I set the vehicle to idle and turned around to look at the brand new problem I'd been saddled with: an extremely traumatized little girl sobbing her heart out in the back of the car, looking terribly lost while perched on a seat made for a cyborg ten times her size.
I sat and looked at her, mildly lost as to how to proceed. I wasn't the worst with kids, but this one had just been through a lot more than most. I decided to start at the lowest rung of Maslow's Hierarchy, and work my way up. I rummaged through the crap under the dash, throwing aside a half-eaten crayon-shaped candy packet (Marine's Choice, accept no alternatives), but the majority of the edible accoutrements were made for soldiers, MREs with 10k calories a serving, closer to motor oil than baby food in terms of nutrional value. I found the most inoffensive one I could find, and gently peeled it open and activated the chemical heater, prompting forth a mouth-watering aroma filled the cramped vic. Fuck me, they actually managed to make an MRE that looked half-decent, I was distracted by my own stomach grumbling as I handed the tray to the girl, who had ceased sobbing, replaced with a terrible case of hiccups.
"Hey, what's your name kid?" I coaxed, taking off my helmet to give her something more than a faceless visor to look at. Probably a poor decision in hindsight, what with my skull being caved in, but nothing a good parting didn't fix. She took the food I proffered, but didn't reply, opting to stare at her feet while hiccupping.
"I'm Dr. Adat, you're safe here, ok? You need to eat up." I poked gently at the food. "Is my daddy with you? I want my daddy!" She said plaintively.
"Can you tell me your name?" I asked again. In response, she lifted up her wrist where a small electronic tattoo flashed beneath her skin. A quick scan revealed pretty much everything I needed to know, but I still waited patiently till she began nibbling on her food before stopping.
"I'm Riley, and I'm 8 years old!" She declared.
"Nonsense, says here you're only 4." I teased, making her squirm in discontent. "No mister, that's in Mars years. My daddy said I'm a big girl now." A thought, presumably of her father, sank her face back into gloom.
I sighed, if she'd actually been 4, she'd be much easier to handle, at this age she'd likely be asking all kinds of uncomfortable questions. I mulled over the idea of hitting her with mild amnestics to reduce the risk of post traumatic symptoms, but she had been sedated throughout the whole mess, and it didn't seem to have fully sunk in. Still, I had a lot of fast talking to do.
"Hey, I spoke to your daddy, he said he had to go on a short trip, and you'll need to stay at your Aunt's place ok?" I referenced her next of kin, a USMA citizen in good standing back in the bigger colonies. She was still rather confused about the whole thing, but I produced a hasty deepfake of her dad, and after a promise to give her some games to play if she behaved, I helped her settle into a nest made of discarded uniforms. She drifted off back to sleep as I kept the vic moving along.
To my considerable surprise, after about an hour of driving, the sandstorm that had waxed ferociously for so many days just stopped dead. It was like a sudden spasm in the thin Martian atmosphere, and the thin yet howling winds that had blown about a Dubai's worth of sand halted in its tracks. I stopped the car, struck by the way endless curtains of sand slowly fell out of the dead air, with nothing but Brownian motion to buffer their steady fall.
I looked up at the newly revealed night sky, and there were more stars than there used to be. I felt a shiver go down my spine when I saw a tiny multicolored butterfly flap its wings. In response, the untinged blackness of the Martian night, without any real moon to light it, now displayed magnificent aurorae that coruscated in the night sky, a phenomenon that had absolutely not been seen on the planet in the last billion or so years; since the molten metal dynamo in the core froze up and solidified. That clearly signaled the use of particle weapons, with trace scatter being caught up in the artificial magnetosphere and lighting up the barren planet.
I assumed that the people or places it was aimed at had an even more stunning but far shorter light show.
It was at this point that my gaze was drawn back down to earth (Mars-flavored), to several pinpricks of light in the distance. It only took a quick zoom to confirm that there were half a dozen armed vehicles, and they were coming right at me.
"Aw fuck." I swore, and threw the vehicle back into reverse, rushing to find some crevice or fold in the terrain to hide behind. A fool's endeavor, if I could see them, they could see me, this thing didn't have any adaptive camo. Confirming my misgivings, I saw the flash of muzzles, followed by rapidly approaching tracer rounds that impacted only a few feet away from the car, now gunning it for all it was worth.
