The Mars Shock Read Online Free PDF Page B

been caught away from home, and were still making mischief in the Belt. But for the first time in hundreds of years, humanity owned the skies of Mars once more.
    That turned out to be a very different thing from owning the land.
    The PLAN had its headquarters in Olympus Mons. Star Force’s scans revealed mind-numbing amounts of electricity being generated and consumed in there, buried beneath the caldera complex on top of the massive shield volcano. The orbital bombardment had bashed Olympus Mons up a bit, but not even ice-rink-sized meteors could make much of a dent in a volcano the size of France. The PLAN was still in there. Still alive. Whatever “alive” meant for an AI. Still plotting death to humanity.
    How did they know? Well, because it kept throwing shit at them.
    There were big guns dug into the walls of the caldera. Since Olympus Mons was eight kilometers high, they could fire ballistic missiles all the way around the planet from up there. But because the peak stuck up above the nuclear-winter blanket of dust shrouding Mars, they couldn’t see very well to aim. Star Force had eliminated every last PLAN satellite in orbit, and demolished all the over-the-horizon radar arrays they could find. The only targeting system the PLAN had left, in theory, was radio waves: spray ‘em into orbit and take pot-shots at the source of any reflections. This was highly inconvenient for Star Force’s satellites, which had to keep changing their orbits, burning through fuel that had to be shipped all the way from Earth. But assets on the ground couldn’t be targeted in this way.
    “Nope. I don’t believe it for a fucking second,” Sophie Gilchrist said, hands on her phavatar’s hips. “They have some way of targeting us. It may not be perfect, but they’re not just throwing kinetic kill vehicles into the air and hoping they get lucky.”
    Lucky for the PLAN had meant, on this day in Conurbation 243, terminally unlucky for a Chinese patrol. They’d been ransacking a farm—one of the dedicated hydroponics facilities often found in larger towns—when a KKV had landed on it. The impact had rivalled a nuclear blast. Around a 500-meter radius from the epicenter, phavatars and earthmoving vehicles burrowed into the rubble. Every UN and Chinese asset within fifty klicks had rushed to the site, and that was how Colden had run into Sophie Gilchrist, an old frenemy of hers and one of the only other Space Corps agents left from the class of ’79. Now Gilchrist commanded a COP platoon, too.
    “There is no way anyone’s alive under there,” Gilchrist said, staring at the debris through the mesh of her phavatar’s Faraday mask. “But I guess we have to make the effort, for the sake of international diplomatic relations.” She handed out crowbar attachments to the phavatars in her platoon. “We were having a really good day, too, Jen. We found like a thousand muppets holed up in a recycling facility. We fed them to their own fucking recyclers.”
    Colden remembered when Gilchrist had threatened to quit the Corps over her belief that the muppets were human, and killing them was murder. She’d come a long way since then. And she was the closest thing to a friend that Colden had out here. Did she, too, have doubts about what they were doing?
    “Sophs,” she said. “Three minutes.”
    There wasn’t any way for telepresence operators to talk in private, since everything was recorded in their data dumps. But Colden and Gilchrist had worked out a system. Colden popped off her mask, gloves, and headset. She was due a legally mandated exercise break. Her phavatar’s MI could handle a task as simple as digging. She left the telepresence center and ran downstairs to the garden. A public vidphone hung from a tree. No one was waiting to use it at the moment. She dialled.
    The signal merged into the datastream connecting Alpha Base with one of the UN sats in orbit, and bounced down again to Theta Base, 300 klicks to the south.
    Sophie