We tumble into the relatively spacious cabin, about two meters wide and four long. Forward, through the wedge-shaped windshield, I can see the ridge, the unmoving vane of the useless Chinese fountain…
The distant horizon.
The young woman—she can’t be more than twenty-three, twenty-four Earth years, half that Martian—sits in the forward seat and takes the pilot’s two-grip wheel. The bus responds with a whine, a deep groan, and a whir of electric motors, and we back away from the ridge, turn north, roll a short distance, then turn southeast.
We take seats on cushions or slings spaced along the bus’s interior. Unmarked bins and plastic crates fill most of the cabin, leaving us with little space to call our own. We do not complain.
“Rough go soon,” she says. “Strap in if you can, otherwise hang a tie-downs.”
Vee-Def assumes a husky feminine voice. The husky part comes easy. “Buckle your seat belts, gentlemen, it’s going to be a bumpy ride,” he says. He’s quoting someone, I don’t know who, probably a movie star, but that’s okay. Everything’s okay.
Tak and Michelin and I try to treat the general’s wounds, which have purple edges, not good; we don’t know if he’ll last more than a few hours. He slips in and out of consciousness, murmuring in Korean.
The young woman focuses on the drive. The bus does not appear to be equipped with other than the most rudimentary guidance. I can make out a kind of sighting telescope in the roof just behind the driver’s seat, probably for taking star fixes. Grid lines on the lower half of the windshield. No side windows, no way for us in the back to look out at the passing spectacle that is Mars.
A bottle of tasteless water is passed around. Even the general takes a long drink.
I feel almost human.
“Remove t’ose skintights,” our driver says.
“Yes, ma’am!” DJ says, grinning like a bandit.
“Scrub t’em out while t’ey charge a buggy taps,” she continues. On Mars, among the Muskies, there are now several kinds of accents and dialects and even some newly birthing languages, we were briefly informed in basic. But we weren’t instructed in any of them.
“Pull your pouches and toss t’em a recycle chute. I t’ink we have filters a fit, back a rear bulkhead, top right drawer. T’en, scrubbed and clean, climb in your suits again. We’re going outside onced we get t’ere.”
Those of us who can, follow her directions. We don’t mind being bossed by a tall blond ranch wife. That’s what our DI at Hawthorne called Muskie women, when he mentioned them at all. “Don’t think you’re going to save all those ranch wives… They are off-limits. They do not fidging care. To you, they matter less than Suzy Rottencrotch.” That sort of shit. I am deliriously grateful. I feel the way a pound mutt must feel, rescued just before they seal the hatch on the death chamber.
We’re all War Dogs, adopted by a very tall, strong ranch wife.
WE’VE STRIPPED TO Under Armour when the first big jolt hits. She wasn’t kidding. We’re off the plateau, off the hardpan, onto real washboard. And heading toward the eastern Drifter. Whatever that is.
“As Raisuli said, It is good to know where one is going,” I quote. Skyrines headed for the Red dote on desert war movies, even flatties. Oddly, Vee-Def does not get the reference, which makes him sullen.
Tak and Kazak finish their chores first, scrubbing and repacking filters, despite the lurching and jolting, and suit up again, then move to the front. Michelin is next. I’m slower, luxuriating in the simplicity of being alive.
Glancing at the ranch wife, I feel the vague pressure of crotch interest. I’m reviving enough to ask what life is like for her, up here, and how I may be of assistance, that sort of hormonal shit. Feels good. But of course, Michelin has moved in first. Michelin imagines himself our Tango Foxtrot Romeo. Not even the obvious competition of Tak sidelines his self-assurance.
He’s trying to strike up a conversation.
The ranch wife shakes her head, twice.
Michelin doesn’t get that she’s fully focused on the job at hand until she shoots out her long right arm and claps a spidery hand over his mouth. “ShutTup, please,” she says. “You want a roll t’is t’ing?”
The long arm’s reverse elbow swivel impresses us all. We goggle in admiration.
“No, ma’am,” Michelin says. He grins like a sap back at us, then squats down behind the control cab—and promptly goes to sleep.
