The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN
Read The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN Online
Authors: Michael Rizzo
Tags: #adventure, #mars, #military sf, #science fiction, #nanotech, #dystopian
CROATOAN
Copyright 2013 by Michael
Rizzo
Part One: “And If I Die Before I Wake…”
Chapter 2: Cry in the Wilderness
Chapter 5: Dissenting Opinions
Part Two: Cities in Dust
Chapter 4: Lessons in Human Nature
Part Three: Warriors
Chapter 3: Holding Down a Shadow
Chapter 4: Lessons from the Insurgency
Map
of Central Valles Marineris
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 the 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.