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  The lock cycled open, my group entered, and immediately sealed their face plates. I did the same and took the opportunity to run one last check on my suit. Unlike the one I had worn in orbit, this baby was new. So new that the chemical smell made my sinuses hurt. Because I planned to escape, the suit’s six-hour air supply, four quarts of water, and two days’ worth of emergency rations took on added importance. I was still in the process of wishing that I had more of everything when the lock cycled open.

  The exterior landscape had a reddish tint to it and was thick with man-sized rocks and boulders: a barrier that might or might not explain why we were about to take a “little hike.” Wind-driven sand peppered our suits and rattled across our helmets. I decided that I liked Mars less with each passing moment.

  I followed the others away from the vehicle and turned to get the lay of the land. It was then that I gave up all hope of escape. No wonder the black guy was so relaxed. Outside of the long, tank-shaped vehicle, and the tracks left in its wake, there was not a single sign of civilization for as far as the eye could see. Six hours worth of air wouldn’t begin to get me where I needed to go. I pulled a three-sixty.

  A rock-strewn plain stretched off towards what my suit informed me was the south. Hundreds of dry gullies cut the west into an eye-numbing maze of channels and banks. Rocks, boulders, and ragged-looking hills marched off to the north, where they terminated at the base of the most amazing sight that I’d ever seen.

  According to the video I had watched aboard the shuttle, Olympus Mons towers fifteen miles above the equivalent of sea level, making it a full-grown giant when compared to the relatively puny Mt. Everest, which stands little more than five miles high. Not to mention the fact that Olympus Mons boasts a caldera that is forty-five miles across and a base that would extend from the Montreal Urboplex all the way to what’s left of the Big Apple.

  But no set of statistics could possibly do justice to the out-and-out magnificence of what I saw. Olympus Mons was nothing less than a brooding presence, squatting there like an ancient monument, measuring everything against its own enormous bulk.

  As for the land to the east, well, it wasn’t any better, consisting as it did of a rock face fronted by a jumble of sharp-edged boulders. I noticed that while some of my companions were scoping things out, most were oblivious to their surroundings, as if they’d seen it all before or just didn’t care. They stood in clusters, their helmets pressed together for private conversations, or just staring at the ground.

  The lock opened and the last group shuffled out. An indicator light appeared inside my helmet, and the black man’s voice filled my ears. He had a stylized “X” painted on the front of his otherwise unadorned suit. I tried to see through the polarized face plate but couldn’t.

  “Alright, boys and girls…listen up. For those of you who haven’t already heard, my name is Dawkins, Larry Dawkins, Marscorp Field Supervisor extraordinaire, and one mean bastard. I ain’t no lifer, and I ain’t no ass-kisser, which means I got where I am by out-surviving a whole lot of dumb shits like you. So, if you work hard, and do exactly as I say, you might live long enough to get paid. Got any questions?”

  Silence.

  “Good…So here’s the scoop. The company lost a shuttle about thirty miles north of here. The pilot and copilot bought the farm, but the ship’s artificial intelligence thinks the cargo can be salvaged. And, since the cargo consists of ten Class IV Cargo Walkers, the first to make it dirtside, it’s worth our while to go in after them. Questions?”

  This time there was. The voice identified itself as Swango. and was clearly male, but I had no way of knowing which suit it belonged to. “Yeah, I’ve got a question. Why walk when we could ride?”

  “Well, gee,” Dawkins said sarcastically, “I wonder. You don’t suppose it would have anything to do with those friggin’ boulders, do you? Or those god-damned rocks? You know, the ones in our way?”

  “Oh,” Swango said self-consciously. “Sorry.”

  “You certainly are,” Dawkins agreed. “Anyone else?”

  I don’t know what came over me, but the fog cleared off long enough for a thought to surface, and the words popped out of their own accord. “What about oxygen, water, and food? Will we be resupplied?”

