Fox got to her feet and stalked past him, heading for the section of the habitat devoted to the cabins. He had used an empty one to sleep in the night before; Fox had just shut herself down on the sofa in the common room. It took him a couple more seconds to get his act together and follow her, perhaps because he could not believe this was happening. Some parts of Fox’s mind were wondering the same, but mostly she was just wound up and ready to see whether that bulge was real or not.

  The bedrooms were fairly well appointed. Nothing huge, but they all had a double bed, a desk with computer terminal, a wardrobe, and a shower room. The toilets were communal to make waste management easier, but you could have a shower to yourself. Fox walked up to the double bed, turned, and posed a little for Justin’s benefit. He was walking into the room and pulling his shirt off over his head as he did so.

  ‘You work out,’ Fox commented as his muscled torso came into view.

  ‘Every chance I get,’ Justin replied. ‘I’m a big guy. If I ever hope to go back to Earth, and I guess I will at some point, I can’t afford to lose too much muscle mass.’

  ‘Good point.’ As he stepped toward her, she dropped to her knees and reached for the waistband of his jeans. He stopped, tossing his shirt onto the floor and waiting as her fingers deftly undid the button and unzipped. He was not wearing underwear. ‘Wow, you’re big.’ Her fingers curled around his semi-erect shaft, feeling it swelling under his touch, stiffening. ‘You’re massive!’

  ‘I, uh, get that a lot.’

  Fox leaned forward, lifting him toward her lips. ‘I’m actually not sure I can get that in my mouth.’ Her tongue flicked at the head of the beast waking up in front of her eyes. Justin gave a muted groan. ‘Let’s see if I can.’

  ‘Fox!’ Kit’s voice sounded urgent and it came from the computer monitor on the desk. Fox let out a groan of her own and looked toward the screen. ‘Fox, someone is attempting to gain access to the habitat.’

  Fox pushed to her feet, giving Justin a squeeze as she did so. ‘Rain check,’ she said. ‘Kit, where? Do we have camera coverage?’ And she was heading for the bedroom door before she got an answer.

  ‘The main airlock,’ Kit replied from a screen in the hallway. ‘There is coverage, but I am unable to see anyone at the door. The access attempt was made by remote and the subject must be keeping out of sight of the cameras.’

  ‘Right. Are they trying to hack–’

  ‘No, they are using Roscoe Thacker’s identity code.’

  Fox marched into the common area and picked up her pistol from the media area. Kit’s avatar was visible on the wall screen now. ‘But they’re staying out of sight of the cameras?’ Fox asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s not what I’d expect from Thacker,’ Justin said. He had done up his jeans, but he was still shirtless. He was, however, carrying a carbine, a gauss weapon with an underslung micromissile launcher.

  ‘No,’ Fox agreed. ‘Kit, show me the camera on the emergency airlock. What’s that rifle loaded with, Justin?’

  ‘Four-mil needles for the main gun, baton rounds in the launcher. Why isn’t Thacker’s code working to open the doors?’

  ‘The security database was wiped with the rest of the data files, Justin,’ Kit replied. ‘I am performing security authentication directly.’ The big screen was now showing the view from the airlock attached to the bedroom wing. There was nothing visible aside from the door itself and a patch of empty rock. ‘You were correct, Fox. An attempt has been made to open the auxiliary airlock using the same code. They have now moved on to attempting network access through the wireless system.’

  ‘Can you tell where they are?’ Fox asked.

  ‘I do not have the skills to operate the base stations in that manner.’

  Fox walked over to one of the terminals in the room. ‘Give me access to the base station controls.’ The screen in front of Fox lit up with a control panel and Fox began to work her way through the screens. To ensure good coverage, the network had four transceivers, one in each wing and one in the common area. Fox checked over all of them, tapping through to the diagnostic screens.

  ‘They are now attempting to hack the network and failing quite miserably,’ Kit announced. She sounded a little smug about it.

  ‘Got it,’ Fox said. ‘Uh, that’ll be about twenty metres from the emergency airlock door at about… ten degrees right.’

