by Greg Bear
“Comets?” Gamecock asks.
“We think so, yes,” Efremov says, and drops down on his knees. These few words and he’s almost out for the count.
“Clearly, something large,” Kwak resumes. Determined to finish this grim briefing, the general refocuses with shuddering effort. “There is only one of our satellites still in orbit, though that may be down now as well. No more frames will arrive for at least a week. Until we understand how our present forces are dispersed, and what strength remains, we are merely observers. Are we agreed on this intelligence, gentlemen?”
Everybody’s agreed, if not happy.
A Colonel Orlov pushes up and struggles to do his bit. “Chinese fountain… inoperable. We lost engineers in the drop. But it may still be reworked—repaired.”
“We have an engineer,” Gamecock says. DJ looks apprehensive. “Do you have proper tools?”
“Possibly,” Kwak says. “But not many spare parts.”
The officers confer in Chinese and Russian. Then another officer enters the tent and looks around: an Indian with a swollen face, chapped and cracked lips and cheeks, his right arm badly broken and hanging in a crude cable sling. Lots of starboard breaks here. A command sled could have landed hard and injured everybody inside, all at once.
“We are in regard to repair and refit,” Kwak tells him.
“Most excellent.” The newcomer reaches out his left hand to Roost, thinks better of that gesture—no good for Muslims, and who knows?—withdraws the hand, looks around with sunken eyes. “I am Brigadier Jawahar Lal Bhagati. Who here is capable of our salvation, and making do for all?”
The old fountain seems to be our last hope.
Gamecock puts a hand on DJ’s shoulder. “Sir, this man is the best we have.”
God help us.
“Most excellent!” says Bhagati. “We have scrounged tools, and may have the right codes to activate. Let us begin.”
BRIEF HOPE
The next few hours, I’m designated quartermaster and scurry back and forth carrying tools and a few of the dwindling water packs. Still no food to speak of, but we can do without that for days longer.
DJ seems to be making progress with the fountain, but it’s getting dark and very cold, minus one hundred Celsius, and we’re not going to be able to stay outside much longer. Keeping warm drains batteries fast. During cold snaps or night, Skyrines are supposed to squeeze into a tent or at the very least huddle in a ditch and cover with dust. Last man pushes dust over the group and then burrows in as best he can. Back on Rainier, we trained extensively on how to huddle and cover. Like puppies, as I’ve said; puppies seem to know how to assume the most efficient piles.
Tak had corpsman training back at SBLM, and despite his own contusions and a couple of cracked ribs, he tends to the beat-up officers in the half-inflated tent with a steady, blue-eyed gaze that is equally good at calming horses.
Our squad, by the way, is code-named Trick and is made up, in full complement, of two fire teams. Tak and I are part of fire team one—weak-field disruptor, rapid-delivery bolt rifles, and multitrack launchers. If we arrive with all our weapons, of course. I don’t know why we still use code names. We don’t even know if Antags understand human languages. But we sure as hell don’t know their languages. No one, as far as we’ve been informed, has ever intercepted comm between Antag units or their ships or equipment. Nothing to help us make a Rosetta. Maybe they just don’t talk.
Which is one reason I don’t like calling our enemy Ants. Ants communicate all sorts of ways. Ant colonies are a single organism, a single mind, mostly, with the individual insects we call “ants” acting both as muscle and neurons. Each ant serves as scout, worker, and a little bit of the colony brain. The colony as a whole gathers intel around its field of action and then solves problems like a distributed network. They communicate by touching feelers and sensing chemicals they leave behind, trails of clues that also serve as a kind of GPS. I’d hate to fight ants, especially big ones. Gamecock, like Vee-Def—like Joe—persists in calling our enemies Ants. Sometime I’ll tell you about my nightmare of getting stung all over.
Christ, it’s getting cold. I’m starting to feel comfortable, ready to settle in and go to sleep, so to keep awake, I walk back and forth in the ditch between the half-inflated command tent, where the generals and colonels are hanging out—with the exception of Gamecock—and back up to the northern branch of the Y to the broken Chinese fountain. My ankles are knotting, so my gait is more of a controlled stumble. Worse, there’s a sickening smell in my helm. I hope it’s not my own gangrene. At the very least, our skintights are well beyond pickle juice; the scrub filters are failing and the residue must be turning rancid, which is absorbing oxygen… Everything needs recharging, replacing. Including me.
