The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN

by Michael Rizzo



  The God Mars Book One:

 

  CROATOAN

  by Michael Rizzo

  Copyright 2013 by Michael Rizzo

  Table of Contents

  Part One: “And If I Die Before I Wake…”

  Chapter 1: The Morning After

  Chapter 2: Cry in the Wilderness

  Chapter 3: Unexpected Guests

  Chapter 4: News of the World

  Chapter 5: Dissenting Opinions

  Part Two: Cities in Dust

  Chapter 1: New World Order

  Chapter 2: The Peacemaker

  Chapter 3: Wake the Neighbors

  Chapter 4: Lessons in Human Nature

  Chapter 5: CROATOAN

  Chapter 6: Escalation

  Part Three: Warriors

  Chapter 1: Envoys

  Chapter 2: The Road to Hell

  Chapter 3: Holding Down a Shadow

  Chapter 4: Lessons from the Insurgency

  Chapter 5: The Pirate Code

  Chapter 6: Lesser Evils

  Map of Central Valles Marineris

  Part One: “And If I Die Before I Wake…”

  Chapter 1: The Morning After

  “PLEASE STATE YOUR FULL NAME.”

  Groggy…

  “Ram…”

  Takes too much just to stay awake, much less keep upright in the chair.

  “PLEASE STATE YOUR FULL NAME.”

  Muscle atrophy makes me feel like I’m a hundred years old. I don’t remember it being this bad the last time.

  “Michael Carl Ram…”

  “PLEASE STATE YOUR RANK AND CURRENT ASSIGNMENT.”

  Vocal cords don’t want to work. Throat feels like dried leather. Eyes too: I can barely see the screen, much less anything displayed on it. Rubbing makes it worse—it feels like they’re full of gravel.

  “Colonel. United Nations Counter-Terrorism Advisory. Attached to UNMAC—United Nations Martian Affairs Council. Joint Planetary Peacekeeping Force. Stationed at Melas Two base. Acting Commanding Officer of Martian Ground Forces since…”

  Dates—especially the numbers—really don’t want to come back through the residual drug fog. I don’t remember it being this bad the last time.

  “…May… May 2058.”

  The air is thick with a musty but dry staleness. I feel like I’ve woken up in a tomb. It’s like an old movie I saw when I was a kid, where the hero gets left to die, trapped by his enemies in some ancient underground. Buried alive. I tell myself it’s just my doped-to-the-gills imagination, fueled by knowing that the base must indeed be buried under at least several meters of rock and sand.

  The blast shields are all still locked down over the pillbox-slit viewports on three sides of me, just like they were when we got the alarm that the nukes were incoming. But the atmosphere hasn’t leaked out. The structure looks intact (at least in the few sections of the base I’ve seen so far). The lights are mostly on (dim, but they would have gone to power-save while we slept). It’s chilly (power-save again) but not lethally sub-zero like it would be if there was anything seriously wrong with the heaters or the power. The base AI is still online. And I can feel the slight caress of recycled air coming out of every vent. Like nothing’s wrong.

  Buried, probably. Entombed, no.

  Still, every surface I touch feels powdered with a fine dust, despite the environmental scrubbers designed to keep the pervasive Martian grit—and every other conceivable particulate—out of our sterile little home away from home. Something must be wrong with the filtration system—this thought keeps nudging at me, even in my haze.

  But then I take another deep slow breath and there is air. Good air. I feel winded from the effort of doing the slightest thing after Hiber-Sleep, and that’s expected, but I don’t feel oxygen starved. And that confirms that the base, or at least this section of it, hasn’t been compromised.

  We’re alive. We’re okay.

  But I know a lot of people aren’t. And my pervasive dread at not knowing what’s happened to the rest of the world gets prodded by the sudden sense that something is off. Wrong. The base AI—“MAI”—doesn’t respond to the answers I gave it. I still can’t see much more than basic shapes and light through the resilient post-hibernation glaze over my eyes—if it answered me on the screens instead of with its droning vox, I wouldn’t be able to see it. Maybe that’s another part of the test…

  “Is that it?” I ask it finally, getting impatient because I feel like I’m about to pass out again, and the crawl back to my assigned Sleep couch is going to feel longer and more painful than the drag up here. “Do I pass?”

  Still nothing—just a blurry screen, like MAI is waiting for something else, something more.

  No, MAI, I can’t see. But nobody can this soon after hibernation. Can we move on?

