I took a minute to ransack everything I could from the bus, though if they'd taken the equipment handed to me by USMA, they weren't carrying it there.

The assault rifle was passable, a old Sig M5 I was quite familiar with from my Army days. In the luggage at the rear, I found an environment suit that fit me, Josh and I had similar proportions. I ate ravenously, downing protein packs and algal candy to fuel my power cells, glad that nothing had taken critical damage.

I went through their phones, the ones who still used them that is, and after pressing Don's beefy paws onto the fingerprint scanner, set my lace to download its files and go through them on my behalf.

Maggie's cute little foldable was set to retinal biometrics, so I pried open her puffy lids and scanned them before she went cold. More random files, once again for my lace to handle.

The two idiots I'd dispatched last yielded more ammo, but nothing else of note.

At the bus's console, I hooked into the telemetry provided by the Starlink dish on top, but found that civilian networks were still down. I found a cam, and looked through to discover that we were pulled to the shoulder of a massive highway, with nothing but a few solar-powered lamps shimmering behind us. The other two had been traveling on a ruggedized sedan without environmental controls, itself waiting patiently for them to return.

Where the fuck was I?

The map showed me that we were on Texan Highway 7, which, not to be outdone by its terrestrial ancestors, was a 12 lane superhighway cutting through the northern end of Hellas Basin, servicing the breakaway colonies as well as the ones established later under the aegis of the Lone Star state.

My lace digested the navigation data, these two vehicles had been part of a convoy headed further north, but had temporarily stopped in the town of New Alamo (Mars colonies were often hilariously cliche in their naming). That's the place we'd left behind, but evidently they'd kept on trucking. The next waypoint in the nav systems was a self-contained structure a short distance ahead, a combination junkyard/gas station/factory that serviced a few hundred homesteads and autonomous mining operations just past polite civilization.

I was torn as to whether or not to turn back and seek shelter in New Alamo, right until my lace reviewed more footage and pinged my attention. The video feed showed me our bus in a midst of a traffic jam, a rather rare sight on a nearly empty world. Dozens of vehicles were leaving New Alamo and departing post-haste for the spaceport, massive signs lighting up to spread the news that an unprecedented evacuation order had been announced, with all civilians to abandon their homes and head for shelter and await a ride back to orbit.

By the time they'd left, the city was deserted but for the forlorn civic robots sweeping the limitless dust.

A part of my brain yelled at me to disengage, to head back and get in touch with Texan authorities. Another part whispered back that that was a bad idea. It was an open secret that the Texans had been supporting the Patriots and the dozen other separatist movements on Mars. If it wasn't all the way up the chain, the rank and file definitely had their sympathies. I didn't want to naively walk into the Sheriff's office, settle in for a cup of coffee, while they phoned home and told their buddies that a certain idiot had made his way back for them to pick up.

The only people I could get in touch with, if not trust, were the UN, USMA, and, shudder, Turing.

I ordered the vehicles to keep moving, follow their prior route. Comms were down, but for intermittent laser links, but even those were under strict lockdown. My attempts to get through, even with UN and USMA authorization codes, were declined outright.

The burst of cathartic violence I'd indulged in had been all of three minutes, a total of five before I had the cars moving again. If there was someone on the other end waiting for us, I was hopeful they would chalk it down to delays along the way, or at least the holdup in New Alamo.

We weren't far from our destination, just half an hour so at the speeds the highway allowed. It wasn't entirely deserted, along the way we passed the first of dozens of enormous transport haulers headed towards where we were going. The height of a three-storey building and wide enough to occupy half the highway, they were laden with dull red ore, tons and tons of it, but were completely unmanned.

Autonomous vics often used local peer-to-peer mesh networks to handle traffic where network connectivity was spotty, and it's a good thing I was listening in, because one of the haulers a kilometer or two ahead reported multiple vehicles inbound.