Finally, I post myself by the fountain, too tired to move. Sleep is a soft and lovely thought. Lovely easeful death. Through a darkening tunnel, I watch DJ’s feet. He’s shoveled out an angle of dust at the base of the fountain and unscrewed a hatch, into which he’s now shoved the upper half of his body. His feet twitch and every now and then he bends his knees. That’s how I know he’s still alive, still working.
Fountains are impressive pieces of equipment. They used to arrive by balloon bounce, but since they’ve gotten larger, more expensive, and more delicate, they’re more often delivered by stealth chutes or even chemical fuel descent. This Chinese model is smaller than some and may have bounced down hard when it arrived. Maybe it wasn’t packed right. At any rate, Colonel Orlov explains, on one of his own slow, painful passes up the trench, that some of its collection tanks have been crunched and its self-diagnostic unit has refused to activate, under the stubborn belief that it won’t do any good. Fountains can get neurotic.
DJ’s boots twitch, his knees flex, but other than that, he’s a cipher.
The fountain suddenly decides to pop its top and push out a collection vane. Orlov and I give out a weak cheer. Kazak, Michelin, and Efremov join us, hopeful. But the vane doesn’t unfold or spin, and it’s no good if it doesn’t spin.
DJ finally shoves out of the bay and shakes his helm. “All busted up inside,” he calls out. We can barely hear him. Kazak and Michelin and I touch helms with him like footballers in a huddle. “The parts that work are unhappy, and if I reroute the bus, the parts that don’t work will suck all the power. Drain it down to nothing. Don’t know what more I can do. If anybody finds a parts kit, let me know, okay?”
We amble in slow lurches for the command tent, loopy from the smell in our suits. None of us wants to spend a night puppied with a bunch of senior officers, but we don’t have any choice. Die outside or steal air and heat from the brass.
BLONDE ON A BUGGY
We’re in serious trouble, no doubt about it. We barely make it through the night. I lie in our pile, moving only when Kazak kicks in his sleep. He kicks like a mule.
General Bhagati is doing poorly. Blood poisoning, best guess. His own once-friendly germs have decided he’s a dead man. That happens a lot to warriors in battle. Germs seem to think we’re all walking corpses.
First light, we seal our helms and leave the tent to stand under the pink dawn. The sunrise is abrupt and not at all spectacular—not that we care. Point comes when beauty is lost on a fellow. My head swims. Helm stinks like a refrigerator whose power has been out for a couple of days, skin itches all over, and I assume the others, like me, will soon consider just popping a faceplate and getting it over with. A miserable end for Trick Squad.
Where did it go wrong? I’ll get into that later, I decide, when the freezing cold really sets in. You get warm, comfortable, and last thoughts come easier. At least the itching will go away. Maybe.
I sit on the edge of our ditch and catch occasional dim speech sounds from around the tent, but it doesn’t mean much, mostly in Korean or Mandarin. I took some Mandarin in high school and junior college, but not much sticks with me. I wanted to take an internship in Shanghai but got turned down because of an ul
traslight criminal record—boosting an uncle’s truck when I was thirteen. Skyrines don’t mind criminals. They beat that juvenile crap out of you, then raise you from petty crook to stone killer. Skyrines start out as Marines, but then we get shipped to the desert and mountain centers for a lot of additional training. There’s also the entire Right Stuff gantlet, including a madhouse LSD psych evaluation that demands a Nuremberg trial. I remember that vividly, more than the routines of piss-poor torture, also known as VPP&T—Vacuum Physical Prep and Training. Hawthorne Depot, Rainier, Baker, Adams—Mauna Kea. Military medicine has been pushed to the ethical limits, and way beyond. Blood doping and juicing aren’t allowed until you’re a finalist, but then the docs really go to town. I added fifteen pounds of solid muscle, then was starved fifteen to make up for it. My body fat ratio…
Shit, I don’t care. I’m sitting on the edge of the ditch, thinking vaguely about women—but not yet thinking about good old Mom. According to hallowed combat tradition, the last thing a mortally wounded grunt asks for is Mom, but in the vac and on the Red, nobody can hear that final whimper.