  The view on the screen shifted as the camera turned to sweep across the area Fox had indicated. The light from the camera swept with the view, but it showed mostly the red-brown wall of the dust still hanging in the air. Then the light hit something which vanished back into the fog as soon as the light touched it.

  ‘What the Hell was that?’ Justin asked, frowning.

  The video feed from the camera reversed over the last few seconds, stopping as the shape in the dusty mists first came into view. It was humanoid, tall and fairly slender. The head seemed to be larger than you would expect on a human. There was no detail in the image, but whatever it was, it looked like the things glimpsed in the video clips the forensics team had found.

  ‘Looks like a Martian,’ Fox said. ‘Any chance you can clean that image up a bit, Kit?’

  ‘I will see what I can do, but the camera resolution is poor. I will not be able to do much. The hacking attempts have stopped. I assume it has retreated knowing that we have spotted it.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Fox frowned at the picture on the screen. ‘I wonder if that was all it really wanted to achieve.’

  Sol 81.

  ‘Tracks,’ Justin said. He was in his EVA suit, his carbine tethered to the front of it by a tactical sling. They were taking no chances.

  Fox’s edge-enhancement software had already picked up the depressions in the regolith, but she was not going to mention that. She stepped up beside him and looked down. ‘Pretty much where we saw it.’ She scanned around the area. ‘Looks like it walked around from the front. Well, ran around. That’s a fairly long stride. Whatever it is can move. Took off like a rabbit when the light hit it.’

  ‘Three-toed feet.’

  ‘Or someone in a costume, but yes, three-toed feet. And the image shows a four-fingered hand after Kit managed to clean it up a little.’

  ‘Yeah. You know, I can believe a boot rigged to make a print like this, and a helmet could explain the head, but the hand… I’m not sure I’m buying that as a costume.’

  Fox gave a shrug. ‘The legs and arms are a problem. What we’re seeing suggests digitigrade limbs.’

  ‘Digi-what?’

  ‘Digitigrade.’ Fox flashed him a grin through her visor. ‘Walking on its toes. Cosplayers and film studios have come up with ways of simulating the look, but it usually results in thicker legs. These things seem to have ridiculously thin limbs. Add in the extra height and I don’t think this is really a costume. I’m just keeping an open mind.’

  Justin frowned. ‘Are you saying they really are Martians?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Okay. Want to follow the tracks?’

  ‘Yup.’

  The dust was almost gone, as much as the dust was ever gone. Kit had got the hang of the station’s meteorological systems enough to state that visibility was now ‘hazy.’ That was apparently more or less a technical term: ‘haze’ was defined as visibility between two and five kilometres. Kit said the sensors indicated a visibility of two and a half kilometres. Most of the heavier particles of dust had now dropped out of the atmosphere, and a lot of the smallest particles never did. The sky had a distinctly reddish tint to it, which Justin said was normal, and the sun was bright overhead with little in the way of atmosphere to block it.

  ‘Should we be worrying about your radiation exposure?’ Fox asked as they made their way over the largely flat landscape, following the trail of weird footprints.

  ‘I wouldn’t worry over it too much,’ Justin replied. ‘The suit takes care of UV and the Sun’s pretty active at the moment, so we’ve got better shielding from cosmic rays. There are no solar events active currently, however, so solar particle exposure is acceptable. Basically, it’s not too bad a time for sunbathing on Mars.’

  ‘Huh.’

  ‘The suit monitors exposure and it’s tracked in our medicals. All part of the great experiment that is Isis City.’

  ‘I suppose it is still just an experiment.’ The city was trying hard to be a settlement, but it was basically a big laboratory at the moment. They had celebrated the fifth anniversary of the first structures being put up in Isidis Planitia on the fifteenth of February. Well, there had been a lot of noise about it in Earth’s media, but whether they had done much on what was basically a random day in the calendar on Mars was an open question. And she had someone to ask. ‘Hey, did you guys celebrate the fifth anniversary up here?’

  ‘We’re saving it for the fifth anniversary,’ Justin replied with a grin.

  ‘Makes sense.’ Whatever, Isis City was there to prove that people could live and work on a planet distant enough from Earth to be effectively isolated. The colony was not entirely self-sufficient yet, but it was getting there. If they really had to do without Earth, they could probably manage, but not easily, and the population was not enough to be self-supporting, even without that gender imbalance.

