by John Varley
I was going to say something, but Evangeline was shouting and pointing behind me. I turned, and saw something big coming down. It burned a bright blue-white, and chunks of stuff were coming off it and bursting. For a moment it seemed to be coming right at us, but that was an optical illusion, I guess, because it passed overhead at least a mile up. I could judge the distance because it still retained some of the saucer shape of the black ships. It looked like a big bite had been taken out of it. It went over the hills to the east of town, there was a moment when we could see nothing . . . then a towering fireball rose into the air just as the sonic boom from its passage overhead hit us.
“I think we’d better get below,” I said.
“I’m already on my way.”
I got another urgent message as we ran for the elevator. Dad’s face popped up in a side window, looking harassed.
“Ray, where are you?”
“On my way, Dad.”
“Come to the subbasement shelter if you’re close enough,” he said. “Have you heard anything from your sister?”
That’s the moment it all stopped being a video game for me. Pretty late, I know that, but you had to be there. Until that ship crashed beyond the hills it was very hard to make yourself believe it was all really happening.
The elevator shook as we descended. Evangeline grabbed my arm and held on, and I put my arm around her. Ice was forming on our supercold suits and bits of it flaked off and fell at our feet.
We reached the bottom elevator level and stepped out into a crowd of hurrying people, some of them dressed in suits, most of them in regular clothes. Down a flight of stairs and we were in the pressure shelter, the absolute last line of defense against blowouts, only to be used if you felt the whole structure of the Red Thunder Hotel was in danger of being breached.
Later, Dad had cause to be proud of his workers. We only do shelter drill twice a year, as opposed to pressure drill, where all guests are sealed into their rooms for ten minutes and shown a video of how to don emergency suits, which we do once a week. So you might have expected them to be a little rusty, especially since nobody really took shelter drill all that seriously. After all, what sort of catastrophe was likely to rupture all the multilayered pressure defenses at the same time? No quakes on Mars. No tsunamis. Plenty of tornadoes, but pretty weak in the thin air.
War? Don’t make me laugh.
But there they were, hustling the confused and beginning-to-be-frightened hotel guests into the shelter almost as efficiently as the crew of the Sovereign, who did this sort of drill once a week. Two big guys in bellhop uniforms were at the entrance, putting a hand on everyone’s shoulder to move them along, while the other hand passed out emergency suit kits.
“Move it along, please, take one and move it along, all the way to the end of the corridor. Move it along, break the seal on the suit pack, and you’ll be shown how to put it on. Move it along. I’m sorry sir, I don’t have time to answer your questions, move it along please . . .”
We hurried down the long, narrow room. TV screens every ten feet or so were showing how to break the seals on the suit packs, how to unfold them, how to step into them, how to zip them up. Very few people had gotten that far. A lot of them were still at step one and not making a lot of progress. Most of them were stuck at step three, trying to stick their legs into the suit arms or putting them on backwards. You can wear them backwards, in a pinch . . . but pinch is the key word. They’re just thick man-shaped baggies, designed to be tolerable for about an hour, and survivable for a day. You plug the air hose into the socket in the wall, then you sit there, sweltering or freezing, wondering if the next time the air monitor says you need more oxy, there will be any coming down the line.
How I Spent My Martian Vacation.
Dad was near the end of the shelter with half a dozen employees, working on the more hopeless cases. He was trying to unwrap the air hose from an elderly woman’s neck. The old lady was looking a little blue. He looked up.
“Ramon, I need you . . .” A piece of ice flaked off my suit and dropped at his feet. He frowned at it for a second, then at me, then decided to ask me later what I’d been doing out at night. “Get to the pressure control center. They’re a man short.” He turned back to his charges, and I made myself scarce, with Evangeline following behind me.
The control center was just off the middle of the tube. There were three chairs in there, each facing consoles. From them we could access any of the hundreds of cameras in the Red Thunder complex. I slid into a seat. I recognized Patil Par-something, never could remember his last name, our house detective.
“What the situation?” I asked.
“We’ve got about a dozen rooms where the guests refused to leave,” Patil said, and shrugged. “They’re safe enough, probably. We’ve sealed their doors, lowered the shutters. Still maybe forty or fifty in the halls and on the elevators, on their way here.”
“Have you heard from Elizabeth?”
Patil pointed to one of his screens. “Your sister’s on her way.”
I saw her hurrying through an almost deserted mall. Behind her was a solid wall of transparent Kevlar, which I’d always thought of as plenty safe enough but, considering the impact I’d seen, suddenly looked like delicate crystal with my sister framed against it. Of course, solid steel would have been no better against a missile hit.
I noticed something else behind her. There were four of the soldiers, the black troops, standing together.
“Looks like they took off in such a hurry, they left the grunts behind,” Patil said, with a trace of satisfaction.
I heard a disturbance behind me. It got louder, with people shouting. I jumped up and stuck my head through the door.
One of the black troops was in the shelter. He had thrown off his helmet and was shoving his way through the crowd, his huge weapon held out in front of him.
“Lemme through, lemme through!” he was shouting. He was a huge man, red-faced, either bald or with a shaved head. He was shining with sweat as he passed me, and breathing heavily. His eyes were all over the place, like a trapped animal.