I immediately got out of the bus, ordering the cars to keep moving, and then ran for one of the haulers that stood patiently waiting for us to clear the road. I jumped, soaring several meters in the low gravity, and clambered onto the top of the bed of ore. While the vehicle grumbled at my presence, after I settled in, half buried in the rubble, it decided that I wasn't a reason to remain immobile and rejoined the procession.

The cameras proved to be vulnerable to the hacks I had ready, so I watched through them as, halfway down the road, the bus and sedan were hailed by two more open-air transports. They realized something was wrong when they saw one of the vics unoccupied, and half a dozen men got out and carefully approached the bus instead, their body language suggesting they were trying to hail them.

Not receiving a response, they entered the bus, and after seeing the carnage inside, came out post-haste, weapons at the ready.

I'd erased everything I could back there, for all they knew, I could have bailed hours ago, and thus about half of them drove off in what would hopefully be a fruitless manhunt, while the others commandeered the remaining cars and drove for where we'd been headed.

They didn't seem to suspect that I'd be right below their noses, or in this case, right above them, hiding beneath a mound of ore.

Soon, the vehicle halted again, and I surveyed my environs with the camera. It was awaiting its turn, the last of a line of trucks unloading their cargo into massive hoppers, sending up clouds of pink dust to mitigate the uncharacteristically clear air.

We were close to the compound, a sprawling structure of ISRU-d concrete and bioplastic. There was a hab block and attached parking, most of it empty, a long line of empty haulers being topped up by superchargers, or in the case of some of them, sipping synthetic hydrocarbons that could swap in for the petrol and diesel that are, for what I hope are obvious reasons, unavailable on Mars.

The vehicle that hadn't gone gallivanting off to chase me pulled up, and the men aboard disembarked and approached the airlock leading inside. They really didn't expect me to be stupid enough to tail them back, not when I was isolated.

I watched one of truck disappear into an unloading bay then switched to its camera feed. This one showed me the interior of the compound, where a network of conveyor belts and robotic arms moved the ore from the hoppers to the processing plant. The plant was a maze of pipes, tanks, furnaces, and separators, where the ore was heated, crushed, leached, and refined into various metals and minerals. The plant was automated, while there were systems designed for human technicians, none of them were hanging around.

The processed materials were then stored in large containers, ready to be shipped to other locations on Mars or to orbit. The compound had a launch pad and a railgun, both capable of sending payloads into space. The launch pad was used for larger and more valuable cargoes, such as platinum group metals or rare earth elements. The railgun was used for smaller and more common materials, such as iron or aluminum. The pad was empty, and while I desperately craved to be off this God-forsaken ball of rust masquerading as a planet, even I wasn't going to make it to orbit intact if I shot myself up in a railgun.

Through the body of my suit, I felt an incessant beeping begin. The truck was smart enough not to dump its load while a human was lying on top of it, but it was also throwing an error that might make someone come over. I checked that the coast was clear, and jumped down to find myself in the middle of an industrial juggernaut.

The facility was huge, as expected, given that there are exceedingly few zoning laws and the price of most land is "you using that?". Mars was always overbuilt, with the room for a billion rather than the modestly growing dozen million or so if you were counting those in orbit.

I'd heard that some of the original SpaceX autonomous construction equipment was still chugging along to this day, building enormous cities of regolith and concrete meant to house people yet unborn, or stockpiling resources for whoever needed them next. Why would you switch them off anyway?

I crept through the machinery, cameras, if present, weren't set up to form a panopticon, and I found plenty of blindspots to work my way through.

A few industrial robots halted when I passed through, likely tripping a failsafe, but I did my best to be unobtrusive, and they picked up right where they'd left off.

The place wasn't pressurized, barring the truck-stop cum refreshment area I'd seen the locals enter. It was a squat structure, the layout suggesting the bulk of it was underground. Not many cameras either, for which I was grateful.

