EPISODE ONE
–KNEE-DEEP IN THE DEAD–

PART ONE
–OMINOUS INTONES–

Mars looked like a real bastard of a planet.

Jack Ward had been given a view of the planet that had been slowly growing over the past two hours. It was starting to make him sick to his stomach, though he couldn't really figure out why. It was probably, he thought as he turned his view away from the window and inboard for the hundredth time, because this was his reward for doing the right thing. He gazed over the crowded, smelly cabin yet again and saw the same collection of sad sacks stuffed into the ship with him like sardines. There were fifteen of the poor bastards in there, himself included, and they were all Marines. Or that's what they were supposed to be, anyway.

He was going to Mars, and he knew what that meant.

He'd been sacrificed on the altar of big business, sacrificed to the great god in the neon sky: the Union Aerospace Corporation.

They all had.

For very different reasons, of course. Jack thought back over the last month and almost immediately turned away from it. What he'd experienced only filled him with disgust, and a harrowing kind of hopelessness. He began to look back out the window, they were actually going down through the outermost layers of Mars's atmosphere now, but instead he stopped and accidentally locked eyes with the kid sitting across from him.

"Almost there, man," he said, grinning. It was a nervous grin, the kind Jack had seen slapped on the pasty, pale faces of dozens, maybe hundreds, of kids too young to know what the fuck they were getting into.

"Yep," Jack replied.

He'd been stuck on this shuttle for almost two days now and holy shit was it getting old. He'd spent ten years in the United Marine Corps and it had taught him a lot of things. Patience was definitely one of those things, but Jesus Christ, even he had his limits. He was itching to get out of this seat, out of this shuttle and do something. Fucking anything. All around him, the shuttle began to tremble as it started the final descent towards the surface of Mars. Jack put his head against the headrest and closed his eyes.

He just wanted to shut off.

No thoughts, no emotions, just nothing.

Unfortunately, being a human being that actually gave a shit about things, namely his fellow man, that just wasn't really an option.

He kept his eyes closed as they continued to descend.

Their ship settled on a square of stainless steel that had been scrubbed and pitted by the bone-dry windstorms that regularly ravaged Mars. After settling on the support struts and turning the ship off, they'd been issued droning orders by a dead, electronic voice recorded who knew how long ago and shoved through who knew how many filters. Don't do this, don't do that, put on the pressure suits. They were all issued bland green pressure suits, no doubt built by the lowest bidder, and Jack took no comfort in the fact that they were all that stood between him and a hard, painful death in an atmosphere he couldn't breathe.

He and the kid, Jenkins, couldn't remember his first name, had talked a lot on the way there. Well, Jenkins had talked, Jack had listened and said as little as possible. It wasn't that he didn't like the kid, (okay, he was a little annoying), it was just that he wasn't in a talking mood, and he'd known too many like Jenkins, seen too many like him dead with limbs blown off or holes in their faces with their brains leaking out.

The only real quantum of solace he took from his present situation was that there should be basically no chance of anything like that happening up here on Mars. Shit, it wasn't like there were terrorists or insurgents or whatever the fuck the PR department was calling them these days way out here. No one had the funding to launch a full frontal attack on the UAC Mars Facility. Just a lot of boring shit up here, lots of patrolling and guard duty and not a whole lot else. Though...Jack frowned as he lined up with the others at the airlock. If that was true, then why did he keep coming across requests for more Marines in the Space Division?

The Space Division was basically the UAC's own private army, the governments of the world didn't have the time or resources to head out into space anymore, they were too busy fighting increasingly desperate wars with everyone who wasn't part of the United Nations...and that seemed to change by the week. Things like water, fuel, food...they were all getting kind of scarce, especially with goddamn eleven billion people all over the planet. So they fell all over themselves to cut deals with the UAC, who did have the cash flow to head out into the solar system and harvest brand new forms of energy and other resources.

Jack couldn't help but feel they were all selling their souls to the UAC.

