Funny thing about the sun from Mars; it’s white. It looks white from Earth, sure - but there’s a yellow tinge to it if you look close, a certain golden aura that emanates through the atmosphere and onto the land below. Sam tells me that it’s white here due to certain elements present in the Martian atmosphere that I won’t try and name - science was never my strong suit, and once I realized that her explanation was veering, as always, to the scientific, I stopped paying attention. Mostly, the shift in coloration is just .. different. Landscapes and structures don’t look how they should look, how they would look back on home. It’s funny, the things you miss.
But today, I am thankful for a white Sol. The incandescent beams shine through red clouds and red dirt and red hills, lending a certain, perhaps appropriate, clinical air to the Eos Administrative Building. Nothing on earth could look so pristine, so clean, so sterile - not even the most heavily-scrubbed and brightly-lit operating rooms in the hospitals back home looked so clean as do the EDF buildings on Mars. Sam tells me that this, again, is due to specific elements found in the atmosphere - but I think it’s something more.
Only wanton greed and overpowering capitalism could permit such a colorless structure, only men - creatures, really - obsessed with objectivism could allow for such lifeless objects to decorate their world. Decorate? Pah. Their buildings scar these red hills, they dominate the landscape even sitting so far below the towering mountains that dwarf them. As much as I may have once found Mars to be alien, Mars finds their ivory presence to be far moreso - and far more unwelcome than ever was I to Mars.
The EDF architects’ rejection of life only makes my work easier, makes it easier to justify what I’ve set out to do. Makes it easier to look to their soldiers as drones, as the Martians call them, make it easier to exterminate them like a swarm of robotic ants. It makes it easier to ignore that, underneath all of that powered armor, that they’re human - that back on Earth, most of them have wives, maybe families of their own. But it doesn’t matter. Here, they are white, bright white, and Mother Mars does not permit such ivoried atrocities to consider themselves men like you and I.
Soon, very soon now, I will detonate the triggered explosives rigged to the foundation of the EDF Administration Building. Sam is sitting this one out and remains incommunicado - “The civilians,” she said, “you’ll kill them just the same - they’re innocent. They’re Martians!” She wanted no part in this. I don’t blame her. Sam’s no soldier. She’s no bleeding-heart, either, usually. I’ve no doubt she’s killed by way of collateral damage her share of civilians, and I told her as much. “It wasn’t like this,” she said, “those couldn’t be avoided. You don’t even need to destroy this building, and most certainly not during the day, not when the bureaucrats will be there.”
Sam, I think, lacks the real will to win this war.
Which I find funny, as it was her and the captain that co-opted me into this fight. I wanted nothing to do with it - I only wanted to mine with my brother. Put some money back, buy my way back home, start a family maybe. I’d thought about buying a bit of land from the Terran government, getting a small farm going, just enough for myself. Then the world could just leave me the hell alone. Things didn’t turn out that way, though.
I don’t know why they pushed me - conscripted me, really - into their fight. They didn’t know me. My brother, Daniel, now he - he I understood. He was always a firebrand, fighting for some cause or another, never able to keep his damn head down. And now he was dead for it. Daniel, like most of the Red Faction, are hot steel. They glow red and bright and true with the justice of whatever cause they rally behind, but they’re malleable, pliable. Their emotions govern them, enslave them. One moment, they’re tearing into an EDF-held village, shooting at seemingly random until the EDF have been purged. The next moment, they’re weeping over the spilt milk of civilian deaths, especially the ones they cause, berating each other for not being careful enough in their death-dealings.
Me, I’m cold steel. Watching Daniel get gunned down for what seemed a minor indiscretion barely registered, and civilian casualties never bother me. Not that I didn’t care about my brother - nothing could be further from the truth - but I assumed that he had it coming, assumed that because I was new to Mars that they’d leave me alone. But then, firebrands almost always have it coming. I fought the EDF initially only because it was a matter of survival; the Red Faction was firing from one side and the EDF the other, and I was forced to choose. Poor decision making process or not, nobody can say that I’m not loyal - to memory, at least. It’s funny though, the way I’ve become acclimated to the white sun, to the red hills and dirt. I’ve never felt a greater loyalty to anything in my life than I do to Mother Mars at this very moment, and - here’s the funny part - I have no idea why. I’d have fought against the EDF in my own way regardless, but this .. this fervent dedication, this loyalty, this .. zealotry, this I do not understand.
Off in the distant west, the loud crack of a sniper rifle rings out, heralding the first EDF sentry kill of the morning. There will surely be more in the hours to come, as offensives are planned for multiple districts across the EDF-held territory. Me though, I’m alone - I prefer it this way. Gives me time to think, analyze, understand - lets me move at my own pace, make sure things get done correctly. I might be going crazy, and what’s damning is that I know it, but I’ll be thrice-damned if I don’t slip down that spiral on my own terms. On terms of well-timed explosives, shining gold in the white morning light.
Sam doesn’t understand what it means to go to war. Sam doesn’t understand that it isn’t merely the Red Faction vs. the EDF, like it was some sort of video game or early 21st century war. Sam doesn’t understand that for Mother Mars to survive, to breathe, to live, then the EDF and their holdings must be purged from the planet. Sam doesn’t understand what it means to bring total war upon an enemy.
But that’s why they’ve kept me around, I think - let the offworlder get his hands covered in blood, let the outsider stain his soul with Martian blood. That’s fine with me. Mother Mars asks this of me, and because she has promised to be good to me, for Mother Mars will I do this, and I will cry no regrets nor speak of bitterness.
When the explosives tear through the building, the orange flames licking the orange sky, not everyone inside will die. They never do. Some get lucky, and by chance place between themselves concrete or steel barriers and the focal points of explosions. Some, inexplicably, will be thrown from the high-rise glass windows to the red earth below and, inexplicably, will survive the impact. Some, simply, will have chosen an opportune time to take a lunch break on the nearby boulevard. I’ve begun to consider them the least fortunate and that it would have been better for them to have died, instantly, in the initial explosion, as they are the ones that will be the first among the survivors to die. They will be terribly aware that a great catastrophe has occured, and fear will grip them - but only until the moment I close the distance between us, and then they will know nothing. What Sam doesn’t know - what I won’t tell her - is that when the red dust begins to settle, I will always be standing amongst the survivors, steel-plated sledgehammer in hand.
I do not relish in the killing. I do not enjoy planting round after round into the spinal column of fleeing survivors, whom run as though I were a great devil, their face a contorted and twisted portrait of abject terror. I do not enjoy knowing that all of this - the execution of the crippled living by way of hammer, the smashing of skulls and spines and hands and legs - is recorded by EDF cameras, beaming the grim footage back to EDF Central Command. I do not enjoy staining the sacred red earth of Mother Mars with the foul and stinking red blood of humans. I do not enjoy that my actions have made me a sociopath.
But what I am is a realist, a believer, a soldier; a mechanic will full knowledge of the tools and machinations of making total war upon an enemy. Fear .. fear is one of the greatest of these tools. It is this tool that softens the enemy, makes them terrified, makes them give ground when they see the grim silhouette of Alec Mason sprinting towards them, sledgehammer clenched-in-fist. It is through this tool that I, and I alone, will not merely drive the EDF from Mother Mars, but beat it into the ground, annihilate it until their biological elements have mixxed into the red dirt of Mars, until the stain of greed and capitalism has been wiped clean from this red planet.
But before all of this, one thing remains: a button must first be pressed.
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