  This was just supposed to be a quick cognitive assessment, standard protocol, a few basic questions to see if my brain made it through chemical hibernation intact. (And I’m still not sure of that myself—I don’t remember it being this bad the last time: seven months under for the shuttle ride from Earth). To see if I’m even remotely fit to be considered the apparent ranking officer in this tomb (since Cal wasn’t there when we started waking up, and worse: I haven’t seen nor heard him between Hiber-Sleep and here, and MAI certainly would have told him we were waking up).

  “Status report, MAI,” I try pushing it into what I figure is the next logical task: to find out what happened while we were sleeping.

  Still nothing.

  “Where’s Colonel Copeland?”

  No answer.

  I think of the bad possibilities: That he fell prey to radiation exposure or decompression making sure the base was intact. Or just got hurt—broke a bone—or got sick with no one awake to help him. Heart attack. Stroke. Embolism. Or maybe he tried to dig out and got himself buried, pinned, or just stuck outside with no way to replenish his oxygen. Lonely deaths.

  Or maybe there were drones waiting for him topside.

  But I’m in no shape to investigate any of those possibilities right now, especially if MAI doesn’t seem willing or able to help me.

  “MAI, what happened to Colonel Copeland?”

  No answer.

  What the hell is going on?

  “How long have we been under?”

  “WHAT IS THE LAST THING YOU REMEMBER BEFORE ENTERING HIBERNATION?”

  Apparently I haven’t passed my brain check yet. But I vaguely remember it is standard to ask for this—your last memory before sleep—to check for any critical damage from your time under. I’m just not sure why there was the disturbingly long delay between questions.

  “Phobos Dock was hit. Bad. The Discs blew the ammo and gas stores. They knew exactly where to hit us. We lost contact with General Ryder. Ares Station was already dead and losing orbit. And there were missiles still incoming from the Shield. Ground countermeasures were holding some of them off, but we couldn’t keep track of the other two bases. Or any of the colony sites. The nukes were creating havoc with EMPs when they blew. Communications were failing.”

  Chaos. I remember chaos. Everything going wrong in the worst way, all at once. The shock of what we were hearing, and the knowing—sealed down here in our holes—that it meant thousands of people were dying in orbit. Thousands. In minutes. And we couldn’t do anything about it. Except try to save some of the tens of thousands of people down here on the ground from a nuclear bombardment designed to guarantee that nothing would survive.

  “PLEASE CLARIFY,” the AI drones in the same dull tone it asked for my name and rank with.

  “We…” Where to start? Too much. Too many things, all happening at once. And all we could get from t
he outside world came from a sudden storm of desperate transmissions. Emergency calls in voices shaking with terror. Panicked protests—terror and rage against the unthinkable. Random flashes of sanity as tactical logic tried to take over, to do something, to fight back. To try and save as many people as possible, no matter how hopeless it should have been.

  “Second January. Twenty Sixty-Five.” I drag the most basic facts out of the storm in my head. “Oh-Six Forty-Five UNMAC Reference Time. I got woken by the alerts, got up to Command Ops—here—as fast as I could drag on my pants running. By then, the whole grid was lit up…”

  The story is already getting away from me, trying to rush out with the same relentless momentum the actual events had. I need to stop and breathe. Try to put things in the right order. Cause and effect:

  “First we got alarms: multiple containment breaches in the colonial research facilities. Several labs just failed, all at once, at least according to the security-ware. Readings indicated massive nanotech and biotech leaks. It was the worst-case scenario, and impossibly bad to be happening in so many places at the same time. But that’s what the monitors on the labs were saying. And what happened next was automatic. Our brand new orbital ‘failsafe’ system—Ares’ Shield—did what it was supposed to do: it armed its nukes and got them target-locked to ‘contain’ the contamination, which meant burning the surface clean, human population and all. Meanwhile, the colony lab techs were all screaming on their uplinks that there was no observable sign of any kind of breach anywhere…

  “This started a storm of chatter back and forth as Orbit and Earthside tried to determine whether the colony techs were just lying to save their own asses, or there really was this incredible glitch in all the breach detection systems. Because if the alarms were right, then we really were losing the whole damn planet to nano and bio contamination in nothing flat. I doubt anyone considered actually burning every colony—one lab, maybe, to save the rest. But they went ahead and put enough nukes on the Shield to burn it all twice over, just in case it ever came down to needing to sterilize the whole planet to save Earth…”

  Talking it through now, it makes less sense than it did then. In the madness of the moment, it was just too much, too fast. All we could do was act, to try to stop it, or at least save as many as we could. But with what happened next, it became clear (at least to us here on-planet) that we were dealing with an unthinkable act of sabotage. Purposeful, calculated, resourceful. Not a glitch. A hack, no matter how impossible that was supposed to be.

