Mars Fire - Chapter XX - Sol 5
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 , Chapter XIV , Chapter XV , Chapter XVI , Chapter XVII , Chapter XVIII , Chapter XIX
Chapter XX - Sol 5 - Friday
The Machine Womb smelled of cologne and industrial oil when he walked in, and the two men responsible barely looked up as the door closed behind Burrows again. Dixon was at his tech desk, hands working across three different input panels, and with his hair tied back into a stubby ponytail. His olive singlesuit smelled like it had been drenched in some mix of spice, smoke, and citrus. Display panels glittered in front of him, metrics twitching and ticking as their inputs registered. Pope was visible at the intersection between the tech module and the two fabricator modules, moving equipment from one bay to the other with his brown singlesuit stripped down and tied around his waist. Burrows could see the sweat gleaming on his inked and scarred skin even from across the workshop.
“All I’m saying is, how did this even get to happen?” Pope nodded in Burrows’ direction when he spotted him, and disappeared into the printer module again without pausing. His voice came floating back to them over the whirr of machines. “They send a rover the size of a damn space shuttle through hundreds of kilometres of our territory, and no-one even notices?”
“They could have been anywhere in that region, we don’t know if they did it in a single trip.” Dixon’s voicebox was as smooth as ever. He glanced back to Burrows and waggled his eyebrows before continuing. “Burrows raised the same point just after we got the news.”
“And we still don’t have answers to either, no.” Burrows scooted past Dixon and moved to the module intersection where a stack of equipment crates had sprouted. “Neither does the council. If they made the trip in a single sprint, then it means they crossed the border pretty much just after I spoke to the colonel in New Hopetown. That’s already a big coincidence. If they did not, it means they were deep in our territory already before they decided to try their luck at Cora. Either way, we still don’t know how they managed that entire trip without being spotted.”
“How many settlements are in that area? At least ten? Fifteen? That’s just in a straight line due east from Cora.” Pope’s voice drifted from the rear of the printer bay. “How the hell do none of those people even see anything?”
“To be fair, it is a big space, and a lot of it is just empty dunes. But yes, I see your point.” Burrows found himself wondering about the same thing. There was supposed to be a patrol grid in that area too, from the militia units stationed there, but with everyone drawn off to the west, to chase the bandits at the railway line, anything could have slipped through.
Which of course raised the question of how that had been allowed to happen in the first place.
Even if the voluntary CDM units had fallen back to the west, what about the more permanent border units? Where had they been occupied?
“We’re driving through that same area on Monday, for the perimeter hike, yes?” Pope reappeared with another crate in his arms, and continued when Burrows nodded. “I’d love to see exactly what our navigation masts are doing out there. Something must be going on, there’s no way you get to play sneaky buggers with a crawler that size.”
“It does look suspicious, no doubt about that.” Burrows glanced at some of the crate labels. It looked like machining bits that Pope was collecting. “Listen, what’s all this for?”
“We need to recondition a drill head that the guys tore up while we were gone. Big delay on the number seven shaft now.” Pope bustled past with an empty crate from the one area, and began loading tools from the other area into it. “Luckily they caught it in time, else we’d have to buy a whole new one.”
Burrows whistled between his teeth, and just shook his head. The old mining shafts here at Home One had slowly decreased in productivity over the years - not through human failure, but simply through deposits playing out. The number seven shaft was one of the handful that still yielded decent output, even as the other shafts were shuttered.
“Good luck having that conversation with the council.”
“Oh they already had that conversation yesterday. Thornton was right on it the moment the machines stopped.” Pope finished loading the crate and brought it back to the intersection pile where Burrows stood. “We’re already in Solutions mode now.”
“Speaking of Thornton, I just saw him, Hameway and Felmann at the admin dome. They wanted an update on the trip.” Burrows gave the two men a brief summary of the meeting before continuing. “I think they are also generally concerned about these developments with the Union. The biggest issue is just that no-one is really sure what to do or how to handle it at the moment.”
