War Between Worlds E-Book

Andrew Stickland

• Herausgeber: Lightning Books
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Serie: The Mars Alone Trilogy
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 446

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Book Three in the Mars Alone Trilogy 'Combines rocket-fuelled storytelling with an Isaac Asimov-level enquiry into what it means to be human. Highly recommended' Amanda Craig, New Statesman Earth and Mars are in open conflict, and seventeen-year-old Leo Fischer is right in the thick of things, fighting his own secret war behind enemy lines. When a mission goes tragically wrong, Leo has to get away from Mars, and for that he'll need the help of the one person he knows he can truly trust – Skater Monroe. But Skater is off somewhere in the Asteroid Belt, and the last time they spoke she wanted to punch his lights out. And besides, Leo's bitterest enemy – Carlton Whittaker, the crazed president of Mars – is about to unleash his most devastating weapon against the unsuspecting Terran invasion fleet. Is now really the time to abandon the fight?

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR THE MARS ALONE TRILOGY

‘Brilliantly pacey, imaginative, high-stakes sci-fi adventure set on Mars – a must-read for all YA thriller fans’

Emma Haughton

‘An old-fashioned pulp sci-fi space opera packed with action, adventure, an android, amorous teens and artificial intelligence’

Nina Paley

‘A beautifully paced, unputdownable story. Stickland’s world-building rings true down to every grain of Martian dust’

Victoria Whitworth

‘Glorious world-building. I couldn’t put it down’

Fran Harris

‘Consummate storytelling that speeds along as smoothly as an interplanetary spaceship… with satisfyingly grounded science’

Iain Hood

‘An immersive adventure. If you like science fiction with strong characterisation and a political edge, this is for you’

Katharine Quarmby

‘Part space-adventure, part coming-of-age story… With quicksilver prose and a pacy plot, it keeps you guessing until the very last page’

Melissa Fu

‘This is aimed at YA readers, but I am a lot more mature and I couldn’t put it down. This book has it all’

Jackie’s Reading Corner

Andrew Stickland is a prize-winning poet and short-story writer whose work has variously been published by the British Fantasy Society, Games Workshop, the Royal Statistical Society and The Economist. He studied law at University College London, then creative writing at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. He is previously the author of The Arcadian Incident and Escape to Midas, the first two parts of the Mars Alone Trilogy. He lives in Cambridge.

Published in 2024

by Lightning Books

Imprint of Eye Books Ltd

29A Barrow Street

Much Wenlock

Shropshire

TF13 6EN

www.lightning-books.com

ISBN: 9781785633874

Copyright © Andrew Stickland 2024

Cover by Ifan Bates

The moral right of the author has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

For Helen

Contents

PART ONE

FIRST STRIKE

A BITTER VICTORY

BAD NEWS

DECISION TIME

LONG TIME NO SEE

MAKING PLANS FOR MARS

EAVESDROPPING

JALA

FIRST STEPS ON MARS, AGAIN

CRACKS BEGIN TO APPEAR

ROAD TO NEW NOWHERE

A REUNION

BREAKING AND ENTERING

WORKING LATE

INSIDE THE HANGAR

A HOPELESS SITUATION

QUESTIONS THAT NEED ANSWERS

PART TWO

SKATER CATCHES UP

THE REST OF THE STORY

SORTING SOME THINGS OUT

SKATER’S PARADOX

ALLIES

THE BLACK SHIP STRIKES

BATTLE STATIONS

ON BOARD THE BLACK SHIP

WHITTAKER LOSES CONTROL

PICKING UP THE PIECES

MAKING AMENDS

PART THREE

LEO AND SKATER TAKE A SUNSET WALK

ARRANGING TRANSPORT

RETURN TO MINERVA

WHITTAKER GETS INVOLVED

THE BROADCAST ENDS

AN UNEXPECTED REUNION

AN UNEASY ALLIANCE

BAIT

LEO AND WHITTAKER TALK

SKATER’S LAST BREATH

THE END

ONE FINAL GOODBYE

EPILOGUE

PART ONE

ALL’S FAIR

1

FIRST STRIKE

Mars was under attack. A huge salvo of missiles, fired from Earth several weeks before, was now five thousand kilometres out from the Red Planet, and the Martian defences were on full alert.

In the ten weeks since Earth’s formal declaration of war, barely a week went by without another wave of missiles reaching Mars. Today’s attack would be the seventh, with a further three already on the way, and each wave contained thousands of warheads. Many were destroyed en route, intercepted by the scores of warships that guarded the outer reaches of Martian-controlled space, and many more would be picked off by the laser defence grid once they reached the upper atmosphere. But some would make it through; they always did. And as each warhead had been programmed to seek out a specific military target, the planet’s defences were slowly, and surely, being worn down.

Colonel Naifeh, senior controller for the Martian defence network (northern sector), was also being worn down. For those past ten weeks he had hardly seen his family, had barely managed more than four or five hours sleep a night, and regularly found himself stuck for days on end inside the dreary bunker complex from where his particular section of the defence grid was operated. He was exhausted and on edge. Those days when the Terran missiles rained down on Mars were always difficult, but today’s shift was being made doubly stressful by the fact that the top brass had decided today would be the perfect opportunity to make the thirty-minute flight from the capital, Minerva, in order to watch the action for themselves.

They were up there now, in the observation gallery behind him. The generals. The ones who were supposed to be running the war, the ones who issued their orders then hid themselves away from the Terran missiles, the ones who reported directly to the president, and always told him the war would be won within six months. But it wasn’t the generals whose presence was making him nervous. It was her: Kalina Kubin, the president’s chief of staff, head of security, and any other title she chose to give herself. She had also come along to observe the day’s events, and her report to the president would no doubt carry a lot more weight.

