The Mars Shock
into a great day, as Sophie Gilchrist would have said.
    “Got it.” Colden dismissed Drudge and then dashed into the bathroom attached to the cabin. She pumped sanitation foam into her palm, rubbed it over her face, and stole a quarter-cupful of water to blot the foamy residue off her hairline. She had to present an unruffled appearance. The dignity of the Space Corps was on the line.
    “Ma’am?”
    “Are you still there?”
    If he asks me why I was crying, she thought, I’ll deck him.
    “Ma’am, you know how our COPs are in the shop for repairs?”
    Every COP in the platoon, apart from her own and Drudge’s, had been badly damaged in the second KKV attack. They’d been brought back to base for repairs. Still staring into the pocket-sized mirror, Colden shouted, “Yes, and?”
    “Can I DIY mine a bit? I just wanna bling it out. There’s no rule against that, is there?”
    As she gazed at her face in the pitiless bathroom light, her ebony skin seemed to fade to white, and it was Sophie Gilchrist looking back from the mirror at her, across an unbridgeable distance. Tears blurred her vision again. The features in the mirror wavered, and now it was Elfrida Goto looking at her, mouth open as if to say: Hold onto me. Don’t let me go. But Colden had let Elfrida go, and now she was dead, too. She bit her knuckles, forcing the sobs back inside. “There’s a rule against everything, Drudge!” she shouted. “But you know what, have at it. A bit of paint, a bit of bling. It might cheer people up.” They would need it when they found out about Theta Base.
    “Rude, ma’am! Thanks!”
    “Wait, what exactly do you mean, bling it out?”
    “Oh, just like you said, a lick of paint, some fins. It’ll be evil!”
    Colden emerged from the bathroom and yanked her best uniform out of her locker to change. Drudge was already skipping away through the trees. She yelled after him, “Hang on! Your phavatar isn’t in the shop.”
    “I switched with Mattis,” Drudge called back without stopping.
    Colden shook her head. That kid! He’d made followers out of earnest Mattis and several others. He had also leveraged his momentary fame, as the discoverer of the NASA museum (as people were calling it), into a shadowy kind of star status on base. He got smiles and fist bumps from even the hardest-core vets now.
    She went to see Commander Jackson.
    ★
    “This is not about the situation at Theta Base. We will not be discussing that, so don’t ask me any questions, because I won’t answer them. Clear?”
    Commander Sam ‘Squiffy’ Jackson sat behind a desk made, like all the furniture at Alpha Base, of stiffened rattan fiber grown on base. It appeared to be balancing on his belly. The joke about Commander Jackson was that he should’ve been disqualified from service on Mars, on account of exceeding the weight limits.
    Gathered in Jackson’s stripped-down office, besides Colden, were Captain Hawker and Specialist 1 st Class Hannah Goldberg, of the Star Force Engineering Corps.
    “We’ve been ordered to carry out a search and rescue operation on the Mahfouz Gradient,” Jackson said, naming a region of the northwestern scarp of Olympus Mons. Like many other things on Mars, it had been named for one of the Luna Union pilots who died in the Phobos maneuver, as a way of buying the Luna pols off.
    Hawker blurted, “Isn’t that where the MFOB that shall not be named is operating?”
    “Do I have to fucking repeat myself? This is not about that. It’s about the ISA having too much power for anyone’s good.”
    Jackson ranted about how intelligence priorities were trumping military logic. Colden and the others sat tight. The commander was on the edge—they all knew that. Jackson had to carry out often-contradictory orders from Earth, while safeguarding his troops’ lives, and repudiating any fascination he may have had with the idea of military glory that lived on in Star Force’s institutional memory. They let him talk it

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