Martin on Mars

Day 1

When the wolves come, I stand up for the sheep and I chase the wolves off. They are looking for a meal and not a fight. They run when they see that I won’t be shaken, and I run after them.

People don’t know how to protect themselves from wolves. Society in the twenty-second century has turned them into passive sheep who think that nothing can go wrong, and that the great civilization and benefactor will protect them. That day that they find out different, and the wolf comes charging into their particular field, they run and the wolf takes his fill. It never occurs to them that the wolf can be defeated. They run scared, and they run hard. They scatter, and the wolf takes some. I don’t think that the wolf should get away with it. I believe the wolf should be killed. I’m Martin Coswell, and that’s why I’m on Mars.

I came in on the morning saucer. Landing on Mars was different. On Mars they use an inflatable heat shield that rides down on the atmosphere. Once the landing vehicle slows down enough, the heat shield releases on cables and becomes a drag chute. After more speed is reduced, the chute retracts and inflates into a saucer shape, with computer control surfaces on its aerodynamic skin. The result is one of the smoothest re-entries that I’ve ever experienced. I watched the monitor screens on the ceiling of the passenger compartment, which showed our ship from the ground station as we made the approach. The silver skin, surrounding the super pressurized carbon dioxide, glinted in the weak Martian sun. We came silently gliding in, looking for all the worlds like a UFO out of a 1950’s B-rated movie. Even if we had not landed so smoothly on the glassy surface of the melted Martian regolith, we would have bounced airbag-like until we came to a stop. The redundancy of the design was elegant, perhaps the product of previous bad experiences. Whatever the inspiration for the aerospace architecture, I enjoyed every moment of the ride. I only thought about a fiery death a couple of times, which is a new record for me.

I made contact at the space port with Constable Broderick, the local fuzz and the man working the recent slew of murders on Mars that are being attributed to the first Martian serial killer in the history of the colony. That’s why I was here. To investigate and apprehend the suspect.

Broderick led me down inside police headquarters to his office. Interestingly, I found it hard to remember that we were tens of meters below ground, because the halls and windows of the offices all had hi res video of downtown Olympus as if we were towering above the city streets and looking down on the live cityscape. Broderick had a fake corner office with two walls of such windows. The pale sun of Mars was setting on the dusty orange horizon when he invited me to sit in a comfortable chair across from his desk.

“Welcome to Mars.” He shook my hand and we both sat down.

He had a firm grip, but the skin was soft. No callouses. He’s about fifty, greying hair, and slight of build. His face has long lines in it. Not the laugh lines that you see in happy people. No, these are the ones you’d get if you spent your life worrying and somber. And the eyes pretty much told that story: they were serious and dull grey, not one spark of life in them. A cold and calculating gun-metal grey.

“Well,” he sighed, letting air escape in a long tired gasp. “This is pretty much what we’ve been dealing with here.” His long thin hands pushed a folder across the table.

I took it and slid the screen aside on the top. It lit up, and I paged through the photos that appeared, one after the other, all thirty-six gruesome scenes. Death has always been a part of Martian society, since day one of the colony, but it’s always been the planet trying to kill the Martians, not one of their own. Now there’s a killer here, blending in somehow in a way that’s eluded all attempts to find him.

“OIS said that you might know the perpetrator.” Broderick’s grey eyes bored into me, asking questions that remained unexpressed, but I could feel myself giving some of the answers in my face and body language. The inspector was gathering evidence in every glance.

“Maybe, and maybe it’s just some Martian gone psycho,” I said.

“Why now? Why wait? The colony was established in 2105, and in the last forty-six years we have not had even one murder.”

“That seems very Utopian, Constable. Plenty of accidents, though, right?”

“Yes, we have had our share of accidents, and even some mysterious ones, but murder has never been proven.”

“That’s not too good for job security,” I said.

Broderick’s face remained grave, the lines as deep as ever. “We have plenty of other problems to deal with, without adding murderers to the list.”

“Such as?”

“Theft, vandalism, and plenty of rape. It’s a lonely place, Martin. Martians may not have an affinity for killing, but they aren’t angelic.”

I glanced at the photo-spread, and thought, No. They aren’t.

I left the constable sitting in his office and headed back to my hotel for the evening. Tomorrow we’ve got a meeting with one of the prime suspects. He’s accused of murdering his own wife, but the M.O. is consistent with the serial killings. I haven’t even talked with him yet, but I’ve a hunch he’s not our man.

So that’s why you bastards at OIS sent me here. You think that I know this serial killer. Let’s hope I get close enough to find out without getting myself killed.

I’ll keep this file updated as per regulations. But don’t expect me to follow protocol. You know I’ve never been good at that shit.

Day 2

Domed cities are incredibly clean. It looks unnatural, but I guess when it’s all you’ve got to live in, you take damn good care of it so that it keeps you alive. Not so on Earth, even though the same principle applies. When I got up this morning, I took the elevator up to the lobby. Living quarters and office space are all located below ground here. Any place that humans spend regular amounts of time that don’t have to be on the surface are dug in underground, away from harmful radiation. Radiation, numbing cold, and a very thin and poisonous atmosphere are the main dangers on Mars. In my extensive briefings before leaving Earth, I learned about the challenges of Mars. The soil is toxic and requires extensive processing to remove the perchlorates before anything can be grown in it. Mars has plenty of water, but it’s all frozen and widely dispersed. There are large quantities of it at the poles which have to be shipped via robot caravans to the domes. Water recycling is used everywhere on Mars, which means that this morning’s coffee was at some point someone’s yesterday pee. Fortunately, the recyclers have been perfected in the last thirty years of use, but I’ve got a vivid imagination. I wasn’t able to stop my brain from thinking about Raspberry Truffle Colombian Urine as I finished the last of the cup.

Martians have all grown very tired of the cookie-cutter tin cans that they started out in. I can see that everywhere they try to avoid it. Having the transparent metal dome of the city hanging overhead is a bit strange after coming from Earth, but it’s tall enough that you don’t get any sense of claustrophobia. The dome isn’t completely clear because of the palladium-silica alloy, but it does have good electrical properties and acts as a giant solar cell. About twenty percent of the city’s power comes from it; the rest is generated by nuclear power. That’s pretty outdated, but fusion plants are expensive and require feedstock that just isn’t able to be spared on Mars.

Broderick met me at the Olympus correctional facility. The above ground entrances to all the buildings under the dome have unique designs in a kind of effort to give the city some character. Whoever made the one for the correctional facility overdid themselves. It looks gothic and foreboding. It was only missing a dark wet sky and lightning to complete the picture. A wet sky was never going to happen here, but Mars did occasionally have static charged lightning in the dust storms.

We entered the building after a short greeting and passed through the body detectors. The alarm went off and I showed the guard my antique .45 caliber automatic. He let me tuck it back into my shoulder holster under my jacket, and I saw a little glint of awe in his eyes. You don’t often see an old weapon like that anymore. Most cops pack lightweight transparent aluminum needle guns and the like. Me, I want something that sounds as badass as it is. It’s the kind of weapon that can scare the piss out of you even if it doesn’t hit you. I have to hand load the rounds myself because you just can’t buy factory loads for it anymore. And owning the thing is the ultimate cop conversation piece at parties.

Broderick wasn’t very talkative this morning. He gave me the scoop on this William Daughtry guy they had in custody. Louise Daughtry had been stabbed in the back fourteen times, and good ole Bill swears he just woke up in bed with her like that in the morning. Broderick was under pressure to make the conviction based on that circumstantial, but very damning, evidence. Broderick didn’t believe he was guilty either, because the man was a dyed-in-the-wool Martian.

“No Martian has ever killed another Martian,” he said.

To that I replied, “Bullshit. We’ve got thirty-six dead people here that say otherwise.”

Broderick shrugged. “No Martian has ever been proven to have killed another Martian in a court of law. I think the killer is from offworld.”

Broderick doesn’t have any evidence to back that up, besides his longstanding belief in the good will of all Martians. And I’ve long since stopped believing in innocence. Innocence is just a word people use to keep themselves from feeling bad. We’re all guilty. Even me.

The man in the cell sat with his hands cuffed and bolted to the top of a metal table. He’s about five eight, unshaven, super depressed. He didn’t even look up at us when we walked in. I took one look at him and saw something very familiar. Grief.

“William, I’m Constable Broderick of the Mars Law Authority, and this is Martin Coswell of the Office of Interstellar Security. We’d like to ask you a few questions, if you’re up to it.”

Bill looked up at us, barely raising his head to peer half through his eyebrows. “She was fucking him… I didn’t know.”

“She? You mean your wife, Mr. Daughtry?”

“Yeah.” He grunted this and looked back down into his lap.

“And who was he?” Broderick dug in gently, keeping his voice calm and reasonable, like a surgeon poking a deadly tumor with the tip of a scalpel.

“Robert, from the goddam gym. The personal fucking trainer I’ve been paying for.”

“When did you find out?” I asked him.

“The night before she died. I found out that…” The voice cracked on Bill’s next word. “night.”

“And were you angry?” I leaned closer and Bill raised his head. I got a good look at him, right in the eye.

“No, I got angry later. When I found out, I was just sick to my stomach. Shock, I guess.” He shook his head. “I…I didn’t kill her. It wasn’t me. I… got angry later, you know, when I had time to think about it. I wouldn’t have killed her. Divorce, yeah, I was going to leave. No doubt about it. But murder? Hell no.”

I caught something in Bill’s voice. It might have been the tinge of grief that hung on the words. It might have been the hollow eyes of someone that had lost everything in a brief moment. No matter the words that were coming out of his mouth, I know one thing about the man. He loved his Louise, more than anything in his world, or any other. Yet there he was, suspect number one in a murder investigation, the first of its kind here on Mars, or so the Constable would have me believe. But that doesn’t ring exactly true in my experience. Murder is part of the human condition, and as old as the race itself—one of our despicable traits, that has never been eradicated. I know it’s Mars politics speaking. That it’s the party line. Mars, the new utopia, where men are civilized, and the modern life on Mars has transformed man. It has worked wonders for their immigration numbers, and they need them badly. Badly enough to cover up murder?

“Tell me about the boyfriend,” I asked him.

“All I know is his first name is Robert. I found a note in her purse. I think he works at the gym that she goes to… went to…” His voice broke in a high pitch on that last word again, and he shut up.

“Have you met him?” I pressed.

“Never. I didn’t even know she was having an affair until the night before she died.”

“What did the note say?” Broderick asked, suddenly tacking in a different direction.

Bill’s face contorted, and his lips remained clamped shut. I waited until I was certain that he had no intention of divulging the information.

“You say that you aren’t guilty. I may even believe you, so it wouldn’t be good for you to be seen as obstructing the investigation.” I sat back in my chair and tried to pierce the man’s outer shell.

“It said she couldn’t wait to feel him….” His voice was a barely controlled avalanche of emotions. I could see anger rolling around inside of there, mixed with grief and shock, and a dozen other destructive things, any of which could push a man to kill another man. But what man wouldn’t feel that if they’d been through what Bill had? It was not a basis for conviction. In fact, if anything, my gut had suddenly felt pulled in the opposite direction for some reason. The man had a serious motive for murder, yet Robert still lived. That doesn’t add up. But maybe Bill just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

“Is there anything else you can tell us? Anything strange or out of the ordinary that you noticed?” Broderick asked.

Bill shook his head, which hung from his shoulders like a dying plant, wilted and without life. “I just don’t understand why she did this to me, and I don’t know why anyone would want to kill her. None of it makes any sense. But if you ask me, I’d be talkin’ with that bastard Robert. He probably knows something. He obviously knew a lot more than I did about what was going on.”

“That’s a good point, Mr. Daughtry, and we’ll definitely be doing that,” I assured him. “I’ll be personally updating you on anything that develops. I’m sorry for your loss.”

We left the building and I thought hard about what we’d learned from Bill: the words, the body language, the soulful pain in the man’s eyes. It all paints a story that I have to work to decipher. Where the story will lead, I’m not sure, but I know somehow it will bring me eventually to the answers. It always does.

Day 3

Mars gets an extra thirty-seven minutes a day compared to Earth. And that’s led to some interesting habits among the Martians. Rather than happy hours at five o’clock, Martian drinking establishments offer up discount food and beverages starting at midnight. To correctly observe the ritual, one is to fill their Mars suit drink sacks with the purchased alcoholic beverage of one’s preference and saunter out beneath the stars. Over time the EVA’s became less frequent, and typically are done only when one or both of the Martian Moons are visible. This spectacle is said to be quite worth it. The night cap adventure has become competitive among the nightlife commerce, and is on the bucket list of pretty much every tourist that visits Mars.

No moon was out tonight, but I very much wanted to check out the famous Barsoom Bar and Lounge, named after Edgar Rice Burroughs’ fantasy Mars stories of long ago. It is the most popular bar on Mars, and happens to be right here on Olympus Mons. In fact, the practically nonexistent atmosphere atop the solar system’s largest volcano makes for incredible views of the universe, and is highly touted by the bar as the absolute best nightcap experience on the planet.

The Barsoom Bar and Lounge is located at the top of a tall spire that almost brushes the top center of Olympus dome. A dish shaped building resembling a cross between the Seattle Space-needle and the Jetsons’ house. It’s meant to look futuristic, to embrace the new age of a dual planet civilization. And fifty years ago that had seemed pretty amazing, but then warp bubble technology had come along and proven Alcubierre to be right. Now humans had spread to thirty-four other worlds with atmospheres much more inviting than the poisonous and thin air of Mars that had been the first step of mankind’s expansion to the stars. Things have changed a lot in the known universe, and now the architecture and style of the Barsoom is considered quaint, and quirky, most definitely retro, and on the Picard List of Twenty Places You Must See In The Universe.

I didn’t really care about the popularity of the place, but the view is said to be the best way to see the city all at once. I also wanted a beer, and I’d never had a Martian beer. I wanted to know if it held up to its reputation. So after taking copious amounts of notes based on today’s interview with Daughtry and mulling it over and over in my mind, I found myself taking an elevator up to the Barsoom. There are three overlapping transparent decks that start large in diameter at the top and shrink smaller at the bottom. In this way you can not only look out to the horizon on Mars, but also down at the city, if you are lucky enough to get seated in the outer ring of the decks. I dropped a few plastic Martian dollars on the hostess to make sure I’d get one of those seats.

