The Mars Shock by Felix R. Savage Page B

nutrient recycling unit. Drops of water welled out around the seal. They’d guessed right to begin with. The seal was good enough for government work. Not good enough to keep the nanites out. “I figure I might as well die well-hydrated.”
    Kristiansen leaned against the cliff face. The news was shattering. Suddenly, hope came to him. “Nanites are micron- sized. They can’t move that fast. It takes these suits how long to patch themselves? Three minutes?”
    “More like six. The epoxy doesn’t set hard immediately.”
    “And the nanites couldn’t possibly move faster than a few microns per second. Your suit is a centimeter thick. Maybe it’s OK!”
    “Yeah, maybe. And maybe not.”
    “How do you feel?”
    “No symptoms. Fingers crossed.”
    Kristiansen bounded over to the Medimaster 5500 and tore at its tattered shrinkfoam packaging. “If worse comes to worst, let’s get you into the Evac-U-Tent.” He exposed the control panel, protected by a layer of capacitative perspex. Holding his breath, he flipped the power switch. The display lit up. “It’s working! No, shut up and listen to me for a change. This medibot has comprehensive scan functionality with sub-10 nanometer resolution. It can scan your blood, your brain, your bone marrow. It can even read the data on your BCI and any other augments you might have. Once we get a handle on the problem, we can look at options for treating the symptoms.”
    “The symptoms?” Murray said. “As far as we know, the main symptom is a psychopathic urge to kill purebloods.”
    Kristiansen remembered Murray casually asking him to confirm that he was a pureblood. Now he understood the motivation behind that question. Murray had wanted to know if, when the symptoms struck, he would be compelled to murder Kristiansen.
    “How strong is the Evac-U-Tent?” Murray said.
    “Strong.”
    “I wonder if anyone’s ever tried to break out from inside one.” Murray chuckled. He threw his empty water pouch into the darkness. “I guess that’s an option. But when the time comes, I’ll probably just take my helmet off. I want your word of honor that if I can’t do that, for whatever reason, you’ll do it for me.”
    Word of honor. Kristiansen wouldn’t have expected to hear that phrase from an ISA agent. It compelled him to honesty. “I can’t promise that. I will promise that I’ll do anything in my power to save you.”
    There was a moment’s silence. The overlapping arcs of their headlamps seemed to shrink. Kristiansen remembered that they had to worry about exhausting their suits’ power packs, as well as everything else.
    “Well,” Murray said, “I guess we’d better start with walking. We should try to cover as much distance as possible before … before anything happens.”
    Kristiansen nodded curtly and scanned the ground, looking for the refill packs Murray had dropped.
    One of the water pouches had vanished. Kristiansen stamped further from their bivouac, looking for it. His time in the Belt had conditioned to him to view water as more precious than gold.
    A flash of silver crossed his helmet lamp’s beam.
    He instinctively jerked his head sideways.
    The missing water pouch drifted to the ground near his boots.
    Someone … or something … out there in the darkness had thrown it back.
     

vii.
     
    Task Force Alpha mustered in the garage, ready to deploy. Colden zeroed in on one of the phavatars standing alongside the Death Buggies.
    “Drudge,” she said threateningly.
    Drudge had finished customizing the phavatar he acquired from Mattis. He’d 3D-printed a oversized human skull and splarted it to the top edge of the carapace. It overshadowed and distracted the eye from the phavatar’s inoffensive face. Colden remembered the Martian skulls that ornamented the temple of the NASA hate cult. This was Drudge’s answer to that horror. For bonus ugliness, the eyes of his skull flashed red, and crossbones flanked it like gun barrels.
    Captain Hawker