by Greg Bear
Assured that we are now relatively clean, one by one, we squeeze through the tent’s canal into our little womb, like babies in reverse. When we’re all in, and I’ve checked the seal and found it good, I crack my faceplate. Checker always takes first sniff. The tent air is okay, clean and cold. Like Russian steppes.
I’M BARELY AN hour into some crazy whimpering dream about mean kids when the tent wheeps intruder alert and we all jerk up, just as something slips through the entrance and plops down among us puppies. Beams flash. Kazak is loudly cursing in his eponymous patois. Then his beam illuminates a helm, a face—a human face—grinning like a bandit. Behind the faceplate, we recognize the broad nose, bushy unibrow, deep blue eyes, and somber, straight mouth.
“Shit, it’s Vee-Def,” Tak says. As we settle down, DJ passes Gunnery Sergeant Leonard Medvedev some water and an MRE.
Still all sergeants.
“Anybody get tactical?” Medvedev—Vee-Def—asks. As we dim our lights, the beams intersect a thin haze, and we realize there’s dust in the tent. Vee-Def entered without brushing down. A severe breach.
“Fuckup,” Kazak says.
“Nobody got tactical,” Tak says.
“Anybody see a sled come down?” Vee-Def asks.
That’s too stupid a question to answer. We’re here in a Russian tent.
“How many tents?” he asks.
“How many do you see?” Tak asks.
More quiet.
“Sticks were all fucked,” Vee-Def murmurs around a swig. His eyes are wide and scared. “I came down alone. Fucking puff was burning!”
“It’s supposed to burn, man,” DJ says.
“No, I mean there was sparkly and the sticks caught it. Looked like space frames, too. We may be all that’s left!”
We’re quiet for a few seconds.
“Bullshit,” Tak says.
“I saw it, too,” DJ reminds us, with a resentful glance.
Bad news takes a while to soak in when you’re out on the Red, because just a little bad news means you’re going to die, and this is a lot. Vee-Def feels the burn of bearing evil tidings. “I don’t like Finnish sausage,” he says, and offers around in pinched fingers a hard little tube of preserved reindeer.
No takers. We scratch ourselves with disdain.
Then Kazak starts giggling. “Is that your Tootsie Roll, man? Or you just glad to see us?”
It’s dumb and not very funny. But for the moment we’re warm, we’re scratching, we’re alive, and Vee-Def does what he does best, he sticks the sausage up his nose, or tries to, and then sneezes and snot comes out with the sausage and the sausage is good only for the family dog, which we were thoughtless enough to have left behind.
It’s not good laughter. It’s harsh and tired and angry. But it is laughter, and there may not be much to be had this trip. We don’t say it, however. Not even Vee-Def is dumb enough to say more.
We’re in the month-old tent of a dead platoon, our sticks got scattered, no transport sleds, our space frames may have caught sparkly, we have almost no tactical, comm seems to be down all over—even our angels are quiet.
We could be the Lost Patrol.
Morning will tell.
MARS WILL BE HEAVEN, SOMEDAY
I can’t sleep for shit. I keep going over how fucked we are.
It’s extreme on the Red. The air is just a millibar above a vacuum. It’s always too damned cold. While there’s quite a bit of water on Mars, overall most of it is tough to get at—locked up at the poles or cached beneath old seabeds or hidden in deep-flowing aquifers. That makes water a major strategic commodity. There’s always a tiny residue of moisture in the air, enough to form high, icy clouds. There’s more water in the air when the seasons melt the caps, which they do with monotonous regularity. Mars can be a cloudy world. I’ve even seen it snow, though the snow rarely makes it to the ground. That’s called virga on Earth. Same on Mars.
On a large scale, weather on Mars is totally predictable. On a warrior’s scale, not so much. There are always those scribbling dust devils, and big storms can block out the sun for months, covering the Red in dark brown murk so dense and fine you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Imagine a near vacuum you can’t see through. But the air does get warmer when the dust absorbs sunlight.
