One Marine said, “It’s not the shooting that scares me. I don’t want to get trampled.” Someone answered, “You’re wearing combat armor, dumb ass. Half the specking planet can walk across your back, and you won’t feel a thing.”
“Armor isn’t bulletproof,” the first guy said.
The second guy said, “So don’t get shot.”
I waited for our gunman to return. He never did. While I waited, I checked back with Ritz.
“Any sign of hostiles at your doors?” I asked. His men had placed sensors that would warn them when anyone came within two hundred yards of the perimeter.
“No takers yet, sir. Why would the Unifieds want to kill Martians, when the Martians don’t like us?”
I said, “This is just guesswork, okay?”
“Yeah.”
I started toward the stairs, knowing that the man with the gun would not be there. He didn’t want to fight; he wanted to slow us down. At that moment, we had a huge numerical advantage; but in another few minutes, Riley’s security troops would return, and the scales would turn against us.
I said, “The New Olympians like us.”
“Then why did they send martyrs to kill us?”
“They didn’t send the martyrs, the Unifieds did.”
“The martyrs came from Mars.”
“The Unifieds recruited them. They sent evangelists here to start a religious revival. That was where the Martian Legion came from, the Unifieds were trying to play us and the New Olympians against each other while their black ops teams carried out the real work.”
Ritz said, “Reprogramming clones?”
“Reprogramming the clones in Spaceport Security.”
“Son of a bitch,” said Ritz. “That almost makes sense.”
“From what we’ve seen so far, the Unifieds have a few busted-up battleships, and they might have some ground troops. They can’t take us on head-on…”
“So they sent recruiters to Mars,” Ritz said.
“Evangelists,” I said. “They started a religious revival. The goal was to recruit fanatics who wanted to believe God could deliver them from Mars.”
I had my men fan out. There were only one hundred of us, but the section was small and empty now, thanks to the gunfire. Seventeen bloody people lay on the ground, most dead but not all of them. A few moaned and moved.
My riflemen took positions along both sides of the stairs as the first fire teams dashed up the stairs and secured the way.
I said, “If you wanted to bring back the Unified Authority, you’d need to get a lot of people on your side, and the best way to do that would be to turn them against us.”
“The Martians?” Ritz generally referred to the New Olympians as “Martians.”
“They have numbers, but they are powerless. They’re meaningless, except from the humanitarian point of view…and these Unifieds are not interested in humanitarian efforts.
“They want to cause unrest on Earth…”
“So they kill off the Martians and make it look like we did it,” said Ritz. “But they still wouldn’t have enough of an army to beat us.”
He knew about reprogramming, but he did not fully understand the implications…neither did I. “That’s where the reprogrammed clones come in,” I said as I walked up the stairs.
I was still at the top of the stairs, my men all around me, when an explosion rocked the area around us. It felt like an earthquake. We were in a hall that led into the grand arcade; there were thousands of picnickers. A hole formed in the middle of the floor. I didn’t see it at first. Then the screaming started, and the panic, and people slid into the hole as the floor crumbled into dust.
On the upper floors, people were able to run to safety. The main floor gave way around that hole, and the disintegration spread. It looked like the floor was made of water, and that water was being drawn down an enormous drain, and the drain sucked in thousands of people as well.
A thick cloud of dust and smoke rose out of the floor. Tactical and night-for-day showed me nothing; but switching to heat vision, I saw the specters of people running, people falling, and the bodies of the trampled.
“What the speck is happening up there?” Ritz shouted over the interLink.
The floor continued crumbling until it nearly reached the outer walls of the court. Picnickers who stayed near their blankets survived, those that weren’t trampled.
“General, what just happened?” Ritz said.
I looked around the area. I had not lost any of my men. Had we been a little quicker up the stairs or sent some men ahead, we would have taken casualties. We had played it by the book, leapfrogging our positions, covering the top of the stairs, then setting a perimeter. Entering an area methodically takes time.
