Mars Fire - Chapter XIII - Sol 4
Serialized science fiction
Previous Chapters: Chapter I , Chapter II , Chapter III , Chapter IV , Chapter V , Chapter VI , Chapter VII , Chapter VIII , Chapter IX , Chapter X , Chapter XI , Chapter XII
Chapter XIII - Sol 4 - Thursday
Once they were back inside, leaving CDM Command was a simple retracing of their original steps - the ladder down to the security room, where the same guard was still on duty, followed by the crooked tunnel and finally the airlock into the Barbarella suit room - and it was only when they were outside the club again, watching a pair of clubbers staggering off towards a waiting rover, that Burrows spoke for the first time.
“That did not go as I had planned.” He motioned for Ian to follow him, and set off back along the route they had originally walked to get to Barbarella. “This changes things a bit. For all of us.”
Ian was quiet for a while as they walked, before replying.
“Why did he trust me though?” There was a hitch in his voice. “I feel like I shouldn’t have heard any of that.”
“Well, it saves us all a bit of time, actually. Now we don’t have to explain it to you later, when it inevitably becomes relevant to you.” Burrows paused for a moment. “Plus, as a member of Home One, you are my responsibility when it comes to CDM matters. When we organise missions, you will be part of the team anyway. So if something happens, it is better to have you clued-up than clueless.”
“Do you think something is going to happen soon?”
“That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?” Burrows snorted. “I have no idea, honestly. Something is bound to escalate, but I wouldn’t bet on the timelines. The Union can be as patient as a rust stain, when it suits them. Like the colonel said, we just have to be prepared and extra sharp now, for as long as it takes. Something will bend and snap at some point.”
The rest of the walk back to the point where Dixon had dropped them earlier happened in silence, and their suits were sending temperature warnings again by the time they reached the still-empty road. Burrows led them to the closest underground tunnel access point, where, after descending the stairs for a few metres, they found an antechamber leading to a green-and-yellow airlock. The walls around them were naked concrete, painted white and streaked with the ever-present orange-red dust, and small drifts of sand had accumulated in the corners of the room. There were two lines of concrete benches built into the walls flanking the airlock, and clusters of cables dangled there from boxes mounted close to the ceiling.
“Power lines, for your suit heater,” Burrows indicated the cables, and sat down on one of the benches. “Plug in, and make sure you conserve your own suit power.”
Both men plugged in, and their suit power levels soon stabilised after that. Burrows kept his carbine across his lap, out of sheer habit. The temperature was still south of negative eighty at this point, and Burrows kept a close eye on his metre, but with the external power they could at least continue to run their heating without depleting their suit power banks too rapidly. Staying topside would have been foolish, placing unnecessary strain on their power and heating elements alike, and cycling into the actual transit tunnels was a waste as well - it was not that cold yet.
Also, sitting down was a lot more comfortable down here than up in the dust and gravel of the streets.
“Has there ever been any direct combat against the Union?” Ian sat on the bench opposite Burrows. “I used to read news reports about border situations with them, back when I was in Planckstadt, but it all sounded so… vague.”
“Officially, no. Not even when they took Seven Craters. Everything that happens is always a ‘misunderstanding’ or a ‘police action’ or a ‘counter-terrorist operation’ or something like that. The news nets and the politicians don’t get paid to tell the truth, so they don’t.” Burrows had an itch on the top of his right ear, and tried futilely to rub it against the inside of his helmet. His neck did not want to cooperate by bending that far. “When they took Seven Craters, it was due to a claim of discrimination and violence against Union personnel. They claimed that settlers in the area were being persecuted because of their Asian heritage, and that those settlers had asked for Union protection. So they sent so-called policing and protection units to protect those colonists, and when there was push-back against those units, the Union sent troops to back up the police.”
“After that, Seven Craters became a de facto Union territory. They still have a puppet government that claims to represent Seven Craters, but it’s a sham, through and through. The entire Primary Council there - their parliament - is now just filled with Lings and Maos and Zhangs.” Burrows sighed as he thought back to his time on Earth. “They did the same on Earth, when I was still there. You might have seen it in the news too, even in Europe. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar - every single time it was the same old excuse. Claim oppression from marginalised ethnic communities, play up the victimhood angle, and then send in troops to occupy and colonise.”
“So no direct fighting then? What happens if someone stands up to them?”
“People get shot. On both sides.” Burrows shrugged. He had seen it himself, several times. “The Union agitators will escalate and provoke things, and the moment you lift a hand to defend yourself, they hit first and then claim they were being threatened. They release doctored video feeds backing up their version of the story, and dismiss everything else as a hoax or fabrication. Even if you have five different videos showing the encounter from your perspective, they will still insist that everything is faked and that only their evidence is the truth.”
