvocalized to Jun, ~Is she going to make it?
“Um. Actually, she might be a few minutes late,” Jun said. He spoke to Kiyoshi, as always, through Kiyoshi’s crucifix earring, which spoofed the SSSA secure comms unit he wore around his neck. Strangely enough, no one at the SSSA had ever noticed that Kiyoshi used the unit for unauthorized communications. Jun’s security was more secure than theirs was.
At this moment Jun was parked on the floor of the Olympus Mons caldera, in the region the CEF used as a spaceport. Kiyoshi knew he was watching everything that happened in the caldera through the CEF’s satellites and surveillance drones. This was all aboveboard, nothing secret about it. Jun got along better with the CEF than he did with the SSSA, thanks to the junta’s obligatory partnership with the Society of Jesus.
That partnership also explained why there was a church here.
The nave, where the congregation sat, was octagonal, with recesses in the walls that had been the workstations of NASA scientists, and were now Stations of the Cross. A flower-shaped skylight filled the church with hazy Mars light filtered through the dome high above. An ornate altar had been set up against one wall. A crucifix carved of Martian stone hung behind it. Those were new. The building was not. It had ‘human’ proportions, unlike most Martian buildings. It had started life two hundred years ago as a NASA hab block.
The PLAN, for its own perverse reasons, had preserved this former NASA base and built a town around it. This was where it had begun its own life, as the AI running the Mars colony. It had slaughtered the humans who once tended it, but kept their stuff. According to the Martians Jun had interviewed, while the PLAN ruled Mars, this had been a sort of religious center. Martians had come on hate-pilgrimages to watch sacrifices in this very building, in a reenactment of the PLAN’s founding slaughter. When the CEF occupied the town, they’d had to use high-powered steam hoses to get all the dried blood off the walls.
Kiyoshi felt distinctly ambivalent about the Jesuits’ decision to turn this building into a church. Had it been up to him, he’d have slagged it.
“It’s the best way of reclaiming the past,” Father Lynch had assured him, “and at the same time, making sure it never happens again.”
“Five minutes to noon!” Mendoza moaned. He was not speaking to Kiyoshi now, but to Father Lynch himself. The Afro-Irish priest had just come into the sacristy with Michael and a couple of other altar servers. The boys helped him put on his vestments for the wedding Mass. Mendoza said, “Father, she’s not coming, I know it!”
“I’m sure she is,” Father Lynch said, texting Kiyoshi at the same time: “You don’t think she HAS run off, do you?”
~Jun?
“This isn’t going as well as I hoped it would,” Jun said after a moment.
★
“You could have at least let me know you were alive!”
“I was in JAIL, Colden!”
“What about after you got out of jail?”
“They said you were on Thisbe!”
“The Thisbe refuge was cancelled in favor of Ceres. And then Ceres got cancelled, too. I’ve been here all along.”
“Well, why didn’t you call ME?”
“I’m a Martian now, if you hadn’t noticed. We’re not allowed to have any such thing as modern technology!”
★
Magnus Kristiansen stepped between the two women. He waited until they stopped yelling at each other. Then he solemnly wrapped one arm around Colden’s shoulders, and the other around Elfrida’s, and pulled them into a hug.
Elfrida tensed, and then sagged. She wouldn’t catch nanites from a hug. Not with her suit on.
“I missed you,” Colden said in a small voice. She was actually subvocalizing. The technology restrictions allowed the Martians to use their nanites for local comms.
Colden was a Martian.
“I missed you,” Elfrida said. Tears filled her eyes. She’d found her best friend again, and lost her forever, at the same time.
It just felt so wrong.
Kristiansen was a Martian, too. He said, “Thanks, Jun.”
“I hope this was the right thing to do,” Jun said. “You travelled a long way to get here. Thank you.”
“A long way?” Elfrida said.
“Yeah,” Colden said. When she spoke, her lips stayed sealed in that tight Martian smile. It made her look alien, even though Elfrida knew the Martians had to keep their mouths closed when they were outside, so they didn’t overdose on CO2. “We live down in the Sulci Gordii.”
“How did you get here?” This was such a stupid conversation to be having. As if they hardly knew each other.
“We walked,” Kristiansen said. “No modern technology for us, remember?”