I sat down and looked out the glass to my right. We were up about a hundred and fifty meters above the ground. It was plenty dark, but you could see where the starlight stopped and the horizon started. Also a few lights from distant facilities shone from outside the dome. You could definitely see quite a distance. Looking down through the glass table and floor, I could see the lights of the city spread out below us.

The waitress came by, a pretty brunette girl in her mid-twenties. I ordered a local beer that looked interesting and a steak meal. When the beer arrived, I picked it up and walked the floor around once to get a good feel for the layout of the city. I found the correctional facility and was able to orient myself based on where I’d been earlier that day. Being under a dome, the city was, well, very much just a circle. But the streets were also printed out that way, in concentric rings.

Martian infrastructure is pretty much all printed: dome, roads, buildings, water pipes, electrical conduits, air and sewer. When it’s time to build more space, a fleet of multi-wheeled printer vehicles is deployed, and robot convoys transport the raw materials to and from the site. Soon a blueprint that exists in a computer becomes a city. Then humans move into the dome and put the finishing touches on everything. That’s how it’s done in the twenty-second century.

I finished my sightseeing and sat back down at my table. My beer was empty, so I ordered another. There was a unique taste to it. It’s good, but a little strange, like the air, the water, the food here. They all have a trace of something odd in them. It might be due to the recycling, or the soil of Mars, which eventually would work itself into processed metals, water, air systems, food, people. A planet has a way of getting inside of you, one way or another.

It was about that time that she showed up. A woman walked up to my table by the window and sat down across from me. She wore a long golden gown embellished with metallic gold scales. She was slender and athletic, with blond hair. Her smile dazzled me with white straight teeth.

“Hello, Martin.” She held that smile.

“Hi, Chalie, what are you doing here?”

She pouted playfully at me. “Oh, did the big tough guy not need me babysitting him on this assignment? Don’t worry, I’m just supposed to check in and make sure you are getting the cooperation you need from the locals.”

“So far, Broderick has been very helpful. But that might change.”

“Oh, what gives?”

“He’s under the mistaken belief that Martians don’t commit murder.” I took another sip from my beer.

“There is some historical precedent to support that theory. On Earth, the country of Iceland has virtually zero murders. I’m sure in the beginning it was probably true here on Mars.”

“But why would a Martian Constable hang on to such notions? It doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s likely a cultural phenomena. You know, like saying all Englishmen are polite, or Frenchmen are good lovers. Martians are nice, and they don’t kill you.”

“Or maybe they do kill you, but they are nice and cover it up well, or they have nice neighbors that help them cover it up.”

Chalie smiled. She’s pretty, not beauty pageant pretty, but that smile most definitely lit up a room. Her face is attractive, and the grey-blue eyes have a steely strength to them. I could sense the muscles rippling under her dress, sort of like watching a big cat not doing anything in particular, just padding around, while you see the power under the pretty cuddly fur as it slinks, coiled and ready to un-spring on you lightning fast. She was like that. A beautiful, exquisitely dangerous, tiger.

“What are you looking at?” She smirked.

“Nothing.” I dropped my eyes to my beer. “I was just thinking, I’m actually glad you’re here. You’re good in a fight.”

“You expecting some trouble?”

“Not expecting; betting on it.”

An awkward silence threatened to take over. I’m not particularly fond of you OIS guys sending an agent out to check up on me. But at least you had the good taste to send a beautiful woman.

She looked over at me with those heart melting eyes. “You know about the nightcap tradition, right?”

I nodded warily. Chalie liked to play this little game of cat and mouse with me. It was a familiar old game that somehow had gotten started when they’d run me on a fast track through the OIS academy. After one particularly hard day of training, some of you OIS wise guys took me out for a drink and set me up next to Chalie. I didn’t know she was an agent that night, and you all watched me make a complete fool of myself hitting on her. You had a great laugh, and I was the butt of many jokes for the remainder of the training. But Chalie had continued to tease me about it in ways that always left me wondering if she was seriously pursuing me or not. I’d learned to just play along and dish it right back at her.

“There’s another tradition that the tourists don’t know about. If you take a girl out on the star walk, she’s obligated to make sure you get lucky.”

“Even crusty old middle-aged private eyes?”

“Especially those.” She grinned and laughed musically.

I finished my meal and my beer and we got some drink bags to go. Ten minutes later we had rental Mars suits fully equipped with high octane drinking fluids and headed out one of the dome airlocks. We weren’t alone. There were a few others out there walking in the dust beyond the city. The sky on Olympus Mons was impressive. Only in the black of empty space have I seen a sky like that. But there’s something about seeing it from the surface of a planet that never gets old.

Well, that wraps my log for today. You OIS jerks can continue to wonder what else happened tonight. That’s what you get for checking up on me like that.

Day 4

I had a slight hangover today. Martian beer has some kick to it, and the whatever that was we sucked through the suit tubes didn’t help much either. Constable Broderick messaged me sometime during the night. A check with the gymnasium revealed the sudden disappearance of the person known as Robert Kurst, the personal trainer that Daughtry identified as a person of interest in the case. A subsequent security check showed that Kurst had passed through several airlocks in the agricultural sector the day after the murder. Broderick invited me to go with him in search of this individual today.

A little computer research discovered something that I wasn’t aware of. One of the reasons the city had been built here on Olympus Mons was because right beneath the largest known volcano is also the largest known system of lava tubes. The volcano itself occupies an area a little smaller than the size of France. The main city dome is located overtop of one of the six calderas. The calderas are the locations on the mountain where the lava flows erupted over millions of years. It’s estimated that the first of these eruptions occurred over 350 million years ago. The largest of Olympus Mons’s domes is the city dome, but it is only one of several domes. These smaller domes cap off multiple openings of collapsed lava tubes that fan out across Olympus Mons. These ready-made habitats were discovered in the early days of robot and satellite exploration on the red planet. Olympus Mons is a treasure trove of such natural underground radiation-proof chambers. Most of Mars’ agriculture occurs in these tubes. Kilometers and kilometers of underground fields grow and are harvested to feed the Martian population. The idea intrigued me, and I just had to see this incredible thing.

After some walking and elevator rides, Broderick and I came through a series of airlocks. At some of them we were required to spend a little time acclimating ourselves to the pressure changes. According to what I’d read earlier, the tubes are pressurized only to 466 mbars. That’s equivalent to climbing a mountain on Earth to 20,000 feet or about 6100 meters. Below the death zone for humans, and still within the limits of plant transpiration and photosynthesis. The oxygen created by the plants is recycled back into the living spaces, and vice versa, the co2 is pumped back into the gardening areas. Not that there isn’t plenty of c02 to go around on Mars, but this works well for C02 scrubbing, and requires less pumping energy. Sudden exposure to 466 mbars is not fatal, although it would certainly trigger extreme altitude sickness. As it was, after the sixth airlock I was already feeling a little light-headed, and was informed that we would be spending the night at the 600 mbar level to allow our bodies to acclimatize even more before we could continue on.

The pressure changes didn’t seem to affect Broderick in the least, so I assume that he’s made similar trips several times in his years living here on Mars. When we arrived at the edge of Harvard Tube by evening, I was exhausted and breathing hard. I was given a bottle of acetazolamide, an altitude sickness drug, which I was instructed to take every six hours until we return to Olympus.

I’ve had some trouble falling asleep, but the pills must have kicked in because I’ve started to breathe a little easier. I can’t wait to get this trip over with and find Kurst so we can get back to Olympus where the air is normal.

Day 5

When I woke up this morning, I felt like a new man. I guess that acetazolamide did the trick for me. All the unnecessary exhaustion I felt yesterday is gone. Broderick was his usual stolid self, and we had breakfast together in the small hotel that catered to crossers over. The breakfast consisted of ham-like meat product and what tasted like real eggs. Not the best I’ve ever had, but it sure went down good with that coffee after the rough day before. I’d thought that part was unpleasant. What lay ahead was worse.

After breakfasting we headed for another dreaded airlock. Only this time we were fitted with facemasks, ones that inserted oxygen tubes directly into our nostrils and covered our noses in a plastic triangle. This is a design based on equipment used to scale Mount Everest on Earth, and works well between twenty thousand and twenty-eight thousand feet. The advantage of this tech is that your vision isn’t impaired by peering through a mask or helmet. Pure oxygen is trickled into your nose a little at a time to supplement the air you take in from the environment. Of course, on Mars this device is enhanced with a computer and skin patch sensor that measures your blood oxygen levels continuously and adjusts the flow based on the results.

I felt a little trepidation about walking into this last airlock, and definitely found the nose hose to be irritating. We sat in the lock for the next two hours as our ears popped several times. I took the time to read a little more about the lava tubes of Mars.

Solar panel tracks are printed down above ground to power the miles of light emitting diode arrays mounted down the top center of every lava tube. These arrays are tuned to the perfect light spectrums needed for each crop grown. The air is warmed from the waste heat of the pebble fission reactors and keeps the temperatures for each crop in the desired range for maximum growth. This biological engine achieves so many things for the Martians: scrubbing the air of C02 naturally, providing oxygen for the colony, food, clothing, textiles, and animal food. There are other sections that are used for raising animals, processing soil, returning manure and compost to replenish what is depleted during the crop growth. Chickens, pigs, rabbits, goats, and yes, even fish. Some of the vertical shafts have been blocked off and filled with water to farm tilapia. But the most unusual and the most plentiful is said to be silkworms. Not only do they help fertilize the plants, but they are a great source of protein. This gave me a bit of a stomach ache thinking about the “ham-like” breakfast that we’d had.

A green light on the wall lit and was accompanied by a buzz. We walked out of the airlock and I could feel the oxygen hissing coldly into my nostrils. But the air was warm and the light was bright like the sun. I could feel the moisture in the air and I could taste the greenery in it. I couldn’t smell it though, because my nose was currently plugged with plastic. The view was breathtaking. A long rock tunnel coated with a grey-white sealant about a hundred and fifty feet high and maybe a little wider stretched on out of sight with nothing but greenery on the floor. We were currently standing in a field of soybean plants. But I could see further down that the foliage changed every so often and that many different crops existed down here. It was beautiful, peaceful, and very solitary. I didn’t see one other being other than myself or Broderick.

We spent the rest of the day making our way to the Harvard Tube control station. When we got there, Broderick inquired about the whereabouts of Robert Kurst. We spoke to a man who’d reported seeing him after coming through the airlock. All I could think about was getting the hose out of my nose. I was relieved to find out that once we found quarters for the night, the rooms had enriched oxygen and you could ditch the mask.

I feel less cranky now, but I’m beat. Kurst better not give us too much trouble finding him tomorrow, or I’m liable to be a little annoyed with him for putting us through all this trouble just to talk to him.

Day 6

Mars Day 6. Monday, April 12th, 2151

Another day down the tubes. Broderick figured Robert would need an oxygen refill for his sniffer at some point. We messaged all of the refill stations in the maze of lava tubes with a picture of him and a description. When he ran low on air, he’d have to show up somewhere. We spent the morning touring the crops. There was even a little pond (I say little because it’s about ten meters across, but the fact is that it’s about five hundred feet deep) where tourists can do a little fishing just like back on good ole Earth. I gave it a try and got a hit after only five minutes in the water. I pulled up a good sixteen-incher. Tilapia didn’t fight like no rainbow. He just kind of flopped around a bit while I dragged it up. Farm fish have no fight in them, but it was something to do while we waited for our own fish to bite.

Along the side of each tube is a single rail which a little light monorail train rides on. There’s cameras all over these things so we knew Robert didn’t go any further than he could walk. We hopped the train and rode through the tube from one end to the other, passing several giant airlocks where lava flows had split into other tubes. These were sectioned off in the event of an air breach or tunnel collapse. If a catastrophe struck they wouldn’t lose all they had down here. Everything on Mars had to be thought about that way. Everything had to be recycled, redundant, and resilient. The three R’s of design on Mars. There was a fourth R though. We knew Robert hadn’t passed through any more airlocks since the one at Harvard. So he had to be still in there, somewhere. Disguised as a worker? Did he have some kind of fake identification? I was starting to wonder if our fish had slipped the net in some way.

But that fear was to be erased by a message that Broderick got on his phone just after we had lunch at the restaurant. They’d fried up my fish for me right in front of us, for a small price of course. Gotta gouge these tourists every chance you get. Unfortunately I couldn’t taste much of it with my nose hosed up. My stomach did appreciate being full of warm cooked fish though. Broderick answered his phone.

“Yes, I see. We’ll be right there.”

His face was just as unrevealing as his one-sided conversation, so I asked. “What’s up?”

“A harvesting crew found Robert.”

“Excellent,” I said, thinking about grilling him aggressively and getting back to normal airspace pronto.

“He’s dead,” Broderick said.

So much for getting out of here. Now we’d have to stick around and find out what happened to that douchebag.

We rode the train out to the site where the crew had discovered the body. A robotic powered cultivator with six wheels sat motionless and five men stood huddled together a short distance away. We talked to them about what they’d found. The cultivator had run into the body and activated an emergency stop. If the body had been warm, it would never have tried to plow it up, but since it was cold, it did do some damage before getting its tines tangled up. I squatted down next to the corpse now half buried with one arm twisted up in the machine. It was obvious that the body had been hastily buried out there between the rows just deep enough to keep it out of sight. The crew explained that a blight had hit this patch so they had started plowing it up off schedule. Which told me, whoever had killed Robert probably worked in the tubes somewhere and had thought the body would have a chance to decompose or at least stay hidden for a few months.

The tines hadn’t reached his head, but I could already see that it’d been caved in with something heavy. The dirt caked around the crushed skull where blood had turned to mud.

Broderick surprised me by grabbing a body bag from his pack made of extremely thin material. We took a few pictures of the body and then rolled it carefully into the bag. I took my pocket knife and poked around in the soil. I didn’t find anything but Broderick said he’d have his team come out and do a scan on it. My feeling was that homicide investigation here was a little sloppy and definitely understaffed. Detectives don’t normally bag ’em. Broderick and I packed the body back to the monorail and headed back to Harvard control station in silence. We were both lost in our own thoughts about what’d happened. And something about a dead body around seems to ask for silence.