Then I noticed an opportunity for mischief. There were external oxygen tanks mounted to the side of the structure, and an industrial bot, a tall humanoid one, was preparing to switch one out. I ran over, ignored its alarmed beep and vocalization, and grabbed one of the empty tanks. I found a valve, fished out a syringe, and transferred some of the neurotoxin my body had stored into it, depleting most of my stock. I quickly filled it up with air from another, and then went over to where the robot was working and replaced it. It was too dumb to be alarmed by my actions, and attached it as programmed.

Right. That shit was potent, and wouldn't be filtered out right away. It would aerosolize, and while I didn't expect the dose to be immediately lethal when diluted to this extent, they'd still notice.

I was lurking behind cover when I heard the airlocks open, and out came running, or rather staggering, a man in an environment suit. He made it halfway to one of the vics before stumbling over, cramping and spasming on the tarmac.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

I popped into the airlock before it could close, and set it to cycle, pushing in the moment it beeped open.

The interior decor resembled a diner, barring all the military grade equipment strewn about. Sure, let's just call it a diner, I'd seen more guns in bars back in the States. The denizens had a tad too much liquor to drink, or air to breathe, because it was chaos in there.

There were four people near the entrance, two of them similarly incapacitated on the floor, and another, a tall man wearing a rebreather, was fishing out another gas mask and some kind of autoinjector.

"Stay with me God fucking dammit!" He pleaded, stabbing one of them. I didn't know what was in it, but it worked to some degree, because the man went lax, his lungs resuming the work of sucking down oxygen from the mask he'd stuck on him.

"Hey Rick, did you get that medkit?" He asked me absentmindedly as I appeared in the periphery of his vision, mistaking me for the man who'd left moments ago.

I cut his throat, spraying his blood over the the two downed men, one of whom began wheezing and gurgling as his lungs fought to breathe, let alone draw enough breath to shout a warning.

The fourth person turned at the commotion, clutching his own mask, and didn't get a word in before I stabbed him in the eye and threw his body over the table.

A woman was drawn by the commotion, in an environment suit she'd likely not removed since she'd arrived here given that she was still walking. "Liam, what the-" A burst from my rifle and she slumped against a table, toppling bottles and plates of half-eaten food. Two more had been following her, and they reacted adroitly, opening fire with more compact weaponry while retreating back where they came.

I didn't have body armor, so settled for several shots that came within millimeters of ending one as he ducked behind cover.

Something felt off, I felt my skin crawl, an unpleasantly familiar feeling of powers manifesting. I looked over to see the dying woman manifest a purple halo, and not wishing to see where that lead, shot her twice in the head. The aura disappeared with the last of her cognition.

"He's fucking here with us! Don't take off your suits!"

I ran, utilizing speed to throw off their aim, and avoided taking a bullet in the process. One of them was hiding behind a door, a categorically non-bulletproof one as I quickly demonstrated. His buddy howled in anguish, unloading mags in desperation while I rolled aside and found an angle from which his ankle was visible. A shot there, and he was on the floor wailing even louder. One more, and I'd found the off switch for his complaints.

There were more of them, but witnessing their two buddies get eviscerated, they wisely decided to remain at the bottom of a stairwell leading down deeper into the structure. There was an elevator too, but the idea of sending myself down it to them was a poor one. They seemed to concur, because they didn't use it to come up either.

I checked to make sure they didn't have another way to get up to me, and got busy with my hands.

"Jesus Christ, you Adat Sen?" I winced as I heard my name butchered with the worst Texan drawl I'd encountered in a while. Ayy-dat Sane. That deserved death.

"Hey, Blue fucker, you hear me? We don't want to kill you, drop the gun and hear me out alright." I kept working, having found a convenient pack of explosives on a table, and even more convenient bodies on the floor.

He'd have more of my attention if he hadn't made the asinine suggestion I drop the gun. He was welcome to do it first.

"We're not your enemies alright? I have a message for- Oh shit he's taking the elevator!"

