The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are (11 page)

I get carried quickly through the green.

I lose track of where I am (still more than a little
bell-rung from getting shot in the head twice). But we come to a
heavy hatch, its metal scarred like tools were put to hacking at
it, but the wounds are rusted old.

They get it open easily enough, get me in. The female
is covering our rear. She’s about to close the hatch behind us when
she suddenly staggers back, goes down.

“
Hammond!
” Murphy shouts.

I get dropped and the hatch gets slammed shut. I can
see the female struggling with something stuck in her upper right
chest.

“Knife!” the first identifies. “This is P-6! I need
Medical. H-8 took a knife. Right lung.” I see Murphy put pressure
on Hammond’s wound.

“Now you owe her, too,” first grumbles at him. “This
corpse better be worth more than fertilizer.”

I can hear Hammond sucking air, struggling as they
try to tend to her. I’m temporarily forgotten.

Ten seconds later, it gets crowded in the airlock as
medical personnel in white worksuits come in and start working on
Hammond. The two males also get help in the form of more security
uniforms. They pick me up and roughly drop me on a gurney like
unusual baggage, making comments about how bizarre I look and “He
can’t really be Colonel Ram.” “So what the hell is he?” “Should we
be bringing him inside?” “Gardener wants to scan him.”

Murphy and his cohort finally strip off their masks
and goggles. Murphy has dark cropped hair, a square jaw, strong
lines, dark eyes. The other one, who I’ve so far only heard call
himself P-6, has a rounder face, with a deep scar out of the right
corner of his mouth. His eyes are cruel.

“Take the meat to Iso. Weapons too.” P-6 giving
orders again. “Gardener’s waiting.”

I get wheeled out as a second gurney gets wheeled in
for Hammond.

“…got a Legacy knifed…” I hear P-6 grousing somewhere
behind me. “…look good on our records… I think I get Kara for
this…”

“Sick, Palmer,” Murphy grumbles back. “Kara’s a
child.”

“She’s grown up enough. Just because
you
haven’t…”

The second gurney gets wheeled past me in a rush, the
medics trying to keep Hammond from bleeding out or succumbing to a
punctured lung. At least they give their wounded higher priority
than my dead ass, however interesting I may be.

Another hatchway, and it gets bright. And open.

I think I’m inside the second dome. It
is
intact.

But the original transparent roof panels are gone,
the geodesic framework now supporting a patchwork of metal plates
gummed with sealant. Additional support columns have been welded in
place abstractly, probably holding up the heavier ceiling and all
the dirt and rock that must be over top of it.

The situation begins to fall into place for me: The
wild people live out in the shattered dome, making due with
survival gear and plentiful food. Their hunters—apparently from
another complete and separate society—live in whatever of
Tranquility is buried beneath the slide slope.

Intimate neighbors—literally right next door to each
other. Were the wild people from this colony? Or did they migrate
in, drawn by the gardens? That might explain the “hunting”: The
colony might not have enough guns and ammo to fight them off, but
enough for the occasional show of force to maintain whatever
understanding they have.

But I got the impression the killing is more sport
than necessity—Palmer, at least, seemed more about trophies and
records and compensation. (And “compensation” here sounds like it
mean sex, and with someone who doesn’t get a say in the matter. Is
this society as striated as the PK, where the warriors have far
more value than the civilians?)

How long has this been going on?

Dome Two has its own green: neat gardens under bright
warm artificial sunlight, beamed from up high in the structure. The
facilities within, at least what little I can see and still play
dead, are in near-pristine condition: The dome interior is ringed
with terraced housing, labs, workshops, all well-maintained. And
neat and clean, especially in contrast to conditions in the
ruptured lower dome. It’s almost as impressive as an ETE hive.

The people we pass look fairly healthy, strong. Most
wear plain colony work suits, shirtsleeves. They keep to UNMAC
standards of grooming.

I get carried toward the center of the dome, to a
towering ziggurat of a complex that reaches for the biosphere roof.
I remember from pre-Apocalypse visits: these were administrative
offices, operations rooms. Recycling. Food processing. And their
medical facilities.