Three of the pursuing vehicles split off to chase me, the others continued barreling towards Moshowitz. I cursed as my car, otherwise well behaved so far, rejected my credentials when I tried to activate its own heavy machinegun. I gave up on pleading with the dumb machine brain that was only good enough for self-driving, and climbed over the exceedingly confused girl to reach the hatch that serviced the turret. There was an exposed data port, and I plugged my lace into it and prayed that the old servicing manual I'd once passingly acquainted myself with a decade back had some relevance to this more modern design. Thankfully, it was indeed the red wire this time, and after confirming that the fucking vic wouldn't pull over after detecting my intrusion, I managed to get the CROWS turret to squawk in anger, firing several bursts at the pursuing assholes. Given the distance involved, I don't think I hit anything, but it did make them swerve a couple times and bought me precious space and time.
I hoped to make it to a friendly US patrol, but Moshowitz really was in the middle of fucking nowhere, and any designations on my map, now several hours outdated, might be meaningless. My lace pinged me, my secondary neural computer picking out something I had missed- One of the pursuers had set up on a small hill, and were unloading something big, with a tripod attached.
Don't tell CPS, but Ares-pattern MRAPs don't come with child seats, so Riley was tossed about a little bit when I manually ordered the car to swerve as hard as it could. Kids are pretty resilient, it would buff out, but what wouldn't was the hypervelocity railgun slug that cut through the battery block like it wasn't there. At least it hadn't hit the crew compartment, my evasive maneuver paying off.
I fired a smoke dispenser, the ensuing cloud mixing with the emissions from the now combusting battery pack and giving us a little more concealment, if not cover. I desperately checked the map again, and noticed a large homestead about 6 klicks away, with little detail to go off. My hopes of losing my pursuers in a straight sprint were dispelled as the damaged battery began letting out its magic smoke, with the spare pack only having enough power for maybe 10 more, and that's without the juking.
Seeing that we'd have to stand and fight at some point, I wracked my brains for a solution, finally noticing a rather incongruous terrain feature significantly closer:
Mars had gone from being thought to having canals, to not having canals, and finally, bonafide real actual canals built by humans, not that this one was going to be visible from orbit. Hellas was incredibly deep, to the extent that in the winters, you could have small amounts of surface water accumulate, not enough to splash about in, but still worth siphoning off. The colonists had dug a canal to collect some of that moisture, with a pump and pipe network leading it back to the colony. There even was an emergency shelter, just enough for a person to clamber into and breathe properly oxygenated air at a safe temperature before help arrived.
I immediately uploaded a small script into my vic, popped another smoke cloud, put a grossly oversized helmet on Riley's head, and dumped her inside a pressure suit, which was so large she fit in the space meant for one leg. I threw open the doors, disregarding the pressure alarm, and rolled out of the moving vehicle, doing my best to keep her safe.
It was a rough landing, but after bouncing into a small boulder, I grabbed her and ran behind cover as our trusty steed bounded off into the distance.
I crouched low in the billowing dust and smoke, and to my immense relief, when our pursuers did catch up, they made no effort to investigate the place and continued chasing after the car. I held a squirming Riley in place, and ignored her muffled cries till we both crammed into the shelter and I took off her helmet.
"Wear this-" I found a kid-sized suit, and helped her climb into it, which she did with the ease of a native spacer. We only had a few minutes before the vic ran out of charge and then hunkered down to defend itself, so the moment she was in, I picked her up again and ran down the canal, tracing the pipe that was covered in meters of sand. Thankfully, it ran mostly straight to the homestead in the distance, and I ran along, hoping that nobody was looking back this way.
It was a long run, but I did make it to the perimeter, where the fence was buried in sand deep enough that a decent jump carried me over to the other side, into the compound. Where I was promptly accosted by a robot dog with a gun strapped on its back.
Thankfully, it was a small dog and a smaller gun, I had reasonable confidence that my armor would stop anything it threw at me, but I still hid Riley behind me for her safety.
"Hello, care to explain what you're doing on private property?" It asked mellifluously, the voice entirely incongruent with its industrial frame.
"Um.. We're just passing through. Are your owners home?" I lied, not very convincingly.
"Don and Camilla are currently indisposed and unable to respond to your queries. As per the Personhood Act, 2039, Section 3E, I'm empowered to act in their best interests. Your presence is not permitted-" Its spiel was interrupted by a door opening and a man with a much bigger gun, the latter pointed right at me.
"Stand down Rover. Who the flying fuck are you?" He asked, staring me down.
I'd seen enough shit today that my patience was running thin. Instead of something productive, I asked "You named a robot dog Rover?".
He paused, momentarily nonplussed. "It's a pun, get it, we're on Mars."
He looked over at my battered exterior, not yet spotting Riley. "You a new offworlder for USMA? You can't be here, you need a permit to enter a citizen's property."
"Firstly, I'm not from USMA. I'm UN, you can check my credentials." I activated my AR tags for his perusal.