Michelin sits beside me. We bump helms and he says, very hoarse, “They’re all down there yelling at DJ in Mandarin. I hate officers. He doesn’t know Mandarin. I do, and they are talking shit. Blaming him for killing us all.”
“How’s he taking it?”
“DJ may know machines, but he is the densest piece of wood in the forest. He’s mostly ignoring them.”
My head is really spinning. My eyes take snapshots at the end of a long, dark pipe.
But I’m not yet blind.
“See that?” I ask, pointing north.
“What?”
“That.” This could go on for a while, but Michelin manages to focus. He grabs my arm.
“That… is a vehicle!” he says.
“Not a Skell,” I observe.
“Definitely not one of ours.”
“Still, it’s pretty big. Antag?”
“No idea. Not a Millie.” Millies are millipede-like Antag transports, with dozens of segments mounted on big tires.
“We should let the others know,” Michelin says.
We don’t move. We’re fascinated by the progress of the approaching vehicle. It’s maybe ten meters long, a cylindrical carriage with big, curved, punch-blade tires. It’s not one of ours, but it certainly isn’t Antag.
We slowly remember that we’ve seen its like in old vids.
“It’s a Muskie bus… isn’t it?” Michelin says with boyish wonder.
A squad’s spooky antennae can spread news quick and without words. The rest of our Skyrines, except for DJ and Gamecock, suddenly appear in the trench, climb to the edge, and squat next to us.
“What’s so funny?” Kazak asks. Nobody’s laughing, but he’s hearing laughter, I guess.
“It’s a Muskie colony transport,” Michelin says. “A bus.”
Gamecock joins us last. We let him shove into the center of our lineup. “Fidge this,” he says. “DJ reports no possible joy with the fountain. I’m getting ready to hitch a ride with the Horseman.” By which he means Death. But then he leans forward, squints, and sits up straight, squaring his shoulders. “Do you see that?” he asks.
“We all see it,” I say.
“Then maybe it’s real. Have you ID’d it?”
“It’s a Muskie bus,” Michelin says.
“Everyone sure it’s not Ant faking a Muskie?” Gamecock asks. He sounds beyond tired. We’re all near the end. My angel has been telling me every five minutes or so that the skintight filters have maxed out. I’m thinking about shutting it down, just to let myself fade in peace.
But there is that bus. If Gamecock sees it, too, and Michelin says it’s a bus, it had better be a bus.
Meanwhile, as the shared hallucination is being scrupulously eyeballed by us ragged group of perch-crows, nobody seems willing to initiate and engage, not even Gamecock. Kazak and Tak do rock-paper-scissors. They come up evenly matched, rock against rock, three times. Spreading fingers is just too damned hard.
“Fate calls on us both,” Kazak says. “Sir, Tak and I would like to go beg a cup of sugar.”
Gamecock nods, but he’s not agreeing, exactly; his carbon dioxide has shot way up and he’s about to fall asleep, then die.
Tak punches his arm. “Sir!”
The lieutenant colonel pulls back. He looks around, behind, down into the ditch, across the broken fountain and the sagging command tent. “Am I in charge here?” he asks dreamily.
“Yes, sir,” Michelin says. “You’re all we got. The Russians are dead. The Indian is dying. Chinese and Koreans are huddled in the tent, and the tent is out of air.”
While we’re considering our lack of options, the cylinder out on the flats rolls forward again. Toward us, it seems. We’ve been surveilled and someone has decided to investigate. Bless them. Bless all Muskies. Survivors. Self-sufficient, quiet… mobile.
Gamecock finds a last grain of resolve and taps Kazak’s helm. “Stand down, both of you. Let them come to us,” he says. “DJ, go knock up the generals and tell them we have visitors and not to shoot.”
DJ hustles, as much as he can move at all, down the slope into the ditch, where he pauses, gets his bearings, despite the fact there’s really only one direction he can move—along the ditch—and then lurches forward again.
I turn my attention back to the flat. I don’t trust superb coincidence. What in hell would a Muskie be doing out here? The nearest settlement is at least six hundred klicks northwest. Somewhere near the center of the comet impacts.