Not everyone who fell through the floor was killed. I could hear people screaming from below.
“They detonated a bomb, but they didn’t get any of us.”
“The hell they didn’t,” said Ritz. “Whatever they did, it blew doors off hinges down here. I lost men.” A moment later, he said, “I’ve lost forty-seven men.”
I had forgotten about the shock wave. The bomb exploded under the floor, in the halls we had just traversed. The force of the shock wave would have channeled through those corridors like medicine in a syringe.
“Forty-seven dead?” I asked. During battle, I analyzed losses by the numbers. I thought, Forty-seven men, that’s more than a platoon.
“Yes, sir.”
“How many injured?”
“The men near the doors were killed, everybody else walked away.”
The men by the doors were killed, I repeated in my head. Men in combat armor don’t worry about flesh wounds.
“There are going to be injured civilians, Colonel. See if you can run some triage in the halls,” I said.
“I’m already out there, sir. Euthanizing them would be more humane.”
“That bad?” I asked.
“General, I have never seen anything like this. It’s like somebody painted the walls bloodred.”
CHAPTER
SIXTY-FIVE
Location: Mars Air Force Base
Date: May 2, 2519
As he watched the explorers on the tactical screen, Watson tried to decipher Harris’s strategy. He knew Harris had to be the one in charge of the explorer fleet. Cutter would never have considered using unarmed antiques in a battle with modern ships.
If I were Harris, what would I do next? Watson asked himself. He looked back at the screen, expecting to see a few of the explorers traveling toward the Air Force base. That’s what I would do, Watson told himself. I would send a few ships on a rescue mission.
On the screen, all 207 explorers were pressed between the spaceport and the base. What the speck are they doing? Watson asked his internal Harris.
“Who are they?” asked Dempsey.
“Doesn’t matter, they’re on our side,” said Freeman.
While Dempsey speculated and Freeman didn’t, Watson returned to the observation deck and its panoramic view of the Martian frontier. He could see the tiny silver ships flying in high off the ground to avoid gunfire. They did not look like spaceships to him. With their broad disc-shaped bows, the explorers reminded Watson of flying saucepans.
He remembered the day he and Harris had visited Smithsonian Field.
The explorers’ thrusters worked better than wings in Mars’s thin atmosphere. The ships traveled the short distance from the spaceport to the base a thousand yards above the ground. As Watson watched, the silver ships dropped out of the sky, but they did not land. Still flying in a loose formation, they buzzed around the Air Force base.
Watson heard one of the bodyguards shout, “They’re going to the landing field in the back.” Another one said, “I’ll let them in.”
He followed the second bodyguard, probably Dempsey, across the base. It was a large building but less than a quarter the size of the massive Mars Spaceport. They passed office areas and living quarters, hangars and
equipment rooms. The building was mostly dark except for the soft-glow emergency lights.
Sore all over and tired, Watson had to fight to keep up with the bodyguard. After ten minutes walking, they reached the other side of the building, where they found men in soft-shell armor passing through the locks.
Some of the armor had Navy insignia, but the vast majority had Air Force. Seeing this, Watson realized that the fighter and transport pilots had come in with the men who flew the explorers.
Still hoping the explorers had come to evacuate the base, Watson walked up to the first Air Force pilot, and asked, “How soon can we leave?”
The man shook his head, and said, “There are battleships up there.”
“Don’t you have self-broadcasting ships?” Watson asked, a real effort with his jaw set.
“Not as self-broadcasting as I would like. Those are hundred-year-old ships out there, it takes ’em an hour to charge their broadcast generators. We’re charging ’em now, but they won’t be ready for another fifty minutes.”
CHAPTER
SIXTY-SIX
Location: The Churchill
Date: May 2, 2519
The U.A. battleship had impenetrable shields and a small fleet of fighters. She moved through space like an injured turtle swimming against a tide, stopped and lowered her shields to launch the fighters, and then she stayed in place, waiting to lower her shields a second time when her fighters returned. Once they were on board, the ship fired her engines and resumed the laborious ten-thousand-miles-per-hour chase.
