They sold it to him—and the rest of us—by playing it up as an essential and high risk mission. None of that is a lie, it’s just that it’s obvious that they didn’t select anyone for the three Leviathan teams just for our skillsets. Hence Specialist Sharp, who has no apparent skillsets beyond her vacantly-absolute loyalty to Earthside, and certainly none remotely related to recon ops or running a nuclear-powered rolling CP. That tells me her only reason for being on the team is to keep an eye on us, to make sure we’re toeing the line. I’ve startled her a few times just walking in on her off-shift in our shared rack space, and she’ll snap off her flashcard and pocket it (or shove it in her underwear if she’s not wearing anything with pockets, hopefully remembering to turn the camera off first). I’m sure what she’s doing is slipping her own encrypted reports to Upworld Command, probably hidden in her personal messages home.
So that also means Sharp is likely the only one of us who freely volunteered for this mission. The rest of us they just wanted to get well-away from their primary foothold, from on-planet Ops, so they applied the appropriate pressure. I’m sure they would have sent several select members of the veteran tech and medical divisions—and Colonel Ava—if they could justify it.
(Though I have my own secret agenda for being here: If we can find any remnants of Chang’s former forces, his hidden bases, I might be able to find surviving Peace Keepers—my people—and convince them to go home, rebuild.)
I zone out, staring through the slit viewports—a good twenty centimeters of layered polycarb between me and the cold thin outside, and whatever’s out in the cold thin, which has been nothing but desert and a few stripped ruins so far. I guess I should be grateful for the view.
“We never got to see topside at Industry, not unless we were on sentry duty—that was usually a reward for our best snipers, if you could call freezing in an H-A can for six hour shifts a reward…” I’m rambling to fill the monotony as the big treads under us grind the landscape as we crawl. “The Civvies never saw daylight at all, unless there was a repair job up in the topside structures. Their whole life was underground. I grew up living in tunnels, playing in tunnels. Crowding around heaters whenever we weren’t generating our own heat from hard work. Always in minimal light to conserve power—full daylight still burns a bit, but it helps in low-light ops. Things got a little better when I was old enough for Service, for Academy. There was heat. Metal walls. Better light, at least for studies. Much better food, and more of it. Regular showers. And topside time, when there were missions. I remember the first time I got out under open sky, how bright and disorienting it was… I almost fell over, in front of the whole unit… but I wasn’t the only one. I think the Seniors enjoyed that, watching us freak about being outside, like they’d tossed us into the void of space… huh…”
“What?” Rios is an attentive listener.
“Just thinking… When we had to evac, after the rebellion, when Chang sent his toys after us… I hustled three hundred people outside, two thirds of them Civvies. So most had never been outside before. I didn’t have time to enjoy their first taste of it, and neither did they. It was all terror and running and ducking.”
“Colonel Ram was there, wasn’t he?” He apparently doesn’t care who’s listening, reporting. (Sharp pretends she isn’t, pretends she’s bored numb.) I nod.
“And Captain Bly. And the Blue ETE: Paul Stilson. And the Devil. Bel. We wouldn’t have made it out without them.”
“Your men didn’t take down the Box bot?” he refers to my official report.
“We were a distraction at best. I lost a lot of good people that day. I would have lost them all…”
He lets my falsification go. I know he understands what any association with Ram or those like him will incur from Upworld. And maybe our shared association connects us, though I know I can’t compare: He served under Ram, fought by his side for years. Ram and I just collided occasionally, usually as enemies, and once as my savior.
“How’d you get the scar?” he brings me back as I’m zoning again, pointing almost shyly to the corresponding spot below the corner of his own mouth. “May I ask?”
I force a smile. Fail.
“Cutting torch. I was still cherry, just out of Academy… There was this… problem… with one of the Civvies. A welder. Good one. High risk work, up in the structures, exposed. His wife got sick. So did a lot of others. Breakdown in one of the recyclers, missed some nasty E-Coli. But she was pregnant. And the Pharmos weren’t able to keep up with drug-synthing. He wanted special priority for her. Section MP told him no. She got worse, so he threatened to blow the section, rigged it with fuel canisters. He would have killed thirty or forty people. I took a squad in, all full of myself, to deal with it.”