“We came through the caverns,” Colden said, gesturing back the way they’d come. “Goto, it is freaking amazing down there. Underground waterfalls. Underground lakes. Stalactites—”
“Stalagmites,” Kristiansen corrected her in that pedantic way he’d always had.
“I can never remember which is which.”
“The tights go down,” Elfrida sang.
“And the mites go up!” Colden finished. They both laughed, and for a second it felt like Colden hadn’t changed a bit.
“There’s a whole world down there,” Colden went on. “Yes, the PLAN built it, but that doesn’t necessarily make it bad. Unfortunately, the locals have forgotten everything they knew about infrastructure maintenance. They’re clueless without the PLAN feeding them instructions. So we’ve been busy, busy, busy.”
Colden hadn’t changed. Inside that cold-resistant, radproof dermis, behind that alien smile, she was still the same old Colden.
“Are you … OK?” Elfrida asked hesitantly.
“Better than fine,” Colden said. She wrapped her hand around Kristiansen’s.
Kristiansen said, “The nanites have changed our DNA. The changes are irreversible. Right now, we feel healthy. In ten or twenty years? Who knows? We’ll just have to wait and see.”
“It’s actually really cool having neuroware,” Colden said. “Now that the PLAN isn’t around to control us through the nanites, we can use it for local comms, all kinds of stuff. It’s like a BCI plus.”
“Jun wrote a new operating system for the neuroware,” Kristiansen grinned. “The St. Stephen Oratorio, version 2.0.” He tapped his head. “Best security in the solar system. The GUI could stand to be a bit less gothic, though.”
“I’m working on it,” Jun said.
Elfrida cleared her throat, “Well, I really want to talk more about this. But guys? This is awful, but I’m supposed to be getting married in—” She checked the time. “Oh, help. Two minutes!”
“They’ll wait for you,” Jun said.
“Goto, you’re getting married? Oh my God!”
The third Martian who’d come with Colden and Kristiansen stepped forward. He was a born Martian. Like all of them, he was a youngish male of indeterminate race. He said, “I am Stephen One. There are many Stephen Ones now, but I was Stephen One while they were still mindless client nodes, so I am keeping it. First come, first served. I am honored to make your acquaintance, and I congratulate you on your upcoming nuptials.”
“Cut to the chase, Stephen,” Jun said. “She has to go.”
“Yes, O Great Liberator,” Stephen One said sarcastically. Jun and Stephen One clearly knew each oth
er well, and were friends. “We, the people of Mars, humbly implore you, Miss Goto, to use your influence with the CEF. All we have left is our planet. Please don’t take it away from us.”
“But I thought you were going to stay here,” Elfrida said. “Isn’t it a done deal?”
Hawker, who’d kept a tactful distance during her reunion with Colden, said, “Remember I mentioned terraforming?”
Jun said, “There are plans … there’s a lot of pressure on me to develop version 3.0 of my oratorio. The SSSA wants Mars for human colonization. The nanites are a fatal obstacle to that goal. They want me to disable them altogether.”
“Without our nanites, we would probably die,” Kristiansen said. “We’re symbiotic with them.”
“I won’t do it, obviously,” Jun said. “And I’m fairly sure they can’t do it without me. But … I’d rather not be the only person opposing them.”
Elfrida heard a tiny catch in Jun’s voice. She realized how tired he must be.
“Oh, I’m exaggerating,” he quickly added. “My Order is on my side. So is the Church in Rome. So is the Order of St. Stephen—that’s the new Martian monastic order …”
“What about the CEF?” Elfrida said.
“Could go either way,” Jun said. “And that’s where we need your help.”
“I don’t have any influence.”
“Yes, you do,” Colden snapped. “Stop underestimating yourself. You were classified as a statistical outlier.”
“A lucky mascot.”
“A person with a peculiar gift for survival. Goto, they will listen to you. If you didn’t have a special classification, they wouldn’t be letting you get married on Mars in the first place!”
“I’ll try,” Elfrida said. She shared Jun’s weariness at the thought that she wasn’t done with her responsibilities yet. Then she told herself not to be so self-pitying. “I’ll annoy them until they say OK just to get rid of me.” She smiled. “How’s that sound?”
The Callisto Gambit Page 42