Everyone moves promptly out of the way of the black
and gray suits wheeling me. What surprises me is their silence: no
one speaks up to question what they’re carting. If anything, the
apparent civilians look intimidated by the security uniforms, and
either rush to go about their business or just get out of sight.
There’s a great deal of fear here, for such a miracle of survival.
Perhaps tyranny is the price of order.

Hatches open. I get rolled through a working medical
facility—larger and in better condition to even the Melas Two
facilities—and into a bright isolation room (which is also nicer
than the last one I was shut up in). A pair of workers (Doctors? Or
just technicians?) in bio suits promptly run scans, manually ensure
I still have no vitals. They inspect my bullet wounds, my bizarre
outfit, all with minimal chatter. It’s clear I’m more upsetting
than just a curiosity, but it’s either discipline or something else
that keeps them quiet. At least they don’t try to perform a
surgical autopsy (not yet, anyway).

I’m not sure what they’ve done with my weapons, but I
seem to feel them close by.

And through the scanning gear, I sense artificial
intelligence. The colony still has its operating AI online.

Gardener. It’s not a person. Their
machine
wanted a look at me.

I dive in, see what I can find. The Med Scanners
don’t have the encryptions their Links do, but I doubt they
expected someone might hack them through their hospital gear. I’m
in without resistance or alarms going off.

Most of what I find is just routine operations:
running the atmosphere and water recyclers, managing the power
plants, monitoring food production—much of that from waste recycle,
supplemented by fresh produce I assume is acquired from indoor
gardens or maybe raiding the lower dome. Further searching reveals
a schedule of “harvesting” assignments, which suggests forays out
(maybe another reason for the hunting—it covers gathering
missions). Confirming this, I find detailed maps of the ruptured
dome and the surrounding area, with plant life populations
identified. The AI even predicts or monitors where the best
bounties will be found on a seasonal rotation. The personnel
dedicated to these runs are all designated “H-K”, followed by a
letter/number designation, possibly like I’ve already heard: P-6.
H-8. There are perhaps fifty or sixty ID codes in the lists.

Digging further, I notice the AI seems obsessed with
calculating resources and production against consumption,
population. There are five hundred and twenty people in the two
sealed underground domes. Each name is assigned a… value score?

Personnel files open for me, as if constantly active:
Age. Sex. Job assignment. Skill sets. Health and fitness—medical
history, specifically for injury and illness. These latter factors
seem to count against their overall score, while positive numbers
seem related to certain age ranges and value to the colony. And
each has a rating for “consumption”. Conservation appears to be a
powerful premium.

And H-K status. All H-Ks have exceptionally high
scores—two to three times the average non-HK.

I expect H-K stands for “Hunter-Killer”, which is
what I heard Mak shouting, but I find out it’s actually
“Hammond-Keller”, the name of the security contractor that was
providing protection for the colony project

I see that H-8—Hammond—is under “Status Review”, her
scores all highlighted. I realize: she’s badly injured. The
machine’s biggest concern seems to be prognosis: can she return to
duty, how soon, and in what condition? She’s being worked on now in
another part of the facility, so her numbers keep shifting.

I try to find out why these “values” are so important
to the machine. And I find another set of stats. This one is a list
of “Outcasts”. They currently number two hundred and eighty three.
Two have been very recently eliminated. This has had a slight
positive effect on resource estimates. Food. Incoming water and
fuel (it looks like the ETE feed lines are still intact, or have
been repaired since the Bang).

The hunting is justified to reduce the competition,
the strain on resources. It’s all very calculated. H-K parties are
assigned kill quotas. Highs scores here increase the H-K’s value.
Only a few H-Ks are on “probationary status” for not meeting their
quotas. (Hammond is one of these, but she also has a “protection”
flag as a “Legacy”. What this means isn’t elaborated, but I
remember Palmer calling Hammond a Legacy— she may be a descendant
of the original contractors, afforded traditional status despite
being probationary.)

I go looking for history: colony manifests, personnel
rosters, records of what happened after the bombs fell. What I get
first is an “Outcast” versus “Residency” tree.

