The island had suffered a crushing blow by the Lake Maker and the fight was over. The marines had survived and if any of the terrorists had, they would be in custody or dead from injuries or drowning soon enough.
“Malevolent One, this is Conan. Over,” the pilot of the transport above asked over the net as they bobbed in the ocean.
“This is Malevolent. We’re in the drink, but we’re all accounted for. Gonna flip our boat back over. Requesting evac. Over.” the lieutenant said.
“On our way, Malevolent. Watch out for the sharks,” Conan said.
As it turned out, the sharks watched out for the marines.
Chapter Two
Scoville Marine Base outdoor gym, moon of Ares
6 March 163 GA
“Man, I’m still sore,” Waren said, as he rubbed the bare skin of his shoulder where it merged with the pectoral muscle. A pink scar of a bullet wound stood out on his skin; the trophy he had acquired for being shot.
“Quit bitching,” Dustin said as he stretched to his toes under the hot sun of the arid Ares day. Faded and dreamy, the blue-green orb of Ghara hid behind the few clouds in the sky impossibly far above. Like Waren, he had taken off his drab, green t-shirt for their PT session with the outdoor weights. The two muscular marines were glossy with sweat.
“When it’s your turn to get shot and you bitch about it, I will support you with open arms. I won’t criticize you. Nope. Nuh-uh. I will be a good brother-marine. I will control your bleeding, secure your airway, and call for a casualty evacuation like a champ.”
“You’re a good friend . . . for a Sotan.”
Waren agreed with a grin and nod of his head. “It’s the cold. We have to huddle up to share body warmth in White Bay, so we need to work on our interpersonal skills. I’m a great listener.”
Dustin chuckled. “Says the man who never shuts up.”
The men shared a laugh, then sat in silence, catching their breath and letting their spent muscles recover. Around them, the base bustled with heightened activity.
The Gharian colonies had never seen anything on the scale of widely-waged war but they had the infrastructure to manage strife on a small scale. If the colony’s method of governance continued to work it never would, but that didn’t prevent the allied moons from trying to maintain a well-trained and equipped military force. Prudence. The standing Gharian colonies maintained tiny armies that remained on their respective moons for defensive purposes, and the orbital ship Pioneer 3 managed the Marines’ forces from its home in the lower Gharian orbit.
Dustin and Waren had been in the First Expeditionary for five arduous years. Beyond basic training, they’d also volunteered for and attended the Ares infantry school, the Phoenix sniper school, the Pacifican medical college, and even the Sotan cold-weather training school. They had studied surveying, meteorology, electronics and many had basic flight training. They’d hiked for weeks in three-person fire teams in the blast furnaces of the Ares equator deserts, and they’d hiked the volcanic ring mountains of the drenching Pacifican islands. They’d carried hundreds of kilos of equipment until they fell from exhaustion and were picked up by their brothers and they’d been trained to do it all using the most powerful of the hand-held Earth remnant weapons: rail guns.
This base outside the Ares capital of Scoville served as the home for the First Expeditionary Marines, and the whole base operated toward a single mission on this day: launching the Selvan expedition.
The mission to the new planet had become official a month after the marines returned from their support mission on the frigid moon of Sota a year before, and now each moon contributed workers, scientists, raw materials, and expertise to the cause as fast as they could make spare. Every city and business wanted to have some piece of the history that was about to be made.
“Hey!” a marine running nearby yelled to Dustin and Waren.
Dustin recognized the man and his familiar deep voice. “Rahim!” he hollered back with a wave.
The man changed course and headed over to the fenced-in workout center. He came to a halt, out of breath. Rahim rested his hands on his muscular thighs and grinned at the two men in front of him. Waren handed him a bottle of water and he took it, chugging several mouthfuls to slake the thirst brought on by the brutally hot sun high above.
“I heard you two are part of the special deployment,” Rahim said once he recovered.
“Yeah,” Waren said with less enthusiasm than the statement deserved.
Rahim high-fived and shook the hands of both men, congratulating them effusively. “Good, good. That’s fantastic. A real-deal expedition. First in over fifty years. You’re gonna be famous. I’m stoked for you guys. Do you know who else is going? A whole marine expeditionary unit right? What else are they for?”