  The Field Supervisor’s reply was more accurate than he knew. “Well, I’ll be damned, a mule with half a brain. The answer is no, we won’t. We have enough air, water, and food to reach the wreckage. Once there, we will take shelter in one of the remaining airtight compartments, resupply our suits, and recover the walkers. And here’s the good news, folks: once the walkers are up and running, we ride out.”

  The supposedly good news left everyone silent. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a whole lot of things could and probably would go wrong, that the company had left us with practically no safety margin, and that Dawkins was standing in the same pile of shit we were. I thought about what he’d said earlier, about not kissing ass, and wondered if that explained why he had pulled such a rotten assignment.

  “Alright,” the man in question said, “enough dorking around. Line up and draw your loads.”

  The crawler remained where it was. Vapor outgassed into the thin atmosphere as a hatch slid open. The compartment was filled with a jumble of strange-looking equipment. Dawkins motioned us forward, grabbed what looked like a high-tech backpack from a row of similar packs, and handed it to the first person in line. I wondered why. If not supplies, what would we carry? The answer blew what was left of my mind. It quickly became apparent that our loads consisted of cyborgs! Walker Wonks, to be exact, specially engineered to pilot the huge machines, and more than a little weird.

  Though human in the technical sense, the cyborgs looked like little more than gray metal suitcases to which shoulder straps and a waist belt had been attached. They had their own life support systems but were dependent on whoever was toting them for mobility and communications. Until they were united with their machines, that is, when they would take on super-human powers, and go to work on whatever task Marscorp had brought them here to do.

  The line jerked to a halt, and a scuffle broke out. I missed the first part but saw the mule twist away from Dawkins. It was then that I recognized the greenie’s suit. I hadn’t been smart enough to wonder which side she was on, but the answer became obvious as she broadcast in the clear. “Resist the evil plan! Free the cyborgs from their devil bodies! Rise up and smite the…”

  We didn’t get to hear the rest of the woman’s diatribe because Dawkins overrode her transmission. “I don’t have time for this shit. Carry the load or die.”

  Silence ensued. Nobody moved. A woman stood next to me. I put my helmet next to hers. “What’s going on?”

  “Dawkins cut her air supply.”

  “He can do that?”

  “You bet he can. Yours too. That’s why we do what he says. That and the fact that there’s no place to run to.”

  I thanked her and pulled away. No wonder a single guard was sufficient. Our suits were rigged so he could control them. The corpies think of everything. The woman surrendered about a minute later. She was gasping for breath. “I’ll do what you say. Give me air!”

  “A wise decision,” Dawkins said, doing whatever he did to restore the woman’s air supply. “Don’t do that again. We’ve got a long ways to go, and time equates to air, water, and food. Come on…hurry up.”

  I received my cyborg two minutes later. The added weight was negligible thanks to the relatively low gravity, but the additional mass would take some getting used to. It felt as if the load was pulling me backwards and off-balance. I leaned forward to compensate.

  A green indicator light appeared in my heads-up display as Dawkins shoved a jack into my external patch panel. I waited for my passenger to say something, but heard nothing beyond the hiss of an open channel. It seemed as if this particular cyborg was the antisocial type. Well, that was fine with me, since I needed what there was of my brain for other things. Like n
egotiating my way over the rock-strewn ground, for example.

  I tongued a couple of pain tabs into my mouth and washed them down with a sip of recycled water. It tasted like what it had once been.

  Once loaded, we set off in the direction of Olympus Mons, winding our way through a maze of hard-edged boulders, going where no one had gone before. Or so I assumed. It was a strange feeling after the humanity-packed cities of Earth, where you had the feeling that every corridor had been walked by thousands before you, everything you saw had been seen a million times, and “new” meant “disposable.”

