by Ian Douglas
They’d made several trips out through the airlock already, lugging along the pieces of the big Westinghouse portable drill unit…and some other things, carefully hidden with the bundles of tubing, condensers, heating coils, and batteries. The drill was portable in name only, a device weighing half a ton that could be assembled in an hour or so and had power enough to drill through tens of meters of hard-packed sand to reach the icy permafrost layer below. Once a hole had been opened, drill tubing with a heated head was lowered to the bottom and the permafrost melted to a thick slurry of mud and water. Most of the water vaporized as it melted into near vacuum; collectors at the drill head captured the vapor and condensed it into liquid, which was pumped into storage tanks for later use.
Such drills were responsible for opening Mars to large-scale human operations like the bases at Candor and Cydonia; besides drinking water, they provided both oxygen and the hydrogen for converting atmospheric CO2 into the methane used by the shuttles. A wellhead had already been set up a few tens of meters to the north of the hab, but the Marines would be expected to start a new well right away; since all water on Mars was frozen, no one well site lasted more than a few days—a week at the most, depending on how many people were based at a given hab—and new wells had to be constantly sited and drilled.
The point was that the watchers would not find their work particularly suspicious. After a few moments, Ostrowsky left them, walking toward the cat with her arms out from the sides of her body, a white cloth in her right hand. “Hello!” she called. “You in the cat! Can we talk?” At least one person in the UN detail must speak English.
“Remain twenty meters from the vehicle,” a heavily accented voice replied over the general talk channel. “What do you want?”
“A ride out of here,” Ostrowsky replied. “For the women. I was wondering if we could strike a deal with you guys.”
“What kind of a deal?”
“No deal,” a second voice added. “We have our orders.”
“Oh. Come on,” Ostrowsky said. “You think us girls want to be locked up with these guys for the next three months?”
“You’re Marines,” the second voice replied. “Didn’t you just spend months cooped up with them on the cycler?”
“At least we had some privacy! We had our own head! Look, there’s gotta be something we can work out. If you could take us back to Mars Prime, maybe we could, I don’t know, make it worth your while, y’know?”
“Well, you’re going to have to be more explicit than that. Exactly what did you have in mind?”
“Well, gee, I don’t know.” Garroway could hear the slink in her voice, could imagine her shifting her hips in that lightweight EVA suit. “We could maybe work something out. But I gotta see you guys face-to-face if we’re going to negotiate. I don’t want…I mean, we’ve got people listening in, y’know?”
The other Marines continued their work, setting up the drilling rig’s legs and connecting the fuel-cell array to the motor. As the banter continued, Garroway nodded to the others. Caswell, Donatelli, and Foster continued assembling the drill, while Garroway, Jacob, and Kaminski moved to a point where they were screened by the rig and found the armor sections that were waiting for them.
Marine Class-One armor could be broken down into eighteen separate parts. One was the front half of the cuirass, a single curved piece of kinevlar that covered the chest and torso. Earlier, several Marines had brought the portable drilling unit out and set it up around at the back of the hab, opposite the structure from the watching Mars cat. They’d brought out three cuirass front halves with the rest of the drilling and collection equipment, and left them piled with other equipment on the cold, hard ground.
Momentarily out of sight of the cat and its crew, Garroway, Kaminski, and Jacob dropped flat to the sand, each of them taking one of the torso armor sections. With the armor propped up in front of them then, they began crawling clumsily across the sand.
Active camouflage was an effect created by the layer of memory plastic coating the metal, requiring only sunlight or a trickle of body heat to work. Lying flat on his stomach, Garroway kept the cuirass out in front of him, bracing it by wedging the bottom edge into the sand, and holding it upright with straps wound tightly about his gloved hands.
