Lakes of Mars Read online

  The lights flickered again, landing us in near darkness, just the terminals casting their pall over the shaking room. The yelling subsided until the only noise left was the explosions, gunfire, and screaming from beyond the bulkheads.

  The lieutenant who must’ve been next in charge rose to her feet and shouted, “Begin preparations for evac! All non-defensive personnel report to the cargo room on level one next to the emergency hatch!”

  “Ma’am, there’s no place to run.”

  “We’re going to breach the inner perimeter. As they rush in one way, we’ll rush out the other,” the lieutenant replied, fear oozing from the cracks in her voice.

  “They’ll run us down in the cavern!”

  “If we can make it to forward checkpoint ten, there’s a covered garage with three Foxtrax and a CPV that can get us back to the SZ. It’s our only choice.”

  Evacuation orders rang out over the loudspeakers.

  “Reyes, Linder, and Gutierrez, you guys get the fuck out of there, there’s nothing more you can do. Everyone else stays until the—”

  The lights went out and this time didn’t return. The gunfire and shouting outside dissipated. A warm unhitching sensation emerged in my crotch and spread to my thighs, and I vaguely realized we were both pissing ourselves. Then silence, broken at first by the occasional growl and scream, and then complete.

  Thud! Thud! Bang! They were beating down the doors. Thud! Bang! Bang! My host marine raised his rifle but his arms were quivering too much to hold it straight. Bang! Thud! Bang! Bang! Bang! I heard the swish of something heavy flying through the air, missing my host by a few inches. It was the door, I realized as the room was lit up by a dozen muzzle flashes. They flooded into the room, the little ones flinging themselves on the nearest marines with the bigger ones right behind, howling, their teeth like razors. A wet spray hit my cheek and I tasted blood in my mouth. The marine tried feverishly to line up targets, firing off a string of wild bursts, then one by one the muzzle flashes around him went dark.

  There was a burning sting on my face, then my thigh, and then my throat. The rifle was knocked away and when I reached for my sidearm all I felt was the rubbery skin of what could only be a Verex.

  I came to back in the booth, gasping for air, grabbing at my throat where it had been ripped out. The pain was bad enough to reduce me to tears, but my body was unharmed, exactly as it had been before I’d plunged in the syringe. I slid down against the wall, writhing and clutching at wounds that didn’t exist. Another thirty seconds passed before the stinging turned to a dull ache and then, except for the urine, it was gone.

  My mind bounced everywhere: Did all that actually happen, or was it a recording? What had they put in the syringe? Where had they gotten it? Before I could really turn things over, though, the monitor began flashing again, instructing me to return to the staging area.

  When I got there I knew instantly that the same thing had happened to the rest of the group, most of whom were brandishing the same expression I’d seen on relatives right after the accident: a shock so brutal and abrupt that it flattened out every other emotion. A bewildering, bloodless decapitation of the senses that rendered us phantoms. Sebastian, the palest of them all, didn’t even glance up when I stood next to him.

  “Ten minutes ago at thirteen twenty-seven, Outpost SR37 was attacked and destroyed. No survivors. That’s what we’re up against,” said an officer in a blood-red UFM—United Fleet of Mars—uniform, materializing out of an unseen corner of the room. He said the words with severity, but there was a forced, routine quality to them, that seemed impossibly out of step with the terror we’d just witnessed. He was middle-aged and bookish, possessing the confidence of someone who had all the answers in the back of a lesson plan, walking with an easy, resolute gait. The officer beckoned us forward, turning down a long corridor into an even larger room.

  “Each of you take a lane,” he said. There were blue grooves running across the floor, slicing it up forty different ways. I stepped in between two of them while everyone else was still looking around, puzzled. “Now jog in place.”

  As he said this, the floor started rising and moving, gently at first, but a little faster every second. I was already pumping my legs before he’d finished the sentence and, sooner than I could process what was happening, I saw the other kids skidding across the room, looking around at each other, mystified. The floor was a giant treadmill, and it hit me then that this exercise was about following orders without thinking about them.