Making oxygen is the trick. Cracking water—hydrolysis—is comparatively easy; CO2 and oxidized dust take more energy and time. That’s why we need fountains. Fountains are big, often the size of a semi cab. We usually carry a couple with us on a drop, but they can also be delivered a few weeks before we arrive, on stealth chutes hundreds of meters wide, usually at night. They plop down on the Red and if the dust is deep enough—if they’re not on impenetrable hardpan—they burrow in and almost immediately pop out solar collectors and extraction vanes and whirl the vanes to collect moisture from the air.
Fountains can stockpile enough volatiles over a few weeks to keep a company alive for two or three months. A big fountain can keep half a company in combat posture for six or eight months, refilling skintights with water and air.
Command can also decide to turn a fountain into a fuel depot, reserving its hydrogen and oxygen for propellant. We’ve all heard of fountains letting warriors suffocate on the Red for the greater strategic good—allowing someone else to get home again. Which do you need more? A return ticket, or enough to breathe? It’s a nasty balance. Needless to say, Skyrines have a love-hate relationship with fountains.
To make matters more interesting, the longer a fountain has been on the surface, the more it becomes a prime target for Antag fire. Sometimes Antags let a fountain sit for weeks, working away, storing up volatiles, and when troops arrive and settle in, then they blow it up. Real sense of humor. Just as we start to party—scrap and stain on the Red.
If a fountain happens to locate a shallow aquifer or cached ice, it becomes a strategic reserve and may not announce its presence even to Skyrines, but instead shoots the news up to command and awaits instructions. Too valuable to waste on grunts.
OUTSIDE, THE DARK is complete and the air is clear. It’s not as cold outside as on the southern highlands, but it’s still plenty cold—about minus eighty Celsius. Inside the tent, curled up like puppies in a litter to conserve heat, we are truly womb brothers. Freudian, but not many Skyrines know dick about Freud, so traditionally, when we puppy up, we joke about bad porn instead. Unless we’re too tired. There’s a whole weird genre of porn down on the Big Blue Marble, about getting it on with Gurus or Antags. We aren’t told what Gurus look like and don’t know much about Antags, so they can be most anything we want. Why not prime green pussy? Some people down on the Blue Marble are just too strange to live. Interesting the Gurus don’t seem to mind them.
In the dim light of a single beam, suppressed to a dull orange and hanging from the center of the tent, I study my mates. They seem to be asleep. I envy them that.
Tak is my friend, we go back a long ways, but I never feel entirely secure around him. He’s quiet, movie-star handsome, lean and sharp, stronger and far more perceptive than me. Ever since Hawthorne, and in all our many battles, I’ve felt with a spooky prickle that someday he’ll survive when I won’t. Still, so far we’ve both survived, often because of what Tak does. He’s damned good on the Red and a beast in a tussle.
Kazak is a very different sort. He’s our barn door exchange student, a short, stocky guy with amazingly slanty eyes and even black fuzz on his crown that descends not so abruptly to a widow’s peak. He came over from Kazakhstan a few years back and got promoted before the Skyrines found out he was a Tartar shithead and closed the barn door. Perfect teeth, long on the canines. A real Canis lupus with a feral smile. Not the brightest, but maybe the most steady and calm in a fight or a tough situation, he can be a quick judge of character, not always correctly, often with a Mongolian twist that’s hard for the rest of us to figure. I can easily imagine him slapping raw meat under the saddle of his stocky pony and chewing on it in between Parthian shots
with a compound bow. I have Polish and German blood in my family. Kazak denies fervently that his ancestors once raped and slaughtered mine. “Mongols so handsome, mother ladies just spread and bred,” he says. Right. When things are loose, Kazak’s sense of humor is murder. His practical jokes verge on felonies. PFCs have to stay on their toes around him.
Even for all that, most of us like him because he’s our shithead and as shitheads go, he’s kind of special. I’ve dropped with Kazak twice and sometimes he has this look that, when he has it, very reliably informs us that our Tartar shithead will take us all back home with him—a fierce wrinkle in one eye that makes me, too, want to bear his children.
Tonight, squinch-faced and snoring, he looks like a troubled baby. Still, he’s snoring. I envy him that.
