Mars Fire - Chapter XLIV - Sol 17

Previous Chapters: Chapter I , II , III , IV , V , VI , VII , VIII , IX , X , XI , XII , XIII , XIV , XV , XVI , XVII , XVIII , XIX , XX , XXI , XXII , XXIII , XXIV , XXV , XXVI , XXVII , XXVIII , XXIX , XXX , XXXI , XXXII , XXXIII , XXXIV , XXXV , XXXVI , XXXVII , XXXVIII , XXXIX , XL , XLI , XLII , XLIII

Lunch was a one-pot soup mix that day, with dumplings and kelp clumps floating in their bowls when they finished up at the serving counter and took their seats alongside Pope. The black-clad miner was liberally covered in grey dust, although he had made a valiant effort at some point to at least clean his face. Black powder still clung around the outsides of his nostril in a quaint mockery of a moustache. His hair was tied back with electrical cord again, and his soup bowl was already half-empty.

“I’m surprised some people can breathe without instructions,” Pope began by ways of greeting. “How these people manage without supervision, is a complete mystery to me.”

“One of those days?”

“One of those morons, more like it,” Pope growled in response to Reyn’s question. “People had big ideas while we were out on patrol, and now there is a stupid amount of correcting to do.”

“Sounds like you two have been drinking from the same water tube.” Burrows took a first taste of the soup mix, before reaching for the salt. The kelp recipe was incredibly nutrient-dense - but also often a bit of an adventure in the taste department. “I’ve been cleaning and clearing machines all morning, and I still haven’t even seen Dixon yet.”

“I saw him come past our lab a while ago. He was looking for data filters or something, and had that big compad of his with him.” Reyn reached for the salt as well after Burrows was done. “He was talking to Mekkels, I think. Something about more processor power.”

“If he’s begging from Mekkels, it must be a big job. He can’t stand him on most days.” Burrows began to spoon the kelp mix into his mouth, and tried to not focus on the flavour too much. “It’s probably the sensor data from Marsden then. He said he had some choice pieces that he wanted to analyse first.”

“Isn’t he supposed to help with your Mumbai contract?” Pope frowned at his bowl as he chased the last wriggling dumpling around with a spoon. “Or is that only later?”

“Only later, yes. I still need to assemble more of the masts before he can start with their operating system frameworks, and I first need to get the damn machines back into production for that to happen.” Burrows began to chase his own dumplings. “I wonder what he’s going to dig out of those sensor scans.”

“More good news, no doubt. Command is probably looking at the same footage as well. If they find something strange before Friday, I’m sure they’ll let us know.” Reyn looked up as someone passed their table. “Speak of the Devil: there he is now.”

Dixon was already at the serving station when Burrows looked up from his dumpling struggles, and the long-hair tech specialist joined them moments later with a steaming bowl in hand.

“What a morning! People can be so difficult when you need something from them.” Dixon’s eye-roll almost made him miss the glance that Burrows and Reyn shared. “What are you two up to now?”

“I hear you’ve been sweet-talking Mekkels. Did you try the old cologne trick on him too?” Burrows grinned when he saw Dixon’s answering grimace. “Or does he play by some different rules?”

“Oh you funny man. I wish I could bribe him with cologne, then I would at least get some work done. I’ve spent all morning trying to get data pre-processed for the Clarke uploads, but someone is hogging the central processing cores with a mining simulation.” Dixon squinted at Pope, who tried his best to look innocent. “Have your rock-heads been getting creative again?”

“Far too creative for their own good, actually. I’m still trying to get a handle on it.” Pope just shook his head. “I thought you were looking at the Marsden info first?”

“I am - for the Clarke uploads. The Carmac Base team sent word that they want the Marsden data ingested as soon as possible.” Dixon took his first mouthful of the soup mix before pulling a face. “This tastes worse than what we’ve been eating the past week.”

Burrows wordlessly slid the salt over, and watched as a scowling Dixon gave the soup bowl a hefty dose.