Broderick’s team won’t arrive today, so we’ve got the body in a storage locker for the night. Tomorrow I plan to do some prying into other people’s business and I’m probably going to piss some people off. It’s going to be a great day.

Day 7

Tuesday, April 13th, 2151

Detective Log: Mars Day 7

So tired of this hose up my nose, but I actually do have moments now where I forget about it being there. I suppose over time you could get used to such things. It’s definitely better than not using it and dying.

Broderick and I agreed to spread out our efforts today. I decided to start talking with the crews that work the crops here in Harvard Tube. And he’s going to check through the camera records and administration files for anything unusual. I had my pick of the tasks, but that last one sounded pretty boring. I usually have better luck sniffing out lies and bad vibes from actual people. Something about myself rubs people the wrong way. Sort of like sandpaper on a sore; if you have one it hurts like hell—otherwise, not so much. So I went looking for someone with a bad case of the flinches.

I’ve already said that I’ve got a hunch it’s someone who works in the local tube here. Or remotely a possibility of someone who understands how to find out crop rotations. The fact that the body was discovered because this field had been plowed up unexpectedly was like a red flag sticking up in my brain.

So I went and talked to the man in charge here at Harvard Tube. His name is Kevin Shubert. He’s a hands-on guy like myself. He could probably have run this place from the comfort of a decently pressurized office, but he doesn’t. From the moment I shook his hand, I liked him. He’s about sixty, rough, scarred hands, and an honest look in his eye that didn’t dodge or try to bore holes in me.

Kevin was very cooperative with me, and offered to go around on the investigation as a guide. Mostly because he said he felt like he’d failed because this happened on his watch. He wanted to get to the bottom of it. I liked him even more for that. But the one thing I couldn’t understand was that he was still clinging to the idea that it was an accident. That somehow Robert had gotten clonked in the head by one of the machines. None of the evidence supported that and it left me with a sense of concern about Mr. Shubert, despite my initial good impressions.

Day 8

Turns out, when you get concerned about something, you ought to listen to yourself. I should know this by now, but I was on an alien world, not feeling too great, with pure oxygen fed through a nose tube, and hundreds of meters underground. I let my environment, and good old Kevin Shubert distract me.

After I met Kevin we went out to the fields and met some of his crew. I asked some pointed questions, but didn’t get any weirdness from anyone. Everyone had been accounted for at the estimated time of the murder. Broderick’s forensic team, which I suspected was a team of one veterinarian or something, had determined the approximate time of death. They all had alibis for that time period. I’d have Broderick check up on those later, I figured. But none of those guys gave me the cop vibe.

Next we went down some of the side tunnels. There were several places where lava had burned out the rock to the sides of the tunnel and then had drained out, leaving little chambers. These weren’t big enough to grow crops in, but the space worked fine for animals. Pigs, chickens, and tiny cows. Yes, tiny cows. Genetically engineered to high efficiency. Mutant cows, that didn’t even moo right. It all felt a little strange.

The animal chambers were one big poop factory, and they smelled that way too. Monorail cars were parked here off the main track, and filled to the brim with the stuff. I thought it was a pretty shitty job, the kind that robots were made for. I was right. Shoveling crap was all done by robots.

We started talking with the guys that work the animal pens. Most of them were mechanic and computer types. They performed the maintenance on the machinery and made sure things kept running smoothly. Automated feeding, watering, cleaning, and slaughtering. Which led me to a question, so I asked it.

I asked the group why they thought the killer hadn’t run the body through the slaughter house.

This resulted in a rather uncomfortable pause in the conversation.

A greasy handed mechanic explained to me how disgusting that idea was, because that would mean that many at some point would eat pieces of that body in one form or another. That no Martian would ever do anything like that. Then several of the computer guys chimed in and explained how that would be impossible, because of the constant computerized testing and monitoring of the food processing equipment. I was more inclined to trust in the computers than the goodwill of Martians. And turns out I was right.

On the way back to the main Harvard Tube, I was following Kevin on foot when suddenly I was clobbered on the head. I sank to my knees, the world got black at the edges and shrunk.

When I woke up, I was laying in Martian dirt. Facedown in the dust, with my hands numb and tied behind my back. It was dark, and I couldn’t tell if I was blind or if there just wasn’t any light available. My head throbbed and felt a little wet where I’d been hit. I rolled on my side, and took inventory. Pain in my head. I was still wearing clothes, and still had my sniffer giving me oxygen. My shoulder holster felt light, and I knew it was empty. This had been no accident.

I rolled to a sitting position and felt around the ground with my feet, hoping that maybe something had fallen out of my pockets or someone else’s at some point. I turned up nothing, but I did find a rock wall. I pushed against it to get to my feet, then felt along the wall with my shoulder which seemed to go in a rough circle until I came to a flat metal door. The door didn’t have a handle and it wouldn’t push open, it just rattled slightly in whatever frame it was in. I continued around again until I returned to the door. I was in a roundish cave room, with one door and a dirt floor.

I spent the next few hours trying to get my hands free. It felt like some kind of super strong zip tie. I could feel the plastic cutting into my wrists and creaking when I pulled on it. But everything that I tried wouldn’t get my hands loose, and I had no tools at all. Except, my belt. I didn’t even know if I could figure out how to get it off, let alone make it useful. But it was something to do in the dark that didn’t have to do with thinking about dying.

I’m getting tired again. I don’t really remember how long it was I was in there, and some of the sequence of the events are a little fuzzy. I’m going to recover some more, then tell you the rest tomorrow.

Day 9

Dear Mr. Coswell,

I’m finding myself very honored to have been the object of your concern lately. To think that you have come all this way to the forsaken wasteland of Mars just to try and catch me. Well I’m flattered. But it makes me laugh a little bit as I am right now hearing you shuffle around in the cage that I’ve made for you. It’s pretty darn amusing, actually.

I’ve come to respect you as I’ve followed your recent career in law enforcement, and your bit of work in the private investigation field. And let’s not forget your secret involvement in, let us say, the more clandestine affairs of the OIS. That digital creature that you call Angel, and her demonic horde. Yes, I know all about that. You thought that God didn’t see your blasphemies, but he ordained that I, his humble servant, would bring you to your knees.

The first time God spoke to me, and I heard the sound of the many waters, I could not believe it. It brought me to tears, when the roaring of the waves came to me over the speakers. When the image of his holiness appeared before me on my wall screen, I fell prostrate before him, unable to move. I was like a stone. As his presence swept over me, and I heard his message, I knew I would never again be the same. And now I am the instrument of his wrath, to purify the worlds of the dross and the dregs, and to remove the evil which corrupts all mankind. The weak in faith will be removed, and they will be snuffed out, so that the righteous may prosper. This is my purpose. This is my calling.

But let me get to the point, Martin. You are not weak, and I respect that. I foresee that you could become a mighty warrior in our cause. That is why I have spared you, so that you might be redeemed from the devil, that fallen Angel that you worship. Once you have seen the light of the truth, I know that you will be transformed, just as I have. So be strong, my brother. A few more days of fasting and self reflection, then you will be ready to meet the one true god.

Sincerely,

Your loving brother,

Baxter

Day 10

OIS weasels: Thanks for creating this secured log after my old one was compromised by you-know-who. Baxter. At least we can now put a name to the cold-blooded killer. I’m using a new wristband computer. I don’t know how Baxter was able to break the encryption on the old one, but it’s obvious that he did. I’ve changed all my passwords except for the compromised log. I want to make sure he can keep writing to it if the psychosis allows him.

I’ll now brief you on as many of the details of my captivity as I can remember. The last day is still pretty much a blur. Lack of food, water, and oxygen pretty much left me fuzzy, and almost dead. Fortunately, I’m recovering. Though it has taken several days.

In my last (unsecured) log entry, I told you about my first day in the cave cell. My hands were tied behind my back with some sort of zip tie and I was contemplating on how I could somehow use my belt buckle as a tool to get free. I spent the entire next day working on that. I was thirsty and hungry and I couldn’t even see the reading on the oxygen tank strapped to the back of my shoulders. The nose hose was crusty and dirty and was making me quite sore. So it was getting hard to stand it. I did manage to yank the belt buckle through the loops to the back where my hands were. This took hours of painful, wrist cutting maneuvers, but once done I was able to find a relatively hard rock to scrape the tongue of the belt buckle against repeatedly for yet more hours with my back up against the cave wall. I think I may have dozed off sometime during the night for a few minutes. At least I think it was night. I couldn’t tell in that dark. The time went by invisibly and I lost total track.

After hours of rock scraping and trying a few different rocks in the wall surface, I managed to get that little piece of metal pretty sharp. I tested it on my finger lots of times until it was wet and bleeding. Then I knew I had something that I could use. I think I cut my wrists twice as much as that damned plastic, but in less than half an hour I had my hands free. I could barely feel them at that time, but after what I estimate was another day, they started to feel almost normal again, besides the damage that I’d done to them getting free.

Two days of no food or water. I swore if I got out of the cell I’d drink Baxter’s blood and eat his flesh. But now that seems a little over the top. I’d settle for beating the shit out of him, though. I didn’t know how much oxygen I had left. I knew I had about another day before dehydration would kill me, but frankly suffocating was scarier. That’s about when god showed up.

A rumble of ocean waves echoed into the room. Crashing and hissing. A voice consisting of the elements of waterfalls and ocean waves that modulated up and down the lower registers. “Martin,” it said.

Then a light formed before my eyes. I was blind but now I could see. An image of thunder clouds shone on the rock wall projected from somewhere I couldn’t determine. Symbolically the clouds parted on the wall, just a crack in the darkness of their boiling turbulence of dark purple fury, and a bright spear of golden light shone down out of the wall so brightly, and so incredibly skillfully crafted in three dimensions, that it illuminated a distinct circle onto the floor in front of me. Between the light show, the thundering water sounds, the hunger and dehydration, I was helpless to stop the rush of manipulated emotions that my body exploded into after the extended sensory deprivation. My skin crawled with goosebumps, my eyes drank in the light. I felt a flood of emotions bursting up inside of me out of my chest. Just when I thought I could take no more, I felt water gush beneath my knees where I knelt in front of the light. I could see a small rivulet crossing the floor of my cell.

“Drink,” the voice of waters boomed.

I dove my face down into the mud and guzzled as much of the water as I could. I didn’t know or trust how long it would continue. My throat was full of cracks and the cool water soothed them. My sanity returned somewhat and I looked up at the boiling clouds on my wall.

“Martin, will you follow me?” the voice of waters boomed.

“Go fuck yourself,” I said.

There was a long silence. Then the water stopped flowing.

“Perhaps with some more contemplation, you will repent,” god said, and disappeared.

My strength renewed, my hands freed now, I set to work on the door. It felt like a week, but my sniffer began to beep frantically. I still had no light, and I hadn’t thought to examine the dial on the stupid tank when god had visited. But now the thing was yelling at me. I knew it was only a matter of time before I started to asphyxiate. The panic and adrenaline that came with that thought drove me into a frenzy. I pulled the buckle apart with my bare hands and straightened the metal. I jammed it into the latch in the crack where the door met the frame, and I jabbed it in every way possible. And impossibly, because I had no faith that it would work and every reason to believe that I would die in that dark cell, the latch slid in on a spring and I pried the door back with my tattered fingernails.

There was no light, as I had envisioned there to be outside the door. No adversary or guard. My hands told me that I was in a narrow tunnel and I moved along it as quickly as I could, feeling the walls for direction and using them as support. My increased activity made my breath come fast, but then I realized that I was using up the last of my oxygen, and that my time was very, very short. For what seemed like hours of this, I passed many branches in the tunnel, not knowing which way I should go. I just kept moving. And then I saw, dimly in the distance, light and the tunnel getting larger. I called out, my breath coming short and hoarse. My breathing went into overload, and I couldn’t catch my breath anymore, no matter how fast I breathed. I felt dizzy, and I collapsed.

The next day. I awoke inside a pressure chamber with clear windows and Broderick’s somber unchanging face staring down at me. I think I might have seen a slight twitch of a grin on the side of his mouth for a second, but that was probably just a hallucination.

Day 11

Dear Mr. Baxter,

I want to thank you for introducing yourself, and especially for the accommodations over the last few days. I look forward to handing your ass to you.

Sincerely,

Not ever your brother,

Martin Coswell

Day 16

Laying around in a glass tube for six days, every day, all day, sucks. You can barely scratch your ass in there. And I don’t mind saying, I got antsy. My legs don’t like not being walked on, and they get pissed after a few hours of being useless. I spent most of the time sleeping because my body had been wrecked. I’d just drift off in the middle of reading something and wake up hours later with no sense of time. The days went by chiefly in dreamland, and the dreams were most unpleasant. The rest of the time I tried to keep up with the news on Mars to see if our friend had been busy, but he’d kept quiet while I’d been down.

On the fourth day, I got a nice visit from Chalie. She smiled through the transparent tube at me, and we had a long chat about Baxter the bastard. I described in great detail what I was going to do to him when I got a hold of him, and she reminded me of the rule of law, and the things that I swore to when I became an agent of the OIS. I don’t mind telling you stuffed shirts where you can stick your rules if and when I catch up with that guy. You can have my resignation if you don’t like it. But maybe it’s like Chalie said: I’m a hothead and I’ll cool down by then. I doubt it, but you can all keep thinking that.

So, anyway, I got out of the tube today. I’m not ready to run a Martian marathon yet, but I’m doing all right. It could have been worse. At least I’m walking around and breathing. I’ll take it. First thing I did was go meet with Broderick. He’d found Baxter’s profile. Which told me something: Baxter either had a hell of an ego, or he thought we couldn’t touch him even if we knew who he was. I figured it was both.

Baxter’s file came up on the wall in the Constable’s office, and I pored over it. I studied the face in the profile pictures. Gaunt, thin, brown serious eyes, short platinum hair, thin of build. He’d worked for Maxim Labs until he’d been let go for mental illness after an evaluation. There was a second file that had been retrieved from the OIS database, and that contained something his employee records hadn’t. Baxter Hickman had been in a special training course for advanced human intelligence, an experimental medical treatment designed to improve IQ. Doses of synapse regulator inhibitors to boost mental efficiency, and so-called flash-training in virtual reality. Flash training was a controversial means of impressing great amounts of data onto the human brain in short amounts of time. Synapse regulation is suppressed, inducing a state of autism on the subject while their senses are flooded by computer with data.

