by Greg Bear
For almost twenty years, settlers kept crossing the vac and arriving on the Red, and then, abruptly, the migrations stopped—mostly because the best settlements maxed out and the others were starving or worse, like Jamestown in Virginia. But a few hundred stalwarts survived, and for a time Muskies were highly regarded, successful pioneers… Until people tired of spending money on the colonies, none of which ever made a return on investment.
So the investment stopped.
After the Gurus arrived and told us that Mars had maggots and we had to go out there and exterminate them before they grew into wasps, the Muskies became a liability. The brass decided we couldn’t defend them, or save them if they got in trouble, once the Battle of Mars began in earnest. I’ve never seen a Muskie, even at a distance. There may be a couple of thousand left alive, but Earth hasn’t done squat for them in years. As far as anyone knows, Antags don’t bother with them, either.
The original settlers paid between $10 million and $100 million each for their Mayflower moment. Our strategy prof at SBLM likened them to the guy who lit out in the 1930s for the Pacific Islands to get away from the hurly-burly and ended up on Guadalcanal.
EVERY SKYRINE IS SOMEBODY’S BASTARD
We march. Radio silence isn’t all that big a deal now, but we keep our talk to a minimum. The sky is still empty. Looks as if what’s going to be here is already here.
Walking on lowland hardpan with only a softening of dust, or low ripples cut through by devil tracks, is easy enough, not like sand or deep dust, and we weigh about one-quarter what we would on Earth, so we could conceivably jump along like John Carter or a moon astronaut, but that’s not recommended and not even all that much fun after the first few leaps, because you never know when your boot will come down on a stone big enough to turn your ankle. There are fucking rocks all over.
There’s a lot of confusion still about how Mars came to be what it is today. Parts of Mars are pure nightmare, from a geologist’s standpoint—so much evidence of big gushes and rivers and lakes and even oceans of past water, present water not so evident, but there all the same—so much difference between the southern highlands and the northern lowlands—plus the biggest visible impact basin in the solar system, Hellas Planitia, surrounded by peculiar terrain both older and younger than the impact… Smart people spend lifetimes trying to riddle it.
Mostly, I leave it to them. But I have my theories. I’m willing to believe all these little rocks fell out of some giant kid’s pockets. He walked around in dirty sneakers for hundreds of thousands of years, picking up rocks and stuffing them in his dungarees. Whenever his balls chafed and tugged his pants leg, he dribbled a stony trail. Johnny Rocker. That explains all these ankle-turners.
We could legitimately pray for a thin cloud of fine silt to blow over, but the sky is not cooperating. Martian dust is a major heat-grabber. Temperatures rise, batteries last longer. Insolation—solar energy—drops quite a bit, but we aren’t laying out solar panels and our skintights have little in the way of photovoltaic capacity.
DJ says he’s in sight of the next Russian tent. He’s quite an ace at finding tents. We knew roughly where it was, but he climbed the pedestal and located the tent box in an old gully. And then he reports it’s got warning colors.
“Germ needles,” he says.
The box is filled with shit that kills humans.
That leaves us with maybe two hours of breath.
BY DATE OF rank, I rule in this fragmented squad, but I don’t give orders because nobody cares until we get our recon and tactical becomes important. Besides, if I go all commando voice—Now, men! Listen up—they’re likely to ignore me and turn to Tak.
Which is fine by me.
I’d sure like to hear from Gamecock, our company commander—Lieutenant Colonel Harry Roost. I don’t much like Roost—he can be a by-the-book hardass—but I respect him. He would be strong and direct out here, if not reassuring. We don’t need a hand-holder. We need a lifesaver with a sense of purpose.
THINGS DO NOT get better. Before we reach the next tent box, Tak spots debris a few hundred meters off and we divert. As we get closer, all I see is a skipping series of strike marks, scorch and scatter—a few craters where chunks hit, while the rest went on and plowed long, shallow graves in the hardpan.
