I had little time to savor my mostly restored apartment before I was picked up the employee shuttle and carried over to Atlas. I spent most of the journey performing systems calibration and daydreaming of the day when I'd make Assistant Director and warrant a personal agrav, or at least a VTOL.

They were really piling it on when it came to expanding Atlantis, it had almost doubled in size since my last visit, courtesy of a pair of geomancers employed by the conglomerate responsible for the expansion.

I had to tolerate a more onerous examination than usual as my lace was audited by security, but it passed unremarkably and I found myself at my desk soon enough. I'd hoped to talk to the Director, but he was off putting out fires in Cuba, so I settled for an email.

I checked my own task list and raised an eyebrow. They wanted me to go to Mars of all places. I wasn't a stranger to cislunar space, but even in this day and age a Mars trip wasn't a trivial matter.

Teleporters capable of interplanetary travel, such as my wife, were national assets, and since nobody would spare one for my ass, I had to travel coach.

I had an AI check transit windows, but thankfully they'd at least budgeted something for me aside from the usual SpaceX flotilla, those took months if not years to make the journey.

It was a UN torchship, the class of vessel that had enough thrust to, if not outright invalidate the tyranny of the Rocket Equation, at least give it the finger.

The UNS We'll Get Them Next Time! was an example of something that would get every single fucking environmental activist I'd ever met worked up, a vessel using an Orion drive.

I feel like that name is far too cozy for what the means of propulsion actually is, namely strapping a rocket next to a chamber where you start blowing up nukes, propelling yourself forward with the blast. It's a truly hair-raising means of getting around, and while there were plenty of the best Ex Nihilists creating plutonium and the like, this design was already antiquated. The absolute best were antimatter drives, while blackhole drives came a close second.

You could also use inertial confinement fusion, dipping down into nuclear salt water rockets, and a more civilized variant of Orion known as Medusa.

The poor bastards without nation-state levels of wealth still made do with chemical or ion thrusters, but I was spared that indignity for once.

Of course, these all used normal sensible physics to get around (even blackhole synthesis was something doable, as long as you didn't want a particularly big one), then you had stuff that pretty explicitly needed metahuman powers.

I'm not sure what the latest word on physically plausible magnetic monopoles is, but the ones in use today are exclusively metahuman generated, a field of metaphysics (not related to the old term) where pseudoparticles mimicked their effective properties. You could use them to catalyze nuclear fusion, which while not a strict necessity, helped when mass was at a premium.

And there are reactionless drives, often powered by the equivalent of a metahuman speedster running on a hamster wheel. But that's a rabbit hole I'm not going to dive into for now, besides, most of them had been long sent away to Alpha Centauri, where an ability to flaunt the normal rules was a decisive military advantage even when their vessels otherwise outclassed ours by centuries at the least.

I finally dug into what required my personal presence.

Oh dear.

How does transhumanity manage to even put up a fight against an alien civilization that has quite plausibly obtained every possible set of technologies that can be attained (barring those restricted to truly superhuman AGI)?

We cheat. If it hadn't been for metahuman assistance, the Solar System would have been glowing white hot, and not just the sun. RKVs would have scoured Earth down to the mantle, and every off world colony would have been hunted down and destroyed mercilessly while we were largely unable to mount a meaningful defense.

Since efforts to intentionally provoke the development of said abilities have had mixed results, and attempts to induce manifestation in mind uploads or AI have been fruitless, the only feasible way to get more warm bodies to throw at the problem has been increasing the baseline human population.

Earth's population pyramid had become incredibly bloated at the base, and families with four or more children had gone from being rare when I was young to practically the norm. Even the colonies served more as backup nurseries to churn out people as fast as possible rather than any meaningful resource production. I hate to break it to you, but humans need not actually apply for most jobs, especially in the industrial sector. Mars was still mostly a barren rock, barring the patches that had been greensmithed with biodomes.

The truly existential risk lurking here was the possibility of the Centaurs successfully subverting a human population, or breeding them in captivity to take the ones who manifested.

If they managed to get their hands on a significant number, our goose was well and truly cooked, the precogs and standard sims concurred on that.

This warranted the commitment of all kinds of atrocities to keep at bay. The standard protocol for a colony about to be captured by the aliens was to kill all the humans first, usually with nukes. Lots of nukes.

The Sayeret Matkal operation during which Grim had been left behind was one where they attempted to destroy an alien breeding center, killing millions of otherwise normal and innocent humans kept immersed in simulated worlds by the aliens. They'd never known of the wider world, or the fact that they'd meet their demise at the hands of fellow humans.

Colony ships had their own fail-deadly devices, to be detonated in the event that capture was imminent. Hundreds of precogs played whack-a-mole to identify any Centaur breeding projects, and no end of manpower was devoted to hunting them down, be they hidden a hundred kilometers beneath a planetary crust, out in interstellar space, or just buried beneath all the shielding the aliens could throw at them.

This was a miserable fact of life, one kept out of the greater public consciousness by some of the most powerful memetic engineering and censorship protocols known to man. They would not react well to the knowledge that over half the casualties in the Centaur War had been people killed simply for the crime of being defenseless against capture.