  But who would benefit from destroying everything we’d built here? Or who would be so terrified of what was being engineered up here that they would be willing to sacrifice tens of thousands of people just to stop the research?

  “Earthside eventually made the sane choice, and authorized a hold-fire on the Shield, but they cut it close because of the transmission delay,” I continue, trying to shake the plague of questions that I really want answers to. But I have no way of getting those answers right now, so I keep focused on the job at hand (or at least start by convincing MAI that I’m competent to do that job). “Earthside kept the nukes from launching, but they didn’t shut it down. They were scared. They wanted more information, eyes-on assurances. They kept the system hot, locked-on and hair-trigger in case the worst really was true.”

  Chest pains start crushing my lungs as my story-telling accelerates. The urgency comes unbidden—I am back in the moment with the retelling, sitting in this bunker—on this very Command Deck—like I was as it happened, helpless to keep any of it from happening. And despite the pain and the increasing effort the story requires to tell, the story keeps pouring out of me, as if driven by its own momentum, like the moment is happening all over again…

  “Right in the middle of this, we picked up the first wave of Disc activity. Multiple contacts, multiple locations, all at once and out of nowhere. And worse, they were in orbit—there’d never been a confirmed sighting of a Disc drone in orbit—firing on Ares Station, making a run at Phobos. Shooting at anything above the planet. Tanks blew. Depressurizations… Everything docked or coasting up there got holed. The big interplanetary shuttles and freighters weren’t designed to handle being shot up like the military drop and recon ships. They were easy prey, defenseless. We scrambled everything we had, sent all the Shuttles and ASVs and AAVs that were flight-worthy up into space on hard burn to try to take out the drones, or at least rescue survivors.

  “Then the Discs hit us on the ground. Not as heavy as what was happening above us, but enough to keep us busy, to chase us to cover and keep us there, especially since we’d just sent all of our air support toward orbit. We managed to pick off a few of the Discs with our batteries, but they hit our main uplink, like their priority was to cut us off. No more direct contact with Earthside. No way to let them know what was going on.”

  Hard to breathe. I feel like my heart wants to quit, like I’ve run ‘til I’m dropping. I need to stop talking now, to take a break and get my wind before I pass out. But the words keep coming:

  “Ares Station—the orbital dock—was wrecked and knocked out of orbit. All we could do was watch on Radar as they fell down at us like so much junk. Then the drones turned from shredding Phobos to swarm Ares’ Shield. But not to destroy it.

  “The Shield had only been online a month. It was like whoever was running the Discs had been waiting for it to be put in place just so they could use it against us. Somehow the drones hacked into it, disabled the hold and set it off. They initiated sterilization. Full sterilization. The nukes—all of them—started dropping on all twenty-one colonies. General Ryder tried to send abort codes before Phobos went silent. With the transmission delay, Earthside Command probably didn’t know it was happening until it was done. The missiles were armed and away…”

  The rage helps cut the haze, and keeps me going despite my lungs threatening to fail, but it gets me shaking. Badly. Reminding me how weak my atrophied body is, even in the low gravity. Reminding me how helpless I am. And how helpless I was then…

  “So we tried to stop it from the ground. Used our land batteries as a makeshift missile shield. We’d worked out firing solutions just in case, keeping it quiet to avoid an uproar with the terrified majority back on Earth that had pushed to place the Shield up there in the first place. And we also got word that a number of the colonies—even the ones without UNMAC garrisons—were taking similar actions: The corporations were bent on protecting their multi-billion dollar investments. And the colonists were bent on keeping Earth’s paranoia from killing them. They’d smuggled in portable anti-missile ordnance, rockets and big guns and jammers...”

