The Infinity Brigade #1 Stone Cold (13 page)

Chapter 13: Boot Camp – North Spot…

I was right about Ensign Anderson. He was not going to be a member of my fan club anytime soon. With that thought in mind, I was glad to be able to get out of his general vicinity as soon as I could.

The Drill Sergeants from both Alpha and Beta platoons divided us up into three groups. As I predicted, the smallest of the groups was the one staying back at our base camp. I was glad to see Corporal Jesus Ramirez leading the Beta squad. He was a good man. Ensign Anderson gave the brevet promotion to Private Dimmit. Sergeant Cochran tried in vain to talk him into giving it to someone… anyone… else but the Ensign’s bruised and battered ego would have none of it. The cost of this fateful decision would haunt us for several days.

My team included JJ Hammond and Private Hansen. I had been worried that Ensign Highmark might detail Hansen for camp duty but we had been granted permission to take one sniper with us. Hansen was our man.

We got lucky with regard to our draw from the Alpha platoon. Sergeant Cochran had pissed Ensign Anderson off enough that the Ensign had been eager to assign the Sergeant to our team to get him out of his sight. I was glad to have the man with us. Our other Alpha team member was a gal named Judy Jansen. Apparently everybody called her JJ as well. We were going to have to work out how to differentiate her from Hammond. 

She was not an especially good shot but she was small and could move fast. Even in Stark suits which should have equalized things out somewhat she was a good thirty percent faster than the rest of us at just about anything. One of her more interesting hobbies was pickpocketing people. She would always hand back what she had purloined from her victims… as she explained,
the fun was in the taking not the keeping.
Besides, the Marines didn’t take kindly to thieves. The very fact that she could pull the ammo clip out of your weapon during the course of a conversation and then hand it back to you a few minutes later… without you ever being aware that it had been taken, spoke volumes about her skills. That, combined with the fact that she was drop-dead gorgeous meant that she was in a word… dangerous. I would not be playing cards with her anytime soon. She would steal my heart and then my wallet… probably in that order.

Tommy Cochran inched up to my position. We were on our bellies on the northwest side of Ascraeus Mons which us Martians always called the North Spot… the name was a holdover from the late twentieth century when Earth probes has first visited the planet. Dust storms covered this section of the planet and the only thing visible were three ‘spots’ lined up like ducks in a row. Ascraeus was the northern most ‘spot’.

I reached out an armored glove and tapped the top of his helmet to get him to look where I was pointing with my other hand.

“What’s our play AG?” Tommy said.

“Well Sarge, I’m thinking to take advantage of some local knowledge our Delta/Echo friends might not be privy to.”

“Knowledge is a powerful thing,” Tommy agreed with a grin that I could see through the faceplate of his Mark Two Stark. “So I see you pointing but I’ll be honest… I don’t see what you’re point at.”

“Exactly,” I agreed. “There are a couple of lava tubes that open up on the northwest side of this rock. I’m pointing at one of the openings now. It’s absolutely flush with the surface so it can’t be seen unless you are right up on top of it.”

“So you’re thinking of moving through those lava tubes?”

“That will keep us off of their active scans,” I acknowledged.

“Won’t they get suspicious when nobody shows up for the party?”

I nodded. Tommy had a point. The Delta/Echo camp had not been shy about using active scanners. Even with our camo net ruse we would be hard pressed to approach their camp. Apparently my reputation preceded me.

“I was thinking Jay might be able to help.” Jay was the new nickname we gave Judy Jansen. It was shorter to say than JJ just as she was shorter in stature than Hammond. “We dress her in a camo net and have her sneak about this side of the Mons and plant a series of those remote pingers we packed.”

“I think I know where you are going with this,” Cochran said to me. “We periodically flash those pingers like we are advancing on the hill and they think there is a force approaching.”

“If we space them right we can even simulate movement. They will be so focused on an enemy that isn’t there, they’ll never be watching for the enemy crawling under them.”

We called Jay over and explained what we wanted her to do. JJ offered to go with her to carry the twenty pingers we wanted planted. She snorted and said he just wanted to ogle her posterior. It should be noted that JJ did not deny the accusation. That said she headed out on her own. It was amazing to watch her work. She ran almost on all fours as she moved from point to point… freezing absolutely still every few seconds. The camo net hardy moved in the nearly non-existent Martian atmosphere that inhabited this altitude on Mars.

In fifteen minutes she had all twenty pingers planted… several within five hundred yards of the summit. Her natural ability plus the Stark suit’s mechanical muscles and the relatively weak Martian gravity allowed her to cover nearly twelve kilometers in that time span. I seriously doubted I could have covered half that distance had I been the one attempting to plant our decoys.  In case I forgot to mention it, I was duly impressed.

“Good to go Boss,” Jay said to Sergeant Cochran as she made her way back to our position.

I shook my head. Tommy saw me and grinned. “I seriously have no idea how she manages to move like that but I could watch her all day,” he said.

“That’s because you’re a lecherous pervert with only one thing on your mind,” Jay said with a wink. It’s worth noting that Tommy did not contradict her, either.

I moved the group towards the skylight entrance of the nearest lava tube. I opened a secure channel to the entire team.

“Jay, I want you to stay near the opening but under camo cover. You are probably the best at evading detection. Your job will be to use the pingers to confuse their sentries. If you need to move a few of them around to keep things interesting go ahead but remember you’ll be out here on your own. Your second responsibility will be to let us know if our friends from the Delta/Echo platoons decide to camp out and roast hotdogs or something near our skylight. If they do, we will make it a point to find a different egress should we need one.”

“The plan is a simple one. We are going to follow the lava tubes. When my Suit’s AI tells me we are near the lip of the caldera we’ll exit one of the vents. Our objective will be to locate and count their sentries and, once we have done that, to take them out with sniper fire as fast as we can.”