In a sense, it was a high-tech version of a very old device…the shield. By keeping the half of an armor torso shell out away from his body, he was blocking the heat signature of his own suit. A careful scan from the Mars cat would almost certainly pick up the heat plume rising above his body in the cold, thin air, but with Ostrowsky out there talking to them, he didn’t think they would be paying that much attention. The active camo on the outer surface, meanwhile, would blend in with the surrounding landscape. So long as he and the others moved slowly, without sudden jerks or movements, they stood a good chance of making it up close to the crawler unobserved.
“How many women are there?” another man’s voice said, as the radio conversation continued. The exchange would help the Marines keep track of what was going on inside the cat.
“Five,” Ostrowsky replied. “Four Marines and a civilian.”
“I don’t know,” the voice came back. “That’d make it mighty crowded in here.”
“Aw c’mon! You guys could think of something!…”
There were just two problems with this plan, one foreseen, the other a difficulty that Garroway hadn’t even thought of until he was on his belly and slowly inching toward the objective. The foreseen plan was the trouble he and the other three would have seeing their objective. They’d allowed for that by working out their choreography with Ostrowsky. She was to walk to a point twenty meters away from the crawler’s door; by keeping her in view and the crawler blocked by their shields, the strike team could close on the target even when they couldn’t see it.
The unforeseen problem was worse. Garroway had forgotten how fiendishly cold the surface of the Martian desert was. The air temperature stood now, according to the readout on his helmet HUD, at minus fourteen Celsius, but the ground, hard-packed sand and loose gravel, was still a literal deep freeze. His armor’s best insulation was on the soles of his boots, and the frigid ground seemed to leach the heat out through the front armor of his Class-Ones like a sponge soaking up a spill. He hadn’t been on his stomach for more than ten minutes before he started shivering inside his armor. He’d already taken the precaution of disabling the thermostat of the suits—there was no sense in giving the UN heat sensors an easy target—and within a very few minutes more, all three of the slowly advancing Marines would be in danger of frostbite, or worse.
What the hell am I doing here? he asked himself. There’d been plenty of volunteers for this assault…and the more he thought about it, the more he knew that the role he’d assumed should have been given to someone younger, tougher, and possessing faster reflexes. He was feeling old…and the feeling grew worse the closer he crawled toward the objective.
“We might be able to work something out at that,” a voice from the Mars cat said. “We’re supposed to pull out of here in a day or two. We might be able to find some room for you women at that. Maybe….”
“Well, okay,” Ostrowsky said. “Let me go in and talk to the other girls, okay?”
Ostrowsky had promised to keep the soldiers in the cat talking until the Marines in the assault team had crawled to within twenty meters of their objective. Now she was walking slowly back toward the hab.
Garroway was shivering hard now, as he angled around toward the rear of the Mars cat. The cat’s engine was in the rear, along with the radiators and waste-heat spills. From there, he and the others should be able to sprint the last few tens of meters to the vehicle without being picked up by its sensors…if they could rise from the icy sand and move now. Judging his position from the angle of the hab, he carefully lowered the shield, just enough to steal a glimpse of the Mars cat past its edge.
Right on target. He was looking straight on at the rear of the vehicle, from a dist
ance of about fifteen meters.
There was still no indication that they’d been seen. Garroway looked about, checking the positions of the others.
Ostrowsky was clear. If they had anything on the ball, the UN troops would be searching the area for anything amiss…but with luck their IR scan wouldn’t pick up the three Marines in the heat shadow of their own power plant. Garroway waited…waited…watching for some overt reaction, and when there was none, he dropped the armor segment, scrambled to his feet, and sprinted forward.
His body was so cold it was more of a lumber than a sprint, but he covered those last few meters and sagged against the Mars cat’s starboard track. He spared a single glance for the hab, knowing that Lieutenant King was watching, was signaling the others to start the next phase of the plan. Working on the assumption that there were undiscovered listening devices still scattered about the hab’s interior, several of the Marines should now be starting to discuss what they were going to do to get rescued. They wouldn’t actually discuss anything; the idea wasn’t to have the UN guards radio for help, but to gather around their radio, trying to make out what the prisoners were saying.