There was a hail of gunfire that put the Otis elevator well and truly out of commission, until the doors opened onto the lower lobby where a squad of well-equipped men aimed at it. There was a chorus of more "Oh shit"-s followed by the boom of the claymore stuck to the chest of their now even deader comrade going off.

Claymores are dead simple, and you'll be simply dead if one goes off with you in the arc of the hundreds of bits of metal shrapnel they set off. Three men were mowed down, another badly hit, while two more had either been in better cover or with more armor on when I broke through the thin roof of the stationary elevator and came down on top of them.

I'd needed the body to get the elevator to move, and more importantly, report a single occupant for anyone looking. The claymore didn't even tickle me, discharging its load in a frontal arc, and so I was up and on them before they could process things.

My augments made this too easy, less than half the mag, and I was once again in the familiar company of cooling corpses. I couldn't smell the stench, not in the quiet comfort of my suit.

The survivor, badly injured by the blast, was crawling towards his shotgun when I stalked towards him. The crueler side of me manifested as me letting him just barely touch the pistol grip before I stamped down and smashed his fingers against the marble floor.

(Mars does have marble, before you ask. It's rare, yet it's there, a relic of more active plate tectonics)

He screamed in abject terror as I dragged him back, quiet fury lending me strength.

"This is Doctor Sen, got an appointment, bitch?"

I threw him against the wall, my enhanced strength making him bounce with the crunch of breaking bones, and I kicked him again when he landed by my feet, sending him rolling and tumbling to the smoking elevator doors.

He wasn't dead yet, though he wished he was. I ripped off his mask, and stared him down. I don't look like the most intimidating dude on the planet, but with my dented skull and the crossword of bruises and wounds criss-crossing my face, I still gave him a fright.

"Please, just let me explain.." He hissed, unable to resist as I flipped him over and quickly patted him down for anything he could use against me.

"Talk fast, you're breathing in tainted air and I'm the only who might stick you with an antidote."

"Lady Purple told us to bring you in, said you might help us if we reminded you." He groaned in pain, while I gave up on a proper cavity search and just tore his suit off, leaving him naked but for his undies.

"Bring me in? You mean kidnap me first and then shoot me later?" I replied in a monotone.

"It wasn't supposed to come to this. We didn't know you'd be with the USMA boots, so when Don ran into you, he didn't know what he was dealing with. He just heard that we wanted you alive, so he used the Parrot he had ready-."

His explanation was interrupted by another explosion from the stairwell that went further underground.

"You know about your buddies trying to creep up on me?" I asked him. I'd set up another claymore, or three, watching the stairs while I dealt with this chump.

"Fuck! No! Let me talk to them, I'll tell them to stand down." He pleaded.

I grabbed one of the bodies and hooked up to the speakers, before tossing it down the stairwell. Panicked gunshots reverberated for a moment before they realized what was up. I could have just thrown the speaker, but the corpse sent a message.

"This is Raul, code seventeen octane. Stand the fuck down, I'm trying to talk to this guy."

"You've got five minutes Raul, I'm sorry." Was the quiet reply over comms. I cut the feed before he got anything else through.

"Why the fuck do you think I'm on your side?" I asked him, holding an autoinjector in one hand while keeping a gun pointed at his head. From how labored his breathing was getting, I wouldn't need it if he ran down the clock.

"That's what the Lady told us, that if we got in touch with you, some geass or shit would activate and you'd know what was up."

"So you were planning to mind control me? That's your plan?" The barrel of my rifle dug uncomfortably deep into his temple, though, credit where due, he didn't seem overly afraid of dying.

"No, fuck man. She said you were deep cover, that you didn't remember a deal with Lumen."

I halted. I remembered our dealings, the jump from the middle of the desert to some kind of ship they used as their base of operations. I'd killed El Presidente as part of my convenient three part payment plan towards getting my wife back. But here? Did they expect me to compromise on hunting down BULWARK? Like hell I would, unless they gave me answers.

