The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN (13 page)

“There are five tubes in the midsection that look
like some kind of new Hiber-Sleep couches,” Halley continues.
“Chemical stores show use—somebody tapped a good part of the
dosing, probably getting here.”

“I suspect the ship may have been carried here by
some sort of unmanned booster that was left waiting in orbit,”
Anton theorizes. “This ship looks like it was built to serve as
their shuttle, lander
and
recon craft.”

“Which means nobody is waiting for them in orbit,”
Rick takes it, “nobody to go looking for them when they came up
missing. The food packs are also dated 2085. Assuming they packed
fresh stores, whatever happened to them happened almost thirty
years ago.”

“Maybe another ship picked them up,” Lisa tries.

“Seems unlikely they’d just leave a perfectly working
ship,” Matthew counters.

“Unless something went wrong,” I agree with the
likely assumption.

“But my biggest find is back here…” Halley drags us
back to topic. She jerks her head aft for us to follow. We go back
through to forward lock, and past what she points out are where the
crew slept through the trip from Earth, then back one more section.
Everything is tight and efficient, uncluttered; small, but not too
claustrophobic—it feels like being inside an executive-sized
jet.

When we get through to the aft section, a touch on
the smooth green walls opens a series of panels, and what look like
work stations fold out. Set in the hull walls are a number of
transparent tubes, sealed at both ends, but apparently empty.

“I’ve been playing with these,” she tells us. “They
look like containment units. Besides being physically sealed,
they’re lined with a kind of EM field.”

“Designed to contain nano-technology,” Rick
concludes.

“They’re clean,” she assures us (and she hasn’t made
us go back to wearing masks and gloves against potential
contaminants). “I doubt they’ve even been used.”

“I guess they didn’t get what they came for,” Anton
decides darkly.

I turn to look at Matthew, who is hanging back in the
hatchway, leaning on it for support. His eyes have narrowed, and I
can hear him breathing hard and slow.

“Armed stealth ship, possibly designed to be hidden
on arrival, sent sometime in the last thirty years, by someone who
wants to remain anonymous, and who apparently anticipated the
possibility of the ship falling into someone else’s hands before it
got back to them,” I summarize what I’m sure he’s thinking. “With
gear onboard to acquire potentially dangerous nano samples.”

Matthew nods in tense agreement.

“Marvelous…”

Instead of climbing back up to the operations levels,
I decide to take a long detour through the other underground
aircraft bays—the deep bunkered hangars we built to keep our
precious ships safe from hit-and-run Disc attacks. (We’re still
keeping the “Lancer” safely separated from the other working bays:
A misstep while trying to figure out the operating systems, hitting
the wrong control, setting off some as yet undiscovered booby
trap—all better to happen with heavy blast walls between our
visitor and anything else we wouldn’t want to lose, though I think
Matthew would be more comfortable if we just left her topside
rather than bring her down into our belly.)

I walk the open hangar decks between our few
remaining ASVs, all in various stages of salvage or repair.
Compared to the Lancer, they’re clunky, battered things: Big
delta-wing shapes dominated by their four powerful rotating
engines, abdomens bulging with their interchangeable freight
modules (one that sits without a module looks gutted), down-turned
angular cockpits looking like the sharp beaks and cold eyes of
birds of prey. Their Mars-red camo paint is chipped and scarred.
They look like rust-colored bird carcasses.

I hear Morales shouting, her curses echoing in the
big bays. There’s a clang of metal as something is dropped or
thrown. I see at least two of her crew standing, looking helpless,
as her legs come sliding out from beneath ASV-4, which is sitting
low on its gear with its rear nozzles both pulled, looking no more
promising after weeks of sweat and frustration.

“Officer on deck!” one of her crew snaps to, I think
at least partly to derail their sergeant’s latest tantrum. Morales
takes her time extricating herself from the belly of the wreck,
wipes her brow with the backs of both gloved hands, then roughly
scratches her scalp through her chopped black hair. I smell sweat,
grease, metal, fuel…

“Colonel,” she acknowledges, but does not get up.
“Any idea how much fun it is to try to machine new parts by hand
and hope they fit?”