And in the meantime, Garroway, Jacob, and Kaminski had reached the cat’s door.
Jacob was an electronics expert, like Garroway had been when he was an enlisted man. He held up his weapons—Radley’s pliers and one of the smuggled pocketknives—and nodded his readiness. Garroway held Ostrowsky’s fléchette gun…and hoped once again that he’d be able to work the thing if he had to. Even with the trigger guard removed, he was having trouble feeling anything at all through the fabric of his glove, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to manipulate the trigger.
With his other hand, he did a quick, three-fingered countdown, two…one…
Garroway hit the emergency airlock entry switch, which slid the outer door open immediately. Kaminski set one booted foot on the rung of the ladder going up the vehicle’s side, then scrambled up to the roof, where the small sat dish hung on its yoke, aimed almost directly straight up. A couple of quick turns on the locking release, and the satellite dish swung easily in its mounting, aiming uselessly at the horizon.
Jacob was the first into the airlock. Both he and Garroway had worked on Mars cats before, during their mission training on Earth and in simulation during the cycler passage. There was a maintenance access panel in the tiny compartment to the left, and in seconds Jacob had popped the cover and was wrist-deep in the wiring on the other side. Garroway braced himself in the airlock’s outer hatchway, Ostrowsky’s fléchette pistol aimed head high at the inner hatch, just in case somebody tried coming through. Overriding the airlock’s safeties, which prevented both hatches from being open to vacuum at once, was a relatively simple matter of cutting, stripping, and crossing four sets of wires, but the process took an eternity of seconds…and the UN troops on board would have known” something was going down as soon as the outer hatch cracked open.
“C’mon!” Garroway said, keeping his eyes on the inner hatch. It was the first thing spoken since they’d left the shelter of the hab. “Damn it, c’mon!”
“Almost…got it…shit! Can’t feel…a thing…through these…damned gloves…”
Kaminski dropped to the sand outside the airlock, Doc Casey’s knife at the ready.
“Here she goes!” Jacob yelled, and then the inner hatch was sliding away as a swiftly strengthening wind blasted out into the airlock. A swirl of loose paper and garbage followed—a couple of readymeal packets, some plastic wrapping, an empty memclip case—and then the hurricane was past and an armored figure with a light blue helmet was swinging into view, framed in the open hatch.
Garroway had been gambling that however many men there were aboard the Mars cat, most would not have their armor on. The stuff was bulky and uncomfortable and made such essential details as urination a tedious chore—or forced the wearer to wire himself up with uncomfortable plastic plumbing. Someone, at least, would be in armor at all times in case of an emergency…but the whole plan would go seriously wrong if several of them happened to have been wearing their suits.
The EVA-suited man in the hatch, staggering a bit still from the shock of the abrupt decompression of the cat’s cabin, was raising a French FA-29 assault rifle to his shoulder. Garroway was already in position, the Ruger pointed straight at the UN trooper’s helmet visor. He squeezed his hand almost convulsively; he felt nothing through the glove, heard nothing in the thin air but a sharp snap, but a white star appeared squarely in the center of the dark visor, and the soldier dropped his rifle, staggering back, groping at his face.
Garroway leaped into the cabin, colliding with the downed man as he thrashed on the deck and nearly falling. Regaining his balance, he swung left, checking the cabin’s rear, then right, toward the control deck. He saw three other men, all down, all unarmored, all clutching faces or throats as they desperately tried to breathe.
“I’m in,” he yelled over the tactical channel. “Four down! Jacob! Seal the hatch!”
“Working on it, Major.”
The inner hatch slid shut a moment later, but it was too slow…too slow. The three unsuited men were still now, or nearly so. The suited man continued to claw at his visor. Garroway knelt beside him, trying to keep his hands away from the starred plastic. Several of the high-velocity fléchettes had penetrated the visor, their finned tails sticking out of the tough plastic like tiny arrows, but air was seeping through myriad tiny cracks. As the gas expanded, it grew cold, and a layer of frost was forming around the impact point. Water was condensing on the inside of the visor, and bubbling wildly through one of the larger cracks. The life-support indicator set into a pop-open recess in the man’s chest armor showed his suit’s pressure at a quarter bar and falling, his heart and respiration dangerously high and shallow.
