Semper Mars (30 page)

A young, tanned, blond, male face peered through the open hatch at her, just visible by the wan light of an emergency lantern. “Come on aboard, Marine,” the man said. “We’ve been expecting you.”

She wiggled through the narrow hatch. There were three men on the other side, one holding an automatic pistol. A fourth man floated in a corner, blood smeared across his face.

“I’m Colonel Gresham,” the man with the pistol said. “US Aerospace Force.”

“Colonel Gresham?”

“Commander of this station,” he said. “Welcome aboard… and I mean that, very sincerely!”

She unfastened her helmet. It was steamy hot inside the station, a testimony to the effectiveness of the Marine siege and the cutting of power. There were no lights on at all save for small emergency lights at key points. “What’s the tacsit?”

“Nearly all of them went out that way a few minutes ago,” Gresham replied. “There are only two or three UNers left aboard, I think.” He jerked a thumb at the body in the corner. “He was on guard here and was going to leave you in the lock, but we persuaded him otherwise.”

“Thanks,” she said. She was floating next to Walsh, checking his breathing. The gunnery sergeant was conscious, still breathing hard but able to nod at her when she touched his face. “For both of us.”

“It sounded like their attack was a last effort,” Gresham said. “I think they knew they weren’t going to get any help from Earth, and decided on a last do-or-die charge.”

“It almost worked,” she said. She pointed at a radio on the bulkhead. “You have power enough for that?”

“Sure do.”

“Okay. Use Channel 15. Talk to the Marines outside, and have them start coming in through here.”

“While you?…”

“Have a chat with the people at the other end of this thing.”

Gresham hefted the pistol he’d taken from the UN soldier. “I’ll come with you.”

“Right.” She put her helmet back on, switching on the headlamps to cast a harsh, yellow glow in the direction in which she was looking. They left Walsh with one of the Americans, while the other took Walsh’s ATAR. Close together, in single file, the three made their way through the silent, stifling space station, getting all the way to the other end before they encountered anyone. Fuentes saw a movement against a lighted window and called out, “Hold it! US Marines!”

She heard a Gallic sigh in the darkness. “I suppose it had to be. Very well, US Marines. We surrender.” There were just two UN troops left, Colonel Cuvier and his aide, a Captain Laveau, not counting the members of the regular station crew.

It seemed like anticlimax. Fuentes’s heart was still hammering beneath her breastbone, and she was keyed up with a battle lust unlike anything she’d ever felt before in her life. As Gresham held the prisoners at gunpoint, she made her way to the control-deck radio. “Cheyenne Mountain, Cheyenne Mountain,” she called. “This is the American Space Station Freedom. The Marines have landed and have the situation well in hand.”

She’d always wanted to say that…

T
WENTY
-T
WO

Sunday, 17 June: 0919 Hours GMT

Garroway

Candor Chasma

Sol 5656: 0838 hours MMT

They’d broken out of the narrow canyon that stretched across the Martian desert from Tithonium eighteen days after leaving Heinlein Station, and then, at last, the MMEF had started to move. On the desert flats beyond the canyon, they’d raced along at a relatively high speed, their drag sled raising a whirling cloud of dust behind them as they ground across endless sand flats and dunes beneath the towering expanses of red-and-tan-banded cliffs four kilometers high.

After three weeks, to say they all were tired, dirty, hungry, or thirsty would have been grievous understatement. Some of them could barely stand, so bad were the blisters and contact sores at various places on their bodies, where the armor had been rubbing almost constantly. Their destination, however, was nearly in sight.

Early in the predawn hours of the twenty-first sol of the march, they deployed from the Mars cat. Four of the Marines—Lazenby, Hayes, Petrucci, and Follet—no longer had working armor. For a time, they’d tried trading off with other Marines, but space was so cramped it was easier to simply take them off the watch list and let them enjoy the relative luxury of living in their fatigues again. Two more, Kennemore and Witek, had such bad sores on their legs and backs that Doc Casey had recommended both men be taken off duty and out of their suits.

Those six, then, plus the three civilians, all remained with the Mars cat, with Corporal Hayes at the controls, while the rest of the Marines clambered out through the airlock for one last time and trudged their footsore way across the sand, leaving the crawler behind.

Garroway and King had carefully checked the terrain ahead using the maps left aboard the crawler. Mars Prime was located two hundred kilometers from the point where the narrow, straight-line fault canyon opened into the far vaster and emptier basin known as Candor Chasma. They’d already traversed about 180 of those kilometers in just the past two days, making a brisk eight to ten kilometers per hour. They now estimated that the base was less than twenty kilometers ahead.

Twenty kilometers. About twelve miles. They could walk that far if they had to.

Once the Marines were moving ahead on foot, Hayes started up the Mars cat again and followed, but slowly, meandering along at a stately three kilometers per hour, a speed so slow that even with blisters the Marines outside could easily outpace the cat. The sled, empty of people now but still weighted down with crates and canisters, raised its signature cloud of dust as it dragged along in the crawler’s tracks. It wasn’t too long, then, before Sergeant Jacob, on point, spotted an answering cloud of dust to the east.

