Day 160. 11 June, 2115:
Things haven’t been particularly promising.
Rick and Anton still haven’t figured out a way to punch a signal through the atmosphere “net”, even with the significant talent pool we have in our ranks. Nor have they managed to get anything other than basic cabin power up on the Lancer. And Morales and her crew still haven’t made a patchwork ASV fly.
And life on Melas Base Two is getting steadily more difficult.
Power has been adequate since we’ve fired up the fusion reactors, and we have enough safe functional heated space to live in relative comfort. But airing, watering, and feeding almost twelve hundred souls has put more of a strain on resources than Anton had initially estimated. Adding to that is all the activity topside, no matter how necessary or therapeutic: O2 is getting bled out into breather bottles every time anyone goes out of an airlock. Rick’s team has been considering ways we might “harvest” the oxygen in the outside air—all we need to be able to do is filter out the particulates and greenhouse gases, but we don’t have the materials we need for filtering the quantities we need. We barely have the materials to keep filtering and re-oxygenating the inside air, and that’s with some creative recycling.
On top of that, Ryder’s “greenhouse”, despite its long-term potential and boon to morale, has been sucking water. Though the makeshift dome above Reactor 2 already looks like a jungle inside at the rate the “Martian” grass is growing, the “crop” is still months away from yielding anything that can feed all of us.
And while there still is food, our choices are limited to irradiated survival rations and recycled nutrient paste. Anything more palatable decayed past edible while we slept.
Lisa estimates we have enough rations to get us through another year if we continue to use them sparingly. But the five months we’ve already spent living off the apparently un-spoilable ration packs has been adding to the pervasive depression. Worse, the rations will likely be remembered fondly as gourmet delicacies when all we have left is the recycled paste that the Tranquility processors make out of our own waste. I’ve been trying to acquire a taste for the stuff, but it’s somewhere between rancid tofu and unflavored gruel. It provides what you need, but it comes with a gag reflex.
Despite the fact that base hasn’t been habited to capacity since the troop reductions and the exodus of the majority of the slide refugees, the surviving bunker sections provide tight, cold, echoing, gray living spaces. I’ve heard it compared to a prison.
The lack of windows makes the passing of the days only numbers on a clock (unless you’re lucky enough to get a post in one of the towers). Otherwise, the only way to see daylight (or the clear, primordially star-rich night sky) is to get time on the surface or negotiate a piece of rec-time in one of the windowed airlock staging areas. From the logs, it looks like fewer and fewer of our people are bothering, unless they have to go outside to work, or if Halley orders them.
Several people have tried to brighten things up, starting with their own barracks and the mess and rec halls, but there’s precious little to work with. Carver and several others have been working in the labs after shifts, trying to make paints, inks, charcoals—anything that could be put to hand to make graphic art. Anton has offered to tap into what’s left of MAI’s cultural database (a lot was lost during the long sleep) to try to make prints, but paper is a scarce commodity (something Ryder hopes to make by hand once her “garden” matures). Mostly, MAI’s surviving memory has been getting tapped for music and video and gaming, and whatever media each individual managed to bring from Earth has been shared like precious treasure. But “shut-in” pastimes only seem to promote the overall inertia.
Other than the short shifts outside, the only exercise we get is the repetitive ritual of PT and “Spin Time” in the base’s three centrifuges. Halley keeps close watch to make sure everyone is getting it done. She says she’s worried about as-yet unknown potential long-term effects from our extremely extended sleep (especially among the refugee children, whose tests remain normal despite the scary lack of growth), but I think she’s doing more physicals than she really needs to just to keep busy herself.
At least our makeshift gym facilities continue to be popular. Converted from an unused barracks section on D-Deck and essential during our rehab, the three big rooms manage to serve alternately for aerobics, tension training, martial arts, low-gravity racketball and half-court basketball, as well as the quirky “Marsball” popularized by some of the early colonists: a variation on soccer with an elevated hoop goal and lots of showy low-G acrobatics, where the walls and ceiling are used extensively for rebounding.
Thankfully, the low-G is also kind to old joints, so old men like me can still play with twenty-somethings and not look too broken. Still, I usually keep to the exercise machines rather than throw myself into a team sport, and tell myself it’s a matter of decorum.
I read the eyes of the much younger bodies I sweat with, and I suspect that the only thing keeping them pushing their bodies this long is that they know they’ll need to keep enough bone and muscle to go home. And then I realize I still have no such ambition, no real desire to go back to Earth, not even if rescue came tomorrow, no matter how curious I might be about much “home” may have changed in half-a-century.