“So if the Clarkes are ingesting military data now, does that mean we’ll be able to query them for simulations soon?” Burrows wiped his mouth with the back of his sleeve after finishing the last dumpling. He had managed to get coolant on the sleeve as well despite his best efforts in the workshop. “I thought that was still months away.”

“They might have been conservative with the original estimates. Or they managed to duplicate the learnings between the two models, somehow.” Reyn looked thoughtful as he considered the situation. “The models can learn from each other past a certain point, it’s just not ideal.”

“Our timelines are not exactly ideal either, for that matter.” Dixon snorted in disgust. “I’m not the only one uploading more data at this point, I think Carmac has been sucking up datasets from a lot of stations the past few days. There’s even been talk of bandwidth issues developing, if we keep growing the packages at this rate.”

“Remind me again why they don’t just have the Clarkes in orbit here?” Pope squinted at first Dixon, then Reyn. “Or is that above the pay-grade of a simple rock-head?”

“It’s a logistics issue, more than anything else. They constantly need spare parts from Earth, and a lot of the safety protocols run on tight-beams between the ground stations and the orbital cores. People are super twitchy about letting those cores run without supervision or safeguards.”

Burrows remembered the history lessons about the first artificial intelligence cores, and how they had caused panic and chaos the first time they had reached out and began to interact with the world outside their physical surroundings. A whole lot of people had jumped very high and worked a very long time after that to get additional safety legislation in place. Banishing them from any planetary surface had been one of the agreed-upon safety precautions, with the logic being that an orbital station was ultimately more vulnerable to attack - and destruction - than something which could burrow its way underground if it needed to get away from retaliation. It had been called the Skynet Laws, although Burrows never learnt the history behind the name choice

Old fears died hard, apparently.

“No-one here has ever bothered to build the infrastructure for it either, at least not in the Liberty Zones.” Dixon shrugged. “I think the NorAm corporations have a couple of cores in geostationary orbit above the Mariner Valley, but that’s about it. They don’t rent them out the way the ones in Earth orbit are used.”

“Of all the things that could make the situation worse right now, a rogue AI core in orbit is probably not something we should be wishing for.” Burrows pushed his empty bowl away. “If Carmac is doing more military uploads now, what’s the new timeline on having the Clarkes available?”

Dixon put his hands up in a gesture of helplessness.

“Above my pay-grade, apparently. Pope isn’t the only one being kept in the dark here.”

“Get wrecked.” Pope dug an elbow into Dixon’s side, who squirmed away with an amused snort. The engineer turned to Burrows before continuing. “How are things back home with you and Tilda? How is she doing with the baby and the war news from the Union?”

Burrows took a moment to collect his thoughts before replying. The memory of the morning was still fresh, and still troubling.

“She’s not entirely thrilled about it, to be honest. We have a lot of talking to do tonight.” Burrows thought of how Tilda had spoken about her father in the past, his service stories from back on Earth, and the impact that his experiences had clearly had on her. “She’s been anti-war since I met her here. When we were just doing policing work in the militia, she had her reservations about it, but she also understood the need for it. She turned a blind eye to a lot of what we did out on the border. Now though, with the Union ramping up for war…”

Burrows trailed off. His sense of duty and obligation to his wife - soon to be the mother of his first child - and his need to protect her, was taking him down a path of conflict that she, from her perspective, was fundamentally opposed to.

How does one reconcile the unstoppable force with the immovable object, to borrow from the old sayings?

“We’re going to talk tonight. Again.” Burrows sighed, and gave a grim smile that faded as quickly as it had arrived. “We have to figure something out, and I’m not quite sure what it is, at this point.”

“She doesn’t want to lose her husband, for one. That’s a rough feeling to deal with when you are the survivor who gets left behind.” Pope pointed at himself. “Waking up alone and remembering what you lost, every single morning? It’s not great, I can promise you that.”