“We actually had a case where a rover camera caught two of their people, in Union suits, shooting down one of our people on the border a year or three ago. When our parliament complained and sent the video as proof, the Union insisted it was all faked. Their minister in charge up here dismissed it out of hand, called it a fake and a provocation, and simply refused to accept our side of the story.”
“What do you do in a case like that?” Burrows put his hands up in a sign of helplessness. “It’s a stupid and pointless debate to try and have with them, because they just lie and cheat their way through everything. They have absolutely no fear of or respect towards outsiders. None. Their commissars tell them what the truth is, and that’s the end of the story. They will not consider anything else. The only rules they follow are our rules - just to use them against us, because they know we still respect those rules. It’s like an atheist quoting religious scripture to try and attack a believer, while having exactly zero respect for that religion themselves.”
Burrows could see Ian thinking about it, his brow furrowed into a deep frown.
“So how do you then deal with people like that? If you cannot reason with them, and if they do not listen to evidence, what do you do?”
“How do you deal with anyone irrational?” Burrows shrugged again. “If it’s one person, you can either avoid them, or get physical. Same as dealing with some religious nut who gets up and in your face at the slow-gate protests. If it’s a political party with eight billion citizens and a shared border, then you need to think a bit deeper.” Burrows leaned back and settled against the concrete wall behind him. The eOX pads on his kidneys, and the other circuitry built into the back of his suit, helped to buffer him from the wall’s frigid touch. “Which is exactly what our parliament and CDM Command has been trying to do for the past five years.”
The conversation tapered off after that, and they waited in silence for about an hour, Ian’s face twisted in thought and Burrows dozing off in his suit, before the rover’s ping popped up on his wrist console. Unplugging and leaving the antechamber took only a moment, and then they were trudging up the stairs back to the surface again.
The rovers were parked nose-to-tail on the opposite side of the road, the mottled CDM unit in the lead again, and Burrows waved to the utility rover’s cockpit as they crossed the road. A spotlight on top of its cabin flickered in response. He led the way to the far side of the rovers, and waited there while Ian clambered up the left flank of the machine towards the airlock above.
The cabin still smelled of tea when it was Burrows’ turn to enter, and after racking his helmet and carbine he went into the galley to grab a cup from the simmering pot. Ian was chatting to Dixon in the cockpit, and the rover lurched into motion even as Burrows walked up behind them.
“How is the shopping list looking?” Burrows steadied himself against one of the consoles before plopping into the drone station chair again. The tea in his hand made rebellious waves before subsiding.
“We’re mostly done with the Tier One list, and half of the Tier Two. We’re heading to the Tachi workshop now to get the rest of the engineering pieces.” Dixon took the rover down a side road, turning west, and threw a thumb over his shoulder to indicate the utility rover behind them. “They have most of the botany and agri stocks loaded up. Pope even found some extra fertiliser compound from a guy who owes him a favour.”
“People owe him favours?” Burrows raised an eyebrow while sipping at his tea. “I thought you were the favours man around here.”
“Ooh that Pope is full of surprises, don’t you doubt him. You know how all the botany people always put their heads together and gossip? I have a sneaky suspicion that our mining boys do exactly the same.”
“Must be all that time they spend with their fingers in the dirt. It brings out the hippie in them.” Burrows grinned at the thought of Pope - big, taciturn around strangers, and with a mind ever filled with machines and plans - mingling with people outside Home One and acting like one of the botanists. “Any surprises along the way?”
“Nothing to raise an eyebrow at. What did you hear from Command? Any news?”
“Some news, yes, but I’ll wait until we’re on the train back before I share. Easier to do it once.”
“You tease.” Dixon pouted, and flicked some of his dark hair back over his one ear. “Fine. Keep your secrets for now.”
Burrows resolved to do exactly that, and sat back with his tea while scrolling through the shopping inventory on his screen. Ian and Dixon fell into a discussion about music - brought on, Burrows suspected, by the younger man’s exposure to Barbarella - and he listened with half an ear as their conversation went back and forth. The shopping list showed a great many green ticks, matching Dixon’s brief summary, and someone had been adding notes along the margins for some of the collected items already. Burrows skimmed through them, but it was mostly technical notes and ratings and concentrations from the various suppliers.
A yawn cracked through his jaw at some point, and he realised his tea had gone cold.
It was going to be a long night.
* * * * *
They finally rolled into the eastern train yards at two minutes before five in the morning. The rover’s interior smelled of tea, and some whiff of musky cologne that had wreathed Dixon after he returned from one of the Tier Four collection runs. Ian had laughingly remarked on it, and received a half-hour lesson on the composition and function of cologne oils in return. Burrows had just sneezed and stayed quiet.