Major General Kwak is in severe pain. He doesn’t complain, but we can’t pull off his skintight, not around that splinted arm. I rummage in the rear bulkhead and find the medical kit in a drawer just below the filters, marked with a red cross, and with Tak’s help administer some morphine. Nothing more modern in the way of painkillers, apparently, but this will do for now. The general regards us with tight eyes, nods his gratitude. Muzzes out. I start looking for a transfer bag or rolls of tape to repair his suit. Either we patch the skintight’s arm, which is showing too much fray, or we bag him entire, or he’s going to have to stay in the bus. Will the ranch wife mind us using her safety gear, depleting her reserves, air and water?
That leads me to ask myself, what is she doing out here all alone—and how do we possibly fit into those plans? She could just as easily dump us in a hole. We’ve never been of much use to Muskies. Maybe their neutrality has taken a more practical turn and they’ve gone over to the Antags. It’s all about survival. I might do the same. How is it bad thoughts return so quick when you know you’re not going to die, not right away?
More sharp lurches and nearly vertical ascents. The suspension squeaks and groans and the tire blades whang like steel drums, bending until they crimp, then snapping out on the uproll with an energy that makes the whole cabin shudder.
I can’t sleep.
But then I wake up and the young woman has stopped the bus, climbed out of her seat, and is stepping gingerly back through our sprawled group. She sees my eyes are open, faces me, and says, “I have a make report and count for what I’ve used.”
“Right,” I say. “Can I help?”
“DoubT it.” She gently nudges the general, who does not react. “Chinese?” she asks.
“Korean,” I say. I’m on my feet, working out the tingles from being jammed up with the others. I bump my head on the cabin roof. How she manages to hand-over and stoop so gracefully is beyond me. She’s beautiful. She’s the most beautiful creature in the entire universe. Gosh.
She cocks me a hard side glance. “I’m a dust widow,” she says. “Know what t’at means?”
I shake my head.
“I’ve gone t’rough t’ree husbands sinTs I war nine. Your attenTon mean as much to me as a sheet mite’s. Understood, SoldTer?”
“Marine, ma’am. Skyrine.”
Nine would be something like eighteen, in Earth years. And that no more than a few years ago, best guess.
“You know my name,” I say. “What’s yours?”
Another hard look. She grimly faces forward. “Teal Mackenzie Green,” she says. “Nick for Tealullah.”
“Nice name,” I say.
Kazak is awake now, listening. Vee-Def and Tak confer in the farthest corner, under the bulkhead drawers. Our commander, Gamecock, is curled up like a pill bug. Kazak and I nudge him. He’s cramped something fierce—that happens when skintights go sour. Lactic acid burn is a misery I wish on no one. He stretches as best he can, grimacing.
“Tell us about this Drifter,” he says to Teal, the ranch wife, the dust widow, whose beauty is undiminished and maybe even enhanced now that she’s scowled at me.
“Not till we get a shelter.” She finishes the seal on her bright green suit, a bulky older model, likely custom-mod to fit. It has different-colored patches on limbs and torso. First owner was apparently shorter. “A wheel is jammed and we’re about fifty meters a whar we need to be. Anybody fit a get out and push?”
We all volunteer. Gamecock picks the strongest, includes me and himself; we’re jammed in the lock again and then outside,
and none of us is sure the skintights will hold suck, after all they’ve been through.
PARADISE LAID UP
U.S. kids are taught that the first settlers on the Red were the superrich and a few of their friends. They made mistakes. A lot of them died. The survivors recruited others, paid for them to fly up—which got harder as news returned about how so many camps were consolidating, failing—disappearing. Mars is a hell of a long ways from Earth when there’s trouble. Jamestown and Croatoan all over again.
But the tough got tougher. They learned and stuck it out and, gradually, the settlements began to expand. Began to really and truly succeed. The survivors became heroes.
