Some wept. Some begged for mercy. Two of them scowled horribly.
OD12 shrugged. She heard servos whine and knew two of the other cyborgs had noticed the shrug. Would their internal computers consider that an anomaly: something foreign to proper cyborg behavior? In that instant, OD12 realized she would have to hide her freedom of thought. She must mimic the others perfectly or she would return to Toll Seven’s pod for repairs.
In another life, she would have chuckled. She knew, however, that if she chuckled, the other cyborgs might destroy her.
“That one,” AZ9 said. His voice box was scratchy due to battle damage.
OD12 swallowed down a sigh. With mechanical detachment, she strode at the chosen bio-form. The male screamed, and he tried to struggle, using a wrestling hold against her arms.
By using magnetic footing to walk upright and anchor herself, OD12 plucked him out of the herd. His wrestling grapples only minimally interfered with her task. She moved away from the protesting bio-forms. She twisted him around as if he were a baby. His hysterical strength was useless against her cyborg muscles. She bent his arms behind him and clicked handcuffs over his wrists. Next, she cuffed his ankles, turned on magnetic power and attached him to the metal floor. She put a neural inhibitor on his neck and all his struggles ceased as if he’d become catatonic. Lastly, she brought up a jack-gun. It was a heavy, bulky piece of equipment. She placed it at the base of his neck, and the jack-gun began to vibrate.
OD12 looked up and noticed that the herd of bio-forms watched her in fascinated horror. A few babbled whispered questions.
After three minutes, the unit made a loud noise. OD12 removed the jack-gun from the male’s neck. He now possessed a gleaming jack in his neck, ready to receive a plug into Web-Mind. But that was for later.
AZ9 pointed out the next bio-form.
Dutifully, OD12 went into the herd to get the female. Now all the bio-forms tried to fight. It didn’t matter. They were naked, lacked gravity and possessed minimal strength. Still, it was an ugly process. It wounded OD12 to hear their whispered words concerning what they thought she was.
She wanted to tell them she used to be just like them. She would have told them their screams didn’t matter. They would become cyborgs or Webbies and the memories of their horror would be overridden. It might not be for the best, but it was inevitable, as escape was impossible.
OD12 understood that, because life was rigged. The only freedom was what she possessed now: a little self- awareness. It saddened her to realize the self-awareness wouldn’t last. It meant.… It meant she had to figure out a way to enjoy it as much as she could while it did last.
She pressed the jack-gun against another neck and the machine began to vibrate and dig into the captured female’s flesh.
-21-
After passing Pavonis Mons and with Olympus Mons towering in the distance, Marten saw SU jets once more.
The commandos skimmed eight meters above huge red dunes, with the sand below drifting in ominous swirls. All day, Marten had fought against an increasingly strong headwind. Omi now tapped his shoulder and pointed into the reddish sky.
At first, Marten thought Omi meant the wispy ice clouds kilometers high. Then Marten noticed slow-moving specks.
“Can the jets climb that high?” Marten asked over the com-link.
“Did you see that flare?” Omi asked.
“Flare?”
“It was near one of those jets, might have been one of them.”
Marten made a shrewd guess. “Martian orbitals must have jumped the jets.”
During the next few minutes, there were four more flares. Likely, it was aircraft dying a violent death.
Marten hoped that meant some Martian space defenses still existed. The thought of being trapped on Mars for good made him queasy. He had been trapped in Australian Sector for years. He wondered sometimes if he ever should have escaped from the Sun-Works Factory the day his parents died. He’d yearned for freedom all those years in Australian Sector. He’d resisted Social Unity, just as the Martians had resisted here. The Storm Assault Missile had changed him. He no longer resisted because he no longer accepted either Social Unity or the Highborn as even nominally in charge of his life. Until he found a free society, a free government, he was his own government, his own self-run State.
Marten squinted up at the wispy ice clouds. He searched for specks, but the jets and orbitals had either perished or left for somewhere else. The Planetary Union was the closest thing to freedom there was in Inner Planets. Yet they followed Unionist doctrine. It talked a good game, but essentially meant the union leaders made the decisions. It leaned heavily on original Social Unity doctrine. The great difference was power. Social Unity wielded it and the Planetary Union wanted it. Because the Unionists fought like a wounded beast, it granted its individual members greater autonomy than otherwise.
To pass the long hours riding the skimmer, Marten had spoken to Squad Leader Rojas about the Planetary Union. It’s how he’d discovered the majority of his information concerning Martian ideals.
Rojas’s major credo and apparently the Planetary Union’s as well was—
Marten wanted a free state, where free people united to achieve goals they genuinely desired. Instead of Thought Police, individual people would work toward individual goals. His mother had taught him about such systems. They had existed in the past and might possibly exist farther out in the Solar System. Yet his mother had also taught him another truth. People were not inherently good. Each human possessed an evil streak and a propensity toward bad actions. Each person needed a code of conduct that corralled that propensity toward bad actions. For his mother, it had been God and the ancient book called the Bible.
Marten shook his head. He refused to let anyone plunder him anymore. His stint in the Storm Assault Missile had torn the last veils from his eyes. He had no allegiance to Social Unity or the Highborn. Both systems sought to enslave him. So the sovereign State of Marten Kluge—the germ to an ancient method of governance—was going to leave Mars before the Planetary Union tried to usurp his freedom and mold him in its likeness.
The great question was how to achieve his dream. If the SU Battlefleet had moved into near orbit, it meant they had likely captured his shuttle. If they held his shuttle, how was he going to tear it out of their grasp? Perhaps just as importantly, how was he going to get into space again to try to wrest his shuttle back into his rightful control?
Twelve hours later, Omi drove the skimmer into a low garage at the base of Olympus Mons. Marten had the men line up in an oxygen zone. They actually looked strange without their EVA helmets on. Most had matted hair and dark circles around their eyes.
Marten spoke tersely to them, commending some and giving others Highborn axioms concerning combat. Then he dismissed the men and told them to get some sleep.
As the men filed away, Major Diaz strode up and saluted. The major looked as dangerous as ever and his hair, incredibly, was swept back hard into perfect form. Diaz had lost weight, but none of the harshness to his