“You killed him?” he asks without judgment.
“It wasn’t my intention. He was an asset. But I didn’t know he was almost as sick as she was. Fever. Dehydration. Made him crazy. We had no choice. I had to fire… Next thing I know… He had a son, ten years old. Kid grabbed his dad’s cutter, tried to set off the canisters. I tackled him, didn’t want to hurt him. He shoved the thing in my face, still live. The shock took me down, my face sizzling and smoking, I could taste myself cooking inside my goddamn mouth.… So my sergeant shot him. Right in front of me. I saw his eyes… Blood all over me.”
He lets me get quiet, just sits there with me as we roll on. Then Sharp lets me know she was listening.
“What happened to his wife? The baby?”
“They died.”
Dinner is quiet tonight. I guess my happy little story killed whatever cheer we manage to muster. But I don’t have a lot of stories of rousing adventure like Rios, Jane, Horton and Wei, fighting alongside the great Mike Ram in heroic battles.
My battles were all skirmishes against Nomad and Pirate incursions. And, thanks to our snipers, we rarely engaged them close enough for any real fighting. When we were finally pushed into big battles, it was in the service of Chang, and he used us mostly for decoration, arraying us in neat ranks in clean new uniforms to intimidate, then left us to get slaughtered when we weren’t so intimidating. I watched hundreds of my fellows, my friends, die under fire, cut to pieces, incinerated, blown apart. Then I spent weeks in a makeshift UNMAC POW hospital, somehow too lucky to die with them. And then I had to kill more of my fellows, my friends, when some of us decided we’d had enough, and tried to say no to Chang.
I know Rios, Jane, Horton, Wei and especially Lyra have had their own share of loss. Scut says Rios had a close thing going with another platoon leader, but she got killed—of all the bad luck during their first contact with the Northeast Nomads. Thirty minutes later, they were allies. I can’t imagine what that’s like: Playing friendly with the people who killed someone you love. (I should be able to say that about the UNMAC—including Rios himself—for the deaths of over four hundred of mine, but I blame that on Chang. The UNMAC warfighters were just doing their jobs, trying to survive. We thought we were. We were wrong.)
The tiny fold-out tables make us sit in tight, wedged hip-to-hip. The others grouse about this every time like it’s a tradition, as we do our little wresting match to get our arms to our food, all of them used to bigger accommodations on base, or before that, wherever they called “home”. And they tell stories of those homes, of happy family dinners on Earth, a place I can’t begin to imagine. Except for Lyra, who—like me—has never been there, having been born here. Me, I never got to eat at a proper table until Academy. And then in Service it was always at post or in barracks with my unit, unless I was invited to a feast-night with the Seniors, a recognition for good service.
And I’m actually grateful for the ration packs. Rios, Jane, Horton and Wei got spoiled by the bounty of the base greenhouse, and with what they traded with the Nomads, before Upworld Command shut that all down. All that I miss—and the vets as well—are the meat flavors. And the sweets. (And the home-craft hooch and brew, off-shift of course.) New Righteous Earth has banned all such
things, and has no issue with enforcing their values on the rest of us.
The good news is both Wei and Captain Rios are magic cooks, even with limited stocks to work from, and happily take turns feeding us, something that picks up all of our days. And full-belly, even my mood is improved enough to enjoy my KP rotation. Because it’s more than just duty. It’s something to do for people you care about. My new unit.
I’m also grateful for the rolling can we’re packed into, believe it or not. It’s tight, but it beats tunnels. It’s warm. It’s clean. It’s brighter than what I’m used to (but not uncomfortably so to my eyes). The recyclers keep up. And there are viewports on the Bridge. I do have to share cupboard-sized quarters with Lyra and Sharp—the Upworld morality insisting sexes sleep and get geared-up/down separately from each other for some reason, like we can’t control ourselves at all—but it’s a bed, and sometimes it’s privacy.