He signaled the rest of the Marine column, which swung to the south and took cover behind a low, sandy ridge. Twenty minutes later, as the Mars cat trundled slowly past the ridge, two more Mars cats appeared out of their dust clouds, racing along at 20 kph from the direction of Mars Prime.

The Marine crawler halted, dust still hanging in a redgray pall above and behind the gently purring vehicle. The two new crawlers halted as well thirty meters away. A few moments later, airlocks opened, and blue-helmeted troopers began filing out.

0946 Hours GMT

Kaminski

Candor Chasma

0905 hours MMT

Lance Corporal Kaminski lay on his stomach at the top of the ridge, watching through his rifle’s sighting camera with a vid-feed to his helmet’s HUD as the UNdies exited their tractors. It looked like there was a total of about fifteen UN troops, all armed. That put the Marines at a serious disadvantage; of the twenty-one Marines on the ridge, only four had ATARs, rifles taken from their former guards so long ago at Heinlein Station.

Surprise, however, counted for a very great deal. Kaminski turned his helmet so that he could see the major, crouched behind the ridgetop a few meters away.

By this time, Kaminski didn’t know a single man or woman in the platoon who wouldn’t have died for the old man on the spot if he’d given them the word. Something about the shared hardships of the past three weeks had welded the platoon together in a way unimaginable before, even after the seven months of sardine-can duty aboard the cycler. If anyone blamed the major for the pain and danger of the march, he wasn’t saying a word, and a good thing, too. The platoon was definitely gung ho—a Corps term from duty in China over a century before that, very roughly, translated as “all together.” The MMEF platoon was definitely gung ho in that sense and wouldn’t have tolerated anyone knocking their new CO.

Kaminski returned his full attention to the rifle. Garroway had run trials out in the desert a week ago, ascertaining that the four best shots under Martian conditions were Ostrowsky, Knox, Caswell… and him. The discovery filled him with a galloping pride. The others were all seasoned vets and senior NCOs; you’d expect them to be crack shots. The fact that he’d beaten out everyone else definitely gave him bragging rights.

He liked it. After he’d turned over his carefully hidden flag, back at Heinlein Station, in fact, some of the other Marines had started talking about him like he was some sort of super Marine, a real lifer. That was nonsense, of course. He was still getting out as soon as he hit Earth again. But it was a real kick to get to do the John Wayne bit. He and the three NCOs had been given the platoon’s four ATARs and spaced evenly along the ridge so that their fire would hit the UN troops from front and rear as well as from their left. Now they were just waiting for the—

“Now!” Garroway’s voice said in his headset, breaking the carefully preserved radio silence.

Kaminski already had the green crosshairs on his HUD centered over one of the UN troops. His glove clamped down on the rifle’s trigger, and he felt rather than heard the silky hiss of five rounds snapping from his muzzle. The man in his HUD display staggered, then flopped forward. Kaminski was aware now of the sound of gunfire, a harsh snapping in the thin Martian air. Two more of the UN troops fell… then a third. The others stared around wildly, trying to find where this sudden storm of death was coming from, and a fourth spun, threw up his hands, and crumpled onto the sand.

The rest dropped to the ground, still trying to find targets at which they could return the fire. Several opened fire at the Mars cat, but Hayes already had the vehicle in motion, gunning it forward at high speed, treads whirling, flag fluttering from the whip antenna, sand and dust boiling into the sky like an impenetrable smoke screen.

Hayes steered the cat in a wild, slewing arc that took it between the hidden Marines and the UN troops; as soon as the dust cloud blocked all view of the enemy, Garroway stood up and waved. “Come on! After me!”

Kaminski rose, aiming from the hip and squeezing off another five-round burst. All along the sandy ridge, weary men and women in armor showing the red-ocher hues of the Martian landscape staggered to their feet and started jogging down the north slope of the ridge. Everyone in the platoon had volunteered to make the charge; even unarmed, they might be able to draw fire from the Marines with rifles… and if a rifleman fell, there would be someone to pick up his weapon and carry on.

With jolting, sand-slipping bounds, Kaminski rushed toward the lead tractor. A figure materialized out of the dust ahead, little more than a shadow, then stumbled and collapsed as Ostrowsky sprayed it with a burst of caseless rounds. Kaminski slowed as they entered the dust cloud, watching each step… and careful now to identify targets before shooting randomly.

“Ooh-rah!” Kaminski bellowed over the tac channel, an ancient Marine battle cry. “Marines!”

0950 Hours GMT

Garroway

Candor Chasma

0909 hours MMT

Garroway reached the UN Mars cat, putting out one hand to touch it. A SIG-Sauer P-940 pistol with the trigger guard removed lay on the sand and he scooped it up. The fight, though, was all but over. Other Marines were finding ATARs and lasers on the ground next to dead or dying UN troopers; the four armed Marines became six, then ten. A brief, savage exchange of gunfire in the smoky darkness of the dust cloud killed two more UN soldiers and sent a round through Sergeant Steve Abrell’s right arm. Air was shrieking through the bloody holes punched in his armor, but Casey reached him in time with a roll of vacuum-seal duct tape, winding the heavy gray plastic around and around the damaged area until the air stopped leaking. Abrell was unconscious, but his armor readout showed he was stabilizing as Casey fed him more O
₂
from his life-support pack. He would be okay, if they could get him into a pressurized environment soon.