Dustin answered him. “Well, they’re standing up and forming a fifth MEU for the trip. MEU Epsilon. It’ll be stationed there, and we were attached to it. They’re already running drills. I don’t think they can form a full-size MEU. We’ll roll at about two-thirds normal size.”
“No shit,” Rahim said, scratching his almost-bald head. “Who’s the commanding officer?”
“Looks like Major Duncan,” Waren said. The sound of approval was unmistakable. “But we won’t know until the official final briefing in a week or two.”
“Bad ass. Are they expecting more anti-expansionist drama?”
Waren laughed. “Of course they are. They keeping getting braver and braver as the expedition organizes. It’s hard to hide where shit is going down when trucks and transports are moving in places they don’t normally.”
“True,” Rahim replied. “Once you’re on Selva though it’ll be safe. I doubt any assholes will slip through to mess around there.”
“Well marines are going, so there will definitely be assholes,” Dustin quipped.
Rahim chuckled. “That’s some truth. Hey Dusty, what’s going on with you and your woman? Still getting married?” Rahim jumped up and grabbed the overhead bars. As Dustin replied, Rahim started a rapid series of chin-ups.
“Yeah! Wedding is set for a month and a half from now. Twenty-second of April.”
Rahim dropped to the ground. “Where is it at? I didn’t get an invite.”
Dustin laughed as Waren got up and duplicated Rahim’s series of chin-ups. Unconscious competition was a problem in the elite units of the armed forces.
“Sorry, Rahim. I had a pretty fucking harsh invite restriction. Melody’s dad is going to be there, and her side of the family is–well, let’s just say posh.”
Rahim dropped off the bars. “Ahhh . . . Yeah, isn’t her dad someone important?” He asked and stole another gulp of water from Waren’s bottle.
“You bet your ass he is,” Waren answered. “Senior Ares senator. Big swinging dick in politics and business.”
“And his daughter joined marine aviation, huh? Wait, didn’t he serve too?” Rahim asked.
“Yeah,” Dustin replied. “Major in the Ares Army.”
“You meet him yet? Or the mom? Is she hot? Melody is pretty hot,” Rahim said, and then bumped knuckles with Waren.
“Sergeant Hohner, Sergeant Dillon, the both of you can go fuck yourselves,” Dustin said with a grin. “Melody’s mother passed away. Her dad’s a good guy. Not the politician you’d imagine. More of a ‘no bullshit’ kind of guy. Blue collar, not a whiff of Russian in him.”
“And you’re happy?”
Dustin’s couldn’t contain his smile. “Yeah, I am.”
Waren pointed at the blushing marine. “You see that? That’s love, Rahim. Love in the flesh.”
“Be still, my beating heart,” Rahim said, clutching his hand over his breast. “But, really man, I’m glad for you. She’s good people. You deserve to be happy.”
“Thanks, man. I was just about to ask for a transfer to the Ares Army too. Thought I might find fewer assholes there.”
Waren and Rahim laughed.
“Maybe, but you’d miss the action,” Rahim
said. “And the assholes. How is this deployment going to work for you guys? Isn’t it long? It’s gotta be long.”
“Yeah, but her shuttle is tasked to it, so I’ll see her more often than otherwise,” Dustin said as a truck buzzed loudly by, its electric motor thrumming away to power its multiple large wheels. The men paused and waited for it to pass.
“Good deal, brother,” Rahim said and shook Dustin’s hand. “I gotta get out of here. My unit is rotating into a cold-weather training cycle on Sota, then we’re deploying there to work counter-terrorism. We’re doing fly-overs of the northern mountain ranges to scan for tunnels or caves they’re holing up in. Sota’s covered in the little pricks, trying to kill people left and right. An actual live-fire peacekeeping mission. Anyway, keep me in the loop. Anyone gets sick, you give them my name, all right?”
“On it,” Waren said as he shook Rahim’s hand. The man departed, leaving the two friends to swelter under the afternoon sun. “What now Sergeant First Class Cline?”