“It’s not like you can promise her you won’t get hurt either.” Reyn shook his head, folding his arms and leaning on his elbows on the table. Burrows saw the tightness around his eyes. The blond engineer was likely facing a similarly uncomfortable discussion back home. “Kayla and I have been talking about it for a while now. It’s not an easy talk to have. There’s no security in what we do, and we can’t make promises. The only real promise we can make is to try our damndest to get back here alive.”

The men were quiet for a moment, lost in their own thoughts. People moved around them in the kitchen area, but Burrows’ mind was elsewhere, in a place where the Martian wind blew over dunes soaked in blood while Tilda’s spectre watched and shook her head.

“I remember the last thing I heard from my brother.” Dixon’s voice was barely above a whisper when he spoke. “He got on the Indigo Traveler and sent me a message before they launched. Said he looked forward to learning about Mars, and seeing what his little brother was up to. Then they launched, and the next thing I heard was the news reporter talking about the collision a few weeks later.”

It took Burrows a moment to place the name, and he felt a frisson of shock run down his spine when the memory finally clicked in place.

“The Indigo that collided with that Union ship, what - eight, nine years ago? Are we talking about the same Indigo?”

Dixon just nodded at Burrows’ question. Reyn was slowly and silently shaking his head, eyes downcast, while Pope had a confused frown across his face.

“Wait, what are you all talking about? What happened?” Pope’s frown deepened. “You had a brother?”

Burrows had always suspected that there was some hidden trauma in Dixon’s past - the years spent in Golden Bough had been a warning bell for him, when he first heard of it years ago - but the information that Dixon had just shared with them was new to him.

“The Indigo Traveler was a passenger hauler. It did migration runs between Mars and Earth, basically.” Burrows sat back, trying to recall the exact details of the story. “They left Earth orbit on one of their usual trips to Mars, and then when they got here, they had a drive failure that left them unpowered in orbit. They were broadcasting on all the standard emergency channels, and there was a Union cargo hauler bearing down on them. The Union ship refused to stop or change course, and rammed them with something like fifteen thousand tons of ore.”

“Then, while they were losing pressure and begging for assistance, the Union ship stood back and accused them of piracy and an illegal boarding attempt. They had lost some cargo modules in the collision, but their ship was still perfectly operational.” Dixon’s hands wrung together on the table surface, the skin on his fingers white where they ground into each other. “The Union captain was calling them pirates and thieves while the Indigo was breaking up and depressurising around them. The Indigo fell into our gravity well, and burnt up on reentry. There were no survivors.”

Pope reached out and placed his one hand on Dixon’s shoulder, a deep frown still on his face. Dixon just sniffed and nodded, eyes still on his hands. When he did eventually look up, his eyes were bright with unshed memories.

“So I guess I’m lucky, in that regard. I don’t have any difficult conversations left.”

Burrows ran the numbers in his head, and realised that Dixon must have moved to the Golden Bough Liberty Zone shortly after his brother’s death. If there was one place where you could imbibe, indulge, and drown your sorrows on Mars, Golden Bough was it - and Dixon had spent almost three years in it before eventually emerging and heading out to Bear State.

Grief was never a pretty shadow to drag along with you.

“Dixon, I’m sorry. I never knew about this.” Burrows reached out and placed his one hand on Dixon’s clenched fists. He gave a brief squeeze before pulling back again. “You’re a bit of an enigma to most of us, most of the time.”

“It’s in the past. We move on, we keep going.” Dixon sniffed again, harder this time, and wiped first his nose and then his eyes with his sleeve. “I didn’t want to bring it up, but when I realised that you guys still have a chance to talk to your people…”

Dixon fell quiet again, and eventually raised a fragile smile.

“Talk to them while you can. Things can change before we expect it, and then your options are gone.” Dixon reached up and squeezed the hand that was still on his shoulder. Pope gave a sombre nod in turn, foregoing the usual witticisms. “Also, screw you guys. I need to go redo my make-up now.”

