“Alright, boys and girls…listen up. For those of you who haven’t already heard, my name is Dawkins, Larry Dawkins, Marscorp Field Supervisor extraordinaire, and one mean bastard. I ain’t no lifer, and I ain’t no ass-kisser, which means I got where I am by out-surviving a whole lot of dumb shits like you. So, if you work hard, and do exactly as I say, you might live long enough to get paid. Got any questions?”

Silence.

“Good…So here’s the scoop. The company lost a shuttle about thirty miles north of here. The pilot and copilot bought the farm, but the ship’s artificial intelligence thinks the cargo can be salvaged. And, since the cargo consists of ten Class IV Cargo Walkers, the first to make it dirtside, it’s worth our while to go in after them. Questions?”

This time there was. The voice identified itself as Swango. and was clearly male, but I had no way of knowing which suit it belonged to. “Yeah, I’ve got a question. Why walk when we could ride?”

“Well, gee,” Dawkins said sarcastically, “I wonder. You don’t suppose it would have anything to do with those friggin’ boulders, do you? Or those god-damned rocks? You know, the ones in our way?”

“Oh,” Swango said self-consciously. “Sorry.”

“You certainly are,” Dawkins agreed. “Anyone else?”

I don’t know what came over me, but the fog cleared off long enough for a thought to surface, and the words popped out of their own accord. “What about oxygen, water, and food? Will we be resupplied?”

The Field Supervisor’s reply was more accurate than he knew. “Well, I’ll be damned, a mule with half a brain. The answer is no, we won’t. We have enough air, water, and food to reach the wreckage. Once there, we will take shelter in one of the remaining airtight compartments, resupply our suits, and recover the walkers. And here’s the good news, folks: once the walkers are up and running, we ride out.”

The supposedly good news left everyone silent. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a whole lot of things could and probably would go wrong, that the company had left us with practically no safety margin, and that Dawkins was standing in the same pile of shit we were. I thought about what he’d said earlier, about not kissing ass, and wondered if that explained why he had pulled such a rotten assignment.

“Alright,” the man in question said, “enough dorking around. Line up and draw your loads.”

The crawler remained where it was. Vapor outgassed into the thin atmosphere as a hatch slid open. The compartment was filled with a jumble of strange-looking equipment. Dawkins motioned us forward, grabbed what looked like a high-tech backpack from a row of similar packs, and handed it to the first person in line. I wondered why. If not supplies, what would we carry? The answer blew what was left of my mind. It quickly became apparent that our loads consisted of cyborgs! Walker Wonks, to be exact, specially engineered to pilot the huge machines, and more than a little weird.

Though human in the technical sense, the cyborgs looked like little more than gray metal suitcases to which shoulder straps and a waist belt had been attached. They had their own life support systems but were dependent on whoever was toting them for mobility and communications. Until they were united with their machines, that is, when they would take on super-human powers, and go to work on whatever task Marscorp had brought them here to do.

The line jerked to a halt, and a scuffle broke out. I missed the first part but saw the mule twist away from Dawkins. It was then that I recognized the greenie’s suit. I hadn’t been smart enough to wonder which side she was on, but the answer became obvious as she broadcast in the clear. “Resist the evil plan! Free the cyborgs from their devil bodies! Rise up and smite the…”

We didn’t get to hear the rest of the woman’s diatribe because Dawkins overrode her transmission. “I don’t have time for this shit. Carry the load or die.”

Silence ensued. Nobody moved. A woman stood next to me. I put my helmet next to hers. “What’s going on?”

“Dawkins cut her air supply.”

“He can do that?”

“You bet he can. Yours too. That’s why we do what he says. That and the fact that there’s no place to run to.”

I thanked her and pulled away. No wonder a single guard was sufficient. Our suits were rigged so he could control them. The corpies think of everything. The woman surrendered about a minute later. She was gasping for breath. “I’ll do what you say. Give me air!”

“A wise decision,” Dawkins said, doing whatever he did to restore the woman’s air supply. “Don’t do that again. We’ve got a long ways to go, and time equates to air, water, and food. Come on…hurry up.”

I received my cyborg two minutes later. The added weight was negligible thanks to the relatively low gravity, but the additional mass would take some getting used to. It felt as if the load was pulling me backwards and off-balance. I leaned forward to compensate.

A green indicator light appeared in my heads-up display as Dawkins shoved a jack into my external patch panel. I waited for my passenger to say something, but heard nothing beyond the hiss of an open channel. It seemed as if this particular cyborg was the antisocial type. Well, that was fine with me, since I needed what there was of my brain for other things. Like negotiating my way over the rock-strewn ground, for example.

I tongued a couple of pain tabs into my mouth and washed them down with a sip of recycled water. It tasted like what it had once been.

Once loaded, we set off in the direction of Olympus Mons, winding our way through a maze of hard-edged boulders, going where no one had gone before. Or so I assumed. It was a strange feeling after the humanity-packed cities of Earth, where you had the feeling that every corridor had been walked by thousands before you, everything you saw had been seen a million times, and “new” meant “disposable.”

But the thrill of trail-blazing soon gave way to renewed anxiety over Sasha’s whereabouts and the neverending task of placing one foot in front of the other. It was cold outside, minus 24 degrees F according to my helmet display, but I soon started to sweat. Turning my thermostat down helped a little, but the problem remained. Try as I might, I had a difficult time internalizing the fact that the sweat was inside rather than outside my high-tech skin. We had traveled about five miles by the time my passenger broke the silence. Her voice was synthetic, and sounded vaguely familiar, as if she’d modeled it on a holo star. “I’m sorry.”

I gauged the ledge ahead, decided I could make it thanks to the lower gravity, and jumped. Slow-motion dust geysered up and away from my boots. I checked the path and started after the mule ahead. “Norgleszap? I mean, sorry? Sorry about what?”

“About you having to drag my nonexistent ass cross country.”

I sidestepped a rock and laughed in spite of myself. “It isn’t your fault. Or I assume it isn’t, anyway.”

“No,” the voice said, “I’ve got an alibi. I was sitting in a crate aboard Roller Three when the shuttle crashed.”

“Sounds airtight,” I agreed politely. “Well, I sure hope you and the others know what you’re doing, or this is gonna be a one-way trip.”

“Oh, we know what we’re doing,” she said confidently. “That’s not the problem.”

“It isn’t?” I asked stupidly. “Then what is?”

“Why, the condition of the shuttle,” she answered calmly. “What if the shuttle went in hard? The walkers were in the main cargo bay. They could be spread all over the place.”

I skidded down the side of a ravine and tackled the other side. “But the ship’s artificial intelligence said the cargo is okay.”

“The ship’s artificial intelligence ‘thinks’ the cargo is okay,” my passenger corrected me. “But doesn’t really know, since it’s bolted into a panel somewhere.”