Mars Fire - Chapter XIX - Sol 5

Serialized science fiction

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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 , Chapter XIV , Chapter XV , Chapter XVI , Chapter XVII , Chapter XVIII

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Chapter XIX - Sol 5 - Friday

Getting the two rovers out of the supply depot and back to their garage bays did not take long, and Burrows met Dixon in the white-striped blue access tunnels behind the bays once they had parked both vehicles.

“I got a ping from Reyn: apparently he and Pope are busy getting Ian set up in the A3 agri dome. They’re clearing out the old aquaponics space.” Burrows tapped on his compad once Dixon was next to him. “Sounds like it will take most of the day.”

Dixon tutted and shook his head.

“If Reyn and the new boy are with the botany people, I’m sure something will keep them busy for the rest of the day.”

“You’ve also noticed?”

“Darling, I’m queer - not blind.” Dixon gave Burrows a mock glare, and Burrows had to laugh in turn. The metal grates underfoot creaked and clanged as they walked back towards the main dome. “Half of the botany girls become very attentive when Reyn is around. He’s definitely working his magic there.”

“And Ian is fresh meat now, and tall too. The ladies are going to enjoy him.” Burrows shook his head when he thought of the previous night at the club. “You should have seen his face when we went into Barbarella. I don’t think the Euro colony prepared him for what happens out here.”

“Oh no, they are a tame bunch in comparison. There are a handful of clubs that test the limits out there, but they are so focused on working and productivity that they never try anything truly wild.” Dixon tapped the control buttons as they stepped into the airlock that led to the main dome. “The ones who are really curious end up going to the Golden Bough at some point, and after that it’s all downhill from there.”

“Really. That explains a lot about you,” Burrows replied deadpan, and got an eye-roll in response as the air vents around them hissed.

“Yes Dad! What are you going to ask next, that I fill in a time-sheet and ask permission whenever I leave my apartment?”

“Sounds like a great way to prevent more cologne contamination through the rest of the colony, I reckon.”

“You know, if you want some cologne, you just have to ask. This act of playing hard to get really isn’t necessary.” Dixon gave him a wink as they stepped out of the airlock and into the green tunnels beyond, and Burrows had to laugh and throw his hands up in mock surrender.

“Fine, I give up. No more cologne jokes today.” Burrows felt his compad give an alert as they moved towards the main admin area. “Actually, no - change of plan. Send some to Ian. Let’s see what it does to his chances with the ladies here.”

“You know, I’m not sure whether you are trying to help, or whether you actually want him to stay single.” Dixon sighed. “Why are Earth men so difficult to read…”

“You know what, please don’t ever tell me how you have that type of experience.” Burrows watched the message scroll over the compad screen. “I need to go talk to the council. Sounds like they want a detailed brief on our last supply run.”

“Just the supply run, or the trip out to Alvie too?”

“Probably both. I talked to Councillor Felmann earlier this morning, he must have told them something that piqued their interest.” Past the c-lock, the main admin area had a pre-lunch bustle of people in it, accompanied by the smell of cooking herbs, and Burrows knew that talking openly was no longer a good idea. “I can’t tell them about the private briefing, but I’ll see what I can do to raise their concern levels a bit. It would be wise for more people to be more careful about this.”

“Always the idealist, you.” Dixon patted him on the shoulder, before nodding towards the engineering tunnels. “I’m going to go catch up in the machine shop. I’ll see you later.”

The council chambers were a simple set of rooms located near the upper level of the dome, and Burrows took one of the dome perimeter staircases from the ground floor up to the second floor. Here, clustered in a doughnut ring around the central skylight, a number of rooms had been partitioned off and devoted to colonial administration matters over the years. The original comm arrays for the settlement still sprawled over most of the main dome roof, and their cabled roots ran into the rooms and terminals here. A slight smell of ozone permeated the air here in a perpetual haze. Burrows followed a familiar route towards the one meeting room, and knocked on the black door once he found it. The smell of food - pastries? - was tracing sweet notes through the air here, mingling with the ozone and making his stomach rumble. Lunch was approaching.