There was little left to say after that, and after agreeing to meet in the Machine Womb at eight that evening to start their mission planning, everyone scattered back to their own work and responsibilities again. Dixon’s admission, while enlightening, had also cast a pall over the underlying matter of how to manage relationships in the coming turbulent times. Burrows found his mind gnawing away at the topic several times that afternoon, in moments of silence between the requirements of the workshop. Even as he finished with the last machine and got it running again, his thoughts kept turning back to what the other men had shared.

Eventually, when the clock reached a quarter to six, he decided to call it for the day, and headed out. The walk back to Admin One was short, and the main dome’s news-screens were filled with a mix of Union propaganda and more footage out of New Hopetown and the slow-gate bombing site. The Union - predictably - was hysterical about the accusations made by the Bear State council the previous day. Domestically, the focus of the slow-gate attack commentary had shifted from How to Why, and the commentators were exploring all manner of possible reasons for the Union’s attack. The official CDM announcement was also being dissected and investigated from every side.

Unsurprising to Burrows, and many others, most of the commentators were beginning to converge on the same idea: General Maxdine had been right when he pointed the finger at the Union’s imminent invasion plans as the probable cause.

Their apartment was empty when he arrived, and he went straight to the kitchen to start looking at dinner options. He had the noodle pot simmering by the time Tilda walked in a few minutes after six.

She wore one of her black singlesuits, and her smile, when Burrows looked up, was thin and tired. She had a compad in one hand and one of the trademark green Botany bags in the other, and both got dumped on the one lounge bench without any ceremony once she was inside. Burrows stepped past the potted plants and held his arms wide, letting her walk into a hug.

“I’m so tired,” she whispered from where her head was pressed to his chest. He could smell the Botany labs on her - plant perfumes, the heady scent of the synthetic fertilizers, and a trace of sweat - and he just held her to his chest for a long moment as her arms stayed wrapped around him.

Eventually she pulled back, and looked up at him with eyes that seemed darker than usual. He was shocked to realise that dark rings had started to appear around her eyes, rings which had not been present on Monday evening.

“I’m sorry the past few days have been so chaotic.” His lips brushed against her forehead, and the smell of her chestnut hair tickled his nose for an instant. “I started with dinner so long?”

Her smile was small as she looked up at him, and did not last.

“Let’s get dinner sorted, then we can talk.”

The rest of the preparations went quickly and in silence, two pairs of hands moving around the small kitchen to get the work done, and before long they were seated at their tiny kitchen table again. Steam curled through the air above the table, and for a while there was only the click of cutlery on dishes as they tucked into the noodles.

Burrows hated the silence.

There was so much he wanted to say, so much he needed her to understand - and yet the words were not there. The logic, the reasoning, the clever little arguments - none of it seemed to carry any weight any longer.

She eventually placed her fork down, and reached out for his hand across the tabletop. Her fingers were cool when he enveloped them in his own.

“What happened yesterday?”

Burrows thought back to the past day - barely more than a day, and yet so much had changed - and did not even know where to start.

“We talked to CDM Command, and it looks like the info we found on the patrol means we’re going to war now,” he eventually replied. He still had his fork in his other hand, and the noodles suddenly looked alien to him, white strands of mush that twisted every which way in the dark brother. His fork rattled on the table when he put it down. “No-one was really expecting it. Not like this, at least, not this suddenly. It looks like there is a lot of movement behind the scenes now. People are starting to put two and two together, and the picture is not really great at the moment.”

“Tell me about it? Please?” Her other hand joined the first, entwined with his own, and her smile was a thin thing that wavered even as she spoke. “I want - I need to understand what is happening.”

It took him a while to collect his thoughts, her hands suddenly feeling like live electric wires in his palms, and his throat felt thick when, in the course of time, he began to talk her through the happenings of the last day. The trip to Stockton, the Union propaganda barrage, the short briefing from Colonel Hayes before the big - and unexpected - announcement, the longer debrief afterwards when he had to explain his mistake with the mission route. Then the late lunch discussions around their military options, the subsequent mission briefing directly from Colonel Hayes, and the final chat with Ian on the trip back. He did not even realise how much had happened the past thirty-odd hours until he found himself sitting with a parched and mildly strained throat by the end of it.