‘Please,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘Let today be a good day.’

The young woman standing behind him stepped forward. ‘What was that, sir?’

‘Don’t worry, Lieutenant Holt. It wasn’t an order, just a little prayer.’

‘That none of the Terran missiles make it through the grid?’

‘No.’ He lowered his voice and risked the briefest of glances up at the observation room window. ‘That the president’s chief of staff doesn’t have to mention me in her report.’

‘Copy that, sir. The woman terrifies me.’

To her face everyone called Kalina Kubin ‘ma’am’, and behind her back they didn’t dare call her anything like the names they would have liked to. She had a way of finding out things – like who was talking about her behind her back – and the list of people who might or might not have said anything critical about her, and then disappeared, seemed to grow longer every day. There was a rumour going round that she had once executed an entire roomful of prisoners simply because she didn’t like prisoners, and Naifeh had no reason to disbelieve it. As far as he was concerned, if the day ended without her having said a single word to him, that would be an excellent result.

He turned his attention back to the control room. A dozen of his most experienced operators were seated at their workstations, all busy reading the information displayed on their monitors or tapping away on their keyboards. There really wasn’t much for them to be doing right now, except to check systems that had been checked many times already, but he was pleased to see they were doing an excellent job of looking busy and efficient, putting on a good show for the generals. He looked at the giant screen that filled most of the far wall. For the moment it appeared to be showing nothing except empty space and distant stars. The Terran missiles were out there as well, but even at this magnification, they were still invisible. Not for much longer, though, he told himself.

‘Lieutenant Holt. How long until the missiles are in range?’

The young lieutenant checked her slate. ‘Sixty seconds, sir.’

‘Very well.’ Naifeh tapped his headset to activate the microphone. ‘All stations. Incoming missiles are at T-minus sixty. Laser mesh is active. Prepare for contact.’

Naifeh watched the screen. After staring at the blank starscape for a minute or so, he began to see tiny explosions of light as the defence lasers tore apart the first of the incoming Terran missiles. More and more flashes appeared, and after another minute there was a steady stream of explosions for his guests to admire.

‘I don’t know why they bother,’ Holt said. ‘The Terrans, I mean. They launch five, six thousand missiles in each wave, and no more than a handful ever make it all the way to their targets. They claim they’re going to war because they need the iron ore and aluminium and whatever else Mars provides them with, but how many millions of tons of the stuff are they wasting with each salvo they fire?’

‘It’s not about the resources,’ Naifeh told her. ‘It’s about control. If there was some way for the Earth governments to guarantee a constant supply of precious metals, they wouldn’t give a damn whether Mars was independent or not. They’d probably be delighted, in fact, because they wouldn’t have to keep subsidising us. No, their issue isn’t with New Mars, it’s with…’ he lowered his voice once more, ‘…Carlton Whittaker.’

‘The President?’

‘Exactly. Whittaker doesn’t want an independent Mars, he wants a Mars that he controls. Everyone knows that. If he controls Mars, he controls its resources, and if he controls those, then he also controls any of the Terran nations that depend on them. And let’s face it, that’s most of them. Control, Lieutenant Holt. Whittaker wants as much as he can get his hands on, and Earth doesn’t want him to have any. That’s why the Terrans are throwing wave after wave of missiles at us, even though we’re stopping nearly all of them, and it’s why they’re about to launch the largest invasion fleet ever assembled.’

‘Wonderful. Another world war and here we are, right in the firing line.’

‘Not a world war,’ Naifeh corrected her. ‘A worlds war. A war between worlds. The very first in human history. And it’s all because of one man’s greed and ambition.’

Naifeh knew he was taking a risk, being so open in his criticism of the president, but he trusted the lieutenant enough to know she would never share his opinions with anyone else, whether or not she agreed with them.

A voice cut in over the comms. Control, this is Gamma Battery South. We have penetration.

Naifeh cursed, then activated his mic. ‘Report.’

Two warheads have made it through the mesh. More expected.

‘How?’

We only have two active lasers, Control. The other two were destroyed in the last wave and we’re still waiting for replacements.

‘Sir.’ Holt was reading from her slate. ‘Delta Central is also reporting penetration…and Gamma North.’

Colonel Naifeh felt the cold trickle of sweat down his back and tried not to imagine what was being said in the room behind him.

‘Fire up the Sandknives,’ he barked.

The order was unnecessary. The Sandknife ground-to-air missile system had already been on standby for several hours. They were the final line of defence, and would launch automatically the instant anything not transmitting the correct ident code entered the lower atmosphere. They were highly effective. Naifeh would rather not have had to rely on them, but with so many sections of the laser grid inoperative, what else could his superiors expect?

‘We have Sandknife activation,’ Holt announced. ‘We have Sandknife launch.’

‘Put it on the main screen,’ he told her. ‘I’m sure our guests would like to see what’s happening.’

The main screen switched from displaying the black of space to the lifeless browns of a stark Martian landscape and the washed-out yellow sky above. Naifeh watched and waited. Thirty-one Terran missiles had made it through the laser grid, and more would follow. But they had over five hundred active Sandknives in his sector alone, each with its own complex electronic brain, capable of tracking an object no bigger than a spotter drone for thousands of kilometres. There was no chance even a single one of the warheads was getting through. No chance, Naifeh kept repeating to himself. No chance.