“Everyone knows the storm is coming, yet no-one knows how to prepare. Classic first-generation settler problem.” Dixon tapped away at his console even as he spoke. “All the smartest people in a single room, and no-one can answer the big question.”
“I don’t see you coughing up any answers either, wise-arse,” Pope replied, shifting some of the crates aside to lower the pile. “Unless your Clarke buddies are working on something we’ve all been kept in the dark about.”
“I think that one would be a surprise for all of us. The Clarkes are still learning and analysing. It will be months still before they get past their T-tests and the M-levels.” Dixon frowned as something on the console in front of him turned red. More keys rattled. “Don’t expect magic answers from them any time soon.”
Burrows turned his attention back to Pope. The man smelled of oil and wet clothing, this close up.
“Will you be up for the Monday hike, then? If there’s a problem with the shafts…” Burrows trailed off.
Pope shook his head, his mouth set into a hard line. Sweat beaded along his cheeks and upper lip.
“They’ll be fine without me. Caleb was gassing about it, apparently, but then Thornton put him in his place. He at least knows that the militia work has to get priority for now.”
“He’d better not be too obvious about it.” Dixon frowned from the other side of the workshop. “We don’t want half the colony to start panicking if the mining boss suddenly tells people that militia patrols are more important than mining right now. People will put two and two together there.”
“Well, none of their mining is really going to matter much if the Union walks in and takes over, will it now?” Pope pulled his shoulders back and arched his back with a grimace. Burrows could hear his spine clicking as he flexed. “None of them are stupid enough to fall for that. At least I hope not. Would be a pretty big disappointment if it was.”
“People being short-sighted? Never.” Burrows snorted, and Pope gave a grim smile moments later. “We already have enough of that to deal with.”
“This Union bullshit is not going to get better. Mark my words.” Pope pulled a rag from one of his back pockets and wiped first his head and then his hands. “They keep pushing and pushing, and someone is going to push back some day.”
“You mean, harder than we did yesterday.” Burrows shook his head. “I don’t know where this ends. We get into an all-out shooting war with the Union, and then what? They’ll roll over us like a damn rockfall. We just don’t have the numbers to stand against them. The moment that fight starts, we’ve already basically lost. It’s just a matter of time then.”
“Now that’s where we disagree.” Pope raised his hand, and began to tick points off his fingers. “Firstly: when that fight starts, every day we keep them busy is one more day for our people to be safe, or get to safety. Second: every day we fight them, we make them bleed. That means death letters back in Asia, and people asking questions. Third: every one of them we kill, means one less suit to occupy the lands they do manage to take. Four: when they come into our territory, we get to go into theirs - and I can promise you, there is a lot of pain we can take into their regions too.”
“As much as I hate to disagree with you, I think we all know that point two is not going to move the dials back in Zhurong or Beijing.” Dixon crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back on his chair. “Their censors will never allow anything to come out. Anyone who dares to say something about it, will get muted and then sent off to a labour camp. People won’t risk that if the government is suddenly paying them a fat little death pension from a kid they lost on another planet.”
“And point three is also a nice idea, until you look at how much they outnumber us here.” Burrows thought of the size of the Glorious Leader crawler they had chased off. “Their western forces can marshall more crawlers than we have militiamen, by the last count. Once they start crossing the border, they will just drown us in bodies.”
“So we have to play smart instead of big and stupid. Why is that a challenge for you lot?” Pope chuckled, and Burrows could not help himself from grinning along.
“Seriously though, their numbers only help up to a point.” Pope leaned back against the wall of the intersection. “We obviously don’t go for face-to-face fights. Those would be suicide. We’d need to put them in situations where their numbers count for less, and then just play those advantages. Even if they are slim.”
“You’re right. I know you’re right. It just looks like suicide on the surface, and that’s what gets most people riled up about the thought.” Burrows pulled one of the equipment crates sideways and plopped down on it. His hair stubble rasped under his hands as he ran them over his head. “We know they don’t function well on their own. That’s something we can probably play up. Councillor Felmann mentioned using jamming tech to make it difficult for them to talk to Zhurong - so that’s likely going to be one of our solutions.”