Tilda took it all in, eyes intent on his as he talked, and only sat back when the silence finally surrounded them again.

“It sounds like you were very lucky with that mission. Like walking into a crocodile’s mouth while it’s sleeping, as my dad used to say.” She looked off to the side, gaze turning inward, and he could see that she was thinking of something from her past. “My dad sometimes told stories like that, from when he was in Thailand. Always the crocodile ones, the ones where they got lucky. He never really talked about the other things they did.”

Burrows knew next to nothing about her father, except that he had fought in the Thailand campaigns before the NorAm coalition pulled out. Thailand fell to the Union a year or two later, riddled with in-fighting and corruption, and the final death toll - from almost ten years of attritional counter-insurgency fighting - had reached into the millions. It was difficult to justify those sacrifices, afterwards, when the end result was exactly what the coalition had been trying to prevent.

“Jack, my love, we’ve talked about this before. I know we don’t agree on this, and that’s fine, but I need you to understand me now when I say this,” she continued after a pause. “I’m afraid that you are going to walk a path that will turn you into my father.”

“You’ve never really talked about your father, to be fair. You’ve told me he was against the war, and that he wanted to leave the NorAm zones to avoid that culture, but…” He pulled his shoulders up into a shrug. “I’m sorry, I don’t actually know what you mean right now.”

“He was anti-war for as long as I’ve known him. Not just a pacifist - he was actively against the constant warmongering on Earth. Almost… something like a militant pacifist, if that even makes sense.” Her smile was brief. “The time he spent fighting in Thailand changed him, Jack. The greed that led to those wars, the political wrangling that twisted good intentions into evil realities, the constant lies - it left a mark on him. The things he saw there, the things he did, the things he didn’t want to talk about. He lost his first marriage because of that, and when he came here, his second wife - my mother - had to deal with it too. My mother tried to help him, here, but he was…”

Tilda trailed off, and tears began to glimmer, unshed, in her eyes.

“Do you remember what I told you about Fred? About how he will never be the same man as he was before Seven Craters was invaded?” She waited for Burrows to nod before continuing. “My dad was like that. He was… broken, and twisted, and filled with so much anger and regret that it bubbled out of him like a fountain. He went to war because he believed that helping was the right thing to do - and the man that came back was someone else. Someone completely and utterly different. I don’t even know who he was before that war, not really.”

She took a single, half-sobbed breath before continuing. Her fingers were tight in Burrows’ hands.

“I have a half-brother in one of the NorAm states. Nathan - Nathan Cooper, he took his mother’s name after my dad divorced her. We’ve only spoken a handful of times, he didn’t want to know or hear anything about what my dad had done after leaving Earth. I asked him if he ever knew what my dad was like before the war, but he didn’t - he was born after my dad came back.” Tilda closed her eyes, and a slow trickle began to leak from the corner of her one eye. Her eyes were still shut when she continued. “He said his mother remembered, and she sometimes talked about it when her meds had worn off. She had late-stage dementia by the time I made contact, and Nathan was caring for her full-time.”

“Do you know what he told me? He told me that he didn’t believe his mother, because the man she talked about was nothing like the man who had left them behind and gone to Mars. She talked about a man who cared for his family, a man who wanted to help, a man who was prepared to sacrifice for his community no matter the cost. He believed in what they were doing, according to her, which was why he went to war in the first place. He believed, which was why she ended up marrying him, and why they had a child together. Nathan said it was all nonsense. He was utterly convinced that she was thinking of someone else.”

Slow, silent tears were running from both of her still-shut eyes by now, sliding from cheek to jawline to chin, and slowly pattering down on the table in front of her. Burrows’ heart ached for her, and he wanted to sweep her into his arms to reassure and comfort her - but he could also see that she still had more to get out.

Her eyes were wet and very dark when she finally opened them again.

