World War Mars

by Isaac Stone

  Right now Jack was someone he wanted to avoid. He was bitter over the way the Force officer treated them the night before. Jack was the one who stayed with Tulpa’s body and watched over it until the meat wagon arrived. He wanted to accompany it back to the base just to make sure he was treated with decency, but Harlo convinced him not to worry about it.

  He could tell by the look in the eyes of the other men that none would ever be the same. What the hell had they just endured? He expected there to be an element of danger in the Volunteer Corps, but this was pure insanity. The kraken he’d come here to avoid was a child’s toy compared to what they went through yesterday. Did this happen all the time? Were all the new Volunteers forced to go through the same hell?

  “Did you hear how many survived yesterday?” Jack’s voice startled him. Harlo turned around to look at his brother in arms.

  Right now, Jack appeared to be a vague outline of a man. He stood and looked at Harlo, but didn’t appear to see anything in front of him. He seemed to have a conversation with the air.

  “Five thousand went into battle,” Jack snickered. “Five thousand. I got the estimate from one of the Force guys. That’s why they needed us. There was no way they could throw the kind of numbers they needed at the Z-boys unless there were expendables. Not with the salties coming along for the ride. No, they needed us to die for them. They needed us to die for Olympia. I think we did a pretty good job.” He turned and looked at the sun.

  “Did the guy tell you how many survived the assault?” Harlo asked him. He wanted to know.

  Jack turned his glassy eyes back on Harlo and tried to focus them. “Seventy five percent casualties across the board,” he replied. “Most of the survivors were seasoned veterans, legit Force soldiers. You want to know something?”

  Harlo said he did.

  “We’re the only Volunteers who survived.”

  “Yeah, I know, we had three hundred men at the start.”

  “I’m not talking about our blessed legion,” Jack explained with a giggle. “There were five other Volunteer legions in the fight. All of the others were wiped out.” He snickered at something at went back to starring at the sun.

  “Didn’t make planet fall?” Harlo asked him. This was unbelievable.

  “Some. Four and change made it down, including us. We’re the only ones who lasted more than half the day, that US counter attack was across the board and really did a number on Olympia. I hope it was worth the money their families will collect.”

  Harlo thought about the firefights yesterday and how much Tulpa loved it all. How many times had he and Bey went through this only to be wiped out yesterday? Was it all just for some territory on Mars? Christ, humans didn’t belong on this place. The entire planet had to be made green just to walk outside and breathe. What kind of damage where they doing to the work done by the planetary ecologists over the years?

  Someone tried to explain to him how this war started on the way up and it didn’t make any sense to him. Over an assassination? It was crazy. Surely, there had to be some sane people around who could negotiate an end to this. There were rules drawn up on how it was to be fought. If they could agree on the rules of war, surely it would be possible to come up with ones for peace.

  “I just thought of something,” Harlo said to Jack.

  “What is that?”

  “This was day one. We’ve got another eleven weeks and six days of this insanity.”

  “Oh that is funny!” Jack announced and began to laugh. He didn’t stop laughing for two minutes.

  “Three months in hell!” Jack said as he fell on the ground in hilarity. Harlo noticed no one who walked past him said a thing. He had a feeling this was a common occurrence.

  At that point he made up his mind he was headed back home once this term of enlistment was up. Fuck the kraken, after a tour of duty in this place, he would personally swim down there without diving gear and find that thing. Then he’d bring it up topside for a barbecue. Yeah, that would be nice, cook the bastard on top of one of those platforms for all the elders who said krakens didn’t exist.

  “You believe in demons, Jack?” Harlo asked his friend as he noted the smell of wet dirt in the air. In some ways, Mars was similar to Earth.

  “Why do you ask?” Jack responded. He’d quit the laughter and stood next to him.

  “One brought me here. I saw my good friend grabbed by a monster from the deep ocean that wasn’t supposed to be real. It hauled him away. I thought the Mars War would be an improvement.” Harlo ran his hand through his greasy hair. He needed a bath.

  “Well, is it?”

  “You know, the funny thing is I’m not sure. I didn’t fancy being squid lunch, but I don’t think Bey fancied a stray bullet taking him out. Same for Tulpa. In the end, we’ll all end up in the same place, so I guess it doesn’t matter. I did like shooting down those red suits. I understand why Tulpa liked staying here in the war. I don’t know if I like what it did to me.”

  Harlo went back to the decontamination tent where the rest of the men who survived the slaughter of the previous day still sat. Some of them looked as if they were awake, some were asleep. He couldn’t tell if they were suffering from any injuries, a few did have bandages, most had pulled through the onslaught with little physical trauma. It was the interior trauma they suffered which would last for the rest of their lives.

  Of course, Harlo reflected, that might not be very long if any more days were like the one they’d just been through.

  Harlo walked sat down on a field chair. He looked up at the regular Force Syndicate men and wondered what brought them over here. If they were with the syndicate, did they have to serve anywhere assigned, or were they allowed options as to where they would be sent into battle?

  Jack walked in and seated himself next to Harlo. He seemed to have a better composure. It was hard to tell. After yesterday, no one would ever be the same. Jack leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Soon he was fast asleep.

