One handy aspect of any sizeable military base was the abundance of heavy industrial equipment. Industrial bots and heavy mechs worked together to perform rescue and repairs, and by dawn, you could hardly tell the place had been nuked, barring the scorch marks of course.
200 civilians and about 30-odd soldiers had died in the explosion, with a hundred or more hospitalized with acute radiation sickness. My expertise as a doctor was called into action a dozen times, even if only to approve of the plans drawn up the autodocs. These days, if it didn't kill you, you'd likely live, pardon the tautology. Even with their bone marrow and gastrointestinal tracts scoured, they'd pull through when with grafts and nanite support. I shuddered, feeling thankful it wasn't the old days, when they'd have been fated to a slow, agonizing death as their intestines shat themselves out, after a brief period of seeming recovery just long enough to get hopes up.
Sanders needed time to recuperate, so I was the one accompanying the Colonel as he stalked through ground-zero. Molten remnants of a quarter of a trillion USDE facility still outgassed, pure silica turned back into useless sand and blast glass. Forensics suggested that Silt had been responsible, likely tunneling right below the structure, slowly enough to avoid seismic tripwires, before planting the bomb and skedaddling. It was all academic at this point, USMA had been thoroughly embarrassed, and even the most slack-eyed colonist would have a hard time believing that a semiconductor fab could just blow up, especially since this one didn't even run on nuclear power.
The thin air had attenuated enough of the blast that the distant Firmament was mostly intact, conversely, the atmosphere wasn't thick enough to be very good at shielding from radiation, and many nanites were sickening, lost to gamma rad damage.
More concerning than radiation on a planet where everyone already knew better than to spend too much time outside were the chemicals released by the blast. A fine ash, made of heavy metals, plastic particulates and who knows what else, gently rained down, coating the dome and adding a yellowish tint to the view until it was scrubbed down.
Once the initial cleanup was completed, I was strongly suggested to head back to my hotel to decompress till orders came in from on-high. On my way back, I observed significant protests on the street, with the Martian Guard showing no real interest in cordoning off parts of New Washington as ordered.
I was bombarded with unsolicited flyers, which I continued ignoring till my lace flagged one for my attention.
A Note from the Martian Underground: Freedom for Metahumans
As the winds of change blow across the barren Martian landscape, humanity must confront the eternal question - in our quest for progress, have we sacrificed our compassion and moral standing? We are the Patriots, a group of determined citizens and metahumans who have come together to fight against injustice while combating the sinister and exploitative practices of the United States Martian Administration (USMA) in the Hellas Basin.
For years, the USMA has expanded and established its grip on the Martian colonies through deceit, manipulation, and subjugation of the very individuals who possess the power to create wonders. These metahuman superheroes, often gifted with extraordinary capabilities, have been conscripted against their will into a life of servitude and indentured labor. The Patriots bear witness to the countless acts of cruelty perpetrated against those who should have been regarded as heroes for their selfless pursuits.
The Patriots cannot stand idly by as metahumans are stripped of their dignity and forced to work under inhumane conditions, subjected to brutal punishment and mind-control practices. We implore the United States government and global community to take immediate action, break the chains of metahuman indenture, and restore their autonomy.
Basic human rights must be extended to metahumans, ensuring they are treated with the respect and dignity they deserve. Their fundamental freedoms of choice, privacy, and life without unjust persecution should be recognized and protected. The exploitation of their powers without consent, an act tantamount to slavery, must be abolished.
As we advocate for change and the emancipation of these superheroes from a life of bondage, we also call upon the metahuman community to join hands with us in this fight. Together, we can usher in a new era of peace and progress, where individuals are valued not only for their unique abilities but also for their freedom to exercise their powers justly and ethically.
The Patriots demand the following:
1. The immediate cessation of metahuman coercion and exploitation by the USMA.
2. The implementation of effective laws and policies, extending fundamental human rights to metahumans and safeguarding them from abuse.
3. The establishment of a transparent and reformed system for metahumans to freely contribute to the development of Martian colonies, without any form of undue influence, manipulation, or harm.
4. The creation of a comprehensive support network, offering psychological, social, and legal assistance to liberated metahumans, helping them reintegrate into society and rebuilding lives.
We are the Patriots - tirelessly devoted to ensuring a just, fair, and progressive society on Mars. We shall not rest until every metahuman gains the freedom they deserve, and the United States Martian Administration is held accountable for its exploitative actions.
Join our fight, and together we shall rise above this oppression.