Dustin stood. “Rest up. Clean up. We have a jungle skills class in the morning. Melody and I have dinner tonight at a fancy restaurant downtown.”
“The Sampan?” Waren asked as he gathered up his stuff from the ground.
“I forget. Some place we can’t afford. I’m sure it’ll be great.”
“Hey you only live once. Enjoy the food and view.”
Dustin nodded as the two men left the fenced outdoor gym. “So she says.”
Chapter Three
Scoville University auditorium, moon of Ares
18 March 163 GA
One hundred and sixty-three years prior when the gargantuan generational vessel named Pioneer 3 arrived in Gharian orbit, the colonists aboard began the process of making a new home. The moon that originally brought them to the Gharian system was Phoenix. The gem of a world hung in a perfect orbit of the gas giant in the Goldilocks zone of the solar system, wrapped in the arms of a life-sustaining atmosphere, covered in water and soil, ripe for human occupancy.
The colonists observed Phoenix from orbit for months, sending down unmanned craft to land, take samples, and gather more information. When the planet was deemed safe by the scientists, a crew landed, and humanity began life anew on a world that had not yet been spent, unlike the husk of Earth their ancestors had departed from some six centuries prior. Phoenix received its name in homage to the mythical creature that was reborn again at death, in the same way as the humans who now called it home. To appease the religious among the pilgrims, the capital city bore the name Eden.
The Gharian moon of Pacifica hung in space in full view of the Phoenix night sky, chasing its sister moons in circles. Substantially more blue than green, Pacifica was an ideal world with its vast oceans, generally warm weather, and lighter gravity. It became the second destination of expansion for the colonists. Benign and plentiful Pacifica thrived fast, soon catching up in population to its older sister and becoming a source of food for the whole system with its deep oceans filled with life.
But Ares . . . Ares came much later. It took the colonists of Phoenix and Pacifica two decades to pull the trigger on the biggest project undertaken by the whole of humanity, barring the Pioneer Project itself: terraforming a world. Ares got its name because it resembled the old planet named Mars that orbited in the original Earth solar system. It had red soil, cold temperatures, a thin atmosphere, and stores of water frozen at the poles beneath the surface. The planners of the Pioneer missions anticipated the need for terraforming and thus made the ships themselves able to take on the task.
A massive portion of the Pioneer 3 craft was a detachable atmosphere-generation facility. The world-shaping machine had fallen from Ares orbit buoyed by gigantic thrusters, parachutes larger than lakes, and balloons filled with lightening gases. The colonists guided it to the surface of the parched red moon until it landed with a world-vibrating earthquake. The pioneers then installed the beast deep into the skin of Ares over the course of five long years.
Drills and pipes sank into the soil like the roots of a magical willow from an old child’s story, thirsty for the icy water buried deep below. Nuclear reactors fired on, stirring up endless power to fuel the growth of photosynthetic bacteria farms and the factories that produced even more solar-powered equipment. As the greenhouse gas emissions grew and grew at exponential rates, the atmosphere thickened, the water rained down, and the ground transformed into something habitable and Earth-like.
Ares now–a hundred years after the terraforming began–was still a dry world with a thin, wispy atmosphere, but the humans of Ghara could live there unassisted by moisture collectors or breathing apparatuses. Still hot–almost too hot at the equators–but it was habitable and it provided for its citizens and the colonies.
The moon named after Mars was the challenge that spoke to Pacificans and Phoenixians. It was the romantic struggle of an arduous life led by those who wished to earn everything that came to them. It was the road less traveled, and the mythical mountain the adventurous wanted to climb. Needed to climb. Ares was the center of the Colonial Marine training bases, as well as the home of the most prestigious place of higher learning in the colonies, Scoville University.
The open-air auditorium selected by the heads of the Selvan Expedition to host the present meeting sat sunken into the ground like a meteor’s impact crater, though the tiered space had hundreds of chairs and desks arranged in perfect symmetry around its clamshell-shaped, rounded edge. An elevated stage sat along its flat edge. Suspended above by steel cables attached to ivory-colored pillars rising like thin fingers, hung a cloud-white composite roof that resembled an old circus tent from the history files.