  “I hear you were the only Volunteer unit that made it through yesterday,” a voice said to him. Jack turned to face a regular Force Syndicate man who wore the uniform of a special operative.

  “Lost our sergeant and corporal,” Harlo responded. “I don’t see as that’s anything to be proud of, least not on the first day.” Sleep crept up on him and he had a hard time fighting it off.

  “There is usually a special award for the ones that do survive,” he told him. “It’s a one-percenter patch they give you at an awards ceremony.” He was tall and thin with a dark hue to his face not caused by the sun.

  “I came here for the money,” Harlo told him, “not some award. They can keep until my tour is over.” His eyes were closing.

  “Just thought you’d want to know, brother,” the man said to him. “I still have mine.”

  Now Harlo’s eyes opened. “You weren’t brought up in a Force Syndicate?” he asked him. “I thought everyone who was Force was born into it.” He was interested, although still ready to sleep ten thousand years.

  “Not all of us,” he told him. “Rodrigo is the name. Yours?” He held out his hand.

  “Harlo.” He shook the man’s hand.

  “I can’t say I’ve ever met someone who changed syndicates before,” Harlo told him. “You came here as a volunteer?”

  “From a syndicate of restaurant owners.” Rodrigo told him. “My family had one in Madrid, but I saw the recruitment poster one day and though becoming a Volunteer would be a nice change. I’ve been here a year. When my term of enlistment ended I went to court and had my syndicate changed.”

  “I didn’t think you could do that,” Harlo responded. “I mean, I know you can, but no one I ever knew back on Earth ever did it.”

  “Takes a court order. You go before a guild court and the judge considers your case. Because of the war, the Force has done what it could to push the process along. They made it clear to me that if I changed once, I couldn’t do it again.”

  “How do you lik
e the new position?”

  “I love it. It was the very thing I was born to do. Even as a kid, I liked to play with miniature army men while the other kids played with pots and pans. Sometimes you get born into the wrong syndicate, I figure.”

  Then how you explain the Sultanates and Zhong Republic, he thought to himself.

  “Nice meeting you, Rodrigo,” Harlo told him. “I really need to get some shut-eye.” He leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes.

  “You do that. All of you deserve some rest. Keep in mind what I told you about changing your syndicate. Sounds to me you have what it takes to be in the Force.” Harlo heard the man’s boots crushing on the floor as he walked away.

  Putting up with a lifetime of this syndicate was the last thing Harlo wanted to do. It still bothered him he enjoyed it when he turned his gun loose on the enemy multiple times yesterday. Did a person have something wrong inside of them if they enjoyed that?

  All he wanted to do was put his time in and leave in one piece if that was possible. What concerned him were the long-term effects of what they were forced to do in this war. There had been no major wars on Earth in hundreds of years and people forgot what horrors they could be. He wondered if there wasn’t some kind of divine plan to inflict the Mars War on humanity so it would never forget what happened to it in the past. How little different they were from the savage beasts of prey.

  Chapter 31

  He dreamed of the kraken. This time it wasn’t Nea, but him who was grabbed by the tentacle and pulled away from the pylon. He could see Nea’s face inside its deep-water suit fade as he was yanked away from it. Then the suit turned into a set of battle armor. He was still pulled away but was no longer in the ocean. Harlo was in an endless sea of blood and the bodies of Bey and Tulpa floated by him. He tried to turn around, but the tentacle held him tight. It kept him from bringing up the gun. The kraken pulled him around.

  Now he faced the monster that wanted to eat him. It had a face made out of skulls and teeth from broken shrapnel and gun barrels.

  Harlo awoke still in the chair but ready to scream.

  Chapter 32

  “General, this is an outrage,” the man from the Ministry of Extra-planetary Defense yelled at him. “You have lost the Blue Lotus Fortress and put the government in a very bad position. A thousand years ago I would not have to have this conversation because we both know what the was penalty for such a loss.”

  The man from the government was short and wide. General Dai didn’t care to see him right now. Dai and the men he brought with him were camped far enough away from Pavonis Mons to avoid any more deaths. But his adjunct came in to see him earlier in the day and told about the representative who arrived an hour ago. The man demanded an audience with General Dai and wanted to see him now!

  The news wasn’t good from the other points in dispute right now. Bellatrix Crossing fell to the enemy four hours ago. Sun Yat Sen City was in surrounded by Olympian Force units and they didn’t know how much longer the forward commandos on the Tisasmuth Point could keep the tanks back.

  It was a textbook example of how a military campaign could collapse in one evening.

  The general, still a fine man in his fifties, let them send in Minister Bao. He would find a way to deal with him.

  “I made the decision to abandon the fort rather than lose any more of my men,” the general explained to him in a calm voice. He hated these decontamination tents because there weren’t ventilated and the weather was hot.

  “Had you stayed in the position,” Bao snapped back. “We would have had time to bring in reinforcements from Earth. There are several troop ships on their way as we speak.” He brushed a bit of dust off his sleeve.

  “Green recruits who would need time to adjust to fighting in Mars conditions,” he replied. “I was aware of the convoy and it wouldn’t have arrived for another month.” The general opened a drawer and slid a folder in it.