I strongly suspected that the debacle on Pluto last year had been of that nature, but even my ULTRAVIOLET clearance didn't cover the true facts.

On Mars, it seemed that a indentured metahuman team had gone rogue, breaking free of their bonds using technology almost certainly given by the Centaurs. This had all kinds of alarms going off, and while the matter was initially deemed the concern of the American government, they'd finally softened and assented to having UNSEEN observe the cleanup procedure just to make sure it all went smoothly.

It must have been bad, the US had always considered itself above the oversight of the UN, and with my own actions in Cuba, I was still surprised that they had allowed UNSEEN to send me, but they either weren't aware of my involvement in Cuba or pretending the same.

Then again, this was at the request of the quasi-independent United States Martian Administration, so Chang might not have been entirely able to kibosh it.

The USMA was viewed with barely veiled distrust by the terrestrial US; during the Dual Secessions, it was rumored that several colonies had attempted to join Lone Star and Cali in breaking free, an attempt aborted shortly after their food deliveries had been embargoed, and Chinese assistance warded off. They'd still retained some grandfathered privileges, including local autonomy, just to keep the colonials happy.

I checked in on Midas, who was being kept on Atlas more to keep him from using his powers than because we wanted to use him, but the kid was too busy to bother with smalltalk. VDW was doing his best to keep him off the books, and avoiding the use of his powers unless absolutely necessary was key to keeping the Accountants and the Secret Service off our backs.

Thankfully, I didn't have to fly all the way back to Guiana, a skyhook was newly placed in a convenient orbit, and I joined another batch of dignitaries in riding a space plane up to low Earth orbit.

I caught two more transfers, and ended up at the propellant depot where the Next Time was docked.

To avoid irradiating a volume of space anyone actually cared about, the vessel would need to use conventional thrusters to get to translunar space, and then we'd ride the atom on a brachistochrone trajectory to Mars, a fancy way of saying we'd accelerate as fast as we could, only slowing down at the halfway point instead of carefully coasting and using gravity transfers like more deltaV constrained spacecraft needed.

From a distance, the ship resembled an umbrella turned inside out by a stiff breeze, there was a large hemispherical pusher plate on one end, thickened to absorb nuclear blasts in the center, connected to a relatively standard, albeit reinforced, cylindrical compartment on the other end. There were the usual accoutrements of spaceflight, large radiators to dissipate heat from the reactor, propellant storage tanks for the chemical thrusters, and finally, at the end furthest from any potential radiation, the crew modules.

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You could tell this thing wasn't built for luxury, or comfort for the matter. When initially designed for an abortive mission to Saturn, it had been built for speed and speed alone. Once passe in that role, it had passed through a few different national ownerships before people got tired of the hassle of operating something powered by nuclear farts, so the UN got a hold of it.

It was lightly armed, lasers meant more for micrometeor clearance rather than serious combat. Most dedicated warships, let alone Centaur ones, would eat it for breakfast. But thankfully incursions by the latter didn't regularly penetrate the Kuiper defense networks, so the Next Time was able to operate largely unmolested.

I got off my shuttle and boarded the vessel, floating about in microgravity. It didn't have any rotational elements due to the short nature of cruises, although it was still reinforced to account for the jarring force of the nukes. Expecting artificial gravity from a graviton generator would be laughable.

The interior was cramped, with most of the quarters devoted to passengers, and the vessel was largely automated with only a skeleton crew to keep the lights on and run the bots.

Captain Vassar was a genial man, content in a relatively safe job after a tour in AC. After initial introductions and a tour of the vessel for us passengers, he left us to our own devices as he worked with the AI copilot to finish refueling from the nearby propellant depot.

I made myself at home, or at least as at home as a sardine in a can could be. My little coffin was mostly intended to keep my body comfy while my mind was immersed in VR, any physical activity was a luxury.

At least they didn't skimp when it came to the quality of the VR sims. I managed to strike up a conversation with a few of the other passengers, most were supervisors headed over to the small UN outposts near Olympus Mons, or planning to switch over on Mars to board ships outbound for the outer reaches of the Solar System.

I brushed up on my knowledge of Martian terrain and geopolitics.

Mars had about two million permanent denizens, without several hundred thousand more transients waiting for launch windows when taking the slow boat out. I panned over the Chinese colonies, predominantly distributed near the Northern pole, the Indian settlements to the south, and then there was USMA taking up the majority of the Hellas basin. That wasn't nearly the end of it, there were corporate towns run by SpaceX and the like, freeholdings, micronations that had bought their own patches, and who knows what else.

Just north of Valles Marineris, the Martian Spire protruded upwards, the second fully functional space elevator in Sol, built just months after the first Lunar one went online. It was the sight of the primary UN base, with satellite bases built around Olympus Mons where the EU and British bases resided.

I skimmed over the pages of political intrigue, as usual India and China were up to their cold war nonsense, USMA squabbling with the freshly established joint Cali-Japan base, and the perennial arguments over water rights at the poles.