We gather around the edge of the strike zone and eyeball the extent. This was once an entire space frame, and it did not fall empty. It came down full of sticks and fasces. There are dead Skyrines everywhere. And a transport sled, split into pieces. Skell-Jeeps spill out of the shattered capsules like the bones of half-born babes. All useless. Even dangerous. Kazak warns us to stay clear of anything that looks like a reactor.
We gingerly poke around, looking for oxygen generators, tanks, packs of skintights, anything that could keep us going for a few more hours. Nobody talks. We don’t examine the bodies. They came down hard and they’re mostly just scattered rips of fabric, squashed helms… freeze-dried stain. They had probably just emerged from Cosmoline, woozy and sluggish, and were getting cleaned off, suiting up, attaching puff packs, prepping for the drop. The space frame must have just then been hit by ground-to-sky bolts or lasers, or sky-to-sky, no way of telling. When seen from a few dozen klicks, or from the ground: sparkly. Just as Michelin and Vee-Def said. Major sparkly to take down the company’s frames and all our sats and, since we have yet to find a fountain, maybe all those as well.
The trunk of the frame might contain extra cargo. We give it a quick search. Nothing here, either. Pure Skyrine waste, nothing to see. Move along.
We have about half an hour. We’ll be dead long before we reach the brown blur. Just keep marching toward the rough position of the next tent box. Kazak suggests we fan out, not to offer a compact target. We break into three groups.
“What’s that tower of haze out there, really, do you think?” Tak asks. He’s about ten meters away, skirting the pedestal’s rim.
“Something stupid,” DJ says, about thirty meters away. “Making itself obvious.”
“Or something strong that doesn’t give a fuck about being spotted,” Vee-Def suggests.
That’s possible, but I don’t want to hear it. If it’s strong and boastful, it doesn’t belong to us. Antags are winning today.
“Maybe it’s a secret sect of Muskies,” Neemie says, moving closer.
“Shut up,” I say. “And keep the spread.”
We go wide again. Fifteen minutes of oxygen, give or take. Soon our angels will warn us we’re down to last gasp and that will seal the deal. Maybe that’s why we call them angels. They could be the last thing you hear.
Hey, Skyrine—it’s a good day to die. They don’t actually say that, but it might be cool if they did.
TIME TO DESCRIBE a skintight. It’s a remarkable piece of equipment, even when it’s failing, even when you know you’re going to die. Your standard Mars-grade skintight is a flexible and seamless suit woven from a continuous monomolecular strand of carbon coilflex, set into a bilayer gel mostly comfy to the skin. Moisture is recycled or broken down into oxygen, depending on the need. In the field, the skintight absorbs skin waste and conveys it through tiny tubes to storage packs around the butt, which gives Skyrines a big-bootie profile. Every few days you remove the extract from the butt packs and throw it away—a useless lump of oil and dead skin and salt and other gunk.
The helm and the angel process video and tactical memory. Skintight fabric contains circuitry for battlefield diagnostic, which sends our health status to the angel for uplink, so that birds on high can tell our commanders how we’re doing down on the Red.
Skintights do nearly everything except walk and fight and they do it quietly and without complaining. Some say they are like the still-suits in Dune, and they do bear a resemblance, but ours do a hell of a lot more than conserve and filter water.
Every Skyrine has a love-hate relationship with his skintight. Can’t wait to get home and get it off, but then he misses the convenience of never having to worry ab
out pee or crap or sweat, and feels, when naked, that one is minus a real friend, perhaps the best friend ever. Some old hands have to relearn bladder control when they’re back in civvies. All the designers need do is make skintights sexually accommodating and Skyrines might never have to come home again.
Yeah.
That said, a skintight whose batteries are running down, whose oxygen is running out, whose water is turning sour, feels less like a friend and more like a jar full of pickle juice.
We are sinking deep in the jar.
THE WAY IT SPOZED TO BE
Immediately after drop¸ or on the way down, you’re supposed to receive updated tactical and maps with known objectives and concentrations of Antag forces clearly laid out, appropriate to your squad’s assigned chores.
Ideally, you’ll drop within a short hike of a fountain or, barring that, a cluster of tent boxes, and somewhere in the vicinity your transport sled will also come down on stealth chutes, spiraling in within a couple of klicks of the company’s drop zone, though they are pretty targets and often don’t make it intact.