“Nicht schiessen! Nicht schiessen!”

“Don’t shoot! I surrender!”

The dust was settling out of the air now, the cloud thinning. The few blue-tops still standing were surrendering, dropping their weapons and raising their hands high. Ostrowsky and Knox, both according to plan, each entered a different UN cat and took the drivers prisoner. In seconds, then, the skirmish was over, the surviving UN troops disarmed and sitting on the ground.

Twenty-one US Marines, with a little help from the decoy Mars cat, had killed nine UN-service Foreign

Legion troops and captured eight, at a cost of one man wounded.

It was, Garroway thought, a fitting end to an epic march that ought to be remembered right there alongside the Corps’s saga of O’Bannon and the Marines at Derna.

The recapture of Mars Prime was a relatively simple and straightforward affair. Questioning the prisoners separately, Garroway learned that there were only five UN troops left at Candor, while all of the rest—a total of some thirty troops plus the European scientists working for the UN—were at Cydonia.

It was a foregone conclusion that one or both of the UN cat drivers had gotten a warning off to Mars Prime, and by now, Cydonia would be alerted as well. The Marines would have to move fast.

They were able to drive right into the Candor base, steering all three cats to the vehicle bay where they parked them. Garroway had half expected a fight at the vehicle bay airlock, but when the Marines rushed through, weapons at the ready, they encountered only a curious crowd of scientists, NASA workers, and Russian technicians. As the Marines staggered into the base proper and began pulling off their helmets,

the crowd burst into spontaneous applause, an applause that swelled rapidly to cheers and shouts until the large base entry foyer started taking on an almost carnival atmosphere. Several of the Marines got kissed by female techs and scientists, despite their clumsy armor and the inescapable stink of twenty-one days without washing or even shedding their armor. Some of the techs had managed to hand-letter crude signs on cardboard: WELCOME US MARINES! and USA! were the most prevalent.

The lounge area was a kind of solarium, with translucent ceiling panels that flooded the converted external tank with warm, morning light; it was equipped with foam-molded chairs and tables that gave the place an almost homey feeling. The Marines were met at the table by a smiling Captain Gregory Barnes, the MMEF’s supply officer, plus the two Marines who’d volunteered to hop back to Candor to assist him, Corporal Jack “Slider” Slidell and Lance Corporal Ben Fulbert.

“Hello, Greg,” Garroway said, extending a hand. He was still wearing his torso armor, but he’d left arm and leg pieces in the cat, along with his helmet. He was already beginning to harbor fantasies about never having to wear that hated Class-One armor again. “Haven’t seen you in an age or two.”

“My God, Major!” Barnes replied. “It’s good to see you! You were reported lost and presumed dead, you know.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“As you can imagine, sir,” Ostrowsky added, “we’ve been kind of cut off from the news.”

“The UN people running the show, well, they didn’t admit you people had left the base where they’d marooned you, at first… but they brought those two scientists, Vandemeer and Kettering, back here, and after a while the word was out that you people had pulled a vanishing trick right into the desert.”

“Glad to hear those two made it back, anyway. I was worried about them.”

“Oh, they’re fine. Holed up with their UN buddies now, I imagine, up in the commo shack. Anyway, everybody knew you were out there, though the UN brass wasn’t saying a word. Then a couple of weeks ago there was a big dust storm…”

“Yeah. It nearly buried us for good.”

“Well, there’d been a lot of activity out of here, Mars cats on patrol and shuttles going out and back. I think they were hunting for you pretty thoroughly. Then they made the announcement, usual rigmarole, that they regretted to inform us that Major Garroway and twenty-four Marines and three civilian scientists had all been lost in the storm after leaving a shelter without authorization or proper equipment. That was the last any of us heard… at least until all the excitement this morning.”

“Well, we rode out the storm all right,” Garroway said. “Maybe they really thought we were dead. Or they just didn’t want any of you going out and looking for us.”

“That could be. We haven’t been prisoners, exactly…”

“But?”

“Yeah. But. They took over Control and the commo shack. They claimed there were communications problems with Earth, but everyone knew that was a lie. They put us Marines in a separate cubicle where they could keep an eye on us. Told us we could communicate with Earth ‘when the political situation there is clarified.’ Yeah. Right.”

“What is the political situation, sir?” Lieutenant King wanted to know. “Damfino. They haven’t told us shit.”

Suddenly Garroway was possessed by an overwhelming feeling of utter exhaustion. He wiped his face and felt the grime caked there. “We’d better take care of those UN holdouts,” Garroway said. “And after that, I think we need to arrange for showers, some serious rack time, and some new uniforms. Oh, and we’ll all need med checks. Most of us are carrying some pretty nasty bed sores, from wearing that armor for so long.”