The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN (29 page)

The intruders match the ETE’s visitors in appearance:
four lean bodies, shrouded masks, up-armored colony gear, PDWs
(fitted with suppressors I’m sure they would use on anyone they
incidentally encountered) and those unique short swords. They cling
to the walls as they advance smoothly, with an unnatural grace;
their footfalls making almost no sound at all, even with
amplification.

And they show us they know exactly where to go, where
to look for our ETE guests or anything we might have “sampled” from
them: Two of the four head straight for A-Deck Medical, to
Isolation, while the other two drop down to the Tech labs on
B-Deck. (More telling is where they
don’t
go: to VIP
quarters, so they assume we’re treating the Stilsons like subjects
for study rather than guests.)

“I’m impressed,” Matthew says over my shoulder as we
watch them on the Ops monitors. “I was beginning to think this
wasn’t worth staying up for.”

“You sure we don’t want to alert the Stilsons?” Anton
asks me again.

“If they’re here for what I think they are,” I tell
him, “then we need to keep our new guests away from our old guests,
and vice-versa.”

The first two gain access to Medical. Further proving
their foreknowledge of our facilities, they immediately split: one
searching the empty Iso rooms while the other goes for the Med
Labs. One deck below, the other two have broken into the nearest
Tech Lab and begin sweeping everything systematically with what
look like old corporate lab safety gear, designed to detect any
trace nano-culture leaks.

“You were right,” Matthew gives me. “They assume we
‘sampled’ one of the Brothers Blue.”

“They don’t know the nanites
do
break down as
soon as they’re out of the body,” Rick adds, shaking his head.

“You
checked
?” Anton confronts him, sounding
almost less offended by the breach of trust than by not being
told.

“Paul
let
Doc Halley take blood. His nanites
were completely degraded before they could be scanned.”

“But they don’t know that,” Anton worries.

“Which is why we keep them away from the Stilsons,” I
tell him.

Our guests start looking frustrated. One of them
tries to tap into MAI through a Lab terminal, tries to access the
sentry system.

“He’s trying to get a fix on the Stilsons,” Matthew
confirms.

“You’d think they’d be getting suspicious that they
haven’t run into anybody yet,” Lisa wonders.

“Show’s over,” I decide, flashing a go-code into the
Link. MAI slams the hatches closed around our guests, and
2
^nd
and 3
^rd
Platoons’ H-A suits move into the
corridors surrounding those sections.

The intruders hesitate for less than a second. They
each slap shaped charges on the nearest exits, then duck and cover
as the heavy hatches blow outward. The H-A teams barely have enough
warning to duck. I realize the blasts have bought our intruders
time and space to move.

MAI gets the lights back on, but the corridors are
full of smoke, more than a breaching charge alone would generate.
MAI cranks the ventilators to try to clear it.

Sprays of full-auto fire come through the blown
hatches on both decks. The troopers track their ICW’s and return
fire in sparse bursts, MAI’s targeting trying to minimize damage to
our facilities. On the screens, the motion sensors—partially futzed
by whatever’s in the smoke—aren’t matching the intruders up to the
firing trajectories. MAI registers breakers being used to hack in
and kill the sensors on the Lab exhaust vents.

“They’ve set up some kind of remote decoy guns,” I
bark into the Link. The troopers respond by launching shock
grenades into the occupied lab (something they don’t dare do inside
Medical because of the delicate and irreplaceable life-saving
equipment).

“You can’t fit a man through an exhaust…” Rick is
arguing, but MAI shows motion in the vents. Then the sensors
fail.

“They’re probably climbing up to A-Deck so they can
make a run for an airlock,” Matthew points to the blueprint.

“Or pop one of the old emergency access hatches to
the roof,” Rick adds other possibilities.

“Rios, get guns on those vents where they hit
A-Deck,” I order. The vents pass just behind the squads he has
surrounding Medical, which puts his guns conveniently close, but it
splits their attention in opposite directions. “Metzger?” I call
over to Aircom.

“On, Colonel,” she comes back ready.

“Can you get me turrets pointed at those vent-caps
topside?”

“Already done, sir. Free to fire?”

“On my order,” I hold.