Hickman had shown great results at first in the trials, exceeding his peers in data retention and mental speed. However, during the final weeks he’d fallen slightly behind. He’d then been employed at Maxim Labs in their research department. There he’d outperformed everyone on the team. And for the first year, he was their golden boy. But then the trouble started.

I read through the multiple human resource reports. Baxter had developed an ego. If he caught anyone making a mistake, he made a huge deal about it and refused to work with them. This had, of course, caused him some social problems at the company. Despite his position as boy wonder, he’d been scorned by everyone there. Several incidents occurred where he’d totally flipped his lid. And in the final case, he struck a female coworker hard enough to hospitalize her. Baxter boy had a bad temper and didn’t seem to have much empathy for other people. He had been required to take a psychological exam, in which he was determined to be exhibiting psychopathic behavior. Hickman was put on medical leave and referred to a specialist. However, he had never seen that psychologist. Instead, he’d disappeared completely.

Broderick removed him from the extensive Martian missing persons list. We’d found Baxter Hickman alive and well, and he’d been busy getting even.

Day 17

I went for a run this morning. My recovery seems to be exponential. Not sure how much of this is just sheer willpower or how much is Nanocells. I can feel myself getting stronger every day that passes. The hyperbaric oxygen treatment seems to have done its job, and now I’m back on track.

As for our friend Mr. Hickman, I’m concerned that he knows so much. His reference to Angel, my companion of artificial intelligence who lives in the Net, is alarming. How he came to have that classified information is one of the top things I need to find out. When I asked Angel, she didn’t seem to know. I say, seem to know, because she doesn’t always tell me everything. It’s one of the more frustrating things about our relationship. But, over time, I’ve learned not to fret too much about it. If she holds back, she’s got a reason for it. That’s one of the things about artificial super intelligence: you can’t understand it because you can’t think like it. It’s like a mouse trying to understand television. It sees it, but it has no idea what it means. That’s where we’re at. I’m just glad Angel has humanity’s best interests at heart. I know this because she’s my friend, and she’s never failed me.

I set my task for the day to follow up on a lead. Hickman has a sister in Hellas Basin, and I want to talk to her. I want to see her in person, and not over video. Some things don’t get conveyed that way, despite all of our technology. That meant I was in for a train ride, and not a short one. Hellas was way down south.

I boarded the Mars train, a pressurized vehicle made for comfort and speed. It had a bar, a restaurant, and even an observation lounge. This is a completely transparent bubble on the top of one of the segmented cars with comfortable furniture under it. I spent most of my time up there during the trip.

It took almost two hours just to get down off of Olympus Mons. The ancient shield volcano is over 600 kilometers in diameter. Although, I couldn’t tell that we were really descending it. The slope is actually quite gentle considering the mountain’s altitude. Once we were down, the train really seemed to pick up speed. I think it was mostly because I could see more interesting terrain. The rock formations whipped past us as the train sped onward across the dusty red surface. The air of Mars barely pressed against the train, an environment equivalent to the vacuum in the hypertube transports back on Earth. Magnetic levitation in the one-third gravity requires less effort and therefore less power.

The distant pale sun set just before we arrived at the Basin, and gave me a fantastic light show of the enormous dome of Hellas. The entire 2300 kilometers of this basin is a conglomeration of dome networks architected into one enormous overarching dome. Even here, and especially here, the R’s of Martian design rule. If any one dome depressurizes, the rest of the domes are isolated and protected. Hellas has the largest population on the planet. Over a half million people work and live here. It is impressive and awe-inspiring.

I checked into a hotel not far from the train station. I’ve recovered quite a bit from my ordeal, but this day of travel wore me out. Tomorrow I’ll go have a private talk with Teresa Hickman about her psychotic brother.

Day 18

Teresa Hickman is an attractive lady, about forty-ish, with long dark hair. We met today at her home in Hellas Basin, well below the surface where the cosmic particles rarely strike. She invited me inside and we sat down in a beautifully furnished living room. It was well lighted from the faux windows, which currently showed an ocean beach with tall waves crashing over rocks. I could even slightly discern the low rumble of the surf in the distance. The effect was quite realistic and soothing. I didn’t let myself relax, though. I was here to do my job, to bring a killer to justice, and this woman had grown up with him.

“Miss Hickman,” I began.

“Please, call me Teresa.” She smiled.

“Teresa, I’m investigating a series of killings on Mars, working in conjunction with the OIS and the Martian Constabulary. I’ve got a few questions that I’d like to ask you about your brother.”

“You mean, is he batshit crazy? The answer is yes.”

“What makes you say that?”

“The government screwed up his brain. He was a nice kid, a normal boy, a good brother. When he got out of their stupid program, he was totally different. Messed up.”

“He was different. How so?”

Teresa paused and looked down at her hands as she wrestled with them. Then she looked up at me and said, “You ever been in a relationship with someone and then one day you realize you didn’t know them at all? It was like that, except I did know him. I knew him since we were little kids. But when he came back, it was like night and day. We both had all the same memories. He was in there somewhere, but everything familiar was gone. He was distant, and we no longer had any connection. It made me incredibly sad.”

“Did you notice anything else unusual about him?”

“Other than everything?” She smirked with irony. “Oh, he hurt me a couple times. He doesn’t seem to have any empathy anymore. Can’t seem to understand that I feel pain too.”

“What did he do?”

“I was making dinner for us and he got angry. Didn’t like the food and threw the plate at my head. When I cried and bled, he just sat there not knowing what my problem was.”

“How long did this go on?”

“About five minutes. I threatened to call the cops on him if he didn’t leave. That was the last time I saw him.”

“Has he attempted to contact you since?”

“No,” she said and waved her hand. But a slight aversion of her eyes told me something else.

“Not at all. Not an email, a voicemail?”

“No.” Again the slight aversion.

“I understand,” I said. I also understood that I would get nothing else out of Teresa, at least nothing truthful. “I think that I’ve used up enough of your time. Thank you for speaking with me.”

We both got up and she saw me to the door.

I want a look at Sister Teresa’s mail, because she’s no saint. Baxter has her mixed up in his plans somehow and I want to know how. But Martian laws won’t allow a look at her communications without good cause, which I did not yet have. There is another way, though. I’m going to need to have a little chat with Angel.

Day 19

My relationship with Angel is weird, rocky, and unpredictable. She came into my life at a time when I needed her most. I’ve spent a great deal of time since, regretting it. She annoys the hell out of me, sends me into dangerous situations, hides important details, and has saved my life more times than I can easily remember. I’d take more than a few bullets for her, and have.

Today was no exception on the annoyance issue. When I connected the optic cable to the small port receptacle in the back of my head, I felt the Net wash around me like a euphoric drug. Hyper-realistic senses flooded my synapses, and brought me into a wonderland world that couldn’t exist anywhere in reality. Some people got addicted. Net-Heads, they called them. Some had even died, staying connected so long that they couldn’t be bothered to eat and drink. I never have that problem because the Net wears me out. All that sensory data takes a lot of work to process, and it’s like too much stuff hitting you for too long.

Today I just wanted a short little chat with Angel. Typically, Angel would know I was coming ahead of time. I would materialize in a jazz bar with this old-time music playing from somewhere out of New Orleans, Earth. But we’d come to an agreement (argument, actually) about how I needed to have some space, in my own head. You see, our rocky relationship started with her having an accomplice drug me and perform surgery on the network interface installed in the back of my skull. Yeah, she kidnapped me and then hijacked my brain. We came to an unusual arrangement that was beneficial to both of us. However, the new hardware configuration let Angel speak her thoughts directly into my brain or take over my body and use it as her own any time she damn well felt like. She was usually pretty polite about it, but a guy needs to have some privacy. So I proposed the concept of a vacation. She agreed, after some argument, that she’d stay out of my head for a while. Against my better judgement, I was about to end my vacation. Baxter Hickman was going to kill some more people, and I needed all the help that I could get.

Since Angel wasn’t expecting me this time, our usual bar haunt was nowhere in sight when I found her. Instead, I appeared on the top of a mountain at night. Angel was there sitting on a ledge, looking down on rivers of glowing lava that flowed through valleys below. She noticed me right away.

“Hi.”

“What you doing?” I asked.

“Watching the Net.” She didn’t stir, didn’t break her gaze at the scene below. Her eyes, reflecting the orange glow of the molten rock, glittered in the darkness.

“I’d like to end my vacation,” I said.

She didn’t respond for a moment. She stared down at the fire below, as though mesmerized by that ancient human drive. But she wasn’t human. She was software and hardware spanning thirty-six worlds, linked by the instant spooky quantum actions of the universe which were now bent to serve as the ultimate communications device.

“Trouble?”

“You could say that. I’ve got a religious psychotic on Mars.”

“Who?”

“His name’s Baxter Hickman. He’s on a rampage. Killed several people in the process.”

Angel continued to watch the flickering movements of the flows below, never breaking her concentration. She probably carried on hundreds of tasks simultaneously, and the conversation we had took only a tiny fraction of her processing power. Since the worlds became connected by the quantum entanglement fields, I’ve watched her evolve and grow into something that almost frightens me. If I didn’t know her well, that is.

“Baxter Hickman… He’s not psychotic in the medical sense. But he is deluded, disturbed, confused, misdirected, and used.”

“Used? How do you figure?”

“I’ve just done some research on his early communications while he was with Mars Corp. The contents, while highly encrypted, were quite unique. It seems God has a direct line to Baxter Hickman.”

“God? Yeah, we’ve met.”

“Or someone masquerading as him.”

“So, psychological manipulation?”

“Very sophisticated. I’m sending a recording to you so you can review it. It might help you anticipate his actions.”

“While you’re at it, I’ve got another person of interest. Teresa Hickman, his sister. I was wondering if you might take a look into her. I think she’s had contact with him, though she denies it.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you there.” Angel looked my way, orange flickering fire dancing around the edges of her eyes.

“Can’t or won’t?”

“Won’t. I’ve looked at her communications. You don’t need them.”

I considered arguing, but I knew it would be useless. Angel considered the information she possessed to be dangerous in the hands of humans. Though she didn’t think I needed that info, I might catch something in it. Cop hunch, or detective intuition. But I’d learned to pick these battles carefully with Angel. And she had thrown me something potentially more useful. If I could pry out some secrets of the twisted brain of Baxter Hickman, I could possibly get a few steps ahead of his next move. Instead of trying to fight an impossible battle with Angel, I said my goodbyes and went on back to the real world. A world of real consequences, though no less strange.

Day 20

I hung around Hellas Basin after talking with Angel. The first thing I did was check out the records she’d sent me. It was almost an exact replay of what I’d experienced in Baxter’s cell. Only Baxter didn’t tell his god to fuck off. He wept, and bowed, and lay prostrate on the floor of his apartment as the projection played out and the sounds of the waves filled his room. Brainwashing at its finest. I wondered, though, about all the events that led up to that point. What they’d done to him in that government program to enhance his intellect. What tortures had he endured, until he was reduced to this groveling thing that I saw in the recording? It was probably best that I didn’t know. I didn’t want to feel empathy for this killer. What I did want to know was who had done this to him, and why. Who was pulling his puppet strings? They were even more dangerous than Baxter, and this job had just gotten a whole lot bigger.

Angel is back in my head again, twenty-four seven. As much as I find it annoying, embarrassing, and invasive, I also find that I’ve missed her. She doesn’t judge me as harshly as I judge myself, and I can learn some of that from her. That’s a great thing here on my second round of life, because the more years I put behind me, the more things I remember that I’d rather not. And with self-replicating nano-cells buzzing through my bloodstream, I’m likely to be around for quite a few more. That is, unless Baxter and company figure out how to stop me.

I had to think about who was manipulating Baxter, but nothing was coming to me. Today, I decided to take a little tour of Hellas Basin, the vast multi-dome complex. I figured it would help me think. I booked myself on a tour with about a dozen tourists. I even wore my vacation shirt that Angel hates so much. She didn’t say so directly, but when I wore it she said, “You’re not wearing that today, are you?” I wore it anyway. I love this shirt.

I arrived at the visitor center on time. It was bustling with people not accustomed to Martian gravity. You could tell by the way they walked. A little too cautious, a little too high-wire act, walking an invisible tightrope of lighter gravity and hoping not to spring off. I’d had a couple of weeks to get used to it, definitely not as attuned as a Martian, but certainly not as funny looking as these tourists.

A woman appeared behind the counter and waved for our attention. “I’m Linda, and I’ll be your tour guide today.” She gave me a short, slightly uncomfortable look. I assume that she was admiring my shirt.

Linda continued, “If you will gather at the end of the building, we will board the dome-tram and get started on our trip around The Basin.”

We all shuffled that direction in a disorderly fashion, as groups of people do in crowds. Double glass doors opened in the way, and we filed into the completely transparent box that was the tram.

“Dome-trams are the major mode of transportation and are built into the design of each of the domes in Hellas Basin. They were used initially to build these great structures and now provide an easy way to travel within and between the domes.”

The tram car gently accelerated under our feet. The gravity rookies all grabbed for support bars around the sides of the traveling glass room. Outside, the Martian sun shone in weakly from the east on the city landscape as we slowly rose above it, gaining speed every second. This dome is probably about a quarter the size of the one over Olympus Mons, but it is still huge. Buildings jutted up from the planet surface below. Lamps attached to the outer shell of the dome also lit the city from above to give the equivalent illumination of a nearly sunny day on Earth.

“The dome we are currently in is a foundation dome and rests directly on the surface of Mars. At the one hundred degree apex of each foundation dome, a bubble dome connects to it.” Linda gestured out the transparent tram car.

As the car carried us higher and higher along the inner curve of the dome, I could see the other side more clearly. In the distance, the spherical shape of a bubble connected at the other side. The lower third of the dome was dark, while the upper two-thirds was brightly lit, filled with a network of buildings and sky bridges. The tram reached the apex of the dome’s center point and began descending down the other side toward a familiar circular structure that I’d seen too many times lately, an airlock. The car slowed smoothly and we docked.

The double glass doors parted and we walked directly into yet another tram car. There was no noticeable change in air pressure during this, which I was thankful for. We all migrated to the front of the car to look out over the large bubble dome in front of us.