On the screen, eight faint exhaust trails were already stretching up from one of the nearby Sandknife batteries, powering into the thin atmosphere and slowly twisting until they were all heading for the same point, like giant skeletal fingers closing into a fist. Naifeh couldn’t see the encroaching warhead, but within seconds he knew there would be a massive detonation to mark the termination of the Terran missile’s long and ultimately fruitless journey.

Suddenly the exhaust trails began to waver. The tight pattern broke apart into a tangle of crossed lines as the Sandknife missiles broke formation and began to head off in different directions. Only two continued on their original course; three sped away across the otherwise empty sky and the final three twisted round and plunged back towards the ground.

‘What…?’ Colonel Naifeh managed, before his words were drowned out by a chorus of screaming voices, both in his ear and from the room in front of him.

‘…we’ve lost control…’

‘…no response to commands…’

‘…the missiles have gone haywire…’

A bright flash caused the screen to auto-dim momentarily. When the image returned, Naifeh was relieved to see that the two remaining missiles had successfully destroyed the Terran warhead. There was a brief cheer from someone, which died away as the first of the rogue missiles hit the ground and exploded, followed almost immediately by another two. There was silence for several seconds as those controllers who were not desperately tapping instructions into their consoles gazed up at the screen. Naifeh watched the clouds of dirt billowing out from the impact sites and still couldn’t believe what he was seeing.

‘Status,’ he croaked. He swallowed and repeated the order, louder this time.

Lieutenant Holt looked up from her slate, shaking her head. Naifeh couldn’t tell if she was trying to say she had no idea, or that it was so bad he was better off not knowing.

Finally a voice cut in over comms. It’s an electronic attack. Something is overriding our missile guidance and targeting systems.

‘You’re talking about a state-of-the-art military-grade weapons system,’ Naifeh snapped. ‘You can’t simply jam it like it’s some short-wave radio transmission.’

No, sir. They’re not jamming our comms, they’ve taken down the whole system. We’re locked out. We have no link to the missiles at all, not even to trigger the kill switches.

‘How?’ Naifeh asked, turning and staring up at the window behind him. ‘How is that even possible?’ The generals were arguing, shouting, waving their arms about and pointing at each other accusingly. His question went unanswered.

‘Never mind that,’ Kalina Kubin said as she strode into the room behind him. ‘Get me a damage report. I want to know how many of the Terran warheads made it through our defences and how many of our own missiles detonated back on Martian ground. I want to know where they landed and what damage they’ve caused, and I want an accurate estimate of dead and wounded.’

Naifeh looked to his commanding officers for confirmation, but they were still trying to apportion blame among themselves and paid no attention to him.

‘I want them now, Colonel,’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ He turned back to the room. ‘You heard your orders. Damage reports and casualty numbers, asap.’

Kubin stepped over to the nearest controller, tugged the commset off his head and attached it to her ear. The controller rose and offered her his seat, but she waved him away, preferring to prowl the room and watch the action on the main screen. It was unnerving for Naifeh to be in such close proximity to the woman. She was younger than he had assumed, with thick, dyed-red hair pulled back from her angular features into a tight plait. He watched, fascinated by her dark, constantly searching eyes and the regular clenching and relaxing of her jaw. She was terrifying but mesmerising. Like a shark, he thought. A shark in search of a kill.

Reports began to trickle in from across the northern sector. Twenty-three Terran missiles had made it through the Sandknives. Several military targets had been hit, including two more of the huge laser defence batteries, and the power of the warheads meant it was probable these had been completely destroyed. Kubin accepted each report with a matter-of-fact nod, turning the information over in her mind, saying nothing, simply continuing to prowl. The more he watched her, the more Naifeh realised the shark comparison was perfect.

It took longer for the reports to come in about the rogue Sandknives. Most of the missiles seemed to have detonated in mid-air; many more had exploded harmlessly in the empty desert. Colonel Naifeh was beginning to feel that a disaster had been narrowly averted when a nervous-looking Lieutenant Holt called him and Kubin over to one of the workstations.

‘Colonel. Ma’am. We’re getting reports of a missile strike in downtown Minerva; buildings destroyed, air seals ruptured, scores dead, casualties in the hundreds—’

‘Where in Minerva?’ Kubin demanded. ‘Be more specific.’

Holt checked the screen. ‘Just north of the Circle, ma’am. Around Longwalk.’

‘And nowhere else?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Good. Send updates through to my office as soon as they come in.’

‘Good?’ Naifeh exclaimed. ‘It’s a disaster. Longwalk is a residential area. There’s a hospital there, and schools.’

‘I’m sure there are,’ Kubin said, turning to face him. ‘But no government buildings. That missile could just as easily have hit Hightower, or the militia barracks, or the docks. These are the places that need to be protected, not hospitals and schools and hab-blocks. Because in case you haven’t noticed, Colonel, we happen to be at war right now, and how do you expect us to win a war with no government, no ships, no troops?’

Naifeh said nothing.

‘Well?’

‘We can’t,’ Naifeh muttered.

‘No, we can’t.’ She gazed at him long and hard, a predator moving in for the kill. But then she looked up at the observation window.

‘Nor can we win a war if we can’t even prevent the enemy’s agents from using our own weapons against us. We were lucky this time. Next time we might not be. So I plan to make sure there isn’t going to be a next time.’

The shark swam past and Colonel Naifeh heaved a sigh of relief.

2

A BITTER VICTORY

At that exact same moment, inside a small, camouflaged dome tent several thousand kilometres further out into the barren Martian desert, seventeen-year-old Leo Fischer punched the air in triumph.