“Labs are clear,” I hear Spec-4 Jenovec—one of the
3
^rd
Platoon squad leaders—declare as they move in on
B-Deck. “They dropped all their gear, went light—they won’t have
breathers if they go topside.”

“Don’t touch their gear,” I order caution. “Back out.
Hold position.”

“Booby-trap?” Matthew asks.

“I would, if I thought that far in advance,” I tell
him. “And these guys seem to keep their moves planned out well
ahead of the game.”

Proving the theory, MAI registers a small blast in
the Tech Lab. Two of the troopers—Price and Scher—light up with
shrapnel and concussive wounds.

“Halley! Armor down on B-Deck!” Matthew barks into
the Link. “You’ll have to stabilize on-site—Medical isn’t cleared
yet.”

“When you catch ‘em they’re gonna regret damaging the
only hospital in over forty million miles,” I hear Halley,
somewhere between irritated and angry.

MAI registers two more blasts, much smaller than the
original breaching charges but just as smoky, blowing the access
panels off the Lab vents on A-Deck. Rios has his troopers
ready…

…and then nothing happens but the billowing smoke.
Motions sensors start to blur out.

I watch helmet feed as a pair of troopers gets sent
forward through the fog to carefully check the smoking vents. The
sighting lasers of their ICWs lance brightly through the haze—I
realize these lines would make them easy targets, but disabling the
sights takes away MAI’s targeting assist (last thing I want is us
shooting each other in the confusion).

“Some kind of Grappler in the vent shafts,” Sergeant
Hendricks reports, aiming his helmet cams into one of the smoky
shafts. “Looks like they shot cables and power-towed themselves up.
Probably took a hell of a beating squeezing through.”

“Nothing on radar, motion or infra-red,” Rios
confirms grimly, moving up. “They’re not in there.”

“No activity on the vent-caps topside,” Metzger
adds.

“They went
down
,” Matthew hisses, then calls
in reinforcements. “Lieutenant Labeau! I need your guns on C-Deck!
Lieutenant Bodicker: D and E Decks! ”

“Too many places to cover,” Lisa complains as two
more platoons race to join the game.

“Especially if they already got out of the vents
while we were busy pointing guns where they were blasting,” Matthew
agrees, probably whipping himself for assuming the enemy would
panic and try to run by the direct route. Kastl is running full-map
motion scans on all decks, filtering the sudden rush of activity
against our own ID tags.

“All personnel: Look for smoke,” I advise. But the
lower decks look clear on the sentry cams. There are blind spots in
our visuals, but motion sensors and tag readers are everywhere.
Without the masking smoke, it should be easy enough to nail
something moving that isn’t tagged, but MAI isn’t reading any
anomalies.

“Bodicker to Ops: We’ve got open access panels on D
and E decks,” we get confirmation with visuals of neatly popped
panels. I instantly wonder if they left open panels as decoys and
exited elsewhere, resealing those plates. But that would take
time.

Fifteen tense seconds later, MAI flashes us an error
message.

“
Duplicate tags
,” Anton confirms. “Somehow
they managed to copy our RFID signatures.”

MAI flashes everyone the copied IDs: Specialists
Tanaka and Caan.

“Get eyes on those duplicate tags,” Matthew starts to
order the obvious.

“Caan is with me,” Thomas reports immediately.

“I’ve got Tanaka,” Sergeant Henderson comes through a
few seconds later. MAI locks those tags, then lights up the
imposters.

“B-Deck West!” Matthew directs. “They managed to
climb back up two decks while we were chasing them too high and too
low.”

“I’ve got guns on the stairwells on A-Deck,” Rios
assures.

“Fifth Platoon coming in from below,” Labeau
supports. “They’re not getting off Baker-Deck.”

“And they’re not getting out of West,” Thomas
promises, her troopers on all corridor hatches.

“Seal the section, lock everything down,” I order,
realizing I’ve just locked our visitors into rich territory: Four
barracks (which means uniforms, survival gear and chaos because
we’ve just shut off-shift Fourth Platoon in with them), NCO
billets, junior officer and support quarters, and an armory locker.
Off-shift census puts forty-eight bodies in that section. MAI reads
fifty moving tags.

“Just lost lock on the imposter tags,” Kastl
announces. “Now I’ve got doubles from Fourth Platoon.”