  But the thrill of trail-blazing soon gave way to renewed anxiety over Sasha’s whereabouts and the neverending task of placing one foot in front of the other. It was cold outside, minus 24 degrees F according to my helmet display, but I soon started to sweat. Turning my thermostat down helped a little, but the problem remained. Try as I might, I had a difficult time internalizing the fact that the sweat was inside rather than outside my high-tech skin. We had traveled about five miles by the time my passenger broke the silence. Her voice was synthetic, and sounded vaguely familiar, as if she’d modeled it on a holo star. “I’m sorry.”

  I gauged the ledge ahead, decided I could make it thanks to the lower gravity, and jumped. Slow-motion dust geysered up and away from my boots. I checked the path and started after the mule ahead. “Norgleszap? I mean, sorry? Sorry about what?”

  “About you having to drag my nonexistent ass cross country.”

  I sidestepped a rock and laughed in spite of myself. “It isn’t your fault. Or I assume it isn’t, anyway.”

  “No,” the voice said, “I’ve got an alibi. I was sitting in a crate aboard Roller Three when the shuttle crashed.”

  “Sounds airtight,” I agreed politely. “Well, I sure hope you and the others know what you’re doing, or this is gonna be a one-way trip.”

  “Oh, we know what we’re doing,” she said confidently. “That’s not the problem.”

  “It isn’t?” I asked stupidly. “Then what is?”

  “Why, the condition of the shuttle,” she answered calmly. “What if the shuttle went in hard? The walkers were in the main cargo bay. They could be spread all over the place.”

  I skidded down the side of a ravine and tackled the other side. “But the ship’s artificial intelligence said the cargo is okay.”

  “The ship’s artificial intelligence ‘thinks’ the cargo is okay,” my passenger corrected me. “But doesn’t really know, since it’s bolted into a panel somewhere.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed. “That’s the prognosis, alright. My name’s Loni. What’s yours?”

  “Max. Max Maxon.”

  “Glad to meet you, Max. Any chance you’d do me a favor?”

  I swore as the mule in front of me came to an unexpected stop, forced me to do likewise, then started up again. “Sure, what do you need?”

  “I’m tired of the darkness, Max. Tell me what you see.”

  Suddenly I knew something I hadn’t known before. I knew that whatever I had lost, others had lost even more. Loni’s brain was intact, but the eyes, ears, arms and legs designed to serve it had been taken away, either through bad luck or a conscious decision on her part. I thought of the darkness within her box, the isolation from the rest of humanity, and shivered. I turned the heat back up a notch and did my best to sound cheerful. “Okay, but I spend a lot of time looking at my feet, so I’ll start there. They are size fourteen or so, large enough to qualify as battleships, and covered with reddish Mars dust.”

  Loni laughed, and thus encouraged, I continued. Describing what I saw to my sightless passenger forced me to realize how beautiful my surroundings were and made the time pass quickly. It seemed as if little more than a few minutes had elapsed when Dawkins announced the halfway point and declared a ten-minute break.

  Mules headed in every direction as they looked for places to sit. Talking to Loni had been pleasant, but Sasha was very much on my mind, so I waited for the greenie to light on rock and ambled over. Loni was telling me about her VR-driven training, but I cut her off in mid-sentence. “Sorry, Loni, but I’ve got a personal matter to attend to. Hold that gafornk.”

  The greenie turned her helmet in my direction but made no effort to avoid me. There was plenty of room on the rock she had chosen, so I sat down beside her. My helmet thumped against hers. It’s hard to be brain-damaged and subtle at the same time. I wasn’t. “You shot at us.”

  Her reply was direct. “Yes, I did.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why shoot at us?”

  “Because I was ordered to do so.”

  “By whom?”

  “Screw you.”

  “What about the girl? What happened to the girl?”

  The woman shrugged. The suit fit fairly well and shrugged with her. “Beats me. The gas put me out.”

  I swore. The woman hooked her thumbs under the pack straps that held her cyborg in place. I could barely see her eyes through the sand-abraded face plate. Was it sympathy I saw?

  “You really like her, don’t you?”

  I was confused. “Like who?”

  “The girl.”

  “Yes, I really like her.”