Skyrines are trained to make do with what they got. But when you got next to nothing…
Every Skyrine drops with at least one basic weapon, his sidearm. As I said, they look like fat .45s. Someone named them Yllas, don’t know why. They don’t shoot bees. They fire bullets and bolts. Bolts are deadly to anything they hit within five hundred meters. They home on whatever you’re looking at with about ninety-nine percent accuracy. The pistols carry a small spent matter cassette and that has to be switched on to charge the plasma about thirty seconds before combat. A single spent matter cassette can charge and launch about sixty bolts. Gun captain—a rotating duty—collects all used cassettes. Spent matter waste is bad shit and we’re supposed to be sensitive about ecological issues. In truth, however, there are a lot of cached bags of it out on the Red; no time in combat to search and recover if, for example, our gun captain gets zeroed. Vee-Def is supposed to be gun captain for this drop.
Kinetic rounds work in vac, of course—gunpowder supplies its own oxygen. But cold can reduce range, and target practice on Earth doesn’t train you for Mars, where windage is usually very light, the thin air very cold, and the gravity drop much slower. Our other weapons, lasers and even weak-field disruptors, can be affected by heavy dust.
Skyrines have been trained to fight in nearly all conditions. Training is so you might not get killed before you gain experience. Newbies start on the Red with nothing but simulations and a month of Earth-based live fire—not nearly enough, in my opinion. You only really improve by doing.
AND HERE’S WHAT we think we know about the Antags, or at least, what we’re told: They probably don’t come from our solar system or anywhere near. That means they arrived on a big ship, tech unknown but capable of crossing interstellar distances. It’s tough to visualize how huge interstellar space is. Vast, vast, long-long-long distance—repeat a trillion times until you feel really small and silly. Mostly empty light-years and deep cold.
But we haven’t found that big ship, have no idea where it might be hiding, and can only vaguely guess how they get from there to Mars. Or anywhere else they take a fancy to. So far, just Mars, we’re told.
But then the grandma said…
Titan! Jesus.
HEAVY HAND
Maybe I’m seeing things.
A couple of lights are floating up in the sky, competing with Phobos for my attention, bright enough to be space frames, but they could just as easily be Antag. Their Grasshopper-class boats are about that bright in orbit—clusters of pressurized tubes filled with transports and weapons and combatants.
Tak raises his hand. Michelin raises his and shouts there are sats still up—and then I see a thin blue line drop down quick, hit the dust, miss Vee-Def—then try again. This time the line touches him, then shifts over to Tak.
“Bit burst!” Tak shouts, loud enough to hear from five meters. We’ve been found.
I get my blue line next, and my angel is suddenly happy to show me where we are, where there might be supplies and weapons—the immediate logistical picture. Only three of us receive the laser lines, so our angels exchange for the next few seconds while we’re chattering like schoolkids waiting for the bus.
“Something’s coming,” Tak says, having finished a quick skim, tagging data he finds immediately important. To my surprise, it’s not survival data—nothing to do with tents or sleds.
It’s a warning.
“Big stuff coming down,” Tak summarizes, concentrating so hard his eyes cross.
Michelin cranes his neck and looks up at the sky, squinting. He covers his helm with gray-gloved hands. Then he crouches. Instinct. We watch him, bemused.
“What is it?” Vee-Def asks. “Landing parties? Big Mojo?”
Big Mojo is rumored to have been seen once, four years ago: a kind of massive Antag orbital capable of shaving off huge, battalion-strength landers and dropping them to the Red. The lights we see aren’t that bright. But they’re also not what we’re being warned about. Whatever’s out there, whatever’s on its way in, the mass is enormous, and there are nine to twelve of them, maybe more, separate objects tracked by our few remaining sats, which have finally and most kindly supplied us with what they know—just before we suffocate.
“Biggest may be a hundred million tons,” DJ says, winnowing the numbers down to basics. “Others, smaller—five or six million.”