But I also realize I’ve lost much of the hope I had for the future of this planet.
Instead, I hold onto the old pride of discipline to get me through my next workout (I tell myself it has nothing to do with the way Tru flirts with me—decorum aside, I am old enough to be her father), and I rely on my curiosity to see what comes next to make it through to tomorrow. That’s what it comes down to: I need to know.
I idly imagine this would be very much like being on a ship going deep interplanetary without Hiber-Sleep: Days of boredom, automatic routine, limited space, rationed food, alone in the void with no support, and an unknown destination a small eternity away.
I’m thankful I don’t suffer from claustrophobia—at times, close spaces are actually comforting for me, though I do have it better than most: I have my private “Deluxe Senior Officers’ Accommodations”, identical to Matthew’s, Lisa’s, Rick’s, Halley’s, Kastl’s and Metzger’s (Cal’s remains unoccupied but untouched, waiting for his return as I don’t have the heart to order it cleared out). Eight-by-eight, it’s almost submarine-efficient. I even have my own private bathroom: a two-by-two-foot recycling shower stall with a sink niche and a retracting toilet under it.
The junior officers, NCOs, pilots and department heads have to share a space two feet narrower than this, bunking in twos (and very few rate their own toilet facilities). The rest of the military personnel share squad-to-platoon-sized barracks, with the enlisted in separate units from the civilian contractors. Some of the more ambitious (or more driven) have simply set up “camp” at their duty stations—Morales has been sleeping in one of the downed ASVs for the past three months, this despite the round-the-clock work shifts keeping things noisy down in the bays.
It’s amazing I haven’t had to discipline anyone for fighting yet, but then the general mood is more a combination of the team spirit of trying to keep each other alive and a sort of vague survivor’s guilt. I haven’t even heard of any flare-ups between the ex-Ecos and the soldiers that spilled each other’s blood in the years of stupidity before the bombs made us all bedfellows.
It helps that there’s been a lot of work to do getting the base and its assets back into some kind of operational order, and Tru’s been actively repaying my including her by stoking the goodwill down in the refugee bays.
Still, Doc Halley gives me regular reports on the meds she’s been handing out (or rationing out). Despite the hope and the team spirit, there is still the tenacious fear that we may be far more alone than just being inadvertently left behind.
Other than a few random shocks (new atmosphere, new plant life, a ghost ship arriving out of nowhere), most of our time is spent in the scheduled grind
of the daily routine: wake, PT, morning Spin, rationed shower (or a trip to Doc Ryder’s “bath house”—converted out of an empty storage bay near Water Recycling—for a Japanese-style sponge-off and hot soak), choking down breakfast (at least we still have plenty of coffee, no matter the quality), then on shift until evening Spin, dinner and a few hours leisure (quite a few of us just keep working, or volunteer to assist with other projects) before it’s back in the rack.
But just keeping busy isn’t enough. The ones that do the best (judged by Halley’s reports and the pharmacy logs) are the ones who can get through each day by finding some kind of peace or satisfaction in the Zen aesthetic of sparseness and discipline, the joy in the minimal. We have air, food (or at least something to keep our bellies full), water, heat, a place to sleep, and work to do. It’s almost a monastic life, despite the stories I increasingly hear of “coupling”, even in the officers’ ranks, because life will find a way (and I’m not sure how much longer I’m going to bother deflecting Tru’s advances).
Still, even the Noble Path leads somewhere—we appear to be only waiting for something that, day by day, seems less likely to arrive.
Some of us are not fairing as well as others.
“It’s not a prison,” Matthew criticizes the popular metaphor over what passes for breakfast in the Officers’ Mess (now a dining hall again, no longer our makeshift briefing room), “it’s more like an oubliette. A deep dark dungeon below the dungeon, a hole you get locked up in so that the ones that put you there can simply forget you.”
He’s looking grizzled and sleep-deprived. (Or is that sleep-overloaded? He spends much of his days shut up in his quarters.) The pained grief has faded—the frustration of having survived an apocalypse with an aged, battered, wasted body that doesn’t want to carry him anymore without significant pain—but he’s sunk into the fatalism of depression.
I miss the wise-ass who existed to be a thorn in the side of his commanders, who challenged the ugly politics with relish, who reveled in never following orders without question. He insists he came to Mars because of his ongoing loyalty to me, but I think it was at least in part because he thought what was happening here was as corrupt as I did. But now that corporate-driven war is fifty years dead, however it ended. Maybe not having a “good” fight anymore has cost him his identity. The only apparent authority left on this world is me, and he knows what I am.