Lieutenant Nolan said, “She’s coming after us again.”
“Admiral, we could outwalk that wreck,” said Captain Hauser. A sly smile spread across his face. He said, “Put twenty thousand miles between us and drop a few mines in our wake. Let’s give her a bumpy ride and go after her sister.”
His words sounded optimistic, too optimistic in Cutter’s opinion. They had attacked and outmaneuvered the crippled battleship, but they had failed to hurt her.
“Do you have an ETA on the de Gaulle?” asked Cutter.
“Eight minutes, sir,” said Nolan.
“Eight minutes,” Hauser replied. He looked at the holograph. They were between the two U.A. ships now, spreading the distance from the crippled ship, closing the gap with the one circling Mars.
In another eight minutes, they’d be the lone EMN ship fighting two Nike-class battleships and a Perseus-class fighter carrier. The Churchill and the de Gaulle were evenly matched in every way except their crew. Cutter liked to think he could outthink the officers below him.
Admiral Cutter said, “Captain, that second ship must have a very compelling reason for staying away.”
“She’s keeping Harris pinned down,” said Hauser. “She’s the cat waiting for the mice to poke their heads out of the hole.”
The battleship hovered a few thousand miles outside the atmosphere. The orange glow around her hull proved that her shields worked. A couple of questions lingered in Cutter’s mind: Why didn’t she shoot at Harris’s explorers as they crossed from the spaceport to the Air Force base? Why didn’t she shoot them as they broadcasted in?
He asked, “Is she leaking radiation?”
“No, sir,” said Lieutenant Nolan. “Not this one.”
The explorers would have been such easy targets, Cutter told himself. Then, out loud, he said, “She’s a feint.”
“What?” asked Captain Hauser.
Excitement showing in his step, Cutter walked around the display, examining it from every angle. He said, “We need to make a run at that ship. Let’s take her head-on.”
“Attack her head-on, sir?” asked Hauser.
“If I’m right, Captain, we won’t need to attack her,” said Cutter. “She’s a feint. She’s a bluff. She didn’t fire on the explorers because her weapons don’t work. That’s what they’re hiding from us.”
The cat has a mouth but no teeth; that’s why she isn’t chasing the mice, he reassured himself, willing to risk everything because he believed it was true.
Captain Hauser did not share his confidence. He said, “Admiral, do you know what she will do to us if she’s carrying shield-busters?”
“If that is a working battleship, we’re already dead,” Cutter responded.
“Yes, sir,” said Hauser, though he did not sound enthusiastic. He turned to Lieutenant Nolan, and said, “You heard the admiral.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” said Nolan.
Cutter looked at the display. He watched the injured ship, now dragging twenty-five thousand miles behind them. Even as he watched, a mine struck the ship, knocking her slightly off course but unable to penetrate her shields. Those shields could be penetrated, Cutter had seen it done; but it took an ungodly amount of firepower to accomplish it.
One ship is lame, and the other has no weapons, he thought. What happened at Terraneau?
On the display, the icon representing the Churchill changed course so that it now headed directly toward the U.A. battleship, a maneuver generally performed by fighters, not fighter carriers. The Churchill’s standard attack speed was seventy thousand miles per hour, offering enemies a mere three-second window to track, target, and fire weapons.
Klaxons blared, warning the crew to brace for imminent attack. Warning lights flashed. In the bowels of the ship, emergency crews prepared for doomsday scenarios.
On the bridge, sailors locked themselves into their chairs. No one spoke.
Cutter watched the display from his seat ten feet away. His lips pressed against each other. His heart pounded in his chest so hard he could feel its pulse in his ears.