‘Yes!’ he shouted, reaching down to pat the shoulder of the man who was standing neck-deep in a hole in the ground in front of him. ‘It worked. We did it, Nik.’

‘Are you sure?’ the man asked. ‘Completely?’

‘Completely,’ Leo replied. ‘Look.’ He held out his slate so the man could see the screen. ‘I used a closed-loop data package initiation signal to interrupt their transmissions. It won’t take long for the mainframe to detect the intrusion, but once it figures out that there’s no way to bypass it, it’ll go into reboot mode, and even if that only takes, say, thirty seconds, that’ll still leave the missiles contactless for long enough that they’ll go into backup safety mode, which should, I’m hoping, be instant auto-detonate.’

Nik laughed. ‘I’ll take your word for it. So are we all done here?’

‘All done.’

‘Excellent. Then let’s get this stuff cleared out and stowed away. We need to be long gone before they trace the break-in back to here.’

At the bottom of the hole was a wide, reinforced-plastic conduit running through the rocky Martian ground, which they had uncovered after a long night’s digging. Another hour’s cutting had revealed the mass of power and communications cables inside, and then Leo had set about the tedious task of identifying and tapping exactly the ones he needed to take control of the Martian defence force’s entire Sandknife ground-to-air missile control system.

It had been his idea. Captain Mackie had preferred the tried and tested sabotage missions on which he’d been sending his men for the past six months – find the conduit, plant the explosives and leave the Martians to clean up the mess. But Leo had finally convinced him that his plan would do so much more than knock out a single missile battery or comms centre for the few hours it would take for it to be repaired and brought back on line. It could wipe out an entire missile salvo, right at the point when it was most essential. Much more effective. And besides, it had been a lot of fun.

Leo reached down and unclipped his cable taps, stuffing them into his rucksack along with his slate and the portable processor array he’d built to take care of all the number-crunching and code-breaking that had been an essential part of the plan.

‘All done,’ he said as he clambered out of the hole.

‘Good,’ Nik replied as he attached a final block of explosives to the inside of the conduit. ‘Then suit up and prepare for evac.’

Leo closed the top of his environment suit and attached the hood to the neck seal. The monitor light on his wrist flashed green. ‘Locked and loaded.’

Nik locked his own helmet to the top of his stealth suit – a more militarised version of the standard E-suit – and Leo heard his voice through the comms.

‘Right, let’s lose the tent.’

The whole operation had taken place inside an inflatable fabric dome, foam-sealed along its base and filled with stolen air from a supply pipe that also ran through the underground conduit. Leo broke the seal and the whole thing collapsed about him in a silent rush of escaping air. He lifted the heavy material to one side, letting in the weak Martian sunlight and there, as expected, was the robot sentry they’d left the previous night.

‘Morning, Taffy,’ he called over the comms. ‘Any chance of a hand with the tent?’

The sentry turned at once and made his way quickly down from the top of a nearby rocky outcrop. Taffy – or Cenotaph, to give him his proper name – was an ANT, an Automated Non-organic Trooper. He was a two-and-a-half metre tall humanoid, built from a lightweight but extremely durable steel alloy and with an internal power source that could run for weeks on end without requiring a recharge. He was ex-military and almost obsolete now, but still invaluable to Captain Mackie and his men. He was also, at least for the moment, Leo’s closest friend.

Because Taffy was more than just a robot. He was an artificial intelligence, a highly complex computer mind who was as capable of autonomous and independent thought as any human. Leo had built him last year – not from scratch, because that would have been a difficult enough task for an entire team of scientists in a fully-equipped lab back on Earth, and at the time Leo had been a lone sixteen-year-old boy, working in a run-down robot repair shop on a space station out in the middle of nowhere. But he’d been the one who had put all the components together, had adapted the software to allow mind and body to function as a single unit and so had, in effect, brought Taffy to life.

He’d also been the one who had devised a system for allowing several huge data blocks of information from an ancient and long-extinct alien civilisation to be accurately translated and then uploaded into Taffy’s mind. Well, to be fair, it had been his mother who had done most of the actual translation work, before he’d become involved in this whole business. But then his mother had been murdered on the orders of Carlton Whittaker, president of Mars, psychopath, and quite possibly the most powerful individual in the Solar System. And it had been Leo’s desire for revenge against Whittaker that had brought him back to Mars and why he now found himself next to a hole in the dirt in the middle of the Martian wastelands, playing the role of terrorist and saboteur.

Was your mission successful? Taffy asked.

‘Beyond successful,’ Leo replied. ‘It was a total burn. It was like…’ he waved his hand vaguely. ‘Yeah.’

‘We’re not done yet,’ Nik cut in. ‘Let’s get back home before we start the celebrations. Taffy, tent and cutting tools, if you please. Leo, power up the skimmer.’

While Taffy folded and packed away the tent, Leo walked over to the rocks and pulled back the camo-sheet covering their vehicle. It was a tiny, open-topped skimmer, old and battered, with barely enough room for a driver, let alone a passenger and a bag full of equipment. He fired up the engine and waited for Nik.

‘I’ve set the timer for ten minutes,’ Nik said as he clambered into the front of the skimmer, allowing Leo to wedge himself in behind as best as possible. ‘That should give us plenty of time to disappear before the drones come sniffing around. Taffy, we’ll see you back at base.’

Very good. Safe journey.

‘You too,’ Leo said. ‘And watch your power levels,’ he added as Taffy set off at a brisk run across the Martian desert. ‘Make sure you don’t burn anything out.’