However, for decades even before I was born, to now, a decade after the first colonies, Mars had been a planet of machines. From lethargic survey drones to nuclear powered crust-crackers, it had seen it all. Even now, as colonists hunkered down in the planet-sweeping dust storms, billions of robots roamed the wastes, digging massive new colonies for the hundreds of thousands of hopeful new arrivals, constructing rail networks and covered aqueducts to bring water down from the poles, extending the Hyperloop network (actually feasible now since the Martian atmosphere was a glorified vacuum), and overall doing their darned best to make that barren rock somewhat livable for humans.

This turned out to be a slight problem when one of the fugitives I was pursuing was a technomancer.

I pursed my lips as I examined the dossier USMA had deigned to provide, I was hunting big game today.

HELLAS BASIN INCIDENT REPORT #23

The following information has been repackaged and implicitly censored to accommodate the level of clearance suitable for UNSEEN ULTRAVIOLET operators.

All time stamps have been re-adjusted to Mars Local Time, and the standard clock rates compressed for the 23:56 Terran day to make them easier to parse.

Should you believe that circumstances call for the urgent unredaction of sensitive information above your clearance level, please contact DOD liason Captain M. Sanders.

--

For the last 4 years, USMA has been trialing the use of metahuman labor to expedite the construction of the Hellas Biodome, including metahuman greensmithing, matter duplication, nanite control, and AI-assisted drone manipulation.

In the past one year, the Intel fab has been experiencing significantly subpar yields, as low as 27% of initial projections. Due to the importance of offworld semiconductor and optoelectronics manufacturing, President Chang approved the lease of several indentured metahuman (IM) teams to help mitigate the issue and bring the fab up to speed.

Local insurgent elements, likely affiliated with Centaur forces, performed targeted assassinations of two USN hydrokinetics, namely Lieutenant Trevor White and Captain Morgan Sawiki, Class 3 and Class 4 respectively. White was killed by the use of targeted Basilisk while off-duty in New Washington, and Sawiki by [REDACTED] while inside the clean room environs of the fab.

To compensate, USMA requisitioned a newly manifested Class 5 hydrokinetic known as Backhand, with demonstrable ability to compensate for the gigaliter shortfall in the greater basin.

Another attempt to cover for the deficiency of output was the requisition of a Class 4 Technomancer Gerald Green, referred to as Machina. AI simulations suggested that fundamental retooling of the fab was required to meet projections, a process estimated to take no less than 2 years. Thus, Machina, known to have unprecedented fine control over robotic machinery above and beyond even Lithium class AI, was inducted to help shore up production.

Both Machina and Backhand had agreed to a 7 year indenture period on Mars and other solar US colonies in lieu of deployment to AC.

They were deployed in an IM unit referred to as BULWARK, alongside the following metahumans:

1) Silt- Class 3 Geomancer/Lithokinetic. Serving an extended sentence after charges of insubordination in the USSF contingent on AC, known to be highly resistant to standard memetic reconditioning. Previously employed on extending USMA underground infrastructure and the construction of [REDACTED] at [REDACTED].

2) Florette- Class 3 Biomancer, responsible for the maintenance and deployment of metahuman-modified plantlife and bio-nanite swarms. Deemed a critical asset for the construction and ongoing deployment of the Firmament in Hellas. No record of prior malfeasance, no prior deployments.

3)Beacon- Class 4 Pyrokinetic. Serving an extended sentence after charges of arson and destruction of government property. Previously employed in USMA fusion power plant maintenance and construction. Note that powers do not require the presence of significant amounts of oxygen for the purposes of combustion.

4)Frostbite - Class 4 Cryokinetic. Frostbite was a recent recruit to the Bulwark unit, brought on board for his ability to generate and manipulate ice and snow. With the increasing demand for water on Mars, Frostbite's talents were expected to be in high demand for the construction of ice mining and processing facilities across the polar regions. Ex-military, was a member of Seal team [REDACTED] before the [REDACTED] incident while en-route to Pluto for deployment.

5)Chimera - Class 2 Fleshcrafter. Chimera has the ability to alter their own body at will, allowing for extreme agility and flexibility. They were previously employed by a biotech company for research and development of new medical treatments. WARNING: Pending reclassification after demonstration of unexpected abilities during [REDACTED] on Deimos. Immune to standard cognitohazard and explosive leashing.

Note that BULWARK is an ongoing project, with several previous members not listed because of current redeployment or confirmed custody by the USMA.

Details about the jailbreak, potential links to ongoing insurgent activities and Centaur influence will be made available on arrival after Dr. Adat Sen liasons with USMA and DOD officials at Hellas.

I let out a low whistle as I finished reading the report. This was a big mess, and it looked like BULWARK had gone rogue. My job was to trackthem down and bring them back to USMA custody. It wasn't going to be an easy task, especially since the knuckleheads hadn't been kind enough to let me bring my own team along, but at least from what I heard USMA had their own field assets. I looked outside using the exterior cameras, and wondered how many of the other ships currently fueling up were carrying more US assets over to put out what might be mildly understated as a fucking disaster.

Well, was it too much to hope they'd clean up their own mess before I crawled over in a week? I hoped not, and got comfy as the chemical thrusters came online, slowly moving the Next Time to a safe distance, assuming there was such a thing when that was the distance it was cleared to start nuking itself.