The Patriots - United for Metahuman Freedom
I sighed, consigning the manifesto to the internal equivalent of a recycling bin. I'd say that pigs would fly before their demands were met, but I suspected that I could already go online and buy some porcine abomination with wings grafted on, likely sufficient for flight in Martian gravity (air density not withstanding). At least this lot didn't seem to have any obvious ties to the Penitents, and truth be told, I had no small amount of sympathy for their plight.
The level of discontent had risen high enough that USMA's terrestrial overlords were taking off the kid gloves. I spotted plenty of police drones buzzing overhead, stealth generators intentionally made spotty so that the civilians below noticed them. USMA police had been sidelined by Grey Men, with no obvious insignia or tags, menacingly clustered around points of interest. This could get ugly, and fast.
My hotel was packed with tourists packing their bags, likely cutting their trips short. I spotted Sanders waiting for me, ignoring medical advice to be out this early. I almost instinctively attempted to order her back to her bed before I remembered that I didn't work for the US Army any more, and hadn't for half a decade now.
"I wanted to convey the news in person. We just got word from SOCOM, kill orders have been approved for Machina and Silt. I'm going to be going out with a Force Recon team, I expect you'll want to come along." She said, nursing what was likely only the last of a series of coffees.
"I'm not getting paid to sit around, and here, take this." I told her, proffering her a strip of modafinil, I never went on an op without it. She examined it and then popped one with her coffee, grunting with gratitude.
"How exactly is this going to be spun?" I enquired, enjoying mild schadenfreude at the thought of the PR nightmare they were going through.
She grimaced, and chugged back some soda before replying.
"Absolute nightmare, and I'm living through it. We had the Chinese on the phone, the brass had to key them in, while they were diplomatic enough to not laugh in our face, they haven't been very helpful either." We walked over to her rover, this time she had come alone.
"What about Lone Star, Cali, or the Indians?" I asked, referring to all the other nations with territorial interests anywhere near Hellas.
She shrugged, keying in details to the autonav. "They're making the usual noises, we know that the Texans have been aiding the rebels, I just hope that the knowledge that BULWARK is receiving Centauri support shakes them out of their nostalgic Boogaloo bullshit." Her voice dripped with bitterness as she gunned it, the barriers at intersections hastily moving out of the way as we sped out past the section of the rotting Firmament, gently flaking where the rads had been too high to tolerate.
I hooked into the rover's systems as we drove out, and spotted a great deal of motion in the heavens. Dozens, if not hundreds of rockets must have been entering or leaving orbit, fireflies buzzing amongst the stars.
The full brunt of the American War Machine was swinging into gear, thousands of troops from all over Mars being rapidly redeployed to Hellas.
"Head's up. Turing is getting involved." Sanchez told me, and it was a good thing I wasn't the one driving, because I'd have swerved off road in fright.
"That's never good-" (This is what we in the business call an understatement) "-What are they pulling out this time?" I asked, already thumbing through files and sending out requests for information on the local net.
"They're claiming jurisdiction because of the tampering of an AGI by metahumans in collusion with the aliens." She declared, taking over the controls in what was most likely a bid to stay awake longer.
Turing was bad news. They rarely acted, content to farm out Compute Governance to individual nations, mostly auditing the Watchers and licensing individual models, but when they did act, you didn't want to be in the same hemisphere. I scanned the sky in trepidation, wondering if they had a Kill Star orbiting overhead.
I loathed Turing; the UN is often declared to be some kind of overarching world government by conspiratorial types, sending shadowy hit squads after people, engaging in widespread surveillance and memetic warfare on the unruly masses, but truth be told, no matter what the text of the One World Declaration says, in reality it holds little more power than it did at the turn of the century. We're underpaid, overworked, and usually the scapegoat for anything national governments don't want to take accountability for.
Now Turing, if you're looking for the closest thing to the Illuminati we've got, they'll do an excellent job filling in.
For starters, I can't even tell you who leads them, or very much about them at all. To the wider public, they're boring bureaucrats responsible for monitoring the Compute Governance programs, or at least auditing the compliance of individual nations. They ostensibly classify and license out the myriad vetted AGI models in use, and oversee experiments on new ones, including veto powers on deployment if necessary.
Far less widely publicized is the penalty for violating Compute Governance. At the minimum, it involves surprise raids and seizure of contraband computing hardware, with perpetrators being let off with a fine and slap on the wrist, all the way to being black-bagged and disappeared. The more extreme measures are reserved for nation states, corporations or just plain old wealthy individuals who don't know better. Think both literal and metaphorical decapitation and replacement with more compliant staff..