“They’re rotating signatures,” Anton confirms.
“Blending in with personnel in that section. Within a few meters,
the readers can’t tell them apart.”

“Making it hard to pick them out in a populated
section,” Matthew appraises. “We’ll need to eyeball everyone.
Thomas: Coordinate with Lieutenant Lee and start clearing the
section.
Carefully.
Keep the corridors locked down and start
emptying the main barracks one-by-one. Check all IDs on I-Scan.
Assume they’ll be trying to pass, wearing our gear. And be ready
for surprises.”

“Yes, sir.”

On the sentry cams, I see the off-shift troopers and
personnel—already out of their racks and in-uniform as soon as our
visitors showed up—get ordered into lines for evacuation. Their
squad NCOs issue weapons, knowing their own troopers by sight. The
three bigger barracks have exits that open directly out of the
section. The smaller barracks and the shared quarters all open onto
the sealed corridors—that leaves eight of our people—including Lee,
the Platoon CO—having to sit put, locked in until the corridors can
be cleared, which means a room-by-room search by Thomas’ armored
teams. But as soon as the first barracks’ hatch opens, smoke starts
filling the surrounding corridors.

“Rios, what’s happening in Medical?” I see helmets
advancing into a dark and hazy facility. There’s small-arms damage,
mostly contained to the entry and the Iso clean-room (Halley will
not be pleased). I also see how our visors mounted their PDWs to
the deck to fire back at us remotely while they went… Where?

The troopers work from west to east: they check the
corners and potential hiding places in the main ward, the nursing
and physician’s stations, the shift-doctor’s small quarters, then
start clearing the exam and Iso rooms one-by-one. At the far east
end, the hatch to the Pharmacy is open, and beyond that: Medical
Stores.

“Don’t trust an open door,” I hear Rios warn his
point team. One of the troopers improvises and rolls a chair
through the Pharmacy hatch. A frag grenade peppers it almost
instantly. They clear the small Pharmacy and repeat the trick with
the Med Stores hatch, but nothing happens. Four armored troopers
leapfrog inside and clear the packed space. It looks
undisturbed.

“Distraction,” Matthew calls it.

“Main elevator’s been hacked,” Rios assesses. MAI
releases the doors. The shaft is clear, but the sensors are
offline.

“They went
down
?” Matthew moans.

“While we’re busy chasing the other half of their
team up,” I agree.

“Feels like a goddamn game of Pac Man,” Matthew
grouses. “Anybody remember Pac Man?” He doesn’t get an answer.

“Thomas: Send two of your squads to clear Medical B,”
I have to order her to divide her forces. Thankfully we have no
patients recovering in that ward, so we cleared it for the night
just like A-Deck. “They may be heading for the larger Med Labs off
the main ward,” I direct, though I expect this is more
misdirection: that they’ve gone deeper to get lost before trying to
make for the surface again. The sections below Medical are
Hiber-Sleep. But Medical sits next to our air and water processors
if they wanted to do us damage. Or they could make a run for our
aircraft hangars. Or the civilian sections.

“We thought too narrow,” I mutter my stupidity out
loud. “We should have had guns on every section.”

“They would have seen that,” Matthew supports. “And
too hard to maintain. We didn’t know when—or if—they were
coming.”

“If they wanted to really hurt us, they would have
gone for Atmosphere and Water, or just blown up our Medical Stores
while they were there,” Lisa tries.

“They may try to hurt us to get themselves a way
out,” I decide. Then call “Tru?”

“Watching the show, Colonel,” she comes on, covering
nervous with her usual cheer. “Anything we can do?”

“Our guest might try for a soft target to lever an
exit,” I warn her. “Have your people ready.”

“Already are,” she assures, panning the camera across
their housing bay to show me what looks like a mob ready for a
brawl: knives and tools and even rivet-drivers and cutting torches
for makeshift weapons.

On B-Deck, Thomas is making slow progress with the
barracks evacuation. The West corridors are full of smoke, killing
our sensors.

“Thomas to Ops, possible problem: Sergeant Martinez
reports Sergeant First Class Schrader tried to get to Lieutenant
Lee’s quarters. Took Specialist Wei with him. They haven’t come
back.”

“They’re not reading,” Kastl checks. “Lost in that
smoke.”

“Shit…” Matthew grumbles.