So why were they constantly hungry for new meat? He knew they were expanding, all the goddamned commercials and infomercials and propaganda campaigns and all the other crap about new research facilities they were building out on Jupiter's moons and a space station over Venus and, in about ten or twenty years, mining operations on Saturn's moons and research outposts around Neptune and on Pluto. But they weren't expanding that rapidly...maybe they were just hedging their bets? Gathering as much manpower as possible for…

For what?

What were they preparing for?

It was his turn to go through the airlock. He got in and the door snapped closed behind him. Several clanging noises sounded and then there was a powerful hissing as the pressure inside the airlock was matched with exterior conditions, and, probably, atmosphere from outside was sucked in as oxygen was sucked out, preserving as much of it as possible. Oxygen was the most precious resource when you were anywhere but Earth. The noises grew farther and farther away, then ceased altogether. The outer door slid open.

A crimson world awaited his gaze.

Despite himself, despite everything he'd gone through, despite the horror of monotony he'd endured getting here, he was kind of stunned by the alien beauty of the place. Slowly, he stepped down the few metal stairs, his pressure boots clanging dully, looking around. They were marooned on a pitted, sooty, pockmarked steel square that glinted dully in the dim sunlight, surrounded by a sea of bloodred sand. Overhead, he could see an ugly yellow-brown sky that reminded him of melted butterscotch, broken by dark, distant mountain ranges.

The effect passed and left him feeling hollowed out, alone, and a little cold. Jack picked out Jenkins's boyish face among the eight others out here so far and moved slowly over to him, trying to give the impression that he happened to be drifting that way as opposed to intentionally going there. He came to stand by him.

"So...what'd you do?" Jenkins asked.

"What do you mean?" Jack replied, though he knew exactly what he meant.

"Everyone gets shipped out here because they're failures or because they made a mistake. And you don't seem like a failure."

"Thanks. I think. I disobeyed orders."

"Whoa, really? Why?"

Jack was quiet for a moment, letting himself remember it. Not all of it, but the broad strokes. "I was over in Keferistan, taking out the latest batch of insurgents that had cropped up over there. We had intel that they were using this old apartment building as a base, I was ordered to get to the high ground and mortar those fuckers back to the stone age. My squad got up on a hill, scoped the situation out and...my spotter noticed some civilians in the building. I asked for someone to confirm the situation, 'cause I wasn't going to blast a bunch of civilians to hell. My CO, some trumped-up jackass with more medals than experience, was screaming at me to just blast the fucking place. I didn't. Took a squad into the building. No insurgents, only civilians hiding out. Our intel was bad."

"So...they sent you here?" Jenkins asked, incredulous.

"Yeah. My CO has a daddy that's a Senator and an uncle that's a four star General. He raised a stink, some other superiors felt that this was the best compromise. Off the record, I was told I just had to do a rotation for a year out here, then I could get back to Earth."

"Well...I mean, at least there's that," Jenkins muttered. "Gee, that makes me sound like a fucking jackass by comparison."

"What'd you do?" Jack asked. He didn't add on the part where he wasn't sure if he even wanted to go back.

He laughed nervously and shrugged. "I was at a base over in Iraq. Got piss drunk one night. Got stupid. Set a box of flash-bangs off and burned down a building..."

"Wow," Jack replied.

"Yeah..."

Well, that made him laugh, on the inside at least.

"Ladies and gentlemen!" He looked over. A man was now among them in a blue pressure suit. Their pilot, he realized. "I've got orders from Sergeant Blackmore and you all have your first official assignment!" He walked over to one side of the ship and hit a button. A pair of huge panels began to unfold, revealing a cargo bay within. Jack heard the hum of a motor behind him, turned and saw a pair of flatbed trucks coming his way.

"Get the cargo from the ship onto the trucks!"

Jack looked into the cargo bay at the polished, gleaming silver crates, all of them stamped with the UAC logo.

He sighed softly.