I turned to Sergeant Cochran. “Tommy, I’d like you and Private Hansen to bring up the rear. I’ll take point with JJ right behind me. You two are the best shots in our little raiding party. If we run into opposition I may need you to pull our butts out of the fire.”

I could tell from her body posture, even while in a Stark suit, that Private Jansen was not happy with her assignment. I knew I could simply order her to do her job but a person, soldier or not, that believed in what they were doing was always going to be more effective. I turned back to face her directly.

“Jay, you are in, by-far, the most difficult position. I’m asking you to draw the enemy’s attention and focus. I need you to be the biggest
pain-in-the-ass
you can be without getting taken out. Can you do that? Can you be a
pain-in-the-ass
for me?”

At this point Sergeant Cochran was overcome by what I like to call ‘voluntary Tourette’s syndrome’. Unable to suppress himself, he felt it necessary to add his two cents to the conversation.

“I can vouch for her AG. When it comes to being a
pain-in-the-ass
there are few people more gifted then our Judy Jansen… Just say’n.”

Jay looked at both Sergeant Cochran and myself. She had a smirk on her face that I would learn over time meant trouble. Unfortunately I was just getting to known the lady and I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

“I’m game,” she said. “But… and this is a big but… You,” she poked a finger at my suit’s chest plate, “owe me a drink and a steak on our first joint leave. Deal?”

Who am I to say no to an offer like that?

***

Tommy and Hansen were a good two hundred meters behind me when I ran into my first obstacle in the tunnels formed by the lava tube we were traveling through. The roof had caved in. The resulting pile of rubble was too close to the ceiling to crawl over. We would need to move the fallen rock… which did not leave me with a warm and fuzzy feeling given the risk of a secondary collapse… or come up with something else to get around this bottleneck.

I waved the two men in the rear forward to join JJ and me. We needed to have a discussion about the best way to proceed. I had learned that there were times when you led by executive fiat, and there were other times when a consensus approach made better sense.

“Looks like you found yourself a big pile of rocks,” Sergeant Cochran said as he and Hansen approached our position.

“Yeah,” I nodded. “The question is ‘what do we do about it?’”

“I vote we NOT move them,” JJ commented dryly while looking at the ceiling.

“The risk of starting another cave-in would be too great,” I agreed while trying to shine my helmet light into the hole in the ceiling where the roof had collapsed.

“It almost seems like another lava tube formed,” Tommy said. “I wonder if we can just jump up there and follow it to a vent near the caldera.”

“Anybody got a different idea or should we go with what Sergeant Cochran is suggesting?”

There were no better ideas so I instructed the AI in my Stark suit to increase the strength in my legs by 300% and jumped the two meters to the hole in the ceiling. Unfortunately the second lava tube was considerably shorter. The result was I hit my helmet against the ceiling of the second tunnel. My visor cracked and I started to hear a sound no one in a near vacuum environment wants to hear… the sound of air escaping. 

I quickly pulled a tube of construction nanites from a forward pouch on the Stark suit and squeezed a small amount of the metallic gel on the crack in my visor. My suit’s AI immediately took control of the nanites and instructed them to mechanically fuse the shattered sapphire glass that formed my visor. In a few seconds the hissing stopped. I checked my air reserves. I was lucky. The mishap had cost me less than a tenth of a percent of my air. It could have been much worse.

“Be careful on the jump up,” I signaled the others. “The roof is a bit low up here and I had to patch my visor when I hit the ceiling.”

“You OK big guy?” JJ asked.

“Sorry JJ, no field expediency promotion for you yet,” I answered.

“Bollocks”

The next few kilometers were uneventful. The ceiling got quite low at times and at other times we had plenty of headroom. At several points the ceiling gave way to open sky. I had Hansen pop up several times and share his 360 video feed with the rest of the team. The last time, we stopped to take an extended look at the recordings he captured. We were closer to the caldera then my AI had led me to believe. There were several reasons why this might happen. Bad initial data or a change in the environment since the data was collected.

A caldera is formed when the magma chamber associated with a volcanic dome collapses forming a bowl of sorts. The edges of the caldera are made of fractured and stressed stone. Over time these edges will give way and the sides of the caldera will slide down into the bowl. On Mars this process is slower for a number of reasons. First, the surface gravity is much lower so there is not as much potential energy to initiate a slide.  Second, the atmosphere is much thinner so the effects of weathering are greatly diminished. The one area where Martian conditions are more extreme than their Terrain equivalents is in the size of thermal swings. Because the atmosphere is so thin, the surface temperature of Mars is primarily a function of solar heating and infrared cooling. Without a thick atmosphere to act as a thermal blanket, the temperature extremes are greater and take place quicker.

I suspected a thermally induced fracturing of the rock around the lip of the caldera had caused some of the rim to break free and slide down the slope. I had no idea how old the survey data was that my AI was using. I made a mental note to myself to update it from direct
GCP Puller
orbital observations as soon as I could.  This would not be a mistake I would make again.

“Ok, it looks like we have spelunked about as far as we are going to be able to,” I announced to the group. “If we venture too much closer towards the caldera there is a real possibility that we are going to be involved in a rock slide. I’m prefer not to be underground if that happens.”

We made our way carefully to the surface. I checked in on Jay. She was having a great time running the defenders in circles. She had even gone so far as to setup a fake duck-blind site with camo netting and discarded candy wrappers.

She set a pinger off several hundred yards behind the blind a couple of times to get their attention and to draw a sentry to where the blind could be discovered. The result was a single Stark-clad investigator came forward and found the duck-blind. Apparently he radioed back to his buddies because a few minutes later three more recruits joined him and they rapidly searched the area in vain for opposition forces that weren’t there.