These yards were on the outskirts of the city, separated from the southern station by a swathe of warehouses and more of the ubiquitous truncated pyramids, and the rail lines here headed directly east to Stockton. Another line led directly west, vanishing into the city and eventually coming out on the far side to head towards Schiaparelli. Side lines curved back to the south and north, heading to those respective stations on the other sides of the city. The original city plans had not included a station here for the simple reason that Stockton had not been part of the original DBMC plans, and the addition of the new city far to the east had subsequently required some reworking of the rail lines at New Hopetown, where three lines instead of the original two now terminated.
The railway control centre here was located in a green and blue pyramid capped with a silvery geodesic dome, and vast fields of solar panels lay behind it to the north, their faces already turned back to the east to await the morning sun. Muted lights glimmered from some of the dome’s lower windows.
“Ferrox Station,” Burrows named it for Ian’s benefit as they followed the navigation lines to the loading area. “They wanted to have line of sight with the other three train stations from up there, so the designers put a dome on top and filled the bottom of the structure with generators. It’s apparently one of the only buildings in the city that has an overheating problem.”
“If I was in charge there, I’d empty out the dome and move the rail operations to one of the side buildings.” Dixon pulled them into an already waiting queue of about five rovers. Burrows thought he spotted Nicholson’s rover up ahead, but all of the CDM units tended to look alike. “Run the data centres from ground level, and fill that dome up with greenery. Make it a jungle biome so it can soak up all the heat, and then run a dance floor down the middle. It would be the perfect place to steam up.”
“Yeah I wonder why they don’t do that,” Burrows snorted. “They probably think trains and cargo are more important to us than dancing.”
“As dull as sand, the lot of them. Not a shred of imagination in sight.” Dixon tutted. “Can you imagine dancing between the trees, and then falling asleep next to some fountain or pool once you are done? Without even a blanket?” He made kissing motions into the air. “Paradise, I tell you - paradise.”
“I need to tell you about these things called mosquitoes, sometime. You can be damned lucky we don’t have any of those up here.” Burrows winked at Ian before continuing. “Ian can actually back me up on this one.”
“Oh you and your horror stories from Earth.” A signal lamp ahead of them flashed green, and the rover queue began to roll up onto a waiting flatbed car. Dixon nudged their own rover along. “Let me guess: they like jungles and water, and make life miserable for people who try to sleep there?”
“You have no idea how right you are, my friend,” Burrows said with a laugh, clapping Dixon on the shoulder before rising. “I’m going out to get started with the tie-downs.”
“Tie-downs? Don’t tease me, captain.” Dixon half-turned and fluttered his eyelashes at Burrows before taking their rover up the boarding ramp.
“Degenerate…” Burrows just shook his head before grabbing his helmet and cycling out. The external temperatures were still deep in the negative eighties, and they would have to work quickly to get the rovers lashed down this time around.
Reyn and Pope, in the utility rover, rolled up behind them as Burrows started hauling out webbing straps, and once Dixon had settled the rover down on its belly again the five men were soon busy with the process of getting the vehicles lashed down. Being laden down with several tons of supplies meant that each rover now needed extra attention, and the ten-minute warning tone came over their suit channels even as they finished up the last of the ties. Burrows could feel the cold seeping into his suit despite the heating elements running at max capacity.
“Let’s hustle up and get some breakfast going. We have five hours to kill, and I want some rack time.” Burrows checked the last anchor strap on the utility rover before trotting forward to the CDM rover. “I also want to see what Dixon managed to find for us for the trip back.”
“Oh shi…” Pope, on the verge of climbing up to the airlock, dropped down and dashed back to the utility rover in long bounds. “I’ll be right back!”
“He found something at Arly’s that he wants to put together with the breakfast,” Reyn offered by way of explanation, as first Dixon and then Ian cycled into the CDM rover. “Something she got from Seven Craters, apparently.”
“New stuff, or something traded internally?” Burrows frowned. They had not had any contact with Seven Craters for years now, especially not trade, and only the occasional refugee managed to cross the border these days to bring news. Those that survived the trip did so with literally just the clothes on their back - and more horror stories.
“Something they traded with the expat community here. I think it’s food related, but I might be wrong.” Reyn shook mildly in his suit, in a sign that Burrows recognised as a cold chill. “I’m going to wait inside, I can’t feel my… backside any more.”
“Don’t tell Dixon, else he’ll offer to warm it up for you,” Burrows called out as Reyn climbed up, and received a chuckle in return. The lock opened, and the engineer was gone.
Pope came bounding back moments later, a sealed and insulated yellow container under one arm. He went straight for the ladder, climbing one-handed with rapid, snatching motions of his free hand, and then he too was inside the lock and gone.
Burrows checked his wrist display. It was a minute before six.
“What is it with these people and cutting everything so damn close,” he muttered to himself as he began to climb. He had just set foot inside the lock when the train started moving.
Next chapter: TBC