  Breathe. I make myself breathe. My skeletal ribcage threatens to collapse. The vitals monitors insist I’m not really dying, not having heart attack. Stress Tachycardia is normal after chemical hibernation, asleep so long with all of your metabolic functions—down to the cellular level—reduced to less than ten percent of norm. It takes days to get over it, to get the drugs out of your sluggish system, and then weeks to get used to moving and breathing and pumping and digesting again. And I’ve only been awake maybe an hour. Maybe two. (I haven’t been able to see a clock.) I remember it took a full month of hard rehab to get over the seven months I slept on the ride here, and maybe I’ve forgotten but I’m sure this time is worse…

  Sitting up and talking is like running a marathon. Just walking the fifty meters or so from the hibernation cells to the Command Deck—even with handholds and less than 40% Earth gravity—almost made me black out twice. At least I got to cheat and take the Medical elevator from D up to A Deck, but I had to sit down on the floor because it felt like I was being launched into space (and the Medical elevator is slow and gentle for transporting the critically wounded). And then the worst part: the only ways up into the Command Ops “Tower” (just one more deck, really) are a flight of steep stairs or a ladder. I picked the stairs (because you can stop and sit on stairs). One flight. I felt like I was climbing a skyscraper (somethi
ng I‘ve had the pleasure of suffering more than once in my youth, and that wearing heavy body armor). I honestly felt like making camp for the night when I was halfway up.

  Just getting here should be all the test MAI needs. But it waits for me to finish my story, unsatisfied. Aggravating.

  (And where the hell is Cal?)

  “They—we—managed to bust some of the incoming missiles on the way down, and throw some others off target. But it wasn’t enough. In a few minutes, the nukes started hammering, hammering everything. The whole Marineris Valley. Melas. Candor. Coprates. Just one could erase an entire colony. A near miss could shatter and burn one. Even the ‘clean’ misses were devastating, kicking loose the big valley walls, causing slides the size of small countries.”

  I know there hasn’t been food in my stomach since before I went under, which I can only assume has been at least several weeks, if not months. But I feel like I’m going to heave (and probably would if I was strong enough to). I blame it on the hibernation drugs, and the incredible effort it takes just to sit here and talk.

  I know the IVs have kept me well-hydrated, but I want a drink of very cold water very, very badly.

  “The Discs managed to knock out some of our surface guns. More missiles got through, and we had detonations close—critically close. One sent a shockwave of superheated Martian rubble that ripped across the topside of the base, turning everything above ground that wasn’t as hard as the bunkers into scrap. That included most of what we had left that flew or wheeled overland. There was no time to get it all below ground, we were just glad we got all of our people indoors and the structures held. Then we picked up a big slide headed our way. We’d gone a long way to harden against slides since the big 2057 colony-wreckers, but this one was bigger than the one that took out Mariner Colony and Melas One. The best we could hope for was that it would roll over us and bury us mostly intact, that the bunker sections of the base would continue to hold. And it looks like they did. But it cut us off from everything, buried us. We couldn’t reach another living soul, couldn’t call out, couldn’t even dig out and repair the Uplink because it was too hot topside, would be for months. And even if we could get outside safely, we couldn’t get to any of the other bases or colonies without aircraft, and none came home from orbit.

  “So Colonel Copeland ordered everyone into hibernation, figuring how long it would take for Earthside to get to us and dig us out.”

  Copeland… What happened to Cal?

  “Colonel Cal Copeland was Base CO. Probably planetary CO if General Ryder was dead. Doc Halley tried to get him down too—worried that he wouldn’t be able to get himself put under right without at least a med tech to help him—but he pulled rank on her and sent her and everyone else to bed. He was planning on staying awake, hoping to hear something… Anything… Then he could wake us up.”

  I keep blinking my eyes, trying to clear my vision. Hoping if I can see straight, I might see some sign of life down here, something to indicate there’s been activity since Cal shut us down. But the only smears in the dust I can see are the ones I’ve made myself coming up here. And now I’m apparently the ranking CO with Cal god-knows-where.

  “I don’t remember going under. They say that’s normal—I didn’t on the shuttle flight, either.”

  I remember guilt, though: helpless guilt because I didn’t want to go down and leave Cal to sit waiting for a call on a smashed uplink, waiting for rescue that could be as long as a year or more out. Alone.

  “Go, Colonel!” I think I remember him finally shouting at me. “I’ve got no use for a shooter now. Nothing you can do by staying awake but suck resources.”

  Because it’s the end of the world, or at least of everything we built here. And over fifty thousand people—everybody but us—were very likely dead.

  So I left him. Because I really couldn’t do a fucking thing. Except maybe survive.

  I’d hoped he’d decide to go into Sleep with the rest of us, but he wasn’t in his couch. And that means he’s been alone for all this time. Assuming…

  “What happened to Colonel Copeland, MAI?”