  “Well,” the woman said, “think about her before you unleash whatever technological hell you’re working on.”

  “I’m not working on a technological rebonk.”

  “Really?” the woman asked. “Then what are you doing here?”

  Part of me wanted to give the obvious answer, to say something about protecting my client, but the rest knew she was right. There was something more going on, something Sasha at least partially understood, assuming she was alive, that is.

  “On your feet,” Dawkins ordered. “We have about twelve miles to go and barely enough air to get there. Let’s haul ass.”

  The next two and a half hours were difficult. Perhaps some of the others had thought to catheterize themselves prior to departure, but I hadn’t and needed to pee. Add to that the fear of what we might find when we arrived at the crash site, and my concerns for Sasha, and it made for a hard, cold lump that rode my gut for the rest of the day. It was twilight by the time we hit flat ground and the mule called Swango saw the first chunk of wreckage. He sounded worried and ecstatic at the same time. “Dawkins! There it is! A piece of wreckage!”

  “Good boy,” Dawkins said calmly. “Now stay away from it until I get there and take a look-see. It could be dangerous.”

  “Or it could be loaded with goodies like oxygen,” Loni said over our private intercom.

  I hadn’t thought about that but knew it was probably true. If the mules stumbled across some O2, the Field Supervisor’s immediate authority would be considerably lessened. And, while the mutineers wouldn’t have any place to go after their rebellion, Dawkins could be more than a little dead in the meantime.

  The wreckage consisted of a huge engine, one of four required to keep a shuttle aloft in the planet’s thin atmosphere, and glittered with a coating of diamondlike ice crystals. I figured some sort of liquid had been liberated when the engine tore free; then it had vaporized and frozen in a matter of seconds.

  We were close now, and picked up the pace without being asked to. It was relatively easy to follow the trail of debris, which, thanks to the lighter gravity, was much longer than it would have been on Earth. Judging from the wreckage, and the huge scars scored in the rocky soil, the shuttle had cartwheeled for two or three miles after it hit before finally coming to rest.

  We found more and more wreckage as we followed the trail. I described it to Loni. “And there’s something that looks like a piece of wing with part of an engine still attached.”

  The cyborg sounded concerned. “But no sign of the fuselage?”

  “Nope, not yet.”

  “Good. The walkers can take a lot of punishment, but they’ll do best cradled in the cargo hold.”

  The bits and pieces gradually grew thi
cker until someone spotted the main part of the wreckage. “There it is!” a woman exclaimed. “Straight ahead.”

  I arrived five minutes later and was amazed by the sheer size of the downed shuttle. The hull towered three or four stories over my head and stretched hundreds of feet in both directions. There were no signs of a fire, which wasn’t too surprising, since there was very little oxygen available to feed on. All the damage was impact-related. A huge circle served to contain the Marscorp “M” and adorned the side of the hull. It was split down the middle, a fact that eliminated the need to find a hatch.

  Dawkins ordered us to wait and entered through the crack. I checked my oxygen supply, saw that I was down to eighteen minutes’ worth, and thought about the assumptions the corpies had used. That we would make the trip inside of six hours, that we would be able to salvage the oxygen we needed from the wreck, and that at least some of the walkers would be operable. Then I realized something that should have been obvious from the start. It didn’t matter if we got back. As long as the borgs made it to the crash site, and Dawkins installed them in their machines, the corpies would deem the mission a success. Which explained why Mars fodder like the greenie and myself had been selected as mules. We were expendable.

  Suddenly I saw Dawkins in a new light. He’d known what I’d just managed to figure out all along, and not only planned to carry out his mission, but save our asses as well. The fact was that we had been lucky, very lucky, and I wondered if our luck would hold.

  And much to my amazement it did, as Dawkins emerged, announced that six of the walkers were operational, and started the search for an airtight compartment. We spent ten minutes on the task, but couldn’t find one. So, with our air running uncomfortably low, we were forced to inflate one of two emergency shelters carried aboard the shuttle.