Грег Бир: The War Dogs Trilogy

It’s not good laughter. It’s harsh and tired and angry. But it is laughter, and there may not be much to be had this trip. We don’t say it, however. Not even Vee-Def is dumb enough to say more.

We’re in the month-old tent of a dead platoon, our sticks got scattered, no transport sleds, our space frames may have caught sparkly, we have almost no tactical, comm seems to be down all over—even our angels are quiet.

We could be the Lost Patrol.

Morning will tell.

Ican’t sleep for shit. I keep going over how fucked we are.

It’s extreme on the Red. The air is just a millibar above a vacuum. It’s always too damned cold. While there’s quite a bit of water on Mars, overall most of it is tough to get at—locked up at the poles or cached beneath old seabeds or hidden in deep-flowing aquifers. That makes water a major strategic commodity. There’s always a tiny residue of moisture in the air, enough to form high, icy clouds. There’s more water in the air when the seasons melt the caps, which they do with monotonous regularity. Mars can be a cloudy world. I’ve even seen it snow, though the snow rarely makes it to the ground. That’s called virga on Earth. Same on Mars.

On a large scale, weather on Mars is totally predictable. On a warrior’s scale, not so much. There are always those scribbling dust devils, and big storms can block out the sun for months, covering the Red in dark brown murk so dense and fine you can’t see your hand in front of your face. Imagine a near vacuum you can’t see through. But the air does get warmer when the dust absorbs sunlight.

Making oxygen is the trick. Cracking water—hydrolysis—is comparatively easy; CO 2and oxidized dust take more energy and time. That’s why we need fountains. Fountains are big, often the size of a semi cab. We usually carry a couple with us on a drop, but they can also be delivered a few weeks before we arrive, on stealth chutes hundreds of meters wide, usually at night. They plop down on the Red and if the dust is deep enough—if they’re not on impenetrable hardpan—they burrow in and almost immediately pop out solar collectors and extraction vanes and whirl the vanes to collect moisture from the air.

Fountains can stockpile enough volatiles over a few weeks to keep a company alive for two or three months. A big fountain can keep half a company in combat posture for six or eight months, refilling skintights with water and air.

Command can also decide to turn a fountain into a fuel depot, reserving its hydrogen and oxygen for propellant. We’ve all heard of fountains letting warriors suffocate on the Red for the greater strategic good—allowing someone else to get home again. Which do you need more? A return ticket, or enough to breathe? It’s a nasty balance. Needless to say, Skyrines have a love-hate relationship with fountains.

To make matters more interesting, the longer a fountain has been on the surface, the more it becomes a prime target for Antag fire. Sometimes Antags let a fountain sit for weeks, working away, storing up volatiles, and when troops arrive and settle in, then they blow it up. Real sense of humor. Just as we start to party—scrap and stain on the Red.

If a fountain happens to locate a shallow aquifer or cached ice, it becomes a strategic reserve and may not announce its presence even to Skyrines, but instead shoots the news up to command and awaits instructions. Too valuable to waste on grunts.

OUTSIDE, THE DARK is complete and the air is clear. It’s not as cold outside as on the southern highlands, but it’s still plenty cold—about minus eighty Celsius. Inside the tent, curled up like puppies in a litter to conserve heat, we are truly womb brothers. Freudian, but not many Skyrines know dick about Freud, so traditionally, when we puppy up, we joke about bad porn instead. Unless we’re too tired. There’s a whole weird genre of porn down on the Big Blue Marble, about getting it on with Gurus or Antags. We aren’t told what Gurus look like and don’t know much about Antags, so they can be most anything we want. Why not prime green pussy? Some people down on the Blue Marble are just too strange to live. Interesting the Gurus don’t seem to mind them.

In the dim light of a single beam, suppressed to a dull orange and hanging from the center of the tent, I study my mates. They seem to be asleep. I envy them that.

Tak is my friend, we go back a long ways, but I never feel entirely secure around him. He’s quiet, movie-star handsome, lean and sharp, stronger and far more perceptive than me. Ever since Hawthorne, and in all our many battles, I’ve felt with a spooky prickle that someday he’ll survive when I won’t. Still, so far we’ve both survived, often because of what Tak does. He’s damned good on the Red and a beast in a tussle.

Kazak is a very different sort. He’s our barn door exchange student, a short, stocky guy with amazingly slanty eyes and even black fuzz on his crown that descends not so abruptly to a widow’s peak. He came over from Kazakhstan a few years back and got promoted before the Skyrines found out he was a Tartar shithead and closed the barn door. Perfect teeth, long on the canines. A real Canis lupus with a feral smile. Not the brightest, but maybe the most steady and calm in a fight or a tough situation, he can be a quick judge of character, not always correctly, often with a Mongolian twist that’s hard for the rest of us to figure. I can easily imagine him slapping raw meat under the saddle of his stocky pony and chewing on it in between Parthian shots with a compound bow. I have Polish and German blood in my family. Kazak denies fervently that his ancestors once raped and slaughtered mine. “Mongols so handsome, mother ladies just spread and bred,” he says. Right. When things are loose, Kazak’s sense of humor is murder. His practical jokes verge on felonies. PFCs have to stay on their toes around him.

Even for all that, most of us like him because he’s our shithead and as shitheads go, he’s kind of special. I’ve dropped with Kazak twice and sometimes he has this look that, when he has it, very reliably informs us that our Tartar shithead will take us all back home with him—a fierce wrinkle in one eye that makes me, too, want to bear his children.

Tonight, squinch-faced and snoring, he looks like a troubled baby. Still, he’s snoring. I envy him that.

Being likable is a gift I do not reliably possess. I can turn it on sometimes, but I know when I’m doing it and feel guilty, people should just know I’m a good guy without the charm wave… But maybe I’m not such a good guy after all. Maybe default is truth. Nobody treats me as anything special, and I prefer it that way. Nobody but Joe and Tak and maybe Kazak. They’re my best friends in this whole dust-fucked war.

An hour or more passes. I’m almost asleep, or maybe I’m dreaming I’m still awake, but I’m definitely awake when the alarm goes off again. Tak gets up on his knees by the membrane, ready to throttle whatever comes through. His face creases with handsome disappointment when a blue-stripe helm pokes in. Just another Skyrine, and this time it is Corporal Lindsay—Mitch—Michelin, his face blue with cold and hypoxia.

Tak raises his hands and flexes them. Finally, somebody we can boss around. Michelin is not the most compliant corporal, however. The entrance sucks shut as he pulls out his second boot, making our ears pop, and he falls on his back across DJ and Kazak. Then he claws his faceplate open and coughs until he’s doubled. It’s several minutes before he can say anything.

“No beacon!” he croaks. “Fuck. Almost died.”

“You’re welcome,” Kazak says.