Free The Mars Shock by Felix R. Savage

“Whoa.”
    Kristiansen tried to guess what had startled the ISA agent. On the dashboard screen that stood in for a windshield, a cliff loomed at right angles to the slope they were traversing. The radar indicated that this was the object it had identified as anomalous. It did seem out of place. It was huge. Kristiansen took it for ejecta from an impact, but rubble didn’t have right angles. Rubble didn’t … have the Chinese character for life printed on it in red.
    “This is one of the Chinese modules!” Murray yelped.
    Kristiansen sat up. “Why don’t they send help to Theta Base?”
    As he spoke, he saw the ragged top edge of the module, twisted metal curling outward, dust blowing around the shards. Further away, a massive hole gaped in its side. This module was very much non-functional.
    “There isn’t anyone here,” Murray confirmed. “I’m not saying this is a Chinese MFOB. Those are much smaller, and they’re red. This is one of the modules that crashed.”
    “What modules?”
    “Go closer.”
    Kristiansen drove downhill, angling towards the cliff-like side of the module, over ground littered with rubble. The buggy’s deep-treaded aluminum wheels lurched and spun in thin air. He braked. “Any closer, we’ll get stuck in this rubble field.”
    “This’s close enough. Come on, I want to take a look.”
    Murray hopped out of the buggy. Cautiously, Kristiansen followed him through the hatch in the roof. It was a pressure seal. The buggy could theoretically be pressurized. But someone had jarked the pressurization lever by squirting splart all over it. Kristiansen could guess why: so the crew wouldn’t be tempted to fill the cabin with air and take their helmets off. It was a natural human instinct to want to escape this glass bubble around one’s head, the fog perpetually forming on the faceplate, the inability to touch or scratch one’s face, and the sound of one’s own breath. Kristiansen had now been in his suit for a whole day, ever since they suited up for pre-flight checks this morning. He could smell the ripe stink of his sweat when he moved. He clambered after Murray.
    They walked and jumped over the scattered rocks. The damaged module lay in a transverse position across the slope. They circled an engine nacelle the size of a juggernaut, torn off and lying by itself. “Must’ve been a rough landing,” Kristiansen said.
    “Yeah.” Murray headed for the hole in the side of the module.
    Kristiansen snuck a glance back at their buggy. Already the dust almost hid it. The vast bleakness of this landscape dispirited him. The thing about planets was that they were large.
    “There were twenty of these modules altogether,” Murray said. “The Chinese landed them on the surface during the Big Breakup. Unmanned. I told you, landing on Mars is easy, if no one’s shooting at you.”
    “Someone shot at this one,” Kristiansen said, pointing at the top of the module. It looked as if a giant had cut its roof off with blunt scissors.
    “Oh hell, yeah. The PLAN KKV’d the fuck out of them. But kinetic kill vehicles don’t move as fast as quantum-entangled comms signals.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    Murray stopped in front of the hole in the module’s side. “These modules were Trojan horses. They carried a computer virus for which the most polite term is ‘bad-ass.’ The Chinese really get AI utility theory. It’s shaken up my whole industry.”
    “The spook industry.”
    “Yeah. We never guessed they were that far along. But hey, they’re our best friends now, so it’s all good.” Murray’s tone conveyed dubiety.
    “This virus, it was a cyber-weapon directed against the PLAN? What did it do?”
    “You want the version with linear algebra?” Kristiansen shook his head. “Short version, we think that’s where the warblers came from.”
    “The virus?”
    “Yup. If only we could catch some of them alive!”
    Kristiansen digested this. It was a lot to take in, and the