“Not something I’d like to try, Sergeant,” I allow
her. She jerks her head toward Pad Bay 3, where we’ve got the
Lancer secured.

“Having fun with our new toy?”

“You don’t seem to be,” I counter.

“No time to play,” she complains, but there’s an edge
that suggests why she hasn’t been hot to poke around the works of
the Lancer since she gave it a cursory once-over: she’s suddenly
fifty years behind the technology curve, a master at working on
antiques, and can’t even have the satisfaction of making those fly
again.

“No, you don’t,” I agree with her. “Despite all the
excitement, the more we look that thing over, the scarier things
are getting. Keep doing what you’re doing, Sergeant. Just get
something airborne. We may need to get mobile sooner rather than
later.”

“Yes, sir,” she gives me, followed by a little twist
of a grin. Then she tosses a part at one of her techs, tells him it
needs to be redone, that the tolerances are all wrong. Then she
offers him a break first. He declines, and heads back to the shops
at a jog. She sends the others off to work on another ship while
they wait. They move with purpose.

“Friggin’ Wright Brothers,” she mumbles after them,
but she’s smiling again.

I give her a nod and leave her to her work.

Tru is waiting for me just outside the hatch to my
quarters, leaning against the gray reinforced bulkhead. Her hard
body language lets me know she hasn’t come to pursue her personal
proposition.

“Does this mean you’re just another all-talk
bureaucrat?” she begins, arms crossed in front of her chest.

“Does this mean you’ve held your election?” I volley
back.

“Doesn’t matter,” she pushes back. “You’ve got some
kind of future spaceship in your fighter bays and not a word of
update down to us in two days. My people haven’t even been allowed
to get an eyeball on it since it landed, you’ve kept us back so
far.”

“I think you’ll find I’ve kept everybody back except
the team actively trying to crack it.”

“And you keep selecting your teams from your own
playmates,” she gets closer to the point. “Do you just assume all
refugees are only suitable for sweeping and shoveling?”

“We’ve pulled all your files,” I try to assure her.
“We know where your skill sets are. None of you would have gotten
here without valuable talent. The more we get on, the more we’ll be
pulling from your ranks to get things done. But right now, sweeping
and shoveling
are
still the biggest jobs. But then, I hear
Doc Ryder has already jumped a few dozen of you into her greenhouse
project.”

“And what about the communication loop?” she stays
focused.

“Get me a leadership chain. Let me know who to talk
to.”

She shakes her head. “We’re not your soldiers,
Colonel. We’re just people. And we live and work here, too. Or have
you forgotten how to talk to people?”

I key open the hatch. “I haven’t forgotten. I was
just never any good at it. I think this is where I’m supposed to
invite you in.”

We spend an hour sitting on my bunk, sipping filtered
water, while I fill her in about the transmitter failure, the
atmosphere net, the Lancer, and all that those things may imply.
She’s s patient listener, not challenging—maybe her way of
rewarding me for being forthcoming. Then we sit in silence for
awhile as she digests. I can see it in her eyes: she’s considering
a dozen different things, trying to juggle priorities.

“I know, it’s a lot,” I allow her.

“Could you ration it out as it comes instead of
piling it all on at once next time?”

“I’ll send myself a memo.”

She smiles. Her eyes are lost in her plastic cup of
plastic-tasting water.

“You really do suck at the whole people-thing,” she
jokes gently. “When you invite a girl into your bunk, you don’t
open by dropping all this scary freak-world stuff on her. It sort
of kills any mood.”

“I’m hoping it isn’t all scary,” I try.

“The unknown is always scary, Colonel. That’s the way
it is with us humans. I can see why you haven’t been eager to be
forthcoming.”

“I’d have thought you’d be happier. The atmosphere
net says the ETE crews are still here somewhere. Odds are there may
be other colony survivors. The Lancer’s existence says Earth is
still there, and someone has at least come looking around since
we’ve been asleep. It’s my job to worry about the scary side.”

She goes silent again, eyes down, idly swirling the
water left in her cup.

“Communication goes both ways, Colonel,” she finally
says. “I’ve got my own issues I’m afraid to talk about.”

