Грег Бир: The War Dogs Trilogy

“Who’s here?” Michelin asks, examining us with bloodshot eyes. He sees we’re all superiors. It does not faze him. Tak hands the newcomer a tube of borscht and some reindeer sausage, then, more reluctantly, a bag of water. Now we’re six, too many for the tent, if it’s all we’ve got, but what can you do?

Michelin fixes his pink-eye gaze on Tak and grins. “Praise be, I’m in heaven. Master Sergeant Fujimori is here to service me. Who needs virgins?” His lips are still purple. He does not look good, but he’s coming around. He holds up the Russian food tube. “What is this shit? Tastes like weak kimchee.” And he erupts an enormous fart.

“Take that bloat outside,” Tak requests, fastidious to a fault.

Michelin is too weak to apologize. After he’s mumbled over our names and ranks, he falls into something like a nap, more like a brief coma, and then, twenty minutes later, flails for a moment before settling down, wide-eyed and shivering.

We’re all awake now.

“Christ, our sticks must have shot their loads early,” he says, rolls over, and asks if we have tactical.

“No,” DJ says.

Then, with a shy smile, our lone corporal confesses he might have something. Turns out Michelin is the only one who got a solid burst before sparkly scrubbed the sky clean. Our angels share and we analyze his download, which includes broken uplink from previous drops.

“Still far from complete,” Tak says.

“None of the fountains are putting out signal,” DJ says. “Maybe they didn’t make it down, maybe they got taken out—not one is talking.”

We meditate on that.

“Tent can keep us going for eight more hours,” DJ says. We give him the look. We do not need to hear what we already know. Tell us something new or something beautiful. DJ glances away, eyes losing focus, going dreamy. It’s his safety.

Tak explores Michelin’s burst beyond the negative on fountains. “Well, here’s good news,” he says. “Euro company before us”—the guys whose reindeer sausages and borscht lie heavy in our guts—“dropped a few tent boxes they didn’t get a chance to use. No data on what went wrong… but there could still be six or seven inside ten klicks.”

Our angels lock, and he shows us that the tents are widely spaced around the pedestal and the crater. We’ll have to hike to avoid suffocation.

Few Skyrines keep it together when we can’t breathe. No matter how tough our selection and training, we all tend to open our faceplates when oxy drops below threshold and claustrophobia takes over. True story. Skyrines typically want to die a few minutes early rather than slip into lung-searing delirium. Go figure.

“Rest up,” Tak says.

After that, we’re quiet for another half hour. I’m on the edge of a buzzing, insect-hive sort of sleep when the tent alarm goes off once more and Neemie squeezes in to join us—Staff Sergeant Nehemiah Benchley, from our second fire team, a strawberry blond surfer with a plump face and Asian wave tattoos that ripple like skin movies on his hands and neck. He’s as ignorant as the rest of us. He reports the east is getting brighter, and he saw nobody else either during the drop or while walking. He cannot explain how he lasted this long. We don’t inquire. Could be we’re already dead. A hypnotically dumb idea that occurs far too often to warriors on the Red.

We drink up from what’s left in the tent tubes, enjoy the luxury of a good piss in our recups, and for a few minutes, the tent smells of urine and ball-sweat. Not unpleasant, once you’re used to it. Like a washroom in a Russian brothel. No disrespect. Dead Russians are saving us this night.

The tent announces in a stern, prerecorded voice—in Russian, Kazak translates—that there are far too many of us and we have depleted its resources.

The sky outside the tent is getting bright.

Time to move on.

Morning is really cold.

We clap on our helms, seal up, query our angels, and one by one, through our faceplates, lift eyebrows or pook out lips, meaning all our angels are quiet. There are still no bit bursts, therefore no sats in the sky. Our angels have no good news, no news at all, and so they say nothing.

The tent is depleted. We birth out and just leave it there. No sense wasting strength trying to dig a hole and hide it, and it’s useless to try to burn it under these conditions, because we’d have to supply the oxygen, and on top of all that, the tent’s been out here for a month and if anybody cares they already know where it is. Likely nobody cares.

More Lost Patrol shit.

“We’re at the butt end of a fight,” Neemie opines into our gloom.

“Right,” DJ says. “Tell us something ripping, Master Sergeant Venn.”

“Ripping is as ripping does,” I say. “We have no commander. We are on a hunt for gasps and sips and lunch. Not that I’m all that hungry.” I look critically at Michelin and then at Vee-Def, who graces us with a dopey grin we can’t really see behind his helm, but we know it’s there.

We keep surveying the sky. From ground level all over Mars, you can spot space frames and other orbitals, especially before sunrise or after sunset, when the angles and contrast are best. This morning, nothing presents itself but a brilliant wall of stars. Air is very clear, and that means it’s not going to get much warmer.

I look west because my left hand itches and it’s on my western side. That little brown blurry patch is still there, up north a ways. Looks too far off to be of consequence, but it’s the only steady attraction in our tight little theater. I touch helms with Tak. “Your ten,” I say. He looks. His new eyes are better than ours. “What is that?”

“Dust devil,” he says.

“It’s been there since yesterday.”

“What do you think it is?” DJ asks.

“A cute little twist in a Fiat… and she’s got a keg,” Kazak interposes.

“Could be wreckage,” I say. “Could be a malfunctioning fountain. Could be anything.”

“Ants,” Vee-Def says, meaning Antags, Antagonists. Every word gets shorter as wars go on. Guys like Vee-Def do the shortening.

“ Could be Antags,” Kazak agrees. “But they would already be here if they cared about us, no? Why waste resources just to put us out of our misery—”

“Go see,” Tak says, cutting off a bad ramble. He’s a steady dude. When Tak makes a decision, others nod and agree. Neemie and Michelin move off first. The rest of us follow. I look back at the tent, our lifesaver, now useless junk. All across Mars there are thousands of tons of stuff that will get buried by dust and then dug up centuries from now and sold at auction. Our job is to make sure it’s Sotheby’s and not Ant-Bay. Ha-ha.

Talk of sparkly has gotten us downhearted. All we want is to find another tent. Not much hope for relief and certainly we can’t hope for a pickup at this point.

We probably don’t have enough reserves to reach the brown blur in the west. But maybe we’re on a drop line, a regular pattern of deliveries in theater, across the plain. A mystical pilgrim’s trail that will lead us to a few more days of life, and no asking God for more, that’s already too much.

HIKING ON MARS in the morning chill is a treat I’d sell to any starry-eyed explorer for a hot shower.

Decades ago, a bunch of them came to Mars and set up parking lots full of white hamster mazes, then dug deep networks of rabbit tunnels. They claimed Mars and called it home. We call them all Muskies after a visionary entrepreneur, Elon Musk. From what little I’ve read, he founded an online bank, made cars and spaceships, promoted a vegan lifestyle, and fought for years with Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos, Virgin’s Richard Branson, and a dozen other competitors around the world for launch facilities and orbital domination. Eventually, they pooled resources to fulfill the dream of putting people on Mars. But Musk had the name that stuck.