Aiko hefts herself over the tunnel with an ease he can only envy. It takes a few tries before Mig can stand upright. He leans against the tunnel wall and waits for the pain to become bearable.

"You're not going to tell me what it is?"

She doesn't reply. The camouflage on her XS-9 turns a translucent grey color. It makes her easy to spot, but she still moves at a tremendous pace. He guards his chest and climbs over the tunnel's dusty arch like a toddler. She waits for him to catch up, then begins walking again. Wind and dust blur the horizon.

"We're on CME watch," Olivia says. "If you're not in by tonight, you'll be dosed to death."

He glances at his rem count. It's at a quarter of his daily allowance. A coronal mass ejection will fry everything without radiation shielding. Mars has virtually no magnetosphere. Nothing can protect them but their suits. He straightens up despite the pain, coughs, and keeps walking.

The factory looms overhead. Regolith streams through cracks and rusted metal. A large industrial airlock sits open like a mouth. Above it reads Shanidar Station. Flags of old nation-states line the entrance. Aiko descends the small hill of regolith that build up in front of it and disappears into darkness. He thumbs his scope and follows her in. The interior immediately fades into view. Regolith half-fills the airlock itself. The inner doors are rusted open. He keeps his M189 at a low angle and steps into the factory proper.

There's an impression of space. It's too large for his IHD to see it all. The walls are badly rusted. Orange-red stains rivulet to the floor like rain. A metal sign leans against the near wall. Someone cared enough to clean it. The top half has been rusted away. Only a pair of feet are visible above bright red font. Make Mars green! Metal squeals and groans in the wind. When he looks closer, he can see bullet holes. Scorch marks. Black patches of desiccated blood are all over the floor.

"How many?"

"Twelve," Aiko says and walks towards the far end of the room. "The station is now secure."

A crumbling stairwell hides an old storage room. When he steps to the right, two warm bodies immediately flare in his vision. It's a clever position. Anyone peering in from the airlock wouldn't see them. He recognizes the faint angular lines of a PEPT. A Portable Emergency Pressure Tent, the larger version of a PEPS. It has some passive shielding, but not a lot. Certainly not enough to protect them from a CME.

"The pilots."

Aiko nods, which is an awkward gesture in a large stealth suit. "I need to bring them in quickly and quietly. If you do this, I will practice restraint with what I know. Do you accept these terms?"

He watches the two incandescent silhouette stir inside the tent. They probably monitor all the local frequencies. Olivia's silence is so loud, it's distracting. He looks back towards the airlock. A jagged piece of sky is still visible above the stairs.

"We'll have to hurry."

She cocks her head and the glowing shapes inside the PEPT immediately start to move. She's speaking on an encrypted channel. The body language is a give away. They're trained to keep still in case enemy combatants are watching them. This is a message: he's the odd man out here. The pilots lay down at the far end of the tent and wait. He tentatively bends down and grasps one of the PEPT's handles. It draws a long abrasion-resistant chord and collapses the tent to a quarter of its size. The hooks deployed underneath automatically retract and the whole thing becomes a sled.

Aiko walks past him towards the airlock.

He watches her go. "You contracted an old Martian to haul live cargo?"

"You are not a Martian and 51 years is barely middle-aged." She glances back at him, then continues walking. "Your weakness comes from your choices."

It isn't a contract. It's penance. He sets his jaw and starts pulling the PEPT out of its corner. The weight is substantial, but not impossible. It's the pain that nearly brings him down. He clutches his chest and breaths as deep as he can without coughing. If he thinks about how long the journey is, he'll defeat himself before he starts.The deep, bruising ache below his sternum throbs in time with his pulse. Aiko waits at the top of the dune, a black silhouette cut from brown sky.

The wind starts to blow dust in droves, which is abrasive in its own right and mostly composed of iron oxide. Any exposed electric current will draw it in like a magnet. It also shifts under him. He struggles to pull the PEPT up the dune. His boots sink into the regolith, which slides out from under him, and the strain pulls across his chest. When he crests the dune, the rest of Shanidar Station stretches out towards the horizon. The landscape is already shifting. He steps aside and the tent slides down the dune. Aiko simply isn't there anymore. The wind covers any tracks, but she's close by. He follows the original map that overlaps the ruins.