I knew what was going on. They call it pnigophobia, which is fear of choking, but it’s actually a fear of vacuum. This dude must have been medicated to make it to Mars at all, and he’d certainly been in terror during his whole stay.
He reached my dad and grabbed him by the arm.
“Gimme one of those,” he shouted, and took the suit bag Dad was holding and started trying to do two things at once with one hand: tear open the suit bag and unbuckle his big equipment belt, which would make him too bulky to fit in the suit. It wasn’t working, so he set his weapon down and concentrated on the equipment belt.
Dad watched until the guy got the belt off and dropped it. Then Dad kicked the weapon along the floor, reached down and pulled the billy club from the belt ring, and hit the guy in the face like Babe Ruth swinging for the bleachers.
Blood sprayed, but the dude didn’t go down. He shook his head and looked pretty pissed off. Dad swung a second time, and the guy grabbed the billy and twisted. Dad was no match for the guy’s Earthie strength, but he rolled with it and let go and backed away as the guy started into a karate kick.
I don’t doubt he was a real terror on Earth, all these guys were obviously elite soldiers, Rangers, SEALs, Delta Force, whatever bullshit name they were using these days. But the gravity fooled him, and he hit his head on the ceiling and landed flat on his face.
The next thing that happened was truly astounding. A little girl who couldn’t have been older than twelve stepped forward and kicked him in the ear. Lots of nerves in the ear. Must have hurt like a bastard.
He roared and reached out for her but she skipped out of the way, and two more people kicked him from behind. Two people stepped forward and grabbed the billy club and held on as three people jumped on his back. He got up as far as his knees before more people started piling on. The sound of it was frightening, the pent-up rage. They were shouting, screaming, growling . . .
It seemed everybody wanted a piece of him, and if they’d continued, I’m pretty sure they’d have literally torn him to pieces.
“Stop!” Dad shouted. “Stop it right now!”
It took a while, but with the help of a few others Dad dug him out of the pile. He was bloody, his uniform was in tatters, and it looked like a piece of his ear was missing. Dad had the weapon in his hands.
He poked the man with his foot, and the guy didn’t move. He was out.
“He’s still alive,” Dad said. “Take him to the infirmary.” When nobody moved, he looked around at the people. “Nobody’s going to be killed in my hotel if I can help it.”
A couple guys stepped forward and picked up the soldier and carried him, not in a manner I’d call gently, to the infirmary. Dad hurried over to me. So within less than a minute I’d found two more reasons to be proud of the old man.
“Ray, get back to your screens. I need to know where everybody is.”
I jumped back into my chair. Me and Patil scrolled quickly through the cameras on all the floors. The halls were all empty. The camera just outside the shelter showed half a dozen people still trying to jam through the door. None of them were black troops. I switched through half a dozen screens and saw no one. The last screen showed the four troops I’d seen earlier, and they seemed to be arguing. Then they seemed to come to a decision, and started to jog.
“They’re headed our way,” I said.
“Get those stragglers inside,” Dad said, “and then seal the doors.” He stood up straight and wiped sweat from his brow. I saw his hand was trembling. “I won’t have anybody killed in my hotel, but I won’t shelter those monsters, either.”
THE MONSTERS CAME to the door and banged on it. We could hear them, but only faintly. Like I said, Martian doors are strong and thick, and there were two of them here, an inner and an outer one. There was no glass in either one.
Dad herded the people to the far end of the tunnel and then stood there facing the door with the weapon in his hands. I switched back and forth between the inside and outside cameras, between my dad and the guys outside pleading to get in.
Three reasons to be proud.
We couldn’t hear what they were saying, but it was getting rough. One was shoving another, and that one shoved back. One of them leveled his weapon at the outer door, another knocked the barrel away—apparently the smarter of the two, as he realized that it wouldn’t do a lot of good to get inside by destroying the air lock. Stupidity won out, though, and the first one got his weapon pointed right again and let off a burst. That we heard, very loudly. Dad jumped, but held the weapon steady.
It didn’t work like it does in the movies. In real life, you shoot bullets like that into a hard surface and the suckers like to ricochet. When the smoke cleared, two of the troops were down. One was writhing in pain, and the other wasn’t moving. The door wasn’t hurt.
They didn’t fire any more rounds.
IN ALL, WE stayed in the shelter for eight hours. Things got organized fairly soon, and before long we were getting reports about the various explosions, and the debris, and the expected impact points of the larger chunks.
The debris, the remains of spaceships and human beings, could do one of three things. The largest part of it was moving at escape velocity and went into orbit around the sun, never to be seen again. A smaller part impacted on the surface. A little bit went into orbit, to be cleaned up later. After two hours all the most dangerous stuff was accounted for. We stayed an extra six hours in the shelter, just to be on the safe side.
When we came out, there was some blood on the floor, but no troops. We had seen them dragging the dead or wounded off, and we never saw them again.
Ten black ships took off and went to war. Seven came back. Whoever they were fighting, they either went back home or were destroyed.