Councillor Felmann opened the door after a few moments, and stood aside for Burrows to enter. The room was small and light grey, barely five by five, and the one wall was a curved stretch of reinforced metal - the outside skin of the dome. The shuttered viewport in it was cranked shut, sealing off a view of the settlement crater outside. A plastic table with five chairs occupied the middle, while a low cabinet with digital modules and interface screens lined the one wall at the back.

Aside from Felmann, there were two other councillors present: Raeger Thornton from Mining, and Garry Hameway from Machining. Thornton was cast from the same mould as Pope - wide across the shoulders, heavy arms, and a barrel chest, supporting a face that was all flat planes and sharp angles - and gave Burrows a bone-crushing handshake when he walked in.

“Welcome, Jack. Thanks for coming on such short notice.” Thornton’s grey eyes and grey hair appeared muted despite the harsh light in the meeting room. His skin was pale from years spent underground, and Burrows could never remember his age despite attending at least two of his celebrations in his time at the colony. Somewhere in his fifties? Martian ageing was still an odd phenomenon to him, what with the longer years and days.

“Hans was telling us about your supply trip. It sounds like you boys had quite a ride.” Hameway was the next to shake hands. He was taller and skinnier than Thornton, and had brown eyes and curly blond hair that tangled off in every direction. His hands were just as callused as the mining councillor’s grip though, and his round face was split into a wide grin - even as he talked. He was somewhere in his forties, Burrow recalled, although the exact age also eluded him.

“We had some excitement on the road, yes. I think it was a good wakeup call for our new member from Planckstadt.” Burrows sat down at the head of the table after Thornton and Hameway had taken their seats, and Felmann had closed the door behind them. Only one chair remained open on the back corner of the table. “Ian’s been learning fast though. He asks good questions, and he uses his ears more than his mouth. I think we can work with him.”

“If only we could say the same about some of our own people,” Thornton grumbled. “Some of the youngsters here make me worry.”

“They’re just blowing off steam, Raeger. We were all the same, back in the day.” Felmann seated himself to Burrows’ right, and gave a small smile. “They’ll go explore in the cities, and then once that energy wears off, they’ll come right back again. They’ll appreciate our setup more once they have experienced the alternatives.”

“And we’ll have sleepless nights until that happens, it seems.” Thornton leaned forward and intertwined his fingers on the table in front of him. “Speaking of sleepless nights, Hans told us about your trip. It sounds like we are in for more sleepless nights from the Union too.”

“It does look like there is an uptick in their activity, yes.” Burrows tried to make himself comfortable in the hard plastic chair. The seat was already murder on his behind. “The militia has been encountering them more and more, out to the east, and they are definitely getting a lot bolder.”

“We heard about the bandits on the road to Culheimer. That’s deep inside our district.” Hameway’s grin had faded, and his eyes were intent now. “Is there any sign of the Union trying to get between us and the Nova Collective?”

“Officially - no. We know they are probing the Nova border as well, along its entire eastern length, but we haven’t really seen it looking much different from the type of harassment we are seeing in the Southern District here.” Burrows also leaned forward, hands linked on the table. “Off the record is a different story. We’ve heard a lot of rumours about their slow-gate being offline, and that they are struggling to keep their border with us secured. A lot of the bandit activity that shows up on that Culheimer route is likely coming in via the Nova border.”

“And we trust the Nova Collective?” Felmann’s voice was soft. “These bandits from the south are definitely not Nova forces?”

“We do trust them, as much as anyone else. I think they are facing similar issues to us, and I don’t think they have the luxury of infrastructure that we have. A lot of their heavy road cargo has been moving north to Culheimer the past four or five weeks, which was apparently the clue that Colonel Hayes and his people were looking for about their gate being down.” Burrows felt the frown crease his forehead even as he thought of their southern neighbour. “If - or rather, when - the Union pushes on them, they are going to struggle. Same as us, just on a different scale. But it’s going to be the same fight, essentially.”

“The Union has been doing a lot of pushing lately, it seems.” Hameway sat back and crossed his arms over his chest. “Let’s not get side-tracked though. Why don’t we start from the top? Take us through your whole trip.”

Burrows spent the better part of an hour doing exactly that, going through the details of each leg of the past two days’ journey. The councillors had questions about countless points - the road conditions, the activity levels at Culheimer, the traffic at New Hopetown, the stores and suppliers they dealt with, the state of the rail tracks, the number of other rovers and travellers on the trains - and Burrows barely noticed when a junior assistant showed up with a plate of sandwiches and a pot of tea. The men helped themselves to food and kept talking as they ate.

