I’ll put up with being hungry, until we’re in places where the cat sits on the mat and has a bowl of milk.
A Murder of Crows
by Alex Hernandez
"I can’t see anything through all this red shit!" Tactical Officer Anton Hershkovitz said staring out the window, then back at a false-color mock up of the landscape. The meteorological vulgarism broke the long silence of their flight.
"Good thing you’re not the pilot." First Pilot Ameera el-Ayeb's words were a few degrees lower than the thin, frigid air outside their S-8 glider. She forced her eyes on the instrumentation and not out the grimy windows as she maneuvered the craft through the Martian stratosphere. Hersh knew that, above all, she avoided looking at him.
They were shoved in next to each other, shoulders chafing, but the distance between them felt great. He had intended to cut her loose weeks ago. His deployment was ending and he didn't need any messy, emotional performances. Then they were thrown together on this reconnaissance mission to find the last garrison of the avian humans left on Mars. To make things worse, this immense haboob had mysteriously blown over the Tharsis region. Now he was the one in a huff.
"Look, Hersh, if you want to end whatever it is we have, all you have to do is say so. We're both adults," she tossed out the remark like a grenade.
"This isn’t right. There shouldn’t be a dust storm of this magnitude at this time of year," he said ignoring her statement. His job was easy compared to Ameera’s. He basically had to scan everything within the area of operations and squirt it back to their battleship, The Harpy Hunter, in orbit, and if there was trouble, he manned the guns while she got them the hell out, which gave him too much free time to obsess over whatever it is they have.
"Fine," she sighed. "Captain Morales agrees with you. He thinks this storm is being artificially generated, which is why he sent us personally. I mean, we are the supreme recon officers aboard the Harpy Hunter." Against all regulation, they’d been enjoying a casual relationship for almost a year, and despite their mutual agreement to keep it simple, it had gotten complicated. Now, he couldn't bring himself to just break up with her, so instead he acted aloof and miserable. Am I waiting for her to make the final, decisive move?
The long-winged plane pushed deeper into the dry, autumnal gloom. The roiling sky mirrored his mood. "Yeah, supremely disposable," Hersh said, trying to get out of his funk. He didn’t look away from his dashboard readouts, but he could tell that she was smiling slightly and it made him smile too. The scent of her jasmine attar drifted in the small, musty cockpit. It was too easy to love her. "You know my deployment is ending, right? I'm probably going back to Florida."
"I’m taking us a little closer to the Valles Marineris canyon system, the dust seems to be thinner down in the troposphere."
"Which is rather suspicious, don’t you think?"
"You think too much. Can't you just relax?"
He didn't know if she was referring to his going back home or the bizarre weather. He chose to talk about the weather. "All I’m saying is that Candor Chasma is the last of the harpy strongholds on Mars. It should’ve been easy to shatter the half-cylinder that caps it and let out the air, but it’s made of incredibly tough diamond; technology that no other harpy settlement in the Solar System has. Now this hemisphere-shrouding dust storm inexplicably appears. Something’s wrong."
When plasma engines were developed, Earth’s provincial population set out and met their sick, hybridized neighbors in the Solar System and they were horrified. It was as if the usual uncanny valley had been rent even wider by some sudden tectonic schism; intelligent machines sunbathing on Mercury like glistening barnacles, dinosaur-freaks roosting on the Moon, Mars, and Titan, but now, after ten years of fighting and forced treatment camps, the Hominocracy Movement of Earth was taking back the Solar System.
"Um, Hersh, am I reading my sensors correctly?"
He had looked away while he ranted and when he looked back at his screen it was as if the hard data was answering him directly, telling him that all his deranged theories were not only correct, but naively insufficient. "What the fuck is that?"
"It could be interference from the all the electrostatically charged particles in the air, but it looks like a massive structure running the length of the rift, from Corprates Chasma to Lus."
"That would make this object more than three thousand kilometers long and almost two hundred kilometers wide!"
"I’m going to do a flyby. Get all our sensors and cameras on it. Can we beam the info to the Harpy Hunter?"