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
And in the worst case, when someone does manage to deploy an unsafe AGI, or an experiment goes south, they're the ones showing up with megaton yield nukes, going up to antimatter, metric weapons, and even rumors of causality scrubbers.
Back when I first received my ULTRAVIOLET clearance at UNSEEN, I went on a deep dive into the dozens of missing individuals, promising startups as well as incumbents shut down without a trace, certain aerospace enthusiastic billionaires and trillionaires who "retired" from public view. That earned me my first reprimand, delivered by a visibly nervous Van Der Waals himself. Of course, as a full cyborg, he wouldn't be visibly anything if he didn't want to make a damn strong point..
Sanchez suddenly jolted up in her seat, with the car's systems taking over without a hitch. Her eyes glazed over in the characteristic manner of someone processing a large info-dump faster than real-time.
"MarsCom just authorized 3 tactical nuclear strikes." She whispered, before inundating me with a deluge of documents, the redaction black hardly yet dry on them. I threw my own assistant at it to condense the findings as fast as I could.
"There are civilian targets within the blast zones!" I was aghast, taken aback by the glowing red markers highlighting several small settlements dotted around Hellas. It was too late, somewhere overhead, an atmospheric fighter drone had already unleashed its payload.
In the distance, over the curve of the Martian horizon, one closer and more obvious than its Earthly counterpart, I saw the first flare of light.
"They finally picked up a chunk of the missing drone swarm. Machina was retooling them, using mothballed civilian infrastructure. We detected fissiles, Command authorized more strikes.." Her tone was clipped, her face numb.
I finally looked at the condensed report. It was.. concerning, to say the least. Mars regulated nuclear power far less than Earth did, it simply was the most practical means of energy generation on a large scale, especially given how weak the solar insolation was. While people weren't going around in nuclear flying cars, any settlement of more than a couple hundred people had a miniature reactor attached, to run energy-hungry in-situ resource generation (ISRU) projects if nothing else.
With things kicking off, it seemed a more thorough than usual audit of fissiles had been performed, finding significant discrepancies. Some of the colonies were seasonal, with only a skeleton crew for the Martian winter, especially near the poles. Stockpiles had gone missing, inventory lists didn't quite add up. I wondered how the hell they'd managed to build a nuke, still, that was hardly the weirdest thing supes had built in a cave with a pile of scraps, but then again it seemed they'd been skimming off the top.
Turing had just euthanized the AI responsible for monitoring them, deeming it compromised. Overkill, if you ask me, the primary task they were responsible was preventing the development of an unaligned AGI, and the Centauri were likely to make that less likely rather than more. Still, it had been proven as early as 2023 that it was impossible to detect backdoors within neural networks, unless you somehow cracked most of cryptography. I'm sure there are Class 6 supes out there capable of that feat, but evidently they're in short supply as Turing usually opts for wipes and full resets.
More concerning was the identification of massive sub-surface caverns and tunnels, ones not noted on previous surveys. And they were swarming with drones. Millions, at the very least.
"Are they going to attempt to nuke the caverns?" I asked, watching the almost invisible signal of large amounts of metal and silicon underground, as detected by neutrino imaging. Not surprising that they hadn't been discovered yet, they really had to amp the sensitivity and turn most of the planet's detectors to this direction to catch them.
She shook her head, "No, we've got tunnels going dozens of kilometers deep. Even bunker buster nukes with greater than 10 megaton yields would be highly ineffective."
I felt a mounting headache trying to breakout. You think you've got a handle on things, and then you end up with a combination of a nuclear-armed mad scientist and someone who can dig him in deeper than an Alabama tick. I was still confused as to where the hell they'd gotten all the resources for this bullshit, the initial drone swarm had been minuscule in comparison.
It seemed that the local strategic AGIs were ahead of me there, as a convenient report had been generated:
Missing feedstock, with large chunks vanishing when the fab had been forced into downtime by the water shortages.
Old resource stockpiles abandoned by SpaceX, BO and their Chinese counterparts during the Secessions, or sold to colonists yet to arrive, who hadn't had the opportunity to find them prematurely ransacked.
This had been going on for months if not years, all under the nose of the subverted AI.
"We're here. Hernandez and the boys are waiting." She declared, before popping open the doors, with us both clambering out into the incipient sandstorm.