  The tracks petered out in a rocky area where there was too little dust to leave a good impression. Even Fox’s software could not find an edge to work with and multispectral imaging was showing nothing. Fox peered around. It looked like they were at the entrance to a small gully. The landscape on the floor of the plain was weird, twisted. Fox figured it was volcanic, or the equivalent; Hellas Planitia was a vast impact crater, the second or third largest on the planet, depending on who you talked to. At one time, there would have been a lot of molten rock where she was standing. Her software sharpened something about twenty metres ahead of them, down the gully, and she narrowed her eyes, double-checking what she was seeing.

  ‘That’s a foot,’ Fox said, starting down the gully. ‘A foot and part of a leg.’

  ‘Where?’ Justin asked, but he followed her and soon spotted what she had seen. ‘Okay, that’s a foot, but it’s in a tennis shoe.’

  ‘Yeah, someone took a walk without a suit. Or they were taken.’

  The body was partially obscured by a twist in the rock, but also covered in sand. They began to scrape the regolith away, unearthing someone in jeans and a T-shirt. Fox had a strong idea of who it was going to be before they got to the face.

  ‘Carter,’ Justin said. The dead geologist stared up at them with eyes still caked with dirt. The atmosphere in this part of the basin was thin, but not thin enough to dry everything out too quickly. He had probably been there for several days. Fox hoped the putrefaction process had been at least retarded or they might not get too much from the body.

  ‘Are you seeing the radio bursts we’re picking up?’ Kit asked inside Fox’s head.

  Fox pulled up her radio reception logs and quickly scanned them. Five bursts of noise over the last two minutes. Signal strengths tended to indicate two sources, one further away than the other. Her system was not set up to give her more than that. ‘I see them. I see them and I’m not sure I like them.’ Aloud, she said, ‘Okay, we need to get him out of here and back to the habitat. We might come back, but I want this body secured first.’

  ‘Problem?’ Justin asked.

  ‘I’m detecting some odd radio transmissions. Could be just noise. Could be burst transmissions like the military use.’

  ‘We don’t have a military. I think the Chinese do, but Isis City is–’

  ‘Like the military use, Justin. It’s not impossible to get them if you’re a civilian. If it is someone out there chatting, I think we should get Carter here out of sight before they come to check on us.’

  Unclipping his carbine, Justin held it out to her. ‘I’m guessing you’re a better shot than I am. I’ll carry him, you keep us safe.’

  Fox took the weapon with a nod. ‘Fair enough. Be careful with him. He’s been lying there for a while. He might be… a bit soggy.’

  ‘I wish you hadn’t said that.’

  ~~~

  ‘Oh God that stinks! Even through the filters, that stinks.’

  Fox looked around at the door to the lab wing and flashed Justin a grin. ‘Wouldn’t know. I’ve got my olfactory sensors turned off. That mask is designed to filter out dust, maybe bacteria. You’ll still get the full effect of a month of putrefaction through it.’

  She had Carter’s body laid out on a cleared geology table. She was no forensic tech, but she could look the thing over before sealing it up for transport, and that was what she was doing. ‘He’s actually very well preserved,’ she said. ‘I think he’s at least partially mummified. I mean, I guess that makes sense. He’d be frozen after the first night he spent out there. That would’ve killed the bacteria in the body. There are no insects out there to help decomposition. I think most of the damage is down to chemicals rather than the usual organic decay process.’

  ‘Wonderful,’ Justin said. ‘You know, we get even fewer murders here than we do rapes.’ He seemed to consider that for a second. ‘We do get people going missing and never being found a little more often, but some of those are probably accidental. Maybe most.’

  ‘Funny,’ Fox replied, peering at the exposed skin of Carter’s left shoulder. ‘I’d have thought murder would be more common. I think if you locked me in a place like Isis City for more than a month, I’d get homicidal.’

  Kit chose that moment to appear in avatar form. ‘Fox frequently indicates a desire to enact homicidal rampages. To date, she has never actually gone through with any of them.’

  ‘Thank you for that, Kit. You know, the skin’s discoloured, and it’s going to take a proper autopsy to confirm this, but I think there are bruises here left by a hand.’ Fox looked up at Justin. ‘We do have someone we can get to do autopsies, right?’

  Justin nodded. ‘Doctor Ruggiero. She’s the chief medical doctor, but she’s also the rep for the Centre for Disease Control and the medical examiner if she needs to be. You say “handprint…”’

  ‘Yeah, it looks like that hand only had three fingers and a thumb.’