And it’s about as secure as something not made of reinforced concrete and buried deep underground can be: The main hull is a sectional module that was manufactured on Earth and shuttled here for the restoration of Phobos Base, but the specs were off (blame the rush job), and it didn’t quite fit with the other sections. But it’s armored against Disc attack (supposedly) and built for the vacuum of space. And it proved sturdy enough to be dropped from orbit on recycled chutes.
And “tight” is twenty-five meters long and ten wide, with enough head clearance to mostly avoid regular concussions. (Though there are lots of odd ridges and rails all over to trip on and bang into, since the thing was built to be used in zero-G.) Inside, we’ve got spaces for three cupboard-sized “quarters”, a small machine shop, a slightly-bigger lab (which Lyra seems very happy to sleep in on a folding cot, giving Sharp and I the extra space), an armory locker with H-A cans for everyone, a toilet with an actual shower, a galley/mess that doubles as a map room (and a rec room), and the Bridge, which is big enough for all of us to enjoy the viewports and not be sitting on each other.
On top of the hull is a full-sized base battery, cobbled from spare and salvaged parts, complete with dual 20mm chain cannons and missile launchers. And if we don’t want to totally vaporize any unfriendlies we might meet, there are AP batteries fore and aft.
Below us (accessible through heavy floor hatches) is Stores, and the quad motors and reactor for our drive train. The reactor was re-purposed from one of the incoming freighter shuttles that was scavenged on arrival for the orbital construction project. (One of my duties is to regularly check radiation levels to make sure the shielding is as good as we’ve been told. Assuming my gear is properly calibrated.)
And below that is my contribution: Treads from four heavy construction tractors to move all this tonnage over rough terrain. They were left behind when Chang stripped our sister-colonies for his Stormcloud. I knew where they were buried. Lieutenant Thomason and Sergeant Mallard headed up the team that linked them together and mounted this beast on top of them, using ASVs for cranes. Then a skirt of armor was added to help protect our motive system from potshots.
The biggest downside of the design is that the hull is piled up ten meters off the deck—we’re almost fifteen meters tall if you count the main turret. And that means we’re a really big slow-moving target. An overspray of Mars-camo polycoat doesn’t make us invisible. Or silent. We really are a massive monster.
And fittingly, we’re named after a monster—a Biblical one, of course, given New Earth’s obsession with such things. My attitude coming through, I had to point out that the Leviathan in the Good Book was a sea monster. Apparently I wasn’t the only one who noticed, so Command’s comeback seemed pretty rehearsed: Spacecraft have always been referred to with some of the same nomenclature as Earth’s water-faring vessels, it’s just that they sail a different kind of sea. And, I suppose, so do we. After all, the traditional names of certain expanses of waterless worlds, including Mars, have included the appellation “Sea”. So here we are, riding a sea monster.
What I actually believe is that using the Bible’s land-based equivalent for a massive beast—Behemoth—would make these things sound oversized, sluggish and awkward. Which is what they are, but let’s not point out the obvious. Besides, “Leviathan” just sounds cooler, like we should really want to ride inside one. (Though I expect a guy named Jonah would have a good counter-argument.)
Supporting the sea monster analogy, Rios says it reminds him of being inside of a submarine he’d once visited back on Earth. This just reminds me again how different our worlds are. Of course I’ve seen seas, oceans, lakes—unthinkably massive expanses of free surface water, and many kilometers deep in places—but only in pictures and video files, part of my basic schooling requirements. But I can’t grasp the concept of seeing one for real, much less riding a vessel across or under the surface of one. The biggest expanses of free-standing water I’ve ever seen—and felt, got my body actually into—were the communal “hot tubs” they had at Melas Two, and that was a weird enough experience, just a dozen or so cubic meters of water… Water filling something as big as our valley world—or even bigger, two-thirds of a planet—I can’t even begin to imagine. So my concept of “sea” is an expanse of open desert. We are in a sea monster.