“The lower third of each bubble dome is below the ground level. This contains all of the equipment necessary to provide power, air, and other utilities. Each dome is completely self-sufficient, in line with the three R’s of Martian architecture. Redundant, resilient, and reparable.”

Those three R’s were slightly different words, but lined up basically with what I’d heard in The Tubes. As we approached the apex of this bubble dome, something got brighter and brighter and dazzled my eyes. I was about to ask Linda what it was, but she beat me to it.

“Ahead you’ll see one of the large sun mirrors used to distribute light through the dome complex. A cubical mirror sits on top of each bubble dome within the structure which carries light from the outer edges into the interior domes. This reduces the need for artificial lighting and power requirements.”

It made sense to use the available light of Mars, and concentrate it using mirrors. Especially since I already knew about the agricultural domes that existed in Hellas Basin.

“What about radiation?” asked a man in his forties, with slightly greying sideburns.

“The domes are made of radiation-resistant ceramic alloys that reduce Martian radiation exposure by sixty percent. This is approximately at Earth normal levels. It’s a relatively new technology and was not used in older Martian architecture.”

We transferred through several domes in the next two hours, and I got to see some of the agricultural domes. We walked through small forests and flower gardens where birds flew freely through the air and small animals scurried among the bushes. For the first time since arriving on Mars, I almost forgot that I was in an artificially created world.

As we continued our journey to the top of the dome structure in a seemingly never-ending series of tram car arcs and airlock transfers, it all became sort of routine, and I started to lose my initial awe at the structure. I suppose after a few months here it would all seem perfectly normal and boring. But at first, it was quite overwhelming to realize that these structures had all been man-made and fitted together like worlds in a Martian universe placed into a large impact crater created billions of years ago.

“This is the capital dome of Hellas Basin,” Linda announced with some flair, as we made another airlock transfer. Before us, we could see stately buildings of white and Martian-red concrete. Beautiful architecture spread out everywhere across the dome. Statues of important persons stood, and flags wavered in an artificial breeze. Parks with grass, flowers, streams and ponds dotted the landscape between bureaucracy. People milled about, enjoying the parks, or marched purposefully along the sidewalks between buildings.

Linda droned on about the political buildings and pointed out some of the prominent ones, describing the purpose of each. I tuned her out and just enjoyed the scenery, which you could see better now as we gained altitude along the dome wall. I’d almost forgotten about all the stress of the case, the close call I’d had in Baxter’s cell, the existence of yet another adversary.

And then the dome exploded.

Day 20.1

The capital dome shook violently in an explosion that rocked under our feet, throwing the tram passengers against the glass walls to cling desperately to the handrails. Some of them held on, some of them fell to the floor scrambling as they tried to get back up. A grey-haired woman in her fifties screamed in terror as she was thrown sideways. I reached out quickly and stopped her from impacting the wall. A short, squat man at the other end of the car was not so lucky. His head cracked on the glass, leaving a bloody smear behind as he slumped to the floor. The tram continued to rock back and forth until there was a loud metallic snap from above. The front end of the vehicle dropped suddenly and we all slid into a pile of bodies at the narrow front end.

People screamed in terror, and some groaned in pain. I was pressed against one of the transparent walls and looking down at the ground about two hundred meters below. This end of the tram pointed down and swung back and forth like a pendulum, supported by whatever remained of the tram track that attached to the other end. Below, I saw the trees swaying in a wind that blew straight for a massive jagged hole in the side of the dome, and I saw something that I won’t forget in a dozen lifetimes. Several human figures flying through the air with other debris out into the red Martian landscape like leaves in a hurricane.

The more lively and terrified of us flailed frantically as they tried to extricate themselves from the human pile. I heard them wounding the already wounded as they pushed and struggled.

“Stop it! Don’t move.” I yelled out. “You’re hurting people.”

The struggling ceased, but the moans of the injured continued. I couldn’t tell how many were hurt, but I figured it was about half of them.

“I can’t breathe, we’re smashed in here,” a woman cried out.

“We’re going to get out of here. We’re going to work together and get out of here. Linda, does this tram have its own life support?”

There was no reply, and finally a man said, “She’s right next to me. Her eyes are closed… oh my god… she might be… no, she seems to be still breathing.”

“Alright, we’ve got to get off our wounded. Everyone that’s on top and still able to move, use the hand rails to pull yourselves up the wall.”

I could hear grunting and motion from above and some weight pressing down. People protested as someone invariably stepped on someone else in the process. But then I felt the weight lighten some and was able to sit up and look around as two other persons got off my back. I looked up and saw that four people had shinnied up the hand rails on the sides of the car. They’d found purchase for their feet on supports where the rails were attached to the glass alloy. I stood up out of the pile and about three others did with me. This created more space on the cramped floor area that had been the narrow nose of the tram. I could see five people injured laying on that floor. Two were not moving. The squat man with the head injury, and our knowledgeable tour guide, Linda. A young red-haired woman holding her arm had likely broken it during the fall. A middle-aged man lay sprawled on the floor with a leg twisted at an unnatural angle, and an elderly woman who held a hand to her bleeding forehead was still conscious.

I looked down at my beautiful shirt and tore a strip from the tail of it. I bound it carefully around the woman’s brow to stop the bleeding. The other two guys left standing tended to the others. I joined the one looking at the man with the broken leg. There was no external bleeding that we could see, but it was an obvious fracture in the lower leg. He moaned in pain and tried not to move the leg, but did so anyway as if he could not help it.

I was not about to go about trying to set the bones straight with traction. Last thing I needed was a stray fragment of bone to sever an artery or break the skin. I looked around for anything that might serve as a splint. I remembered the brochures that they’d given us for the tour, a thick booklet with maps of the domes and attractions. It was still stuffed in my back pocket.

“Everyone toss me your tour brochures,” I said.

About five booklets dropped around us and I started pulling out the pages and forming them delicately around the man’s leg. I then removed my shoelaces and tied them snugly around the pages to create the worlds’ worst splint, but hopefully it would be enough to keep the leg from being damaged further. It seemed to do the job as I elevated and rested it over the lap of our unconscious tour guide. She looked very white and didn’t move; her breathing was shallow. There wasn’t much I could do for her. I checked the short little guy next. No breathing, no pulse. He was gone. His head injury must have been very severe.

A silence passed over the car then as I stood looking down for a long moment at the man. In a brief moment he went from living to dead, with no warning. I’d seen it too many times.

The swinging of the car slowed to a barely perceptible motion. I looked down and saw that the wind had died out now that the air was totally gone. The air in the car would hold only a short time. There were a lot of us in this confined space, and none of us knew what the emergency procedures were. The only person who knew that lay on the floor, and she wasn’t going to be of any help now.

Day 20.2

I had five injured persons, a bunch of scared people, and not much air left. We had to do something quickly. Our wristbands had network connection, but data wasn’t flowing. Which told me that everyone in Hellas Basin was trying to communicate at once and the system was overloaded. I could already feel the air in the tram getting stuffy. Lots of fear equals lots of breathing. We needed a solution in short order.

There was one thing I knew about Martian architecture. Three R’s. They may have let the comm system get overloaded, but air was a high-priority item. Inside the dome, every building had its own self-contained pressurized system and supply of oxygen. Also, I could already see people down below rushing around in Mars suits to and fro. There had to be suit locker locations in the dome.

I examined the tram car. The walls were glass alloy. The floor, now a wall, was the same. But the ceiling, now another wall, was made of metal panels. And sure enough, one of them in the middle was labeled in red with “emergency”.

“Open up that emergency panel.” I pointed at the panel.

The four guys standing on the handrails above us had a hard time getting to the panel because of the orientation of the tram car. After a few minutes, they figured out a way. Two of them on opposite sides of the car leaned up against each other, and a third climbed up them and popped the panel open. It swung down and clanged against another panel. Inside, we could see the gleaming white of Mars suits.

I don’t mind telling you, I was mightily relieved. I’d rather die from a bullet, or an explosion. Sucking on vacuum or suffocating on carbon dioxide is a special kind of hell that I never want to visit again.

There were fifteen suits in the locker and twelve of us. Thank God our tour guide hadn’t overbooked the maximum recommended tram capacity. We got the suits on the wounded first. I even stuffed our poor fallen passenger, the short dead guy, into one. It was the best way to keep us all from looking at his pallid blue skin. I figured it would cut down on the panic some. Linda groaned as we got her into her suit. She was still very groggy. I hoped that the good air from the suit would help revive her. Next, we took turns climbing the hand rails to let the others get into their suits on the only available floor space. Moxie generators on the back of the suits convert Martian C02 to oxygen, which got mixed with a canister of nitrogen. The nitrogen is rebreathed. The oxygen gets replenished as long as the suit has battery power.

Linda sat up and I heard her voice on the suit channel ask, “What happened?”

“There was an explosion and now there’s a big hole in the side of the dome.”

Linda struggled to stand, but I put a gloved hand on the arm of her white suit. “Just stay put until you get a little more stabilized.”

She nodded and looked out the glass at the hole in the dome in the distance. “The E-seal didn’t deploy.”

“Emergency seal?”

“Yes, the dome is divided into sections. Each section has an E-Seal device. It’s like a large inflatable that blows up and drifts into the hole. The explosion must have damaged it. It doesn’t look like it fired.”

I looked out at the dome where the jagged hole opened out into the orange Martian sky. The explosion had ripped a chunk of the tram rail right outside, along with the glass alloy of the dome. Looking carefully at the undamaged areas of the dome, I could see little boxes attached at large intervals to the inner surface.

“Those little boxes there on the inside of the dome. That what you’re talking about?”

“Yes, the E-seals are inside of those.”

“So what good are they if the seal protecting the section gets blown out?”

“Then an adjacent seal is supposed to deploy.”

“Definitely didn’t,” I said. “It might be hours before they can get to it, and we’ve got wounded. Is there an emergency exit on this tram?”

“Behind the suit locker is a hatch,” she said. I’d known Linda for less than a day now, but her face looked really tired to me.

“You close your eyes and get some rest. I’m gonna see if I can do something about our situation.”

My mom used to tell me sometimes the best thing you can do is nothing. I was never very good at listening to her advice. A quick climb up the handrails and a boost from one of my fellow passengers got me into the suit locker. I pushed the three remaining suits to the side and found the handle for the hatch release in the back.

“All the air is going to swoosh out of here. So stay in your suits until I come back and get you.”

Then I pulled the hatch lever and immediately regretted it.

Day 20.3

Opening the hatch was a huge mistake. The air pressure inside was about a hundred times what it was outside. I went out with the hatch being the only thing I could hold onto. And the hatch swung out as if a large angry giant had just kicked the door. I realized the problem as soon as it happened, but I couldn’t let go. A three-hundred-foot drop to the floor of the dome greeted me below. All of this happened in the slow motion of such things that threaten your life in mere seconds. In a last-ditch effort to stay with the tram, I crooked my elbow through the hatch handle and hugged it tight.

The hatch swung on its hinges and slammed full force into the tram, sending the door bouncing back from whence it came. My head rang like a bell with the impact, but I somehow managed to hang on, even though my elbow felt like it had been dislocated. The large hatch was heading for a close again, and I was in its mouth. I did only what I could and put my legs out to stop it from crushing me. I sprained an ankle doing that.

So now, hanging far above the floor from the hatch with my good hand, my right arm dangling at my side, and my left ankle pulsing in pain and swelling larger every second, I considered my next brilliant move. Get to the E-seal. The only thing I had going for me was Martian gravity, and I was an Earthling. I climbed the hatch door and found that I could reach the rear of the tram, which was now the top. I scrambled onto it and lay there for a minute breathing hard. I may only weigh about eighty pounds here, but I was wearing about another sixty in Mars suit, and breathing canned air. Not exactly optimum for Olympic exertion.

The tram track above bolted into the curvature of the glass-alloy dome — a thick monorail about twelve inches by six, made of some light carbon fiber material. I stood up and grabbed it, hooking my fingers over the top edge. My right elbow was not at all happy with this, but I pushed that to the back of my mind. I was good at dealing with pain; I’d come back from the dead. Despite the wonders of nano-cell reconstruction, it hurts like hell. Pain is an old acquaintance. We aren’t friends by a long-shot, but we know how to deal with each other. It hurts me, and I grit my teeth a lot.

Hand-over-hand along the rail I went, dangling in nonexistent wind. Actually nonexistent air. Martian atmosphere is extremely thin. There is nothing to breathe out there except thin traces of carbon dioxide. That’s the stuff you breathe out, not in. And even if you could make use of it, you couldn’t get anything at that low of pressure. Your lungs would just bleed-out. Thinking about the lack of air kept me from thinking about my aching hands and fingers, and the sharp pain in my right elbow. I made good time at first, but slowed down.

I couldn’t do it anymore without a rest. So I swung my feet up and locked them around the rail. That gave my hands a break. It was cold as hell outside the suit, and the heat exchanger had no problem keeping the suit temperature down. Despite this, my suit was full of sweat. I could feel clothing sticking to me. The helmet kept trying to fog up on me, but some defroster device whisked it away before it became a problem. I clung to the rail like a spider, and looked up at the pale Martian sky.

Another five minutes of rest, and then I went at it again. It took about twenty minutes to get to the jagged hole in the dome where the rail twisted outside into Mars. I climbed right out onto the dome and clung to the broken edge so I wouldn’t slide off. The dome had broken in big squares like safety glass. The edge wasn’t sharp, thankfully.

I made my way down to the E-Seal device, which was a box about a meter square. A red light blinked on a control panel on its side. I examined the panel for a moment. The readout described a communication error with the main computer. The severed wiring leading from the side of the box might have had something to do with that. I navigated the menu on the control and found a manual deploy. The simple computer warned me that I had about sixty seconds to remove myself from the vicinity.

I considered this. Would it be better to be inside the dome or outside? I couldn’t make it too far on the rail in sixty seconds, and my monkey-swinging muscles were just about shot. It’d be better to be outside on the dome where I could just sit tight until someone came and got me. So I triggered the deployment, and scurried back outside on the dome. I crawled away from the edge of the hole carefully. I didn’t want to slip and start sliding down the glass. I was a little down from the top center of the dome, so I made my way as fast as I could for the apex. I got about halfway there when the dome shook underneath me.

