Free The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN by Michael Rizzo Page B

came here
to die, too, you know…”
    He chuckles at that, shakes his head, pushes a gloved
hand up under his goggles to wipe at his eyes.
    “Of course I know, you selfish fuck,” he scolds me,
laughter cutting through his grief. “Except you had no
delusions about going out sexed-up and happy in bed. You didn’t
come here to die, you came here to get killed . Maybe you
told yourself you signed on to do something righteous, save this
planet since you did such a fantastic job of it on the last one…
But what you were really going for was the whole pointless
blaze-of-glory thing, and our UN masters were happy to oblige. Why
else would they have approved your transfer at sixty-five -goddamn-years-old to the fucking Starship
Troopers and put you on the shuttle? You’d done enough damage to
their precious agendas with your bizarre un-killable popularity and
that righteous rage that you pass off as some kind of code of honor
and justice. And, yes, you did manage to make most of it
balance out right by the end and walk away with everybody shaking
hands and pledging to do the right thing. But then, everybody knew
it would just be a matter of time before you started in again,
before you felt like somebody in power had crossed one of your
personal lines and needed to be taken down, and then the shooting
would start all over—nobody believed you were done. So they needed
to get your happy ass as far away from their newly ‘secure’ little
planet, and let you off yourself in a way that would cause them
minimal mess, and maybe lets your memory serve them in the
process…”
    He turns away, looks down at the tip of his stick as
it chops idly into the broken rock between his boots. “That’s why
Lisa came—even with all the shit you put her through, she still
wouldn’t miss your funeral.” Then he shakes his head, his laughter
getting lighter now. “Selfish fuck…” he repeats. “Just go ruin my
pity party. It is all about you, just like always.”
    I give him time, let him breathe. I don’t put a hand
on his shoulder—I think he’d be offended.
    “So this is what getting old is,” I dig instead.
    “No,” he sighs, shakes his head. “This is getting old
for us .”
     
    I cycle the airlock, wait for the pressure to
stabilize (which is much quicker now that it doesn’t have to cycle
up from near-vacuum anymore), feel it stab into my ears until I
swallow a few times, pinch my nose and blow. Peel my mask off.
Trade bottled air for recycled air. Then sit on one of the benches
provided in the tight space between the inside and outside hatches
and start the routine chore of vacuuming the dust off of me.
    “Colonel Ram,” I hear Anton on the Link before I’m
finished. “We’re about ready to try a test, sir.”
    “I’ll be right up.”
    I don’t hurry, though. Instead, I catch myself
sitting and staring at the deck. Thinking of Matthew. It’s not like
him to dip so far into hopelessness, even with all he’s been
suffering physically. The last time he was remotely like this was
when an assassin missed him (maybe on purpose) and took away what
was probably the first actual love of his life. He retired for
awhile after that, but couldn’t stay out of the game for long.
    But he’s not wrong: when they offered me a choice
between a pretty public “hero’s” retirement (filled with carefully
scripted face-tours and media-friendly endorsement opportunities
until I’d aged safely off the celebrity radar) or a trip the hell
off the planet (even if it was designed to get me martyred so I
couldn’t cause them any more trouble), I got on the shuttle without
a second thought.
    Yes, Matthew. We did some evil things in the name of
a “better” world, more than whatever we “fixed” could ever pay off.
On Earth. But on Mars, I thought—for the first time in a long
time—that I could do something better. But only if I could start
fresh.
    And Mars itself was just getting started—a new world.
There was hope,