The logic behind these monsters is sound enough: Since the ETE certainly won’t cooperate with ramping up fuel production for regular and longer recon flights, we needed another way to get around, to explore the far reaches of the valleys. A reactor-powered vehicle doesn’t need refueling every few-hundred klicks, and can take it slow enough (and get close enough) to catch things flyovers and satellites would miss. And it can be built on-planet from available salvage (it strikes me this was also Chang’s preferred method).
But the missions are weeks, maybe months long, sealed in a pressure hull, and hell-and-gone from support if something goes wrong. And when something goes wrong, the satellites watching over us are small reassurance.
So here we are: One eager newbie volunteer and the rest of us exiles.
I should be off-shift, but I can’t miss this. And neither can anyone else, as we all cram into the Bridge.
Nike Colony.
We come up on it just before sunset, the evening winds blowing at our back, killing visibility as we lumber up on the site in the foothills of the Catena Divide.
I catch myself checking the wind currents on the animated satellite map, the sky-eyes view of the entire valley chain still a novelty. Of course, it shows me the same flow patterns every day, with minimal variation for the seasons and the occasional effect of larger Datum-level storms, but between the geology, geography and the Atmosphere Net, it’s as regular as clockwork. It’s just cool to be able to see it big-picture, to see the physics happening. The Marineris chain is thousands of klicks long and mostly straight along the equator, looking very much like a nasty whip-scar across the planet’s belly (with a slight clockwise angle that tells me whatever celestial force applied the whipping was left-handed). So when the sun comes up, the east heats first, and the expanding air—held under the “roof” of the electrostatic atmosphere net—blows west down the deep, narrow main channel. As it sets, the east end cools first, and the west is the last to stay warm, so the air pushes back eastward. (My teachers called it a “solar atmospheric tide”, but they didn’t have real-time orbital views to let us see it. My DIs and SOs were only concerned with how to use the phenomena tactically, so they were just content that it was predictable.)
I unglue from the novelty, and look to the practical: Outside.
The Divide slopes reach extra-far into the valley floor in this region: a full twenty klicks from the Datum-level Crest ten klicks above us. And between us and the Primary Divide Slope is a “wrinkle”, a low mountain range that runs parallel to the Divide, its crest-line up to three klicks high, but still almost ridiculously dwarfed by the much shearer and three times higher Divide Rim behind it. Even in the rising dust haze, the view is pretty spectacular, the setting sun highlighting the crenellations of the ridged slopes
.
But beyond that, there’s not much to see in terms of what we really came for. Like Tyr a few days behind us, Nike is blasted away, buried under slide and shifting dunes, just like the satellites told us. Nothing but the barely-visibly lines of a few broken foundations are even noticeable, and that’s with graphic overlay of the original colony plans to help pick them out.
“Upside,” Rios tries, recording the moment for his report. “There’s a lack of visible debris. No scrap. That probably indicates scavenging. So somebody’s been busy here.”
Jane lets us know the atmospheric pressure here is up above 0.33, and O2 is up another half-percent, making it breathable without gear for several minutes, longer with acclimatization. It’s been getting slowly but steadily richer as we head further east. And the ruddy foothills are still studded and laced with green: wild surface growth that started to be a common sight west of Tranquility, and has been coming and going in patches along our route, wherever the subsurface water, sun and soil best catch the seed-scattering winds. Sometimes there’s even evidence of surface water, at least temporarily: We’ve seen signs of flow-patterns in the soil, most probably from freeze/thaw, but sometimes there’s so much—patches of dried “mud” hundreds of meters across—that some of the vet techs wonder if the ETE Station output clouds actual produce “rain” in this region (another thing I’ve seen on video but can’t imagine experiencing for real: a water shower coming out of the whole sky).
The God Mars Book Four: Live Blades Page 4