  No answer.

  “Has there been any contact with Earthside?”

  Still no answer. I take the time to work my eyes, to try to focus. The vitals monitor still says I’m okay, despite how close to passing out I feel. MAI’s screens only give me text of the transcript of what I’ve been narrating.

  But then I finally can see enough to notice there are things missing from the standard display.

  The date… There’s no date.

  “MAI, how long have we been under?”

  It’s actually worse getting back down to the Hiber-Sleep chambers than it was getting up to Ops. And going down stairs in this condition isn’t much nicer than climbing up them.

  Then the stress from dealing with MAI—What the hell is wrong with MAI?—only added to it. And still no sign of Cal.

  More questions than answers, and more questions every moment as my brain starts working again.

  I barely make it back, and that’s with stopping to rest four times. No way I’d be remotely able to search the base further for Cal (and he would have come if he could, as soon the wake-up cycle started). I barely have the wind to shout for him—I tried anyway a dozen times, but the corridors just echo like a horror movie. With every dragging step, I hoped he’d just pop around a corner, call me a busted old man with that obnoxious grin of his, tell me everything is under control and he had better things to do than watch us drag-ass out of Sleep. But he doesn’t.

  I’m running on rage—rage at being helpless. Again.

  At least I’m not sitting on the floor when the elevator gets me back down to D Deck (though I am hanging onto the rail for dear life).

  “CO on deck!”

  I recognize Lieutenant Carver’s voice barking the reflexive announcement with as much wind as she can muster. The almost two hundred assorted enlisted troopers and junior officers in this chamber actually try to snap-to for me—at least the ones who can stand—and that’s more than I expected from them so soon after the systems brought their metabolisms back to something resembling normal. (The two-dozen-odd techs and other non-military supports don’t bother to stand, but they at least try to assume some kind of alertness.)

  I wave them back down, still needing to hang onto the elevator hatch to keep myself on my feet. They all almost fall back into their couches. But they all look at me—two hundred and twenty-three just in this one chamber (capacity is one more, which should have been Cal, but his couch looks unused)—and their bleary eyes ask for news I haven’t got. Their faces look drained of blood, their bodies look starved. I feel like I’ve walked into a death-camp. And most all of them are less than half my age.

  “Where’s Colonel Burke?” I ask Carver as she offers me a shoulder to lean on to get across the room. She points back to one of the bodies who didn’t bother to budge off his couch when I came in.

  I realize why I needed to ask: I can barely recognize the man I’ve known most all my life, or at least the parts that mattered. He’s beyond pale, and his muscles have wasted so badly during sleep that he looks desiccated. At first I feel my stomach sink because I’m afraid I’m looking at a corpse, but then I can see the readouts quietly reassuring that he’s got all his vital signs.

  “Status?” Colonel Burke—Matthew—looks up and asks me as I sit down on the edge of his couch. His voice is a rasp.

  “If it weren’t for the readouts telling me otherwise, I’d be throwing dirt over you,” I tell him. He grins. Coughs.

  “Not what I was asking…” he manages like he is dying.

  “I know.” I look around. The chamber is crowded, the couches stacked three-high (at least they rotate down to deck-level so you don’t have to climb) with little enough privacy even if all the ears in the room weren’t waiting to hear what I might have to say. “Can you move?” I nod toward a discreet corner where we can talk, behind the plexi partial barrier of th
e chamber’s small monitoring station. It’s only a few yards away, and has a couple of reasonably inviting chairs.

  “I hate you…” he grumbles, and I can see the effort it takes him to get himself even half-sitting. I offer a hand, but he waves me off. Carver is there almost immediately, and she’s smart enough not to ask if he wants help. She just puts her arm under his shoulders and lifts him. I remember Jane Carver being muscular, square-built, a fanatic for weight training. Most of that muscle is gone now, but what she’s got left is a lot more than what I’ve got. The two of us get Matthew up and across the room and ease him into a chair. Carver gets us water, then looks to see if I need anything more, as I sink into a seat of my own. I give her a nod of thanks, and she takes the hint to give us space.

  My head feels like it weighs a hundred pounds, and my body feels like I’ve been hit by a truck. But Matthew looks like he’s going to die on the spot. He has an excuse: he’s a few years older than me—75 to my 71, and that’s still damn old despite the extra years and health the best military grade regenerative medical treatments bought us. And he’s had both knees replaced. Taking the trip to Mars and its low gravity bought him maybe another decade of being able to serve as an officer (though I doubt he did it for health reasons).

