The Mars Shock Read Free

these dunes had been high berms topped with solar panels. Humanity—spying on the PLAN’s building programme from afar—had assumed they were just more art. But the quakes had demolished the loosely bonded rubble blankets, revealing what was inside: long, one-storey concrete silos, mostly intact.
    Two of the Chinese tanks overtook them, and rumbled away down the two leftmost boulevards. Every fifty meters or so, they paused to rake the silos with charged-particle beams. The buildings did not explode. They just collapsed.
    “OK,” Colden said. “We’ll stay a safe distance from that.” She led the platoon down the rightmost boulevard.
    The newbies swivelled their heads, eyes on stalks. “Hard to ’magine it was an AI made this place,” Mattis murmured. He said AI like everyone did, as if it was a curse word.
    Colden scanned the street alertly, too. But she was not looking at the scenery. Once you’d seen one PLAN town, you’d seen them all. She was looking for movement.
    “We have to clear the houses,” she said. “We’ll go up one side of the street, and come back down the other side. Everyone has their IR filter enabled, right? I shouldn’t even have to ask.”
    Her own IR filter showed the silos as bleak ranges of polar-blue hills. But those concrete walls were thick. Anyway, the absence of heat sources didn’t necessarily mean the silos were empty.
    They clambered over the first dune of rubble, slipping on loose rocks. The entrance was at one end. It was just a hole. There’d probably been an igloo-style exit when the protective berm was in place. The silo was proportioned oddly, by human standards: long, high, and narrow. These were typical Martian proportions. Cots stood in broken lines, easily a hundred of them stretching from end to end of the silo. Broken pieces of machinery lay here and there on the floor. “This is a typical Martian dwelling,” Colden said in her tour-guide voice. “But note the absence of any working fab equipment, such as printers, CNC lathes, forges, etcetera. That is a sign that the muppets evacuated a while back, taking their valuables with them. When they were here, you would have seen manufacturing equipment all mixed up with domestic shit. They worked, ate, and slept all in the same area, like medieval people.”
    Drudge leapt into the air, turned a somersault, and came down on a cot. He jumped from one cot to the next, his clawed feet ripping up the thin polyfoam mattresses.
    “Agent Drudge! What the fuck are you doing?”
    “We used to do that at home,” Drudge explained, jumping down from the last cot.
    Oh, so he came from a group home, where the kids slept in dormitories. Colden had kind of figured that. “Jesus,” she said. “Don’t do it here.”
    Near the end of the dwelling, Allison Gwok screamed. “Aaargh! A rat!”
    A rat, Colden thought. Give me strength.
    She strode to catch up with Gwok. The newbie’s phavatar was standing on a cot, pointing at another one. “It went under there!”
    Colden’s deputy, Pratt, and the other vets struggled unsuccessfully not to laugh. Colden was having difficulty in that regard, too. She picked up the cot Gwok was pointing at, and tipped it on end.
    A dozen four-legged creatures raced out from underneath. They leapt at her, climbing her legs, gnawing on her carapace. They did look a bit like rats, except they were the size of Yorkshire terriers, with huge bouncing bellies. Colden grabbed them by the scruff, one by one, and threw them down the silo. The vets shot at them with their flechette cannons. It was a contest of skill and timing, like shooting clay pigeons. Drudge got in on the action, whooping, too late to score any kills. “Ay caramba!” he yelled. “Are these the Martians?”
    Colden strode over to one of the twitching bodies, stood on its forepaws, and bent to slice its belly open with the cutter laser in her right gripper. Silvery dust spilled out and rolled across the floor like mercury. “See that?