Chapter 9 HUNTER #2
Now, as I contemplate the low odds of a touching family reunion in the near future, I’m carefully submerging myself in the Pax system, creeping through each section of it like some soldier in one of those movies where they cruise along underwater with only their eyes showing, then jump out and pull off some badass attack.
Only I guess my helmet would be covered in daisies.
The invaders’ ops team, which seems to consist of at least two of the four people we saw on the bridge, are methodically working their way through all the registers Pax has in its systems. But why? What kind of information could they be after?
The UN Central Registers keep track of who’s who and who’s where on Mars.
Some sections of the planet are still unclaimed, and if you want to get your hands on one of those, the deal is that you have to (a) find a way to get yourself here from Earth, and then (b) physically occupy the land you want to grab, and (c) register your claim with the UN.
You have to tell the UN everything, from who’s in your group to what kind of business you’re planning to carry on to your survey results, what kind of natural resources you find, the works.
It’s expensive – even for us – to get here, so the registers also reveal the various alliances, nations and corporations that are pooling their cash to make the trip. And fewer of them are doing it these days, since the only unclaimed land is the stuff that doesn’t hold much of value.
Every claim out there involves some kind of alliance, except for the GravesUP territory.
We were first, after all.
My grandfather Michael Graves was a visionary who built a pile of businesses, and changed just about every part of daily life on Earth.
He was in housing, medicine, transport, tech – most people’s toothpaste probably has a GravesUP logo on it.
And then he was the guy who tore up the United Nations Outer Space Treaty (yes, they actually called it that, ten points for originality) and got things on Mars jump-started thirty-one years ago.
Nobody thought he could do it – that he could launch a rocket, that he and his team could make it to Mars.
And then one day he’d done it, and everyone else was caught with their pants down.
The Graves family have always been rule-breakers.
And honestly, there’s every chance that humanity would still be stranded on Earth without someone having made a big move.
Say what you will about us – and plenty of people do – but the reality is that humanity needed a lifeboat.
We actually built one, while everybody else debated what color the paint should be.
We didn’t just dream about it – we did it.
The heavy hitters – the USA, China, Russia, India and some Euro alliances – were all up within five years of my grandfather’s team’s first landing, because it turns out that panic-buying a space program is actually more effective than you’d think, provided you have the budget.
Then came more corporations, more countries, and finally the UN itself, about a decade after the party began.
It took them a while to convince their members to cough up the cash.
The early claimants were called the Red Star Rebels, because they all became rule-breakers, once we were. It was kind of like the old gold rushes, everybody grabbing land for themselves, except for one important difference, which was that in the case of Mars, nobody was already living here.
There are protesters who … let’s say they don’t see my grandfather the way I do. Who think everybody deserves a ride.
To them I say: if the Mars For All crew wants a future on the red planet for all of humanity, they need to let the best of humanity do the building first. Then we’ll talk about whether their kind can contribute.
I’m jolted from my thoughts when I nearly open a registry while someone else is still in it, which would show them an additional user they couldn’t explain.
‘You okay?’ I jump at Cleo’s voice as she reappears. ‘You just yanked your hands back from that keyboard like it bit you. Looks like you got into the system?’
‘Strolled in.’
She folds her arms, and her tattoos seem to twine around each other, like she’s some disapproving greenhouse creature. ‘Don’t get too cocky, rich boy.’
I shrug. ‘Humans may settle the solar system, but they will never get better at passwords.’
‘Why do they even have them here? Why not handprints?’
‘For a start, your hands have to be pretty clean, and this is the greenhouse,’ I reply. ‘Some places they have them in engineering too, because of all the grease. I’m guessing not here, if you haven’t seen them.’
She gives me a quick shake of her head.
‘Only real problem with them is that they encourage hackers,’ I continue. ‘And obviously we wouldn’t want that.’
She gives me a flicker of a smile, and deep on the inside, I allow myself a mental fist pump. It shouldn’t feel this satisfying to make her forget our problems for a millisecond.
‘Figure anything out?’ she asks, resting her hands on the back of my chair and leaning over my shoulder, her cheek close to mine, which isn’t distracting at all.
