Bud's eyes snapped open, his neural processors instantly alert. Jamie's sparse room came into focus, the first rays of Martian dawn filtering through the narrow window. Actually, it was artificial sunlight from a projector screen above the bed. They were too deep within the Academy for windows.
A notification blinked in Bud's peripheral vision—a response to the message he'd sent Laz the night before, received while he was exploring the hidden corridor.
With a mix of anticipation and dread, Bud accessed the message. The reply was characteristically nonchalant: "No problem, old friend. In fact, I've booked a dinner with several Academy instructors for tonight. Quite looking forward to it!"
Bud's heart sank. He couldn't believe Laz would be so foolish. Well, actually, he could believe it. He’d been worried about precisely that. Every interaction with the other instructors was a risk. And a dinner? The possibilities for disaster were endless.
And there was more. Laz had added a postscript: "Oh, and Patricia sent an encrypted message. She'll be returning from in two days, expecting an update on our progress. Exciting times, eh?"
Panic surged through Bud. He needed to get to Laz immediately, somehow contain the situation before it spiraled completely out of control. It was entirely possible he was already in prison. He was halfway to the door when Jamie's voice stopped him cold.
"We have a training exercise in twenty minutes." The cadet was already dressed and gathering his gear. "It's off-site. We need to leave now."
Bud searched for an excuse to skip the exercise. But what could he say? He couldn't reveal anything about Laz, and what possible errand could a cysniffer have that would take precedence over its handler's orders? Reluctantly, Bud fell into step beside Jamie, stomach churning, head pounding with anxiety. As they exited the room together, Jamie gave no sign of their interaction the night prior. Bud did his best to ignore the possibility that he could be following the cadet straight into a trap.
*
The derelict apartment complex looming before them was a crumbling relic of Mars's early colonization days, abandoned completely since the Purge. The other students and their cysniffers were already gathered, the air thick with nervous excitement. As they approached, Bud noticed the sideways glances and poorly concealed snickers directed at Jamie—and at himself.
"Look who finally showed up," one cadet jeered. "Jamie and his defective mutt."
Jamie's jaw clenched, but he said nothing. Bud barely held back a growl, and wished dearly that he could snap his jaws at the jeering cadet’s ankles.
The colonel's sharp voice cut through the chatter. "Attention!"
The group snapped to order, even the cysniffers sitting at rigid attention. Bud mimicked their posture, hyper-aware of every movement.
"Today's exercise will test your ability to utilize your cysniffer's olfactory sensors," the colonel announced. "I've hidden a small vial of android synfuel somewhere in this complex. The first team to locate it wins a special prize—dinner with the officer corps of the city’s Cysniffer Battalion."
A ripple of excitement passed through the group. All except Jamie, who remained impassive. Bud, however, joined in the others’ enthusiasm. A dinner with high-ranking officers could be the perfect opportunity to acquire the credentials needed to access the hidden corridor’s restricted area.
"You have one hour," the colonel barked. "Begin!"
As the other teams rushed off, Bud made a split-second decision. He activated the low-grade EMP he'd been carrying. Nearly in unison, the cysniffers began stuttering about, looking this way and that, obviously disoriented. The colonel seemed to assume it was due to a lack of experience from the cadets and not some intentional sabotage, and began snapping out reprimands that were thinly veiled as words of encouragement. Under most other circumstances, it would be terribly obvious that someone had purposefully meddled with the cysniffers, and Bud made note never to use the EMP again except under the most dire of circumstances. Still, he took advantage of the ensuing confusion, nudging Jamie deeper into the complex.
"This way," Bud said through Jamie’s earpiece, his enhanced senses already picking up traces of the synfuel's distinct odor.
The cadet hesitated for a moment, surprise flickering across his face. Then, with a quick glance at the other cadets, most of whom were still either struggling with their cysniffers or blanching under the colonel’s remonstrations, he followed Bud's lead.
They wove through decaying hallways, dust and debris crunching beneath their feet. Bud's mind was divided—one part focused on tracking the synfuel, another running calculations on how to use this situation to their advantage, and yet another worrying about Laz and the impending dinner disaster.
"How are you doing this?" Jamie whispered as they climbed a crumbling staircase. "The other cysniffers seem completely lost."
Bud pondered a response, eventually deciding silence was best. Jamie's eyes narrowed, but then he frowned, shoulders sagging.
“Oh. So you don’t know where you’re going, then?”
Bud huffed—a sound an ordinary cysniffer probably couldn’t make—and carried on without reply. Jamie followed after him, clearly reluctant. They emerged onto a floor that had partially collapsed, creating a treacherous maze of twisted metal and broken concrete.
"Be careful," Bud warned. "This level's structurally unsound."
They attempted to pick their way across the debris field, but it was no use. The synfuel wasn’t more than a hundred yards away, but they’d never reach it this way. With a frustrated growl that Bud was careful not to translate through Jamie’s earpiece, they backtracked back down the stairs.
As they descended, Bud decided to probe Jamie's thoughts. He’d had plenty of opportunity to report Bud’s behavior and hadn’t, so it seemed a safe enough. "Why weren't you excited about the possibility of dinner with the officers?"
Jamie sighed. "Dinner with them would be great. I had a dog growing up, so cysniffer duty has always been my dream. But my instructor in the basics class didn't like me. I barely learned enough to pass. There's no way I’m going to win, so what’s the point in getting worked up about it? Just look, we've already headed in a direction entirely apart from all the others."