"Dr. Adat Sen? This looks legit, what the hell are you doing out here?" He asked, still not moving the gun away from my face.
"I'm here to drop off someone. Maybe you know her?" I kept my eye on him as I gently pushed Riley out into the open in her tiny spacesuit.
"What-" She turned her face plate transparent for a moment- "Wait, is that Riley? Andy and Ellen's kid? What's going on?" He asked, stunned.
"Long story. I just want to hand off the kid to you and leave, you can call CPS or whatever the fuck they do with orphans on this planet." I said wearily. It was safer for all concerned if I didn't drag her into any gunfights.
"She's an orphan? What happened to Andy? Hey!"
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He yelled at me, as I turned my back and walked towards the gate. "What the fuck is going on? First all the comms go offline and then you just hand me a kid? I want to know what happened to her father!"
He stopped, cocking his head to the side. In response, a dusty screen on the exterior of a building came to life, showing distant camera footage of the vehicles that had been chasing me, now driving straight towards the settlement.
"Are they your buddies?" He pointed at the display.
"The opposite. They're terrorists, here to kill me. I need to leave, and now."
"What the hell, look, if you're actually legit, I'd love to lend you the car, but Cam took it to head to the city before the storm. Wait, I think they're trying to hail us." An incoming point-to-point call request popped up on the screen, the ID withheld. It had to be based on line of sight, all the sat networks in the area were offline.
My armor felt a hundred pounds heavier. Even if I left, there was nowhere to run, I'd be trekking a hundred kilometers on foot to get to anywhere of note.
"Wait a moment. I had a message for you, came through on the net." I heard him jogging after me, leaving the kid behind, guarded by the dog.
"Is it the UN?" I asked wearily. I didn't particularly want to phone home, I half planned to find a shelter and sit this shit out. Unfortunately, my sense of duty overrode self-preservation.
"Beats me. Here, take a look." He held out a phone, and me being an idiot, I looked into it while using a helmet that belonged to someone else, running a neural lace that was behind on OTA updates.
The Parrot hit like a truck, one I'd entirely failed to dodge. The man had shown hints of separatist sympathies, expressing concern for Andy Reed. I'd ignored the hints, had mistaken a neutral face for a sympathetic one. The truth is, I just hadn't wanted a fight. I could also pin it on more brain damage.
He approached carefully as I convulsed, his appearance a blur. If he was speaking, it was drowned out by the rising static roar of tinnitus.
Time flashed. My lace was offline, forcibly shutdown and unresponsive to my mental imprecation. I was in a car again, or to be more accurate, the Martian equivalent of a bus.
It was a spacious vehicle, with enough room to stretch your legs down the aisle. I didn't have time to appreciate the legroom, because I came to with a start, struggling against subtle restraints that only tightened when I made a sudden movement.
"Man, I was afraid I'd fried something. You ok Dr. Sen?"
I feigned more grogginess than I truly felt, while surreptitiously eyeing my surroundings. I wasn't in my armor, having been changed into nondescript smart clothing, with nothing fancier than induction coils for heating. They hadn't given me a pressure suit, just in case I had ideas of making a run for it.
"He's not going to go roid rage on us with that fancy shit of his, is he Don?" A man in military fatigues walked over curiously. I didn't know what good MARPAT camo meant for terrestrial forests was on Mars, but he rocked a set of milsurp BDUs none the less. A handsome enough man, with the intense eyes of a fanatic, and a few aesthetic scars retained only for the cool factor since we've long had the tech to remove them.
"It's cool. I stuck him with that shit that turns off a lace, you know, the stuff from Medici. I've got a monitor in the seat, if his lace shows any signs of reactivating, we'll see it." Don placated, looking pleased at his foresight.
I resolved to kill them, and everyone else in the room.
I felt immense rage, barely held down. I was sick of being jerked around, sick of not having any agency. The UN told me to jump, I asked how high. And now a bunch of fucking LARPers of the kind that had rooted for the Texan Secession, running around the desert with their AR-15s and having a glorified barbecue until the drones got them had captured me.
Unfortunately for them, I didn't have just the lace on me, but the backup systems hidden in my vertebrae. Without the primary lace, I could barely interface with them, but I still felt its presence, comfortable, warm, waiting. I wondered if this is what it was like to be a conjoined twin.
It wasn't able to plug right into my mind, not without tripping the machine that was stapled into my scalp. I knew how those worked, monitoring the frontal lobe, zapping the lace with electricity to keep it inactive. They'd depowered my limbs, but only through blocking incoming transmissions from my brain, not expecting a backup system that worked from my lower spinal cord. If they'd simply cut the cord, well I had wireless systems in my body and extremities, I could puppet myself on autopilot if I had to.