“Jesus,” Neemie says, his voice husky. His air is going fast. So is mine.
“Why tell us this shit now?” Michelin asks, lifting his head from his crouch.
“We’re within five hundred klicks of point of impact,” I say. “Approaching at more than forty klicks per second, which means they’re moving in… I think fast… from outside Mars’s orbit? Solar orbit? Extrasolar, from the Oort?”
Does that make sense? Wouldn’t the Antags want to slow them down, whatever they are, or do they just plan on skimming atmo and making another go-around?
“What can we fucking do?” Michelin cries.
“How soon?” Neemie asks.
“Doesn’t say.”
Some lights now roll into view low in the west, very bright objects indeed, very big, one actually a crescent—and moving fast. Right for our collective noses, so it looks, so it feels.
Then, just as we are about to fall on our knees and wait for the big bright things to fly by or hit us square, Vee-Def finds practical info in the bit burst and shouts, “Three more Russian tents! A whole pallet! A hundred meters that way—” He points.
We run. No questions, no disagreement. We got maybe ten minutes of air.
I look over my shoulder and nearly take a header. But you can stumble quite a ways on Mars and still recover, if you’re fast with your footwork. What I see, as I keep my footing and keep running, is that the objects in the sky are tumbling; the motion is obvious—bright, dark, crescent wobbling. Quick count: one scary big one, visually wider than Phobos but, I hope, I fear, much closer, and nine or ten smaller, but by now you can see all of them rolling around way up there like happy seals in an ocean swell.
Tak and Kazak find the pallet of three tent boxes and we cluster around as Vee-Def and DJ and Michelin slice the containment straps and separate the boxes, check the stripes—safe—then pop the seals. Two tents spring out, nearly hitting me and Michelin, and then roll and lie there, all innocent and beautiful. The third won’t disengage from the box. Its air reserve is empty. It’s not quite useless, however—Vee-Def harvests its water packs.
We got maybe four minutes to get one or both of the remaining tents to inflate before we climb inside, but even if we do that—
The first object hits the atmosphere. It draws a superfast ghostly white flame across the sky. The flame lingers and turns pale purple. The object strikes beyond the northwestern horizon. It is gone. Not so bad. Then a brilliant flash seems to roll out of the west, quickly fades to a gloriously supernal mauve, while a pinkish dome shot thro
ugh with coiling white clouds blooms at the center of the strike. The dome rises into perfect mushroom cap, supported by—nothing! No central pillar of smoke or cloud at first, but finally it seems to fill in, condense, and we see the mottled grayish stalk, tossing out curving streamers of purple and white.
We stand in awe. I’m gasping—Cheynes-Stokes breathing, not good.
The first tent has nearly inflated.
Then the ground shakes—heaves violently, tossing us like bowling pins. We end on our butts, clutching at the hardpan, while all around, dust leaps and pebbles and rocks do a crazy, jiggling dance.
A few dozen meters away, the hardpan cracks open, taking in the pallet and the bum tent—swallowing them whole. Almost gets DJ as well, but he scrambles toward us like a desert beetle. The crack stops a few arm-lengths from my faceplate. The sound is awful, a hard-packed, rhythmic pounding that shakes our skulls, our bones, makes the fabric of our skintights ripple, like standing too close to a Japanese drummer in full frenzy. My head pulses with each wave, and then—the waves seem to bounce off something and come back from the other side, from the east. What the fuck is that about?
We look west again.
A translucent wall of air passes over, buffets us, and suddenly we are surrounded by a muffled, pressing, scary quiet.
“Cone of silence!” Tak calls out, lying flat beside me.
“What?”
“We’re in the cone! The shock wave’s bounced against the upper air and arced over!” he says.
I have no idea what he means.
“More coming!” Michelin shouts. We all manage to look up. The sky, the horizon, is a soundless, eerie sort of awful, shot through with gray streaks spreading from that too-perfect mushroom cap, then obscuring it. That might have been the big one. If it wasn’t, we won’t survive, because it isn’t over. A half dozen others skip this way and that across the sky and through the clouds like stones on a pond, finally plunging…