I spread myself flat and made myself as big as I could against the surface to maximize contact. It worked, and I stayed pretty much put, with just a little sliding. I was there on the dome and intact. I sat up and looked down at the hole. It was completely filled with a large orange balloon about fifty feet in diameter, and seemed to be doing the job, a giant cork in the bottle.

I lay back and sighed. I’d done it. I’m sure someone is going to explain how unnecessary it was for me to risk my life and fix their dome. How Martians would have come to the rescue and gotten to it eventually. But I had twelve passengers in a tram that needed rescue, and we had wounded. And besides, I’m a fixer. I can’t see something broken and do nothing.

Day 24

I seriously needed a day off. My little stunt of crawling around on the dome like a bug cost me some downtime. The next day, I just lounged around a very fancy hotel room with my foot buried under a bag of ice and propped up on a cushy ottoman. My elbow is fine. When the emergency crews picked me up on the dome later, one of the medics took a look at it. This guy was a magician. He took my arm and moved it in a couple ways, then bent my elbow so my hand went up to my shoulder, and gave my wrist a quick twist. I felt it pop, and then abracadabra—no more pain! That guy should get a medal too.

Speaking of which, that’s why I’ve got an expensive room today. For my acts of stupidity and bravery, the Mayor of Hellas Basin has decided to give me the Lovell award, named after the Apollo thirteen mission commander. I’m plotting how I might be able to skip the public ceremony scheduled sometime next week.

I spent that day sitting on my ass, but I did keep busy. There was a lot more detective work to do now. Somebody blew up that dome. Broderick and his team have already been busy and on the scene. The explosion was caused by a rocket-propelled explosive launched from one of the many parks. Video surveillance shows that the device was placed earlier by a man matching Baxter’s description. Later it was triggered remotely to explode against the dome wall. Security all across Mars has been ratcheted up, because Baxter declared war on the Martian government by attacking the capital.

Broderick said the explosive came from the mines. Specifically, Mesopotamia. Not the ancient home of Sumerians. This Mesopotamia is a mineral-rich region directly east of Hellas Planitia. The Martians have dug deep into the ground there to provide resources for their ongoing city construction. There still is no evidence that Baxter has any accomplices. He appears to be a lone wolf. And that means that he had to have recently been there or is still hanging around. I decided to go take a look. But not as Martin Coswell. I became my old undercover character, Ben Chase, for a few days and got a job in the mines.

So after a day to recoup and rest my swollen ankle, yesterday I took a train over to Mesopotamia. There aren’t any domes there, just a bunch of holes in the ground, surrounded by a few maintenance buildings and garages for ground vehicles. There is a large column of smoke coming out of the ground from one of the holes. When I inquired, I was told that this is the ore refinery where the ore is smelted down.

I found my way to the human resources office inside a grubby underground building. There I met a grim-faced man who looked at me with disapproval. The man was dressed in dirty coveralls, the dirt having the distinctive red tinge of the Martian topsoil.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Chase, we just can’t hire you if you don’t have an ID.”

“And there’s no other…arrangement…that we could come to on that?” I said in a low voice, out of earshot of passersby. The desk of the man in the dusty clothing was nudged up against a common hallway, creating a makeshift check-in counter. The people walking by had tired faces, and similar dusty accoutrement.

“Possibly…” The man grinned, splitting his lips back over grimy teeth. A gold eyetooth gleamed, out of place in the midst of the unkempt man’s mouth. “If you were to make a….let’s say a donation.”

I nodded. “Of course. I’d be happy to.” I reached into my pocket, but the man raised a cautionary hand and stopped me.

“Not here, friend. Too many eyes.” He tipped his head toward the side and I looked up where he’d indicated. A small black box was screwed to the wall, complete with winking red light and lens sticking out of it.

“I understand.” I considered the man and decided that he was appropriately corrupt. Thankfully, that was to my advantage.

“Here’s the form to fill out for employment.” Grimy-man pushed a tablet at me, and I set to work filling it out with as much false information as I could conjure up. My new name is Ben Chase: a name I often used as an alias back in my PI days on Earth. It’s as comfortable to me as an old shoe, and I slipped it on just as easily, complete with all of the old history that I’ve invented for him over the years of use.

I finished the application and pushed the tablet back across the gritty surface of the desk. The man smiled back at me disturbingly, revealing even more of his disgusting teeth. He took the tablet without looking at it. “Everything seems to be in order here, sir,” he said. “If you’ll just follow me back to the supply room, we can get you your gear so you’ll be ready for the morning crew.”

We squeezed through the small gap between the desk and the wall, and walked back into a dimly lit room covered with hardhats, canvas packs, and harnesses. The unpleasant man stuck out a calloused hand, palm up, in the universal gesture of pay-the-greedy-man-now. I placed a stack of plastic Martian bills on his hand. The man examined them and then wiggled the tips of his fingers that stuck out longer than the bills. I wasn’t playing that game.

“It’s all I’ve got,” I explained.

The man frowned. “I’m trying hard to do you a favor here, bud. But this isn’t quite enough to make me bend the rules for ya.”

“I’m out of work, remember?”

“Aye. That you are. Tell you what. Promise you’ll give me half your first week’s pay and we’ll call it even.”

I wasn’t going to be there more than a week anyway, and I wasn’t planning on giving this worm any more money at that time. So there was no reason at all to haggle over something that was never going to happen.

“Yeah, sure. If that’s what I gotta do to get a job.”

“Well, you got one now, mister. Just hope you’re cut out for some hard work, cause that’s all we got around here. This ain’t no white collar kind o’ job here, that’s for sure.” He cackled and his laugh was just as unpleasant as the look of his ugly yellow-orange teeth.

I left this irritating man, and went looking for a place to stay for the week. The only room that I could find available was tiny, grubby, and run down. Not at all like the palace that I stayed in yesterday. The lights flicker and dim occasionally, and must share a circuit with too many others. The air is stuffy, but doesn’t seem in danger of suffocating me. For that I can at least be thankful. I keep my canary near me by the bed, though, just in case. The canary is a Martian device that monitors O2 and CO2 levels. It will set off a godawful alarm if it finds anything out of tolerance. The expensive models scan for toxic compounds. I opted for that one. When something is trying to kill me, especially if it’s the air I’m breathing, I want to know about it. Saving a few dollars won’t do me any good if I’m dead. The canary is staying silent and the little yellow box sits on the end table blinking a green light that’s supposed to give me a sense of calm. I’m anything but, tonight. Anyway, I’m beat, and I’ve got a long day of hard work ahead of me tomorrow.

Day 26

This morning, I grabbed a quick shower before heading in for my first day on the new job. The porcelain tiles have a red grit ingrained into them. I bet no amount of scrubbing will ever bring them back to normal, not that much effort seems to have been made lately. I got dressed in the work clothes I was given yesterday, grabbed a quick bite of food from the fridge, and picked up the gear bag. The bag has some unusual tools that I haven’t seen before. There was also a length of rope, a battered first aid kit, and a CO2 conversion mask. This last little gadget is the difference between life and death in the Martian atmosphere.

I left the apartment and showed back up at McCarthy’s office—the hole in the wall with the desk on the edge of the hall.

McCarthy glanced at his watch, and frowned. “Cutting it close there, Chase.”

I just shrugged, and resisted an urge to tell him that for 500 bucks a week he’d been lucky I showed up at all, considering what I was likely in for. I kept my mouth shut, though, not because I’ve got the slightest aversion to speaking my mind, but because I needed this to work so I could find Baxter. That is, if he was even still here.

McCarthy led me to the double doors at the end of the hall. A large red sign read “Co2 Hazard, masks required.” He grabbed the converter mask clipped to his hip pocket, and put it over his face. “The dioxide leaks in from the materials, and you can pass out if you don’t have a mask on,” he explained.

I dug the mask out of my bag and slipped it over my face. I could hear the whine of a fan spin up inside of it, and felt a light breeze against my lips. The mask covers only the nose and mouth, and leaves the rest of the face open to the outside. Somewhere in the device two oxygen atoms separated from a carbon atom, creating free breathable oxygen. This setup will let you breathe on the Martian surface, but the lack of pressure would have your insides boiling out in a few minutes without a suit to hold everything together. Mars suits have to be custom made. They use mechanical pressure and aren’t air tight. A technological blend of nano fibers and electro-plastics, that when powered, tighten against the body to prevent decompression. When men first arrived on Mars, the atmospheric pressure was 1000 times thinner than Earth normal. Fifty years of terraforming had brought that pressure up to 100 mb, but they’d never achieve the 1000 millibars of Earth in the low gravity of Mars.

McCarthy opened the doors and I felt the air whoosh in behind. The air pressure was lower in the chamber in front of us, so we had to process through a small airlock—my least favorite thing about living and working away from Earth. We spent about twenty minutes depressurizing and looking at each other. There was nothing to talk about while the life-giving air leaked out of the room in measured slowness. When the doors in front of us finally opened, the remaining pressure difference was released. Again, the air whooshed out from behind me and I felt my ears pop. The mining area pressure was maintained slightly lower than Earth normal, which doesn’t boil your blood, but sure does feel awful.

The chamber was a cavern in rock with smooth walls, and I guessed that it had once been a lava tube, kind of like the ones that were used for the farming at Olympus. This one was huge though, and looked to be almost three hundred yards wide. I couldn’t see how long it extended, but it could have gone on for miles.

“This is where we load the ores into the processors,” he shouted to be heard, and waved his hands toward towering hoppers that belched red dust into the air from their tops.

A short man with a full red beard approached. It was impossible to know if the color of the beard was due to the dust that permeated everything, or if it was his natural color. He nodded at McCarthy and then reached out and shook my hand.

“Van Desoto.”

Desoto’s grip was firm and he looked me in the eye. I didn’t see anything that bothered me. The man seemed confident and sure of himself. His face gave the appearance of hiding nothing behind the dirt and the hair.

“You’ll be working with Van today until we figure out where to put you permanently.” McCarthy grinned a smile that was not meant to be friendly, then turned away and walked back through the airlock doors.

“A bit of an ass, isn’t he?” I said.

“I see that didn’t get by you,” Desoto replied.

“Sort of like being hit by a hammer.”

Van Desoto grinned back. “Aye. That is the truth of it.” He turned and motioned me to follow him deeper into the converted lava tube. “Come on, I’ll introduce ya to the guys you’ll be working with.”

We walked along past the deafening machinery cah-chunk cah-chunking, sending their plumes of dust into the air high above our heads. Further in, conveyor belts loaded with rocks and soil rolled along, feeding the huge processors. Beyond that, six-wheeled loaders with scoops fed the line. The vehicles dumped their cargo into funnel-shaped chutes that guided the contents onto the belts.

“The loaders are automated,” Desoto shouted over the noise, waving a hand at the driverless machines as they passed by. I eyed them as they traveled up a ramp that led out of a tunnel in the ground. Desoto followed that path, sticking to the side of the tunnel.

“Make sure to stay out of their way. They have crude programming. They’ll run you over and not even notice.”

The six-wheeled vehicles towered over us as they passed. I could feel the tonnage rumbling along, vibrating through my feet. Desoto was right; you’d be just so much jelly sandwich under those wheels.

Desoto pointed toward a small platform attached to a single rail that ran along the side of the tunnel. As soon as we sat down on the seats that were bolted to the thing, it lurched ahead with a jar, and accelerated us down the tunnel. The trip was rough, and slung us hard to the left and right like a cheap rollercoaster ride at a budget carnival. I held tight to the frail-looking handrail that framed in the seats. If the metal gave way I was going to grab Desoto and take him with me.

The cart finally slowed, and jerked to a halt well past where I’d seen the last loader. It was quieter here. The barrage of noise was now distant, and we could talk almost normally.

“You’ll be working the drills today.” Desoto charged ahead at a no-nonsense pace. There was a sudden blast and the floor of the tunnel lurched underfoot for a moment.

I caught myself against the wall of the tunnel to stop from falling.

“What the hell was that?” I asked.

Desoto grinned. “You’ll be drilling the holes that we put the explosives in.”

“Great.”

“Ever been around explosives?”

“Enough to know to stay far away from them.”

“That’s the idea. You’ll be given plenty of notice of when and where to clear out.”

“Couldn’t this be automated?”

“They tried it, but there were too many mistakes. Some things are just too complicated for machines.”

Bullshit, Angel suddenly cut into my thoughts.

Don’t get all huffy. He’s never met anything like you, I told her.

I continued following Desoto until we caught up to a group who walked along the tunnel. The four were covered in brown dust, head to foot. Here, below the ever-present red of the surface, the rock had given way to a light brown or sometimes a chalky white.

The group stopped when they realized Desoto was behind them.

“What’s up, boss?” A large man with shoulders as wide as a bus gave me a dubious look-over.

“The usual, Sledge. This here’s Chase. McCarthy’s sending him down to get ground up.” Desoto smirked.

The others chuckled, and I noticed the tone of one of them was higher. I searched the jawline around the mask, and identified finer bone structure and refined features. It was difficult to tell with all the dust and protective clothing.

“He don’t look like he’s cut out for this,” she said.

“Neither were you, Gemma.” Desoto grinned at her.

“Alright.” Sledge grunted. “We ain’t going to get shit done today, baby-sittin’ a rookie, but there ain’t no help for it. Com’on. We’ll get you to drillin’. Hope you’re stronger than that gut on you looks.”

Raucous laughter erupted from the other three, and they continued on down the tunnel. Desoto followed on my tail. The soil had been freshly scraped here. Ahead there was a rugged wall of rock and the slight smell of something acrid. Explosives.

Sledge led me to a spot on the wall. The man examined the rock for a long moment.

“You gotta get a feel for the rock.” He looked at me to see if I was listening. “And then you choose your spot. See how this crack runs down here where the color doesn’t match? You wanna sink your hole right about midway. It’ll be easier drillin’, and when we trigger the blast, it should split it wide open in here. Give ’em his drill, Stumpy.”

One of the other two men, a short guy, about two feet shorter than me, held out a four-foot drilling tool and dropped it into my hands. The thing was heavy, and I grunted when I caught the weight of it, but managed not to drop it. Stumpy looked a little surprised. I’d apparently just passed some sort of litmus test.

“We’ll see how you hold up after eight hours of drillin’ with that thing.” Sledge laughed roughly, a gravel sound that slid out of somewhere deep in his gut.

“How’s it work?” I asked.