Instead, I relied on the relative intelligence and autonomy of my backup systems to find a side-channel for communication. I thought, an almost meditative experience as I willed my breath calmer, my heart slower.
I almost missed it, it was almost subliminal, a quickening and slowing of my pulse and heart-rate, skipped beats encoded in Morse code. The backup neuromorphic computer said hi.
I'd prepared for something like this, even if the usual circumstances that a lace as advanced as mine went offline were death and injuries that made you wish you were dead. Programmed a few macros too, just in case, and I began tripping them one by one. A queer sensation in my gut suggested my drug glands coming online and making their own witch's brew, one I was eager to share.
"Care to tell me what you want to do with me? Where we're going?" I asked.
The other man glowered. "Fuck you Fed, keep your mouth shut or I'll shut it for you."
"You and this clapped out bunch of bandits you call a militia?" I asked with a lopsided grin.
"You know, for someone who's just killed a good bud of ours and who we're itching to return the favor to, you talk too much."
"He died like a bitch." I sneered at them.
A vessel throbbed in his temple, and he stepped forward, only to be restrained by Don, the big man putting a placating hand on his shoulder.
"Easy Josh, he's trying to get to you. Trying to piss us off." He explained, looking at me carefully, and then pulling out a tablet that buzzed with diagnostics. Likely checking that I was still neutered like they expected. He sighed with relief and put it away.
I sent a fallback command to my lace, encoded in a particular twitch of my facial muscles. The response from the inhibitor was immediate, a jolt of electricity that had me convulsing, eyes rolling up my skull.
"What the fuck? Are you crazy?" Don yelled, grabbing the tablet again.
"Don't do that, you're going to fry yourself, you idiot." A woman came running over, concern evident in her young face.
I did it again, with the same result. I twitched, seeing double as more current hammered into my nervous system, escalating as I kept up the act. I was seeing double, and the ensuing moan wasn't an act.
"Stop that!" She yelled, snatching the tablet away from a tongue-tied Don and swiping at the interface.
"Fuck you, you're not taking me alive." I explained, drooling saliva down my chin.
"It's as high as is safe Maggie, if I put him down forcibly he might not wake up again." Don warned her.
I was jerking like a frog hooked up to a fusion reactor, the only thing keeping me in my seat were the restraints even though my limbs were powered down.
"Goddammit, sedate him, hit him with this." She fished out an auto-injector and tossed it to Don, who stared at it helplessly.
"That shit won't work, he's got work done." He stammered. "Just try it, if he's too fucked up to think he can't hit a kill-switch."
I hit a kill-switch. My heart stopped beating, or at least the primary did, with the second waiting in the wings and immediately, darkness encroached on the edges of my consciousness even as the enhanced RBC nanites in my bloodstream rushed out to keep my brain oxygenated.
"She's going to kill us if we let him die, I'm getting the defib thing, just hit him with everything." She ran to the front of the vehicle and propped open a hefty first aid kit.
"I say we let him die." Josh said dispassionately.
"Buddy, we had one job. Here, keep an eye on him." Don lumbered over, and his glazed over as he ripped open a patch of my suit and prepped the autoinjector, stabbing it into my thigh.
My heart immediately restarted, and he whooped with joy before stopping cold, I could hear the gears working in his head as he processed why a massive dose of sedatives had kickstarted my heart.
"Maggie, is that supposed to-" I grabbed him by the throat, my secondary systems in control of my limbs. A gush of arterial blood accompanied my wrist blade slicing his carotid, and he staggered back and slumped against a seat, hand pressed to his neck as if he could tourniquet the bleed with will alone.
"You CUNT" Josh yelled, going for the gun in his holster. My hand kept moving, finding the control for the restraints and discharging the ultracapacitors in my fingers, frying the controls and freeing me from the lax straps to move in earnest.
He was fast, managing to backpedal, bringing up his gun and discharging three shots center mass before I was upon him. Too little, much too late. My subdermal plating caught the rounds, being more than capable of halting pistol calibers in their tracks even if my innards didn't appreciate it. I was on him as he reached for a vibroblade, the world slowing to a crawl as I closed the distance.
It was a weird experience, I wasn't truly in control of my limbs, they were running off the macros I'd ordered my backup to execute, with extra flourishes the surprisingly smart systems added as they assessed the situation. We were talking with my autonomous nervous system as the intermediary, the irregular beats of my juiced up heart telling it to keep at it tiger, you've got it covered.