Garroway fumbled at his armor’s utility kit. If he could get a patch in place, he might save the man’s life…but to do that he would have to pull the fléchettes out, and the suit would decompress completely in those few seconds, even if he managed not to shatter the plastic.
The man’s eyes, just visible through frost and dark plastic, were panic-wide and bleeding. He clutched at Garroway’s wrist as the Marine tried to tamp down a pressure seal around the cluster of fléchettes…but before he could complete the task, the man’s life-support indicators flatlined.
“I think the poor bastard’s had it,” Kaminski said. Garroway started. He’d not realized the other Marine had entered the cat.
With the short, sharp fight over, Garroway felt numb, barely alive himself. He’d not been in a firefight for a good many years, and he’d managed to forget how terrifying the experience was…and how much he disliked it. He hadn’t even been shot at, but his senses had been keyed to such a high pitch that now, as the adrenaline rush receded, he could hardly stand.
Kaminski was checking the other bodies. All showed the bruised faces, the blood at nose, mouth, eyes, and ears characteristic of explosive decompression.
Not a pleasant way to die at all….
Garroway forced himself to keep moving, keep working, as he checked through the cat to make sure they’d caught all of the UN troops. The interior of the Mars cat was about the same size and shape as the inside of a large recreational trailer. There were four bunks aft, and a doorway leading to the supply lockers and fuel-cell storage. Forward was a tiny galley, a sitting area, and the forward command suite, which included the driver’s seat and a small communications console on the cab’s right side.
Sergeant Jacob was already sliding into the chair at the communications console. One of the dead men lay sprawled at his feet. “Hey, Major? Today’s our lucky day!”
“What’s that?”
“Doesn’t look like they got a message off.”
Garroway leaned over the Marine’s shoulder, studying the main screen. The unit was set for satcom relay, and the screen showed the cryptic legend SATLINK ACQUISITION and the winking word SEARCHING. One of four smaller display
monitors above the console showed an image—the inside of the hab module, as viewed from one corner of the room, high up near the ceiling. The fuzzy image showed Lieutenant King talking to three other Marines. They had missed a bug, then…though it fortunately had been positioned far enough away from the table that the UN troops wouldn’t have been able to overhear their planning sessions.
“Let’s see if we can get an uplink,” Garroway told Jacob. The younger Marine’s fingers flicked across the touch screen on the console, tapping in a chain of commands. A moment later, the SATLINK ACQUISITION line was updated with a CONNECT: MARSCOMSAT4 and a passcode entry blank.
Garroway stared at the screen for an unpleasant moment. All nonmilitary communications on Mars had used a programmed passcode; the human operators didn’t need to enter a tiling. If the computer was demanding a code entry now, it was because someone had added it. He’d seen Bergerac insert a computer memory clip in the com console back at Cydonia. “Try the standard passcode,” he told Jacob.
Jacob complied, and a new line appeared on-screen.
PASSCODE INCORRECT; ENTER PASSCODE:——
He’d been right. The UN had changed the access codes for all communications links on Mars, and not just the military ones, either. It only made sense. The key to any successful coup was communications; Bergerac and the Joubert woman obviously wanted to keep the takeover on Mars a secret, at least for now, and the only way to do that was to lock up the Marines and take over all communications on the planet. By changing and then controlling the access codes, they could do just that.
“What do you think, Sarge?” he asked. “Can you hack it?”
Jacob shook his head. “I could try, sure…but you know what kind of wall we’re up against here, sir. Without a trapdoor or the code key back at Cydonia or Candor, I could sit here for a century or two typing in random alphanumerics and never get anywhere.”