Anton slides up a tray of ration oatmeal and dried fruit, and today he looks almost as beaten as Matthew.
“I may need to ask you for something big, Colonel,” he starts even before he’s settled, and I can feel his weary frustration. “I’ve officially blown every component I could safely scavenge trying to punch a signal through the static shield. All we’ve got left are the comm systems in the ASVs.”
“No luck with the Lancer?”
“Worse, I think,” he sighs out, then looks like he’s said the wrong thing and wants to take it back. He looks around the room, but no one else seems to be listening in—the handful of junior officers in here with us are all looking vaguely dazed over their meals. “I didn’t want to say anything until I know for sure, but remember that idea about taking the Lancer above the static net and broadcasting out? Now, I can’t really tell until I’ve gotten all the systems unlocked and online, but it looks like the transmitter may have been pulled.”
“Pulled?” I jump on it before Matthew can.
“Like I said, I can’t be sure, but it looks like someone very deliberately and very carefully removed the transmitter boards, and there’s no sign of them anywhere.”
“Somebody didn’t want anyone else using the ship to call out,” Matthew concludes like it doesn’t matter.
“Could it have been cannibalized for some other project by the original owners?” I ask. Anton shrugs.
“Looks too neat to be an emergency MacGyver move,” he offers. “I’m hoping I can tell you more when we get access.”
I gel that for a moment. Matthew is looking grimmer.
“Could we boost one of the ASV transmitters enough to be heard, assuming we could fly it up above the atmosphere net?”
“It would make noise,” Anton allows. “But even if we wait until conjunction, I’m not sure it would stand out enough against the background of what the net is putting out. Same if we flew out of the valley, up to Datum level: I don’t think we could get far enough from the net’s noise to be heard, not with what gear we have left.”
“What if we shut down the net?” Matthew considers flatly. “Knock out those projectors, then seal up in here while the atmosphere starts bleeding out. No static, we might get heard. Or at least someone might take notice if the net got broken, come take a look.”
“And if Doctor Halley’s right, and there are survivors living out on the surface who need that air?” Anton protests, trying to suppress his shock.
“Then we shut it down, make noise, and turn it back on again,” Matthew returns, not making eye contact. “Assuming you can figure out how it works.”
He gets up from the table and leaves without another word. Anton gives me a pained look.
“Let’s focus on getting the ASVs up,” I offer. “Make priority out of getting a close look at whatever is generating the net, maybe visit one of the ETE stations—they’re up higher, and might have transmitters in better condition.”
“Assuming the stations aren’t occupied,” he semi-jokes.
“If they are, then I expect we’ll be making quite a bit of noise.”
I check in with Morales again—I think my daily visits only increase her stress—before I head back up to the Command Deck.
The routine grinds the worst here—or maybe a close second to Air Command, a painfully useless station as we currently have nothing that flies. Now that the systems we’ve got left are running as best they can, all we can do is watch, listen and wait. And so far the only brief moment of excitement was the arrival of the Lancer. Otherwise, the planet is dead quiet. At least the other crews have actual work to do, no matter how much of a struggle it is.
Kastl, Grant and Shaloub have the first duty shift in Ops today, with Metzger, Weiss and Li over in AirCom. They put on a good show of keeping their eyes on their screens, at least for my benefit. Otherwise, all there is to do is stare out the thick plexi pillbox-style ports at the slow clean-up and reconstruction going on outside, and beyond that, just dust blowing over empty rust-colored desert in all directions.
By ten, Lisa comes up, thoughtfully bringing us a hotpot of what passes for coffee.
“All quiet on the Western Front?” she tries making conversation. She manages to come and go with a gentle civility—more than duty requires of her—treating me like some casual old friend or distant relation. I can only imagine what it took for her to bury whatever pain I’d so effectively caused her. Still, I notice she avoids looking at Tru whenever she joins us for a conference or “drops by to chat”.
“Just enjoying the scenery,” I tell her dully.
Tired of reviewing status reports of a thousand minor operational details that barely change (and the most significant change is the steady and depressing decline of palatable foodstuffs), my eyes have been drawn outside, though now barely focused on what I’m ostensibly “supervising” through the bunker ports: Out past where Carver has her team coming off another battery drill, their red Heavy Armor suits making them look like upright ants running across the rusty terrain. Out beyond the perimeter battery line, now partially restored to surround two sides of the roughly comma-shaped bunker complex like a medieval battlement. Out into the gently rolling plain of mostly-monochrome rock and gravel. Out there, I numbly watch one of the construction units working monotonously on restoring the pressurized tubeway out to Reactor Two, where Ryder’s got her greenhouse dome with her garden—or crop—of now-giant Martian “grass”. A dome of green in an endless sea of red-ochre sand and rock.