Olivia's voice abruptly fills his ears. "A dust bus just pinged the spaceport tower."

Mig stops. "Blue caps?"

"No data plates," she says. "It's heading your way."

Dust busses are a descendant of the original rovers. They're fast, low to the ground, and hard to detect. Good for short range ambushes and smuggling. Skimmers use them all the time. He taps his comm to make two clicks and scans the horizon. The wind starts to whip regolith high into the air.

His IHD picks up a small cone of heat through the dust. Mig drops the PEPT's handle and sinks to one knee. The cone grows larger and sharpens into a low-slung square surrounded by rainbows of different temperatures. Its wire tires nearly glide over the regolith. No markings are visible, at this range and in this light, but markings aren't necessary. Ellie doesn't do anything half-way.

He hears a few clicks. They aren't part of martian radio etiquette, but the pattern is familiar. It's RMC: Restricted Morse Code. A holdover used by Earth's military. Memories percolate slowly. He hasn't heard it in nearly 30 years.

. — .

Ready?

Mig looks at the PEPT, then peers through the scope of his rifle. The dust bus is near enough for visible light. He can make out three people in it. The suits are familiar. Ellie, Black, and Turza. That's life on Mars. Less than 500,000 people live in small oases of air scattered around the planet. Most know each other, many are related, all are desperate. Yesterday's friends become today's marks.

It's tempting to dump the PEPT and let them hack each other up. He taps his trigger guard. One bad call is all it takes to destroy a hard-won reputation. Every merc in the Rust relies on their reputation for work, especially when trying to woo blue caps and their lucrative contracts. He sets his jaw and responds over comm.

. — .

The dust bus nears Shanidar Station's outer complex. Ellie's no fool. Her ride has heavy alloy plating. They couldn't get away with that on Earth, but lower gravity opens up new possibilities. A quiet rasp creeps into his ear. It starts to beat like a heart. He recognizes it immediately. It's a ScramShield. A sphere of interference that kills the electronics in smart weapons like suit-killers or the projectiles off an AW220. No guidance, no trigger, nothing. Martians started making them nearly 30 years ago and they've been in use ever since. A countermeasure that Earth military still can't counter.

A long, low beep suddenly blares in his ear. It's ratty, even though it's bouncing off the spaceport tower.

A woman's cool, pre-recorded voice starts speaking. "This is the Emergency Alert System. The Space Weather Centre has issued a CME warning. A coronal mass ejection is expected to make planetfall by 6 p.m. Coordinated Mars Time. All zones must evacuate to A-1-1 shielded habitats immediately."

The eerie wail of a civil defense siren rises and falls over comm. Two thoughts hit Mig at once. The first: the only place in New Shanidar with A-1-1 shielding is the Blue. The second: the Emergency Alert System pings all nearby receivers. They're being lit up for anyone to see.

Mig switches to the encrypted channel. "Is it real?"

"Yes," Olivia says. Her voice is pocked and garbled. "I'm going to lose signal. Blue caps are moving their satellites."

"Get Azizi and Mbita and get into the Blue before they shut the doors."

"I'll stay as long as I can."

The dust bus veers towards him. He must be the nearest ping.

"Stay alive, Olive."

"You stay alive," she retorts, "if you want to keep your promise."

The anger in her voice is expected. It's the powerlessness underneath that fills Mig with shame. He tries to swallow it down, then switches to open comm. "Ellie."

No response.

"We're all going to die if we do this now." He waits for the emergency message to repeat. Still nothing. "I fucked up. I mean I really fucked up and I don't know if I can make it right. But I don't want to die before trying."

"I told you, Mig." Ellie's voice is calm despite the crackling signal. "I want my gun back in perfection condition."

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A/N: What??? I know. It surprised me, too. I've been slowly pecking away at all these stories (yes, including Lacunae) but my muse decided today was the day for The Rust. I don't even know.

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