“The Eco War is fifty years gone,” I remind her. “I’m
not about to restart it here. For all we know, the children and
grandchildren of your movement are running things right now. I know
there’s still bad blood—that’s the way it is with us humans. But
right now, we’re all we’ve got.”

She forces a smile, but still doesn’t look up. Then
the smile goes away.

“That’s the least of my scaries. I’ve got sixty-two
kids ranging from three to fourteen years old—at least that’s how
old they
were
before you add fifty years in a Hiber couch.
So far, it looks like the adults all made it through okay, barring
any new surprises to come. But Doctor Halley blows it off every
time their parents ask about what happens if you chemically stall
development that long. These kids stopped
growing
. Then they
started wasting during sleep like the rest of us. They’ve all
rehabbed faster than their elders, so they’ve still got that
child’s resilience going. But it’s been six months since we woke
up, Colonel.
None
of them have shown any sign of further
physical development. On top of that, I’ve got two pregnant mothers
who are afraid of what’s going to happen. Halley insists the babies
look and sound healthy, but one of them should have delivered
almost a month ago.”

I see a teardrop fall onto her hand. I take the cup
from her, and then take her hands in mine. She fights the tears
back down, shakes her head until they go away. Then she gives my
hands a squeeze.

“Maybe you don’t suck so bad at this talking to
people thing…”

Day 158. 9 June, 2115:

“Worst case, what are we likely to be facing out
there?”

I know the question can’t really be answered with any
certainty, but I need them to agree on something, or at least
clarify all of their various theories so we can decide how to
proceed once we do have the means. And I realize I must look
melodramatic, standing at the Briefing Room slit windows, staring
out across Melas Chasma as the winds blow dust and grit over the
rolling terrain under a rosy sky.

“Based on what the colony labs were working on when
they were hit?” Rick cuts back with more than an edge of
frustration, his fingers idly scrolling on the panel on the table
in front of him. I’m sure he’s spent months—like the rest of
us—mulling over this, spinning worst cases against more hopeful
possibilities. The time since we’ve awoken has narrowed that list
somewhat: eliminating both the worst and most encouraging by the
simple fact that we’ve seen and heard nothing at all, at least
until the Lancer showed up. But what we have learned because of its
arrival brings us together again to speculate, hopefully
productively instead of nihilistically.

“What we
knew
the labs were working on,” Anton
counters, tensely pivoting his chair side to side. He has reason to
be frustrated: still failing in his dual projects of sending out a
distress call and cracking into the operating systems of the
Lancer. “The corporations didn’t exactly keep their required
research reports up-to-date. Especially with the Shield going into
orbit.”

“And with the hottest work moved to the ETE stations
for safety, it made accounting even harder,” Rick reinforces his
fears.

“Or hiding the scariest projects even easier,” Tru
follows.

“Can I have a best guess?” I press them, trying to
stay objective, trying not to pace in the tight conference room.
“Start with what scared the pro-Eco groups enough to lobby for
putting missiles in orbit.”

“DNA engineering goes wrong and creates a
super-virus,” Matthew throws out one of the more common fears.

“No,” Ryder denies. “Even the scariest biological can
be contained mechanically. Especially on Mars because everything
and everyone is pressure-sealed, sterilized, contained.”

“That’s exactly why that kind of research flourished
here,” Rick backs her. “Easy containment. Anything that broke out
wouldn’t get far.”

“Unless it was designed—or evolved—to eat through
whatever we had containing it,” Tru counters with one of the more
popular Eco fears.

“Which is a much greater risk with nanotech than
biologicals,” Anton takes it.

“The Hunter-Killers,” Halley offers, sounding
confident.

“The anti-cancer bots?” Matthew asks for
clarification. “I thought we liked those?”

Tru’s eyes go hard, but she stays pointedly
silent.

“The ones that passed FDA were the best of the lot,
the most stable and reliable,” Ryder gives him. I notice she chose
her seat next to Rick. Now her hand is on the frame of his chair,
but not touching him directly, not in front of the rest of us. “But
the risks during R&D were huge: Programming nano-machines to
enter through the bloodstream, to search out and destroy specific
types of cancers, self-replicating off the waste components of what
they kill…”