NOBODY TOLD US anything. The black troops took up their posts again, but there weren’t as many of them, and they gave off a real scary vibe. But it didn’t seem directed at us Martians so much as at their own commanders. None of them had died during the attack simply because there had been no blowouts. It turned out they were as safe outside the shelters as we had been inside them. But it wasn’t lost on them that they had basically been abandoned.
They weren’t supposed to talk to us except to give us orders, or as much as was strictly necessary for things like weapons searches. But a few Martians began to talk to them, and a few of them talked back. Bits and pieces gleaned from these contacts began to be heard on underground networks.
Believe it or not, they didn’t seem to know a lot more than we did. They were a mercenary force, as we had figured, but they didn’t know who was paying the bills. True to the mercenary ethic, they didn’t really care so long as the money was good. You got the impression that a lot of them would have been a lot happier in a situation where they actually got to kill folks. Apparently they had considerable experience in that department; there were dozens of places on Earth where people with their skills were in great demand. Same old story.
But none of them were what you’d call space warriors for the simple reason that no war had ever been fought in space, or on another planet. These guys were used to fighting in hostile environments, in deserts and jungles, basically all the shit holes of the world, where so much of the violence was concentrated.
What they weren’t used to was fighting in a place where you hardly dared shoot your weapon for fear that you’d cause a blowout that could kill you. They figured they could survive in any place on Earth, but the only place they could survive on Mars was amidst the “hostiles,” in a controlled environment. And since they were not trained in low-pressure combat and were not expected to go out on the surface . . . they hadn’t been issued pressure suits.
The word went out: Leave the grunts alone. Where did “the word” come from? Nobody was sure. But there was a “revolutionary” underground, and it was communicating in the good old low-tech way, by whispering into ears in dark corners. You can’t bug every place, and what the supercomputers couldn’t hear they couldn’t analyze. The big advantage in staying clandestine was that the invaders had very little “humint,” as the folks in the spy game put it: human intelligence. They couldn’t put agents among us, they’d stand out like cows in a herd of horses.
Am I saying we had no traitors? No Benedict Arnolds?
No, of course not . . . but we had a lot fewer than you’d think. Not really from any overwhelming sense of “patriotism,” that idea hadn’t really caught on yet. But we were mightily pissed off, okay? We were angry enough over the “Red Thunder Ten” business, and now the invasion . . . enough already, okay? It was us versus them, and I guess that’s where patriotism starts out.
Plus, one day the names of six collaborators were put out on the grapevine, and those six somehow got the living crap beat out of them by people who they were all unable to identify. Worse, after that nobody would talk to them. Nobody. The thin trickle of human intelligence our occupiers had been paying good money for dried up to no more than a drip after that. It seemed wiser, if you couldn’t really see yourself as a Martian, if you couldn’t stand with your oppressed brothers and sisters, if you only wanted to get on with your business, to at least shut the fuck up!
But that was the real key to our stiffened resistance, when all was said and done. Getting on with our business.
Business was bad.
The only thing that prevented all the hotels on Mars from being empty the day after the invasion was that there just weren’t enough ships to carry all the tourists at once.
You want to make a Martian mad? Do something to screw up the hospitality industry. Now you’ve got our attention.
16
KELLY: So Travis, do you know anything at all about what’s going on?
TRAVIS: Very little . . . I’m not the CIA or a Homelander . . . have a few sources in both places . . . they’re not talking . . . bottom line everybody thinks it’s some sort of corporate fight . . . maybe
with political backing from the Chinese or the Americans . . . though the Americans are pretty busy with other stuff like a few million dead people and 400 million very angry ones . . .
MANNY: What do they want with us? Is it Mars they want, or . . . us?
TRAVIS: It’s us . . . because we’re the only possible link to Jubal, if he’s still alive . . . and Jubal is the key to everything . . . to a lot more than you know . . . and I’m afraid Jubal did a very rash thing before he took off . . .
Travis then told us the first part of why everybody was really so anxious to find Jubal. Even then he didn’t tell us all of the reason. Maybe he wanted to break it to us gradually, just what a hole we were in.
TO THE EYES of the world, Travis had handed over the responsibility for the Squeezer drive to the assembled leaders of the world and its citizens that sunny day at the Orange Bowl before I was born. In the real world, it wasn’t over.
Travis had always known the Squeezer drive was incredibly dangerous, much worse than any atomic bomb that had ever been built. Squeezer bombs could literally blow up the Earth. Could humanity handle all that power? But did Travis have the right to be the anti-Prometheus, denying humanity the free power that could do so much to solve so many problems? Bubble power could lift vast parts of humanity out of poverty, stop its reliance on increasingly scarce and polluting resources like oil, coal, and uranium. It gave us the power to travel the solar system, and even reach the stars.
Travis decided he didn’t have the right to hold it back . . . but Travis always hedged his bets. He did a lot of hedging, and only some of it was public knowledge.
The system they came up with had worked well for over twenty years, and there were three parts to it:1. Primary Squeezer units, the ones that made the bubbles and could control their size and hence the degree of compression inside them, were made only on the Falkland Islands, and only by Jubal and/or the small number of scientists Jubal schooled in the techniques of making them. So far, no one else had figured out how to do it for themselves.