"Well, I don't remember this bit. Did she say how to re-jog my memory of this so called deal?" I wanted to stay coy in case anybody was listening in or recording this, just in case they CC'd my handlers. But my heart wasn't in it, the moment he'd brought up Lumen, I knew he had me.

"Right, well the Parrot was supposed to work first try." He admitted helplessly, while I adjusted the dose of the antidote and stuck him with the minimum needed to keep him from asphyxiating. I cuffed him, just in case, and jogged over to the first two idiots and hit them up too, if these guys were allies, no, just plain old neutral, I wouldn't kill them if I didn't have to. And if he was bullshitting me, I had access to enough high explosive to make my anger evident, not that bullets wouldn't suffice.

I checked my lace's logs, and found the entries from when the Parrot had struck me.

WARNING: UNHANDLED EXCEPTION CODE 8FFB7 OCTAROON

TRIPWIRE TRIGGERED: BASILISK ANOMALY, CLASS ĤĒƘǠߙᏋ

The lace had detected something wrong, and had tried to go into a locked down mode to mitigate the worst of it. I scrubbed through gigabytes of recorded brain imaging, and found clusters of anomalous activity in my hippocampus.

It was either the onset of a very unusual seizure, or an attempt to activate obfuscated memories that the lace had taken to be a hostile act and halted in its tracks.

"Do you have any way to back that claim up?" I demanded, unwilling to risk it right away.

"Lady Purple can take over minds, you'll see this weird glow-"

"Let me guess it's purple?" I asked wearily. Someone's coffee was getting cold, and since their body was competing in the same race, I took a sip so it didn't go to waste. It was meh.

"You want a prize? Yeah, we start glowing, and then she can speak through us and channel her powers. Do you want me to try?"

The gun was in his face as soon as the words were out of his mouth.

"Any metahuman fuckery without my say-so and Lady Purple puppets a corpse, you hear me?"

He managed to flinch, a sign that the antidote was working.

I checked that there were no convenient ways up from where the remaining (potential) hostiles were lurking, and hooked up the protesting man with a satchel charge.

"Minor precaution."

I then sat and had a quick chat with my second brain, my opinion of the backup neuromorphic system greatly elevated by its performance while I'd been incapacitated. It was smart, not human smart, but I'd come to trust it like an 'ol reliable hound that would raise hell at the first whiff of a bear.

If activating the suppressed portion of my memories made me act up, it would override my primary lace and knock me out while taking over functionality. Then blow up everything in a square kilometer, kill anyone who looked at me funny, and finally find a way to broadcast through the jam using some of the more powerful comms systems that the place might have till someone came to get me.

It listened patiently, and sent a warm wave of agreement, which I could swear had clear undertones of promised brutality if someone, including myself, tried to take advantage of me.

OVERRIDE ACCEPTED

CORPUS CALLOSUM SIGNAL FILTER DISABLED

ALLOWING ACCESS TO ANOMALOUS BRAIN ACTIVITY

Oh shit.

When I met Lumen in Vegas, they'd insinuated that I'd met them before. The ship, that fucking ship. When all your other memories faded, smell remained. I could practically taste the ozone, burnt copper and the stink of blood from when I'd first boarded it.

It didn't have Earth gravity inside, I'd been practically bouncing, but at the time had chalked it down to metahuman fuckery instead of the more prosaic explanation that it hadn't been floating on terrestrial seas.

The first Parrot, the one that fucked me up when I checked into ATLAS a few months back, the time since then already feeling like centuries. It hadn't been an attack, or more importantly, they'd been trying to activate me. Too bad that whatever cognitive filters the UN had installed on my lace head been on it faster than I was.

It all came rushing back, promises and veiled threats. Had El Presidente really been the first job I'd done for them?

"Alright. I'm going to hear you out now."

Was it too much to ask for glasnost and perestroika from the people on my side? If they were more polite, I'd have to kill a much smaller fraction of them.