The God Mars Book One: CROATOAN (35 page)

I stay where I am for another fifteen minutes, until
my air is getting low, but there is no further sign of life. I go
back to the salvage camp to recharge, and tell Rios we’ve
apparently drawn attention.

12 September, 2115:

For reasons I don’t care to explain to anyone, I stay
the night at Melas Three, camping down in the newly-pressurized
aircraft bays with Morales and her team. I’m hoping that she just
chalks it up to an old man’s lame attempt to boost morale, the CO
spending some face-time with the grunts instead of shutting up in
one of the officers’ quarters.

I don’t get any actual sleep. Instead, I spend the
night lying on my roll on the steel deck, staring at the shot-up
hulls of the two ASVs that had been left for us to find. These were
vehicles for exploration and construction once upon a time, a means
to move men and equipment, to make the world benefit all of us.
Fourteen years after Harker’s team made the first landfall, we
started shooting each other. Nine years of that, and we nuke the
planet. Fifty years later, it looks like we’ve devolved hundreds of
years, rewound our history, our precious progress.

When I close my eyes, I see the mystery woman,
armored and deadly, appearing and disappearing in the dust, and
realize: This is what a Martian looks like.

And I see the carving up in Ops:

CROATOAN.

By morning shift, all I am is bleary-eyed and still
not eager to call Earth, or sure what I’ll even tell them about
what we’ve found. (Do I tell them everything, or do I withhold
details that might cause them to react in fear? And if I don’t tell
them everything, what happens when they come and find out what I’ve
been withholding?)

I know my duty—I know what’s expected of me. But
Sun-Tsu wrote that the general in the field must have the
discretion to either follow or not follow the orders of his distant
superiors as he sees fit to best accomplish his objectives. (Of
course, that wisdom probably wouldn’t stand against a court
martial.)

I fly back “home” after lunch (and more planning with
Anton and Rick). No more sign of “desert demons” watching us,
though I ride back in the cockpit so I can look down on the
landscape as we go. All I see is empty desert all the way back to
Melas Two.

I get the call before my ASV even shifts engines into
landing orientation.

“The Stilsons need to speak with you, Colonel,” Lisa
tells me. “They insist it’s urgent.”

“We were attacked at sunrise,” Simon hisses even
before I’m all the way through the hatch into Command Briefing.
He’s been pacing, staring out the Plexi viewports northwest, in the
direction of his home Station.

Lisa and Matthew are already seated, both looking
grim. Paul is coiled in his chair with his arms wrapped around his
torso like he’s going to crush himself—he doesn’t even raise his
eyes to greet me. Simon tries to say something more, but he looks
like he can’t even speak. Instead, he keys up a video transmission.
On our screens, I see missiles slam the towers of an ETE Station,
throwing chunks of concrete. More missiles come, but they vaporize
before they hit.

The viewpoint we’re watching is from somewhere up
high on the towers. Dust begins to rise and obscure the view, but I
can see orange sealsuits on the landing platforms, Spheres in hand
like they’re trying to hold back a storm. The view pans out to show
us small aircraft, weaving madly, throwing missiles from under
their delta-wings. One of the missiles manages to go low enough to
avoid the Spheres’ interception and takes out part of the platform
support. A section buckles, and I see at least one sealsuit tumble
down with the collapsing deck, vanishing down the slope.

The screen shifts and I’m seeing it again from
another angle: missiles slamming the great towers. But then I
realize it isn’t the same Station. A jumpy close-up shows me
distinctly
yellow
suits swarming out to defend their
facility.

“They hit Orange and Gold Station almost
simultaneously,” Lisa explains.

“The two Stations closest to Shinkyo Colony,” Matthew
clarifies.

“They just flew in and emptied their loads,” Lisa
continues, trying to keep her voice level. “No warning.”

I watch something amazing then: One of the yellow
suits grips a Sphere and a Rod together tight to his chest and
leaps into the sky. No sooner is he off the platform than his body
is thrown even more violently through the air, as if he’s being
catapulted. He crosses a third of the distance between the Station
and the attacking craft before he begins to lose momentum. I watch
him spin in mid-air, point his tools behind him, and then his body
is flung forward again. It reminds me of the way a cephalopod
swims, in bursts of thrust.