  “Jump!” he bellowed, and I jumped just high enough to clear a metal cargo crate that had come zipping down my lane. There were shouts and crashing noises all around me, but I couldn’t chance looking.

  “Jump again!”

  I jumped again.

  “Duck!”

  I managed to keep my footing as medicine balls swooshed by, sending cadets sprawling. I had to hurdle a girl as she crashed into my lane.

  “Now lie down!”

  My elbows and knees burned against the floor as more medicine balls flew past, this time lower and from every direction. I slid backward with my fingernails clawing into the rubber before being flung feet first off the apparatus, crunching against the cadets already on the ground.

  “Up!” the officer barked as the enormous treadmills began to slow. “Now get back on!”

  It kept going and going, the cool air turning balmy from forty bodies heaving, billions of moving atoms radiating energy. I’d been stationary for a month in hypersleep, so my reactions were sluggish and confused, exhaustion descending in sheets after only a few moments, each one separating me further and further from the mill’s pace. My chest burned, my limbs were raw, and I’m pretty sure my nose broke when a ball clocked me. But as terrible as I felt, judging by the smatterings of blood on the adjacent lanes, somehow I was making out better than most everyone else.

  I’d just climbed back on after having crash landed and felt that the contraption was moving even faster. Before it had been the same speed for everyone, but it was like it was waking from a deep slumber in stages, each lane reclaiming a feeling of its own, angling up or down, smooth or irregular, and I found myself in a dead sprint against a terrific, pitted incline. I gave it everything I had, but all my effort was swallowed by the countervailing force, transporting me into a plane where everything I did was a second too late and a newton too weak. Spit gathered at my lips and eventually my legs buckled and I slammed face first against the floor, ripping a gash in my cheek.

  Even then, there was no time to rest. An expressionless instructor in red looked at me and pointed towards my lane. During the seventh round I vomited and nearly slipped on the puddle as it came back around on the tread. When I fell for the fifteenth time, I couldn’t get back up and the guys in the red uniforms had to hoist me on the platform. It started moving and I tumbled backward, but a man caught me and pushed—though the incline was so steep that my legs instantly turned to rubber.

  “Crawl!” he barked.

  After the twentieth time, I couldn’t get up to crawl even when they helped me. I was the last to break, though, and when I finally collapsed the rest of the recruits stared at me in astonishment. I staggered toward them, stopping next to Sebastian who was sitting on the floor, holding his arm gingerly, a mosaic of cuts and bruises on his face. Why did they make him do this? I was sure they’d have impressive-sounding justifications, but it seemed unnecessarily cruel. He was obviously never meant for the field.

  “I’m sorry, Sebastian,” I whispered, as I helped him up. “I know you didn’t think it was going to be this way.”

  “It’s not supposed to be,” he murmured back.

  “I see you’ve all worked up quite the appetite,” the head instructor deadpanned, “but a detour to the infirmary seems in order before lunch, so go ahead and follow that handsome master sergeant to your right.” He pointed toward a gaunt man with pockmarked skin who had already started off down the corridor.

  Chapter 5

 
; “Tough first day, hon?” the nurse asked as I lay down across the cot.

  I nodded.

  “Commander Marquardt can be a real stickler for his rules since they’re all he has. But you can’t let him get to you; it’s only in the getting that you’re gotten.”

  I nodded again, unsure of what to think. Everything in the room felt familiar but off at the same time. Too white. Too reflective. The color of eerie, overdone dental work. The exception was the red Mars emblem on the lightboard above me, overlaid with two red stripes crossing above an eagle’s head, ever so slightly dimmed in power-saving mode.