Even in my dissociated state, I stabbed him without issue, the monoblade slicing open a gaping wound and cleaving his diaphragm and stomach in twain. He brought his blade up and into my flank, but it didn't hit anything but battery fat, the slick material letting it slide right out. I grabbed his arm before he could swing it again, and this time discharged the other hand's capacitors. He screamed as his limb fried, and I head-butted him with a satisfying crunch of breaking nasal bone. This one was on me.
He fired another round that pierced through the side of the bus, setting off the breach alarms, but I brought my knee up into his side, hammering the wound. His ribs were crushed, his light augmentations no match for my military grade ones. I thrust my hand with the blade into his gut again, and brought it out with his heart thrashing in my grip like a wounded quail. I crushed it, and kicked him aside before rampaging forward.
Maggie was screaming, the pitch of her voice competing with the klaxons as I ran towards her with brutal speed. Another woman appeared, opening the door behind her, with an assault rifle in tow. She had a visor on, so I switched targets with the massive gob of saliva I'd built up in my mouth. Neurotoxin, a lot of it, even with my own immunity, my mouth and throat had gone numb.
Maggie got most of it on her face. Her screaming went up another octave as she clawed at her own skin, delicately painted fingernails drawing blood.
My hand grabbed the pistol Josh dropped of its own volition, lifting it at her and the other women, but it was a biocoded model and refused to fire, so my arm threw it like an ungainly boomerang right into the latter's face, denting her visor plate.
She responded by blasting away in my general direction. Only a single bullet hit me, embedding itself somewhere non-critical, so I ignored the dying Maggie and kept on sprinting towards her. The bus swerved, automated systems deciding to halt till the holes in it were patched, and I bounced off the wall and kicked her in the chest. Her rifle flew out of her grip, and she gasped as she hit one of the handrails behind her. I swept her leg, brought her down to the ground, and then tore off her visor to reveal a frightened face, barely a teen. A nasty bruise was already marring her waifish features, and I looked on dispassionately as my fists kept punching, till she no longer looked human or had much of a face to begin with.
I grabbed her rifle, running back to where Maggie lay on the floor, her lips already a concerning shade of blue, still desperately pawing at the controls of the tablet. I came over, my leg lifting up and then coming down with the scrunch of breaking fingers, and then a kick to the neck snapped it like a twig.
I picked up the tablet, and proceeded to use it, far slower than the liquid fury I'd displayed. The secondary system was smart, but it deferred to my instructions as I ordered my fingers to move and work the finer details.
Tap. Lace inhibitor disengaged. It was like a cup of coffee after a long, long day.
Another click, with far more finesse. The device at the bottom of my neck paralyzing my conscious control of my limbs switched off, and they were mine again.
I sighed. Still no time to rest. I quickly grabbed what I could, avoiding the spray of sealing foam as the bus's systems decided that if none of the humans were going to do anything about the rapidly dwindling oxygen levels, it would take matters into its own hands. The vehicle's windows were blacked out, and I couldn't find any electro-opacity controls at the back, plus the bullet holes were sealed up at this point so I wasn't eager to open them up to take a peek. So I was trudging over to the controls when I saw movement on the parking sensors. People were coming, preparing to enter.
"Maggie, Dan, what the fuck is going on? Are you OK?"
Someone was hailing us, his voice playing over the bus's speaker.
I coughed and disengaged my vocal cords, using speakers embedded in my throat to emit an eery facsimile of the former's voice.
"Fucking Blue Man almost got loose. Josh had to put a bullet or two in him, he's unconscious and we're trying to get him stable!" I said using a dead woman's voice.
To add verisimilitude, I switched to Josh's baritone. "Bastard wouldn't stay dead, but I think I hit something important, he's not moving."
"Aww man, that's not good, but I'm just glad you're OK. The boss will understand, hang on, we're coming in." The relief was palpable as the man hit the entry button on the RV, opening up the cubicle that could be depressurized and repressurised at will without venting the entire thing. He wasn't expecting me to be just standing there, wedging myself in a small space where one of the pressure suite had hung, tolerating the hard vacuum that passes for an atmosphere, so he missed me entirely, focusing on hitting the keypad for the main section as I moved behind him. Another stepped through, already working at the seals of his helmet as air hissed back in. The first man was intent on peering through the glass that showed the interior of the vehicle, to little success under the blanket of foam that coated it. He was startled as a gurgling sound became audible as the airlock repressurized, turning to find his friend collapsing with a vibro blade through his neck. He had barely craned his neck when I grabbed it and twisted, leaving him staring at his own reflection in the mirrored glass till he dropped to his knees.
If you couldn't tell, I was pissed, and I'd be killing till someone with a badge told me to stop.