The attacking ships get some sense of what he’s
doing. I see them change course hard, turning tail. The flying man
has two targets, who zig-zag each other to make his choice more
difficult, but he manages to focus just enough. I see him point his
Rod and one of the ships jerks as its port wing shatters—not like
it was hit by a missile, but like something invisible swatted it.
It struggles to keep its attitude but begins to spin—the pilot was
pushing too hard to get away to have any control now. The ship
tumbles out of control and slams back-first into the rocky terrain
of the valley floor. Its wingman doesn’t even pause, just burns for
home. The flying man changes his posture and begins to drop
gracefully down, his tools again clutched close to his chest.

The scene shifts back to the Orange Station. Either
they’ve practiced this or they’re communicating between Stations
during the fight: Two orange suits fling themselves airborne just
as the yellow had. But this time, the enemy takes a different tack:
One ship burns hard for home while the other one turns and flies
straight at them. It cuts between the two flying suits before they
can fully respond (still, I see the ship jerk as if it struck
something hard with each wing) and throws itself suicidally at the
Station. It’s all the ETE can do to raise their Spheres against it.
The ship explodes against their resistance, but the shockwave sends
them all flying. I see at least two more go tumbling off down the
mountain.

“The monsters would kill
everyone!
” Simon
growls.

“It was senseless,” Paul finally manages to say.
“What did they hope to accomplish?”

“A test of your defenses?” Lisa suggests.

“Or a message,” Matthew offers darkly.

“Your people: how bad were you hurt?” I ask.

“They will recover, Colonel,” Paul gives me, but it
doesn’t lighten his mood. “And the towers were not damaged
critically.”

“It makes little difference,” Simon snaps. “They are
willing to destroy the only thing that keeps all of you people
alive. For what? Greed? Envy?”

“What does your Council say?” I try to refocus him.
“What will you do now?”

“They have recalled us,” Simon tells me, still
seething. Paul keeps his eyes from mine. “We are leaving.”

I catch Paul out in the corridor. His brother looks
back once, then keeps walking for the stairs.

“I’m sorry, Colonel,” Paul offers. “But you are at
risk if we stay here.”

“I know,” I tell him. “But that’s not what I’m
worried about.”

“Simon will finish the parts for the portable
transmitter dish for Mr. Staley—it was almost completed even before
you found the new components.”

I hold up a hand to stop him.

“These ninjas—or whatever they are—they’re reckless
in battle. They fight with no regard for life, even their own.
You’ve seen that yourself. So has Simon. But they’re always
thinking ahead. Nothing they do is strictly what it appears to
be.”

“What are you saying?”

“
Trap
,” Matthew is suddenly behind us. “They
knew they couldn’t breach your Station defenses. I just had MAI do
a firing solution given an analysis of their ordnance: They didn’t
even try. They could have aimed to do more damage, but they shot
sloppy on purpose. They were just putting on a show.”

“We found two bodies in each ship they lost,” Paul
tries to counter, visibly struggling to believe it. “They
sacrificed four lives—for a
distraction
?”

“For a tactical manipulation,” I tell him. “They knew
what you would do next.”

He processes for a few seconds, then it looks like it
hits him like a slap.

“The recall?”

“They know we’ve increased our defensive posture,”
Matthew explains. “Trying to take you from us again would be very
costly.”

“So they do something to draw you out,” I finish the
thought, then let him digest it.

“It makes no difference, Colonel,” Paul heavily
concludes. “Staying here endangers you even more than it endangers
us. But isn’t there a saying? ‘Forewarned is fore-armed?’”

“There is.” I give him a grin.

14 September, 2115:

We delay the Stilson’s leaving for two days,
hopefully just long enough for the Shinkyo to wonder what we’re
doing. We assume they’d already set their trap before the attack on
the Stations, just in case Paul and Simon left immediately upon
receiving the news. Two days isn’t enough time for us to get any
sense of where they may have set up or what they’re up to, but it
gave us time to plan countermeasures of our own.