  The emblem and the instructors wearing red Mars uniforms, instead of the green-grey Fleet ones I’d been expecting, made me remember vaguely that the training stations were actually operated by the different member planets, even though they all fed into the same Fleet. It made me feel even worse because although Mars was home, I wasn’t a fan of how it was run. There were education thresholds for voting and holding office, and different sections of the planet were divided up into zones that you had to pay fees each year to access. It kept parts of the cities super clean, and the forests and lakes feeling pristine and untouched, especially around New London where I was from. Yet even though my family could afford the highest zones—living in an eight—it had always seemed shitty that people couldn’t hang out somewhere just because their job didn’t pay enough money to let them. And I think after the accident it was that distaste that made me want to leave all the more.

  “It’s not so bad. All the dried blood makes it look worse than it is,” she said, dabbing at one of the wounds. “But I do want to use my magic marker on that handsome face of yours. It would be a shame for it to scar.” She took out a metallic cylinder about the size of a pen and shone a blue light from its tip onto my cheek, making it tingle.

  “What’s that?” I asked, watching my breath escape into a plume, aware that it was even colder in here than the booth or the room where the giant treadmill had been.

  “A nurse’s secret.” She held up a small mirror, showing me the just-closed wound. “Anything they can do, I can undo. But you really do need to be more careful, honey,” she quipped, looking down at my hands.

  The gashes from the tank had barely had a chance to scab before the treadmill had cut them open again.

  “I’ll try,” I responded, deciding to play along.

  “And I suggest getting acquainted with your new surroundings as quickly as possible, since only once the fangs are pointed out can they be filed down,” she said.

  “Like on the Rim with all the hidden gas deposits and different Verex?”

  She stopped her work and peered at me through piggish eyes, moving close enough that her breath transformed the air around me into a bouquet of rotten lilac, intermingling with her perfume. The light was playing through the curtain, forming odd shapes upon her and giving each word a larger, fantastic quality.

  “Es-pe-ci-ally on the Rim. Things are much harder to see when you don’t like looking at them, which is the reason the uncomfortable things have all the biggest secrets. But I don’t suppose you know anything about that, do you?”

  “I . . . I don’t know,” I stammered, shivering, having no clue what she was talking about.

  “But you will,” said the nurse, returning to my hands.

  “Are you using the pen on them, too?”

  “No, no, dear,” she chortled as if the notion was absurd. The gentleness was still in her voice but it felt out of place, as if she were putting frosting on something that had long since spoiled. “That only comes out in special cases. Usually it’s better for the healing process to occur naturally, so it can practice. You wouldn’t want something as important as that out of practice, would you?”

  “No,” I said, looking right at her for the first time. Initially, I’d thought she was young, because her cheeks had smooth, tight skin, but after studying harder I saw there were miniature wrinkles radiating from her eyes and the corners of her lips.

  Catching me watching her, she stepped sideways, out of the light. “Luckily for you”—she glanced down at a pad of electronic paper—“Aaron, we’re still a ways from the Rim. Out there, not even my magic pen can save you.”

  Chapter 6

  The C-Block cafeteria resembled a ship’s mess hall, busy but not big, full of cadets sitting and eating and standing at the serving lines. The walls were ghost white and the metallic tables, benches, and chairs were spread out in a checkered pattern, reflecting the overhead lights like chain mail. A couple of cadets looked up when we entered, but most were too preoccupied to bother.

  “Nothing like the first day of school, eh?” I asked, surveying the scene.

  Sebastian shook his head. “I’ve always been scared of them.”

  “It’s good to be scared sometimes; it lets you know you’re pushing yourself,” I said, surprised that I, of all people, was giving something like a pep talk. “Everyone here was in the same position, probably thinking the exact same thing, and they seem to all be getting on alright now.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said as we walked toward vats of multicolored goo that were spread out like a burnt rainbow. The stuff was viscous in some places and runny in others, resembling a series of small, half-frozen lakes. I nudged one with the serving spoon when it was my turn, mixing the crusted parts around before wiping a little onto my tray.