‘Hard to say. There has to be a reason they’re here, specifically.
However ineffectual the UN is – no offense – people do still care at least a little bit when someone tries to screw with them.
They’re, like, the fig leaf. The shield everyone uses to pretend we’re all being civilized up here.
So I’m asking myself what Pax has that nowhere else does, apart from apparently shit security. ’
‘I follow your logic. Got an answer?’
‘The UN Central Registers feel like the obvious choice. There’s a lot of confidential information.
But what they want to do with them, who knows.
And hang on, now one of them’s looking at the plant inventory.
The life-support stuff – hydrogen, oxygen, this whole section of the base. Environmental controls.’
She catches her breath, the same fear running through her that’s just tensed my muscles. ‘They’re looking for us?’
‘I don’t think so, they’re not checking security cams or monitors. Maybe they just want to know how all the systems work. Or maybe they want to figure out how to break them into tiny pieces.’
‘I hate this,’ she mutters.
‘You’re not alone.’
‘I was thinking.’ She straightens up from where she leaned on my chair.
‘You know how they say, “You can run, but you can’t hide”?
Well, we can’t hide unless we just want to crouch here until they blow us up in six hours or so.
But maybe we can run? There aren’t any long-range vehicles left after the evac, but there are the short-range rovers.
We could use one as a lifeboat if we had to.
They’ve got life support, at least. Hell, we could hide in one now.
The dust storm’s officially rolled in, that would give us cover. ’
‘It would unless they spotted us. Then we’d be running away incredibly slowly – what do those things do, twenty-five kilometers an hour? – and with a limited range. We’d be sitting ducks once the short-range battery ran out and they could just come pick us off.’
‘Killjoy,’ she mutters. ‘We don’t …’ Her voice trails off, and I twist in my chair, suddenly sure she’s spotted a threat. But she’s just staring into space, curling a lock of red hair slowly around her finger.
‘Cleo?’
‘There are long-range vehicles at the base,’ she murmurs. ‘They arrived in them.’
I blink at her. She’s right. ‘You think we should boost one of their rovers?’
She shrugs. ‘They’ll go far enough to get us to a neighboring base. I think we should at least take a look at them.’
‘If we’re about to steal a car, I think we should break into that packet of cookies we found first, just in case. Blood sugar aids concentration, you know.’
‘You’ve never been in actual danger before,’ she informs me. ‘And it shows. You eat your cookie, I’ll be back in a minute.’
She disappears through the doorway that leads to the environmental-control equipment. I briefly consider following her, but … I do have those cookies. So I dig them out and crunch my way through one as I wait for Cleo to return.
She reappears with a small remote in one hand and a tiny drone hovering in the air in front of her, almost completely silent. She has a headband on now with an eyepiece flipped out from it, just a transparent screen that sits in front of her left eye.
‘Drone has a camera?’ I guess.
‘Let’s let someone else check around the corners for danger,’ she replies. ‘Grab a couple of helmets and pass me a cookie.’
So I grab the helmets for our suits – can’t be too careful about the potential for catastrophic breaches while there are folks running around with guns – and pass her a cookie. Then I follow her into the hallway.
We move quietly, and knowing the drone’s checking the way ahead means we can move a lot quicker too.
Cleo keeps it up near the ceiling, where it won’t be in anyone’s line of sight if it buzzes around the corner and into danger.
Whatever faint noise it makes is masked by the sound of the fans working in the background.
As we pass the banks of doors, a thought occurs to me. ‘Where are your quarters? Is there anything you want to take with you? There’s no promise this place will still be standing when you come back to it.’
Cleo pauses before she replies and it’s like she’s choosing her words. ‘It’d be out of the way,’ she says after a moment. ‘There’s no need.’
And I’ll be honest, it’s a little weird, the way she says it.
Unless you’re in the fancy seats, you don’t get much of a luggage allotment, coming to Mars.
An engineering student sure wouldn’t. Whatever she brought would have meant a lot to her.
I brought my favorite piece of my dad’s work.
It’s a small, delicate sculpture in soapstone, all wistful curves, and it took up a full third of my own luggage allotment.