The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN (17 page)

“Meet us up in Command Briefing,” I tell him. “Be
ready to ask questions.”

Paul sips his coffee—or the radiation-preserved
powder that survived fifty years in storage with us—like we’ve
handed him the finest drink he’s ever had.

“Real coffee is quite a luxury,” he confirms.
“Sometimes it comes down on humanitarian drops, but we leave those
to the Nomads and refugees. They need the supplies more than we
do—we actually manage quite sufficiently off of our molecular
factories, but our best substitute isn’t the same as the real
thing.”

“Humanitarian drops?” Lisa asks him as the last of
our team of “interrogators” joins us. Matthew, Lisa and I were
already waiting when the guards—two troopers still sealed in full
HA’s—brought him up from Medical (with all other sections still
sealed off just in case). Halley came up with him, with Rick and
Ryder a moment behind. Our last stragglers—Anton, Tru, Carver,
Rios, and Morales—had further to come. (Carver, at least, had the
decorum to change out of her Heavy Armor and into a fresh LA
uniform. Morales and Anton are wearing their work jumpers.)

“I suppose it’s hard for me to start
anywhere
without leaving you behind somehow,” Paul apologizes. “But then, I
don’t know what you know, so therefore I don’t know what I don’t
need to tell you, if you see my conundrum.” He looks specifically
at Matthew now. “Obviously I do not expect you to simply tell me
what you know and what you don’t.” He sips his coffee again. “I
suppose I’d better start at the beginning—or the ending, depending
on how you see it… With the Apocalypse.”

“When your Discs blew the shit out of the whole
planet?” Matthew prosecutes sweetly. Paul only gives him his usual
grin. I realize it’s probably his way of keeping his patience with
us.

“I can only hope to assure you that the Discs were
not ours,” he responds evenly. “I cannot readily prove this, of
course, though I hope one day you will be able to tour our
facilities and get to know us better.”

“One day?” I ask.

“That decision is not mine to make, Colonel. I am not
an Elder, not on the Council. And as I believe I mentioned earlier,
my very coming here was not something my leaders approve of.”

“Well, that’s gained
my
trust,” Matthew quips.
“Anybody else feel better?”

“I cannot say anything more on the subject of the
Discs, Colonel Burke, because my own people do not know their
origins, not even after all these years,” Paul defends himself
coolly. “I could give you wild speculations, but I expect you have
enough of your own already.”

“Are the Discs still active?” I attempt to
refocus.

“No, Colonel Ram,” Paul answers with a hint of
gratitude. “As far as we know, they have not been seen since the
Apocalypse. Either their mission was completed with the bombardment
and isolation of Mars, or they managed to destroy themselves in the
process.”

“The
isolation
of Mars?” I pick out. “What
happened after the bombardment, Paul?”

He loses the easy smile, sips at his coffee (but this
time doesn’t seem to enjoy it as much), then puts his hands on the
table, lowers his head.

“Nothing went unscathed, Colonel,” he begins with a
heavy breath. “The ETE Stations were spared the direct brunt of the
attack because the Shield platform was
programmed
to spare
us—I can understand Colonel Burke’s suspicions about us, but I am
asking you to trust me enough to listen—but the blasts cut us off,
severed our Feed Lines, drove us inside to escape the radiation. As
for everywhere else… the bombs quite literally reshaped the
valleys. Colony sites that weren’t direct victims of the
detonations were devastated by shockwaves and landslides and
crippling EMP. Yes, there were survivors, and there still are, and
I will tell you what I know of them, but first you need to know
what happened between the worlds.

“Everything in orbit and incoming was destroyed. That
meant Mars was completely cut off, with no ready means for relief.
Worse, what communications did reach Earth before the uplinks went
silent were still quite convincing that Mars had suffered
catastrophic contamination from the reported lab breaches. What
Earth could see of the surface using telescopes was only the
devastation of the bombing. Radiation and residual heat from the
blasts effectively masked any sign of life, as well as any ability
to confirm or deny that there had been nano-contamination.