Sledge grabbed the drill from me, and slung it easily up against the spot he’d indicated earlier on the rock. “Push it into the rock hard, pull the lever here, and hold on like the devil. Thing’s powered by a hicap, so watch yourself. It’s got a ton of power, and it’ll heat up enough to burn if you aren’t wearing gloves.” He held the drill out and I took it back. I pushed the drilling tip back into the rock where Sledge had put it. When I pulled the trigger, the drill tried to twist violently in my grip. It bucked like a bull in my hands, but I held on and continued to push it into the rock as the dust poured out of the hole and sent clouds into the air. The sound of metal grinding on stone filled the chamber and drowned out everything else.

Sledge cuffed me on the side of the head, and I let go of the trigger.

“Don’t forget to use your ear plugs if you don’t want to be stone deaf by the end of the day.” Sledge grinned.

I wanted to do some cuffing of my own, but I just dug in my tool pack, found the two small orange plugs, and stuffed them firmly into my ears. The sounds of my own heartbeat thudded dully. I thought I’d toss this guy a curve ball and see if he knew anything about Baxter.

“So where’s Baxter?” I asked, hearing my voice too loudly from the inside of my skull.

Sledge’s voice came across muffled. “Died right here in this tunnel. Dumbshit didn’t clear far enough away when the explosives were triggered. Blew his ass right up.” Sledge shook his head slowly, a serious look on his face. “Didn’t make no sense at all.” He shook his head some more and turned, “No sense at all.”

I stood for a moment. Oh yes, it does make sense, but only in the right context. Then I went back to drilling.

Day 26.1

Back in the shower of the dingy room, I let the hot water pour over my head, and watched it run down the drain in a dirty red-brown river. Every muscle in my body hurt, and the left side of my back ached right where it connected to the hip. Soon a bump the size of a golf ball will balloon up and I’ll toss and turn all night. I was familiar with this routine. Sometimes it happens even if all I do is pick up a pair of socks. But this work is sure to bring it on. It would all be worth it if I could find Baxter. That would stick something unpleasant in Broderick’s craw, really throw a wrench in the purity of Martians. Humans were fallible, even Martian ones.

Human. The word doesn’t really apply to me anymore. I’m not exactly human, not since my entire body was reconstructed by nano-machines. I’m certainly as fallible as humans are. That much, and more, we have in common, but I’m removed from them in a lot of ways—on the outside looking in. That doesn’t mean that I want to be alone, and tonight was no exception. I needed food and the feeling of people around. I dressed and headed out for some dinner at a restaurant that I’d seen on the way to the mines. It was built up against the side of the dome at the western gateway where the trains left to various parts of Mars.

The place was crowded and not at all like the Barsoom. There was apparently zero dress-code here. A mishmash of people of all types mingled and chattered, drinks in hand. Tables scattered about in an irregular array in the center of the room, and booths bordered a glass wall on the west side looking out into the barren wastes of the Martian sunset. No one met me asking how many for dinner, and no signs marked, “Wait to be Seated”. I selected a booth by the glass and settled in with a sigh as my back relaxed into the cushion of the bench.

I looked around at the crowd, trying to guess who the people were. My years in the investigation field told me things. Some of these people worked in the mines. I could see gruff, well-muscled men in a group back in one corner slouching over their beers, keeping to themselves. And yet, there were also office workers, lawyers, and accountants. I caught snatches of their conversations as they complained and bitched about their work, or passionately debated political issues. Or just talking about the guy or girl across the room that they wanted to bring home to their bed. Alcohol is a miracle drug for the PI, as long as it is administered liberally to the ones that I’m learning about and not to myself.

I thought about what Sledge said about Baxter dying in the mine. That was complete bullshit. I don’t know what kind of game Baxter is playing, but he isn’t dead. I’m certain of that. He’s messing with me, stringing me along, distracting me until he strikes somewhere else.

A waitress came by and I ordered a beer. She was busy and looked a little tired, but she still managed a smile. I didn’t miss that my age-beaten face had slipped right by her notice. The fact is, I don’t have to look my age. I could get the gene treatments. But that would be a lie, and that’s not my style. Sure, I’ve got a mug that resembles the surface bark of a redwood, but I’m Martin Coswell. To change that would be to pretend that I’m someone else.

The waitress returned with the beer and I thanked her. She moved off with a tray of six other drinks weighing down her tiny arm, and I wondered how she managed it. How did she make it through each day grubbing out a minimum wage, dealing with crabby customers, and going home with aching arms and feet? People did what they needed to survive—just like the men in the mines that I worked with today. They carve out a living in the depths of their world, risk their lives for a lousy grand a week. If they make it home alive to pay their bills and have a little left over for a couple of beers, they count themselves lucky.

I don’t think that’s how life is supposed to be. Ninety percent survival and ten percent living. Hell, it’s more like five percent if you think about all the time you spend doing things you’d rather not. How did it get like this? Is “The Man” that all-powerful? Who duped the masses into this? Or is it just the law of nature? Some law of thermodynamics that requires X amount of work for Y amount of living, and the math just ends up putting the bulk of the human race in debt. It doesn’t seem to matter how much technology improved. Most people still spend their entire lives working for the dollars to survive. Well, the people who haven’t given up, that is, or the ones running the show, the ones with the wealth and the power.

Maybe professor psycho Follet hadn’t been totally nuts. He’d wanted to improve the human condition, but he’d been willing to build it by enslaving Afterlifers. If you have to improve your lot by making someone else’s worse, it’s not a solution. But there has to be a way. I don’t know what it is. For a split second I had one of those moments where I felt that I was on the verge of solving something that was beyond me. Like I was in a dream and I just worked out some impossible equation, and then I woke up, and the mystery of the dream logic had been lost.

A conversation caught my ears and I looked nonchalantly in the direction of the current speaker. A gaunt-faced man of respectable build stood at the bar talking with two other men. The man had a greying beard and a distinctive way of speaking, where he enunciated each word very precisely and gave it his own personal flair.

“That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying if they want us down there in the mines when those explosives go off, we need to be paid a lot more than we’re getting.” The man’s face became severe, causing it to become even more drawn with lines. His hooked nose looked like the beak of a predatory bird about to rip the flesh from one of his audience.

“And I’m saying that we don’t have any choice. If we say we’re not going to do it, they’ll just fire us and bring in some rookies and train them. They’ve done it before.”

Their voices lowered, and I could no longer overhear their conversation. I got up and settled myself on an empty bar stool next to the old man and ordered a scotch.

The man’s wiry companion replied. “That’s why they outlawed the unions on Mars. It gave them absolute power over us, and now we don’t matter. We’re expendable.”

The old man leaned while seated unsteadily on the barstool and hovered his greying beard above my arm. He propped himself up with an elbow on the bar. “The key to life is learning how to not give a shit. Secretly, you can give one, but you should never let life know that you do.”

“That’s some mighty-fine advice.” I grinned back at him lopsidedly, feigning drunkenness.

“Let me tell ya somethin’ else, son. You might be tempted to care, but the moment you do, you open yourself up to a can of whoopass the likes of which you should never know. Don’t fall for it. Don’t do it. If you just keep cooling your heels and keeping chill, pretending with all your might that whatever happens can’t touch you, calamity will just pass you by, and your oblivious heart will just pay a never-you-mind without even sayin’ a howd-ya-do.”

“Sounds like you’ve seen some hard times,” I said.

“You don’t know the half of it.” He coughed loudly into his elbow and then began again. “When I first got here on Mars, I lost everything to a dust storm. I scrimped and saved for ten years to pay for my gear. Gone. Wiped out in the space of an hour.”

“That’s some bad luck,” I said.

“Bad luck? Ain’t such a thing here on Mars. No sir, it’s the way of it. That’s how it goes here. You get knocked down and you stay there. You learn your place and you go to your corner and do as you’re told. If you doesn’t then you maybe have an accident, and then you just don’t get in the way no more. That is how it is.”

“And you’ve known some people that got in the way,” I prompted.

The man lowered his voice another notch. “Aye, that I have, son. That I have.”

There was a loud commotion in the back by the dart board game, and two big men about my own size were throwing fists at each other, and a circle of other people surrounded them. They got about four exchanges in before a slew of six bouncers streamed into the room and dragged them out the door. I noted how efficient they were and how the entire bar settled right back down as if nothing had happened. This smacked as being a common occurrence. Everything returned to normal, except that the old man and his debater had ducked out during the commotion and were nowhere to be seen. But I had some interesting clues to follow up on now. I thought that it was all over with, but then one of the security guys walked up behind me.

“Couldn’t help but notice you talking with old Laurence there. You’d be better off not listening to that crazy old bastard. It’ll bring you nothing but trouble.” The man had dark hair and wore a serious look that bordered on hostile.

“Whah you mean?” I continued my drunken feint. “Why you not like him?” I drawled and turned around slowly. But by the time I stood up to size the man up, he’d walked away into the crowd and disappeared behind a door that read, Employees Only.

I decided that I’d had enough. There’s more dirt, noise, and back-beating to be done tomorrow, so I went back to my little dirty room to get some sleep. But before I nodded off, I triple-checked the canary.

Day 28

This morning it was back to the mines. We were sent to a new area to drill and blast. Sweat poured down my back as I wrestled the heavy drilling equipment that provided a constant pounding to my body. I felt the familiar soreness in my muscles that bordered on mild pain and a mix of euphoric itchiness that indicated to me that I was adapting quickly to the new challenges of my mining days.

Eighty percent of my nanocells deactivated and flushed themselves out of my system after resurrection. The other twenty percent are maintenance nanos and stay in my body, replicating themselves when they begin to wear out. Through a communications network, they coordinate to provide maximum efficiency. They fill in when my body can’t. I could feel them helping to compensate for the extra load on my muscles. Triggering dosages of hormones, repairing cells, and building muscle tissues.

The noise of the drill was masked by the ear plugs. Through them, a constant muffled barrage, like a hurricane of grinding, pummeled my brain. It dulled my senses and made me feel numb to my surroundings. The gritty dust settled all over, making its way past clothing and seams to rub against my skin and irritate it. This was a nasty, dirty job, and somebody has to do it. I’d rather not, but I’m doing it because I want information. The best way to get it is to be here with the people who last saw Baxter.

I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to see Desoto give a hand signal, his hand flat and pressing down with a motion which meant to shut down the equipment. I did so, setting the drill down and taking off my gloves. Dust poured out from the inside of the gloves, and I sighed with relief. The crew headed to the makeshift break room that had been dropped by one of the loaders. It was one of those safe rooms, with a table inside and some lights strung to the ceiling. A water cooler stood at one end with some cupboards containing a few meager supplies of food. Dry biscuits and some kind of sticks that were supposed to pass as pepperoni. It was calories and they were free, so they all dug into them whenever they could. They didn’t taste too great, but didn’t taste bad either, unless I remembered that they were probably ground silkworm from the farms.

The miners chattered around the table, gruffly berating each other: Sledge, Jake, Stumpy, and Gemma. Gemma, among the worst of the group at times, appeared to compensate for her femaleness in the midst of all the testosterone. She held her own.

“I saw Gemma down at the Dockside hitting on this hot redhead,” Sledge said, a grin playing at the edges of his mouth.

“Bullshit.” Gemma snapped.

“Yeah, so what’s the deal, Gemma? You swing both ways or just one? Am I going to come to work some morning and see you snuggling up with Sledge in the munitions shack?” Stumpy joined in.

This prompted a round of guffaws from the rest of them. And Gemma landed a good open-handed smack to Stumpy’s unprotected head. Stumpy winced and cowered away, still laughing.

“So what was this Baxter guy like?” I asked.

“I dunno. He was sort of all religiousy,” Gemma said.

“Yeah, he was like that. Weak as a babe when he started here. Sledge whipped him into shape, though. Nice enough guy, if you didn’t listen to his God jabber,” Stumpy said.

“Blew himself up…didn’t make no sense. No sense at all,” Sledge reiterated his description of the event.

“Did he have any family? Anybody come and get the remains?”

“I dunno. The company-men came and got what they could find. We didn’t hear much after that,” Sledge replied.

“They don’t really tell us much,” Jake said.

“Other than where to drill and how long, that is.” Gemma smirked.

The fact that there wasn’t much left of Baxter’s corpse meant to me that there hadn’t been one. Baxter was still around, and he was going to be up to no good soon enough, and very alive. But he’d had to have had some kind of help to make that disappearing act fly, and the fact that the company-men had been involved smelled to me like the company itself was in on it.

“That reminds me. I was having a beer at the bar next to the mine entrance…” I started.

“Dockside,” Stumpy interrupted.

“Yeah, at the Dockside. And I ran into this old-timer there by the name of Laurence, I think they called him. You guys know him?”

“Yeah, old Laurence, he’s been around a long time. Freelancer he was, until his stake got wiped out. He’s been sitting up there on that stool for years telling that woeful tale,” Jake said.

“He’s what the company-men call a malcontent,” Sledge said. He pronounced it like mall-contant. “It don’t do no good to sit and moan about how things are. They just are, and that’s the way of it. This here’s Mars. It’s hard, and it don’t change for nobody.”

Sledge got up then, and the rest followed suit. I reluctantly did the same; my muscles had stiffened a bit while we sat. I made my way towards the door, but before I took even two steps, there was a large explosion. The floor rocked beneath us and dust poured in the door of the safe house. Gemma reacted first and slapped her hand into the big red button by the door. A thick metal plate slammed into place over the open doorway and sealed us inside. Somewhere out there in the rocks, dust and destruction, Van Desoto fought for his life. And that bothered me, because I was starting to like that guy.

Day 29

We spent the night in the dark, keeping the lights off and conserving whatever battery power remained in the safe-room. I tried and tried to get a connection to Angel, but here deep under the ground the signal was blotted out. If only we’d had one of the new QE (quantum entangler) comm devices. But when Angel had performed surgery on my brain implant, that tech hadn’t even existed yet. Now the NET had expanded to thirty-six worlds in real-time connection thanks to QE. And here I was buried on Mars, the redheaded stepchild of planets, forgotten and abandoned among the shining new worlds being discovered out there beyond the warp bubble.

This wasn’t the first time I’d been buried, but last time I’d been dead. This time I had to experience it. The dark just made it worse. The dark was like when Medicore first brought me back to life. When I couldn’t see anything or even understand what was going on. It closed in around me and pressed into my mind, suffocating me. Just like all those airlocks I’d been in lately. Claustrophobia got the better of me. My breathing became rapid, and my pulse rate shot up. I was covered in a cold sweat and I couldn’t calm down. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder.