The loneliness was back, so was the hopelessness, but this time it had a harsh new edge to it: despair. Jack looked out over the landscape as he was driven along, having hitched a ride on the back of one of the trucks with the others who didn't fit up in the cabin. Stupid, because if he fell off it would probably be easy to shatter his visor or get a rip in his suit, and then what would he do? But he found that he didn't quite care.

Being here like this, it felt like...a death sentence. Like exile. It was a horror that he had never faced before: failure from which there seemed to be no escape. It was like he'd been tried, found guilty, condemned, and killed...only he was still alive. Maybe he was dead. Maybe this was Hell, or Purgatory. It was sure close enough to what might pass for it.

"Everybody off!" the pilot called as the trucks rumbled to a halt.

Jack turned and looked at the base. Mars City. It loomed over them, made of the same pitted stainless steel material as the landing pad, intercut with airlocks and windows. The road they were taking in terminated before a huge airlock that no doubt led into the garage bays and motorpools where more bored or stupid Space Marines were waiting to unload the cargo. Space Marines. He was a Space Marine now.

What a joke.

Christ, all the way up to Sergeant, ten years in the military and he was a goddamned Space Marine. Busted back down to Private, like salt in the wound. He got off as the truck came to a complete halt and fell in line with the others. The pilot pointed them towards a more regular sized airlock up ahead and told them someone would be waiting inside for them. They moved up, single-file, and went into the airlock. Someone must have been running it because it slid open and a flat voice informed them to come inside three at a time.

Jack, Jenkins, and a female Marine he'd caught eyes with a couple times on the way out went inside. They were cycled through after some kind of blazing neon blue light briefly filled the airlock bay, a scan no doubt. On the other side was a receiving bay. Lockers lined both sides of the room and a frowning, buff man with a shaved head holding a PDA was waiting for them. He studied his PDA for a moment longer, then looked up.

"Pressure suits off, in the bin," he said in a listless, droning voice, pointing at a big, wheeled laundry bin. "Then through the door, end of the hall, through the next door and wait for Sergeant Blackmore," he added.

The three began to comply.

"What about our stuff?" Jenkins asked.

"You'll get it later," the buff Marine replied, sounding irritated.

Jenkins got the message and shut up. They stripped back down to their basic fatigues and were just leaving when the next batch came in and the man repeated his litany. They came into a chromed corridor where the UAC logo was stamped at regular, precise intervals every couple of feet. He imagined he was going to become extremely familiar with that logo: two pale yellow overlapping circles with an elongated dark tan triangle in the middle of them, inside of a dark tan square with pale yellow lettering beneath it reading UAC.

It unsettled him, sent an uncomfortable chill tinged with fear through him.

The three of them reached the door at the end of the hallway and as they approached it, it slid open, up into the ceiling, with a strange whooshing sound. Beyond was a large, open area where a great deal was going on. Jack, Jenkins, and the nameless Marine stood in an open space beyond the doorway, seemingly out of the way of the general foot traffic. Jack studied the area while he waited for all the others to file in.

The periphery of the room was busy. He spied a couple of techs squatting down over what looked like a little gun-drone, sparks spitting from their tools as they worked on it. Several more men and women were scattered around the room, on guard duty. Another pair of men sat behind a desk, looking bored. A pair of techs had a panel off in the far corner and were dealing with whatever machinery was hidden behind it.

Occasionally, the overhead lights would dim and come back.

While he waited, Jack found his eyes drifting over to the other Marine. The one he wished he'd been sitting next to instead. He didn't know her name, but when he'd first seen her, there had been a kind of instant attraction. It was more than lust, he was familiar enough with it to know that much. Not love, he didn't believe in love at first sight, it was a crap idea, but there was definitely something there and part of him was telling himself how stupid it was to even be thinking about this. But then another part quite rationally pointed out: well, what the fuck else did he have to look forward to anymore? A relationship, even one of casual sex, would help take his mind off of how absolutely fucked up his life had become lately.

She was beautiful in a rough kind of way.

