The Mars Shock Read Free Page B

grippers. Undeterred, he attempted to climb straight up the wall, holding onto the bolts where the scaffolding had been attached to the regocrete.
    “Drudge,” Colden yelled. “I told you to stay the fuck out of here unless I called for you.”
    “They’re all dead.”
    “I did not declare the room clear yet!”
    “No they aren’t,” Drudge corrected himself. He leaned away from the wall and chopped at the last intact segment of scaffolding. It collapsed. The PLAN never built strong where they could build cheap. Bodies and body parts sluiced down, landing on top of Pratt, who cursed Drudge out. The refuge was tall but it didn’t have a lot of floor space. Piles of bodies now obscured Colden’s view. Drudge jumped down on top of the pile he’d just made and dug in it. He bobbed back up, clutching a frail young boy with his guts spilling out from a flechette wound. Drudge held the boy up to his chest. “That’s what I heard!”
    They all heard it then, transmitted from the audio mic in Drudge’s phavatar’s chest.
    Singing.
    The boy’s voice was so faint, and the air so thin, they couldn’t catch the words. But Colden didn’t need to. She’d heard this before. “Oh, fuck it,” she cried. She snatched the boy and tried to push his guts back into his body. He jerked violently. His eyes rolled up to show the whites, and he died in her arms.
    She laid him down among the dead bodies of the other muppets. Thought about closing his eyes, but it seemed pointless when his guts were hanging out. “Now we’ll all get in trouble!” she yelled at her team.
    She took them out through the partition wall. The refuge was divided vertically in half. One half was the room they’d just cleared, where the muppets used to come to breathe. They were like whales: gengineered to be able to store excess oxygen in their blood. They only needed to breathe a couple of times a day. In the other half of the refuge, they grew their beans and greens. The slime in the tanks generated their oxygen. There was no need to take any of this gunk back to base. It had already been analyzed, and proven to be the same algae that the first colonists of Mars had brought here in the early 2100s.
    The platoon sprayed a few flechettes around, and left. Colden tossed a grenade over her shoulder, triggering a satisfying roar of crumbling concrete.
    Gwok was sniffling back sobs. “They look like people. I knew, but I didn’t really understand. Just like people.”
    “They aren’t people. They are Martians. Meat puppets. Muppets.” How many times had Colden gone through this with newbies? It had taken her long enough to accept it herself. “They may have human DNA, but there is nothing in their heads apart from PLAN neuroware.”
    That’s what she had been told. And then everything had gone screeching into reverse, and she wasn’t sure what she believed anymore.
    And Gwok, a product of the new training curriculum, persisted. “What about the one Drudge found? They told us some of the muppets are friendly. We have to separate the friendlies from the hostiles, and take them prisoner according to the—”
    “The Geneva Convention!” Drudge jumped in, like a kid suddenly recalling the answer to a quiz.
    All because of a bit of warbling.
    All because some linguists and computer scientists back on Earth had gotten excited about the anomalous behavior of about one in one hundred of the PLAN’s muppets, the strategy of turning Mars into a parking lot had been cancelled. And the Star Force brass, also safely back on Earth, who’d wanted a ground invasion from the start, had gotten their way. Complete with the fucking Geneva Convention.
    Colden led the platoon into the next silo. Here they found the workshop where the muppets had made their DIY rifle. She vented her feelings by kicking the equipment over. “You heard Captain Hawker,” she said. “If it moves, slag it.”
    There were just too many muppets, and 99 out of a hundred of them wanted to