“Jack, I fell in love with you because you were so different from the man that had raised me. You listened to me, you challenged me, you believed in me - and you sacrificed for me, when words were not enough and action was needed.” Her voice was quavering now, and the sides of her mouth were twitching as she fought to control her emotions. “You were everything I wanted in a partner and a husband. You still are.”

Her silence was punctuated with a heavy swallow as she battled her emotions, and the realisation - long hidden, but now finally given context - rolled over Burrows in a slow wave of ice.

“You think the same thing is going to happen to me.”

His words hung between them, brittle glass that threatened to shatter at the slightest touch. She gave a single, slow nod, and more tears spilled down her reddening cheeks. Her hands suddenly felt tiny in his, and he had to stop himself from squeezing them together for fear of shattering them.

He opened his mouth to console her, to tell her it would not happen, that it would be different this time - and then found himself without words.

How could you even begin to make a promise like that? How could he sit there, in the here and now, and promise her that the war would not change him? That the sacrifices he was willing - and going - to make, would not come from a part of himself that would leave him just as twisted and ruined as her father had eventually become?

We all have to pay a price for what we want, always.

The voice whispering in his head was sharp and mocking, and Burrows recognised it all too well.

His time in the Pacific had changed him. His time in Maputo had also changed him. Inhaca had been one hell of a change, to almost everything he had brought with him before he first set foot on that island so long ago.

“I don’t know what this war is going to bring across our paths.” Logic - scornful, fatalistic logic - warred with the emotions churning in his chest, but he forced himself to continue, one slow word at a time. “I don’t know how it is going to change us. I cannot give you any promises on how we will look at the end, or whether we’ll even reach the end.”

“But - I can give you my word, that I will keep trying to be that man you fell in love with,” he continued. Tilda’s tear-streaked face was red by now, and her mouth was pulling into something that wanted to become a smile or a cry - yet knew not which. “I will keep talking to you. I will keep sharing with you. I will fight to keep this thing we have alive. I don’t know which way it will go. No-one does. But I will keep trying. You have my word on that.”

Her smile was a fragile thing, and slow to take shape. Tears still streamed down her face, and Burrows almost jumped a mile high when she quickly pulled her one hand out of his to wipe at her cheeks and chin. Her fingers were damp when they curled back into his hands again moments later.

“Thank you.” Her voice was barely audible across the tiny table. “I know you will try. That’s one of the things I love about you: you’re always willing to try.”

“I don’t want to go to war, my dear.” Burrows felt his own smile take on a tinge of the sadness that was floating behind his eyes as well. “I want to stay here with you, and raise our children, and grow fat and old together while our children and grandchildren explore the stars. I want a peaceful life for the two of us. I want a botany dome of our own, where we can plant grass and strawberry plants, and a tree as tall as the admin dome.”

He leaned down to kiss her hands - so soft and small inside his callused grip - and the sadness inside him shifted as well, sand washing away to reveal something else. There was steel underneath it - willful, determined, stubborn bands of steel that permeated his thoughts like braided iron in a concrete hab dome wall - and when he looked up again, he could feel that determination settling onto him in a heavy mantle.

Tilda saw it too, and reached for him, but he caught her hand in midair and planted a final kiss on it before smiling back at her.

“I want that dream, my dear. It’s our dream, and we will have it - but we are going to have to work for it. I have a responsibility to the colony, and to our state. I have to do my part, whatever it takes.” His smile faded. “I can’t walk away from that. I wouldn’t be the man I am today, if I did.”

“And I don’t want you to change, and yet you now have to walk that same path that broke my father.” Tilda shook her head slowly. Stray strands of hair stuck and clung to her still-damp cheeks. “It feels like the universe is mocking us.”

“No-one said it would be easy, my dear.” Burrows stood and pulled her up as well, before drawing her into his arms. “But we’ll have each other, and that will make it a little bit easier.”

He thought that he felt her nodding, but the only thing he could be sure of were the tears soaking into his chest.

Next chapter: TBC