“Sorry. I had to pee. But I hurried back.”
“All is forgiven. Thanks for the ride. Try to get assigned to my walker, so I can return the favor.”
“Will do. Wish we could talk some more, but they’re waiting to take you away.”
“No problem. If I had lips I’d kiss you.”
“Traddlemop.”
Then they took her away. I didn’t know what the others thought about the tears that trickled down my cheeks and didn’t really give a shit.
Things went relatively well after that. It took about twelve hours to grab some sleep, refill our oxygen tanks from the shuttle’s supply, and bury the pilots. The sun had just started to peek over the horizon when we started the service. The walkers were equipped with a variety of attachments, and what would have taken us hours they accomplished in a matter of minutes. The graves were laser-straight and perfectly aligned.
It was a strange funeral. The sun rose higher in the sky and sent long black fingers down across the plain. Eleven space-suited mourners sang “Amazing Grace” while five four-story-tall machines stood at attention. The sixth walker, the one controlled by Loni, served as the only pallbearer, lowering the space-suited pilots into their neatly excavated graves with slow, deliberate movements of her long, spindly arms.
Dawkins called for a moment of silence, and I wondered if anyone else was struck by the fact that not a single one of us had known the pilots, or what kind of people they’d been. And what, I wondered, was the difference between the cyborgs, who lived on after the death of everything but their brain tissue, and the pilots, who were gone wherever dead people go? Was that what we were? Chunks of brain tissue? And if so, what about me? Seeing as I had lost a goodly amount of mine, did that make me less of a person? My head started to hurt, and I let the questions drift.
And so it was that a few cubic yards of rocky red soil was pushed in on top of the pilots and carefully welded metal crosses were erected at the heads of their graves. They looked kind of lonely as we turned our backs on them and boarded the walkers. And I did manage to ride in Loni’s machine, not that it made much difference, since the inside of one cargo space is pretty much like another.
The good news was that it took the walkers less than two hours to traverse the ground we had covered in six. The bad news was that the ride consisted of an unending series of jolts, each one of which threatened to drop my stomach through the bottom of my feet, or lift it up through the top of my head.
But all things come to an end, even bad things, and the ride was no exception. Unfortunately, however, the end of one bad thing can signal the start of another, and such was the case.
I know that the walkers intercepted the huge machine-city called Roller Three, and were admitted via one of the hatchways provided for that purpose, but didn’t actually witness what took place. For what seemed like obvious reasons, the cargo hold was not equipped with niceties like vid screens, and Loni was far too busy to provide a blow-by-blow description. So the first thing we saw was a pressurized vehicle bay, some tool-toting technoids, and the troops sent to pick me up. It took them about ten seconds to spot me, separate me from the rest of the group, and order me out of my suit.
The guards wore red berets with Marcorps Special Forces badges on them and were very, very good. I could commit guard-assisted suicide and nothing more. The smaller of the two, a woman with corporal’s stripes, handed her weapon to a steroidal sidekick and moved to pat me down. Assuming I could take her, which was a lot of assuming, Frankenstein would put a dart through my heart. Not an especially attractive option.
The corporal finished her search, took two steps back, and allowed Frankenstein to slap the gun into her outstretched hand. It had the look and feel of a well-rehearsed drill. The weapon seemed to leap into the cutaway holster and snap itself in.
“Okay, Maxon. Head for door number two.”
I looked. Door number two had a big numeral “ 2” painted on it so idiots like me could see it. I noticed there were no threats, no promises, just “head for door number two.” The woman scared the hell out of me. I shuffled towards door number two. The greenie with the piercing blue eyes yelled something, but I wasn’t sure what.
I was pretty good at slip-slide walking by now and managed to stay in contact with the oil-stained deck. It vibrated as Roller Three advanced over another half-inch of Martian soil. We passed through door number two and entered a hall that was wide enough to accommodate the machinery used to build it. Airtight doors lined both sides of the corridor and were closed against the possibility of a blowout. Each bore an electro-sign. Eventually, after a trip up multiple flights of stairs, and down what seemed like miles of heavily traveled corridors, legends like “Machine Shop” and “Cybernetics” gave way to more administrative titles like “Logistics” and “Records.” The corporal ordered me to stop in front of a sign that read “Executive Offices.”
Frankenstein frowned, punched a code into the keypad located by the door, answered a question over the intercom, and stood aside as the door opened. The corporal gestured for me to enter, and I obeyed. I saw a receptionist backed by an entire compartment full of freelance number-crunchers. Most were wired to their computers and didn’t bother to look up as we entered. The receptionist was a scrawny little guy with an artificial arm. It whirred as he jerked his bionic thumb towards the other end of the room. “Park him in the conference room.”
The corporal was not one to waste words. She motioned with her head. “Move.”
I moved.
A weary-looking zombie sat chained to a console. A jumper cable connected his brain to a mini-comp. He followed our progress with dull, uninterested eyes. No one else even glanced in our direction.
It made me wonder if prisoners were so common that their comings and goings were regarded as normal, or were these men and women so dedicated to the Marscorp bottom line they cared for nothing else? Both possibilities were equally depressing.
The conference room door had been decorated with fake wood grain. It had peeled along the edges and I wanted to tear it off. The door slid out of the way and we stepped inside. I saw Sasha and felt my heart leap into my throat. She was alive! Tired, edgy, but alive!
In spite of the formal nod, and the noncommittal expression, I saw relief in her eyes. It made me feel warm inside.
The corporal gestured for me to take the chair next to Sasha, and I did. The room had no decorations to speak of and didn’t need any. A large picture window took care of that. A dust storm moved across the distant horizon. It drew the eye like the flames in an old-fashioned fireplace, filtering the landscape through a reddish-brown haze, and shifting with the wind.
The door swished, and I turned in that direction. A man had entered. Either Mother Nature or the biosculptors had been very good to him. He had a handsome face, ruddy complexion, and snow-white hair. His body was tall and athletically graceful. Energy crackled around him. He smiled and I smiled back. It was impossible not to.
“Mr. Maxon! Ms. Casad! Thanks for coming.” The way he said it removed us from the category of prisoners and made us feel like honored guests.
The man turned to the corporal and treated her to one of his high-voltage smiles. “Thanks, corporal. I’ll take it from here.” The corporal, trained killer that she was, smiled bashfully, said something incoherent, and pushed Frankenstein towards the door.
The man leaned across the tabletop to shake hands. His grip was cold and limp. I let go as quickly as I could. He smiled. “Howard Norton, General Manager, at your service.”
“Max Maxon. Glad to meet you.”
He turned to Sasha and offered his hand. “Ms. Casad. Welcome to Mars. How’s your mother?”
Sasha looked hopeful. “She was fine the last time I talked with her. You know my mother?”
Norton nodded and sat down across from us. He leaned forward. A tidal wave of cologne rolled over me. “Yes, your mother and I worked on a project prior to the war. Different disciplines, of course, but she struck me as a competent scientist, and I was impressed by the quality of her ideas.”
“Mom’s impressive, all right,” Sasha said evenly. “We are, or were, on our way to see her.”
Norton nodded sympathetically. “Yes, I’m sorry about the ambush. Marscorp had nothing to do with it. While we are aware there are differences of opinion between Trans-Solar and the Protech Corporation, we have positive relationships with both companies, and would like to keep it that way. That’s why we put the surviving Trans-Solar people on a ship and sent them back to Earth.”
“And the greenies?”
Norton looked my way. The smile was predatory. “We have a labor shortage. The tree-huggers were convicted
