Free The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN by Michael Rizzo

Matthew now, walking the perimeter alone, like he’s done
every day since he could spend more than an hour on his feet. His
circuit gets longer every day—he’s up to needing two cylinders
worth of air for his afternoon “therapy”. Still, he’s limping even
in the low gravity, chopping the gravelly Martian soil with his
makeshift walking stick, checking on the progress that Carver and
Rios and their respective platoons of troopers have made on getting
some of the battery guns replaced.
    Refitting after what the slide did to us has been an
exercise in creative engineering. Everything has been a game of
scavenge and trade-out, digging deep into our stores of spare
parts, making one working machine out of a few (or more than a few)
busted ones. That strategy got us two working construction dozers,
a handful of assorted short-range scout rovers, one almost-working
armored track, and about a quarter of our pre-bombardment
compliment of base guns.
    But nothing flying. We had four ASVs safe in the
bunker hangars when the slide hit, but the reason they didn’t go up
with all the rest of our ships to rescue the people we had in orbit
was that they didn’t fly. And they’ve continued to defy Sergeant
Morales’ attempts to cobble one good aircraft out of them. She’s
threatening to get creative, weld together something from scratch.
It wouldn’t make orbit, but it would give us eyes in the air, and
get us a lot further out for recon than the battery-powered
rovers.
    I head in Matthew’s general direction, my boots
crunching the rusty gravel, doing the light shuffle-skip that
walking on uneven ground becomes in .38 G’s, raising puffs of fine
red dust (dust that I’ll need to vacuum off of me when I go back
inside, to keep the abrasive and somewhat corrosive stuff from
wreaking havoc with delicate gear and sensitive skin).
    The pervasive dust makes me think of Lisa’s mystery
footprints again: if anyone else could have survived this long,
they’d be able to move around on the surface like we can, needing
only oxygen and protection from the elements, and they probably
could have been doing so for the last several years. Unfortunately,
since the length of Marineris sits in line with the equator, the
shifts in temperature from one end to the other as the sun crosses
the sky creates regular dust storms at least twice a day, scouring
away even recent footprints. If anyone was walking around on our
real estate, the evidence is long erased.
    (One interesting note, though: there was no trace of
outside sand in those mystery footprints. Whoever visited us was
carefully clean.)
    Then I remind myself of some other math: without
Hiber-Sleep, the youngest adult colonist at the time of the
bombardment would now be almost seventy, and without the benefits
of the nano-treatments that have been working to keep both time and
the rigors of this harsh planet in check. (Plus, this base is one
of the only sites that had G-Simulator centrifuges to maintain
enough muscle tone and skeletal integrity to keep one’s “Earth
Legs”—a twice-daily ritual of being spun up to Earth gravity for
several minutes, which Halley got us all ordered back to as soon as
we’d cleared Stage Two rehab.)
    “Don’t we look spry?” Matthew teases through his
obvious discomfort as I come jogging up.
    “Five months of PT and nano-rehab,” I give him, “it’s
either spry or dead.”
    “I think I’m number two.” He leans on his stick—part
of the barrel of one of our battery guns bent out of true—like he’s
bearing full Earth weight (but if he was, his “stick” would be
almost too heavy to drag around).
    He looks out at the horizon to the west, out into the
center of the vast clamshell-shaped Melas Chasma, over three
hundred miles across and over 20,000 feet below Datum (Martian “sea
level”) at its deepest. Its distant rims are barely visible in the
pink haze of dust and frost as they rise up four miles above us,
leveling off almost perfectly