It was two long and miserably uncomfortable hours before Leo caught his first glimpse of the tall, wire-anchored carbon monoxide chimney that loomed over the outskirts of their current home, the aptly named New Nowhere. At some point in the distant past it had been a small farming community, but now the mile-long biodomes stretching away into the flat plains beyond the settlement were nothing more than tattered shreds of polyglass hanging from a few remaining fragments of skeletal structure, and the soft, brown and fertile soil they once housed was just more dust.

Dead settlements. There were hundreds, maybe even thousands, of them all over Mars, abandoned overnight whenever the government decided it was no longer worth supplying them with free oxygen. Sometimes they struggled on for a while, like New Nowhere had, installing its own oxygen factory and power generators, but everyone knew that once the government pulled out of a settlement, it was doomed. Now these places were home to roving scavenger bands, nomads and, on occasion, terrorist commandos. Over the past few months, Leo had called several of them home.

Nik slowed as he passed the oxygen factory, allowing the hidden sensors to scan the skimmer, then set it down outside an old storage shed the soldiers were using as a vehicle park. Leo struggled out and stamped his feet to get some circulation back into his legs, then helped Nik drag the skimmer inside the shed. Once it was secure they made their way across to the only building in town that had light spilling from its shuttered windows.

Leo brushed off as much of the dust as he could before stepping into the airlock, but the stuff got everywhere and he knew from experience that a quick brush down now wasn’t going to prevent it from working its itchy way into every possible piece of spare clothing he possessed, including his sleeping bag. But it was still better than not bothering.

Once through the airlock, Leo unclipped his hood and took a deep lungful of the poorly filtered air that was only slightly more pleasant than the recycled stuff he’d been breathing for the past two hours. He was thirsty, as he always was after a session in the full suit, and he made straight for the small dining area at the far end of the main room.

There were half a dozen people in the room and Leo greeted each of them as he passed, smiling and happy and flushed with success. Most of them returned the greeting, but he was surprised to find that none of them seemed interested in coming across to talk over the details of the mission as they usually did. It was as he was finishing his second cup of water that Captain Mackie emerged from one of the side rooms.

‘Hey, Cap,’ Leo called out. ‘One more successful mission to add to the tally. Didn’t I say it would work?’

‘Yes, you did. And I’m glad you’re both back safe. Taffy on his way?’

‘Yep. I told him to take it easy on the pistons, so expect him sometime around sunup. Anyway, how did we do? How many of the Terran missiles got through? How much damage did we cause?’

Captain Mackie gave Leo a weak smile. ‘Why not come through and we’ll talk about it in my office.’

‘Sure.’ Leo poured himself a third cup of water from the filter and followed Mackie through the doorway into the tiny room that served as both the captain’s office and sleeping quarters. The hydraulic doors were broken, stuck halfway open, and the only light was what little spilled through from the main room.

‘So,’ Leo continued. ‘What’s the story?’

‘It was a good mission. A handful of warheads did make it through, and they definitely wouldn’t have done if it hadn’t been for your actions. A good chunk of the laser defences are down, and will be for some time; a couple of communications hubs were also taken out of action, and the munitions depot at Marshal Peak.’

Leo grinned. ‘That’s great. Much more than we could have done in half a dozen sabotage raids.’

‘But that’s not all.’

Mackie wasn’t smiling. Suddenly Leo got the feeling things were maybe not as great as he thought. ‘What?’ he asked, the grin slowly fading. ‘What is it you’re not telling me?’

‘One of the missiles landed in Minerva, in a residential district. There were a lot of civilian casualties.’

‘In Minerva? But I thought the Terrans were only targeting military sites. Was it a malfunction?’

‘It wasn’t one of the Terran missiles.’

It took a few seconds for Leo to understand what Mackie was trying to tell him. ‘But…’ he managed, and then a wave of images began to flood his mind. He saw the broken shells of buildings, the rubble lying on the streets, the oxygen fires and the screams of the wounded and dying. And the dead. He’d seen dead bodies before, plenty of them, last year, when the Martians had bombarded their base at the mine. And before that, when he’d escaped from the research facility with his mother…

His mother. He’d seen her dead body as well, laid out and still warm, the poison that had killed her still eating its way through her. So many dead. But they had all been killed by other people, not by him. Even Carlton Whittaker, the president of Mars and the cause of all this murder and chaos and suffering, even he’d survived Leo’s assassination attempt.

‘How many?’ he asked.

‘This is war, Leo,’ Mackie replied. ‘Sometimes these things happen.’

‘How many?’

‘It wasn’t your fault.’

‘How many?’ He was shouting now. ‘I need to know.’

‘A hundred and sixty so far. They expect more.’

The shock felt like a punch to the chest. Leo let out a gasp and felt his insides tightening so that he wasn’t able to take another breath. There was a pounding in his head and a darkness began to creep in around the edges of his vision, as if the rest of the world had suddenly decided to abandon him. The strength went from his legs. He wanted to sink to the floor, but now there didn’t seem to be any floor beneath him. He was floating, falling…

He felt hands grasping his shoulders, guiding him down until he was sitting on something solid, and after a few seconds felt the trickle of lukewarm water across his lips.

‘Take little sips,’ Mackie urged him. ‘It’ll help.’

It did help. After a moment the spinning died away, his vision returned, and then all he felt was heavy and weak. He sipped some more, while Mackie watched him without speaking.

‘They were supposed to auto-detonate,’ Leo managed at last. ‘That’s what they’re designed to do if they lose the signal.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I can’t believe it. A hundred and sixty people.’

‘You didn’t kill those people, Leo.’

‘Yes, I did.’