  “You’ll get used to it,” said a girl in a blue uniform who was standing in front of me.

  I nodded, unconvinced, and reached for a grainy roll that looked safe.

  “Sebastian,” I began, as we set our trays down at the end of a long table, hoping to get his mind off his injuries, “do you know what happened back there in those booths?”

  “A live tie-in, I suppose, piggybacking off the signal in our Mylan Chips,” he said, looking up at the ceiling.

  “How come from a battle we were losing?”

  “To scare us.”

  “Yeah, but why?”

  “Why would you scare someone, Aaron? And I’m not talking about the nervous kind you just referred to, but the ‘scared’ scared kind.”

  I thought about it for a few moments. “I dunno . . . to get them to do what I want, I guess.”

  “Right, because if you’re scared, that’s admitting to yourself you’re not in control, right? That’s why you’re scared. And when you’re not sure of yourself anymore, you . . .”

  “You start listening to someone else,” I said.

  “I think it’s that simple.”

  “But a tie-in doesn’t explain how we felt the same things our host, or whatever, was feeling. It was like we were there. And besides, I don’t think Telnet’s strong enough to beam all that data across—”

  “Mind if I join?”

  A lanky, bespectacled girl with jagged hair, only a bit older than me, already had her legs through the back of an unoccupied chair. “I’ve been strolling around, listening to all you Greens talk and, I must say, you two are having by far the most interesting conversation.”

  “Are we Greens because of our inexperience or our uni—”

  She ignored Sebastian’s question and swiveled to me. “It’s refreshing. All the whizzes I came in with have already thrown in such a steep ante that they’re too committed to consider the whys and the why nots of what they’re doing. After all, if they think too hard, they might not be first to get to the next scrap the Reds toss, and that’s what really scares them more than anything.”

  She took a large gulp of teal liquid from her glass. “Of course, that’s what the rat’s supposed to do.”

  “What?” asked Sebastian.

  “Get the cheese.” She looked at us both, flicking the bangs out of her face with gangly gracefulness. “Even the really smart ones can’t resist; they just need bigger mazes.” She jutted out her hand as if to stab us with an invisible sword. “The name’s Fin.”

  “I’m Aaron.”

  “And I’m Sebastian.”

&n
bsp; Her eyes lingered on Sebastian, whose bludgeoning in the Tread Room had far surpassed mine. “I hope they haven’t been too rough on you.”

  “Nothing that won’t heal,” I said. “I imagine they don’t want their merchandise getting too beat up.”

  She paused. “You’d be surprised.”

  “What’s that supposed—”

  “It was a tie-in, by the way,” she cut in, ignoring Sebastian again. “You’re right that Telnet isn’t powerful enough to beam that much data across the grid, but who said they had to beam that much data? The visual file’s enough to tell your eyes a story and then your body just fills in the blanks.”

  “But I couldn’t just fill in the blanks, because I have no idea what being torn apart feels like,” Sebastian argued.

  “Well, you had some help, didn’t you?”

  “Help?”

  “The white serum,” I said.

  Fin mock-raised her eyebrows and tilted her head.

  “But what could they put in it that would get your body to fill in the blanks?” I asked.

  “That’s the million-credit question, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Whatever it was, it should’ve tripped our Mylan Chips and notified the Fleet.”

  Sebastian looked lost in thought as I rubbed the side of my head, knowing my own chip was in there somewhere, lodged deep inside my skull. As it had been explained to me by a Fleet officer visiting my fourth-grade science class, the Mylan Chip was placed in our cerebral cortex when we were three, where it monitored our neuron firing patterns. Most of the time it would just listen in the background, but if we thought about something sufficiently abstract and inventive, it would cut off our train of thought and transmit the pattern to Fleet intelligence for analysis.

  It always kind of creeped me out that if I thought about the wrong thing, Fleet officers might show up and arrest me. But given my struggles in intro biology and physics classes in prep school, that was the last thing I should have been worried about.