“Still, the first instinct
was
to send rescue.
From what we could hear, the entirety of humanity was shaken by the
tragedy, and every nation and corporation immediately mobilized to
send help. The immediate response was one of incredible altruism,
charity and unity of purpose. For a bright, shining moment, there
were no wars, no enemies. Competing nations and corporations joined
together. But sadly, it only took a matter of weeks for man’s
capacity for fear and hate to begin to overcome their better
nature.”

He pauses to look each one of us over, trying to read
in our features how much we are following him, how open we are to
believing his tale.

“We have every transmission archived,” he adds with
almost numb calm, specifically looking at Matthew. “Our children
study them. Our Elders have never stopped debating them. Because
they give us a powerful insight into the nature of the human
animal, what we are and what we come from.”

“What happened?” I gently refocus him, reassure him
we
are
willing to hear. He sits back in his chair for a
moment and gathers himself. Under his calm façade, I can feel that
this is shaking him.

“First and foremost came the fear,” he restarts, not
making eye contact now. “The old fear that began this whole
tragedy. Fear of a plague that could not be stopped. Fear that
those in power could not protect them, or would even put everyone
at risk for their own profit. That fear created the Eco movement,
made it rise to popularity.” I see him nod in Tru’s
direction—obviously he knows who she is as well. “And that fear put
the very instrument of our devastation over our heads. But despite
the overwhelming horror of the tragedy it reaped, that same fear
quickly began to undercut everything good in the nature of
mankind.”

I can see his hands tremor ever so slightly as he
sips his coffee.

“Man is a strange and paradoxical creature. And as a
social animal, one of the things he does worst is take
responsibility, especially for his own demons. We could hear it
clearly in the transmissions from Earth: people began to rally
behind a radicalized Eco movement, driven by those that would gain
power by blaming, by persecuting, by feeding on the fear that
science and greed had created a monster that walked this planet
waiting for any opportunity to ravage all mankind. Ultimately, it
proved a convenient excuse for man to disown his own sins, to
scapegoat their own agencies. They began to turn violently on the
very governments and corporations that would have made rescue
possible. It was a remarkably easy thing to do—for the average
citizen to deny that it was his own needs and wants that had driven
the governments and corporations to support the research that they,
in turn, were now so terrified of. Mankind had the demanded cures,
demanded the longer life, demanded the new and better toys. Without
that demand, that desire, none of this could have come to pass—Mars
would have remained an ‘unprofitable’ rock in space, no more than a
curiosity for scientists and explorers.

“But now that their fears had overwhelmed those
desires, it was easy for mankind to blame the greed of faceless
corporations and the corruption of aloof governments for everything
that had happened, including the devastation that so terribly ended
it. Within weeks, governments were purged, the great corporations
were embattled and bankrupted, consumerism was vilified, and
economies collapsed on a global scale. But by persecuting the
perceived agents of this atrocity, they also unwittingly crippled
any hope of mounting a timely rescue. It was only after the damage
was done, after the rage had been spent, that wiser voices were
able to be heard calling for reason.

“By then, hope was already fading, and the fear had
new soil in which to take root: Weeks and months went by with no
further contact from the surface. Now the fear told them that
everyone not killed by the bombs was now dead anyway, victims
not
of the delayed rescue effort—again, mankind does not
readily accept responsibility for its own sins—but of the
still-assumed contamination. Now they openly hesitated because of
the fear that returning to Mars would only contaminate the
rescuers, and then Earth in turn, dooming all life. And that fear
did what fear does best: it made people forget everything else.
Then it turned them against anyone who would try to defy it. Hated
science and greed had created a monster that could not be
destroyed, you see, only
isolated
. Any survivors were
believed to be beyond hope, and most people convinced themselves
there could be none. The only ‘sane’ thing to do was ensure the
imagined horror would not come home. They declared us all dead
within the year, and we became their new martyrs: We died saving
them, saving Earth.”