The one thing that Burrows did not tell them about, was the secret meeting with Colonel Hayes. That one he kept to himself, as per the original instructions.

“The last thing we got out of the Alvie Ranch encounter is something we’re hoping will come in handy in the future sometime.” Burrows brushed crumbs from his chin before sitting back from the table. Bread was not too common in the colony, and sandwiches - with cucumber, lettuce, tomato and cheese - were a relative luxury that rarely crossed a dining table here. Many of the grain types had not taken well to Mars, for reasons unknown to the thousands of scientists who had been prodding at the problem for more than fifty years now. Grain had to be shipped in from Earth now, and while there was a brisk grain-for-ore trade among many of the settlements, it was still a relative rarity.

“We managed to scan and record a high-definition electronic fingerprint of that Glorious Leader crawler of theirs. Dixon - I mean, Hank Franklin, our tech specialist - used the militia rover to do a full-spectrum patterning on it.” Burrows had to remind himself that most people outside their group rarely knew their other nicknames. “If it comes back into our territory and passes one of the navigation beacons, we’ll know it immediately.”

“Even after you took out their antennae?” Hameway spoke around a mouthful of sandwich, with a hand in front of his mouth. “Won’t their repairs change that profile again?”

“It will, yes, but only to a relatively minor degree. We still have their reactor readings and their local network profile, and we got more scans after they left from the mining site, when their systems were already degraded by our, ah… persuasion. Even after they repair their arrays, we’ll still be able to match them with a high likelihood.”

“They’ll need big balls to come back after how you treated them.” Thornton wiped crumbs off his hands and sat back with a creak of complaining plastic chair. “But that’s part of the problem here, isn’t it? That crew won’t be allowed to talk about it, so none of their other people will know about it or learn from it. They’ll just censor and hide the whole thing from their own people, and then blast out more lies about our ‘militia aggression’ on the border zone.”

“It’s a bit of a stretch to call Alvie Ranch a border zone. But that’s how they’ll sell it to their sheep.” Hameway sipped at his tea to chase the sandwich down. “Any word from Colonel Hayes about this whole situation?”

“Nothing yet. I filed a report last night while we were en route back here, but we haven’t heard anything since.” Burrows recalled the eye-blurring fatigue as he had tapped away at the keys in the jolting rover cockpit, behind Dixon. “We’re expecting to hear something back within the next few days. There will probably be a final update from Nicholson’s team as well - I believe they escorted that crawler all the way back to the official DMZ line.”

“Absolute bloody farce.” Thornton snorted. “They send their own teams four hundred klicks into our territory and play dumb when we confront them, but when we send our own militia units to our own side of the border, they start screaming about mobilisation and how we are ‘provoking’ them by placing ‘troops’ on the border.”

“We’re actually doing that again on Monday.” Burrows took them through a brief overview of the planned training march before concluding. “It will be mostly new settlers getting trained and certified on their hostile environment skills, and all the new militia people will do an extra march with other objectives. It’s the standard stuff we do every three months, but we’ll have to see how it goes this time. Even three months ago, we weren’t seeing this much heat on the border compared to now.”

“Same routine as last time?” Hameway leaned forward. “It might make you a bit of a target if you clump up in your usual formation for that exercise.”

“We’re actually thinking of spreading out more this time.” Burrows nodded in agreement. “It makes us smaller on the satellite views, and looks less like a concentrated push or convoy to their sensor techs. They apparently got very jittery last time we did this.”

“Lots to learn for Ian, then. Will he be ready in time?” Felmann waited until Burrows nodded before continuing. “I saw him in Botany this morning, it looks like he’s off to a good start. We need him to make a difference there.”

The unspoken request was clear to Burrows: make sure the kid comes back.

“We have had a good rapport with him thus far, and I’m sure he’ll figure out the marching and survival elements quickly too. We’re getting him fitted with a militia suit this weekend, and then basic rifle training after that. He should be able to pull his own weight, come Monday”

“You’re going to make him a problem for the botany girls,” Thornton rumbled, and there were chuckles around the table. “Put him in a suit and make him a soldier, and the girls will be all over him in no time.”

