Read The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN for Free Online Page B

with adequate resources, they’ve probably lost
all means to get anyone down here—they’d be stuck playing the same
waiting game we are.”
    Lisa takes a long moment to let Doctor Ryder process
her husband’s possible fate once more. I’m glad I had her do this
part of the briefing. I know I come across as stone-killer robot
cold, especially when I’m angry. Matthew masks his rage with his
bitter humor. Anton is just too young—despite how brilliant and
dedicated he is, he can’t help but sound like a green kid,
especially when he’s talking in front of a big group. And Rick—who
would be my next best choice to deliver technical bad news—still
hasn’t been released from bed rest.
    Ryder looks like she really wants to leave the room,
wants to go back to Medical and re-bury herself in her work, stay
distracted until we actually know what happened outside of our
bunker home. But she stays put.
    Lisa chews her lip and moves on. “We also know that
the interplanetary shuttles and freighters in orbit were at least
critically damaged. Hopefully, they managed to abandon ships and
get picked up by the craft we sent up their way when the shooting
started. With luck, they sheltered on the surface, somewhere well
away from all the detonations.”
    “Which means well away from us,” Doctor Halley
considers why no one’s come back here: this whole region got nuked,
and probably geologically destabilized—we’re in the biggest canyon
on two planets, and it wasn’t that stable before it got pounded
with fission warheads. (As far as we know, there could be a
kilometer of rock over our heads.) If our pilots gathered up
survivors and brought them down to the surface, they’d land far
away from here, and use their remaining fuel for power while they
waited the months it would take for Earthside to send help.
    (And that would partially explain the lack of
contact: If everyone left is in survival-mode for the long stretch,
no one has resources to do outreach.)
    Lisa has to stop then and catch her breath, and I can
finally hear how weak she probably feels. She only meets my eyes
for a second, enough to remind me I have no right to give a shit
about her anymore as long as she can do her job, and then she gets
rolling again:
    “Beyond that, if both Phobos and the orbital dock
were out, then anything that was inbound from Earth wouldn’t be
able to stop and offload. Or refuel. Now I know there are
contingencies worked out for emergencies like this, ways inbound
shuttles can make a low-fuel slingshot and get back to Earth by the
skin of their teeth. But that depends on whether or not the
incoming ships were still maintaining those contingencies, or if
they’d gotten complacent with the regs. Even if they were careful
and hit the return maneuver right on, getting home is still far
from assured.”
    “A lot of the corporate supply ships were pushing
it,” Matthew considers grimly, “trying to milk the dollar, flying
loaded past safety specs. I doubt they were still thinking in terms
of ‘What if all the docks aren’t there when we show up?’”
    “So where would that put a relief mission?” I ask for
the bottom line, though I’ve been crunching the numbers myself in
my rehab haze.
    “Earthside would probably have to put it together
from scratch, new ships and all,” Staley calculates. “I’m sure
they’d make it top priority, but they’d also be expecting the worst
on arrival. Telescopes—and any survivors’ reports—would show them
how bad we got pounded. And they’d know we wouldn’t be able to
support them on this end, so they’d have to put together a mission
that could make it both ways and expect to carry thousands of
evacuees—a lot of them badly injured—on the return trip.”
    “I doubt they’d be thinking about evacuating the
wounded,” Halley interrupts. “The return flight is too long to be
an ambulance ride, even with hibernation. They’d try to drop us a
hospital unit, treat the bad cases