The cyborg sounded concerned. “But no sign of the fuselage?”
“Nope, not yet.”
“Good. The walkers can take a lot of punishment, but they’ll do best cradled in the cargo hold.”
The bits and pieces gradually grew thicker until someone spotted the main part of the wreckage. “There it is!” a woman exclaimed. “Straight ahead.”
I arrived five minutes later and was amazed by the sheer size of the downed shuttle. The hull towered three or four stories over my head and stretched hundreds of feet in both directions. There were no signs of a fire, which wasn’t too surprising, since there was very little oxygen available to feed on. All the damage was impact-related. A huge circle served to contain the Marscorp “M” and adorned the side of the hull. It was split down the middle, a fact that eliminated the need to find a hatch.
Dawkins ordered us to wait and entered through the crack. I checked my oxygen supply, saw that I was down to eighteen minutes’ worth, and thought about the assumptions the corpies had used. That we would make the trip inside of six hours, that we would be able to salvage the oxygen we needed from the wreck, and that at least some of the walkers would be operable. Then I realized something that should have been obvious from the start. It didn’t matter if we got back. As long as the borgs made it to the crash site, and Dawkins installed them in their machines, the corpies would deem the mission a success. Which explained why Mars fodder like the greenie and myself had been selected as mules. We were expendable.
Suddenly I saw Dawkins in a new light. He’d known what I’d just managed to figure out all along, and not only planned to carry out his mission, but save our asses as well. The fact was that we had been lucky, very lucky, and I wondered if our luck would hold.
And much to my amazement it did, as Dawkins emerged, announced that six of the walkers were operational, and started the search for an airtight compartment. We spent ten minutes on the task, but couldn’t find one. So, with our air running uncomfortably low, we were forced to inflate one of two emergency shelters carried aboard the shuttle.
The second was missing. A more imaginative person than myself might have spent a significant amount of time considering what might have happened if the first tent had been destroyed, but I felt no desire to do that. No, it was much nicer to cycle through the lock with the warning buzzer sounding in my ears, strip off my suit, and seek the solace of a small but well-designed inflatable rest room.
It was only after I had taken a much delayed pee that I remembered Loni and the fact that I discarded her along with my suit. I hurried back. The shelter had been designed to accommodate twice our number, so there was plenty of room. I wound my way between people, unoccupied suits, and built-in equipment to find that a pair of mules were disconnecting Loni from my suit. I put on one of my most intimidating frowns. “Hey…what’s going on?”
The man had his face plate open. He looked in my direction, then looked again. “Dawkins told us to collect six borgs and connect them to the walkers.”
I nodded my understanding. “Great…but let me say goodbye.”
The man looked unhappy but decided to go along. “Okay…but make it snappy.”
Loni’s umbilical was still connected to my suit. I left her on the floor, lifted the suit, and draped it across my back. The helmet felt natural after wearing it for so long. “Loni?”
“Well, if it isn’t my own personal chauffeur. You disappeared.”
“Sorry. I had to pee. But I hurried back.”
“All is forgiven. Thanks for the ride. Try to get assigned to my walker, so I can return the favor.”
“Will do. Wish we could talk some more, but they’re waiting to take you away.”
“No problem. If I had lips I’d kiss you.”
“Traddlemop.”
Then they took her away. I didn’t know what the others thought about the tears that trickled down my cheeks and didn’t really give a shit.
Things went relatively well after that. It took about twelve hours to grab some sleep, refill our oxygen tanks from the shuttle’s supply, and bury the pilots. The sun had just started to peek over the horizon when we started the service. The walkers were equipped with a variety of attachments, and what would have taken us hours they accomplished in a matter of minutes. The graves were laser-straight and perfectly aligned.
It was a strange funeral. The sun rose higher in the sky and sent long black fingers down across the plain. Eleven space-suited mourners sang “Amazing Grace” while five four-story-tall machines stood at attention. The sixth walker, the one controlled by Loni, served as the only pallbearer, lowering the space-suited pilots into their neatly excavated graves with slow, deliberate movements of her long, spindly arms.
Dawkins called for a moment of silence, and I wondered if anyone else was struck by the fact that not a single one of us had known the pilots, or what kind of people they’d been. And what, I wondered, was the difference between the cyborgs, who lived on after the death of everything but their brain tissue, and the pilots, who were gone wherever dead people go? Was that what we were? Chunks of brain tissue? And if so, what about me? Seeing as I had lost a goodly amount of mine, did that make me less of a person? My head started to hurt, and I let the questions drift.
And so it was that a few cubic yards of rocky red soil was pushed in on top of the pilots and carefully welded metal crosses were erected at the heads of their graves. They looked kind of lonely as we turned our backs on them and boarded the walkers. And I did manage to ride in Loni’s machine, not that it made much difference, since the inside of one cargo space is pretty much like another.
The good news was that it took the walkers less than two hours to traverse the ground we had covered in six. The bad news was that the ride consisted of an unending series of jolts, each one of which threatened to drop my stomach through the bottom of my feet, or lift it up through the top of my head.
But all things come to an end, even bad things, and the ride was no exception. Unfortunately, however, the end of one bad thing can signal the start of another, and such was the case.
I know that the walkers intercepted the huge machine-city called Roller Three, and were admitted via one of the hatchways provided for that purpose, but didn’t actually witness what took place. For what seemed like obvious reasons, the cargo hold was not equipped with niceties like vid screens, and Loni was far too busy to provide a blow-by-blow description. So the first thing we saw was a pressurized vehicle bay, some tool-toting technoids, and the troops sent to pick me up. It took them about ten seconds to spot me, separate me from the rest of the group, and order me out of my suit.
The guards wore red berets with Marcorps Special Forces badges on them and were very, very good. I could commit guard-assisted suicide and nothing more. The smaller of the two, a woman with corporal’s stripes, handed her weapon to a steroidal sidekick and moved to pat me down. Assuming I could take her, which was a lot of assuming, Frankenstein would put a dart through my heart. Not an especially attractive option.
The corporal finished her search, took two steps back, and allowed Frankenstein to slap the gun into her outstretched hand. It had the look and feel of a well-rehearsed drill. The weapon seemed to leap into the cutaway holster and snap itself in.
“Okay, Maxon. Head for door number two.”
I looked. Door number two had a big numeral “ 2” painted on it so idiots like me could see it. I noticed there were no threats, no promises, just “head for door number two.” The woman scared the hell out of me. I shuffled towards door number two. The greenie with the piercing blue eyes yelled something, but I wasn’t sure what.