She had a thin tan that would fade probably pretty soon, since none of them would be getting any sun for quite awhile. Her face was narrow, kind of angular, her brunette hair short, just long enough to be pulled into a tiny ponytail, which it was. She looked...competent, and maybe rough around the edges, and her green eyes were sharp, full of that no-nonsense, no-bullshit focus that all good soldiers had.

And she looked really fucking good in her uniform.

She suddenly looked over at him, like she could feel his eyes on her, and she probably could. He knew that women tended to have better peripheral vision than men. She locked eyes with him and damn if her gaze wasn't intense. He saw something there, but what? Anger? No, not anger, something else. No, it was the kind of look he saw in the faces of soldiers getting ready to take on a challenge, and looking forward to it.

Well what the hell did that mean?

"Attention!"

By then, all of the Marines from the transport had gathered in a loose formation in front of the airlock bay. A door across from them had opened and now a great bear of a man filled it, standing ramrod straight, decked out in combat armor and uniform, all polished and pressed within an inch of its life. He was big, bald, and very well-built, and was already sporting that dead pale pallor that indicated he'd been up here for quite awhile, away from the sun.

"Single file facing me!" he snapped.

As Jack stepped to, falling in and standing rigidly at attention, his body reacting almost automatically to the command, he noticed that everyone else in the room stood more sharply at attention and all conversations came to a dead stop. The newly christened Space Marines fell in to a single file that almost ran the width of the room. His hands clasped tightly behind his back, this new man, their new CO no doubt, marched into the room, frowning intensely, scrutinizing them all. As he approached, Jack suddenly found himself wondering what this man had done to deserve getting exiled to Mars City.

Probably not the best first topic of conversation.

"Soldiers!" he snapped, moving to one end of the line and slowly working his way down it as he spoke. He stopped and stared into the eyes of each man and woman there, as if measuring them. "My name is Sergeant Blackmore. You are all now Privates in the Space Marines! I don't know what kind of bullshit you might have heard on the way up here, but we do not run a shoddy operation here on Mars, or on Phobos, or Deimos, or anywhere else in this system! I expect and demand excellence. I expect and demand no mistakes. We are in a dangerous environment, soldiers! No mistakes! Mistakes, nobody goes home!"

With this apocalyptic pronouncement, he finished his long, measured walk and moved to stand in front of them, arms still behind his back, back still ramrod straight.

"You all have forty five minutes to get your gear, find your dormitories and settle in, then you are to report for your first day on the job. PDAs will be waiting for you in your rooms. Do not lose them, do not loan them out, do not fuck with them. They are crucial to security here in Mars City and expensive to replace and repair, and make no mistake, that will come out of your pay. Now start going up to the desk here and these men will give you your room numbers. Take a moment to thank the UAC that you will be sharing a room only with one individual instead of fifty. Remember, forty five minutes and I expect every last one of you to be on time!"

With that, he turned and left the room.

What a great start to his life and career here among the stars.

Jack joined the others as he headed up to the desk.

His roommate was Jenkins.

Because, of course, why not?

He didn't actually hate the kid, or even bear him any ill will, he was just...annoying. They'd been assigned their room and given directions. He'd caught a glance from the beautiful woman without a name, (to him at least), and she looked sorry for him. After navigating the complex of corridors that made up the dormitories for the Marines, he and Jenkins found their room. It was longer than it was wide and divided pretty much perfectly down the middle. Standing at the head of the room, in the open doorway, you would see mirror images to your left and right. The furniture started with blank metal desks that held a powered down PDA, then a dresser with four drawers, and finally a single-wide bed, made up, neat and pressed.

Then, at the other end of the room, another doorway that led into the bathroom. Their bags were on their beds.

"I call shower!" Jenkins said, making a beeline for the bathroom, snagging his bag on the way in and closing the door behind him.

Jack reached out and slowly closed their front door, feeling the weight of everything that had happened so far coming down on him.

Suddenly, he wasn't entirely sure he had the will to endure this latest development in his life.