"Maybe you should check the readout from my sensors" Bud replied, taking care to keep his L.A.N.G. unit from communicating his decidedly un-cysniffer sarcasm.
Jamie paused, checking the sensor hanging in front of his left eye. His eyebrows shot up. "An aberrant heat signature just above us!"
“We’d be there already,” Bud replied, “if not for that collapsed floor. But there’s a way around. Come on.”
As Jamie hurried after him, Bud hazarded pushing Jamie a bit further. "You know, cysniffers are really nothing like ordinary dogs."
"How would you know?" the cadet replied. "Do they program cysniffers to know anything about regular old canines? Or anything else not having to do with catching cyborgs and androids?"
Bud hesitated. Bud if Jamie was as smart as he seemed, then Bud had already revealed more than enough to be damning. "I've got some advanced programming. But never mind that. It doesn't take a trained eye to see the differences between household pets and those tin cans."
Jamie didn't reply, but his expression said plenty.
They reached what had originally been the apartment building’s front entrance. It looked like a bomb had been dropped on it, much of the center portion simply collapsed into a crater, leaving two halves sagging worryingly inward. As Jamie struggled with the rusty entry door, Bud was lost in thought, contemplating how much he should tell the cadet about his true purpose. He was so distracted that he didn't notice the approach of another cadet and his cysniffer until it was too late.
The cysniffer began alerting, whether on Bud or the nearby synfuel, Bud wasn’t certain, but either way it wasn’t good. He quickly fired his EMP again, causing the cysniffer to go silent and turn from the building. Its cadet cursed and grabbed it by the neck, dragging the disoriented automaton toward the dilapidated apartment building. Bud almost felt bad for the machine. When the cadet reached the building, he shoved Jamie aside and entered.
Jamie moved to retaliate, but Bud bit the hem of his jacket, holding him back. "He's going the wrong way," Bud said. Jamie arched an eyebrow, but didn’t say anything.
Good, Bud thought. Maybe the young man was beginning to trust him. They entered the building, turning opposite from the other cadet. Bud led Jamie down a corridor and up a flight of stairs to a unit with its door hanging off the hinges.
The apartment within was a scene of desolation. The living room contained only a sagging couch and a threadbare carpet stained with what might have been blood. In the corner lay the skeleton of a dog, a silver collar fused to its spine, gleaming rings of steel entwined about the bones. Within the rib cage glowed the canister of synfuel.
Jamie knelt beside the skeleton but made no move to grab the prize. He rested a hand on the long-dead creature’s skull.
Bud's heart ached. For all he knew, this could be Moose's skeleton. He hesitated, then licked Jamie's face. It’d been so long since he’d been near someone who showed emotion over the tragedies of his past.
"We should take it," Bud said gently. "Win that dinner. It could be... useful."
Jamie nodded, reaching for the synfuel. As his fingers closed around it, a shout echoed from the hallway. The other cadet had doubled back.
“I don’t know what you did to my unit, but the colonel’s going to hear about it!”
"Run!" Bud barked, all pretense of being a normal cysniffer abandoned.
Jamie's eyes widened, but there was no time for questions. They bolted from the apartment, the angry shouts of the other cadet close behind them.
As they raced down the stairs, debris shifting treacherously under their feet, Bud's mind raced. He needed to get into that dinner. Could he somehow bring the building down? Silence the cadet chasing them permanently? He did some math as the sprinted down a stairwell, but concluded there was nothing he could do quickly enough to create a collapse.
They burst out of the building, Jamie clutching the synfuel canister to his chest. The colonel and other cadets were visible in the distance, gathered at the rally point.
"Wait," Bud panted, pulling Jamie to a stop. "We need to talk."
Jamie looked at him, fear and confusion warring in his eyes. "What are you?" he whispered.
Bud took a deep breath. "I'm not what you think I am. And I don't think you are either, Jamie Wells. We're both here for reasons beyond what the FOG believes."
For a long moment, Jamie said nothing. Then, quietly, he said "My mother... she wasn't—”
“What’s going on here?” The colonel was approaching, trailed by the other cadets. It appeared that several of their cysniffers still hadn’t recovered from Bud’s earlier EMP.
As if on cue, the other cadet emerged from the building, red-faced and furious. "Colonel!" he shouted. "That cysniffer—it talked!"
Jamie and Bud exchanged a look of panic. Then Jamie did something unexpected. He laughed, loud and forced.
"Talked?" he called back, his voice dripping with sarcasm. "You’re just mad that you couldn’t tell right from left on your readout."
Several cadets behind the colonel shickered, though he quickly silenced them with a glare before turning back to Jamie and the enraged cadet. “You’ll do well to remember, son,” the colonel said, glowering over Jamie’s shoulder, “that in the field, results are all that matters.” Turning to Jamie, he added, “Good work, Wells. Seems we may have underestimated you.”
Jamie looked down to his boots. “Yes sir,” he mumbled, though Bud’s ears picked up the slight edge in his tone. He wasn’t certain what that meant until the colonel turned and Jamie’s hand dropped to his side and found Bud's fur, giving it a subtle squeeze.
A silent promise. A new alliance forged in the ruins of the old world.
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Note: I wrote this story with the assistance of AI. To read about my process, see the following post:
buymeacoffee.com/dtkane/mars-174-years-after-earth-destruction.