Burrows grinned at the thought.

“I recall the tactic, yes. It seems to work quite well to get the new men to stay here and put down roots, if you don’t mind the pun.” Burrows turned to regard Felmann. “I wonder whose idea that was?”

“Me? Why are you looking at me, young man?” Felmann’s eyebrows rose so high that they appeared to be receding into his hairline. “I had nothing to do with how you met your wife.”

“I wasn’t talking about my wife, councillor, but since you mentioned it now…”

“All a coincidence, of course. Every time.” Thornton winked at Burrows before turning serious again. “Jack, we need you to be honest now. Are we going to have problems with the Union soon?”

“Yes.” The word was out without even a thought. Burrows followed it with a sigh. “I think there is a very real chance that we are going to see a repetition of the Seven Craters scenario from them somewhere in the next six to twelve months. The moment that they have those fake settlers of theirs inside our lands, they will run their usual victimhood routine, and then they are going to come across the border with no plans to stop.”

“The only thing we can do for now, as the militia, is to be as sharp as a razor and just get on top of those situations as quickly as they develop,” Burrows continued. “We cannot give them a moment to establish a foothold here. That mining site incident yesterday could have gone completely differently, I think we were actually very lucky when we called that bluff of theirs.”

“If you had been delayed in the capital, they would have set up living quarters, and then they’d still be there today. Or if that bandit fleet on the Culheimer road had kept you in the south for another day.” Hameway pulled at his chin, a thoughtful expression across his face. “I agree with your assessment, you were very lucky they backed off when they did.”

“It was a gamble, I’ll freely admit that. If we had shot off all their antennas and they were still there, it could have escalated quite badly from there.” Burrows’ second plan, in the event of the bluff failure, had involved blowing the tail segment off the massive crawler in an attempt to get them moving again. After that, Plan C would have involved the site’s mining machines and digging a very big grave.

“My guess is that their commissars panicked when they started losing net access back to Zhurong.” Felmann looked intently at the shuttered viewport, his eyes seeing something far beyond it as he considered the events. “Someone was worried about not having orders and not knowing what to do, so my estimation is that they decided to pull back while they still had confirmed orders on how to respond. We know they don’t think well on their own. They never have, and I think you played into that fear of theirs.”

“That’s a kind assessment, councillor, but I’m still calling it luck for now.” Burrows gave a grim smile. “I definitely won’t try it a second time. I think Zhurong will learn quickly from this, and the next time will have different results for sure.”

“Be that as it may, I think it definitely gives us something to consider as well, on the civilian side.” Felmann nodded at the still-pensive Hameway. “Garry, it might be a good idea for your people to start looking into jamming gear. Anything we can make to sever those mobile links that the Union uses. If we can find a way to cut them off once they enter our territory, it could make a difference when that fight finally happens.”

“Not a bad idea. We’ll need to think of our western options too, though.” Thornton cocked his head towards the shuttered viewport. “As much as we want you militia boys to win the fight in the east, we’ll have to think about evacuation plans to the west too. Get our supplies ready, get the equipment catalogued and sorted, and start working on how we’re getting this place empty once the Union is on the horizon.”

“Headaches, Raegar - that’s what you’re giving us. Headaches and more sleepless nights.” Felmann sighed, and then stood. Burrows followed a moment later.

“Jack, thank you for the update. I think we all have some new things to consider and be concerned about now, and we definitely need some planning to start preparing for this mess.” Felmann extended his hand, which Burrows shook. “Good luck with getting Ian sorted out this weekend.”

“Councillors.” Burrows nodded at the two other men, opened the black door, and left. The corridor outside still smelled of ozone, but the pastry smell - probably their lunch sandwiches, in retrospect - had faded.

His thoughts ran in circles as he followed the passageway to the nearby staircase and began to retrace his steps back to ground level.

The council knew more than they let on, that was for sure. Burrows was not their only source of information. How much they knew, was another question - and as much as it pained him to keep them in the dark about the real situation at CDM Command, he also understood why. One wrong comment or unguarded moment, and that story would take on a life of its own within the colony - or even wider.

The final puzzle was the fifth seat at the table, which had remained empty.

Who else was meant to have been there?

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Next chapter: TBC

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