“It has some merit, but good luck getting into those channels of theirs.” Dixon rolled his chair down the length of the tech desk, closer to the intersection where the other two men were. “Even if we manage to get the channels and the codes, we’re still playing a power output game there. You need more noise than their signal strength, and we saw yesterday what those crawlers can put out.”
“And we also saw what happens when you start to scalp those rovers.” Pope’s eyes gleamed as he elaborated. “Whenever we see a command rover like that, we just need to scalp it. Wreck all their rooftop transmitters, and then see how responsive they are after that.”
“The problem is that those big crawlers probably won’t be that close to the action anyway. They’ll lead with a fleet of rovers, and their models are just as capable as ours. So you’d first have to find the command units, and then have to get close enough, somehow, to punch them in the head.” Burrows sat back with a sigh. It was a wargame scenario that had talked through often enough before, and despite all the ideas that were thrown around with each session they still had no way of really knowing what would work best in practice.
Once the shooting started in earnest, all the plans went out of the airlock anyway.
“Well… even if our jamming isn’t perfect, if we can at least reduce the range at which they can transmit, then it will also slow them down. Get them to bottle up, and stick closer together - and then finding the command crawler should be easier from that.” Dixon mused. “Triangulation will help as well. If the navigation beacons are still up, we could probably use those to assist.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it. The beacons were some of their first targets in Seven Craters.” Pope wiped the last of the sweat from his arms before pulling his singlesuit back on over his shoulders. He plopped down on a crate opposite Burrows once he was done. “It’s a pity we don’t have a backup grid for that.”
“We have the Deertrail sensors, sure, but those only run for around seven days.” Burrows had always found the name for the militia’s temporary, hand-placed sensors rather quaint. “Once you activate those, you’re on the clock - and once the fighting starts, we won’t have time to place and replace them.”
Dixon’s voicebox gave an unusual sigh, and Burrows looked up just in time to see a look of realisation flash across the tech specialist’s face.
“But what if we don’t place them during the fighting?” Dixon had his hand on his chin, and his gaze was a thousand miles away. “What if we emplace them before the fight - long before the fight - and then just switch them on when the fighting starts?”
“Are they set up for that though? What I recall from their specs showed them as fully inert when switched off.” Burrows frowned as he tried to remember the full technical specifications. “They are either on and fully functional, or off and fully inert. There’s no way to remotely activate them.”
“You don’t need to. You can link them to the beacon power supplies on an interrupt switch, and then when the beacon is destroyed or goes offline for any reason, the Deertrail wakes up.” Dixon had a triumphant smile on his face as he finished. “It should be a dead simple modification, and the bonus is that the Union - or anyone else, for that matter - will never know.”
“While we then get seven days of sensor feeds from the same area which the Union thought they cleared.” Burrows was nodding, with Pope mirroring the movement. “How doable would this be?”
“We have a pallet of Deertrails in storage - you can set a timer and watch me do it when I get back.” Dixon bounced off his chair with a grin, and trotted towards the outer door. He was gone without another word, leaving Burrows and Pope alone in the workshop.
“So that maybe solves one of our issues.” Burrows felt his smile slipping as he sat back. The interior wall was cool against the outside of his singlesuit. “It still leaves us with ninety-nine others, unfortunately.”
“We’ll deal with them one at a time. Improvise, Adapt, Overcome - as the old manuals all used to say.”
“Except they stopped saying that when we found out that improvising and adapting takes time, and that time is a luxury you don’t always have up here.” Burrows felt a wry smile twist his face. “Now we teach the kids to Plan, Prepare, Provision - which sounds great when you’re dealing with issues that have known answers, but for this mess…”
“This Union thing is going to be a stress test, aye.” Pope leaned forwards, elbows on knees and hands cupped under his chin. His eyes looked off at something that Burrows could not see. “I’ve already lost everything, Jack. My wife, my kids, my mom and pop. I have nothing left but time to plan. And this time, I really want my pound of flesh if they are going to come knocking again.”