Then arrived the third wave, including hard-core folks who found Earth too civilized, too restrictive—too stupid. Rugged individualists, political fanatics, IQ theorists seeking to isolate and improve the human gene pool. Diehard bigots and supremacists, happy to turn Mars into a spaghetti western. My high school history teacher, Mr. Wagner, fairly liberal, left his students with the impression that Mars was pretty much a lost cause. Still, it sounded exciting—romantic. Frontier towns with attitude. A boy could still dream.
Our strategy prof in basic at SBLM added a few more details: “Before the arrival of the Gurus, private sector colonies on Mars denied Earth’s taxing authority, and even tried to declare their terrestrial and orbital assets exempt from government interference. After our war began, when the government took over all launch centers, the colonies protested, refused to pay their cable bills—stopped recognizing Earthly specie. Their access to interplanet broadband was cut. Blackout followed. Silence.
“We know where the settlements are, mostly, but we are not authorized to contact them, to intervene in their defense, or to commandeer their assets unless absolutely necessary—and only then with prior authorization from ISC.”
Back then, International Space Command was in charge of our war effort, until Germany, Canada, and all of South America withdrew and the United States fragmented politically into war and pax states—those that accepted the story told to us by the Gurus, and those that did not. Forty U.S. states supported, those most likely to get richer from Guru tech and science. Ten did not, mostly in the South and Midwest. Cuba abstained and declared itself neutral, despite having achieved statehood just a few years before.
International Space Command regrouped and was renamed International Sky Defense, or just plain Sky Defense. Some of our equipment still carries the old logo. Most of the Northern Hemisphere countries joined in and contributed to the effort, India and China massively—big industrial needs, lots of Guru bennies. Two-thirds of our forces are now Asian. You learn quickly how tiny a slice Western civ cuts from Earth’s pie.
The Sky War entered its thirteenth year and at the age of twenty-six I became a sergeant. Timeout does not add to seniority, only active duty on the Red. There are a lot of inequities in the Corps, but bitching gets you nowhere because, as always, brass is polished brighter than me and thee.
THE LAST OF my squad—so far as any of us know—has been rescued by a ranch wife who is taking us with her to a mysterious site she calls the eastern Drifter. As I’ve said, I’m not completely ignorant of Mars geology, but I have no idea what a Drifter might be or what it might look like. Yet now, apparently, we are there.
The bus shudders to a halt on a rugged slope of dust-pocked lava. Teal has pushed her vehicle as far as she can, two hundred meters up this slope, beyond which rises an odd, knobby hill about fifty meters high at its peak and, from what we can see, about two hundred meters wide. Teal locks the wheel and joins us in the rear.
Our skintights are now charged with sufficient air and water to last us at least a few hours. The landscape we see as we exit the bus’s airlock is fascinating but tough to riddle. Thirty meters to our left—north—is a mound of deep brown and black stone, not lava, weathered almost smooth. To me the mound resembles a half-sunken head. I make out a beetling overhang like a rumpled brow. To the right of this head, south and west, lies an angled ridge like a muscular black arm, its “hand” clenched into a fist, protecting a kind of rocky harbor. A giant seems to have risen out of the planet, head, neck, and one shoulder, then laid an arm across the lava field, trying to shove itself up, but somehow got stuck—freezing solid before it could climb out and walk away.
Sunken giant. Shit. For the first time in many hours, curiosity takes strong hold. We need to know what our ranch wife is doing out in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of our tactical theater, not too far from our ODZ—Orbital Drop Zone. All alone—except for us.
Teal completes her circuit, then butts helms with Gamecock and makes her needs known. She’ll go back to the wheel and steer, but she wants us to roll the bus the last few dozen meters into the curved embrace of the giant’s arm. I hope there’s something waiting there other than a metaphorical armpit.
I take position near the bus’s right rear wheel, careful not to let the edges of the blades touch suit or gloves. No wonder our ride was rough. The wheels are worn almost razor-blade thin. Everything about the Muskies seems threadbare, last-ditch, desperate. And yet, the dust widow saved us.
Gamecock comes up beside me, along with Tak, and we decided how best to move the bus to where the lady wants it to go. Our effort is mighty, the progress slow, but we manage in about fifteen minutes to close the distance. Then Teal locks the brakes, steps out again through the airlock, holds up her hand, and marches off into the shadow of that massive, crooked arm with a wonderful, long-legged stride that combines hop and jog. A true princess of Mars.