But then my eyes catch just a touch of new color: a fleck of sapphire blue out in
the red, a hundred meters or so outside the main perimeter gate, and well away from any of the work crews. It strikes me that it wasn’t there just moments before—and I’ve been staring out this window all morning.
“What…” I start, pointing Lisa’s eyes where I’m looking. The blue fleck moves just a bit, turns, and then I realize I’m looking at a man.
“Lieutenant Carver!” I shout into the link. “One hundred meters due west, straight out through the Gate! Give me eyes…” Then I turn to Kastl, Grant and Shaloub, who’ve jerked to alertness like someone fired a gun: “Who’s out there?”
Kastl is already zooming in on the grid, but the only icons on the screens are the codes for Carver’s HA’s, turning and fanning toward the gate.
“No tag,” Kastl confirms, his voice edgy. “It’s not one of us.”
The blue shape is just standing still, out on the plain, as Carver’s armor moves to surround it. I key up an image from her armor feed.
“What the hell is it?” I hear Matthew’s voice on the link.
“My luck,” Carver grouses to no one in particular, her voice shaky. “We’ve got him, Colonel—it’s… It’s human. Not one of ours. He’s… He’s just standing there, sir.”
“Is he armed?” I ask, looking the figure over on the feed as Shaloub gives me an enhanced zoom. It’s dressed in some kind of bright blue jumpsuit, possibly a light pressure suit, with boots and gloves and something that looks like a snug-fitting helmet or facemask and hood. The mask and helmet are shining silver, like polished chrome.
“Not that I can see,” Carver answers. “Well, maybe…”
Zooming in closer, there are shiny objects arranged on its belt, a series of plain short metal rods and softball-sized spheres, all looking chrome-plated like the helmet.
“Grenades?” Lisa wonders, pointing to the spheres.
As if in answer, the blue figure’s gloved hands raise slowly, cautiously, but with grace and surety. Two-dozen weapons lock—laser dots dance like red fireflies all over the blue suit and silver mask. The hands show open palms, the body-language is passive.
“I’m looking at some kind of insignia,” I hear Sergeant Horst on the link. I switch to his armor camera—he’s off to the figure’s left side, and there’s a view of a round colorful patch on the shoulder.
“That’s an ETE logo,” I hear Matthew growl—he’s watching this from his quarters. “Fucking shit… I’ll be right up…”
“Orders, Colonel?” Carver demands, her voice shaky.
“Hold…”
I don’t get to finish. The blue suit’s hands reach down smoothly for the buckle of the belt. A weapon fires—readouts tell me it’s Corporal Lewis’ ICW—and I can see the AP round cut clean through the blue suit center-of-mass, right through the heart. Blood sprays out the back as the shell exits, and the figure staggers backwards, boots tripping over rock in a low gravity stagger. Pivoting. Going down onto hands and knees.
“Hold fire!” I’m shouting. “Hold fire!” Carver already has her hand up to enforce the order.
But then another hand goes up—this time from the blue suit. Still kneeling in the dirt and rock, one hand goes up. Signaling for us to hold.
“What…” Lisa starts.
The figure gets up. Slowly. With difficulty. But it stands. Turns back to face Carver (and very likely Lewis, who is standing next to Carver). Gets both hands up and struggles to resume its original non-threatening posture.
“What the fuck…?” Matthew sounds almost breathless—he must be dressing as fast as he can while he keeps his eyes on the feeds.
I zoom in as close as I can get. The hole where the round pierced the blue suit is closing up, the fabric re-knitting itself. A view from behind shows the exit wound—though larger and more roughly torn—doing the same. Something under the fabric—barely visible—looks like boiling metal.
“Please don’t do that again,” a voice comes calmly onto the Link. The hands go back to the belt buckle—slower, this time, with more reassuring gestures—and unfasten it. The belt of shiny spheres and rods comes away from the blue suit. One hand holds it out to the nearest armored trooper. I can see the featureless mask turn and look straight up at the Command Tower, right at me.
“Colonel Ram,” the voice comes again, soft and smooth. “My name is Paul Stilson. We should speak. I expect you have many questions, and I, for my part, have quite a lot to tell you.”
Chapter 4: News of the World