Being likable is a gift I do not reliably possess. I can turn it on sometimes, but I know when I’m doing it and feel guilty, people should just know I’m a good guy without the charm wave… But maybe I’m not such a good guy after all. Maybe default is truth. Nobody treats me as anything special, and I prefer it that way. Nobody but Joe and Tak and maybe Kazak. They’re my best friends in this whole dust-fucked war.
An hour or more passes. I’m almost asleep, or maybe I’m dreaming I’m still awake, but I’m definitely awake when the alarm goes off again. Tak gets up on his knees by the membrane, ready to throttle whatever comes through. His face creases with handsome disappointment when a blue-stripe helm pokes in. Just another Skyrine, and this time it is Corporal Lindsay—Mitch—Michelin, his face blue with cold and hypoxia.
Tak raises his hands and flexes them. Finally, somebody we can boss around. Michelin is not the most compliant corporal, however. The entrance sucks shut as he pulls out his second boot, making our ears pop, and he falls on his back across DJ and Kazak. Then he claws his faceplate open and coughs until he’s doubled. It’s several minutes before he can say anything.
“No beacon!” he croaks. “Fuck. Almost died.”
“You’re welcome,” Kazak says.
“Who’s here?” Michelin asks, examining us with bloodshot eyes. He sees we’re all superiors. It does not faze him. Tak hands the newcomer a tube of borscht and some reindeer sausage, then, more reluctantly, a bag of water. Now we’re six, too many for the tent, if it’s all we’ve got, but what can you do?
Michelin fixes his pink-eye gaze on Tak and grins. “Praise be, I’m in heaven. Master Sergeant Fujimori is here to service me. Who needs virgins?” His lips are still purple. He does not look good, but he’s coming around. He holds up the Russian food tube. “What is this shit? Tastes like weak kimchee.” And he erupts an enormous fart.
“Take that bloat outside,” Tak requests, fastidious to a fault.
Michelin is too weak to apologize. After he’s mumbled over our names and ranks, he falls into something like a nap, more like a brief coma, and then, twenty minutes later, flails for a moment before settling down, wide-eyed and shivering.
We’re all awake now.
“Christ, our sticks must have shot their loads early,” he says, rolls over, and asks if we have tactical.
“No,” DJ says.
Then, with a shy smile, our lone corporal confesses he might have something. Turns out Michelin is the only one who got a solid burst before sparkly scrubbed the sky clean. Our angels share and we analyze his download, which includes broken uplink from previous drops.
“Still far from complete,” Tak says.
“None of the fountains are putting out signal,” DJ says. “Maybe they didn’t make it down, maybe they got taken out—not one is talking.”
We meditate on that.
“Tent can keep us going for eight more hours,” DJ says. We give him the look. We do not need to hear what we already know. Tell us something new or something beautiful. DJ glances away, eyes losing focus, going dreamy. It’s his safety.
Tak explores Michelin’s burst beyond the negative on fountains. “Well, here’s good news,” he says. “Euro company before us”—the guys whose reindeer sausages and borscht lie heavy in our guts—“dropped a few tent boxes they didn’t get a chance to use. No data on what went wrong… but there could still be six or seven inside ten klicks.”
Our angels lock, and he shows us that the tents are widely spaced around the pedestal and the crater. We’ll have to hike to avoid suffocation.
Few Skyrines keep it together when we can’t breathe. No matter how tough our selection and training, we all tend to open our faceplates when oxy drops below threshold and claustrophobia takes over. True story. Skyrines typically want to die a few minutes early rather than slip into lung-searing delirium. Go figure.
“Rest up,” Tak says.
After that, we’re quiet for another half hour. I’m on the edge of a buzzing, insect-hive sort of sleep when the tent alarm goes off once more and Neemie squeezes in to join us—Staff Sergeant Nehemiah Benchley, from our second fire team, a strawberry blond surfer with a plump face and Asian wave tattoos that ripple like skin movies on his hands and neck. He’s as ignorant as the rest of us. He reports the east is getting brighter, and he saw nobody else either during the drop or while walking. He cannot explain how he lasted this long. We don’t inquire. Could be we’re already dead. A hypnotically dumb idea that occurs far too often to warriors on the Red.