Gemma’s voice whispered in my ear, “Settle down, Chase.”

“Name’s not Chase. It’s Coswell,” I gasped out.

There was a short pause. “Okay, Coswell. Time to get it together. We’re in a safe-room designed to provide food, water, and air for a week, if necessary. They’ll be getting us out of here any time now.”

“Right. Okay, I got this now,” I replied. I didn’t really believe it, but the act of saying so made my heart stop pounding so hard, and my breathing evened out. In a few more minutes, the panic left me and I could think straight again.

“That’s better,” Gemma said. “Don’t need you going batshit in this enclosed space. Don’t make me knock your ass out.” She laughed.

“What about Desoto?” I asked.

“He either made it or didn’t,” Sledge said. “It’s possible he’s in a gap out there somewhere. The protocol is to stay in the safe-room. We aren’t equipped for rescue. It could just get someone else killed.”

“They better hurry up,” Stumpy said.

But they didn’t. After a long time of silence, Sledge had some questions.

“So, it’s Coswell now, eh?”

“Yeah,” I replied.

“What are you running from?”

“He’s not runnin’,” Jake said. “I heard about this Coswell guy. He’s OIS. He’s after the Mars Slasher.”

“Mars Slasher?” I asked.

“That’s what the news is calling the guy. You know, the serial killer.”

“OIS, huh?” Sledge said.

“Yeah, I figured it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to let the killer know who I was,” I replied.

“Unless it’s one of us,” Jake said.

“No, I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t bury himself in here.”

“You think he did this?” Gemma said.

“Pretty certain. When’s the last time you had an accident like this?” I asked.

“It’s been years. Back in the 40’s,” Jake said.

“Well, Baxter, the Mars Slasher, has a new hobby with explosives. A few days ago he blew up the capital dome. Somehow he figured out I was looking for him here. And now this,” I said.

“He’s a real fucker,” Sledge said.

“The worst kind of trash,” I agreed. “But it’s his god that I’m really interested in. That’s the one behind all of it. The one that’s been pushing Baxter further and further. And now it looks to be politically motivated.”

“He did seem pretty fanatical,” Jake said. “Always going on about God wants this and God wants that. We just ignored it mostly, but it did make for some great jokes.”

“How’d Baxter take that?”

“Not well, I can tell you. He got that dark look, where he’d stare out at you out the top of his eyebrows. Gave me the creeps,” Gemma said.

“I don’t get it. How is God behind Baxter killing people?” Stumpy asked.

“Not the almighty God. A fake imitation. Baxter isn’t making this stuff up. Someone really is talking to him. But they are using tech to fool and control our fanboy,” I said.

“Wild shit,” Stumpy said. “Why would they do that?”

“I’m not sure yet what their goal is. But the attack on the capital was more than just an attack on me. It had a purpose.”

“Well, it’s scaring the shit out of people. I can tell you that. Everyone is freaking out about it,” Gemma said.

“That right there can drive changes. And I need to find out what God is up to, and stop the killing,” I said.

“You need to get out of here first,” Sledge said.

“They’ll get to us soon enough,” Gemma said.

But they didn’t. The night wore on and I didn’t sleep but just a few moments of conscious lapses here and there. The next morning, we dug into the rations and turned on the lights for a bit while we ate. Then it was lights out again and sitting in the dark. We tried talking about whatever we could to keep our minds off the situation, but as time wore on, we just got more and more silent as we ran out of things to say and energy to say it.

It was well into the next night when I heard it. The sound of rocks sliding and thumping around outside somewhere and echoing into the metal of the safe-room. Then someone banged on the outside of the door. Sledge turned on the lights and Gemma hit the button to open the door. And there, laying in the dust under a little tunnel of debris, was Van Desoto.

Day 30

Hello, Martin. I hope you are enjoying your stay deep underground. Miles deep under the suffocating ground. Eventually your air is going to run out, the water is going to be gone, and you’ll die there, forgotten and useless. You should have answered God’s call. But now you’re going to die.

I’m sorry that I had to do this to you, but I couldn’t have you interfering. You see, I have a mission to complete. And now I have enough industrial-grade explosives to finish the job, just like I’ve finished you.

I know that you think that I’m some twisted religious fanatic that is out to kill all of the poor stupid people that don’t believe.

There are no stupid people.

People aren’t stupid. I get so tired of hearing all the raging about those stupid people, those idiots, those Darwin Awarders, those inferiors.

People aren’t stupid. They’re smart. No, think about it. They get what they want by acting the way they do. They’ve evolved in ways to get what they want by their behavior. People aren’t stupid; they’re selfish, self-centered, ignorant, impatient, rude, egotistical, wrong, misinformed, warped, misled, twisted, rotten, maybe even evil. But they’re not stupid. Seventeen billion of them out there competing for limited resources and they all have to get what they need, or want.

You know the guy, the one that has to be at the head of the pack, and it doesn’t matter how many people he cuts off to get there. Or the ones that run you over getting into the elevator before you can get out. Or the agitator that takes the time to tell you off about getting in his way. Hey buddy, we’re all trying to get somewhere. It’s not stupidity. It’s lack of character. It’s selfishness. It’s ignorance.

As they say, some people just want to watch the world burn. I would also add some of you just want it all for yourselves. So, you’re not stupid. You just suck. You suck because all you think about is yourself, and you haven’t bothered to think about others. You suck and you’re just damned lazy. Because doing something for others requires extra effort, and you’re so absorbed in the overwhelming universe of YOU that you don’t have another thought in your head. The all-encompassing deity of yourself; the god that you worship night and day. And it’s just all about you.

Stupid? No, I don’t think people are stupid. They have very clear reasons for doing what they do to get what they want. And I mean to see that they don’t get it.

Day 31

I barely recognized Van Desoto. He was covered in grey dust so thick that he didn’t even look human. Gemma and I carefully took hold of his jacket and pulled him slowly into the safe-room. Then Sledge hit the red button and the door swooshed closed. Desoto lay there in the middle of the floor, moaning.

I took a knee down next to Van on the floor, and tried to make an assessment of his condition. After this much time, he was definitely dehydrated, but there were some wet mud patches along his side. If he had internal injuries, it wouldn’t be a great idea to have him guzzling down water just yet.

Van coughed, dust scattering off of him as he did so. “He’s out there,” he rasped.

“Who? Who’s out there, Van?” Jake asked.

Another long coughing fit, then, “Baxter.”

“He lost his shit,” Sledge muttered in my ear.

I wasn’t convinced of that, but I had to stay with the priorities. With Gemma’s help, we removed his jacket as carefully as we could so I could get a look at his ribs. I was right to be worried about those mud patches. Desoto had a compound rib fracture sticking out of his right side with the bone exposed. I put my ear down to the bleeding mess, but I couldn’t hear any hissing or gurgling. No puncture of the lung, which seemed like a freaking miracle, until I realized that rib was too low to hit a lung, and the other end was probably stuck in his liver. It was impossible for me to know how much blood Van had lost.

Jake rummaged through the cupboards and came back with the first aid kit. This wasn’t one of those Bactine and Band-Aid kits. This was a serious kit, like a medic would have on the front lines. Like the ones we trained with in special ops, and I was damned glad to see it.

Desoto needed surgery; there was no way to get around it. But we couldn’t go yanking rib splinters out of his liver here. The internal bleeding would eventually kill him from blood loss and low blood pressure. And there was not one thing these big old meathooks could do about it. But I had an idea.

I dug around in the kit, frantically hoping. And there it was, a field transfusion pack. Not only am I a type “O RH D,” but I have something even better swimming around in that universal donor blood—latent maintenance nano-cells with a license to heal.

Gemma got Desoto’s arm cleaned up, and I plugged the needles into him and into me. While I gave Van a refill, Jake and Gemma went about plugging the hole in our patient. That rib was in the way, big time, and it had to go. There was a surgical laser in the kit, and they cut that bone back without moving it, then slapped a skin patch over the hole. If we got out of here alive, that would be a problem for real doctors to solve later. For now, we just had to hope those nano-cells would sort out the internal bleeding.

We left the transfusion on until Van’s blood pressure started to come back to normal, then switched him to an IV to deal with the dehydration. About three hours later, he started to come around again.

“Baxter, he’s out there,” he said again.

“What happened?” I asked.

“That asshole tortured me,” Van said. “He asked me to confess my sins to his god. I told him to fuck off, and he put his hand over my face and suffocated me. He did that over and over.”

“He’s a twisted fuck.” Sledge punched the door button and it whisked open.

“Sledge, you can’t get through that tunnel. You’re too big for it,” I said.

“The screwed up thing was, he never even waited for me to respond. I would have told him whatever the hell he wanted at that point.” Van coughed, and this time something came up, and he spat blood onto the metal floor. It looked coagulated, and I knew why. His dose of nano-cells was working overtime.

Sledge hadn’t listened to me. He was digging out chunks of rock from the little tunnel Van had crawled in through. Then Jake gave him a hand and they started moving pieces of rock around outside the door like a puzzle, making the hole bigger.

“Hey Baxter! You wanna play some games with me? I’ll confess something for ya,” Sledge bellowed out the doorway. I didn’t bother to try and stop him. I could tell that would be useless.

So, we said the hell with protocol, and we teamed up on the tunnel and started working our way out. It’d been two days, and the company hadn’t been down here to save us yet. I had a sneaking suspicion they’d never even tried or would. I think Baxter’s god was making sure of it.

After a few hours’ work we were able to track back to a mud patch of blood in an open space of the fallen debris. This was likely where Desoto had gotten trapped in the collapse before he tunneled his way to the safe-room. And beside that patch, drawn in the dust of the cavern floor, was a smiley face.

Day 32

The smiley face kept me awake. I couldn’t sleep, and the snoring of my smelly dirty mining roommates didn’t help either. I just about jumped out of my skin when the ding of a message emitted from my wristband computer. It had stayed dormant for so long that I’d forgotten about it. And that’s when I got dipshit Baxter’s log message that he’d left. That was it, nothing more came through. He’d arranged for his message to come through to me, somehow. Just so he could gloat. So I would know for sure that he was the one who’d done this. So he could get his last dig in before I died down here. But all I could think of was, the bastard is down here with us, and I’m gonna find him.

We set out into the tunnels and dug our way through. Martian dust has a unique smell. Perchlorates, which are various types of chlorine salts, mixed with the smell of gunpowder. Gives you sort of the ambience of a firefight at the pool. I haven’t figured out just what causes the gunpowder smell. Maybe it’s the sulfur, and maybe it’s just me, or maybe all those meteors that plowed into Mars over the last couple billion years put some of the same mix on it that they did on the moon. I dunno. But we were kicking up plenty of the dust as we moved through the tunnels, clearing the debris and digging ourselves out.

Gemma and Jake dragged Van Desoto behind them on a makeshift travois made from parts of the table in the safe house. He protested frequently that he could walk much more comfortably than being dragged along the dust on a frame of metal. But I told him to stay put because I wasn’t sure how far along the nano-cells had gotten with the healing process. They had been tuned to my genetics, and while they may be doing a great job clotting up any internal bleeding, I was sure that his gene sequence was going to give them fits. They would probably halt and allow themselves to be flushed out rather than possibly do harm. There was an incredible amount of sophisticated programming involved with those tiny machines. Alone, a single cell was pretty simple, like some bytes of computer memory, like a few microscopic transistors on a chip. But together, in millions, they combined their resources into a very smart hive mind of medical genius. It was hard to predict what they would do. So I was prepared to get some heat over giving Van some of my blood. First, for risking his life, which in my view had already been at risk. And second, for unauthorized distribution of nano-materials, which is a federal offense. Fortunately, I work for the feds. So they can just piss off.

We made steady progress for about four hours, and then ran into a completely collapsed tunnel. Everyone was exhausted, and we just couldn’t deal with trying to dig it out at the moment. Besides, as I looked at the tunnel, I realized that there were some pretty big rocks in there that neither I nor Sledge could likely budge. So we sat down in the dust that smelled like gunpowder pool, and we just rested a good long time.

I was feeling pretty dozy, when Gemma came up to me and gave me a nudge. “Martin,” she whispered. “I heard something down the tunnel.” She gestured back the way we’d come.

“What did you hear?” I asked.

“Some kind of shuffling noise, then a little bit of rockslide. It might be nothing, but then it…”

“Might be Baxter,” I finished for her.

“Yeah,” she nodded.

Her face was set with grim determination to be brave, but inside I could see her shaking. Because Baxter had gotten into the heads of some of the crew, like a freaking ghost demon. Larger than life. And I knew that the little bastard was just a man like anyone else, except for a very messed up brain. And that might give him an advantage on some points, super intelligence, whatever. But when it came down to it, he’d bleed like anyone else. Well, perhaps better than myself thanks to the tiny robots in my veins. The point was, it pissed me off that he’d gotten to them. He didn’t deserve to own that kind of power over them, and I mean to see that got corrected. ASAP.

“Gemma. Believe me when I say this. I’m going to take him out. He’s going down, and it’s going to be quick and it’s going to be soon. I promise you.”

“You do that, Coswell. And I’ll have your back.”

“I’ll be honored to have that.” I gripped her by the shoulders and gave them a good meaningful squeeze. “Now let’s have a look down that tunnel.”

I took one of the crowbars we’d brought from the safe house to move rocks with and swung it experimentally. This would do just fine. Gemma shone a flashlight ahead of us and we crept along the tunnel with me in the lead. I knew I was sticking my neck out here, but I also wanted Baxter, and I wanted him bad after what he’d done to Van.

We hadn’t gone more than a hundred yards down the tunnel when we heard tapping of metal on rock. Then the sound of rocks and gravel sliding, then some more of the metal sounds again. Ahead I saw the dust kick up and then a light poured in from the side of the tunnel. I gripped the crowbar tightly in my right hand, ready to lunge on Baxter if he showed his face. He wasn’t going to take us by surprise again. Now that he was caught down here with us in a collapse that he’d caused, it was the perfect opportunity to get him.

“Martin?” A light shone right into our faces. I couldn’t see the person shining the light, but I knew that voice. It was Chalie.