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.