The U.A. ship traveled at just over one thousand miles per minute with no acceleration. She sat dead ahead of the Churchill, five thousand miles away…
Four thousand miles…
Three thousand miles, and the enemy would have launched her torpedoes. It was too late to turn around now. Even emergency maneuvers would not save them.
If they fire, will the computer warn us before we die? Cutter wondered. The Churchill’s shields were up, but they would mean nothing against shield-buster torpedoes.
Two thousand miles. If torpedoes were coming, they should have already hit.
One thousand miles. The Klaxons continued to wail, and the warning lights flashed as the Churchill flew over the top of the enemy ship. Some of the sailors on the bridge shouted.
Cutter let out the breath he’d been holding for over a minute. Something had finally gone right.
And then the de Gaulle appeared on the display.
CHAPTER
SIXTY-SEVEN
Location: Mars Spaceport
Date: May 2, 2519
“Harris, we’re falling apart down here,” Ritz said.
Colonel Hunter Ritz was an officer who lived to complain, but he never backed down from battles. Using a commandLink option, I peered through his visor, then through some of the visors of his platoon leaders.
The fighting had begun.
Unbeknownst to me, Ritz had smuggled trackers into the spaceport. Trackers were motion-sensing robots. They were little more than a pole with a motion-tracking aiming device and an automated trigger. You could attach anything from an M27 to a missile launcher to a tracker. Ritz had armed his trackers with particle-beam pistols, a decidedly short-range weapon. He’d had his men place the trackers in the air locks, which were thirty feet across, slingshot range.
The particle-beam weapons blew people apart. The entrances to the locks were covered with sleeves and boots and other bits of combat armor. The blood on the walls meant that there were arms in the sleeves and feet in the boots and heads in the helmets.
Looking through different Marines’ visors, I saw locks in which the trackers still worked and locks in which the enemy had managed to overwhelm our defenses.
Colonel Ritz ran to help a faltering platoon. Looking through his visor, I saw bodies piling up on our side of the lines. An RPG sailed through one of the open locks and exploded, tossing bodies in th
e air. Ritz turned in the direction of the blast, saw two security clones coming out of an air lock, and shot them.
“Are any of you sniper trained?” I asked the men I had brought with me.
“Yes, sir,” two men answered my call. I kept my snipers and sent the others back through the rubble. At this point, Ritz needed warm bodies and trigger fingers more than I did.
Using the commandLink, I marked a map of the spaceport. I highlighted the tunnel that led to the Spaceport Security barracks, the oxygen generators, and the reactor, and I sent the map to my snipers over the interLink. I said, “You’re on recon now. You take the edges and neutralize any and all threats. You got that, Marines. I will march straight ahead. You will flank the enemy and neutralize his ass.” I added, “Keep an eye out for bombs. These guys don’t care about collateral damage.”
They gave me my “Sir, yes, sirs!” and I gave them thirty seconds to work their way into the shadows.
The area was empty now. What had been a large hall was now a crater, the floor mostly destroyed, leaving heaps of rubble and bodies in the ravines twenty feet below. For the last year, the New Olympians had lived like rats, and now they were dying like rats as well.
If we make it out of here, the airlift begins today, I told myself.
Ritz’s voice came in over the interLink, shattering my meditations. He asked, “General, did you send your men back?”
“Affirmative,” I said as I ran the gear in my visor, opening a window to peer through Ritz’s visor. I saw bodies. The air locks were choked with bodies. They littered the floor. I said, “Scan the area, I want to see your line.”
“Are you voyeuring me, sir?” he asked.
I had never heard the term before, but I understood it. My patience was running out. Ritz was a good leader and a good Marine, but he tried my patience. I said, “I am tired of repeating myself, Colonel.”
“Sir,” he said as he panned to his left, and then to his right.
The fighting had slowed. I watched one of Riley’s clones wading through a knee-deep quagmire of armor and corpses, firing his weapon blindly ahead. He made it all the way to the end of the air lock before bullets struck him in the head and chest.
The Clone Sedition Page 32