  ~~~

  ‘Any sign of those transmissions?’ Justin asked. His carbine was in his hands now. He did not exactly look nervous, but he did look a little wired.

  ‘No,’ Fox replied. ‘Kit’s monitoring constantly, but there’s been nothing. I can’t shake the feeling that we’re being played.’

  ‘You think they wanted us to find Carter’s body?’

  ‘I think someone has wanted us to find pretty much everything we’ve found since this lousy horror vid started. I am unsurprised that we are not finding any signs of an ancient, underground city.’ They had spent much of the afternoon searching in any location the maps of the region suggested you could find such a place, and they had found absolutely nothing. Fox never wanted to look at another brown rock.

  ‘It’s going to get dark soon.’

  ‘Yeah, we’ll head back. I want to fly out in the morning.’ She turned and started in the direction her navigation system told her would lead them back to the science station.

  ‘Yeah, another night waiting for aliens to break in and murder us would be great.’

  ‘Where’s your spirit of adventure? If they try to kill us, we’ll finally get to see one of them. Besides, I have every confidence in our ability to turn them into corpses if it comes to it. We aren’t unarmed scientists. Though, even if Carter’s dead, that doesn’t mean the others are.’

  ‘We haven’t found any more bodies,’ Justin conceded. ‘I’ll see if we can get some satellite time when we get back to Isis City. Maybe infrared or something could pick something up. Disturbed ground?’

  Fox smiled. ‘Good call. We can get the time. If I need to, I’ll call Earth and Jackson can talk to the government, and then the government will yell at someone up here.’

  ‘Huh, yeah. Hey, what if the Martians have, um, phasers or something?’

  ‘They’d better be good with them, or between us we’ll give them a lot of extra orifices.’ Fox walked on in silence for a second or two. ‘You know, I’d be disappointed if they don’t have phasers. What kind of crappy sci-fi horror would this be if the Martians don’t have ray guns?’

  ~~~

  ‘Round two?’ Fox asked.

  ‘Round two?’ Justin replied.

  ‘You know, sex. Round two.’

  ‘Uh, I know this sounds a little crazy, but I can’t help but feel that if we start, Kit’ll appear to tell us something’s trying to get in.’

  Fox contemplated that for a second, her lips pursed. Justin had had food. They had found some not terribly bad beer in a cooler. They were each drinking a bottle, Fox knowing that it would not impair her at all and doubting that one bottle would give Justin problems. She could put some more amateur porn on the screen, but…

  ‘You know, seeing as we are bit-players in a horror vid, you might be right. I guess we’ll just sit here and wait for our doom.’

  Justin frowned at her. ‘I don’t think you’re taking this seriously.’

  ‘Mm,’ Fox agreed, ‘I think you might be right.’

  Airborne over Terra Sabaea, Sol 82.

  ‘We’re about twelve minutes out,’ Justin said. He was not exactly flying the shuttle; the ship’s AI was doing the work and Justin was supervising.

  Fox sat in the co-pilot’s seat because it was more companionable, and because Carter’s corpse was wrapped in plastic and lying in the passenger compartment. Fox was used to dead bodies, having seen more than a few in her time as a soldier and a cop, but that did not mean she wanted to spend time with them when she did not have to. They were both in pressure suits, but their helmets were off; Fox’s was relatively pointless anyway. ‘Good. Hopefully we can get Carter’s autopsy organised today. It seems pretty obvious what killed him, but I want anything else your Doctor Ruggiero can give us.’

  ‘Like whether there’s… an alien handprint on his shoulder.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Fox looked around at her pilot and frowned. ‘You okay?’

 

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