“They believed we were all dead?” Ryder challenges.
“And just left it at that? They didn’t even try?”

Paul locks eyes with her. His jaw sets.

“It was
easier
for them that way,” he tells
her icily. “And the ones that weren’t satisfied to leave it be were
hamstrung by the Quarantine, by lack of resources and support.
Small humanitarian missions were coordinated: probes, supply
drops—all unmanned and one-way to allay the fears that a human crew
would be contaminated, lost on a hopeless errand.”

“And there was no word from the surface, from
survivors?” Lisa questions. “No calls for help?”

“A few messages did manage to filter back across
space from the devastated surface,” Paul tells her, somewhat more
gently, “from makeshift transmitters not unlike the one you
recently attempted to build. But Earth could only hear fragments
from them, and what they heard were tales of mass casualties and
failing resources, failing hope. From what they could hear, Earth
made their own tragic calculations, that most likely no one would
be left alive by the time any relief could reach them. Within two
months, there was only silence, as the last transmitter stopped
sending. That silence convinced them that their fears were well
founded, and excused them from attempting—
risking
, as they
saw it—a proper rescue.

“We ourselves managed contact with Earth during that
time, perhaps the clearest of any of the surviving factions because
of our locations, but we could only give limited and unpromising
assessments because of our distance from the colony sites. Then,
after all the other transmitters had stopped, we also chose to fall
silent.”

“’
Chose
’?” Lisa starts, almost coming out of
her seat.

“Just as communication outgoing was fragmentary, so
was what the few survivors who had means could hear from Earth. But
we could hear the fear taking over: The UNMAC Quarantine, the fear
of contamination, the steady reductions in rescue mission plans,
the cold calculations that rescue wasn’t worth the risk of
spreading an unstoppable plague to Earth.” Paul stops for a moment,
raises his cup to his lips, but puts it down without drinking.

“Worse: while Earth had little actual sense of what
had happened here, many of the surface survivors had even less. You
yourselves are an excellent example: how much do you know of the
fate of the planet, of the colonies, even with your superior
resources? Your bases had the best communications with orbit until
the attack severed them, and your uplinks were among the last to be
destroyed. At least
you
knew that the Discs were responsible
for triggering the Shield. The colonies were cut off shortly after
the Shield targeted them—the last they knew of Earth was that Earth
was trying to kill them all because of an imagined fear, a false
alarm. Those that survived did very much fear that Earth would try
to kill them again, that since they seemed so reluctant to send
rescue, they would instead send more bombs. That fear came to rule
this planet.”

“So they—what?—they
hid
?” Matthew questions
incredulously.

“From even the initial attempts to re-establish
contact, to call for help, it was already sounding like rescue
wasn’t going to come,” Paul looks at him directly. “Or that if any
rescue did come, it would be cautiously limited, that the survivors
would be remanded to quarantine, even killed if Earth judged the
risk too high. And if Earth even remotely believed there was still
a risk of contamination, they might bomb again.”

“So there wasn’t a
single
survivor that kept
calling for help?” Lisa doesn’t believe.

“There
were
a few. For some, their equipment
eventually failed. But many factions actually
forced
their
fellows to stop transmitting, and in some cases even killed those
who would not cooperate—their fear of Earth was that great.”

“And Earth left it at that?” Matthew isn’t buying.
“For
fifty
years?”

“No, Colonel,” Paul locks him with his eyes again.
“Nothing is so simple. We’ve kept listening, passively. The Earth
you knew has changed because of what happened, more than you can
imagine. There was indeed a revolution of sorts: Once the general
public—the most vocal majority, at least—finally began moving past
their initial overwhelming fears of returning for a rescue, or at
least found they could not live with not knowing what had happened
here, they found that their bureaucracies were not so flexible. The
Quarantine still stood, and there had been too much upheaval to
effectively oppose it. The world economy destroyed, people could
barely maintain quality of life, much less invest in rebuilding the
infrastructure necessary for mounting a large interplanetary
mission. And the new ‘culture’ wouldn’t support it.