Burrows saw how Pope’s fingers dug into the back of his hands until the skin turned white.
Would he ever understand what Pope had lost? The thought of losing Tilda, and their unborn child - especially to the Union reeducation camps - sent chill fingers down his back.
“Do you think fighting them is going to make a difference this time?”
“I don’t fucking care, to be honest.” Pope fixed his gaze on Burrows, and there was something terribly dark behind his eyes. “These people took everything that I loved, everything that I worked for, and made it disappear. For the past five years, my life has felt like a fucking black and white video that has had every drop of colour bled out of it. I don’t even have photos of my family, Jack. I can’t even remember what my kids looked like, or what they would look like now. If they’re even still alive.”
“So I don’t care what the rest of Bear State says when the fighting starts.” Pope continued. “I will bleed every single one of those Union bastards that I can find, and I will bleed them until they are just as pale as that black and white video. I will have a fantastic time doing it, and I will make sure they know I’m having a fantastic time.”
Burrows just looked at the other man, and eventually looked away.
Pain did terrible things to people.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Pope. I don’t have answers either, and I’m not going to pretend that I know what you went through.” Burrows shrugged. “I lost people on Earth, but… never like this.”
“It feels personal, you know?” Pope wrung his hands together, shaking his head slowly. “I know it isn’t, and I know the Union probably doesn’t even have a clue about me - but it still feels personal. It feels like they came after literally every single thing that I loved and enjoyed, and stomped on it. My parents. My dad with his little bonsai trees, my mom with her knitting. My wife. Emma. Some days I struggle to remember her face.”
Pope’s voice cracked for a moment, and he swallowed hard before continuing.
“My sons. Billy, William, the silly little fights they had over the block set some days. Everything that mattered to me, they took away. And then I look at all of that, and I ask myself - how is that not personal?” He shook his head, eyes on the ground. “How is that not personal?”
The two men sat in silence for a while. The workshop hummed around them as machines cycled through their mindless routines.
“I know I need to move on, and I know I need to start looking at the future again. Jason is part of that. I need to build a future that he can also be safe in.” Pope’s voice was soft when he eventually continued. “I just don’t see how that future is going to work with the Union on our necks. They don’t fucking listen to us. If that means we have to fight, then I am going to kill every single one of those rat bastards I can get my hands on. Every single one. Even if it doesn’t bring my family back. Even if it means people hate me. I will not let them take anything else from me, Jack. I won’t. I fucking won’t.”
Burrows wondered how many other survivors from Seven Craters felt the same way. Were there people in Bear State who felt the same way from the families lost at Marsden Mines, and all the other settlements on the eastern border that had been devoured by the Union’s relentless expansion?
It was a question he realised he had never even given any thought.
How many other people could even begin to understand what Pope had gone through - was still going through, by all indications?
“I say this with the biggest respect, Pope, but I really don’t ever want to be in that situation myself.” Burrows looked over at the other man, saw his gaze still fixed on the floor. “I think of losing Tilda, and my heart wants to stop. I just can’t imagine it.”
“The problem is not that your heart stops when it happens, Jack. The problem is that your heart has to keep beating afterwards.” Pope looked up and managed a twisted smile. “That’s the real shit part of the deal.”
That evening, after dinner, Burrows held Tilda in his arms and tried to imagine how a her-shaped hole would feel like in his life.
The thought left ice in his veins.
Next chapter: TBC
Man, that ending hit hard. The contrast between the technical talk about Deertrails and Pope’s raw grief was incredible. That line about his heart having to keep beating after losing everything! Burrows holding Tilda at the end really drives home what’s actually at stake here. Great chapter.
Intriguing. The workshop's atmosphere is so vivid, I can practically smell it. Pope's question, "how did this even get to happen?", resonates. Was it a fundamental flaw in the mission's initial architecure, or a more immediate operational problem? Makes you ponder the human element in complex systems.