  And Hiber-Sleep recovery is brutal even on the young.

  “What’d you find?” he presses me.

  “Doctor Staley…” I see our Chief of Technical Engineering moving around, and I wave for him to join us. Anton Staley is young, lanky. Of the crew that slept in this chamber, he manages to look the least wiped, but not by much. I offer him a stabilizing hand sitting down, but he waves it away with a weary grin.

  “I can walk,” his voice grates out. “But thanks anyway, Colonel.”

  “Something’s wrong with MAI,” I tell them quietly once we’re settled. “And I can’t find Colonel Copeland.”

  “I doubt you got very far to search, Mikey,” Matthew tries. “I’m surprised you made it all the way up to the Command Tower and back in one day.”

  “Place looks like a tomb,” I tell him, fighting for breath again. “Dust says no one’s been moving down here for awhile.” Then I ask Anton: “You checked the hibernation logs?”

  “1197 all healthy and accounted for,” Anton confirms. “Everybody that went to sleep with us made it through. But I double-checked: Colonel Copeland didn’t join us—he’s not logged into any Sleep chamber. What’s up with MAI?”

  I take the time to try to get my brain together. It would be so easy just to go back to sleep.

  “I’m not sure,” I tell him. “That’s why I need you to come back up with me.”

  “You don’t look like that would be a good idea, at least not today,” Matthew warns. “You know the post-sleep protocols. You shouldn’t be on your feet for several hours, or walking further than the nearest head Day One. And that’s assuming we’ve only been out for about as long as a shuttle flight.”

  “Those protocols also assume there will be people who aren’t in recovery to support you through rehab,” I remind him.

  “And since there aren’t, I take it that means there’s no sign of relief or rescue?” he asks grimly. I shake my head.

  “We’re still well-buried, as far as I can tell,” I confirm what little I know. “But MAI won’t give me anything about our situation. Nothing about Earthside contact, relief missions, status of the other bases and colonies… It won’t even tell me how long we’ve been under.”

  “I noticed that,” Anton reports, sounding more than a bit disturbed. “Date-stamps have been wiped on every system I’ve checked. The calendars are all just… missing…”

  “Like I said: Something’s wrong with MAI.”

  “If Earthside hasn’t gotten here yet, it can’t be more than nine months, maybe a year, year-and-a-half tops,” Staley assumes hopefully, after running some calculations in his head. “Even if all the loop shuttles got knocked out.”

  “I’m not sure,” I tell them. “First, I thought MAI was just running a basic cognitive eval on me. It started asking the usual questions—name, rank, date, my last intact memory—but then it wanted me to talk more and more about what happened before we went under. The containment breaches. The Disc attacks. The bombardment. After that, it got strange…”

  Some of the other recent-sleepers are still watching us, trying to listen, trying not to look like they’re listening. Then the room takes a spin on me, and I feel Matthew’s hand on my arm like he’s trying to anchor me.

  “You really shouldn’t have humped it up to Ops so soon,” he scolds. “Emergency protocol can wait—doesn’t look like much is needing your attention urgently enough to risk the concussion you’ll get when you pass out and hit the deck. You need to get back in your couch, let the machines start building you back up.”

  “So do you,” I give him back, trying to make my face grin. “But we have questions that need answering. At least a basic Sit-Rep.” Then I turn to Staley: “What can we check from down here?”

  “A lot of the peripheral systems are still out, probably just in power-save, but I should be able to get a basic network online from here. I can start communicating with the other Sleep chambers, get an eyes-on status report—at least enough to tell me about supplies, atmosphere recyclers, water and heat. Maybe how much of the base is still sealed. If that doesn’t work, I’ll hump it down the corridor to access MAI’s core in Aux Ops.”

  “Make sure Doc Halley clears you first,” I warn him. But he only grins at me (though he looks like he’s falling asleep).

  “It’s no further than you just hiked, and I won’t have to climb any stairs.”

  I give him back a smile.

  “Copeland did his job,” Matthew tries to comfort. “Everybody got through the storm.”

  “Except Copeland.”

  “We don’t know that,” he tries badly to reassure. “Go back to sleep, Mikey. Let the rehab gear get your system spun up. We’ve got a roof over our heads and air and heat and water and food, at least for awhile. And if Copeland’s here, we’ll find him. Stubborn bastard probably got tired of watching us snooze, dug out and went for a recon.”