A/N

So, a trailer for Traitor of Mars came out not too long ago, and according to it, Dizzy Flores is alive and kicking, among other things. Bit of a headscratcher for me, and I've seen a few theories floating around. Anyway, drabbled this up as a take on it.

Ghosts of Mars

"You're not real."

She…it…he couldn't tell, ran her fingers along his shoulder. He couldn't feel her touch, such was the thickness of his armour, but still, he shivered.

"I'm not real?" she whispered. "I'm here, aren't I?"

No. You're not. You can't be. You can't be here, because your body was shot into space twenty years ago.

But she was. Isabel "Dizzy" Flores. Mobile Infantry, Private, Roughnecks. Dressed in nothing but a vest and jeans, bereft of weapons or any armour. If she were real, she'd be twenty years older, not to mention having red rather than blonde hair.

"Remember, Johnny?" she whispered, her two eyes locking in on his single good one. "Remember that night we shared? That last night, across the stars and under them?" Her fingers ran down his arm, and down the side of his check. "Remember?"

He shoved her away and walked across the Martian sands. If he accepted that the universe was more insane than he'd realized, he could accept that Dizzy Flores hadn't been killed on Planet P, or God (who now existed according to the Federation) had done a Lazarus on him, and given him his friend slash lover back in the all too perfect flesh. But he couldn't accept that. Because whoever…whatever, this Dizzy was, there was one thing that he couldn't accept.

"Something wrong, Tiger?"

Her personality. It was all wrong. It was as if someone, or something, had taken the template of the perfect human female, under the premise that the average human male would only be interested in physique, and a personality that would be receptive to using that physique to create more humans. Dizzy Flores wasn't perfect. She never had been.

"Go to Hell."

And he'd never asked her to be.

So on he trudged over the sands of Mars. He, John D. "Johnny" Rico. Former hero of the Federation, former head of a satellite station in orbit of Mars, now assigned to a Mobile Infantry unit to take back the planet from the Arachnids. Specifically a unit that he was now separated from due to a FUBAR atmospheric insertion. He had a gun, ammo for it, and power armour as advanced as anything in human-controlled space. Yet all he could do was trudge with Dizzy Flores behind him.

"Johnny, what's wrong?"

He shook his head and kept walking. He'd landed on Mars, and there she was, right in front of him, no worse for wear for someone who'd been impaled by a Warrior Bug.

"Johnny, get your head out of your arse."

He walked even faster – that was something the real Dizzy Flores would have said. The Dizzy Flores who-

"Johnny!"

He spun round and pulled a pistol on her. Pistols were next to useless against Bugs, and there were few situations when one needed to use them on a fellow human. But, there were always exceptions. Such as now. Such as drawing a pistol on a girl who didn't look a year over twenty, who was just standing there on Mars.

"Listen to me," Johnny said. "There's only three ways you could be here now, and I don't have the time to indulge in them. So, either you disappear, or I waste a bullet and make you disappear."

"You'd kill me?" she whispered.

Scowling, he holstered the pistol, and began walking again. Scowling, he heard her walk after him.

Alright, fine. "One," he called out. "You're some kind of human-Bug hybrid that the Arachnids have created in some pathetic attempt to infiltrate the Federation." He spun his head round. "Newsflash Dizzy! You're not meant to impersonate people who are dead."

Dizzy laughed. A perfectly normal sounding laugh that nonetheless sent a chill down his spine. "Alright then," she said. "What's the second option?"

"Second option?" He picked up the pace, this time keeping his eye on the straight and narrow, if such a thing existed in the Martian sands. "There's a Brain Bug nearby that's doing some psychic mind trick. That it's trying to distract me, or get me to do an Anoke, or whatever it was you freaks think are going to break me." He sighed. "Well, newsflash. I don't know jack, and if you want me to talk, you're going to have to stick your stinger in my head before I shove it up your arse."

"Don't think the Bugs have arses. Remember high school biology lessons?" Dizzy laughed. "Poor Carmen. She could never stomach what we could."

Johnny paused. Carmen. She…it…whatever, had mentioned Carmen. Carmen, who was likely on the other side of the galaxy right now, taking part in an invasion of Klendathu that was anything but secret. Carmen, who he hadn't seen in years.

And the Bugs knew that. Unless…

"So then," Dizzy said. "What's the third option?"

"The third option?" He murmured. He took out his pistol and ran it through his fingers, sitting down on a small rock that looked like every other small rock on a planet that, compared to Earth, was nothing but a small rock. A rock that supported his weight as he met the creature's eyes again. Eyes that matched those of the real Dizzy Flores perfectly. If it was a trick from the Bugs, why was it that the eyes were what they got right?

"Option three…" he began, "is that I'm simply insane."

"That's it?"

"That's it. Whacko. Section eight. Unfit for duty."

"I don't think you're unfit for duty."

"Yeah, well, I'm still talking to you aren't I?"

"And why is that?"

Why indeed. He didn't know. He could guess, and generate his own set of options, but the first one that came to mind gave him so much pause that he dared not even contemplate darker alternatives.

"Johnny?"

He evaded her gaze and cast his own over the Martian sands, shivering in the wind. Mars was a cold world. Humans could live on its surface thanks to terraforming, but that didn't change the fact that Mars was still colder than Earth – it was simply too far away from the sun to exceed twenty Celsius bar the equatorial regions. Still, he had to admit, Mars had a beauty to it that the wasteland worlds of the Arachnids lacked. It was…primal, he supposed. The planet named after the Roman god of war, the planet that had enraptured mankind even before they reached into space, before the collapse of Western democracy and the birth of the Federation. Mars wasn't Earth, but right now, it was a close second.

"Twenty years," he murmured.

"Huh?"

"Twenty years," he repeated. "That's how long I've been doing this Dizz. How long since you died."

"But I'm here."

"No you're not. You're here, because I'm so old and so desperate that trapped on this shithole, I've conjured up some dream girl, because of my three closest friends in this world, one's dead, the other could be dead, and Carl…Christ, I can't even begin to guess where he is, or what he's doing." He stood up. "So, yeah. That's why I'm talking to you. Because I'm so old and so desperate that I'm talking to a hallucination that may or may not be from the Bugs." He tapped his forehead with his pistol. "Well, congratulations you overgrown insects – humans are insane. It's why we're so good at killing you."

Dizzy, or whatever she was, just stood there. She put a finger to her chin, in a move that was meant to be seductive. Johnny holstered his pistol. He'd wasted enough time with this. If he was going to die on this planet (and chances were that he would), he could do it while not in a prepubescent wet dream.

"Twenty years," she said. "So you'd be thirty-eight?"

"In a few months, yeah."

"Hmm." She smiled. "You don't look that old. In fact…" She drew towards him, putting one of her arms around his, and the other…

He tore away and kept walking. Across the Martian sands. Headed for the LZ in the hope that his unit had survived, and were more sane than he was.

"Johnny, come on! All's fair in love and war! And football! Hey, remember that move you used to pull? Can you still do it?"

Walked as fast as he could.