The Mars Shock by Felix R. Savage

made her herself.
    Eh, hell with him.
    She looked down at the locket in her grippers. She’d crushed it. “Whoops,” she said lightly. “Guess I don’t know my own strength. You should tell your guys to pick up some more of these, if there are any down there.”
    “I’m not taking that shit back to Alpha Base,” Hawker said.
    A procession of Chinese grunts climbed out of the hatch, carrying dead muppets, stacks of ceremonial blue jeans, and some wicked-looking machetes.
    “Wow,” Hawker said. “Machetes.”
    “For killing the sacrificial victims whose skulls ended up on the ramp,” Colden said. “I’ve changed my mind. The muppets we killed probably were sacrificial victims. That would be why they made them dress up in NASA gear. Maybe they were about to be killed when the Phobos impacts struck, and they’ve been stuck here ever since.”
    “And then we came along and sacrificed them to the noble cause of winning this war a little faster,” Hawker said. “Heh, heh.”
    All this time, Drudge had been messing with the telescope. The gouges he’d made in the roof, combined with the weight of the soldiers in their combat suits, and possibly prior weakening by the impact of the KKV a few streets over, suddenly cracked the regocrete right through. Drudge’s phavatar, the telescope, a chunk of roof, and the grunts who’d been standing on it fell down into the chamber.
    “Fuck!” Hawker shouted.
    The chunk of roof had landed on the scale model, crushing the glass case and its contents to smithereens. No one would be taking that home now.
    Colden edged back from the hole in the roof, afraid her phavatar’s weight might crumble it further.
    “Sir!” A panicked voice cut across the babble of swears on the public channel. “Sir, I’ve got a suit breach! My leg’s all torn up!”
    “Aw, Ustinov, man, are you sure?”
    “Drudge, assist that casualty!” Colden said. Here was Drudge’s chance to redeem himself after smashing the scale model.
    “On it, ma’am!” Drudge’s phavatar soared out of the hole in a standing leap—a feat impossible for a human, even in Mars’s gravity—with the injured private in his arms. Hitting the roof, he stumbled. Colden grabbed the casualty from him. The private’s right leg was a mess. The chunk of roof must’ve hit him, gashing his supposedly impermeable outer garment, and his actual spacesuit, from knee to boot-top. Dust already coated the exposed flesh and the sluggishly welling blood. Colden prepared to rush him down the ramp to the buggies.
    “Do it, Ustinov,” Hawker rasped.
    At that moment, Sophie Gilchrist line-of-sighted Colden. “Hey, Jen. This just turned into a great day.”
    “Sarcasm implied, I take it,” Colden said grimly. Hawker got in her way, preventing her from reaching the ramp. Sidling around him, she said, “We just smashed a unique PLAN monument to shit. What about you?”
    “Geoff’s team found some muppets hiding in the farm. Like maybe ten survivors all huddled up together.”
    “So what’s the problem?” She switched channels again. “Hawker, could you please get out of my way?”
    “Don’t be a wimp, Ustinov,” Hawker ordered, dancing on his feet to stay in front of her, his gloves raised as if to push her back.
    “They’re all warblers is what,” Gilchrist said. “Every motherloving one of them, singing away like a fucking choir.”
    “Oh, great. What’s Captain Saroyan gonna do?”
    “They’re discussing that right now, but I think we’re gonna end up taking them home. Unless … I wondered if you could get Captain Hawker to talk to him? I don’t want to lose our exercise area. If I don’t get to run, I get seriously depressed.”
    Each MFOB had a so-called Detainment Module. They were gymnasium-sized, pressurized, and all of them were still empty of muppets, to the best of Colden’s knowledge. MFOB personnel used them to play games and hold dance parties. You could even run laps in there, if you were into