‘No.’ Mackie’s voice was suddenly firm and commanding. ‘The war killed them, just like the hundreds of others who were killed by the Terran bombardment.’

‘But they were soldiers, they—’

‘They what? Deserved it?’

‘Should have expected it.’

‘But they were still people, with homes and families and futures. Putting on a uniform doesn’t change that. It doesn’t make it their war.’ He paused, and the quiet, caring voice returned. ‘It’s just that sometimes accidents happen, and innocent people die.’

‘But it was still me who pulled the trigger.’

They both fell silent. Leo sipped his water, remembering his one and only trip to Minerva with Skater and Pete. They’d gone up onto the Skywalk and looked out across the pillars and domes of Mars’s capital city, taking in the whole sprawling mass of the city. And then the missile came down and tore the whole thing to pieces, and there again were the bodies in the rubble.

‘I was already a lieutenant before I killed my first civilian,’ Mackie said after a while, talking quietly and staring down at the table. ‘It was my very first special ops mission. Central Africa. We were sent in to deal with a rebel militia group who’d taken some aid workers hostage. Negotiations had broken down, time was running out. You know the sort of thing. So we deployed in and they were waiting for us. They’d been tipped off. They’d rigged up the hostages with high explosives, and when we entered the settlement where they were being held, the rebel soldiers sent their captives running towards us, telling them they were free and to get out of there as quickly as possible. We shouted for them to stop, to turn back, but of course they kept on running. They were women, all five of them. Just girls really. I picked out one in my scope. She was tall, dark-haired, olive skin. Even beneath the dirt and the tears I could see she was beautiful. It was a clean head shot, and we were using hi-ex ammo. It destroyed her. I destroyed her, to save my own life.

‘There’ve been many more since then, but that one was the worst. And it was a long, long time before I was able to accept that it wasn’t me who killed her, it was that bastard who strapped the explosives to her in the first place. A long time. But eventually I did accept it, and I’m sure some day you’ll feel the same about what happened this morning.’ Captain Mackie stood up and rested his hand on Leo’s shoulder. ‘Get some rest. Go see Doc if you need something to help you sleep. And come and find me any time you need to talk.’ He gave the shoulder a gentle squeeze and went through into the main room, leaving Leo alone in the gloom. Alone with one hundred and sixty broken and bloody bodies.

3

BAD NEWS

Carlton Whittaker had been dead for a little over six months, ever since the day Leo Fischer had managed to come face to face with him, shake him by the hand and secretly inject him with the very same poison one of his assassins had used to kill the boy’s mother. But Whittaker had defeated every enemy he’d ever gone up against, and death was no exception. His body might have been lost, but his mind, his consciousness, thoughts, memories, everything that was important in making him who he was, all of this had been saved, transferred at the last minute into an android body specially created for him by his chief scientist, Professor Arun Randhawa.

The android body’s features were an exact copy of his own, those of the frail old man he had been prior to his death. This was necessary, Randhawa had insisted, so that the transfer from organic to synthetic would go unnoticed. The Martian people were already unsettled by the prospect of a war with Earth, and rumours about their president’s ill health only made matters worse. They needed reassurance. They needed to see that Old Man Whittaker was still in charge, was still up to the task of leading an independent Mars. Reluctantly, he’d been forced to agree.

But there had been a second android body waiting for him, one built to resemble the man he’d been at age sixty. And a third for some unspecified point in the future, when he would finally have the outer shell this amazing new mind of his truly deserved – the body of a Carlton Whittaker in his early thirties. Randhawa had agreed to carry out the subsequent transfers as soon as the newer android models had been fully field-tested and as soon as he could come up with a plausible scientific rationale to explain the dramatic changes to the president’s appearance. The professor had cautioned that setting up a convincing back story for such a visible de-ageing process could take many months, possibly even years. For Whittaker, six months had been more than long enough. He had insisted on going ahead with the second transfer without delay and, reluctantly, Randhawa had agreed. Which was why Whittaker had spent the past two days at the professor’s research facility, and the past several hours unconscious.

He woke up, or at least that’s what it felt like. He was slowly becoming aware of who he was, and he wondered where he was and why he’d been asleep. He tried to open his eyes but realised they were already open – he simply hadn’t been using them – so he began to process the information being transmitted by the optical sensors. And from what little he could see, he understood himself to be in Professor Randhawa’s operating theatre. Yes, now he remembered. They were there to carry out the transfer into the new body.

But the process was obviously not yet complete and he found that he still couldn’t move. He tried to press down to see if he could feel any pressure on the tips of his fingers, but there was nothing. He tried to speak, but his lips remained closed and no sound emerged. And even though he did have access to the input from his optical sensors, he couldn’t even move the eyes in order to get a better view of the room around him.

As he became more aware of his surroundings, he also became aware of the fact that there were two of him in the room; two separate bodies that both appeared to be part of Carlton Whittaker. And as one part of himself was being gradually filled with thoughts, and sensations, and memories, these same things were being drained from another part of him. He was finding himself, and losing himself at the same time. It was the strangest sensation, impossible to explain or even fully understand, perhaps even enough to drive a person to insanity. Fortunately, he was no longer a person.

Professor Randhawa heard the door slide open and looked up from his monitor to see Kalina Kubin striding into the room. He was less than delighted to see that she was still wearing her normal clothes as she entered the operating theatre, which was meant to be a germ-free environment.

‘Oh, come on in,’ he called out sarcastically. ‘Make yourself at home. The sterilisation protocols are mostly for show anyway.’