Testing the water, we sent an ASV out, to see if they
would show their hand if a ship headed in the direction of a
Station. There was no response. Simon suggested that they might
have some way of detecting an actual ETE presence, possibly learned
from previous encounters, so a decoy wouldn’t work. I suggested
sending a Sphere on an unmanned ASV, but Simon reminded me that
their tools are inert when not in proximity to their owners. That
meant the only thing the Shinkyo would respond to was the detection
of a
live
ETE presence, the very thing we’d rather not risk.
But the brothers were more than eager to take that risk.

Minutes before sunrise on day two, we raise an ASV up
out of the bays and push it through a combat liftoff. It makes a
dash for the nearest ETE Station—Blue Station—and we almost
immediately get word from Council Blue that an attack has commenced
against that Station.

I get video feed of a pair of small jets like the
ones that hit Stations Orange and Gold, throwing missiles wildly at
the towers. Council Blue was prepared: everything gets deflected by
ETE Spheres that had been ready and waiting for this.

“You called that one, Mikey,” Matthew mutters praise
as he watches the fireworks in Ops. The tactic is a sensible one:
The Shinkyo could not anticipate with certainty which of the
Stations the Stilsons would head for, so they had to try to draw
them to one. Bombing their home Station made sense because of the
emotional connection as well as the proximity, and we let them
think we fall for it. The ASV goes into full burn toward Blue
Station.

But then it cuts hard into a bank that flips the ship
almost full around, turning south-southeast. Now they’re burning
across the valley for Green Station, which sits on the eastern
extreme of the Melas South Rim—the Station closest to Melas Three.
It’s a hundred-and-twenty-five-mile run across open valley, and
we’re hoping it’s tempting, especially because we start
squeezing.

Council Blue springs his own trap. A handful of his
most experienced “technicians” burst up out of the soil well
down-slope from the Station. They’d used the subsurface Feed Lines
to tunnel into position undetected. And now they use their tools to
fly up right into the midst of the attacking jets. An instant
later, both ships have been slammed out of the sky, and his men are
moving in to secure any survivors. The Councilman takes a moment to
call and officially thank us for both the intel and the tactical
advice—it’s the most joy I’ve heard out of that mask yet.

Out in the valley, the game is on.

“Here they come,” Metzger announces from Aircom.
Radar gives us a triad of blips that appear from the east-central
valley floor—it looks like they’d been using the Arcadia ruin for
cover. It’s an ideal location to give them the best run at us, no
matter which Station we headed for.

“I see ‘em,” I hear Smith confirm. “Let’s see what
this old bucket can do.”

“Two more,” Metzger adds to her running report as
blips appear out of gutted Mariner Colony. “They really were hoping
we’d go straight for Blue Station.” The two new blips head south,
desperate to catch up with the action.

The three from Arcadia try to intercept the ASV by
getting between it and its goal. Smith does the expected thing and
banks east, trying to do an end-run around them, but the ASV is no
match for the speed of the light Shinkyo jets.

“Send in the cavalry,” I order on cue. Two ASVs spin
up and blast off our pads, a reinforcement that both sides know
will get there too late.

“Come on, baby…” Smith sings to his ship as we watch
the enemy bear down on it.

“They’re splitting,” Metzger announces. “Two targets
are dropping out.”

I see it on the tactical map: two of the three jets
from Arcadia suddenly brake and drop into a ravine. The third flies
full out at our transport. Suicidally.

“I was wondering how they planned to beat…” Matthew
begins. The sudden flashover on our screens cuts him off
mid-sentence.

“Holy
shit
…” I hear Metzger gasp. All I can do
is watch.

The lead attack ship becomes a flare that swallows
almost a square mile of valley. Our instruments flutter with
static. Smith’s feed goes dead.

“You’ve got your answer,” I tell Matthew. Seconds
later, we feel the rumble of the blast like a mild quake through
our boots.