  “That does not excuse your irresponsible actions by abandoning the Blue Lotus Fortress,” the minister continued. He leaned forward and slapped down a folder on the general’s makeshift desk, which consisted of a board across of drawers. The general’s chair was a bucket turned upside down.

  “This is the order that turns your army over to me,” the minister sneered at him. “The government has empowered me to personally take charge of this mess and straighten it out.” He leaned back with a smug look on his face.

  General Dai picked up the folder and looked at it. “I see that it does,” he commented. “I should quit. I really should. However I have a mandate that prevents me from doing such.” He dropped the folder back down.

  “What mandate?” Bao demanded. “Mine comes from the highest office in Gudong!”

  “Let me show it to you,” General Dai replied. He reached below the desk with his left hand.

  It came up with a pistol. Before the minister could say a word, Dai shot him three times in the chest. One bullet pierced the heart.

  The minister collapsed to the floor in a fountain of blood. He didn’t move.

  Dai looked up to see his adjunct stand at the door of the tent. They were far enough away from the main camp and the gun was low-caliber. Enough for little to have left the tent in the way of noise. Besides, who notices stray background gunfire in a war zone?

  “The minister has suffered a great tragedy,” Dai told his adjunct. “Please see that you dispose of the body and send an apology to Earth on my behalf.”

  The general handed his adjunct the folder. “Please see that this is burned.” The adjunct bowed and began to pull the body away.

  “The general has eliminated the government minister,” Moussa said to Seydna Jabaal. “He did it personally and let one of his men dispose of the body.”

  “That solves one problem,” Jabaal told him. “But not all of them. He did learn about the government’s intent to replace him?”

  “Yes, sir, we sent all the information to him by our courier. I have no doubt that the general knew about what was going to happen before he even picked up that file.”

  The conversation took place in a hut made out of corrugated metal on the US side of the Martian landscape. It was day and the weakened sun shone light down on them both. Jabaal preferred the strong light of home, but it would be a long time before he would see it again. Perhaps he never would.

  “The general had to know the government is determined to get rid of him,” Jabaal commented. “Did he tell our people anything else?”

  “Only that he’s fully in accord with your plan and ready to move on to the next stage.”

  Jabil took a sip of coffee. Too sweet. These accursed Martian brands never had the right flavor of the Earth ones. It was the same with the food and everything else. Even the animals and plant life imported from Earth developed in a way no one could understand.

  “Send a message to the general,” Jabaal told him. “Let the general know that I am close to obtaining the support among our general staff for what I need to do. If he can get enough support among his people, it should not be a problem. But we can only move when we are sure it’s all in our favor.” Jabaal place the coffee cup back down.

  “Of course, Sayenda. May I leave now?”

  “Yes you may.”

  He vanished out the door of the hut.

  A few minutes later, another man entered the room. He had on the uniform of a combat brigade leader.

  “Everything proceeding according to plan?” he was asked.

  “Of course. This war is no longer in danger of ending anytime soon, our return on investment will exceed even the most optimistic predictions. Did you see my adjunct that was just here?”

  “Yes, he passed me on the way out.”

  “Kill him. Silently. No one needs to know. He’s sold us out to the prince.” The officer bowed and left the hut.

  “So easy to find them out,” Jabaal said as he set fire to a piece of paper in front of him.

  Chapter 33

  Harlo rested in t
he couch of the star liner after it had reached maximum speed. Earth would still be a month away. He longed to see it. As the only survivor of his Volunteer legion, he was allowed to rotate back home two weeks early. He was grateful, even if he had to turn down the offer of more money to stay and finish out his term of enlistment. There’d been more subtle hints the Force would like to have him as one of their men, but he turned them down. He slept again and dreamed of the kraken. This time it appeared to him with tentacles made out of fire.

  Legion Nine didn’t really exist any longer. It was merged in with a larger Force unit, although they let the fight as a unified squad. They let them have a few days off to recuperate after the capture of the Blue Lotus Fortress. After the fort was secured, Command fed them into a regular Force unit and they were sent into action against the Sultanate on the Western Front. This was trench warfare of the most tedious kind and Harlo spent several days with his fellow Volunteers camped in the wet dirt. By now, they were no longer concerned about biohazard or chemical attacks, but the suits were kept handy in case it was used on them. They still needed to wear body armor whenever in the combat zone.

  Harlo saw the other Volunteers picked off one by one. Each day, there would be another assault or someone would be ordered to fix the barbed wire protecting the trench. It was a guaranteed way to leave you out in the open.

  After three months, he was the only one left.

  Harlo couldn’t understand why, but he seemed to have a second sense about attacks or snipers and knew when to avoid them. The others hadn’t developed this sense.

  “Did you hear the latest news?” his companion on the flight home said to him. “The salties have attacked near that fortress you were inside. Looks like we may have to give it up.”

  “That sucks,” Harlo responded. “We fought long and hard to take it.” He tried to look despondent.

  The truth was, he no longer cared. He’d like to go back out there and take another crack at the enemy, but it never seemed to end. Tulpa had that figured out. Killing was a sport that could turn into its own end.