Kalina ignored him and walked straight over to the older-looking of the two Whittaker androids. ‘Mr President?’

Randhawa pressed a button on the console beside him and the central part of the room began to rotate slowly. It stopped when the younger-looking android was facing the woman.

‘Try this one.’

‘Is he with us?’

‘Possibly. The eyes are open, so he’s probably aware of what’s going on. But if not he’ll be recording anyway, for review later. Speech and motor functions are still offline though, so don’t expect any sort of response.’

‘How long till we can have a proper conversation?’

‘A couple of hours. Can it wait?’

‘Not really.’ She wheeled a spare chair across and sat down opposite the unmoving body.

‘I’ll leave you to it then,’ Randhawa said, knowing from past experience that even though he was the president’s chief science adviser and part of his inner circle, there were times when even he wasn’t invited to the table, as the generally unpleasant Kalina was never slow to remind him. ‘Let me know when you’re done.’

‘Stay,’ the woman told him. ‘This actually concerns you as well.’

Randhawa sat back down. ‘Then I’m all ears.’

‘I take it you’ve both been shut up in here all day?’

‘Correct.’

‘Have you accessed any of the news feeds?’

‘No. Why?’

‘Because we had another missile attack this morning.’

‘And?’

‘This time some of them got through.’

‘Some?’

‘Ten.’

‘Ten missiles? That’s a lot of damage, potentially.’

‘Yes.’

‘So, was there much?’

‘One of them came down in Minerva, Circle North District.’

‘Circle North?’ Randhawa felt a stab of fear inside his chest and began to suspect why Kalina had told him to stay. ‘My wife works in Circle North.’

‘Yes,’ Kalina continued, still in the same, matter-of-fact voice. ‘Northside Medical was one of the buildings hit.’

‘Oh my god,’ he shouted, leaping to his feet. ‘I’ve got to go. I need to make sure she’s okay. She hasn’t called. Why hasn’t she called me?’ He reached for his phone, then remembered it was still in his jacket, in his office. ‘I’ve got to go,’ he repeated.

‘No,’ Kalina said to his back as he headed for the door. ‘What you’ve got to do is stay here and finish the transfer.’

‘Forget it,’ he snapped, without turning round. ‘He’s fine. I’ll finish up when I get back.’

The door opened automatically as he approached and he came face to face with two heavily-armed soldiers. He went to push past, but one of them put a large hand on his chest and brought him to a stop. He tried to pull it away, but the man was too strong.

‘Move!’ Randhawa bellowed, and flung himself forward with all his force.

It was no use. The second soldier pinned his arms from behind, and between them they dragged him back into the room.

‘Let me go,’ the scientist shouted, still struggling against the tight grip of the guards but directing his words at Kalina. ‘Or so help me, I’ll kill you.’

Kalina came across and stood in front of him, staring intently into his face as if searching for something. ‘No, you won’t,’ she said calmly, almost dismissively. ‘Now stop struggling and listen to me carefully. Your wife’s name was not among the list of dead. Minerva is three hours away, even by fast jet, and the fastest jet available is the president’s private shuttle. So finish the transfer and then we can all be on our way. You can travel back to the capital with us. The president needs to be back in Minerva to deal with this situation, and I would hope even you can see that getting him there as quickly as possible is far more important than getting you there.’

The anger was already beginning to fade. As much as he hated this woman, he had to admit she was right about getting back to Minerva. The president’s jet was the fastest way, and it wasn’t going anywhere without Whittaker on board.

‘At least let me call her,’ he said, shaking himself free from the soldiers who had finally relaxed their grip on his arms.

‘Be my guest. But if she’s not among the dead, then she’s almost certainly helping to deal with the injured. I’d say she’ll be far too busy to take your call.’

‘I’m still going to try.’ He tilted his head, motioning towards the doorway. ‘My phone’s in my office.’

‘Very well. But please don’t do anything stupid, Professor. My men will escort you, and if you try to run off, they’ll shoot you. Only in the leg,’ she added, turning to the guards. ‘Nothing that will stop him finishing his work.’

‘You’re a psychopath,’ Randhawa told her. And if anything has happened to my wife, I will kill you, he added to himself.

A brief flicker of a smile appeared on the woman’s face. ‘Don’t take too long.’

Whittaker watched the professor leave with the two guards.

‘We’ll need to watch out for him once we get back to the capital,’ Kalina told him. ‘It was true, what I said about his wife not being among the dead, but she was listed as injured. I don’t know how badly, so I thought it better not to mention the fact, but once he finds out he’ll no doubt come looking for…’ she waved her hand vaguely, ‘revenge, or something. Perhaps when you’re back in action you might give some thought to replacing him. I know you say he’s a genius, but I suspect we’ve already got the best out of him and I’m sure we could find plenty more geniuses who might be less volatile. And a lot less annoying.’

Had the new body’s motor functions been active, Whittaker would have smiled. They were like bickering children, both vying for his favour, and in their own way they were both annoying. But both – at least for the moment – still necessary. The professor was a genius, that much was clear from the remarkable quality of the android body the president had been inhabiting for the past six months. And that was only the basic model. This new one would be even more effective. And there was a third, apparently better still, that was already being set up in preparation for the next transfer. That one would give him the appearance of the young man he used to be, all those years ago. Whittaker knew it was unnecessary. He was already unbelievably powerful, almost invulnerable, practically immortal. But if you were going to become a god, why not look the part as well? That transfer was still several months further down the line, however, and Randhawa was smart enough to have ensured these procedures couldn’t be carried out without him. So until the whole process was complete, the professor and his idiosyncrasies would have to be tolerated.