The bus is now about fifty meters off.
Gamecock raises one arm. Waves it slowly. The vehicle slows and stops again. My vision is almost gone. Through the fuzzy end of a dark gray barrel, I make out a few more details. There are patches all over the fuselage. The curved blades on all six tires are scratched and dented and look to be from different batches, varying in color from titanium gray-orange to rusty steel. Bus has been around for a while. A prospector? I’ve not heard of such out here, but even Muskies must have hard-core purists who can’t stand to be around anybody. Pity if the bus is carrying just one gnarly old miner with a chaw-stained beard and the phys of King Tut.
DJ returns, it seems right away—but that could mean I’ve nodded off without knowing it. Tak is shaking me by my arm, and Kazak is trying to rouse Michelin, who’s not responding.
“What’s with the generals?” Gamecock asks DJ.
“Asleep or dead,” he says. “That fountain was our last hope. Sorry, fellows.”
“Not your fault,” I manage to say. I can hear them okay, but I’m not sure they hear me. Sound is funny on Mars. Everything is funny, or soon will be. I’m hypoxic. I don’t even notice that someone is approaching us on foot, not until a tall, slender figure in a lime-green skintight is almost upon us. Very tall. Maybe two meters.
Carrying slung tanks and a pressure hose.
The figure’s helm lases ours. A female voice inquires, “Give refill? Or you walk a me back my buggy?”
We all try to walk, but it’s a bust. We tumble over on the ridge and slide past her, if it is a her; I hope it’s a her. Mother or female angel, really an angel. I’m good with either. Michelin directs her to Gamecock. She attaches her hose and pumps oxygen for a few seconds, and when his eyes flutter, she disconnects and makes rounds, giving us each a few minutes. My concentration returns, but my head hurts like hell. The tunnel is wider but I’m seeing double and can’t stop blinking.
Then the female does her rotation again, charging our suits with at least an hour’s worth of gasps. When she’s finished with the second rotation, she steps up over the ridge and into the furrow. We all sit on the other side of the ridge and enjoy just breathing, waiting for our wits to reassemble. It’s going to be a long wait.
Our savior comes back leading the Korean general. Tak follows. Our eyes meet. He shakes his head as he walks up the ridge.
“Sorry,” the female says. She sounds
young. “Coudna get t’em in time. We should get a my buggy and te hell out. Ot’ers sure come soon.”
Her voice is high and a little hard on consonants and s’s. I had read about thinspeak… pronunciation adapted for high altitude or thinner air. Now I’m hearing it. Plus a true Muskie accent. She’s the real thing. Through her faceplate I see a wisp of white-blond hair and large, blue-green eyes. She’s very tall. Have I said that already?
“Are we the last?” Gamecock asks. “I mean, our company…”
“Havena seen else a-one. Sommat set off transponder an hour ago. I tracked a way off course and found you.”
DJ must have activated the fountain’s beacon. He may have inadvertently saved our lives. But likely he also announced our presence to anything that gives a damn within a hundred klicks.
We march to the buggy’s airlock, helping each other along. DJ and Michelin tend to Major General Kwak.
“Second gen?” DJ asks the ranch wife as she returns to assist. We’re all on radio comm now.
“Don’t be rude,” Tak says.
“Born a Mars,” she confirms. “All guys? No fem?”
“No women,” Gamecock says.
“Damn. Be good, now.” She gives us each, one by one, a foot up into the lock. “Carry us all, buggy’s got just juice enow make te eastern Drifter.”
Great. Whatever that is.
Her eyes meet mine as she hands me up, right after the general. She’s strong, despite being slender. “Welcome on’t, Master Sergeant Venn.” She sounds out my name precisely. It’s on my chest strap.
I smile. “Thank you.”
“Get te hell in,” she says.
I am the last. She climbs up and seals the door. In the cramped lock, she hands out brushes unlike any we’ve seen—labeled “Dyson.” Like magic, we’re clean in a few minutes, with nary a speck kicked loose. She dumps the brushes down a little chute. “Gecko tech,” she announces with that amazing smile as the lock finishes its cycle and she pushes open the inner hatch.