We drink up from what’s left in the tent tubes, enjoy the luxury of a good piss in our recups, and for a few minutes, the tent smells of urine and ball-sweat. Not unpleasant, once you’re used to it. Like a washroom in a Russian brothel. No disrespect. Dead Russians are saving us this night.
The tent announces in a stern, prerecorded voice—in Russian, Kazak translates—that there are far too many of us and we have depleted its resources.
The sky outside the tent is getting bright.
Time to move on.
GOD SAVES DRUNKARDS AND BAKA DUDES
Morning is really cold.
We clap on our helms, seal up, query our angels, and one by one, through our faceplates, lift eyebrows or pook out lips, meaning all our angels are quiet. There are still no bit bursts, therefore no sats in the sky. Our angels have no good news, no news at all, and so they say nothing.
The tent is depleted. We birth out and just leave it there. No sense wasting strength trying to dig a hole and hide it, and it’s useless to try to burn it under these conditions, because we’d have to supply the oxygen, and on top of all that, the tent’s been out here for a month and if anybody cares they already know where it is. Likely nobody cares.
More Lost Patrol shit.
“We’re at the butt end of a fight,” Neemie opines into our gloom.
“Right,” DJ says. “Tell us something ripping, Master Sergeant Venn.”
“Ripping is as ripping does,” I say. “We have no commander. We are on a hunt for gasps and sips and lunch. Not that I’m all that hungry.” I look critically at Michelin and then at Vee-Def, who graces us with a dopey grin we can’t really see behind his helm, but we know it’s there.
We keep surveying the sky. From ground level all over Mars, you can spot space frames and other orbitals, especially before sunrise or after sunset, when the angles and contrast are best. This morning, nothing presents itself but a brilliant wall of stars. Air is very clear, and that means it’s not going to get much warmer.
I look west because my left hand itches and it’s on my western side. That little brown blurry patch is still there, up north a ways. Looks too far off to be of consequence, but it’s the only steady attraction in our tight little theater. I touch helms with Tak. “Your ten,” I say. He looks. His new eyes are better than ours. “What is that?”
“Dust devil,” he says.
“It’s been there since yesterday.”
“What do you think it is?” DJ asks.
“A cute little twist in a Fiat… and she’s got a keg,” Kazak interposes.
“Could be wreckage,” I say. “Could be a malfunctioning fountain. Could be anything.”
“Ants,�
�� Vee-Def says, meaning Antags, Antagonists. Every word gets shorter as wars go on. Guys like Vee-Def do the shortening.
“Could be Antags,” Kazak agrees. “But they would already be here if they cared about us, no? Why waste resources just to put us out of our misery—”
“Go see,” Tak says, cutting off a bad ramble. He’s a steady dude. When Tak makes a decision, others nod and agree. Neemie and Michelin move off first. The rest of us follow. I look back at the tent, our lifesaver, now useless junk. All across Mars there are thousands of tons of stuff that will get buried by dust and then dug up centuries from now and sold at auction. Our job is to make sure it’s Sotheby’s and not Ant-Bay. Ha-ha.
Talk of sparkly has gotten us downhearted. All we want is to find another tent. Not much hope for relief and certainly we can’t hope for a pickup at this point.
We probably don’t have enough reserves to reach the brown blur in the west. But maybe we’re on a drop line, a regular pattern of deliveries in theater, across the plain. A mystical pilgrim’s trail that will lead us to a few more days of life, and no asking God for more, that’s already too much.
HIKING ON MARS in the morning chill is a treat I’d sell to any starry-eyed explorer for a hot shower.
Decades ago, a bunch of them came to Mars and set up parking lots full of white hamster mazes, then dug deep networks of rabbit tunnels. They claimed Mars and called it home. We call them all Muskies after a visionary entrepreneur, Elon Musk. From what little I’ve read, he founded an online bank, made cars and spaceships, promoted a vegan lifestyle, and fought for years with Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos, Virgin’s Richard Branson, and a dozen other competitors around the world for launch facilities and orbital domination. Eventually, they pooled resources to fulfill the dream of putting people on Mars. But Musk had the name that stuck.