And Ms Kubin? She was a useful enough associate, and an effective chief of staff. She was ruthless and loyal – both traits he approved of – but she was also hated by the military, and as the long-range war with Earth transformed into a closer and more direct conflict, this might prove unnecessarily awkward. And the professor was right, she was a psychopath. Perhaps when he was back in action he might give some thought to replacing her.

She was still speaking.

‘Something else I didn’t mention. The missile that hit Minerva wasn’t Terran, it was one of ours. Someone hacked into our network and took control of the entire Sandknife system while the missiles were in flight. We were lucky the damage was limited to one city sector. It could have been much worse. I’ve already dealt with those responsible for allowing it to happen, but we haven’t made any progress yet on identifying or locating the terrorists responsible.’

We both know who was responsible, he thought. Who else could it possibly be? Leo Fischer. The so-called boy genius, the boy who killed a president. Knowing who was to blame was never the issue, it was finding him that was the problem. Whenever he showed up, there always seemed to be someone waiting to rescue him, pull him out of harm’s way, hide him away somewhere. But there was a solution to the problem. And it was so elegantly simple, Whittaker wondered why it had it never occurred to him before. Or perhaps it had. Perhaps he was simply remembering something he had just forgotten.

In less time than it took for the woman to finish her sentence, he had installed the idea in his mind, run through numerous possible scenarios and their potential outcomes, settled on the most likely to succeed and calculated the probability of that success at ninety-three percent.

Yes. If he could have, he definitely would have smiled.

4

DECISION TIME

Leo did need to talk to someone, but it definitely wasn’t Mackie. Despite his offer from the previous day, Leo knew perfectly well what the captain would say: this is war, these things happen, get over it. He would put it more kindly than that of course, but that’s what it would boil down to.

He’d thought about talking the whole thing over with Taffy, because sometimes the AI’s alien side came up with interesting ideas or suggestions that Leo would never have thought of himself, but in the end he’d decided against it. Even now, Taffy was still more machine than person, and although Leo wasn’t sure what it was he needed, he knew it definitely wasn’t a logical conclusion based on a rational evaluation of all the variables.

So what about the mysterious Agent Aitchison, who apparently worked for some vague law-enforcement task force and who was the one responsible for getting Leo involved in this whole mess in the first place? He always seemed to know everything that was going on anywhere in the Solar System and always had an immediate answer to every question. He would certainly have plenty of advice, and wouldn’t be slow to give it, but he wasn’t exactly one of life’s great listeners. Besides, Aitchison was only interested in one thing – destroying Carlton Whittaker.

Back when Leo had first met him, Aitchison had been investigating MarsMine, the company Whittaker had created decades earlier, but which he still controlled with absolute authority. MarsMine had transformed Whittaker into one of the most powerful individuals in the Solar System – certainly the richest – and Aitchison had been desperate to find evidence of the bribery, intimidation and corruption that must have fuelled Whittaker’s meteoric success. But now that Whittaker was also president of Mars, things had gone way beyond this. Now all Aitchison wanted was Whittaker dead, and preferably in some way that wouldn’t turn him into a martyr for Martian freedom and independence in the process. So why would a man like Aitchison care what battles Leo was fighting with his conscience? He would say the same as Mackie: this is war, these things happen, get over it. Except that, unlike the captain, he wouldn’t waste time trying to be kind about it.

No. There was only one person Leo wanted to talk to, and she was probably the only person he knew who didn’t want to talk to him in return: Skater Monroe. She’d also been there from the very start, making friends with him during that first shuttle flight from Earth to Luna, spending time with him when no one else seemed interested, helping him stow away on a cruise liner to Mars, and risking her own life to save his on more than one occasion. For a few months they’d been boyfriend and girlfriend and, though Leo would never have dared admit it to her, he’d probably…almost certainly…been in love with her.

But then his mother had been murdered and he’d abandoned Skater without so much as a word, leaving her stranded on a space station in the middle of nowhere while he stole a spaceship and went to hunt down his mother’s killer. They’d spoken only once since then, briefly over a comms link, when she’d made her anger at his actions, and her new opinion of him, perfectly clear. Any relationship they might have shared, even their friendship, was well and truly over. Not that it mattered. She was somewhere far out in the depths of the Main Asteroid Belt, living her own life and probably doing a much better job of it than he was right now. And even if there was some way to make contact with her, even if she didn’t hang up as soon as she took one look at him, the comms lag over that distance meant there would be no possibility of having anything like a proper conversation.

So Leo said nothing, buried his guilt as far down as it would go, and got on with cleaning and repairing his equipment. Usually, the day after a mission was when they moved camp, but the previous day’s strike had been so far from the base that Mackie felt it was safe enough to stay for a few more days. The men could do with the rest, and it would be a good opportunity to carry out some much-needed repairs to their vehicles. Besides, New Nowhere was the best settlement they’d come across in weeks. It had a safe – if limited – oxygen supply, an underground water reservoir that still contained a few undamaged tanks, and more importantly, no other inhabitants. The captain was in no hurry to leave.

Taffy returned mid-morning and came to find Leo as soon as he had stowed the equipment he’d been carrying.

‘All good?’ Leo asked.

Yes. All good. The robot set down a stealth-suit helmet on the workbench beside Leo. Trooper Stevenson asked me to take a look at his helmet. Do you mind if I work beside you?

Leo looked up at the narrow slit of glowing light on the machine’s otherwise-featureless faceplate. ‘It’s fine, Taffy. You know I like having you work next to me. You don’t have to ask.’