The sun is just over the upper forearm and shines in our eyes, so we can’t see her in the shadows. A minute or two later, she returns, shaping out of the darkness like a green ghost, and tells us to push some more.
We push.
Hard-packed sand and dust form a decent floor inside the arm. In the shadow of the wall, my eyes finally adjust and I see, set into the giant’s upper chest (I can almost count the ribs), a solid metal gate about ten meters wide and nine meters high. Beside it is a smaller gate, more of a door. The big gate has been opened, I presume by Teal, exposing a black cavern. The gate’s outer surface has rusted to a close match for natural Martian brown. Hardly visible at all, except up close. The stony wall surrounding the rusted gate is coated with a thick layer of lava, alternating rough and glassy, as if a melted flow slurped up the giant’s arm. In the armpit and crook of the elbow lean two dramatic intrusions of massive, six-sided columnar basalt.
Vee-Def leans in to say, “Muskies are vegan, right?”
He probably saw a movie about cannibals on Mars.
“They certainly won’t eat your stringy ass,” Kazak assures him.
I am only half listening. The giant has faced wind, water, and lava for a long, long time—why not just wear away, sink down, give up? “It’s still trying to swim,” I tell myself.
Michelin emerges and lends a hand as we push the bus across the threshold, into a cramped, dark airlock barely wide enough to accommodate the wheels and skinny dudes sneaking around each side. He tells us the general is doing poorly, might not last more than a few hours unless we decant him into full medical. “He’s got something he wants to say to Gamecock. His English is better than my Korean, but he’s going in and out.”
As our ranch wife comes through the narrow gap to the left, shining a bright single beam, I see glints and realize the roof is low, low indeed. How the bus fits at all puzzles me until I notice that it has hunkered down on its suspension and the bottom of the fuselage is now just a few centimeters above the lava floor. Teal’s light reveals unnatural-looking grooves crisscrossing the walls and roof. I’m no expert, but the cavern, the lock, seems to have been dug, blasted, or melted out of a large mass of metal-bearing rock, leaving basalt columns as structural support.
Teal opens and climbs through a smaller hatch in the inner wall, and we stand around for a few minutes until the gate closes behind us. Then she returns and inspects the outer seal.
&
nbsp; “Airtight,” she says. “After I open te inner, we’ll push and park beyond.”
“Have you been here before?” Tak asks.
“No,” she says. “But I know of it.”
“Is this the eastern Drifter?” I ask.
She looks past me. “Get everyone out when we’re t’rough.”
“Our Korean general is going to need some help,” I say.
“Stretcher in te boot.” She taps the bus’s stern, showing us the outlines of a flush equipment bay. In short order, with her help, I pull out a rolled and folded stretcher and prepare it. “From here is slope,” she says. “Should make pushing easy.”
With that, the tall young lady returns to the bus’s midsection, lifts herself up, squeezes flat, and climbs in.
The inner lock door now pulls aside, back into the rock. Very neat engineering, I think. An echoing blat of the horn tells us to resume pushing. A few minutes later, we’re inside a chamber about three meters below the floor of the outside entrance. DJ and I close the second gate behind the bus. This one has a thick polymer seal that grabs hold of the circular metal frame. Encouraging, but still no pressure.
The inner chamber is high, dark, possibly natural—a relatively smooth half ovoid about twenty meters across. What would leave a big egg-shaped hollow in the dense, metal-bearing stone? Hot gas? Steam? The floor is dust and sand, compacted from material that could have drifted in before the airlock was finished. In the gloom, we see nine other vehicles in a tight half circle pushed close to the northern wall. They look old and worn-out.
Teal clambers down from the bus, all arms and legs, with an unfamiliar, almost alien grace. She looks back at us, at me, gestures for us to follow—and is once more definitely human, definitely female.
Command would surely frown upon fraternization with Muskies, if they thought it likely or even possible. But the fact is, we’ve received no instruction about them one way or another.