We disembarked in a cloud of sublimating water vapor, I'd already suited up inside the rover, there wasn't a convenient airlock for miles.
A faint shimmer, and then the Force Recon operators dropped their cloaks, revealing themselves entrenched in a gully formed by a long gone river. I examined them keenly, I hadn't run with American SF for a while. Back in my day, the FR boys had always been touchy about their designation as a Tier 2 unit, considered a notch below Delta or DEVGRU, despite still reporting to SOCOM. Most people didn't even know who they were, with the SEALs hogging the limelight and book rights. I wasn't sure where they stood now, but undoubtedly they were the best assets on hand when it came to Mars.
Each operator bristled with weaponry, and I spotted more than a few pieces that were clearly made by Crafters. Energy shields, unnaturally powerful power sources for railguns and lasers, bespoke power armor that could outperform mundane counterparts, these guys had the works. The behavior of a few of their drones strongly suggested they weren't running standard AI, but pseudo-intelligences made by technomancers. I didn't trust the damn things, but they would likely prove resistant to intrusion, and that's what counted.
They didn't have any pressurized quarters of their own, it seemed they were fully intent on slumming it in their pressure suits, and their leader, a Lt. Emir Hernandez, was another cyborg decked out enough to resist the Martian environment.
"Dr. Sen, I'm acquainted with your work." Hernandez said, voice thin but clear.
"I'm surprised, didn't know Marines could read." I bantered back, prompting muffled chuckling. You could take me out of the Army, but it would take a great deal more to take the Army's benign jockeying with the USMC out of me.
I synced up their combat network, prompting an absolutely hilarious log of errors as the expert systems tried to figure out appropriate clearance levels on the basis of the fact that I'd been a captain, and it failed to find logs of my dishonorable discharge after I fled the country (data corruption was a massive issue for events in the early 30s). I watched in real time as I was given access to files that I absolutely shouldn't have seen, then the same files then redacted faster than you could fart, with a mountain of legal notices demanding I take amnestics or consent to lace audits. I forwarded them to UNSEEN to worry about and dug into the plan instead.
The target was an abandoned BSL-5 lab, the kind you built when handling extremely sensitive or hazardous materials. The only higher classifications, BSL-6 and 7, involved isolated vacuum-gapped space stations and black labs in basement universes. For pretty much all practical purposes, including existentially dangerous pathogens, a lab tucked away on an uninhabited chunk of Mars was more than good enough.
I examined the plan with interest. It had been a rather ambitious project, initially started by a joint US-EU venture in 2032, a belated response to the H8N3 outbreak and the abortive attempt by an antinatalist terrorist org to greensmith a newer strain of COVID-28.
Newly drunk with the sheer magnitude of industrial capacity of burgeoning interplanetary transit, plans had been drawn up for a truly ambitious installation.
The Moshowitz Lab resembled a turnip thrust into the Martian rock. It extended several hundred meters into the crust, and radiated outwards undergrounds, extending tendrils of independent laboratories and other facilities.
It had never been finished, the events of 2033, not to mention the Secession, had left the facility mothballed with only a third of it complete. Still, there has been preliminary automated experiments running, overseen by a skeleton crew, until they were all recalled shortly after.
The records suggested that most of the equipment had been left behind, including an operational nuclear power plant.
(I did tell you that the Martians had a relaxed attitude towards nukes that confuses us Terrans)
Then again, at that time it was a 1200 km trek to Moshowitz from the nearest settlement, so it's not like they couldn't afford a meltdown or two, not that reactors these days were capable of that.
Right now, SigInt had picked up anomalous activity there, in the subsurface portion of the facility. Or to be more precise, both the US and the EU had picked up the changes a while back, but each had assumed that it was the other messing around in there and hasn't enquired further.
Only a few of the sensors were still reporting, and the sandstorms meant that satellite surveillance was a no-go.
Now, we'd be taking a platoon of jarheads and kicking down the hermetically sealed doors to see what was cooking in there ourselves. I'd have preferred another nuke or two to save us the hassle, but tactical nukes wouldn't be sufficient to wipe out such a hardened structure, and there weren't enough of the truly massive strategic warheads in orbit to throw around willy-nilly.
Breach-and-clear of a hardened facility with an opponent who had months to entrench?
My life expectancy had just gone to a simple "no". Still, my inner military nerd was already salivating at the prospect of seeing what some of the more bespoke gear the FR boys were carrying around would do. At the very least it would make big booms, and God knows Mars had a shortage of those right now.