It looks like it starts within a few years of the
Apocalypse. Once the surviving colony population stabilized, the
machine—Gardener—began calculating resources, what the colony could
support. Then it looks like hard decisions were made.

The first ones made “Outcast” actually had high
scores, especially in terms of skill sets that included survival
skills, construction, surface-greening, even military. Maybe these
were volunteers, or personnel deemed able to make do in the harsher
environment of external shelters (this would have been well before
the atmosphere thickened and the temperatures moderated—even
sheltering in the broken dome wouldn’t have been much better than
original surface conditions, and there certainly wouldn’t have been
such a green bounty).

As the years pass, the Outcast assignments shifted to
low-scoring individuals: Old, sick, injured, unskilled (or at least
lacking colony-valued skills). First it seemed to be calculated to
maintain a population that the colony could support. But over the
years, the “Residency” population has been getting smaller.

Colony resource production has also been declining.
Things are breaking down. The colony is slowly dying. I wonder if
they know.

Meanwhile, the Outcast population has been
increasing, especially in the last decade. They’re thriving.

I realize I’ve got a “visitor”. The H-K Murphy is on
the other side of the transparency.

“What is he?”

“We haven’t determined, sir, I’m sorry,” one of the
medics answers him quickly (and does seem to need to apologize for
whatever failure). “Gardener confirms the DNA record, but obviously
the body doesn’t match this Colonel Ram. Ram was in his early
seventies when the bombs fell.”

“Is it a Hybrid?”

“We’re not reading active nanotech. But somehow his
blood is staying oxygenated.”

“He’s not dead?” Murphy doesn’t sound as nervous
about that as the medics.

“No heartbeat. No respiration. But scans won’t
penetrate…”

“Get out of there.”

“But Gardener, sir…”

“Out. Now. My expense.” It sounds like Murphy values
his civilians even if his AI doesn’t. (I wonder what “expense” he’s
risking.) And they move, leaving me, sealing me in.

“No more games,” he directs at me. “I know you can
hear me.”

“Thank you,” I tell him. “I was getting stiff.”

Alarms go off as I sit up, swing my legs over the
side of the table so I can face him. I finally let my face and
forehead wounds heal. Murphy manages to keep remarkably calm as my
“fatal” wounds close and vanish. The three security suits that come
rushing in don’t look nearly so composed. Matching pistols point at
me through the transparency.

“Will those even shoot through the polycarb?” I ask
idly. I recognize one of the responders as Palmer. They don’t
budge.

“Where are his weapons?” Palmer wants to know,
urgently.

I raise my hands like I’m surrendering, show them a
trick: My sword and gun fly from a clean box in the cell with me. I
put the sword back in my belt, the gun back in its holster. I
retrieve my knife as an afterthought, put it away too. Then sit
watching them like they’re no threat, barely interesting.

“Guns down,” Murphy orders. They comply when Gardener
agrees with him enough to silence the alarms. I see the wide-eyed
medics watching through a portal in the exit hatchway.

Murphy’s never bothered to draw his weapon. He still
doesn’t, as he steps up to the transparency.

“Why play dead?”

“It got me in here,” I admit. “Sorry if that’s at
your expense.” I mean that—he seems like a descent sort. Palmer on
the other hand looks like he wants to hurt someone.

“What are you?” Murphy keeps leading the
questioning.

“Long story.”

“I have time.”

“Do you?” I reverse. “Gardener tells me your systems
have been steadily failing. You’ve been Outcasting more and more of
your people. How long until it’s just you H-K? And too many
Outcasts to cull?”

Palmer’s gun comes back up. I probably shouldn’t have
admitted hacking their precious AI.

“That won’t hurt me.”

“Don’t bet,” he threatens. “I loaded with molecular
explosive penetrators. We’ve dealt with you ETE before.”

“I’m not ETE. But yes, that might hurt. Best not to
get off to a bad start between us. I
am
here to help.”

“ETE only help Cast and Siders,” Palmer almost spits.
“No-Values that swarm our gardens, eat our food, siphon our air and
water and fuel when they’re not cutting our lines and trying to
strip our home.”