Gathered in the auditorium, facing the stage filled with science professionals, politicians, military officers, and government officials, sat hundreds of men and women who would take part in the expedition firsthand or who would support it. Flanking the group in the open spaces were photographers and journalists documenting the experience for those who couldn’t be there. They broadcast live to every colonist who cared to watch.
Most cared.
A tall woman with a crown of thin, chestnut hair pulled back approached the podium at the center of the stage. She wore a pantsuit the color of sand, despite the heat of the midday, in a style far older than she was. The suit had to feel like an oven, and the gentle trickle of sweat down her face gave away her discomfort.
She tapped the microphone to ensure the device worked, and then leaned forward with a hint of a nervous smile. Tiny wrinkles at the corner of her mouth and the edges of her eyes betrayed her real age as she addressed the gathered crowd with a voice accustomed to speaking in public.
“Hello everyone. People of Ghara. I am Doctor Margaret Ford, lead scientist of the Selvan Expedition. Welcome to the final public briefing for our biggest journey yet.” Doctor Ford stepped back from the podium and started to clap slowly. The row of people to her left and right sitting at long tables joined her applause, and the crowd gathered in the numerous auditorium seats took part as well. Several people cheered and whistled excited to be a part of human history.
“Thank you one and all. Greetings to the people who are joining us via broadcast across the moons of Ghara as well. Your support is welcomed and appreciated and we wish everyone could be here in person to share in this. To keep this brief we will move briskly through very basic summaries of information from the subject matter experts about Selva and the expedition. Exact details are confidential for safety purposes but we will be sharing a lot of information today,” Margaret spoke confidently. This was her place of comfort; her agenda. “First off I’d like to invite Doctor Lima Rasima up to speak to us about the geological nature of Selva.”
Dustin and Waren sat on the upper, rear lip of the auditorium’s bowl. They were joined by their fire-team leader, Lieutenant Lionel Hauptman.
The wiry blond officer with the wide shoulders leaned over to his charges. “I do like the darker-skinned ladies,” he said as he watched the sc
ientist approach the podium. Her luxurious and thick hair fell to her shoulders like bolts of darkest silk. She wore fine fabrics colored with floral prints that moved with a vaguely exotic air as she walked.
“Shhh,” Dustin said. “I came here to listen and learn, sir.” Dustin stole a glance at a lower and closer row where he could see the back of Melody’s head. She sat with Beagle’s flight crew. They hadn’t spoken in days because of the mission’s increasing tempo.
“You are no fun now that you’re engaged,” Hauptman said with a feigned scowl.
Lima Rasima adjusted the microphone and on the tips of her toes greeted the crowd as well as the innumerable people watching and listening across the moons. After working through those moments with a hitch in her voice and trembling hands, she settled in, greeted the crowd, and began her presentation. It didn’t take long for the marines to realize she was far more than a pretty face and nice blouse.
“Selva is similar to old Earth and Phoenix in terms of its geological strata, mass, mineral deposits, and soil composition. Our landers have drilled into seven different locations of interest and have found evidence of mica, copper, nickel, iron, bauxite, trace gemstones with a preponderance of topaz, and some small quantities of gold. We have also found ample amounts of many heavy metals thus far absent in quantity from the moons. Guardedly, my colleagues and I are describing Selva as being ‘mineral rich.’”
The crowd applauded. The lack of industrial minerals on Ares, Phoenix and Pacifica had hamstrung a vast number of technologies the colonists had hoped to manufacture once again.
“That’s awesome,” Dustin said to his friends in all seriousness.
“Yeah,” Waren said. “Imagine if we had the materials to make some of the old Earth gadgets. You know people used to carry phones on them? Like, everyone had their own little computer on them at one point.”
Lima continued. “The geological survey will primarily be tasked with working with the marines to establish the location for the initial structures on Selva, as well as locating other natural resources usable in the short term. We will be researching Selva’s tectonic plates, earthquake activity and doing some additional surveys working in conjunction with the biology and meteorology teams. Selva truly is a gift to humanity. Thank you all. I look forward to reporting from the surface of Selva soon!”
Colony Lost Page 4